Bad Glass

“Get out!” he roared, falling back against the wall, overwhelmed with emotion. There were tears streaming down his cheeks. “Get the fuck out of our home! You aren’t welcome here. You aren’t welcome!”

He collapsed to the ground and buried his face in his hands. “You aren’t welcome,” he continued to sob, losing energy and volume. “You aren’t welcome.”

Sabine jumped to her feet and started toward him. Her jaw was clenched, and there was dark venom in her eyes. I stopped her. I grabbed her in a tight bear hug and rotated her away from the photographer, putting my body in between the two of them. “Shhhhh,” I said, trying to make a comforting noise in her ear. “Shhhhh. He’s done. It’s all over.”

After a handful of seconds Sabine stopped struggling, and I let her go. She took a step back, then adjusted her jacket across her shoulders. “Fuck this shit,” she muttered, and fled the apartment, violently ripping the front door open and letting it bounce off the wall.

I turned back toward the photographer and gave him one last look before following her out. He was still sobbing in his hands.

And as I watched, he toppled over.

That’s how I left him, the great Cob Gilles, Pulitzer Prize—winning photographer: sobbing, curled into a fetal ball on his apartment floor.

Photograph. October 22, 01:31 P.M. Fingers in concrete:

The picture is lit with a flash. Washed-out gray concrete. Sharp shadows pointing to the left. The toe of a single out-of-place boot is visible on the right side of the frame—a stray object intruding on an otherwise stark scene.

And set in the middle of the photograph: fingers, protruding from the concrete floor. They sprout out of the ground like thick-stemmed plants, only different—not pushing out displaced dirt, instead reaching up from a perfectly smooth unblemished surface. The surface cuts below the knuckle on all the fingers save the pinkie; the pinkie’s knuckle is bisected neatly in two. And only the tip of the thumb is visible, little more than a thumbnail, sending up a glimmer of reflected light.

The angle is low; the camera is perched about a foot off the ground. And even though it is not a macro shot, the image is close and clear—razor-sharp details, blown up larger than life. The flesh on the fingers looks ghostly pale in the glare of the flash, and the ragged, dirty edges of the fingernails are all visible. The knuckles have been scraped raw, dotted with tiny tags of gray-white skin, ripped up to reveal a glimpse of rosy pink beneath. It is not a bad scrape, just the result of unintended friction, the kind of wound you’d get wrestling an unwieldy box through a narrow doorway.

It is a desolate shot. Gray and lonely.

“What the fuck was that?” Sabine barked as soon as I caught up to her out in front of the photographer’s apartment. She let out a feral growl and kicked at a bloated paper bag lying on the sidewalk; it burst against her boot, sending fast-food wrappers and a crumpled-up cup skittering across the concrete. “I had plans. I wanted to help her, for God’s sake! I wanted to help her with her art! But she wouldn’t even listen.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think she wants your help,” I said. “And whatever your plans are, I don’t think she’s in any condition to lend a hand.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I gathered that.”

Sabine let out a loud sigh; it was an exhausted rush of air, and in it I could hear her anger deflating. When she continued, her voice was imploring, and it sounded like she was asking me to do her some abstract favor, maybe change the very nature of the world around us. “I just … I was expecting something different, you know? Magic, not silence.”

I nodded and tried to give her a reassuring smile. It felt weird on my lips, and I thought I might be doing it wrong. “I know,” I said. “It’s disappointing. But maybe we shouldn’t be putting so much faith in other people.”

Sabine gave me a questioning look, and we passed a couple of moments in silence.

“He was a photographer?” she asked in a gentle voice. “Just like you?”

“Yeah,” I said, flashing a wry smile. “Just like me.” I shook my head and walked away, moving out into the middle of the street.

Sabine caught up to me as I started to retrace our path back through the dark city.

Even more than before, the streets of downtown Spokane seemed deserted. It was late, approaching midnight, and there were no lights in the surrounding buildings. There was no laughter, no screams echoing in the distance. Just silence. Silence and the sound of our feet on wet pavement.

We were a long way from the world I knew.

I glanced up into the sky, expecting to see the face of the earth floating overhead—like maybe we’d been transported to the moon or to some alien asteroid hurtling through space—but there were only clouds up there, and the muffled outline of a moon packed in cotton.

I wanted to get home. I wanted to get home to Taylor.