Watchlist

by Bryan Hurt

  He looked for the camera taking the pictures. Was it in the ceiling tiles? Was it embedded in the doorframe?

  He was up on a chair using his phone to look at Facebook with one hand and searching the ceiling tiles with the other when a security guard unlocked the door.

  “I had to smash it,” said Tre. “It was hacking my computer.”

  “The cops are on their way,” she said. “Just so you know.”

  “Man,” he said. “Why did you call the cops? It’s a fucking robot!”

  “It calls the cops automatically, dude,” said the security guard. “Do you know how much these things cost? You basically just crashed somebody’s yacht, dude.”

  “Whose apartment is this?” asked Tre.

  “You mean you don’t even know where you are?” asked the security guard, laughing.

  His phone was ringing. It was Jessica. He put his phone on the ground and started smashing it with the slab of marble, gritting his teeth so hard that they squeaked, while the security guard just shook her head and laughed, not getting too close, quietly taking video with her phone just in case the cops had questions.

  The Transparency Project

  by Alissa Nutting

  After college, Cora found it hard to get a well-paying job. Amidst stints as a waitress, a bartender, a barista, she came across a few medical testing gigs at a local research facility. Usually, these paid a few hundred dollars and required her to put a cream onto her skin that sometimes caused a rash and sometimes didn’t, or to put drops into her ears that caused variable levels of itching and/or burning and then required her to rank the intensity of itching and/or burning on a numerical scale.

  There were many things in life that Cora found difficult, like choosing which scent and brand of dishwashing soap to purchase. If all bottles of dish soap cost the same amount of money, were all the same size and color and merely differed in fragrance, it would still, she felt, be a very hard decision, because there were many fragrances and they weren’t even in the same fragrance category: there was citrus, floral. There were atmospheric titles like Ocean Breeze that inspired their own line of thought and questioning altogether (for example, which ocean? How strong a breeze?). But other tasks, such as being at a given place at least fifteen minutes prior to the time when she actually needed to be there, had never proved to be a struggle for Cora. The researchers noted and appreciated this, and it led to her being offered The Transparency Project.

  The Transparency Project was not a one-day test but a hired, permanent job that would last until her natural death. When the leader of the research team said the word “natural” in the phrase “natural death,” he emphasized it in a very unnatural way. Each year, her paid salary would be the previous year’s average salary for all full-time workers in the city where she lived, in addition to a generous benefits package. All she had to do in order to receive this money every year until her natural death was come into the facility for monitoring and testing two days a week, eight hours per day. And have the operation. She could travel up to six weeks of the year, provided she allowed a monitor to meet her at a nearby hotel room for monitoring twice a week during each week of travel. If she were ever injured, comatose, or unable to come to the facility for any reason despite being alive, she would allow them to come to her for the monitoring. There would be legal documents outlining this permission. She would sign them.

  The operation would remove all existing skin and fat from a front section of her torso, starting at the top of her ribs and ending at the top of her pelvis. Her blood and muscles would be infused with a harmless solution that would allow them to become transparent under select wavelengths of light, including daylight and fluorescent lighting, allowing researchers to easily see through to her internal organs. Her skin in this region would be replaced with a clear, waterproof polymer film; when she wasn’t at the facility, she could wear a flesh-colored silicone panel that would easily snap onto a sternum-mounted fastener. When they showed her the panel plate, she rubbed her hand across its surface carefully, like it was asleep and she didn’t wish to wake it up. “What’s this?” she asked them. It was a small brown nub in the sternum’s center that had been designed to look like a protruding mole. It was the panel’s release button.

  The first few months after the surgery, she never released the panel on her own, and on observation days at the facility when the panel was removed, she felt very cold despite the fact that there was no drop in her temperature readings. She began bringing a blanket that she’d put around her shoulders when the panel came off. She avoided looking down at her own organs when the panel was off, mindful to keep her posture straight and her head directed forward or looking up at the ceiling. In order to do this, she pretended she was standing on the ledge of a very tall building, because she was very afraid of heights. Dropping her eyes would not provide a welcome view.

  But gradually, this changed. The panel didn’t feel like her own skin so much as a bodice or a giant waistband; she always wore the panel beneath her clothes in public, but when she got home she found she liked removing it and walking around her house in an open robe. The panel wasn’t capable of sweating, but it often felt that way—despite being dry and even slightly cold to the touch, it felt like a tight shirt that was collecting her body’s warm moisture; when she snapped it off and set it on her nightstand, always balancing it upright on its edge against a reading lamp, she swore her organs felt a pleasant rush of air. This wasn’t possible, of course; the plastic layer that coated them wasn’t porous or permeable. But the psychological feeling was a pleasant one that she enjoyed. At first she only caught sight of her organs in accidental peripheral glances—the mirror, the reflective surface of the new chrome kitchen appliances she’d bought with her new salary. Then, day by day, the coils and twines of her insides became familiar geography with patterns and symmetry that didn’t threaten her sense of order but instead increased it.

  The only sight that continued to give her discomfort was her beating heart. Not its image but its constant movement when she was at rest. Its pulsing reminded her of the way a digital alarm clock’s numbers would flash repeatedly when the power went out and made her feel like an essential part of her needed to be reset. During each session at the research facility, a therapist came into the room at some point and spoke with her and sometimes Cora would talk about the sight of her beating heart with the therapist. Usually the therapist had her speak directly to her heart, saying affirming sentences such as, “Heart, I appreciate you keeping me alive. Heart, I am grateful for your service.” Other times, the therapist asked her to report any unpleasant dreams. Early on, she had a dream that she was at the beach in a bikini, and upon seeing her internal organs a flock of gulls swarmed around her and tried to peck them out. Later she had a dream where she thought she’d woken up only to find herself standing at the foot of her bed watching herself sleeping. Her dreams were being projected on the skin panel resting on her nightstand, playing upon it like a video. It was the dream where seagulls attacked her at the beach.

  Recently the therapist asked Cora to consider starting to date again. Cora replied that she’d never enjoyed dating, but that prior to the operation, it had been her habit to seek out companions for one-night sexual encounters. That she’d done this a few times a year prior to the operation, but had not done it since. “Then try finding someone and having sex,” the therapist said.

  So she joined an online service and tried. The first man declined to meet after hearing about the operation she’d had. The next said it was okay but changed his mind when she took her shirt off and he ran his fingers along the edges of the panel’s thin seams. “I work on computers all day,” he explained, “taking their cases off. Sometimes I get repair calls because the cases come loose and fall off by accident, all on their own.” She assured him that it wouldn’t, declining to admit this was possible if he pressed the release mole firmly enough by accident, or if she pressed it firmly enough on purpose. The thi
rd was fine with the operation and the panel’s seams and even asked her to take the panel off and leave the bedroom light on. He wanted to watch her organs during intercourse.

  They began having sex, but soon he stopped. “Sorry,” he explained. “I feel like I’m watching a surgery in progress or something,” he said. Cora was annoyed but thought it was better to pretend to be confused. She got ready to say, “There’s no surgery,” or tell him she’d had the operation over a year ago, except she got distracted by her dresser’s mirror. She watched her heart beating again and again like an unanswered question, like a phone in her chest that would not stop ringing. “Hello?” Cora said. In the mirror’s reflection, she could see that the man was no longer next to her in bed. Maybe he’d gone to the bathroom, or maybe he’d quietly left.

  The Gift

  by Mark Irwin

  He was about the size of a wooden match and floated—arms spread out—like a skydiver in a small jar his wife had given him, perhaps because they were childless and he was always traveling.

  She gave it to him on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, in October, while they were on a retreat at a monastery in northern New Mexico. They were having dinner at Francisco’s, just north of Tres Piedras, sitting by the fire when she said—more tenderly than he’d ever known—“Here Mark, I’d like you to have this.”

  At first he thought it was a small salamander, for they used to catch those in mountain ponds, but upon looking in astonishment he could see that this tiny figure swimming about in a thick fluid appeared to be a man—perhaps because of its short black hair. He could see no sexual organs, and the body tight he thought it was wearing appeared to be its own skin.

  “Claire, what a wild gift,” he said. “Thank you. Where’d you get it?”—then from her solemn, penetrating, and almost religious stare, he knew it was real.

  Sliding, sometimes somersaulting, while at other times resting on its side, the tiny figure always seemed buoyant.

  “Well,” he said, as if to bolster his own disbelief, “he must have cost a fortune!”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Where’d you get it? Some lab in California?” he said in jest, half mockingly, but she only smiled, as she did when he’d asked her to marry.

  Smiling again, she added, “He’ll keep you company on your trip, since I have the cats, but don’t open the jar. His food source is infused in the liquid and all the waste is absorbed.”

  Too good to be true, he thought—a pet man—and nodded in disbelief. He was driving to Los Angeles on Friday and would be there for a month, doing some research on language divinely inspired, more specifically on “speaking in tongues,” and the Pentecostal Church had its American origin around there in the early 1900s.

  THE DAY BEFORE he left, Claire explained once more why they could no longer live together—how they wanted different things. “Books are your family,” she said. A phrase that haunted him, but he finally agreed. It was something they’d both long sensed—talked about—and she was going to move in with her elderly mother.

  “Take care of your little man,” she said.

  They both felt terrible, but in one sense he was glad to be leaving. En route he stopped in northern Arizona at a rural B&B called La Rose des Vents, run by a French couple. After a long and wonderful meal, which included salmon pâté and bouillabaisse, he retired to his room where he read and watched the tiny creature glide effortlessly about the jar on the end table. Later he placed the jar on his chest, in order to get a better look as he lay in bed, feeling guilty that he hadn’t given it a name, perhaps because he was still a bit spooked by the recent course of events, and how at times that homunculus would push its tiny face against the glass like a child peeking into a house full of other, hidden children.

  Later that evening as he stared, mesmerized by its movements, it appeared to be writing something on the inside of the jar, writing furiously with all its will—some word over and over. Slowly he unscrewed the jar and with his finger reached toward its outstretched hand, but when he tried to pull it up the inside of the glass, the arm detached and the wound, like a slow red spill into a greater stain, suffused first the body, then the entire liquid to an incandescent pink.

  WAKING, STARING INTO the desert sunrise, he wondered if it was his own name or perhaps Claire’s that it had tried so willfully to trace on the glass, and he saw how large and red everything became there, forgetting who he was, as he reached toward the open window.

  What He Was Like

  by Alexis Landau

  Nadia works at the convenience store a block away from my house. They sell anything from Vaseline to saltines, bruised apples, and floss. I mostly go there for stamps, quarters, and Cascade. Nadia is from North India and she has two teenage sons and one daughter, away at college. She praises the daughter and curses the sons. She says her sons are slow. Her daughter, on the other hand, is studious and diligent and always tries to please. “Similar to you,” she adds.

  I stop by the store maybe once a week, sometimes twice. Nadia has taken a liking to me. She usually comments on my appearance, which at first made me uncomfortable but now I have gotten used to it and I realize it’s just something she does. Scrutinizing my face, she will say that I look tired, or that I have lost weight. I tell her that I always look tired. Once she asked me about my eyebrows because she liked the shape. Another time she wondered about the small blond hairs on my upper lip. “How do you get rid of them?” she asked from behind the counter. Yesterday when I ran into the store for a bottle of water, dressed in black jeans and a white button-down shirt for teaching, Nadia raised her eyebrows, impressed, and told me I should wear makeup more often. “You look better today,” she said, pinching her cheeks. “More color.”

  Oftentimes it seems as if she is squinting into the sun, her own long shapely eyebrows drawn together. Her skin reminds me of how tea looks when clouded with milk. A few gray strands glint in her light brown hair, which she has recently cut because she says it’s easier this way. I ask if her husband liked her long hair better, but she laughs bitterly and says he doesn’t care at all. I ask this only because my husband prefers long hair to short and was disappointed when I cut it off last summer. Since then, my hair has grown back, longer than it ever was, past my shoulder blades.

  Nadia’s husband sporadically appears in a gray BMW with tinted windows. He owns the store. On an odd Tuesday morning or late Friday afternoon, he’ll pull up to the curb and check things out. He has salt-and-pepper hair and a beard trimmed close to his face. She will argue with him about not having enough inventory. He will cajole her into covering another shift. I imagine they also fight behind closed doors because Nadia has said that she hates her life. She tells me this casually, ripping off a neat line of ten stamps from the roll. The coiled-up little American flags are released into my open palm. Her sons are stupid and she must help them with their homework every night after working here all day. If not, they will never get into college. Behind her, miniature bottles of Purell gleam on the shelf, along with new toothbrushes and disposable razors. Her sons are twins and I have seen one of them riding his bicycle down Lincoln Boulevard, dangerously weaving in and out of traffic, his T-shirt billowing in the wind. She constantly tells me not to have children because children will ruin my life. “No more movies, no more vacations, no more anything. All your freedom, gone! I work here day and night to send my daughter to college in Canada. It costs fifty thousand dollars a year.” I nod, wondering why her daughter is in Canada. The cash register opens, signaled by that high-pitched ring. Instead, she advises, a dog is better than a child. She allows my dog into the store even though dogs aren’t allowed. My dog sniffs at all the candy bars and packaged nuts, leaving a slight trail of saliva on the plastic wrappings.

  WHEN I GOT pregnant I felt nervous about going into her store. Especially since I knew I was having a son. But I finally forced myself to go there because we were in dire need of milk and paper towels one morning,
and when she saw my protruding stomach she was solicitous and asked if my hair had grown thicker, if my skin had stayed clear, if I felt sluggish? When I answered each question, I wondered if she secretly thought that my life was ending. Nonetheless she pressed a special ginger drink from Australia into my palm for nausea. The dark brown bottle felt cool to the touch.

  Walking home, I ran my palm along the honeysuckle hedges, the white flowers nestled in the green, giving off a sweet puckered scent. It was the height of summer and the jacaranda trees were shedding their lavender petals, crying violet. Bougainvillea sprouted erratically over walls and fences, bursts of magenta and faded orange. I walked up the hill, noticing my shortness of breath, which I had also noticed a few days ago in ballet class during the barre exercises. I placed a hand on my stomach, and felt the heaviness there.

  I could see my next-door neighbor standing outside on her porch, fussing with her potted plants, all succulents, her white hair in a wispy bun. She never leaves her house and on rainy days the smell of cat piss emanates through her screen door. She has lived on this street for forty years with her husband who has gray skin and gray hair and does not speak. He is eternally busy in their garage tinkering with a vintage car that seems irreparable. When we first moved here three years ago, she used to stare at us through her living room window. When we ate dinner, and I passed the salad, I’d catch a glimpse of her ghostly face peering through the darkened window. Once she took a photograph of us, the flash reflecting off the glass and I screamed, which my husband thought unnecessarily dramatic. When my husband confronted her, she explained in a lilting little girl’s voice that she was only taking a Polaroid of her cat. After that we hung curtains in the living room and planted more ficus trees along the border of our property.