Bad Glass (37 page)

There was a narrow hallway on the other side of the door, leading all the way to the front of the house. Taylor was standing in its center, facing away from me. There was a blanket strung across the corridor at about breast height—a makeshift clothesline barrier, partitioning the hallway into a number of smaller spaces—and she was peering over its edge, down toward the floor on the far side. She was talking to somebody, somebody hidden out of sight, and gesturing with both hands. I couldn’t make out most of what she was saying. Only a couple of her words, raised loud, made it through the doorway: “not staying,” “not safe,” and a single, pleading
“please.”

There was an answering voice from the person on the other side of the blanket, but it was low and calm, and I couldn’t make out a single word.

It was strange, this scene, and I couldn’t tell what was going on. Who was she talking to? One of her parents? And why here, in the middle of the hallway? And what was up with the partition?

I held my breath and tried to concentrate on the muffled sound of Taylor’s voice, trying to pick meaning out of that muted cadence. But there was nothing there, just the dull rumble of argumentative voices, or, rather, the rumble of one argumentative voice set against the reassuring calm of a patient and soothing one. This didn’t go on for too long. After a couple of minutes, the conversation ceased, and Taylor was left standing there, vibrating with mute energy. Then, in a gesture of complete frustration, she pulled the blanket aside and stormed toward the front of the house.

As she made her way to the front door, pushing aside a second barrier, the blanket closest to me slipped from its clothesline and fell to the floor, spilling with a quick, fluid motion. And what it
revealed … well, I actually jumped at the sight, and my hands, pressed flat against the screen door, bounced wildly off the metal barrier.

It was a man, merged with the hardwood floor. The top half of his body looked perfectly normal: a Middle Eastern man dressed in a white button-down shirt. But the shirt stopped midbelly, at the floor, and the bottom half of his body was gone. His hands moved against the floor and walls, slow, languid, and completely insensate. His head lolled, and a line of spittle spilled from his lower lip. I couldn’t see his eyes—his head was moving, and he was over a dozen feet away—but I could imagine them rolled back inside his skull.

There was a woman seated next to the man’s stunted body, a white woman in her fifties, propped up in a comfortable nest of pillows.
Taylor’s mother?
She jumped at the sound of my hands bouncing off the screen door, and a startled cry escaped her throat. Her eyes widened when she saw me standing at the window, looking in. With one hand, she reached out and grabbed the man’s shoulder comfortingly; the other started scrambling toward the blanket on the floor, trying to reassemble her makeshift blind.

“Taylor!” she cried. “Taylor!” Now the woman’s voice was loud enough for me to hear, frantic and shrill and filled with a primal, instinctual fear. “What is this?
What’s going on?
”

I looked up and saw Taylor towering over her parents. Her eyes were locked on me, narrowed and filled with a cold, biting anger. She wasn’t moving. My presence here had frozen her solid.

Her mother continued to struggle with the blanket, trying desperately to throw it up and over the clothesline. She worked one-handed, refusing to release her grip on her husband. “Help,” she said, turning to look back at Taylor. “Please, Taylor, for the love of God, help!” Her words came out frantic and disjointed. There were tears running down her cheeks.

Finally, Taylor stepped forward and put the blanket back in place, carefully draping it over the clothesline. Once it was back up—and her parents hidden from view—Taylor pointed at me
and gestured me away from the window. It was an angry, dismissive shooing gesture. And at that moment, I swear, there was genuine hate in her eyes. At that moment, I think she couldn’t fucking stand me.

I backed away, horrified.

What had I done?

I sat down in the dirt and waited for Taylor to appear. There was a frigid wind blowing down from the north, and the clouds were getting darker overhead, a dense slate-gray weight perched above the city. It felt like snow.

I didn’t know what was going to happen with Taylor. I’d looked in on something private here, a secret, and didn’t know how she was going to react.

Her parents. Her father, melted into the floor, consumed by the city.

I thought it was unheard of—this phenomenon—I thought it was something that I alone had been carrying around. I thought it was mine. But Taylor had seen Weasel; she’d seen his fingers. She was a part of it now. I’d infected her.

Maybe it would be for the best if she pushed me away. Maybe I was a cancer that needed to be excised from her life.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” she asked, rounding the corner of the house. She stopped on the other side of the yard, crossing her arms and leaning back against the wall. “Did you follow me? Did you fucking follow me?”

“Danny told me about the house, your parents’ house. I was worried about you. You ran away … after Weasel. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“And how the fuck did Danny know? I didn’t tell him. Has
he
been following me?” These words brought a sour look to her face, a look of wounded betrayal. “Are there no fucking secrets around here? No privacy?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, but I didn’t mean—” I struggled for a moment, trying to figure out what I did mean, what I’d been
hoping—or expecting—to find on the other side of her parents’ window. Finally, I managed: “I didn’t mean to scare your mom. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m sorry.” Taylor’s face remained impassive, set in stone. “And I’m sorry about your father.”

There was a hint of emotion then, a slight twisting at the corner of her lips. Taylor remained still for a while. Then she pushed herself away from the wall and let out a loud sigh, her anger transitioning into a desolate sadness.

“She won’t leave him,” she said. “My mother. She thinks he’s still in there. The sounds he makes; she thinks he’s communicating, thinks he’s saying her name. Miriam, fucking Miriam. But he’s not. It’s just stupid, senseless noise.” She clenched her arms tighter across her chest, like maybe she was just now starting to feel the cold October air. “She’s set up camp right there, next to him, and she won’t leave … Yet she won’t let me stay in the house! She wants me out of the city. She wants me gone.”

“She loves you. She wants you to be safe.”

Taylor clenched her body even tighter. I could see her shivering now. “I don’t see why,” she said quietly, a bitter hint of self-loathing in her voice. “She should hate me. I ruin everything I touch.”

“That’s not true,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s just not true. I don’t know … maybe it’s me. You remember what Danny said? There were no reports of anything like this before I showed up. Nothing. Nowhere. It’s just around me—people falling through walls, losing cohesion. It’s something I brought into the city, something the city brought out of me. You just got too close … And I’m sorry for that. I’m just so, so sorry.”

“No, Dean,” she said, her voice calm, suddenly devoid of energy. She was stating fact now; there was no room for emotion. “It’s not you; it’s not even the city. It’s me. I’m doing this. Everything around me.” Then, more quietly: “It’s what I do. People get close to me and they fall apart.”

“That’s just not true.”

“This happened a month ago, Dean,” she said, gesturing frantically
toward the house, toward her father trapped inside. “Before you got here. We were fighting. I was yelling at him—fucking yelling—and he stepped through the fucking floor. He put his foot down, and it just didn’t stop going. And it’s not just him, Dean. I see this a lot. It’s happening all around me … You saw Weasel!”

I stood up and started toward her, wanting to give her some type of comfort, but she held up her hands and took a step back, shaking her head violently. “Jesus Christ, Dean. No! Just stay back.” Her voice hitched, and tears started to pool in her eyes.

“What must she think?” she whispered forlornly, staring back toward the house, toward her mother. “She knows, right? She’s got to know. But what must she think … of me?”

I tried to give her a warm, reassuring smile. “You’ve got it wrong, Taylor. It isn’t you. I’m not sure what it is, but it isn’t you. Your mother understands that. It’s the city … it’s just the city.”

“But how can you know that? You can’t know that. No one knows that!”

“I do,” I said. “I just do.” I paused, remembering the man dangling from the ceiling back on my first day in the city. “I saw something like that—” I gestured toward her father. “—when you weren’t around, when Weasel stole my backpack. So it can’t be you … Hell, I thought it was me.”

Taylor stayed silent for a handful of seconds, staring at me like she was trying to figure me out. “You’re lying,” she finally said. “You’re a lying bag of shit, and you’re just telling me what I want to hear.”

“I may be a bag of shit,” I said. “But I’m not lying.” I took a single step forward, and this time she didn’t retreat. “I’m close to you, right? We’ve slept in the same bed. You’ve been happy with me, you’ve been mad at me. Well, I’m still here, aren’t I? I’m fine. And Danny’s fine. And Floyd and Charlie and Sabine—they’re fucked up, but they’re still fine. They’re not falling apart.” I shook my head once again. “It’s something else, Taylor, some other process.
It’s got to be. And whatever you think you know, you don’t. You really don’t.”

Taylor watched me for a moment, her face impassive, absorbing my words. Then she shook her head, refusing to believe.

“You aren’t saying anything here, Dean. Your mouth is open, but there’s nothing coming out.”

She turned abruptly and started back around the side of the house, heading toward Second Avenue. “Now get the fuck out of my mom’s yard, before she finds her shotgun shells.”

I followed Taylor through the city streets. She stayed about ten feet ahead of me. Each time I tried to catch up, she put on a burst of speed, leaving me behind. She was pissed off. I couldn’t reach her.

Her father had fallen through the floor over a month ago. She’d been living with that, bearing that responsibility. How could I prove that it wasn’t her fault?

I can’t
, I realized. Unless I somehow managed to figure out this whole thing, there was absolutely nothing I could do to convince her otherwise.

And then—

There was a great tearing sound in the sky just as we reached the middle of the 290 bridge. It was loud and violent, and it shook me so deeply that I nearly fell over. At first, I thought it was an earthquake, but the ground wasn’t moving. It was just a sound, so loud that it confused my senses, a physical pounding in my eardrums.

I covered my ears with my hands and turned toward Taylor. She was doing the same thing; her hands were pressed against the sides of her head, and there was a pained, confused grimace on her face. She was looking up at the sky.

The clouds above our heads were coming apart, like eddies of water spilling downhill. It couldn’t have been a wind in the upper atmosphere; it was moving too fast, fleeing a point in the sky
somewhere over the middle of the city. Massive dark gray thunderclouds gathering, clumping, and spilling away, all in a matter of seconds. And the sky they left behind—

I felt my breath hitching in my throat. For a dozen seconds, I couldn’t remember how to breathe. I couldn’t remember anything but that sky. My God, that sky!

The sky was red. Varying shades of red—a vast field of shifting density—from neon pink all the way to dark oxblood crimson. It was an unnatural paint box of color.

The clouds were gone in a matter of seconds, leaving behind nothing but that depthless red plane. The earth-shattering sound disappeared with the clouds.
It was the sound of a massive vacuum cleaner
, I thought absurdly as I stared up into the crimson void.
The sound of the clouds being sucked away, like a bucket of spilled sand
.

“What’s going on?” Taylor yelled, partially deafened.

I shook my head.

A corner of the sky lit with an electric spark of light, followed by a loud momentary
crack
. The sound of artillery fire or a dead tree snapping in two. It was nowhere near as loud as the original rending noise that had shaken me to my very core. This was followed by another burst of light and another
crack
, lighting up a different portion of the sky.

“Is that lightning?” Taylor asked.

“I don’t know.”

She grabbed my hand and started pulling me down the street, west, toward the center of town. It seemed like her anger was gone. For the moment at least, it had been preempted.

People were emerging from the buildings up and down the street. Dirty, ragged refugees, some rubbing their eyes as if just awakened from a solid sleep. They were all staring up at the sky. Mute. In shock.
If they weren’t in shock
, I thought,
if they were capable of reacting in an appropriate, rational way, there’d be screaming and panic. Chaos and prayers and violence
. The sky was
bleeding, after all. Up above our heads, the sky had fallen. And this …

This was its bloody corpse.

“Dean!” Taylor called into my ear, startling my eyes back down to the street. She was pulling at my arm violently. I’d stopped without realizing it. “We’ve got to find out what happened. We’ve got to find somebody who knows!” I got my legs moving once again, and we continued west. Toward the courthouse, I realized, toward Danny and the military.

We found Mama Cass at Post Street. She was sitting in a lawn chair in the middle of the road, directly in front of her restaurant. Her customers stayed back on the sidewalk, but her old Jewish cook—
Hershel
, I thought, remembering his name—stood at her side, his hands tucked beneath a tomato-stained apron. She had a bottle of beer dangling from one hand as she stared up at the sky. There was a bemused look on her face.

Taylor was going to run straight past, but Mama Cass stopped us. “Where do you think you’re going?” she asked in an amused voice. “Running to the military, maybe?” Taylor pulled to a stop and turned back toward Mama Cass, pure hatred burning in her eyes. Mama Cass was watching us with a sly grin. “That won’t get you very far, darling.” She sounded drunk. Or high. Or out of her fucking mind.