Bad Glass Read online

  “Welcome to St. James Tower,” she said. She laughed and started toward the front door.

  Photograph, 1990. Joyous Iraqi soldier:

  A brilliant sun, beating down on hardscrabble desert. Sand-colored grass sprouting out of sand-colored earth. And a soldier, walking toward the camera.

  The soldier’s dark Middle Eastern features are contorted in a joyous smile—radiant, beaming—and there are tears spilling from his eyes, etching dark rivulets all the way down to his jaw. He is dressed in military brown, but his shirt hangs open, and there’s a sweaty red cloth wrapped around the top of his head, protecting him from the brilliant sun. There is an automatic rifle lying on the ground behind him, abandoned in the sandy dirt.

  The soldier’s arms are raised. A white cloth dangles from his left fist.

  He is surrendering. Joyfully.

  After entering St. James Tower, we plunged from a dark foyer into an even darker stairwell. We found both doors—the door to the stairwell and the door to the street—propped open with stacks of books, volumes from a timeworn set of the Oxford English Dictionary. Despite a cold breeze from the street, the air inside was thick with the smell of rot; I made an effort to breathe in through my mouth, trying to keep that horrible stench out of my nose. Sabine swung her flashlight across the width of the stairwell, revealing a mound of trash bags stuffed into the space beneath the lowest flight of stairs. Some of them had split open, spilling a litter of apple cores, coffee grounds, animal bones, and soiled paper to the concrete floor.

  “Fuck,” Sabine said. “I think it’s time to call the health inspector.”

  She started toward the base of the stairs, then stopped abruptly.

  There were twin glowing lights up on the second-floor landing, small metallic orbs floating about a foot off the ground. They winked off for a moment, then started moving forward, sliding noiselessly through the air. Sabine jerked the flashlight up and let out a relieved laugh.

  The light revealed an orange-striped tabby perched on the edge of the landing. Its bright eyes narrowed under the flashlight’s sudden glare, and it stared down at us for a moment, its tail swishing angrily. Then it resumed its descent. It stayed close to the wall, watching us with suspicious eyes, and when it was about five feet from the ground, it suddenly leaped forward. It bounded down the remaining steps and out the sliver of open door.

  Sabine let out another shaky laugh. “There aren’t too many animals left,” she said. “They fled even before the evacuation. I haven’t seen a dog or a cat in months.”

  “Yeah?” I grunted. I clenched my bandaged hand as if trying to refute her claim, if only to myself. Already, my wounds felt better. The antibiotics were doing their job.

  “Hell, they’re smarter than we are,” she said with a laugh. “They took the hint. They left when it was time to leave.” Then she started up the stairs.

  There was light creeping from beneath the door on the third-floor landing. A hand-lettered sign had been duct taped over the doorknob. It read, in giant block letters: FUCK OFF!!!

  Sabine gave me a quizzical look and cocked an eyebrow. I shrugged, then stepped forward and knocked.

  A man pulled the door open before I could even drop my hand. At first, he seemed nothing but wild hair and wilder eyes. “Did you see a cat?” he asked. “A fucking cat, clawing at the fucking door?” His eyes darted back and forth between Sabine and me. He was shorter than both of us and at least three decades older. His shoulder-length hair was reddish-brown, and it jutted from his scalp like strings from an unused mop head. Despite the cold weather, his shirt hung open, revealing pale pockmarked flesh.

  “It’s always here, that fucking cat. I try to lock it out, but somehow it manages to get back in. And then it’s trapped, and that’s a million times worse. It howls like an injured baby. A fucking baby! The bloody thing’s driving me insane!”

  “It left,” Sabine said, taking a cautious step back. “When we came in. It ran out the door.”

  “Good,” the man said. “It’s a motherfucking miracle.” He leaned forward and cast a skeptical look down the dark stairwell. When no cat came screaming out of the shadows, he let out a satisfied “harrumph” and pulled back into the doorway.

  He stood there motionless for a time. The look on his face morphed from one of frantic mania into a sudden guarded skepticism, as if he had just now noticed us standing on his doorstep and, seeing us there, remembered an intense fear and distrust of strangers. He crossed his arms in front of his chest and started scratching at his forearms; the flesh there was red and dry, flaking away beneath his yellowing nails.

  “Do I know you?” he finally asked, sounding genuinely perplexed. “What do I want—?” He closed his eyes and shook his head violently. “I got that wrong. I mean, I mean … what do you want?”

  “Mama Cass sent us,” I said. “I’ve got a package for you.”

  At this, the man’s tensions abruptly eased. The lines on his forehead and beneath his eyes disappeared, and his shoulders dropped, muscles falling slack.

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?” he said. He took a step back and ushered us inside.

  The man’s apartment was absolute chaos. It was a studio apartment, and the ceiling, fifteen feet above our heads, was a maze of naked ductwork. Rows of bookcases crisscrossed the room from one end to the other, laid out in disjointed, meandering lines; it was like something designed and jotted down by a drunken architect, without the aid of a ruler or steady hands. The shelving was packed full of notebooks and sheets of loose paper. The clutter was so dense, it filled every open space, spilling from bookcases, across the surface of card tables and down to the floor below.

  There was a truly extravagant amount of light in the room; at least a dozen battery-powered lanterns—perched on tabletops, bookcases, and hanging from the walls—kept it lit as bright as day. And that can’t be cheap, I thought. There can’t be that many batteries left in the city anymore.

  “Do you want anything?” the man asked, nervously fidgeting from one foot to the other. “I think I’ve got some beers in back if you’re thirsty.”

  I shook my head no, and Sabine didn’t respond. I don’t even think she heard the offer; her eyes were too busy roaming about the room, lost in the chaos.

  “Okay, then,” the man prompted. “You have something for me?”

  I opened my backpack and retrieved Mama Cass’s package. It was about the size of a football, wrapped in canvas and taped shut. The bundle was heavy for its size, and it rattled like a maraca. When I handed it over, I noticed that the man’s eyes had become fixed on my open backpack; the lens of my camera was visible, protruding out of the opening like a headless neck. When I zipped it shut, the man’s eyes jolted back up, exploring my face for a couple of seconds before darting abruptly away.

  “I, I—” he said. Then his mouth snapped shut, and he retreated to the far side of the room, disappearing behind a wall of bookcases.

  “Look at this place,” Sabine said in a hushed whisper. “This is more than two months’ worth of junk … he was a shut-in long before this weirdness started.”

  I made my way over to the nearest table and ran my hand across the mess of paper on its surface. The feel of the paper surprised me; it was a thick, glossy stock, a very familiar weight. I flipped a sheet over, revealing the front of a photograph. It was a picture of the Spokane River at sunset, seen from Riverfront Park. The sun was so bright, the world over the river was nothing but a radiant shade of yellow. And the ripples on its surface formed stretched-out geometric shapes, etched across the water like art carved into a slab of black marble.

  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 pag
e 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.

  I found the photographer seated at a mahogany desk with his back against a line of boarded-up windows. What once must have been a spectacular view of the city had been fitted with precisely cut pieces of plywood, blocking out every hint of the outside world. Day or night, I’m sure the apartment would have looked exactly the same: lit from inside, completely divorced from the weather and the sun, from the city and the world.

  There was an array of camera equipment spread across the desk before him. And between his hands, Mama Cass’s football had been ripped open to reveal batteries and a cracked-open bottle of pills.

  “I saw your camera,” Cob Gilles said. “You’re a photographer, right? You’re here on assignment?”

  “I’m here on my own,” I said. “I want to report on what’s happening.”

  The photographer smiled and nodded, and his eyes explored my face. I got the impression that he was judging me as I stood there in front of his desk, that he was looking for something in my expression. Something important. A sign, maybe. A twitch. A subtle hint of understanding.

  He was trying to figure out if I was worthy. He was trying to figure out if he should take me seriously.

  Finally, he leaned back in his chair and shook his head, passing judgment. “You’re just a kid. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  I took a step closer. “Fuck that,” I said. I could feel my face growing flush with blood, and this time it wasn’t just a fever making me hot. “I’m doing just fine. I’m getting my shots. I’m holding it together.” I cast an accusing look around his apartment; the place was a sty, an absolute pit. Then I looked pointedly at the constellation of pills spread out across his desk.

  Who was he to judge?

  He nodded and sighed. “Yeah,” he agreed. “Fuck it. Whatever. No lectures.”

  He reached beneath his desk and produced a can of Budweiser. He popped the top, then spent a couple of seconds staring blankly at his desk, like he was waiting for something to happen, like he was waiting for his eyes to come into focus or for one of his photographic subjects to settle into a pose. Then he swept some pills into his hand and downed them quickly with half the can of beer.

  “I guess Sharon wanted us to meet,” the photographer said. “Mama Cass, playing the motherfucking matchmaker. I wonder what she was expecting. Did she think I’d choose you as an apprentice? Or … or … fuck … is this some type of cautionary visit? ‘Watch out, photography boy, or you’ll end up like crazy old Cob Gilles’?” He closed his eyes and downed the rest of his beer. When he continued, his voice was much quieter. He sounded thoughtful now and a bit confused. I got the impression that, at this point, he was talking primarily to himself. “Or maybe that’s not it. Maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe you’re the message. To me. Some type of reminder?”

  “No,” I said, and I offered him a sympathetic smile. “I’m Dean. I’m not a message. I’m not ‘photography boy.’ Just Dean.” Despite his abrupt dismissal—of me, of my talent—I couldn’t stay mad at him. The man was quite obviously damaged. He was somebody to be pitied, not hated.

  The photographer laughed and shook his head. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Dean. It’s a real motherfucking pleasure.”

  Cob Gilles again offered me a beer, and this time I accepted. I sat down in front of his desk and raised my can in a wordless salute.

  Then we settled into a thick silence.

  The photographer’s eyes roamed about the room for nearly a minute before finally settling on an unremarkable spot halfway up the nearest wall. I studied him closely as he fixated on that spot. I watched as he slumped bonelessly into his chair. I watched as his eyes lost focus, going dull like clouded glass. He didn’t seem to mind my scrutiny. Too drugged out, I guessed.

  �
�Which of your photos would I know?” I asked, breaking the silence. “What made you famous?”

  His eyes snapped into focus. “I was—” He cleared his throat. “I was embedded with the army during the first Iraq war. Desert Storm. I was there for the start of the ground assault, and I got photographs of Iraqis surrendering. People liked those pictures. They liked them a lot.” He stood up unsteadily and made his way over to a stack of framed pictures propped up against the boarded-over windows. After shuffling through a half dozen, he came up with a three-foot-by-three-foot frame. “Here. It’s the fucking pinnacle of my career.”

  The left half of the frame was taken up with a single photo: an Iraqi soldier walking toward the camera. The soldier’s arms were raised, and a white scarf fluttered from his left hand. There was an automatic rifle lying in the sand at his feet. The soldier was smiling, and there were tears running down his face. He looked positively jubilant. The entire scene was bathed in warm, golden sunlight, a slice of the world dipped in amber.

  Next to the picture, mounted on the right side of the frame, was an oversized gold medallion.

  “This … this is a Pulitzer Prize,” I said. I wasn’t asking a question or voicing surprise. The words just fell out of my mouth, without emotion or real understanding.

  Cob Gilles grunted. “Yeah, well, the photo’s a fucking joke. The guy pretty much collapsed right after I took that shot. He had a fever of 103 and a wound on his leg that was going gangrenous. He was mewling in pain as he walked—just, just fucking mewling, like a pistol-whipped kitten. And that expression in the picture? I swear to God, it was never there. It must have been a freak twist of the mouth in between sobs of pain.”

  He grabbed the photo from my hands and tossed it to the floor, spinning it back toward the other framed photographs. There was a loud crash as it hit the wall.

  “I was so proud of that shot. So fucking proud! And it wasn’t even real.” He gestured toward the shattered frame. “That’s not what was going on over there, in the desert. It was a fluke. Nothing more.”