Watchlist Read online

  Published by Catapult

  catapult.co

  Anthology selection copyright © 2015 by Bryan Hurt

  All rights reserved

  First published in the US by OR Books

  ISBN: 978-1-936787-42-5

  Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by

  Publishers Group West, a division of the Perseus Book Group

  Phone: 800-788-3123

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015951166

  Printed in the United States of America

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Kate and Bonnie

  Contents

  Introduction by Bryan Hurt

  Nighttime of the City

  ROBERT COOVER

  Sleeping Where Jean Seberg Slept

  KATHERINE KARLIN

  Testimony of Malik, Israeli Agent, Prisoner #287690

  RANDA JARRAR

  The Relive Box

  T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE

  Scroogled

  CORY DOCTOROW

  California

  SEAN BERNARD

  Adela, primarily known as The Black Voyage, later reprinted as The Red Casket of the Heart, by Anon.

  CHANELLE BENZ

  Ladykiller

  MIRACLE JONES

  The Transparency Project

  ALISSA NUTTING

  The Gift

  MARK IRWIN

  What He Was Like

  ALEXIS LANDAU

  The Entire Predicament

  LUCY CORIN

  Coyote

  CHARLES YU

  Terro(tour)istas

  JUAN PABLO VILLALOBOS

  Safety Tips for Living Alone

  JIM SHEPARD

  Prof

  CHIKA UNIGWE

  The Witness and the Passenger Train

  BONNIE NADZAM

  Moonless

  BRYAN HURT

  Our New Neighborhood

  LINCOLN MICHEL

  Buildings Talk

  DANA JOHNSON

  Lifehack at Bar Kaminuk

  MARK CHIUSANO

  Making Book

  DALE PECK

  Dinosaurs Went Extinct around the Time

  of the First Flower

  KELLY LUCE

  Ether

  ZHANG RAN

  Drone

  MILES KLEE

  Transcription of an Eye

  CARMEN MARIA MACHADO

  The Taxidermist

  DAVID ABRAMS

  Second Chance

  ETGAR KERET

  Strava

  STEVEN HAYWARD

  We Are the Olfanauts

  DEJI BRYCE OLUKOTUN

  Viewer, Violator

  AIMEE BENDER

  Thirteen Ways of Being Looked at by a Blackbird SR-71

  PAUL DI FILIPPO

  About the Contributors

  Acknowledgments

  Credits

  Introduction

  It began with the baby monitor. Months before I’d conceived of this book, my wife and I bought an Internet-connected camera to watch over our infant son while he slept. With a swipe of our fingers we could call him up on any of our iDevices—on our phones while we were out to dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant, or on our tablets while we watched TV on our couch—and there he’d be, butt lifted cartoonishly into the air, breathing softly but visibly, in grainy green-and-black. We could swivel the camera 180 degrees, taking in all corners of his room, or zoom in on his face, and then past his face, filling our screens with two giant, dilating nostrils, an open mouth. Then we could go back to eating our vegetarian spring rolls, or watching whatever it was we were watching on TV. Seeing him was a comfort. Watching him meant we knew that he was safe.

  When I told my neighbor—novelist and contributor to this very anthology Alexis Landau—about the camera, she asked if he could see it. Did he know that he was being watched?

  We were at the park, pushing our kids on the swings.

  I told her that the camera was on a table next to the crib, a few inches away from his face. “It’s not like we’re spying on him,” I said.

  But her question lingered. Were we spying on him? Was my son aware of the camera we had trained on him while he was sleeping? At the time he was six months old and the only direction he’d figured out to crawl was backward. I doubted that he was aware of the camera, and even if he was, so what?

  I shrugged and went back to pushing.

  Get used to it, little dude. Being watched is part of life.

  WE ARE BEING watched. That this statement probably no longer shocks is itself somewhat shocking. But ever since Edward Snowden revealed the NSA’s massive, clandestine surveillance program in June 2013, we’ve been inundated with news—seemingly every week—about yet another aspect of our once-thought-private lives that is now subject to some kind of scrutiny. We’ve learned that the U.S. government or one of its allies has been reading our e-mail, listening to our phone calls, and watching nearly everything we do on the Internet—Facebook posts, Google searches, instant messages, World of Warcraft gaming sessions. In early 2016 Apple was called before Congress to testify about its refusal to obey a court order to unlock an iPhone that was used by one of the terrorists who murdered fourteen people in San Bernardino, California, in December 2015. Privacy experts said that the stakes couldn’t be higher. If Apple were forced to comply with the court, it would be required to build custom software for the FBI that would create a so-called backdoor into the San Bernardino iPhone, and other devices like it, that would allow law enforcement to access everything on it, from location to e-mail and text messages. Worse, it would set a larger precedent. “If a court can ask us to write this piece of software, think about what else they could ask us to write,” said Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, in a recent interview. “Maybe it’s an operating system for surveillance, maybe the ability for law enforcement to turn on the camera. I don’t know where it stops. But I do know that this is not what should be happening in our country.”

  Yet so far we’ve responded to news of this surveillance with . . .

  . . . a burp of indignation . . .

  . . . some outrage in the op-eds . . .

  . . . by and large, a collective shrug.

  Perhaps we’re largely untroubled by this news because it doesn’t register as anything new to us. Every private thing that’s been taken, we’ve already been giving away for free. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—since the advent of social media, and long before it, we watch ourselves more closely, keep tabs on each other better than any government agency ever could.

  The technology certainly helps. Pew Research estimates that collectively we now spend seven hundred billion minutes on Facebook each month. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, aristocrats would also invest lots of time and money to pose for intimate portraits that they would put on public display. There’s value in being seen—always has been—and so it’s funny but not coincidental that the word status is linked so integrally with today’s social networking: the more you see me, the more I’m worth.

  WATCH SOMETHING and you change it. This is something that we all know pretty intuitively, and something that’s been explored by philosophy and science. Photons change from waves to particles when they’re observed under electron microscopes. There’s the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat.

  We act differently, perform differently, when we know we’re being watched. Or even when we think we are. That’s the logic of the panopticon, the circular prison in which the inmates can’t escape the watchman’s eyes.

  The question that inspired this book is how we are affected by this constant surveillance. Does a camera trained on a sleeping child change him? How does an ever-present, faceless audience alter who we are? One way to interpret the Delphi
c maxim “Know thyself” is to take it as a warning to ignore the masses, their judgment and opinions. But what does it mean when our notion of self is tied so inextricably with our notion of audience? In a world without privacy, what becomes of the private self?

  I decided to explore these questions through fiction not because fiction gives us good or definitive answers—good fiction is very bad at that—but because fiction allows for the widest range of inquiry. Through stories we can document, verify, speculate, scrutinize, judge, and watch. Stories help us put human perspectives and particularities on otherwise faraway topics and distant news headlines, drawing us closer because of fiction’s powerful empathic lens. Fiction, then, is another kind of surveillance technology. We read to better see and understand the world around us—other places, other people, other lives. But the best stories inevitably do much more than that. They help us see ourselves by revealing the unacknowledged and undiscovered parts within us, the parts of ourselves that we had not uncovered, that we had not yet known. We read stories to see the world and to see ourselves.

  When I approached the contributors for stories about surveillance, the only guideline I gave them was that the book’s scope would be broad and imaginative. I’d take stories that were “ripped from the headlines,” that were set in far-flung and not-so-distant futures, or that took place one hundred years in the past. What surprised me about the stories they gave me was not how uniformly excellent they are or how thoroughly they explore the topic—I expected that all of the stories would be excellent and that they’d leave no stone unturned. There are stories collected in Watchlist that are political, apolitical, ethical, cautionary, realistic, experimental, “genre” stories—science fiction, historical, noir. Stories by authors who are well known and stories by authors whom you’ll know well soon enough, authors who should be on your own personal “watchlist.” What surprised me was that despite their breadth, each of the thirty-two stories in Watchlist suggests that the real price of surveillance is intimacy. The more we know about each other, the less we actually know.

  For what it’s worth, I hope they’re wrong, even though I know they’re not.

  Still, stories are powerful not because they let us see the world as it is—fallen, flawed, full of loss—but because they show us the world as it can be. The most powerful stories help us recuperate loss, transform it, and turn it into something beautiful, a work of art. So here’s an alternative surveillance story I propose, a fantasy, I know:

  Watching is close attention. Close attention is an act of love.

  So get used to it, little dude. Being watched is part of life.

  —Bryan Hurt

  Nighttime of the City

  by Robert Coover

  She drifts through the bleak nighttime of the city like an image loosely astir in a sleeping head, disturbing its rest, destined for the violent surreality of dreams. She wears a belted black trench coat, a black silk scarf around her throat, a black felt hat with a wide pliable brim shadowing her face. Streetlamps mark her isolate passage, drawing her out of the velvety dark and casting her back into it, until, under one where she is expected to appear, she does not. Nor is the clocking of heels on wet pavement now heard. There are echoey calls and whistles, as from hungry men, but none are seen, nor is she. As if by a conjuring, a man wearing a black narrow-brimmed fedora now appears under the streetlamp that had been awaiting her arrival, his belted black trench coat not unlike hers, black silk tie and white collar at the throat. Somewhere there is a menacing rumble as of a train passing underfoot or overhead. As it fades away, the man withdraws a pack of cigarettes, taps one out, fits it between his lips, drops the pack back in his pocket, lights the cigarette inside cupped black-gloved hands. His sharp cruel features are briefly illuminated. Then, hands in pockets, cigarette dangling in the shadows beneath his hat brim, he slips into the dark space she was last seen entering. Distantly, a siren can be heard, rising, falling. She reappears, stepping into the damp light, then continues on into darkness, into the light of the next streetlamp, into darkness, light, gone again. A second man appears under the streetlamp toward which she had last been moving, dressed like the first. The soft muffled rumble, ominously coming and going. He cups his gloved hands, lights a cigarette, disappears into the shadowed space she last entered. Faint wail of a distant siren. After it fades to silence, she reappears, moving from streetlamp to streetlamp as before. The two men, thought dismissed, if they be they, have also returned, cigarettes burning beneath their hat brims, and they follow her at the distance of a lamp, visible, then lost to sight, as she is visible, lost to sight. She pauses under a lamp. They pause. There is a third man already standing under the next one, his face in shadows. He cups his gloved hands, lights a cigarette. The wings of his white collar gleam at the margins of his black silk tie like place markers. She turns back: the other two are silently watching her. She steps into the darkness. Hat brims lowered, they follow. There is something like a sighing wind, rising, falling, and the streetlamps brighten, dim again. Behind them in the darkness, nothing can be seen or heard, but for what might be the scurrying of vermin, the icy clicking of knife blades opening. But then a bottle shatters explosively against a brick wall, and there is suddenly a blazing light, revealing an alleyway heaped with headless corpses clothed in black. Not far away, tires are screeching, cars crashing, and something like screams that are not screams rip past and fade again. She rises impassively from the pile of bodies, and as the headless men also slowly rise, she reaches up as if to pull down a window blind. As her hand descends, darkness does as well. Silence.

  She enters an elegant white marble bar filled with men, some headless, some not, those with heads wearing black fedoras, lit cigarettes in the shadows beneath their brims. There are mutterings, the scratch of matches, clinking glasses, chairs scraping, all fading as she enters, a glacial silence falling. She crosses the white room under her broad-brimmed black hat, hands in trench coat pockets, black heels ticktocking on the marble floor, toward a black leather door at the other side. The men, those headless, those not, their white shirt collars crisp and gleaming, rise to follow her. She pauses at the door as the men gather menacingly around her; then she opens the door and steps into the next room, the men pushing through behind her. But only she arrives on the other side, a severe and solitary figure as before. It is a glossy white marble bar much like the other one, with motionless men scattered about, some with heads, some without, faint barroom sounds fading away to a taut silence. Her measured tread on the marble floor fills the silence the way a heartbeat might resound in a hollow stone breast. A headless man rises to block her passage, two men with heads and hats, cigarettes aglow beneath the brims, a second headless man, a third. She passes through them as though they were not there to the black leather door at the other side, where she pauses. The men crowd up around her, threateningly as before. She steps through to the next room; they step through. But only the men arrive on the other side. They stumble about in seeing and unseeing confusion, knocking over tables, chairs, each other. They turn back toward the door. She is standing there, just beyond the threshold in the room that they have left, scarved and hatted. She closes the door. They press against it, pounding on it silently or on each other as darkness descends.

  She moves down a dark street lined by parked cars, her way lit only by the occasional streetlamp, each dropping a small puddle of wet light for her to step through. As she passes, headless men and others with heads in black fedoras step out of the parked cars and follow her in and out of the light of the lamps. She turns down an unlit alleyway, heels clocking hollowly, now little more than the shadow of a moving shadow, the men behind her jostling one another between the dark brick walls, their shirt collars eerily luminous. Where the alley opens out onto the lamplit street, she pauses. Behind her, the walls of the alley, grating harshly, slam together on her pursuers. She crosses the empty night street (distantly, sirens cry and fade away) to the next alley, followed by another lot of me
n in belted black with and without heads and hats, many emerging from parked cars, streaming in from all directions. This time, at the far end, she turns to watch impassively from under her wide soft hat brim as the brick walls crash shut. In the docklands, they follow her out to the end of the pier, her heels thudding on the wet wood to guide them in the dark. Some of them are now pressed flat, looking like paper cutouts of men in belted trench coats, some of these with heads and hats, some also without. She steps silently aside. The headless ones, unseeing, both flat and full, tumble off the end of the pier, and those with heads, pushed along by the confused headless ones, tumble in, too. The water is soon filled with drowned men. The flat ones float on top along with bobbing fedoras, their bodies rippling rhythmically as the waves roll under them and softly lap the pier.

  In the rail yard, she crosses the tracks in total silence, the hatted and headless men following, the flat ones wrinkled and waterlogged, the full ones bloated, and they are crushed by a train roaring suddenly out of the night.

  She stands in pale light against a brick wall as if pinned there, her face shadowed by the wide soft brim of her black hat, hands in her black trench coat pockets. Somewhere, hungry men are growling and muttering. Her shadow darkens in contrast to the rapidly brightening wall. She steps out of the dazzling light as the men pursuing her step into it, and a large truck, horn blasting, tires screeching, crashes explosively into the wall, its own headlights extinguished by the impact, dark descending amid an invisible rain of falling brick and felt fedoras.

  Everywhere there are men under streetlamps, stepping out of parked cars, those with heads lighting cigarettes, all of them roaming the docklands, moving in and out of bars, patrolling the rail yards, and scurrying—seeing and unseeing—through the bleak labyrinthine streets of the night city. There is an occasional ominous rumble, underfoot or overhead, and the distant wail of sirens can be heard, the crumpling of crashing cars, the muffled kerwhumps of dull explosions. Also, from time to time, never far away, the echoey hammering of heels on pavement, which causes the men to pull up short, cock their ears if they have them, turn toward the clocking heels, then continue, redirected, when they stop. The men are headless or else they wear black fedoras, brims pulled down over lit cigarettes; they are wet and ripply if flat like cutout men or bloated if not, and all now carry silvery handguns in their black-gloved hands. Remotely, shots can be heard, the whine of ricocheting bullets. Sometimes a man falls clutching his chest, but after a moment rises again to continue his mazy pursuit. Drawn by the pulsating footsteps, the men converge upon a small barren lot from which lamped streets radiate damply in all directions. She appears out of the ubiquitous shadows, first in one of the wet streets, then another, the men firing upon her wherever and whenever she is seen. She appears in two streets at once, dually approaching the men in the empty lot, then three, five, eight, all of them. There is a rattle of gunfire in all directions, the glittery shattering of glass, the dull thuck of bullets striking bodies; she is fragmenting, disintegrating in all the streets, while the men—flat, full, hatted, headless—topple, one after another, surrendering their small measure of dignity to the black city streets. She walks, whole again, among their sad crumpled bodies, glass crunching underfoot; then, as the streetlamps brighten briefly, only to fade again, she disappears into the descending night. The men are all dead. No, they are not. They rise once more, step under streetlamps, light cigarettes in cupped black-gloved hands, tug their hat brims down if they have them, adjust their black silk ties in their gleaming shirt collars, cock their ears. In the silence, the clocking heels resume.