Bad Glass

I grabbed a handful of paper and flipped it all over, setting off an avalanche of brightly colored photographs. Dozens of glossy images slid across the surface of the table, some reaching its edge and tumbling down to the floor. The cascading motion unearthed a three-ring binder buried near the center of the mess.

Moving slowly, as if in a trance, I flipped open the notebook and found page after page of celluloid negatives. Each line of film had been slotted into a translucent sleeve: dozens and dozens of perfectly preserved images, each its own captured moment, crammed into a tiny, unreadable rectangle. I lifted a page and squinted through the colored plastic. I could see buildings hidden inside the plastic. I could see people.

“From before I went digital.” I turned and found the man standing on an overturned bucket in the middle of the room. He kept his back to me as he grabbed a dark lantern from the top of the nearest bookcase. “I still use film on occasion, but it’s hard to get. At least, it’s hard to get here.” He cracked open the lantern and replaced the battery inside. The lantern lit up in his hands, but the effect on the room was negligible. The room was already so bright.

“Who are you?” I asked, suddenly apprehensive. The number of photographs—if in fact all these bookcases and tables were filled with photographs—left me positively awestruck. In fact, it scared the crap out of me … the sheer magnitude of this place—thousands and thousands of images, each a potential gem, hidden away inside this chaos. It made me feel claustrophobic.

The man smiled. It was a relaxed smile, and it made him look completely different. He was no longer the erratic, crazy man who’d answered the door. “My name is Cob Gilles. I was a photographer … once.”

The name was familiar. I’d seen it in my photography books back in school. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember the images it had been attached to. “You’re famous,” I said with a note of awe. “You’ve got a reputation.”

He nodded and stepped down from the bucket. He continued to avoid meeting my eyes. “Yeah,” he said. His voice was quiet, not much more than a whisper. “I had a reputation.” Then, with a bitter smile, he picked up the bucket and started toward the back of the room. He turned a corner and disappeared into the stacks, his voice trailing behind him like a limp, lifeless tail: “But that was outside, back when it mattered.”

I glanced over at Sabine, and she just shrugged. Then I hitched my backpack against my shoulder and followed Cob Gilles into the maze of bookcases.

Sabine stayed behind. The last I saw, she was walking the perimeter of the room, running her hand along the wall as she slowly surveyed the photographer’s loft.

There was no order to the shelving, at least none that I could see. Just books and folders, filling up every inch of space on the shelves and piled into tall stacks on the floor. There were photography books mixed in with the unlabeled notebook spines, and I recognized a couple from my collection back home.

I pulled a folder from a shelf at random. Inside, I found a six-by-eight-inch print pasted to the first page. It was a black-and-white portrait, framed so that the subject’s face was missing; there was an ear and the nape of a neck in the center of the frame, but the picture ended midcheekbone. A square of flower-print wallpaper was visible behind the subject, taking up the entire left half of the photograph. Somebody had taken a red pen and drawn a circle around the wallpaper. An arrow extended beyond the frame to the empty space beneath the image. The word DISTRACTING was written in large block letters. Then: dodge/blur. I flipped through the rest of the folder and found a dozen more shots from the same photo session, all annotated in the same way—hastily drawn words questioning composition and technique.

The last page had a head-on view of the anonymous model positioned in front of that same swatch of flower-print wallpaper. The subject’s entire face had been scribbled out, lost beneath the tip of a permanent marker. And the pen had been thorough; there was absolutely nothing visible beneath the thick wash of red ink. I couldn’t even tell if the subject was male or female.

I slid the book back into place and started looking for the photographer.

After the first line of bookcases, I turned right and found myself confronted with three more pathways. The way out wasn’t obvious—down each path I could see nothing but row after row of cluttered shelving—and the photographer was nowhere to be seen.

“Mr. Gilles?” I called out hesitantly.

“This way.” His words drifted back into the maze, a distant grunt muffled by wood and paper. I followed his voice down the left-hand path and, after one more turn, emerged from the far side of the makeshift library.