Nathan couldn’t figure out which part of his shift he hated most, the morning rundown he got from the third-shift monitor to start each day, the closing briefing he had to give at the end of his workday, or the terrible eight hours he spent in the dark security control room between those two events. He probably should’ve liked the closing briefing best, since that meant he got to leave for the day, but it also meant he had to talk to Jerome.
He wished Jerome was more like the third-shift monitor, who was mostly inoffensive apart from the faint smell of not yet spoiled—but definitely past its prime—milk that followed him around because of his preference for drinking 2% directly out of pint cartons while he worked. After a third shift that Nathan assumed must have been particularly rough, he found four empties in the control room trash. Maybe the third-shift monitor knew he smelled bad, because his morning rundowns were always succinct and professional, even if his red eyes and frazzled hair suggested he would come unglued if he spent another moment in the booth. Nathan didn’t hold that against the third-shift monitor, though. He was pretty sure he didn’t come out of the control room looking great either, and he at least got to work during regular hours.
Jerome was the only one who didn’t seem affected by the job. He brought an enthusiasm to it which Nathan found creepy. Every day at the shift change Jerome would clap his hands together and ask Nathan to tell him about that “action, action, action.”
Considering the size of the building, there was surprisingly little “action” to report, particularly of the kind Nathan assumed he was looking for. Maybe that would’ve been different if he hadn’t been working the day shift.
Since the daytime was ostensibly the quietest shift, Nathan was also responsible for compiling the reports filed by Jerome and the third shift monitor, as well as his own, into a log for the landlord. Jerome kept asking to see the log, claiming that he needed to ensure the things he’d witnessed were reported accurately, but Nathan was pretty sure he was just trying to sweep up any bits of “action, action, action” that might have been kept from him. As far as that went, the resident in #302 probably featured the most prominently, since every weekend the same man would visit her and they would either argue or, well… not argue. Although Nathan wasn’t sure how useful it was for them to log these incidents since the front office received noise complaints for both.
Strangely, nobody ever complained about #145 although she was liable to plug in her electric bass any time she was home. Maybe the amp was quieter than Nathan thought, but he preferred to think that her neighbors appreciated her talent. Once, he thought he saw a baby in #147 stand up and start bobbing his head along while she played, but that could have been in response to anything, really. Sometimes #145 would plug in her bass and then sit with it in her lap and stare at the wall, not even plucking a string or anything. She could sit like that for an hour or more, not frequently, but often enough that Nathan began to feel he had a sense for whether the day was a playing day or a sitting day. He wasn’t sure how to describe the sit days in the log. At first, he figured he could leave the entry blank, but could he really call sitting still with a bass in your hands for minute after minute nothing? He eventually decided it would be more efficient to leave the regular practice days blank and describe the days where #145 stared at the wall as: she did not play bass today.
Nathan didn’t want to tell Jerome about #145. It felt wrong somehow, as if whatever was happening between her and her bass was too pure to be disturbed by Jerome’s gaze. Nathan realized it was entirely possible she kept playing or sitting there with the bass after the shift change. Maybe Jerome already was watching, but Nathan didn’t want to know and he certainly didn’t want to be the one to point her out.
Nathan was in the middle of watching #145 plug in her bass when he caught a flurry of movement on one of the fourth-floor monitors. It was Jerome’s room, #419. Like Nathan, but unlike the third shift monitor, Jerome had accepted the management company’s offer of a discounted apartment. It was a little weird at first to think about the camera concealed in his living room, but at least that way Nathan knew exactly the extent to which he was being watched and wouldn’t have to guess and worry like he would in another building. Jerome apparently didn’t mind the cameras at all. The movement in question had been Jerome standing up on his couch cushions and standing squarely toward the camera. He wore nothing but a silk bathrobe, which he untied as he began to gyrate his hips in a circular motion. He kept at it for a bit, presumably waiting long enough to make sure Nathan had a chance to notice him, before he let the robe fall all the way open.
Nathan looked around at the monitors, searching for something—anything—else that might require his attention, but as luck would have it the monitor for #419 sat at about the center of the array of monitors which Nathan had to watch. There wasn’t anywhere in the building he could turn his attention towards without catching at least a glimpse of Jerome’s dick swinging around and around and around.
For the first time, Jerome said nothing when Nathan started the afternoon briefing. He probably wanted to wait and see if Nathan would bring up the silk robe unprompted. Maybe he wasn’t sure if Nathan had really been paying attention to the monitors, or maybe he chased the thrill of knowing that Nathan had seen him and was going to try anything to avoid bringing up the subject.
Nathan told Jerome it had been a quiet day—an unauthorized visitor to the fitness center had been the only item of interest. Which, not including #145 and Jerome’s stunt, really had been the only thing he’d seen that shift, although he might have been a little distracted.
“Nothing else?” Jerome pushed.
“Nope, sorry.” Nathan wasn’t the sort of person who struggled to look at people when he lied to them, but he learned it was a little harder to look at someone who had been helicoptering his dick at him a few minutes before. Nathan got up from his chair at the monitors. “See you tomorrow.”
“Oh, you will,” Jerome replied.
The rundown from the third-shift monitor presented Nathan with a dilemma. He wanted to know if he’d also seen Jerome’s stunt, but he also hoped that if he never spoke of what Jerome did again it would become less real. Nathan tried to plot a middle course.
“I’m kind of worried about Jerome. Has he seemed off to you lately?”
The third-shift monitor was only halfway through his last carton of 2%, offering Nathan a rare glimpse of him in what Nathan guessed was his natural element. “He seemed normal to me at the shift change.”
Nathan figured that if he was going to have to push on about the dick swinging in a conversation with someone, he would rather it be with the third-shift monitor than Jerome. “He didn’t do anything unusual afterwards?”
“What, like in his home?” The third-shift monitor took a gulp of milk. “I try not to watch you guys, you know. That’s like spying on your cousin, man.”
Nathan wasn’t exactly sure what would make spying on a cousin any worse than spying on somebody else, but the third-shift monitor—whose last sip left him with a milk mustache it didn’t look like he planned on wiping off—didn’t seem to be in the mood to elaborate.
“That’s why I didn’t take the employee discount. I don’t want to worry about you or Jerome eyeballing my business.” The third-shift monitor tossed his empty container in the trash by the door and left Nathan alone at the monitor.
#302’s weekend visitor let himself into the lobby using a fob he wasn’t supposed to have. Nathan was embarrassed to admit that he felt sympathy with the man who came to visit #302. Why did #302 keep having him over if all she planned to do was argue with him? He tried to rationalize his resentment of #302 as the standard occupational resentment of a security guard. He didn’t begrudge her for having problems in her life, he only wished they didn’t have to happen here.
Normally he wouldn’t track somebody through the cameras like he started to do with #302’s visitor, but on a Wednesday morning this was the only game in town, unless he wanted to check in on Jerome again.
It should’ve been easy enough for him to follow #302’s visitor once he moved out of the lobby. His next stop should’ve been the east stairwell, or the elevator if he was feeling tired. When he didn’t show up on either of those monitors, it would’ve certainly been easier for everyone if Nathan decided to ignore it, but what if #302’s visitor hurt himself, or worse, used the borrowed fob to commit some sort of crime?
These were the reasons, or at least the ones Nathan told himself, why he kept checking the monitors until he caught #302’s visitor entering apartment #104. He did not let his eyes rest on the feed from #104’s living room for too long. He wasn’t sure where it was, but there was a line between being a watchful protector and a creep, and Nathan was determined to stay on the right side of it.
Jerome also had visitors. Four men who were maybe his friends but were maybe actors he’d hired off the internet. They all wore trench coats, which, considering Jerome’s robe situation yesterday, Nathan found ominous.
For the first part of their visit Nathan thought he’d overreacted; he watched them play Chinese checkers in Jerome’s living room for about an hour. Nathan was about to take his eyes off the monitor to start editing the log binder when the trench coats started to come off, revealing the silk robes they all wore underneath. They joined Jerome in standing on the couch cushions facing squarely at the camera.
Nathan focused on the logbook on his desk. He wasn’t going to write about the dicks. Even with this omission the binder’s 5” rings were so full the front cover couldn’t close all the way. It was always the challenge with the log, Nathan tried to narrow his notes down to things the landlord wanted to know, but the extent of the cameras suggested the landlord wanted to know about everything.
If knowing everything was the goal, even the overflowing binder fell short. Going by the incident reports it seemed like #302 had no life of her own outside her turbulent relationship with her weekend visitor, but on weekdays, when she had some time to herself, she’d practice the clarinet. Considering the amount of noise complaints against her already Nathan wasn’t sure if that helped or hurt her case. But was it his job to help or hurt her, or just to describe what she did?
Then there was #145. He probably didn’t need to log whether she played bass or not, but without those notes there was no real way to record her existence in the building or how she spent her days at all. And shouldn’t the log report on the model citizens as well as the more troublesome residents? At the same time there wasn’t any particular reason to highlight #145 as opposed to #617, #505, and #112 who also played the bass. There were even more guitar players, and quite a few had keyboards although there was a much smaller subset of those who actually practiced. Nathan couldn’t explain why, but none of them seemed to have the same relationship with their instruments as #145 had with her bass.
All the effort of putting the binder together turned out to be a waste of time anyway; the landlord didn’t want to read his reports.
Pauline, the property manager, and—as far as Nathan guessed—the landlord’s enforcer, thumped the binder down on her desk. “The instructions were to make the reports digestible.”
She picked up and dropped the binder again. The binder made a loud thwack as it hit the (probably fake) wood. “Is that the sound something digestible makes? The landlord doesn’t need to know everything, just give him the lay of the land.” She made a sweeping gesture toward the door to let Nathan know he was dismissed.
Nathan realized it probably wouldn’t help to point out that the report wasn’t close to having everything. It barely scratched the surface of even ten percent of the activity. Besides, he was already most of the way out of the office, brushing past the property manager’s decorative ficus, which was doing amazing.
If the landlord didn’t want to read his reports Nathan wasn’t sure what he was supposed to accomplish with the cameras. It wasn’t like they functioned as any sort of deterrent for bad behavior since nobody in the building, apart from Jerome and himself, even knew they were there.
#302’s weekend visitor hadn’t yet left #104’s apartment. He checked #302’s monitor. She wasn’t home. She was almost certainly at work. The weekend visitor must have known that, otherwise he wouldn’t have dared try to visit #104. He checked the hallway outside of the control room. If he hurried, he had a clear path to the stairwell. He ripped a page out of his observations notebook and wrote: he’s cheating on you.
After another quick check of the monitor, he scampered out of the control room, down the four flights of stairs to the third floor, and all the way to the end of the hall to slide the note under #302’s door. Slide was an understatement. He made sure to push it far enough through the gap that he couldn’t get the note back if his resolve weakened later.
He ran into Jerome on the fourth-floor landing. Nathan gave him a little nod and hoped that would be the end of it. Of course, he wasn’t going to be so lucky.
“Look who decided to come out here where the action is.” Jerome wore a trench coat like the ones his visitors had, which made his comments about action seem even more loaded. Nathan understood that split-front clothing was a weapon in the hands of Jerome.
Nathan squeezed past him and kept moving up the stairs. “I had to show the log to the property manager.”
The explanation seemed to satisfy Jerome, who stayed behind as Nathan worked his way up through floors five and six.
“Wait!” Jerome came running up behind Nathan, finally catching him on the seventh-floor landing. “If you were taking the log to the property manager, where is it now?”
Nathan couldn’t believe he was standing there frozen as if he’d been the one caught whirling his dick around, but here he was.
“The log is still in the room, isn’t it? You’re interfering.”
Nathan wasn’t sure what, if anything, the landlord would do if Nathan reported Jerome’s stunts with the checkers and the silk robes, but he knew the landlord would fire him for sure if Jerome mentioned that he’d left the control room. Throughout training, it was stressed that interfering in the events around the apartment was prohibited, as it risked exposing the existence of the cameras.
“You weren’t dumb enough to put whatever made you leave the control room in the log, were you?” Jerome ran ahead of Nathan. Maybe he was hoping Nathan would race him back to the control room, but that was pointless. Jerome was too fast.
By the time Nathan walked into the control room Jerome had already grabbed the log and was flipping through it. He’d already gotten distracted from finding the incident Nathan had been interfering with and moved onto the month’s earlier entries.
“What’s all this about #145?” Jermone kept flipping. “Bass, no bass? Oh man, it's worse than interfering. You’re leering, man.”
So now, apparently, Nathan was the pervert. “There are worse things one of us could be doing.”
If he’d intended that to have some sort of corrective influence on Jerome, Nathan was badly mistaken. Jerome snapped the binder shut. The only other times Nathan had seen him so happy were the moments when he let his silk robe fall open. “So, you have been watching. I was worried you weren’t monitoring my room because of some code of honor thing.”
Nathan couldn’t have been surprised by that. Obviously, he was the audience for Jerome’s little shows.
“Why don’t you put them in the log? I mean, what else have I gotta do?”
That, on the other hand, did surprise Nathan. He couldn’t imagine why Jerome would want the disrobings included in the log. One of the things Nathan had appreciated about his job was that he could always exempt himself from the scrutiny of the landlord.
“I’ll tell you what, you put me in the log, and the landlord doesn’t need to know that you ever left the room today.”
“So, you’re trying to get fired?”
Jerome laughed. “Over something I’m doing in my own apartment? He can’t do anything to me, not with what I know.”
“You want him to know you’re swinging your dick at me.”
“You’re just a middle man. I want the landlord to know I’m swinging my dick at him.”
Over Jerome’s shoulder, Nathan noticed that #302 had come home and found the note he’d slipped under her apartment door. Nathan wasn’t sure how he expected her to react. In hindsight he had no reason to think she’d believe the note at all, but something about the careful, controlled way she set the note down on her kitchen counter suggested it had confirmed something she’d suspected all along. For as out of control her personal life had seemed, she met this news with a cool resolve.
Jerome noticed him watching. “Oooh, #302. We have some drama?”
“Maybe,” said Nathan. It was almost officially time for Jerome to take over the shift, so he figured Jerome wasn’t about to get up from the control room’s one office chair. “If it’s not about me, why don’t you ever try your stunt with the third-shift guy?”
Jerome hissed in a breath between his teeth. “I would never do anything while that freak is watching.”
Nathan didn’t know what to do with that information. The third-shift monitor had seemed mostly normal, apart from the milk thing. What possible depth of depravity could the third-shift monitor have reached to get such a strong reaction out of Jerome? Or was it his normalcy and inoffensive nature that Jerome found so repugnant?
Jerome spun the office chair around back towards the monitors. “Go ahead and take off.” He leaned closer to watch #302. “Just put me in the report next time. People like us need to watch out for each other.”
Nathan wasn’t sure which would’ve been worse, having Jerome think he was some kind of freak like the third-shift monitor or having Jerome believe that they existed in some category of like-minded people. Either way, he felt it was better to leave now instead of telling Jerome that the landlord didn’t want to read the log anymore.
For future reports, Nathan figured the best way to keep them digestible was to consolidate the myriad events taking place around the building at any given time into a collage of representative stills. Each one would be roughly overlaid onto the floor plan of the building in the area where the event was captured. He hoped that overlaying each image of the events in the apartment might adequately capture the complexity of what he was trying to record. The approach worked in some instances. #145 showed several instances of the same bass player either playing or staring thoughtfully into the middle distance.
The more active apartments were the problem. #302 was such a tangle of activity that even Nathan, who watched it all unfold, could no longer tell which frames showed the fights and which ones showed the reconciliations. At least he was finally able to include a shot of #302 reading the note Nathan left her and finally a still of her practicing her clarinet alone.
Unfortunately, that turned out to be the less salient appearance of #302’s clarinet in his report. She must have learned that her weekend visitor was also seeing #104 because one day she showed up on the first floor. That incident was hard for Nathan, both because he wasn’t sure if it was better to choose one of the frames of #302’s clarinet raised menacingly over #104 or if he should use one of the pictures of the clarinet hitting #104’s forearms, or shoulder, or the one where it mercifully just grazed the side of her head, and also because he felt responsible.
He was surprised in the following days that #302 hadn’t been kicked out of the building. An attack on a fellow resident seemed like the sort of thing management would’ve heard about and acted on whether or not Nathan was watching, but it seemed like #302 and #104 agreed to never bring up what happened between them again. Nathan even saw them end up in the gym at the same time. Neither of them acknowledged the other was there but also neither one was willing to leave early to ease the tension. Now Nathan had to worry that including the incident in the upcoming collage would disturb the delicate understanding they’d reached.
Maybe Jerome could help him here. His segment of the report was already a barely legible mass of whirling dicks and arms moving marbles across a star shaped board. Suppose he expanded that frame to make it a bit more coherent? Given the amount of activity in that particular apartment the edit had a way of reducing everything else in the collage to a sideshow for Jerome’s grand festival of nudity. The clarinet incident slipped into the border while #419 dominated the center of the new report. Nathan printed out the collage and placed it on the empty rings of the next month’s binder.
Nathan figured the briefing after Jerome saw the collage was bound to be a weird one, but he certainly didn’t expect Jerome to be so pleased with the report that he gave Nathan a pornographic magazine as a gift. Nathan didn’t even know they made those anymore. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. He’d seen enough nudes in his line of work that he was pretty much desensitized to them. Maybe Jerome knew that, because the magazine also had a story.
The story was about a resident of a quaint suburban cul-de-sac who suffered from insomnia. On nights when it was particularly bad, the resident would go out to the tree that stood in the island in the center of the circle and watch the neighborhood. Sometimes he saw owls or coyotes or deer. Most of the time not even the animals would notice he was up there, or if they did notice him they didn’t see any particular reason to care. One time he saw a work van pull down the street and slowly go around the circle before driving off, but the driver had probably just been confused while navigating the maze of subdivision streets in the dark. Another time he spotted his neighbor’s teenage son sneaking back into his room after a late night out, but he didn’t think there was anything particularly nefarious about that. Mostly, if he wasn’t going to be asleep anyway, watching the non-events of the neighborhood seemed slightly preferable to watching his ceiling.
One night when he was up in the tree, he heard somebody climbing up below him. The newcomer was older and could not climb as high as he could, so the resident was able to watch the new man quietly from above. The newcomer had a strange telescope with a knob on the top and a dial on the side, and he would periodically adjust both for reasons that weren’t entirely clear to the resident. The newcomer never pointed the scope away from the bedroom window of the house directly opposite the resident’s own. He thought about confronting the peeper, but who knew what else he was carrying besides the scope? At least from this vantage point he could peep the peeper.
Periodically the peeper would return to the tree. The resident thought about calling the police but worried that would lead to unpleasant questions about what he’d been doing in the tree with the peeper in the first place. Before the peeper had arrived it hadn’t even occurred to the resident that people might find it wrong that he’d been up there, but now he found himself in an impossible position. If the peeper ever did anything dangerous, they’d be glad the resident was there to stop him, so the resident couldn’t stop going to the tree. But if the resident ever got caught up in the tree people would assume he’d been the peeper all along.
Things finally came to a head when a branch broke underneath the peeper, sending him tumbling to the grassy island below. The resident heard a crack that he knew was a bit more than just the branch, and sure enough the peeper, unable to control himself from the pain, began to yell. Lights started to come on in the surrounding houses, and the resident could see the peeper’s foot pointing off in a weird direction. As much as he had no sympathy for the peeper, the resident felt like he couldn’t sit there and do nothing. The resident climbed down from his hiding spot in the branches and called an ambulance. Probably as a result of the surprise at seeing another person in the tree, the peeper stopped yelling and stared at him wide eyed.
After that night, the resident noticed his neighbors didn’t want to talk to him anymore. It took him a bit of time to accept this. At first he chalked it up to people still being in shock at having a peeper in their midst, but after about two weeks the conclusion was unavoidable. He confronted his next door neighbor while she brought in her recycling. After a traditional neighborly back and forth where she denied there was any problem, the neighbor apparently had enough.
“It doesn’t matter that you caught the peeper, at the end of the day you’re another guy in a tree.”
The story by itself would’ve bothered Nathan enough, but immediately after it appeared a picture of a barbarian warrior that looked an awful lot like him lifting a pregnant barbarian queen who looked like #145 in his musclebound arms. It went without saying that both figures were nude.
At least in this case the photos were obviously not actually of him. His job didn’t allow him even half the time it would’ve taken to build a barbarian warrior physique, let alone pose for such a picture. But had his face been added in with some sort of editing trick or had his brain just found a few points of similarity and run with it?
After his shift, Nathan could barely touch his microwave chicken pot pie—which was usually a favorite. He tried not to plop down too hard on his futon, whose frame had been about to break for almost two years now but somehow kept holding on. Even with his employee discount on rent he never quite got around to saving up enough money to replace it.
Pauline stopped Nathan by the entrance of the control room before he could start his next shift.
“The landlord wants to see you in my office.”
This was a bit of a shock to Nathan. He’d never once actually met the landlord. Even when he’d been hired for the job Pauline had handled his interview and the (very brief) orientation. He figured the landlord taking a direct interest in him couldn’t be good.
His fears were confirmed when Pauline turned her monitor around and the landlord, who hadn’t even bothered turning his camera on for the video call, said “you know what, I don’t even want to look at him. You do it,” and abruptly disconnected.
So, it looked like the only contact Nathan was ever going to have with the landlord was seeing that beigeish yellow circle on a grayish blue background. At least now he knew the landlord’s first name was Tate.
“I’m sure you’re wondering what it is I’m supposed to do.”
It seemed obvious to Nathan he was going to get fired. Unless the landlord’s only recourse for not being able to look at him was promoting him to cover an additional shift in the monitor room.
Pauline explained that they’d gotten a computer program which could generate a quick and digestible report based on the images it scanned through the security system, the same idea Nathan had been trying with his collage. She showed him the latest computer report, and Nathan was pretty sure none of the people in the image actually lived in the building. Instead, the collage was a group of people who plausibly might live in a building like theirs doing the sort of activities you’d possibly expect someone to do in their apartment but without any relationship whatsoever to the things Nathan had actually seen on his monitors.
Out of habit, Nathan’s eyes scanned over to Jerome’s apartment and he had to admit the program wasn’t completely useless. Although it hadn’t blown up the image the way Nathan had, the computer showed a many-armed, many-legged figure in a barely-still-on silk robe staring back at whoever held the report. The figure’s face didn’t look anything like Jerome’s though. It didn’t really look like anybody, although if Nathan were pressed to name a resident the face most resembled, he would’ve had to say it looked most like him.
“Still a few kinks to work out, but it’s not that far off from whatever this is.” She slid Nathan’s collage across the desk. She, or maybe the landlord, had drawn three question marks in red permanent marker over the grotesque carnival in #419.
“It also brings the benefit of not harassing the residents.” She followed up the collage with the nude magazine, which Nathan must have left in the control room. Pauline pointed to the image of #145 in porno-Nathan’s muscly barbarian arms.
“Jerome made that,” Nathan protested.
“It doesn’t matter anymore, he’s not working here either, and we don’t need a third shift anymore.” Pauline continued.
It didn’t seem right to Nathan that the third-shift monitor would get fired for something that Jerome and he, although mostly Jerome, had done.
“Oh, he wasn’t fired.” Pauline corrected. “He was laid off. We’re firing you.”
As Nathan left the office for probably the last time, he realized the ficus, which looked great as always, looked that way because it was made of plastic.
At the very least, Nathan and Jerome now fit into the category of “people like us” that included the unemployed. He thought about how Jerome was convinced he was untouchable because of what he knew. That hadn’t been the case, but it wasn’t like the landlord could evict him over a computer-generated image, right? Or even if he could, would that really make Jerome’s situation that much worse than it already was? As much as it hurt Nathan to admit it, Jerome’s perspective might be useful in figuring out what they could do next.
Jerome said nothing when he answered his door, but the third-shift monitor, who apparently had gained Jerome’s trust and was now sipping 2% on the couch, greeted Nathan by raising his carton.
The Chinese checkers set sat ready to go on the coffee table. “Since this is your first time you can borrow Rex-Rex,” Jerome explained. “But after that you’ve got to bring your own robe.”
The bathroom had little cubbies for his shoes and regular clothes, and once he unrolled the robe he could see why it was called Rex-Rex. A tyrannosaur wearing a very little but very complicated crown decorated the front pocket of the robe. A larger version of the same image appeared on the back. It really was impressive, and quite soft and breathable, too.
Jerome and the third shift monitor were already standing up on the couch when Nathan got out of the bathroom. They’d left a gap in the middle which Nathan assumed was his place to stand.
“It feels good, doesn’t it?” Jerome asked.
The three of them squared up to the camera and undid the knots that held their robes shut.
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