Bad Glass

As far as I knew, Charlie was still in the house across the street. When I’d tried to tell him what was going on, when I’d tried to get his help with Floyd, he’d just grunted distractedly, barely even acknowledging my presence. I ended up leaving him behind. Now, sitting on the edge of Floyd’s bed, I could see the blue glow of the radio in the second-story window across the street, and I could imagine Charlie sitting there in the growing dark, frozen like a statue, his mind stuck inside some faulty programming loop. Waiting—just waiting—for something to break him free.

And it was my fault.

Taking Floyd down into the tunnels, showing Charlie the radio—I was certainly doing some powerful work here. I was destroying people left and right.

Shit, I’m a fucking tsunami, I thought, a wave of destruction rolling through the house! First Amanda and Mac, then Sabine, and Weasel, and Taylor, and Floyd, and Charlie. I wondered how I was fucking up Danny’s life. I probably gave him some mutant STD or something. He probably has spiders burrowing deep into his brain.

Jesus! I was like a motherfucking plague.

On this house. On the people in it.

When Floyd’s breathing started to sound a little bit stronger, I darted into my room and grabbed my camera and notebook computer. I set up my gear on the floor next to his bed and started to work on my second post, pausing every couple of minutes to check on his breathing.

First I transferred pictures from my camera, then I spent a couple of minutes checking up on my hardware. The camera batteries were still half full; the computer was down to 45 percent. I tilted the surface of the zoom lens back and forth in the wash from my computer screen, and then I tried to clean the dirty glass, carefully brushing aside dirt and dust, using an alcohol spray to wash away a pair of errant fingerprints. When it was suitably clean, I capped the lens and put the camera back into its bag.

Then I stared at the computer for a while.

I didn’t want to go on. I felt an incredible sense of dread at the thought of those pictures lurking on my hard drive.

My enthusiasm was waning … and fast. Whatever I’d come to the city to find, to see and to document, I was starting to think it just wasn’t worth it. No matter how great the images were.

This was not a good way to get a reputation, I realized. This was a good way to die, to disappear.

Then leave, an urgent voice cried inside my head. It was a distant voice, and I got the sense that it had been screaming for a long time now. That one word, over and over again: leaveleaveleaveleaveleave. I just hadn’t heard it.

But I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t leave Floyd. I couldn’t leave Charlie. I couldn’t leave Taylor.

And frankly, I couldn’t leave the dream. My dream.

No matter how disillusioned I got—how stupid and myopic the urge became—I still wanted to take those beautiful photographs. I wanted to create something amazing. Art that would change the world! Even if it wasn’t smart. Even if—my life on the line—it wasn’t objectively worth it.

So I sat there, listening to Floyd’s breath—it was stronger now, I was sure of that—and I popped another couple of Mama Cass’s Vicodins, trying to gather up the strength to go on. And when I felt the warm roil of the drug start to surge inside my head, I leaned forward and launched my image viewer.

I tried not to think about what I was doing, tried to get lost in the simple step-by-step process: select several days’ worth of photographs, right click, “open all,” and then page through each individual frame. It was easier if I didn’t think about it too much.

Just images without context. Just blocks of color on my screen.

There were over two hundred photographs, and my computer slowed to a crawl as it opened window after window after window. I started closing them one by one, picking out the best of each set and tossing away the ones that were out of focus and boring. A street scene, poorly framed; the tunnel in the park—without context, these didn’t look like anything special. It was a pretty random process. Very intuitive. If I had stopped to think about what I was doing, if I’d been perfectly sober and unemotional, I would have spent a much longer time on each picture. I would have considered framing, the quality of the light on the subject, the oh too clever game of analogy and meaning, and the way the viewer’s eye traveled across the image—whether the lines pulled you in, toward the subject, or pushed you away. Instead, I went with my gut reaction.

Did the image move me? Did it provoke emotion?

In the end, the ones I discarded were the ones I could discard. And the remaining seven were the ones I just couldn’t close, the ones I had to keep looking at.