Daryl Gregory - The Sound of Glass Breaking

This is a mainstream story I wrote while my wife and I were living in Salt Lake City, Utah. We were only in Salt Lake for a year while Kathy did her doctoral internship at the University of Utah Counseling Center and worked on her dissertation. I got a job at the university training people how to use their telephones and voicemail ("Press pound. That's right, pound.") At night I tried to get some writing done.

I thought external deadlines would spur me to productivity, so I took advantage of my staff discount and enrolled in a fiction writing course with François Camoin. The first assignment eventually turned into "Free, and Clear." The second was this story. (The third and final story was a mess best lost to history called "Golf Digest Fiction Supplement #8: Love on the Links"—an aburdist thing about golf-cart-jousting octogenarians who fight and fall in love.)

That year we lived in a dark and dreary basement apartment. The landlord called it "garden level." I called it "soul-killing." But we were broke and the price was right. Salt Lake was a great place to live, even if you weren't Mormon, but in that apartment I felt like we were underground and under siege. Almost everything else in the story is made up, but my God, that apartment…

Three a.m. and footsteps creak overhead: the cop is home. Gordon comes awake—eyes still closed, body still paralyzed by sleep—but listening. Marti, a warm mass beside him, sleeps through everything. Gordon’s never told her how the cop wakes him every night.

There’s nothing for a long time. Finally the cop speaks: his voice is low and vibrates through the floor, but the words have been absorbed by the wood and plaster. The woman says nothing that he can hear. The bed squeaks in a rhythm. The headboard knocks against the wall—steady, steady—and Gordon rubs a hand past his stomach; he is already hard. Then the woman’s voice, as clear as if she were next to him:

“Shit.” The word sounds delicate. Marti turns on her side and one arm falls across his chest. Later Gordon listens to the man clump to the bathroom and turn on the shower, listens to the water drum against the tub.

“We’re throwing the damn cat out.” Marti holds the ironing cord, insulation split open, red and yellow and green wires exposed. Some have been chewed through to the copper. Gordon keeps his head down, flips a page of the phonebook and runs his finger down the column: Grocers, Grouting Compounds, Guard Dogs. Guards—Door & Window. “The cat is going to die,” she says.

He can’t listen to her when she gets like this. He picks up the phone and dials. Rufus bats at the cord, snags it with one paw, and bites. Marti screams—really screams, nothing falsely dramatic. Rufus jumps sideways and explodes down the hallway.

There are tears in her eyes. “I’ll fix the iron,” he says. She shakes her head, slowly. Gordon realizes that he and the cat are equally in danger. “I know a guy."

“There isn’t—” she says. “This isn’t because—” Marti turns toward the window.

Gordon waits. There is nothing safe to say here. A click from the receiver in his lap and a voice sounds distantly. He doesn’t want to lift the handset. He doesn’t want to make a sudden move.

They live in a half-basement apartment, where the windows are waist high from inside, flush with the pavement on the outside. In the summer they keep the windows open and the blinds closed, and at night the sounds are so close it’s as if there are no walls at all; a car door, a conversation in the parking lot, the screeching of cats fighting. The sound of boots on the ceiling. Anything can wake him. Sometimes his eyes snap open and he thinks, They’re coming. He doesn’t know who, or why he’s so certain: these are dream facts. Sometimes he reaches for Marti in the dark and traces the curve from ribs to stomach. Sometimes he presses his cheek against her belly and listens. A month ago there was a bundle of cells and nerves about two inches long in her womb; he had listened like this and not even known it was there.

He watches for them when they leave their apartment: the cop, a little overweight but looking good in his black and gray uniform; the woman much younger, fresh-faced but curiously neutral in her expressions. Gordon has never seen them talk to each other. They do not hold hands. It is difficult to imagine them as the source of the night sounds; it’s difficult for Gordon to visualize anyone except himself and Marti making love.

Gordon and Marti come home from shopping and the cat runs past their legs, into the parking lot. Gordon sets the bags inside the door and turns to get him.

“Just leave him out,” Marti says.

“He’s an indoor cat. He’s declawed.” They’ve had this conversation before.

“If he wants out let him out.” Marti moves past. Gordon stands for awhile, looking into the parking lot.

He props the door open with a five- pound sack of sugar and carries the groceries into the kitchen. “What if he gets hit by a car?”

“We can only hope,” she says, and loops an arm around his neck. She kisses his ear and it’s as loud as a champagne cork.

At work post-its are glued to his computer screen, the surface of his desk, the sides of his coffee mug. There are prioritized lists in his Franklin planner, Action Plans tacked to his cubicle wall, and a silver-framed list of Long Range Goals on fake parchment on the top shelf. The words and paper confuse the issue, blind him; it is impossible to read one word without reading all of them, and soon everything is confetti, visibility down to zero. He responds only to the ring of the phone, and each time he answers it’s with a sense of dread: what have I forgotten now? His Team Leader drops him an E-Mail to tell him he’s falling behind, that he should get focused, but the words blur on the screen and Gordon has to shut his eyes.

Gordon sits upright in bed, heart hammering, and he doesn’t know why. He looks around the dark room. Marti mumbles from her pillow, “What is it?”

Outside, a car door opens. A man swears and then yells something that is all consonants: he’s drunk, Gordon realizes.

He slips out of bed and parts the blinds: the windows are cranked open and there is only the screen between them. Yards away the cop is stepping out of his car, his civilian car, the bumper folded against an iron support column of the carport. The left headlight is shattered. The cop looks at the mess, shakes his head, and turns around. The top buttons of his uniform are undone. Through the screen Gordon can smell oil and hot metal.

“What is it?” Marti says, and the light comes on in the bedroom.

The cop halts in mid stride, and he and Gordon make eye contact. For a moment neither man moves, and then Gordon releases the blinds and whips around: “Jesus, Marti!” It’s half yell, half whisper. Marti flips the light off, but the cop is already stepping forward, Gordon can hear him.

“Hey!” the man shouts. His voice is too close, just inches beyond the screen. “Hey!”

Gordon waits for a foot to tear through the thin mesh and blinds. Finally Marti yells, “We’re calling the police!” Gordon thinks, she doesn’t realize who it is.

The cop sighs. “Shit.” Gordon waits until the shuffling steps fade, then cranks the windows dosed. In bed he spoons against Marti, his arm covering her warm stomach, and listens for the clump of boots on the ceiling.

Rufus knows the sound of his car and as soon as Gordon steps out he hears the cat complaining from the window. He opens the apartment door and Rufus jumps forward, but Gordon is ready and scoops him up. “Hey, boy, how’s it going?”