Watchlist

by Bryan Hurt

  Our New Neighborhood

  by Lincoln Michel

  When the incidents start, my husband decides that what our neighborhood needs is a Neighborhood Watch. “We need to watch our assets as closely as we’re gonna watch the twins,” he says, tapping the baby monitor screen. The screen is dark and blue. It shows two pale teddy bears in an otherwise empty crib.

  The next morning, I come downstairs and see Donald slinking in the corner with a black trench coat and fedora.

  “What do you think?”

  We’re low on disposable income and, as usual, he bought a size too large.

  “It looks a little conspicuous,” I say.

  “That’s the idea, Margot. I want them to know someone is watching.”

  My husband buttons the top button of the coat, puts on a pair of sunglasses.

  As I slide the toast in the toaster, I see him out the window. He’s sneaking through the bushes in the neighbor’s backyard.

  THE REASON WE are low on cash is that we poured our savings into buying house #32 in a neighborhood called Middle Pond. Middle Pond is located between West Pond on the east and East Pond on the west. All three are part of North Lake, which is itself a subset of the Ocean Shore suburb.

  It looks perfect on paper. It has a stellar school system and all the amenities.

  “Normally, I’d say we should wait and see,” the real estate agent said, “but if you don’t snatch this now you’ll watch it go bye-bye.”

  Donald downloaded an app called HausFlippr that estimates property values in exclusive neighborhoods. Each time the Middle Pond score went up a full percentage point, Donald cooked rib eyes on our new five-burner grill.

  He hasn’t cooked rib eyes in months.

  OUR NEIGHBORS ARE not as worried about the declining rating. “My father used to say, ‘Markets fluctuate like fishes swim,’” John Jameson says at the neighborhood improvement meeting. It’s our week to host and I’m placing triangles of cheese beside rectangle crackers.

  Several of the other wives are insisting on helping me.

  “We’ll make sure this is the last time you host until after the miracles pop out,” Mrs. Jameson says.

  “Can I see?” Alice Johansson asks while lifting up the hem of my blouse.

  “There’s nothing to see, I’m not even showing.”

  In the other room, Donald is raising his voice. “Well my father always said you can never be too careful when it comes to property and prosperity. Plus, I already bought the trench coat.”

  The three of us walk back in holding the one tray.

  “Okay, if it will make you feel better, we’ll take a vote.”

  Donald is a tall, muscular man. He knows how to use his body, how to loom. The vote is tight, but Donald stares down enough neighbors that his budget is approved.

  “Let’s move on to the question of acceptable dye colors for next month’s Easter egg hunt.”

  “I refuse to participate if metallics are allowed again,” Samantha Stetson says. “They hurt my eyes.”

  THE CRIB IS temporarily in my office. This means that the baby monitor camera is temporarily in here too. It is shaped like a purple flower and situated between the plants on the windowsill. The monitor is downstairs in the living room. I’ve adjusted the angle of the camera so that it can see the crib, but can’t see my computer screen.

  I can’t allow Donald to see what I look at online.

  THE PROPERTY VALUES in Middle Pond are based on the reputation of the neighborhood, which is determined, in large part, by the official score assigned by the North Lake Committee on Proper Property Standards.

  We are never told the qualifying factors, but judging from the way the inspectors inspect, the list is long and varied. They inspect the level of seed in the bird feeders, observe the height of the grass in each lawn, and mark down rule infractions during the games of hopscotch on the street.

  Our neighbors probably thought that Donald would get bored after a week or give up when the score increased. But the score keeps declining and by mid-month Donald has an entire operation set up in our basement.

  “Look at those paint stains in the driveway of the Johnsons’. And see how the Stetsons keep every curtain drawn?”

  I’m maneuvering the laundry basket between his monitors and stacks of notes.

  He calls me over, makes me watch a time-lapse progression of black cars entering and leaving the Jacobsons’ garage.

  “I’m going to see if the neighborhood board will increase the Watch’s budget. I need at least a dozen cameras. What do you think?”

  I want to tell him that my bladder hurts and my back aches and I don’t care about the neighbors’ driveways. I want to tell him that he was supposed to be helping me during the pregnancy, not getting in my way. Mostly I want to tell him that he should be looking at me, not the neighbors.

  OR THAT’S WHAT I know I’m supposed to feel. In fact, I don’t mind that Donald isn’t looking at me. After five years of marriage, my own eyes have started wandering.

  I know that every marriage goes through those phases, where you look at the other person and can’t remember what you ever saw in them. I know that it will pass, and that the babies will give us something new to look at together. But they aren’t born yet.

  When Donald starts pinning evidence to his corkboard, I creep upstairs and open my SingleMingle account. I gaze at the pixelated men. Some of them are smiling with salt and wind in their hair. Others are introspective, reading a novel in a leather wingchair. When I click next, a new one materializes. I click next again and again and again. There is an endless number of these men. My favorites are the ones who don’t have shirts on. Some even crop their heads off, leaving just their disembodied, under-tanned torsos moving across the screen.

  Donald’s operation starts out small, and consists mostly of warning signs that Donald posts around the neighborhood. These signs show a dark figure with glowing eyes and the words You Are Seen.

  Nevertheless, during the inspector’s next visit, while he is measuring the dampness of the cul-de-sac gutter, somebody keys the inspector’s car.

  THE NEXT DAY, HausFlippr changes our safety rating from A to A- and drops our overall score five points.

  Donald’s budget is quickly tripled.

  He buys a dozen cameras from Discountsleuth.com and hides them around our property. One is slinked through the hose, looking out at the street. Two face our immediate neighbors’ houses through holes in the fence that Donald drills with an old dentist drill. One is hooked to the weathervane at the top of the house, providing a rotating view of the neighborhood as the wind blows.

  The cameras snake down into the basement, where they are monitored by Donald and his two interns, Chet and Chad.

  I USE A fake zip code on my SingleMingle account. My user info is a lie. My height is shrunk an inch, my status marked “seductively single,” my eyes labeled hazel instead of green. I use photos that obscure my features, angles that make my nose look bigger or my hair a different shade of brown.

  If anyone who knows me saw my profile, they wouldn’t be able to recognize me.

  Still, I make sure to browse strangers in other neighborhoods like North Forest and South Beach.

  A man with the username OceanShoreStud27 catches my eye. His profile doesn’t have much information, but I want to know more. I plug his user photos into reverse image search, find his other profiles on other sites. His name is Derek Carrington. He’s thirty-seven, a Libra, works in finance, has a blog devoted to his sport fishing catches. I check out his most played songs on BoomboxFM and a list of every movie he’s rated on Moviemaniacs.com.

  What gets my heart truly racing is the satellite photo of his house. It’s only a few miles away and has a back porch and a pool. I zoom in as far as I can until the pool’s blue hues are giant pixelated blocks. I imagine myself sitting by the pool with Derek, our twins splashing in the abstract art.

  I come.
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  I organize the files on Derek, zip and encode them on a folder in my external hard drive.

  Then I start searching again.

  “CORRUPT ASSHOLES!” DONALD is pounding his fist into the refrigerator.

  He notices me in the doorway, gazes at my stomach.

  “What are the three of you craving? Fried chicken? Tacos? I can get one of the interns to make a run.”

  I tell him Thai, and he sends Chet out. He looks at me with that serious expression he gets when he is unsure if I can handle what he wants to say. It’s my least favorite expression of his.

  “A dog attacked Chad when he was affixing a new camera to the yield-to-children sign. We got a photo, but none of the neighbors will identify it.”

  “People get protective of their pets.”

  “The bastards are trying to stonewall me!” He hits his own palm with his fist. “It’s not just that violation, Margot. It’s vandalism. Crime. Drugs. Lord knows what else.”

  He mistakes my bemusement for worry. He comes over and touches my stomach with the backs of his hands.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t let anything happen to any of us.”

  He continues to rub my belly with his knuckles. I try to think of the last time those knuckles touched me in a place I wanted to be touched.

  “I wish I could see what was going on in there,” he says without looking up.

  DESPITE DONALD’S EFFORTS, the incidents don’t stop. Someone toilet-papers the Thompsons’ oak tree. A raccoon spills garbage all across our cul-de-sac. Four yards have grown well beyond the allowable length. Donald calls in a half-dozen noise violations, but can’t pin down the sources.

  He has successes too. He catches the Jamesons’ cat urinating on the Abelsons’ rosebushes, gets little Sally Henderson to sign an affidavit that she left her Frisbee in the gutter.

  When we bought this place, Middle Pond houses were valued higher than West Pond and nearly equal with East Pond. Now they are not better than condos in South Creek.

  Donald takes a temporary leave from his job. Says he’s going to focus on the family, on our protection. The North Lake Proper Property Standards Guidebook is a tome. Donald and his interns keep finding new rules and new violations.

  Worse, he thinks the neighbors are undermining his efforts. They keep ripping the cameras out of the streetlamps and snapping the microphones on the fire hydrants.

  “It’s probably just the teens being teens,” I say over dinner. It’s the only time that we see each other anymore. I spend all of my time upstairs in the bedroom, adding men to my folder, while Donald spends it in the basement, monitoring his wall of screens.

  Donald doesn’t look up from his bowl of noodles. “Youth is no excuse for crime. If you don’t stop them now, they’ll be watching the world from behind a set of bars.”

  THE NURSE SQUIRTS the gel, fires up the machine.

  I’m not sure what to think of the little objects on the screen. I know, intellectually, that they are our children. But they look like microbes in a microscope, inscrutable creatures from another world.

  “Those are the hearts, those are the brains,” the nurse is saying. She uses a little laser pointer on the screen.

  “The checkup comes with prints, right?” Donald asks. “I want to be able to look at these whenever needs be.”

  AS MY BELLY swells, my searching habits shift. I’ve gotten bored gathering information on strangers in distant neighborhoods, started to yawn seeing the photos of middle-aged men next to their cars and fireplaces. I move on from SingleMingle to other, more explicit sites. Affluent Affairs, OK-Dungeon, WASPs_Gone_Wild.

  I set my zip code to Middle Pond, check in on the neighbors.

  Browsing close to home, I have to obscure myself further. I use photo-editing software to change the tint of my skin. I make sure that there are no identifiable objects in the background of my selfies or else decorate my wall with dime-store decorations that I throw away after a snap. I get the latest encryption software to block my IP.

  The men on these sites are like me. They do not reveal their faces, don’t give away identifying information.

  I stare at a hand or corner of a painting caught in the background of a photo and try to figure out who I’m looking at. Is that William Carlson’s untanned thighs? Do those pubes curl how I’d imagine James Jacobson’s to curl? Is that edge of cheek or lock of hair one I’ve seen at a neighborhood meeting?

  THE NORTH LAKE Committee on Proper Property Standards applauds Donald, gives him an award for excellence in property protection. Donald makes me come to the ceremony. It’s the first time we’ve been out together in weeks. These days, the twins move so much I’m peeing every thirty minutes. For the most part I stay upstairs, logged in.

  As usual, Donald’s speech is overlong and mawkish, yet sprinkled with some sharp wit. I’m too far along to drink and try to will myself drunk by staring intensely at the glasses of merlot. I pee twice during the speech.

  The residents of Middle Pond, however, are not happy with the Neighborhood Watch.

  “You scared Sally,” Hubert Henderson says when the Hendersons come by for dinner two nights later.

  “She wouldn’t be scared if she didn’t have something to hide.” Donald chews his pork chop slowly, his eyes rotating back and forth between the Hendersons.

  “Look, this has gone on long enough. This neighborhood doesn’t need a watch. If anything, you are making people uncomfortable and they are acting out!”

  Donald gets up, wipes his chin with a napkin. He goes into the other room.

  “Why, I never,” Henrietta says. She turns to me. “You understand our concern, right? You have children on the way. You don’t want them spied on all the time, do you?”

  I’m not really paying attention to her. I’m looking at the curve of Hubert’s elbow, mentally measuring the distance between moles on his neck. Have I seen those body parts digitized before?

  Donald comes back and slaps down a manila folder. It’s stuffed with papers and has Hendersons written on the top in thick marker letters.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Hubert says.

  When he opens it, the folder is filled with photos of him and his family. Secret shots of Sally not wiping her muddy shoes on the welcome mat, close-ups of fungal infections on the trees, stills of the cat devouring a protected songbird. He flips through them with increasing speed. “This is madness,” he sputters.

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD ASSOCIATION cuts off the Watch’s funding, but Donald doesn’t care. “It just means we are getting to them.”

  He shows me grainy footage of neighbors wearing black stockings on their heads and ripping out his cameras. He freezes them, puts them side by side with photos taken from their Buddy Face pages.

  I lean forward, fascinated at seeing the same photos that are in my files on his screen.

  The next week, Donald takes out a mortgage on our house. He puts the money into three iSpy drones. They can fly up and down the neighborhood for two hours before they need to be recharged. Each has a camera on a swivel base.

  “These babies are the future of neighborhood protection,” he says.

  I watch the test run from my upstairs window.

  Chet and Chad set up chairs down on the front lawn. They cheer each time the drones pass by.

  MIDDLE POND FEELS like a ghost town. Children are no longer allowed to play games in the streets. No one walks their dogs or barbecues on the lawn. Our neighbors do not want to have every action watched, every interaction documented. They stay inside with the curtains drawn. Most of our neighbors have purchased tinted windows for their cars so that Donald cannot see how many come and go.

  The only things that move on the streets are the drones humming in their preprogrammed patterns.

  I can barely even move indoors. My belly is swollen, and when I look at myself in the mirror, I don’t recognize who I see. I know that it won’t be long before the twins are born, and
that their birth will mean a change to much more than just my body or our house.

  I’ve installed the Bread Crumb Trail app on Donald’s phone. The app shows you a digital bread crumb trail to your device’s location so that you can find it if it’s misplaced. I use it to monitor Donald’s movements, see where he is coming from or going to.

  “Donald, maybe you can drive me to the movies. Have a night out for ourselves before the house is full of screams.”

  “Can’t now, Margot. Things are coming together. I’m connecting the thread. This thing goes all the way to the top.”

  He is breathing heavily on the phone. We never see each other in the flesh anymore. The house is divided between our bases of operation. When I ask him for something, Donald sends one of the interns upstairs.

  “The top of what, Donald?”

  “You don’t even want to know.”

  *

  I WAIT FOR the drone to fly past, then close the blinds. Today, I’m finishing up my file on John Jameson. I found him on SuburbanPervs, recognized his sprinkler system in the background of an explicit pic.

  It only takes a few clicks to get his credit score, high school GPA, and family tree. I put the details in my spreadsheet, gaze at the figures. You can look at all that data and the picture of a person really does emerge. It really does. I know more about Jameson now than most of his friends, more perhaps than even his wife.