Bad Glass

I felt bad for him. The only message I could read there, in that close-up, was a message of fear: Charlie’s mother looking back over her shoulder with that frightened look on her face, like she wasn’t alone on that abandoned street, like there was something else there, chasing her. Something horrible.

Amanda and Mac were playing in the backyard when I finished up my coffee. They were having a snowball fight. Amanda was hiding behind a row of rosebushes while Mac lobbed projectiles high into the air, sending them raining down like artillery shots. After a round of sorties, Amanda popped up over the line of bushes and whipped a snowball directly at his head, sending him toppling over.

Their laughter was high and bright, a counterpoint to Charlie’s insistent tap-tap-tap.

Amanda stuck her head in through the back door. “Me against you three,” she panted. “Mac needs the help. He’s getting his ass kicked out here!” A snowball hit the window at her side, and she turned, laughing, to once again join the fray.

Charlie’s fingers didn’t even pause on the keyboard. After Amanda disappeared, he started sucking at his teeth absently, filling the room with a wet, slurping sound. I set my empty coffee cup in the kitchen sink, then headed upstairs to start work on my forum post.

Taylor’s door was right across from the stairwell, and I paused when I reached it. I listened for a moment, then knocked tentatively. There was no response. I pushed, and the door swung open. The room was empty, her bed neatly made. Early riser, I thought. Already out in the world, doing whatever it is she does in the morning.

I continued on to my room.

I spent the rest of the morning staring at my computer screen, trying to assemble a forum post. It was a stressful task. The way I looked at it, this was the most important thing in my life. It was the next step in my journey, putting my pictures out there for the whole world to see.

These were my dreams and aspirations. In pieces on my computer screen.

More than anything, I wanted to make the right first impression. I wanted to capture people’s attention and establish credibility right off the bat. I wanted people to look at these pictures—really look at them—and take me seriously. I wanted them to recognize my passion, my skill, my art.

No wonder I was anxious. I had the weight of my entire future sitting right there on my shoulders.

I decided to start with some of my more mundane images. If I started with the insane stuff, I reasoned, no one would believe me. I could hear the arguments now: Yeah, he just Photoshopped a finger onto that spider; and that face in the wall, it doesn’t even look real—it’s just a mask, a mannequin.

No, I decided, it was better to start off with the stuff no one would dispute.

First up: the soldier in front of the ENTERING SPOKANE sign. Then an empty city street. Then Riverfront Park. And finally, a pair of pictures from Mama Cass’s: one showing the crowd of refugees gathered around the storefront, the other showing a handful of dirty faces watching me suspiciously. I liked this final picture; I thought it ended things on the right note. It put some human faces—ragged and tired, haunted and angry—amid all the desolation.

I was laying groundwork. Setting the scene.

I’d get to the insanity later.

I spent several hours tweaking the images, trying to make them perfect. Then I composed a couple of sentences for the top of the post. I tried to keep my preface simple; I wanted to let the photographs speak for themselves.

Greetings from Spokane! Here are some pictures from my first week in the city. I came here to document the conditions and, perhaps, find the truth behind the stories we’ve all been hearing. I’ll try to post more as events and pictures happen, but my Internet connection is pretty much nonexistent (I had to sneak this post out of the city, passing it hand to hand across the border).

I added the “hand to hand” thing to take heat off of Danny, in case this post ever caught the attention of the authorities.

After I finished the preface, I read it over a couple of times, trying to imagine the impression it would make. I found it lacking. It felt cold, clinical. There was no emotion, no hint it had been written by a real human being, someone capable of being moved by the things on the other side of the camera’s viewfinder. Tentatively, I typed out another line:

It’s strange here. It feels like a different world.

I stared at the post for a long time, reading over that sparse handful of sentences, studying each and every aspect of the photographs. It still felt insufficient somehow, incomplete. It is incomplete, I told myself. There is no end here, no conclusion … not yet.

But it is a beginning.