We Are Watching Eliza Bright

by A. E. Osworth

  When she is left holding giant wads of satisfyingly-torn fabric and trailing them like she’s wearing a pretentious and poorly constructed dress—that is when she sees The Profile that looks like it should be on a coin someday and here is Preston standing outside the window in the middle of turning around—he’d been facing away—he has Dog with him who appears to be fine save for the cone of shame—Party hat! Eliza corrects herself because that’s what the vet called it but that is the last rational thought she has as Preston mounts the stairs to the entry while poking at the camera and the speaker

  We can see Preston now as well—We were dimly aware of him or at least dimly aware of his public persona but this is the first time We have seen him in person—in Meatspace—We can Read him to Filth nearly instantly as his close-up face broadcasts onto our televisions because everything about him screams “I do not know what I am doing” and he is so young—younger than many of Us—and he has The Feral Look of the Creatively Constipated—the Look that arrives when combined with Perceived Hyper-Competence and Public Pressure—every time he has an idea he is convinced it will be his last—Preston’s original Human Man is made entirely of default settings with an alignment of True Neutral and it is sad to really see him and understand why: if ideas are finite resources then why put any creativity into this at all? middle skin tone and middle brown hair and Middle Middle Average Average Average with the default red unitard and blue cape—it’s constant fear and We can tell he hasn’t figured it out yet—Making Art is like cutting plants or giving gifts—you have to Release and Trust or things won’t grow and you have to move forward with Abundance and Open Hands and the Understanding that The Muse doesn’t visit hoarders

  “Fuck!” Eliza screams and that is all that rests between her ears right now—the only thought is screaming curse words “Fuck fuck fuck” she slams her ball of tattered material to the ground and stomps toward the stairwell and to where the door opens out into the world

  “What the—” Our Suzanne walks up to the window where Eliza had only seconds before been standing “Oh” she says

  Eliza rips the door open and says into the bright sunlight “you’ve got to be shitting me”

  Chapter One Hundred Three

  Preston is easy to follow, so we follow him. Follow him to this very spot because there are so many angles, so many strands and we have to hold them all in our hands at once for the whole thing to make any kind of sense. In the morning on Christmas Eve, he wakes up and Dog, in his cone of shame, is standing by the bed. Staring. He is no longer facing the wall in the corner. He tentatively wags his butt-stump and Preston’s heart soars into his mouth, into his fingertips. For the first time since this all started, he feels hopeful.

  Dog points his nose toward the door and spins back around, looking soulfully into Preston’s face, begging, pleading. Preston actually laughs at how silly he looks. It is so early. Five in the morning. He hasn’t been doing much at work lately, and he figures even if he took the day off, no one would much notice. Until the day previous, he’d been spending hours on the third floor every afternoon, accomplishing nothing. Everyone is convinced he’s inventing the future of gaming, but we know better. We know he’s slumming it with that slut. One word echoes in his head, in ours too: charlatan. He is fooling them all.

  Preston has made too many bad decisions to be our king anymore. He’s succumbed too hard, and for too long. Let his elite status muddy his moral, ethical waters. And what were we expecting? Fucking Chad. Fucking Chad pretending at being a real, upstanding gentleman. We hate Preston Waters.

  He pushes that thought—our thoughts—away, swats them with his hands as he swings his legs out of bed. He knows that today, today he will try to do work. Today, when he goes to the third floor on Christmas Eve, he will use the Vive to access a virtual whiteboard. He will do what he’s been resisting for so long—he will make Fancy Dog Games into a true plural. It is over, he thinks. The worst of everything is behind him. Eliza is behind him. And now this—whatever it was—with Suzanne is behind him too, since they got caught. Life will go back to normal today, and tomorrow he will fly, early in the morning, to his parents’ house for Christmas. We do not hate Preston Waters after all. Long live Preston Waters.

  But he has to make amends, he thinks, and he hatches a plan that we all think is a terrible idea. He thinks he’s out of the quicksand; he is completely unaware of its ever-present pull. Goldfish never notice the water that they’re in. He decides that since it is almost a holiday, he can swing arriving late. Around ten. That gives him five hours. He grabs Dog’s leash, his own coat. He feels buoyant; he is wrong to feel buoyant.

  After he unlocks his four fancy new locks and ushers Dog down the hall and out the elevator, he spends two hours walking. In the false dawn, everything is misty. Dewy. He walks into Central Park when he gets to it, taking his time. In the half-light, statues look as though they are of another world, reaching out of the fog toward him and the sky. Dog pees on everything. He shies away from strange men, joggers in orange knit caps wearing socks pulled up to their knees, but he is better. Everything is better. The cold and the wet are transformative.

  He turns east and leaves the park, only half admitting to himself where he is going next. He walks across town until he is staring at the bridge to Queens. He stops for a second, surprised at himself. He realizes his legs are cramping, wobbling like sticks made of Jell-O. He looks down at Dog, who is panting hard. He hails a cab to take him the rest of the way. He drops an intersection into the air, one that he has unwisely memorized.

  When he gets to Suzanne’s neighborhood, he is exhausted and confused. Where could a person live, here? And yet, there’s a Starbucks on the corner. It is still New York City, after all. He pops in to buy himself some time, some energy. All he had, he left in Manhattan.

  The morning light is just cresting the warehouses, turning their brutal façades orange, when he finds himself on Suzanne’s street again. He still isn’t sure he wants to knock on her door. So he checks his coffee cup. “Peter,” it reads. He snorts. Then, to waste a few more minutes, he gets Dog to sit and holds his coffee cup out, name facing his iPhone camera. He whistles and, as if Dog is also determined to make the best Instagram photo, he cocks his head to one side, the cone transforming instantly from sad to adorable. Preston Instagrams the photo, #nofilter because everything is golden in the sunrise. Perfect. It is also #LongLiveDog. We are glad to have the photo; we are elated. We love that he feels safe enough with us to have ignored all previous warnings. Because if he doesn’t do this, in this exact moment, there is no end to the tale, not a swift one nor one that’s satisfying. If he doesn’t do this, we have to leave the narration up to the fags and the females, relinquish our story-making capabilities or our truth-telling capabilities. He watches the hearts tick up for thirty seconds before he takes a deep breath, puts his phone in his pocket and grabs Dog’s leash off the ground.

  He mounts what he thinks is Suzanne’s stoop to—what is this? A warehouse? He stands on tiptoe to look at a security camera mounted in the entrance. Suzanne isn’t particularly technical, he thinks, not compared to the rest of his office. Is this perhaps an addition since Eliza’s gotten here? Eliza is this technical, and her life is such that she might want a camera at the entrance—

  Oh God. He realizes the optics of what he is about to do. He is about to walk into a house with Eliza, who he has fired and has certainly slept with in meatspace, and Suzanne, who he has not fired but has slept with in cyberspace. What am I doing? he thinks. This is a bad idea, he thinks. And we scream and we throw our figurative popcorn. Yes, you dipshit, this is a terrible idea. None of us think it’s a good thing to do, even though we understand. We understand the siren song of women and bad choices, but we as men are supposed to rise above all that. He is about to straighten up, about to turn around and walk away, not knowing he’s already tipped the scales. But the door bursts open and, surprised, he jumps up, spilling coffee over his fingers. Dog leaps back dow
n the stairs, butt-stump reaching between his legs. “Uh,” he says. He can’t think of anything else to say.

  “You’ve got to be shitting me,” says Eliza.

  We see her.

  We’re coming to take you away, ha ha.

  Chapter One Hundred Four

  We will now look in on Lewis, because it’s an important day for him as well. More important a day than for Eliza, even. More important for him than for us. The most important day he’ll ever know.

  It is the first time Lewis Fleishman sees raw sun in a week and a half. His experience of daylight has been filtered through windows and sunglasses, which hide the evidence of his experiences at night. The sunglasses remain until he reaches the Apollo Theater. He stands in front of the red letters, dead in the blue sky, and takes the sunglasses off. No one around here knows him, so no one points out that he looks like hell.

  He has a vague and mistaken inkling that Eliza and Suzanne are somewhere around here, and so he’s come up on the subway. He realizes Harlem is a big place, he likely wouldn’t find them even if they were here. He makes choices at random, convinced he will eventually stumble upon Eliza because they are drawn to each other. Their fates are two sides of the same coin. They have more in common than they don’t. He hasn’t checked Twitter. If he were to, he might know everything that we know. He might know he’s in the wrong place. And his phone sits right there, in his pocket. He could check it at any time; all the information is right there at his fingertips, and it’s pinging away his location. But he never reaches for it. As it stands, he cracks his frowned mouth open and laughs at himself. Of course he isn’t turning up in front of Suzanne’s apartment, wherever it may be. He is being insane. Grinning, he reapplies his sunglasses. Or is it a grimace? To the outside observer, it looks like he is enjoying a nice morning; the city strings up large snowflakes made from Christmas lights on 125th Street each year, nestled neatly in the crosses of power lines. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for someone to be happy.

  Except we know Lewis Fleishman doesn’t give a flying saucer about Christmas or things being pretty. He experiences everything as though he is wearing wool armor—the twin smells of fried Popeyes and the salty rot of the fish market are delivered to him as though through a mask, and the flowers look false against the December air; they have no business being that bright. A bell ringer’s bell doesn’t penetrate the cotton in his ears, placed there by sleeplessness. He sees the flash of a red Santa hat (or was it a red ball cap? Rare in Harlem, but we are everywhere) and thinks to himself, fuck it all.

  What strikes him, of course, are the people. He knows, rationally, that their body parts aren’t unzipping finger by finger, ear by ear. But all the people have been unzipping since Eliza talked to him for the last time, regardless of how hopped up on medication he is, regardless of how many times he leaves messages on his doctor’s answering machine. Even his mother’s face is marred by ever-shifting carnage. And if he isn’t careful, if he doesn’t keep his mind actively focused on the blood, the gore, he begins to lose his color once again, becoming the drowned magician of his childhood nightmares, unable to escape his chains. And then he is surrounded by water.

  Something in the alleyway. There is always something in the alleyway, it is New York City. Everything is grime. It could be anything—discarded cardboard boxes melting in the cold-wet, dropped chicken bones, human feces. But this time he swears he sees a dog’s tail, severed, long and white with cloudlike curls of fur wisping off it, wrapped in butchers’ paper or newsprint or just there, on the ground. His doctor has told him none of this is real; he walks quickly past, trying to forget the image. An eerily concrete iteration.

  “Excuse me.” He stops a man with no nose.

  “Yes?” this noseless man says.

  “Which way to the George Washington Bridge?”

  The noseless man’s eyebrows raise.

  “I’m meeting a friend,” Lewis stumbles. “For—for some biking.” People bike across that bridge, right? “He’s returning my bicycle at the bridge and we’ll go from there.”

  Lewis knows the lie is weak, but the man with no nose points anyway. “You’re way too far south,” he says.

  But Lewis shades his eyes. He could get on the subway, get there in a minute. But maybe between here and there he will stumble upon Eliza. Then he can tell her she won. “It’s a nice day,” he replies. “And I’ve got all the time in the world.”

  Chapter One Hundred Five

  We can see them now. Framed in the window, we’re now capable of imagining exactly what this conversation is. “No, no. He doesn’t get to come in.” Suzanne runs to the door, hands outstretched. “No.”

  “What—what is this place?” Preston asks.

  Suzanne raises an eyebrow. “A warehouse full of artists. Surprised you don’t know that, considering you seem to have the rest of my paperwork memorized.” Then there is silence. One breath. Two breaths.

  “What possessed you?” Eliza asks.

  “To what?” Preston responds, though he thinks he knows the answer already. Time, time, he is buying himself time to think of what, exactly, possessed him.

  “I mean, for starters, to come here?”

  “I recognize my choice is a little unorthodox—”

  “Stupid,” Suzanne interjects. “Your choice was stupid.”

  For a beat we think Preston will get defensive, or have a Conversation as though he is at the office. Instead, he lets a breath escape his lips, as though he is deflating. “Alright. Yes. It was stupid. I did a stupid thing.”

  “And you know what other stupid thing you did?” Eliza asks. She can feel the electricity buzzing in her face. Her hands feel like they are going to float away. We don’t think she is talking about the very stupidest thing he’s done; no one in this room is aware of it yet. But we are. We are so, so happy.

  “I imagine it was, uh, what we did in the gam—”

  But he can’t finish his sentence. Eliza barrels right over him before he can even finish his m sound, let alone the rest of the thought. “I mean, that was weird. And yeah, pretty tremendously fucked up. More fucked up for you than Suzanne, honestly, since you’re the CEO and therefore her boss, but no. What I was referring to, what I think is particularly stupid, is after you play knight in shining armor and stash me in a cab, sling me over your shoulder and carry me naked into a public street, hide me in your apartment. After you suffer some consequences for that and I drag your bleeding dog to the vet’s office, you peace the fuck out. You. Don’t. Contact. Me. Once. That’s the fucked-up part I’m focused on.” Of course that’s what she’s thinking about. Women are always thinking about their goddamn boyfriends.

  “Well it’s not like you contacted m—”

  “Don’t even start,” says Suzanne. “I told you she wasn’t leaving her room, I told you she was upset. I told you she was climbing the walls in here! You have her burner phone number. You could’ve called her.”

  “Thank you, Suzanne,” Eliza says, surprised that she is coming to her defense after they’d been yelling at each other moments before.

  Or:

  “I mean, that was weird. And yeah, pretty tremendously fucked up. More fucked up for you than Suzanne, honestly, since you’re the CEO and therefore her boss, but no. What I was referring to, what I think is particularly stupid, is the fucking radio silence on behalf of Fancy Dog. What, you’re just like entirely unaware of anything but Dog’s tail getting hacked off? We’re only going to condemn that? We’re not going to, I don’t know, post any messages of support for one of your former employees that’s being stalked? Do anything to try to clear my name with this absolute basket of deplorables you’ve cultivated as your most devoted fanbase? Hell, even just retweeting the See No Monkey announcement with a thumbs-up would’ve been less absolutely fucked than saying nothing.” Of course that’s what she’s focused on. “You care so much about me and my career and my safety when we’re face-to-face, but when it comes to engaging with the real conse
quences of having a moral fucking backbone, when it comes to putting your own money on the line for those trendy feminist beliefs you’re paying lip service to, profiting off of, suddenly it gets very quiet in here.”

  Suzanne turns to Eliza. “And you know who else is doing this, by the way? I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to, like, bother you. But this whole cold-footed hero bullshit? Devonte is doing it too.”

  “I knew he wasn’t contacting me, but I thought he was, like, giving me space or, like, unsure what was going to get me tracked. But he isn’t talking to you?”

  “Yes. He apparently ‘can’t.’ Whatever that means.”

  “Oh, he can’t?” Eliza turns back to Preston and points an accusatory finger back at him. “And I suppose you can’t either?”

  Preston stutters. “Eliza, what you’re suggesting is—it’s not poss—”

  “Well you know who can’t?” Eliza shouts at both of them. “You know who definitely can’t? I can’t.”

  “And you know she can’t opt out of any of this?” Suzanne sticks her thumb out in Eliza’s direction. “You can. You and Devonte can, apparently. All these man children running away when something gets real tough.”