We Are Watching Eliza Bright

by A. E. Osworth

  When Eliza opens the door, wider this time than before, he notices: that she is a hot mess; that she has furniture—nice furniture; the computer and the hard drive poking out from behind the television; the white walls are mostly bare and her bookshelves are lean—he can relate to that, the indecisiveness about what to put on them, in them. He hadn’t really looked when he’d shown up earlier. He was mostly focused on how stupid he’d felt. Now, though he’s frightened, he doesn’t feel quite as stupid. There’s no audience.

  Eliza opens the door when she hears the knock. We think that is unwise, given her situation, but she hasn’t thought of it because she’s a dumb bitch. Or she looks through the peephole and sees her prey. Or she is drunk. Very drunk. She has a bottle of WhistlePig rye whiskey in her hand. Her eyes are red and puffy, her cheeks almost as red as her eyes; her face hurts. “Oh. You,” she says, instead of “hello” or “why are you here?” And then, to answer a question she thinks she can see in Preston’s face: “It’s from my pre-no-income days. I guess I’ll buy cheaper next time.”

  “I didn’t say—didn’t even think—”

  But Eliza laughs, mean. “Sure you did.”

  “Eliza, I swear, no judgment. About anything. No judgment at all.” Both stand still, looking at each other across the threshold. Eliza tries to remember how to exist in her numb body. How do limbs move?

  She takes another pull from the bottle. “I suppose you should come in. You’re here, after all. Again.” And she turns around and leaves the door open for Preston to walk himself through and shut. She collapses on the couch, limbs splaying out in all directions. More gingerly, Preston sits down beside her, coat still on.

  “Whiskey?” Eliza asks.

  “Fuck yes,” Preston says as he takes the bottle, takes a swig.

  “I would’ve got you a glass,” Eliza says.

  “In situations like this, why bother with a glass?” He pauses. “Shit,” he says. It isn’t impassioned, it isn’t loud or even really a curse word. It is just a fact, stated plainly.

  “Yep,” she says. He passes the bottle back. Pull; burning in her mouth; pull; burning in her throat, then her empty stomach. At least the whiskey washes the taste of vomit out, replaces it with the feeling of tears, which she promptly shoves down into her chest.

  “So I came to take you to the police station. I figured we can report the funny-farm thing. That’s harassment.” He pauses, wishing for the whiskey to teleport back into his hand. Eliza reads his thoughts or his face—she supplies his right hand with the bottle. His pull is long. He shakes his head after, looks at the label. “This stuff is good. And then we can talk for real about rehiring you, that way our lawyers—” But Eliza is already shaking her head.

  “Preston. When I said I didn’t want to play anymore, I meant it. All of it. Someone leaked that file—someone I know. Someone who works at Fancy Dog. I never want to look at Guilds of the Protectorate again for as long as I walk this earth.”

  Preston opens his mouth to argue, but changes his mind. There will be time, he thinks. He can convince her, when she needs the lawyers or when it all blows over or—sometime. Sometime in the future, the nebulous foggy future, he is sure he can convince her to come back. Instead: “Well, let’s get to the police station anyway.” He stands and turns toward the door. “That funny-farm business is no fucking jo—”

  “Don’t you dare.” Eliza stands too, and grabs the front of his coat before he has a chance to get out the door, or to convince her. Preston stumbles. The end result is face-to-face, chest-to-chest. “Don’t you fucking dare. You fired me, and now I can say whatever I want, and you don’t get to—”

  She wants to explain to him that she has everything under control. Before getting wasted, she’d called the bank, the credit cards. Someone in the litany of humans she spoke to said “how did this even happen?” in the crackly, accusatory way one person can talk to another when neither party can see the other’s face on the phone: anonymity at its worst. She thought about calling her mother; thought better of it. By the time she grabbed the bottle of whiskey she’s now drinking, exhaustion had already set in. The kind that makes it impossible to believe doing anything, let alone explaining her situation to stone-faced New York City police officers, is worth it.

  When she opens her mouth to say all this—to say that people are by and large lazy and she doesn’t think anyone will waste their time coming to look for her apartment, or that weird internet boys won’t expend more effort than it takes to tweet at her or leave a creepy message on her phone, or that she isn’t that damn important—all she can think of is grabbing Preston’s hair, pulling it. Back when she could imagine herself behind Preston’s desk one day, or at the very least launching a game of her own. An image arrives, unbidden: unzipping his skin and climbing inside.

  She bursts into tears.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, hey,” he says, short-circuiting a little. This is not how he thought this would go. Or it is, just not quite so ugly or so close.

  “Please leave. I’m begging you, I really just want to be alone right now and this”—she sniffs hard and Preston can hear the snot gurgle in her face, her throat—“this is very embarrassing.”

  “It’s not very safe to be here alone, Eliza.”

  “It’s not very safe to be anywhere with anyone,” she retorts. Then she giggles and it is a horrifying sound, a horrifying face. “The call is coming from inside the house. I don’t know who to trust. It could’ve been you! You could’ve leaked it!”

  “Listen, like—at least let me stay here? I’ll stay here! Strength in numbers, in case people show up.” He pauses. “And it wasn’t me. I wouldn’t ever do that.”

  “If you stay here,” she says, “I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to look at you. I will go in there and you will stay out here and you can, I dunno, watch my door. As penance. Or whatever.”

  Dumb fucking cunt.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Devonte’s apartment is in the financial district. He’s thought about cooler places with fewer meat-headed finance bros, but he likes the big picture window through which he can see the river. He both loves and hates the way people looked at him back when he moved in. They wondered openly, with the unhidable contours of their rubber faces, if he should be there, with his fancy sneakers and his snapbacks and his brown skin. Walking through his building, he set his mouth somewhere between a grim line and a smirk as people’s eyes flicked over him, trying to hide surprise. Eventually they got to know him and it stopped. Mostly.

  Today there is no smirk. He turns his key and collapses in his chair. His most prized possession: a record player accompanied by an ever-growing collection of vinyl he hunts down in dusty shops when he isn’t staring at a computer. He pours bourbon into a Glencairn glass and sets the needle carefully down, paying attention not to the music but to the welling up of sound in his body, in his bones. His apartment fills with rich reverberations that only emanate from physical media—digital never comes close. He sips the bourbon, torn by his haves—on the one hand, is it really fair that he has and his cousins have not? On the other hand, they told him he never would—“The nerds shall not inherit the earth,” or maybe “Stop being such a fucking pussy,” they’d say as they left him behind or, on the truly bad days, worse. Much worse—blackened eyes and toilet-water hairstyles worse. That makes it all the sweeter that he has and they have not. He smiles. It’s complicated.

  When his body soaks up enough good resonance and liquor, he powers up his hand-built computer. He emails his Anonymous friend. “Not here,” he replies. “IRC.” Internet Relay Chat. It’s where the hackers live.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Eliza and Preston aren’t even finished when someone knocks at the door. They want to ignore it, but the knock comes again, loud and frustrated. Eliza pulls on her pants so fast that she puts both legs in one, mermaid style, and has to begin again.

  Or she comes out of the bedroom with her whiskey bottle as Preston gets
up from the couch, coat still on, unsure of what he should be doing now that he is sitting vigil in her apartment.

  She looks through the peephole and frowns; leaves the chain on and opens the door, talks to the pizza delivery man through the crack.

  “I didn’t order a pizza.”

  “Eliza Bright?” the delivery man asks, and she nods. “I have an order for Eliza Bright at this address. Three large pizzas with pineapple, anchovies and hot sauce, no cheese, plus two liter bottles of root beer. Man, that is some weird party you’re having in there.” The delivery man shakes his head.

  Preston is up and behind her. “You guys actually made that?” He draws himself up tall and looks down the bridge of his nose. Eliza thinks he is fairly terrifying—that way he has about him of being smarter than anyone else in the room, directing it at people in these concentrated moments like a pinpointed laser. “That’s inedible. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see that’s inedible. You guys didn’t think this was a prank?”

  The delivery man turns a little red—Preston is in his boxers, bare-chested. Eliza blushes too, and wonders why he couldn’t have put on some clothes. She’s managed. Or he is fully dressed, overdressed even, and the collar on his coat is popped up; he looks like Sherlock Holmes. Rich. Intimidating.

  “I—I—it’s pay on delivery,” the pizza guy stammers.

  “We are not paying for inedible pizza we did not order,” Eliza says. Embarrassed though she is for the pizza (and the boxers and the boy, if our theories are correct), she is absolutely not shelling out any cash. She closes the door.

  “That was weird,” Preston says.

  Without replying, Eliza pulls her laptop toward her and checks her Twitter. She sifts through the notifications: “80085, you like pizza? Lol, this is a important question, you like pizza?” she reads aloud. She Googles her name. Then the number, 80085. She finds our subreddit. “I hope the bitch really is allergic to fish,” she reads aloud and turns to Preston. “I am, by the way. Allergic to fish. Ah, yes, here”—she squints at the screen—“from the allergies listed on my intake forms. Yup, they know.” Eliza is calm—calmer than she should be, we think. Calmer than we were hoping she’d be, those of us who sent the pizza. How quickly does one get used to this? Or is this what she wanted, this attention from us? Our eyes are all on her, waiting for the tweet, for the sign that she got our little joke.

  Preston wants to say “This is fucking sick.” Or he is impressed with our ingenuity. Or he feels like Doctor Frankenstein, wondering how something he brought to life could have become such a monster. His mouth hangs open, but no words come out. Someone knocks at the door again. Eliza rises to answer, but Preston shakes his head and looks out the peephole himself. “You’ve gotta be shitting me,” he says as he opens the door to a bicycle-helmeted delivery guy carrying white bags with giant red characters on them.

  “I have an order of salmon teriyaki,” he begins, reading off a receipt.

  Preston interrupts him before he can get going, “I’m sorry, there’s been a terrible misunderstanding. Any orders your establishment gets for us tonight aren’t for us, okay? Someone’s—playing a joke, okay?” The delivery guy blinks a few times, slowly, like he has to compute each word, as Preston shuts the door. He turns back. “Please, Eliza, we have to call the police now.”

  Eliza snorts. “And say what? We’d like to report a pizza?”

  “Well we wouldn’t have to put it like that, that’d just get us laughed at, that’s not—”

  “Preston. Do you know what I’ve had to do today? After I left? Not even today, just this evening. All my bank accounts, my credit cards are frozen right now. I literally don’t know how I’m going to pay rent come January first, let alone buy Christmas gifts, because of course I haven’t done that already. I changed every password I can think of for every account I can still get my hands on; my Gmail has been hacked so bad that the password’s been changed, probably a million times by now, and I’m waiting for Google’s customer service to get back to me on that. They’ve left Twitter and Facebook pretty much alone—I can only guess they want me to see all the messages they’re sending me, because they didn’t seem to have any restraint at all with my Tumblr. That’s covered in porn. And not just any porn. Violent porn that they have photoshopped my face into.”

  She takes a breath, hoping Preston will ignore the slurred, mushy quality of her diction. “Preston, this took them two hours to do.” She looks at her phone to check the time; she is nothing if not precise. “Three, I guess it took them three hours to do. My phone is filled with this fucking horrible song. They’re all calling me 80085 now. So no, no I don’t want to call the police. I don’t want to do anything right now. I want to die, basically. Or just to stop existing. I don’t even want to expend the effort required to die.” She looks anywhere but at Preston so he can’t see how close she is, yet again, to crying. It’s what she feels like doing; it’s what would get her sympathy; it doesn’t matter anymore, that professionalism, because they’ve fucked. Halfway fucked. Or: It doesn’t matter, that professionalism, because she has all the power and she doesn’t work there anymore. Or: It doesn’t matter anymore, that professionalism, because nothing matters when the world is a strange mirror and the day, twisted and refracted, ends so very differently than how anyone could’ve expected.

  Someone knocks at the door. Eliza pushes Preston out of the way, saying “For the love of—” as she careens, unsteady on her feet, toward the peephole. But she changes direction, ends instead with “Oh thank God.” She pulls the door open for Suzanne and grabs her by the wrist, pulls her inside.

  “Whoa,” Suzanne says as Eliza flings her arms around her friend’s neck. Suzanne takes the sloshing bottle of whiskey from Eliza’s hand and sets it on the coffee table next to the key dish. “You’re hammered, that didn’t take you very—” Her eyes land on Preston, who is still half naked. Her eyes widen.

  Or, her eyes land on Preston, who is still wearing his coat and looking small and confused because he isn’t quite sure what his role is, here. And he is so used to being sure. To knowing what should or could be done. To being in charge, ordering folks about, and he hasn’t been listened to once this evening.

  “Okay,” she says. “We’re gonna talk about that later.” She pushes Eliza away so she can look her in the face; Eliza sways on her feet. “We’re gonna make you some coffee, sweetheart, and then we’re gonna talk about—”

  “They’re sending me fish, Suzanne.”

  “Hm?”

  “The internet is sending me death fish.”

  After Suzanne sits Eliza on the couch and coaxes information out of her, pieces together the fragments and says “oh hell no,” or “nope” many times, she takes down the phone number that, even now, is providing a steady drip of eerie ’60s music to Eliza’s voicemail without ever ringing her phone. Then she texts Devonte because it is the only thing she can think to do.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Suzanne: Devonte?

  Suzanne: Devonte?

  Devonte: hold ther fuck on, I’m tracking down this anonymous person i used to know

  Suzanne: can you track a phone? like if i gave you a phone number rn?

  Devonte: hell no

  Suzanne: but you know this code shit

  Devonte: it’s not the same thing and besides i’ve got a pretty strong aversion to breaking the law. things don’t go well for black dudes who do that and telecomms are straight up evil

  Suzanne: i thought everyone learned this stuff by hacking

  Devonte: well i went to stanford instead, so

  Devonte: but save the number my friend might be able to do something with it

  Suzanne: i just googled it, it’s a bufffalo ny number

  Devonte: congrats, you know more about it than i do, i nominate you the law breaker for this group

  Suzanne: tho i suppose it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s from buffalo, if its one of those prepaid burner things, and like, i would make
sure it was a prepaid burner thing

  Suzanne: dev do you think he’d be more likely to put a buffalo number if he lives in buffalo? does this mean this little shit is, like, fairly far away from here?

  Suzanne: Dev?

  Suzanne: Dev?

  Devonte: hold the fucking fuck on, i got him

  Suzanne: the phone guy??

  Devonte: no the hacker

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Eliza reaches out and grabs Suzanne’s arm, eyes wide. “Wait. How did you get up here?”

  “The doorman waved me through,” Suzanne says with a shrug.

  Preston’s eyebrows furrow. “Without calling up first?”

  “Well, based on my delivery history for the evening, he probably thought I was having a party,” Eliza says. She looks at the whiskey on the table and wishes it was still in her hand. “Never mind that I’ve never had a party here in my life.”

  “I’m on it,” Preston says. He puts his pants on, then a shirt. Eliza is thankful. Or, he simply walks from the door, having never once taken his coat off.

  The instant the door clicks behind him, Suzanne wheels around to Eliza with her eyebrows raised as high as eyebrows can possibly go while remaining attached to a human face. “What the fuck?”

  “Should I have told him to be careful? When he left?” Eliza slurs. “Was it weird that I didn’t?”

  “That’s what you’re worried about right now? Details, before he gets back. What the fresh hell is going on?”

  Eliza shrugs. Her movements feel like a bourbon slushy, all soft and watered and drunk. “I dunno. It just happened. He was just—right there in my face, I dunno.”

  “Well, like, do you like him?”

  “Yes? I mean, he’s a good guy. Smart guy.”