Bad Glass

I took a half dozen photos before I noticed the line of muddy paw prints stretching from the front door to the rear of the house. The prints were large, and as soon as I noticed them, I thought I caught a hint of animal musk in the air. It was the barest tickle at the back of my nose—probably just my imagination, really, nothing more—but it was enough to transport me back to the tunnel in the park. And once again I was there, following Mac down into the dark, searching for him as he faded away, as he found entry into Amanda’s world. A world of dogs and wolves. A world of savage eyes and teeth and blood and flesh.

I recoiled from the entryway and retreated back to the middle of the road.

After that, I didn’t linger. I stopped taking pictures and instead just concentrated on covering ground.

There was graffiti on a building near the 290 bridge, clearly visible from the middle of its span: overlapping green and black lines scrawled across white stucco.

It was the Poet’s work. I recognized the writing.

Just one sentence, but it left me feeling perplexed and just a little dizzy:

I THOUGHT WE WERE FALLING, NOT FLYING.

I took a couple of pictures and moved on.

Danny’s map was surprisingly precise. It ended in a neat series of squares sketched out along Second Avenue, filling the space between Pittsburg and Magnolia Streets. There was a circle around the middle square and an arrow pointing to a phrase at the edge of the piece of paper: “blue tarp on roof.”

I rounded the corner and immediately spotted the house with the tarp. It wasn’t a very nice neighborhood, sitting right there at the edge of I-90, but the blue-topped house looked well cared for. It was boxy and small: two stories tall, but the second floor couldn’t have been much more than a single slant-ceilinged room. None of the windows were broken, and the hedges at the yard’s perimeter looked as if they’d been trimmed recently. The tarp on the roof looked fairly new as well, bright blue and still perfectly placed, despite the weeks of wind and rain and snow. There was absolutely no way it predated the evacuation.

I paused and turned a full circle before approaching the house. The street was still and silent. There were no people, no animals. The nearby stretch of I-90 was deserted as well, the western roadblock miles away, the military occupied elsewhere.

I was alone here, near the center of the city, and it was all very … calming.

This was a feeling I’d been having for a while now, something I’d been circling around, narrowing in on, as I walked the empty streets and thought about the empty city. Away from the eyes of people, I could do anything and it really wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t change the world. It wouldn’t change a single mind.

And that was very liberating. For so long, I’d been trying to impress others. I’d been trying to impress my father, my peers, the girls in my life, the professors at school. And then there was the whole photography thing, nothing but a desperate attempt to impress the whole world.

But here I’d found something different, something new. I’d found comfort in not making an impression, jumping into the ocean and not making a splash, not leaving a single ripple.

I can’t imagine that this was a very healthy thought—it was the height of solipsism, after all—but it was calming. And there was still Taylor. I still wanted to make an impression with her. With her, I wanted to make a big-ass splash.

I stayed to the side of the house as I approached, rounding a chest-high hedge and ducking beneath the nearest window. I raised my head and looked in through the slats of a venetian blind. The front living room was empty. There was a sofa and an armchair arrayed around an unlit fireplace, and an end table supported a stack of magazines at its side. I continued toward the back of the house, stopping in front of a kitchen window. Someone left the room just as I raised my head to look in. I only caught a brief moment of dark-clad back as he or she turned the corner into a hallway on its far side. The person was nothing more than a blur of motion in the doorway; I couldn’t tell if it was Taylor or one of her parents.

I continued on. There was a screen door at the rear of the house, hidden inside a tiny garden. The garden was well maintained but not very lush. Slumbering for the winter. I carefully picked my way through the garden and glanced in through the back door window.