Bad Glass

The first one was a technical mess. It was off center and poorly lit. And I hadn’t even taken it. Sabine had, at my first dinner in the city, playing with my camera, holding it up above her head. I remembered sitting at the dining-room table—stoned out of my mind, relaxed and very, very warm—the whole room bathed in candlelight. I was actually in the photograph, sitting at the table, smiling vaguely at Sabine and the camera. And I was surrounded by the entire household.

When I looked at it, I was once again flooded with that feeling, that warmth, the belief that I had actually found something here, inside the city. The good old days, I thought. They sure didn’t last long.

The next picture was something completely different. It was the face between the walls, and it was cold and terrifying and alien. I’d already worked on the photo some, making the face easier to see inside that narrow space, and I didn’t spend long looking at it now. Seeing the pale flesh—remembering the way it had trembled, the way its eye had rolled blindly—made me feel sick to my stomach. I considered closing it—just trashing the image and hoping my memory of that horrible specter could somehow disappear with it—but ultimately I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t let it go. So I paged on to the next image.

It was the spiders, crawling from the hole in the wall. Goose-flesh erupted across my back. I didn’t spend long staring at the image; instead, I shrunk it down into a small window and brought up the picture the Poet had sprayed on the front of Cob Gilles’s building. It was the same scene. Or close enough. The two holes were a similar shape, and the spiders were about the right size. And while the placement of each animal wasn’t quite the same, the similarity was uncanny. My photograph and the Poet’s painting … these were two different representations of the same event. But how? According to Sabine, the painting predated my photo by at least a week.

Maybe it’s a common occurrence, I thought. Massive spiders. Complete with human fingers. Swarming like a tide, pushing out of gaps in the city, trying to engulf and consume everything they can reach. Maybe it happens once a month. Or once a week. Or every other day.

I grunted and paged on to the next image. It was a close-up of the spider with the human finger. It was a truly awful image—just bad photography—grainy and poorly framed. But I couldn’t ignore it, couldn’t discard it. I’ve got to post this, I told myself. If nothing else, I’ve got to give my public the finger.

It was a bad joke, I know, but it made me smile—a goofy, half-drugged smile. But the smile died as soon as the next photograph popped into view. And suddenly the joke didn’t seem funny anymore. It seemed cruel and sinister.

Weasel’s fingers, embedded in concrete.

It was actually the best photograph of the bunch. It was a close-up shot, not at all cryptic or confusing, and the focus was tight. Despite the horrific nature of the subject, there was absolutely no missing what it was. It was a set of fingers trapped in solid concrete. Period. End of paragraph. And I liked the lighting. I liked the look of Weasel’s flesh against the gray concrete. The background was bright, lit by the camera’s flash, but shadows sprouted from the base of each finger, traveling across the floor and landing on the wall. The foreground was dark and desolate; the toe of Taylor’s boot was visible frame right. Looking at it now, I was surprised I was able to get such perfect focus in such a dark environment. It’s a fast lens, I thought. Good glass.

I closed my eyes and paged forward to the last image.

It was the picture Taylor had taken, the two of us in bed with Danny. How did it get here, at the end? I wondered. I must have been rearranging during my first pass through the photographs. I must have put it here. But was it random chance, or was I trying to tell myself something? Was I trying to end on a high note, trying to remind myself of the good that still remained here inside the city?

The picture was out of focus and pretty much incomprehensible. Danny’s head in my lap, but you really couldn’t make that out. It was just a blur of blue denim, dark hair, and warm skin.