by Bryan Hurt
Suddenly, I get a pop-up chat from Jameson’s profile, SilverFoxGolfer72.
“I think you’ve been looking at me,” he says.
I don’t reply.
“I’ve had my eye on you too,” he says.
He puts in a request for video chat.
“If you record, I’ll sue.”
OUTSIDE MY WINDOW, things are getting ugly. The Neighborhood Watch is opposed by a new group, the Middle Pond Citizens’ Veil. The MPCV scuffle in the streets with Chad and Chet. They cover all the Watch signs with their own symbol: a child skipping rope with a hood over her head.
The exact membership of the MPCV is unknown. They wear latex masks that have been fashioned to look like Donald. I do a double take when I see them on the sidewalk in front of our house, erecting a temporary wall.
Donald responds by attaching speakers to the drones and blasting out audioclips of the neighbors admitting their violations and begging for forgiveness that were recorded during secret interrogation sessions with Chet and Chad in our basement.
Donald is secretly receiving funds from the North Lake Committee, who are concerned that the destabilization of property standards will spread beyond Middle Pond. I know this, because I’ve started monitoring Donald’s emails—his password is shirleyandhugh2015, his desired names for our twins and the year of their upcoming births.
Donald, you are our man on the inside, the most recent encrypted email says. Remember the three Cs of neighborhood standards: Community, Commitment, and Containment. Emphasis on containment. This can’t be allowed to spread.
WHILE I’M TRYING to use public information to answer Frederick Abelson’s uCloudPhotos security questions, a brick smashes through the window. The double-wide crib is covered in shards of glass. I wobble as quickly as I can to the window and see a Donald-faced figure climbing over our fence.
There is a sheet of paper attached to the brick. It says, Do you want out? Check [ ]Yes [ ]No. Sincerely, the MPCV.
I think about this question for some time. Out of what? The neighborhood? My marriage? My soon-to-be-formed family? My life?
If I could go back and do things differently, well, of course I would. But isn’t that true of everyone?
I mark my check. Then place the paper in a paper shredder.
THE TWINS ANCHOR me to my desk chair. I can no longer see my toes when I stand up, and the hormones and chemicals swirling inside me are making me feel as if my body is an alien vessel. The main thing it feels is hunger. Chet and Chad bring me takeout meals, but Donald remains a ghost floating in the glow of his basement monitors. I see him only through a small camera that I tucked behind the washing machine. When I installed it, I saw something that broke my heart just a little bit. Above his workstation there were two images: a map of the neighborhood and the sonogram printout. There are pins and string connecting the image of the twins to the map of our neighborhood, permanent marker notations on the side. I can’t make out the chicken scrawl code.
A part of me thinks that when all of this is over, it might not be impossible for us to go back to the life we had. We could delete all the data we’ve accumulated, purge the audio and video. Live again like our neighbors are strangers whom we simply wave to on the street.
Why not? Every day people reset their lives, move to new towns or take up new jobs.
But then an explosion echoes down the street.
THE FLAMING CAR is not our car. Donald doesn’t know what happened, and there is no clear footage as the drones were captured in nets strung between the streetlamps on the cul-de-sac right before the attack.
The explosion pulls the different factions out into their yards. The Neighborhood Watch on ours, the MPCV and sympathizers on the others. The air is thick with both tension and smoke.
“This is a declaration of war,” Chet says.
“Each house is either with us or against us,” says Chad.
“You two don’t even live in this neighborhood,” I say.
Chet scratches his ear. “Well, we get college credit if the mission here succeeds.”
Donald pulls me close, moves his body in front of me as if to shield me from the neighbors’ eyes.
“I’ll find out who did this,” he whispers to me. “I have cameras they don’t even know about, feeds beyond their wildest dreams.”
The driver is singed and shouting, “No, no, no! What the fuck?”
No one moves to help him. His clothes are still slightly on fire.
He looks around at all of us. He is wearing a pointed purple hat with embroidered stars. His pointer finger is outstretched and he moves it from family to family, yard to yard.
“What kind of neighborhood is this!” he screams. He says that this was only his first week driving the Wizsearch street-mapping car. Wizsearch has been expanding into online maps and is trying to get real-life pictures of every street. “It’s supposed to be a public service. If you didn’t want to be mapped, you could have opted out online!”
“YOU LOOK JUST about ready to burst,” Sarah Ableson says. She’s standing in my doorway holding a casserole dish. She lets out a high-pitched, forced laugh.
“Still a month or so to go,” I say. I’m thankful that my belly is large enough to obscure my laptop screen. I reach my hand behind my back to close it.
Sarah’s eyes dart around the room. She mouths something to me that I can’t understand.
“I brought you my famous third trimester tortellini!” She’s talking much louder than necessary. “I ate this for a month straight with both Bobby and Susan!”
She hands me the casserole tray and then slides a note into my pocket.
Sarah steps back into the hallway and scans to see if anyone is there.
“Well, I better be going. Hope to hear from you soon.”
After she leaves, I read the note. It tells me that they know the room is bugged, so they can’t talk. They want to know if I can broker a peace meeting, get the two sides to come to terms.
There is a phone in a plastic bag in the middle of the casserole. Donald won’t be able to monitor it. Call us if you can help end the madness.
*
I DRAG ALL of my files—every neighbor I’ve gathered data on, each .doc of their life and spreadsheet of their history—and place them in the recycle bin. I tell myself that it’s unhealthy to be spending so much time monitoring the lives of others, and so little time looking at my own. Plus, when the twins finally arrive, I won’t have time to look up my neighbors and video chat with masked faces. I’ll be shaking brightly colored toys before their newborn eyes, or watching to make sure they don’t eat rat poison or loose nails.
I hover my cursor over the pixelated trash can icon. I click on it and start to sweat. I hit undo, sending the files flying back to the proper folders.
There’s always time to delete them when the twins are born. I’ll be able to make a clean break when that happens.
Until then, I fire up the browser, log back in.
And then one morning I wake up and the neighborhood is quiet. I don’t hear the drones flying past. I don’t hear Chet and Chad struggling with masked Donalds in the street. I don’t even hear the sounds of cars driving quickly down the street.
I get up and pee. Wash my hands with antibacterial soap. I struggle to the window.
At the end of the street, I can see two people being shoved into a patrol car. The rest of the houses have their driveways blocked off with police tape.
I move to my laptop, start to do a Wizsearch News search for “Middle Pond.” No results.
I look over at the casserole phone still in its plastic bag. I dial the preprogrammed contact, listen to it go straight to voicemail.
Then someone taps spryly on the door.
DONALD EXTENDS A handful of roses. His face is shaved and he’s wearing a new suit that fits just right. He looks nothing like the disheveled figure hunched over his charts I’ve been monitoring in the basement.
/> “It’s all over, baby. We won, you and me.”
My heart is beating quickly and I’m unsure what combination of fear, relief, and confusion is mixing in my head.
He hugs me and tells me he’s taken down the cameras and will be renting the drones out for upscale weddings for overhead photo shoots.
“The North Shore Committee asked me to give you this.” He hands me a pendant of an eye surrounded by a white picket fence. “There will be a ceremony later, of course.”
He pins it carefully to my blouse.
“Margot, I have to say I had my doubts about you for a little while. I thought you were looking for kicks elsewhere, but I couldn’t see the big picture. Obviously you knew that I was monitoring your online activities. Your research was the key to the whole operation’s success. The files you had on the neighbors exposed it all: tax fraud, drug use, and everything else we needed to take them down.”
Donald takes me by the hand and leads me downstairs and out onto our front porch.
“There will be a housing depression for a little while, but with the bad elements gone the market will stabilize before the twins are even in preschool.”
We step out onto the trimmed green grass. I can feel the twins swimming inside me. The empty neighborhood that they will be born into surrounds us. I look at the facade of the house across the street. It is similar to our house, but different. It has the garage on the left and ours has the garage on the right.
Buildings Talk
by Dana Johnson
We called him That Fat Bastard Fatty Arbuckle because he was fat and that’s all we had. We thought about trying to be above it. I know it’s unoriginal and ignorant to point out the fatness of a guy that huge. But he just looked like every little thing Essex Properties Trust was doing to us. The rent being raised first 3, then 7, then 10 percent for the last two years. The shady utility company they switched to in the middle of my decade there, with all its hidden “fees,” so that the cost of a five-minute shower set us back like twenty bucks a pop. I’ve lived with so many dudes to keep living here, the latest one, Franklin, he didn’t even know of a time when stuff that was free, now costs. It’s like trying to tell some fifteen-year-old about how back in the day getting your luggage on the plane cost you nothing, because it shouldn’t have. Like the parking spot that used to be free, all of a sudden costs $150 a month to park my car that only runs some of the time. All this after the romantic years, the years when no one wanted to live in downtown Los Angeles, where your shoes slipped in blood and spit and urine and vomit, where you yelled at your dog not to sniff the needles in the gutter, because, in fact, you knew exactly where they’d been. And so they courted us, the first in the building. You’re pioneers! they said all chummy and enthused, like they were letting you in on some great real estate deal, when all they were doing was making sure they didn’t have any empty apartments. They even gave us duffel bags with the building’s logo on it: Banker’s Loft Since 1905. If old building management sniffed the vague scent of us about to jump ship, move to some other building that was trying to fill their apartments, winking and blowing kisses at would-be tenants with other useless but seductive merch, they got all Please sir, please don’t go on us. Begged us to sign a new lease. No rent increase.
But Fatty Arbuckle. He was the most recent in a line of building managers. The others would last a while but kept being shown the door, word was, because they didn’t know how to strike the balance between being nice and making money. Me, I hated him from jump because he looked like a dude in costume. And even my roommate Franklin hated him. “He is so not pulling that off,” he was always saying, but Franklin was a guy with his own fashion problems that I’ll tell you about in a minute. But this new manager: you’re asking for resentment and hostility if you’re the kind of person who wears a pocket watch and you’re on the shy side of thirty. Old-timey rounded collars with thin ties, bow ties sometimes. Suspenders on days when he seemed to be daring us to crack behind his back about the fact that a man that fat didn’t need suspenders, let alone the belt that wrapped around his body like he was caught in a black Hula-Hoop. He was never going to be one of our favorite people in those kinds of getups, but when he refused to hear our arguments about why, as longtime tenants, we should be shown the courtesy of a lower, hell, no rent increase, we went off the rails. Every day was all things Fatty.
My roommate and I, we sat in the office at a time for which we were made to have an appointment, when back in the day you could just wander in and shoot the shit over a too-small Styrofoam cup of hours-old coffee that tasted like lye. They were really doing up the historical aspect of the building, relics they’d found during the excavation and remodel, a few rusted beer cans, somebody’s glasses frames. Some ashtrays. When I’d first moved into the building, I tripped out over all these old things because they were proof that some guy I didn’t even know cracked himself open a beer and enjoyed it and smoked a butt and lived his life. It was like he raised a can for me, the guy way in the future, and said, Life’s a bitch and a laugh so, aw, fuck it. What are you gonna do? Look, I know, it’s not like they raided some pyramid tombs and pulled up King Tut, but it was something in a city that never feels that old, according to a bunch of dummies who don’t know jack. I don’t know, my father’s father’s father was a bricklayer somewhere in England, okay? And in 1905, some dude laid down some bricks and built a really cool building, not some tan, nondescript stucco crap you can find anywhere around town, but this, Banker’s Loft. Lately, though, the beer cans and whatever were just looking like stuff. In the rental office the walls were covered in grainy sepia-toned wallpaper with blown-up images of Banker’s Building in the past, before it was lofts, when it was just offices where some guy working toward the next payday punched a time clock. We sat there without being offered our lye coffee and Fatty was all business. “What can I help you with today?” He leaned back and made a little steeple with his fingers.
We were there because we were done with the 10 percent increase business. We had to talk this through like reasonable people. Any lunatic would have agreed: that was so much more money every month. Were they even for reals?
“So,” Franklin started, all reason and politeness. “We’ve lived here for like, what? Eight years?” He looked at me and I nodded. Actually, he was my fifth roommate in ten years. Nobody liked to stick around too long. The idea of a loft that wasn’t theirs, with rent being raised willy-nilly just whenever? Turns out people didn’t really like that. Eventually they always ended up telling me in one way or another, It’s been real, rolling their dollies of hastily broken-down IKEA furniture down the marbled hallway. Franklin was only on his second year but I’d thought he’d be good ammo against Fatty Arbuckle, since they were representing similar decades, was my thinking. Franklin twirled the corners of his mustache, turned up on the ends in backward Cs. This all of a sudden frustrated me, this fashion problem that I mentioned earlier. He put wax on it. I had been cool with that, which is embarrassing to admit, until seeing him with Fatty Arbuckle made me feel like I was the anachronistic freak who wandered in from the future, in a strange costume of black Converse, jeans, and white T-shirt. Maybe I had. It was kind of a Happy Days look somebody pointed out to me. Franklin coughed. “I’m sure you know that already,” he said to Fatty, “how long we’ve been here. He’s been here,” he corrected, tilting his head sideways at me and stammering. He was starting out with no conviction. Dude, my eyes said, focus. I was going to use his barbershop quartet ass and then maybe not be all, Dude, don’t move out when he decided to move on. I had decided that right then. His limp handshake had foretold this moment, my moment of losing faith in the guy. But I don’t have that kind of emotional intelligence when I need it. Not when rent is due.
Fatty Arbuckle looked at Franklin and then at me. His kept his eyes doing that side-to-side thing like we were a tennis match and his smile was spooky as hell, a puppet smile or something. Still as a photograph. It never changed.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to recover the fumble. “I think loyalty should count for something. Never missed a payment. I break down all my boxes when I get deliveries. I’m the kind of guy that picks up other people’s trash, even. Walking down the hall? I see like a cigarette butt or something? I pick it up.” Franklin turned to look at me and telepathed the fact that we both had stepped over dog shit in the hallway that some d-bag had left behind walking his dog. But come on. You have to draw a line. “So,” I said, “not that you owe me, us, anything, of course. A courtesy. That’s all I’m asking. As someone who has been a solid, reliable tenant.”
Fatty looped his thumbs under his belt. Sat up straight. Smiled his frozen-in-time smile. “I understand you have been a good tenant. Essex Properties respects your tenancy. But we cannot make distinctions between tenants. Those who have lived here for a long time and those who are new.”
“Old management did,” I said, and Franklin nodded, even though he was just passing through and didn’t know shit about old management and new.
“That was then, and this is now,” Fatty said. He shrugged, but his face still had that mask smile. I studied the rolls of his neck, wanting to work my way into them, to the bony, chokeable part. “Look,” he said, holding his palms up. “This is a corporation. Whatever the market dictates, that is what we do. As long as the price of rents goes up, so, too, will the rents at Essex Properties Trust.” He delivered this brutal honesty with a dimpled smile and I realized that he didn’t look like Fatty Arbuckle at all, but Hardy from Laurel and Hardy. We’d gotten our fat guys mixed up from the very beginning.
“So, that’s it?” I looked at Franklin but his eyes said, I got nothin’.
“You’re welcome to consider other rental opportunities,” Fatty said.