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 page 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.”
“Does it matter?” I asked. “You got the shot. You were in the right place at the right time. The soldier’s expression was there, and you caught it. And the emotion… it resonates. So what if it was a fluke?”
“You are a reminder,” Cob Gilles said with a smile. “You’re a fucking blast from my past. I thought the exact same thing back then.” He stuck out his thumb, once again gesturing toward the broken frame. “I thought: if you click the shutter enough, if you burn through enough film, you’ll eventually get a shot. Not the shot, mind you, just a shot. And that’s photography: a fluke occurrence, something absolutely unforeseen. The collision between chance, preparation, and time. And it doesn’t even matter what it is as long as it looks good.
“But it’s not true. It’s just not true. There are lies to every image. And the things you choose to show, the things you keep… they do much more than just illustrate. They change things. They alter opinion and mood. They change minds. And not in an objective, reasoned way, but deep down, on a powerful, instinctive level.” He let out a tired little chuckle, very cold, very bitter. “And you lie with pictures just like you lie with words. You can’t help it, you can’t control it.
“And I’m not just talking about news photography, about subjects steeped in politics and scandal. I’m talking about a sly smile on your lover’s lips. I’m talking about the expression on your child’s face.” He closed his eyes, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, making it look like he was trying to swallow something, like he was choking down a rough ball of emotion. “All of that stuff turns dark. Through bad glass, it all gets tainted.”
Cob Gilles finished his beer and crushed the can against the edge of his desk, letting the crumpled shape fall to the floor. “You’ll see,” he said. “You’re young. You’ll learn.”
I nodded, not quite sure how to take this exceedingly bleak view of photography. If there were lies to photography, I figured, there was truth, too, truths we’d never see if not through the dispassionate glass eye of a camera. How’d he lose sight of that? I wondered. How’d he get so bitter?
“And what are you working on now?” I asked. “Who sent you here? Newsweek? TIME? Rolling Stone?”
He shook his head. “No. That’s not me. Not anymore. No fucking way.” His face contorted into tight pale lines, as if even the thought of work gave him pain. “I mean, I still take pictures—I guess, I guess it’s a compulsion with me, something I have to do—but I delete them now. Immediately. Especially if they’re… weird. If it’s the city.” He forced a tense laugh. “Fuck! Most of the time now, if you see me taking pictures, I’m working without a memory card. It’s just, just—fucking click and consigning it all to the ether.”
“Why?” I asked. “What happened?”
He shrugged. “I just stopped trusting. I stopped trusting all of this.” He gestured vaguely at the photography gear laid out before him. “It’s no good. The images it shows… it’s all lies now, Dean. It’s all bad glass. And I just don’t want to spread it anymore.”
He once again reached beneath his desk, this time coming up with a half-empty bottle of Scotch and a pair of glasses. I wondered briefly what else he had squirreled away down there, around his feet.
I watched him fill the glasses. His hands were steady but slow.
“What do you think’s happening here?” I asked.
He stared at me for a second, then turned the question back around. “What do you think, Dean?” He handed me my drink. “You’re new here, right? You haven’t been tainted yet… at least not much. What do you think’s happening here?”
I paused for a moment, thinking. I didn’t have an answer, and I didn’t really want to venture a guess. “Mama Cass thinks it’s some type of hallucinogen, something in the environment that’s making us all crazy.”
Cob Gilles nodded. “Yeah. That sounds like her. We’re all broken, hallucinating, and she’s the only one taking it in stride. At least that’s what she’d like to believe… the only one strong enough to ride it all out—this strange and dangerous trip—and walk out the other side with money busting her every seam.”
“You don’t agree?”
“No.” He smiled. “No, we’re not insane. It’s deeper than that. It’s the world that’s gone insane, not us. It’s the world.” He bolted a swallow of Scotch and leaned forward in his chair, swaying slightly before his hands found the edge of the desk. “It’s a tumor,” he continued in a confidential whisper. “It’s a cancer—brain cancer—somewhere deep in the core of the city. Growing, distorting the shape of reality. Spreading. Metastasized. Terminal. It’s eating us hollow. We’re eating ourselves hollow.”
I glanced down at my glass, focusing on the beautiful glowing liquid. It was easier to look at, easier to comprehend. When I glanced back up, I found him watching me, his eyes suddenly bright and jovial. Those eyes told me his entire story. He knew how crazy this all sounded, but he no longer cared.
He had his booze. He had his pills. He’d made himself ready for the end of the world.
“I saw it, Dean. I actually saw the tumor.”
For a moment, I thought he was kidding, or at last speaking in glib abstractions. But those eyes were not the eyes of a jokester; they were the eyes of a man who really didn’t give a fuck what I believed or how I reacted. He was speaking in order to speak, in order to hear his own words. Nothing else mattered.
“It was in the hospital, I think, though I’m not quite sure. We started way out east, in the industrial district, but where we ended up…” He smiled widely and shrugged. “Jesus Christ, it was fucked! We were underground for… I don’t know. A long time? And I don’t remember most of it—moving in a drunken trance, like snatches of memory from a weeklong bender. I remember it was cold at times. And sometimes we were in earthen tunnels, sometimes in basements and corridors.
“There were six of us at the start, but only two of us made it to the room. I really don’t know what happened to the others. I remember glancing around and seeing fewer and fewer people, but it didn’t really register. It was like my higher brain functions had been shut off. I was dizzy, and I think I threw up a couple of times.”
He raised his glass back to his lips. His hand was shaking now, and I heard the glass clink against his teeth as he finished off his drink. He lowered the glass and refilled it quickly, spilling another tumbler’s worth across the surface of the desk.
“We must have climbed back out of the underground at some point, but I don’t remember any stairs. Just the room. It was halfway down a carpeted corridor—the entire expanse gray with predawn light, all the color stripped out of the world. And then there was this… room—” As he said these words, Cob Gilles’s voice swelled with awe. “There was this room,” he continued, “with golden light spilling out, onto the floor of the hallway. And we were there, at the threshold, looking inside. We must have been aboveground, because there was an entire wall of picture windows on the far side of the room, blinding us with the most beautiful golden light. We were at least ten floors up, and the city outside was gorgeous and new—I don’t even think it was Spokane. And there was a big table stretching down the middle of the room, with people sitting all around. It was some type of boardroom, and everyone was dressed in business attire, sitting motionless, staring at us. Staring at us with unblinking eyes. At least twenty of them, both men and women.
“I don’t know what they wanted, but their eyes were absolutely huge, expectant. Like they knew something was going to happen—and that something, whatever it might be, was going to be absolutely terrible. And then—” The photographer’s eyes scrunched up as if he were trying to riddle out some complex problem or trying to remember something that desperately did not want to be remembered. “—and then they stood up, all at once, in freakish unison. And then…” Cob Gilles shrugged and once again raised his glass to his lips. Before drinking, he mumbled around the glass: “And then… I just don’t remember.”
I joined him as he drank deeply. My head was swimming, and the sharp bite of Scotch did little to straighten things out.
What the photographer was saying was absolute insanity—boardrooms and businessmen! If anything, it supported Mama Cass’s theory. What he was describing was a drug trip, a hallucinogenic break from reality.
The photographer let out a bracing hiss and set his glass back down. “When we came to, we were sitting on a bench downtown, and it was just the two of us. The others were gone. And they stayed gone. We never saw them again.”
“And that’s the tumor?” I asked. “A boardroom filled with stuffed suits?”
The photographer shook his head. He didn’t seem put off by my abrupt summation. He just seemed very, very tired. “There was a sickness there, Dean; I could feel it. There’s something horribly wrong with the very nature of the universe, and it was centered right there, in that room, at that meeting. Like suddenly physics had gone awry. Stars had collapsed, and atoms had split. And it was tearing everything apart. And this—” He gestured about the room, but it was clear he meant the city and not the chaos of his apartment. “—this is a symptom. This place. This feeling.”
I shrugged and lifted my palms into the air, a gesture of pure frustration. “It could have been a delusion, a chemical state that imbued your visions with a sense of importance, with spiritual clarity.” As I talked, memories of Psych 101 came flooding back in. “That’s what religion is: epiphanies and euphoria. Just neurons misfiring.”
Cob Gilles smiled and shook his head. “I saw through the veil, Dean. During that trip, the scales—as they say—they fell from my eyes.”
He once again reached for the bottle of Scotch, this time almost knocking it over. Instead of refilling his glass—a task I don’t think he could have managed—he drank straight from the bottle. “And what I saw… that was the reality. And this world—this whole fucking world—is the delusion, nothing but a fever dream spinning away inside a dying mind.”
He paused for a moment, then continued: “And what happens, Dean? What happens when that mind dies? What happens when there’s no one left to hold it all together?”
“Dean!”
Sabine’s voice was shrill and frantic, and it sounded a long way away.
At the sound of her cry, Cob Gilles started in his chair. He’d been so focused on me—and his booze and his story—I think he’d forgotten all about Sabine, left to wander through his apartment as we talked, as he let the drugs and alcohol work their magic on his body and nerves.
I spun around and started toward the confusion of bookcases, then decided to bypass that maze altogether. Instead, I stayed near the wall, passing a small, garbage-strewn kitchenette before finally reaching the front door and picking up Sabine’s trail.
“Dean!” She was closer now, and her voice sounded more frantic, more desperate.
“Sabine!” I called back, but she didn’t respond.
What will I find? I wondered. Her body, sunk into the floor? Her eyes, pleading for help?
I collided with a bookcase and sent a shelf of notebooks cascading to the floor. A binder popped open, and the air filled with photographs.
I turned a corner and found Sabine standing in the narrow space between the wall and a row of bookcases. Her face was contorted with confusion and anxiety, but she looked healthy, unharmed.
After a moment of tense silence, she turned and faced me. “It’s the Poet,” she said, her voice congested, breaking into a breathless sob. “It’s the Poet… and she won’t speak to me!”
I followed her gaze back down the narrow space. There was a woman sitting on a stool about a dozen feet away. She sat perfectly still, facing away from us. Her back was ramrod stiff, and her whole body looked tense, ready to spring.
She was wearing a hood. It was a black leather fetish hood, and it covered almost her entire head, leaving just her eyes, mouth, and jaw visible. A spill of dark brown hair cascaded out from beneath the back of the hood, falling over the collar of a gray, paint-spattered peacoat. I could see her face in profile. Her pale lips trembled with suppressed energy, and her bright blue eyes—framed in cut-out ovals—quivered as she looked pointedly away.
“Sharon said she wore a mask,” Sabine gasped, her voice harsh and breathy. “That’s why she sent me here—so I could find her! But she won’t say a word!”
Unleashing a sudden burst of anger, Sabine turned back toward the masked woman. “Fucking say something! Fucking talk to me!”
The Poet remained still. I thought I could see her eyes widen at Sabine’s outburst.
A hand grabbed my arm and jerked me back. My foot slipped on a loose photograph, and I almost fell to the floor. “It’s time for you to go,” Cob Gilles growled. He was drunk and unsteady, but that didn’t diminish the force of his hand, or his words, as he pulled me toward the front door. He launched me in that direction with an abrupt shove, then went after Sabine.
“You better fucking leave her alone!” he yelled. “She’s my angel—my angel!—and she’s been through enough shit without some crazy bitch yelling at her!”
He grabbed Sabine’s coat and pulled her back, but unlike me, Sabine did fall. The photographer didn’t wait for her to regain her feet. He just kept pulling, dragging her across the hardwood floor. Sabine kicked out, knocking stacks of books across the floor and setting one bookcase tottering precariously. Finally, one of her flailing arms struck Cob Gilles’s shin, and he lost his grip on her coat.
“Get out!” he roared, falling back against the wall, overwhelmed with emotion. There were tears streaming down his cheeks. “Get the fuck out of our home! You aren’t welcome here. You aren’t welcome!”
He collapsed to the ground and buried his face in his hands. “You aren’t welcome,” he continued to sob, losing energy and volume. “You aren’t welcome.”
Sabine jumped to her feet and started toward him. Her jaw was clenched, and there was dark venom in her eyes. I stopped her. I grabbed her in a tight bear hug and rotated her away from the photographer, putting my body in between the two of them. “Shhhhh,” I said, trying to make a comforting noise in her ear. “Shhhhh. He’s done. It’s all over.”
After a handful of seconds Sabine stopped struggling, and I let her go. She took a step back, then adjusted her jacket across her shoulders. “Fuck this shit,” she muttered, and fled the apartment, violently ripping the front door open and letting it bounce off the wall.
I turned back toward the photographer and gave him one last look before following her out. He was still sobbing in his hands.
And as I watched, he toppled over.
That’s how I left him, the great Cob Gilles, Pulitzer Prize—winning photographer: sobbing, curled into a fetal ball on his apartment floor.