And that would be that. One fewer person in Taylor’s house.
And I didn’t want that. I really didn’t want that. I liked Floyd. I liked his relaxed skater charm, his playful smile, the way he laughed so easily and with such an inviting warmth. I didn’t want to see the house without that. I wanted the chance to once again sit out in the backyard, listening happily as he played his guitar.
At least Charlie isn’t here, I told myself. That—the two of them together—would have been too much for me to handle.
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.
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.