Solaris Rising (35 page)

“Well...” The woman grimaced. “That’s the simple description. I’d give you the full rundown but to be honest, I don’t really understand it well enough. I mean, I understand it but –” She looked around quickly, pointed at the telephone next to the keyboard. “I understand that enough to use it but don’t ask me to explain how it works. I’m installation – I plug in wires, I hook up cameras, I adjust the focus and set the time-stamp. I can show you how to re-wind so you can check what happened two hours ago or last night – it’s not too hard. And here’s the quick-start.” She stood a small instruction pamphlet to one side, between the keyboard and the monitor. “It’s got all the instructions you’re gonna forget I told you.”

Dov chuckled politely. “How far back does it go? I mean, how long will it record before it records over whatever it’s already recorded?” He paused, replaying what he’d just said. “Did that make sense?”

The woman laughed. “Yeah, I gotcha. It’s unlikely you’ll ever need anything beyond the previous twenty-four hours. But if for some reason you ever do, we’ll have it archived. But I gotta tell you, in all the time I’ve been doing this, I never heard of anyone having the cops ask them for ‘surveillance footage’ –” she made air quotes that Dov could almost see. “Except on a TV show.”

She produced several forms for him to sign, gave him copies, and before he could ask her anything else, she was scurrying around, packing up her tools, collecting empty boxes, styrofoam inserts, and folding up drop cloths. He went to carry the ladder out to the truck for her but she waved him off with a firmness he didn’t dare argue with, despite her cheerful smile.

So that was that. Perched on the stool behind the counter, Dov looked directly at each of the three cameras in the store – one in the far corner, one over the door to the office, and one on the wall directly opposite where he was sitting. And when he sat at the desk in the office, the fourth would be looking over his shoulder.

Abruptly, he realised he’d been looking from one camera to the other every five seconds. “Oh,
hell
,” he muttered. Yesterday he’d been silly; today, head-bugs were eating his brain like Pac Man. The cameras hadn’t even been in for a day – not even for an
hour
– and he already had some kind of bizarre OCD. He slipped off the stool thinking he’d go back to the office and then remembered the camera there. He’d forgotten to allow for that one when he’d been doing his weird OCD thing just now. Damn it, he couldn’t even get
that
right.

Leaving the ring-for-service bell on the counter, he went back to the office anyway, striding past the desk without looking left or right to shut himself in the tiny lavatory. Privacy at last. He flipped the light switch; the bulb flashed and went out.

Now he had
real
privacy, even from himself. The way he was going, by tomorrow this would seem like a luxury. And still, he realised, he had a finger over his lip.

He opened the lav door intending to stride back out to the store again still not looking at the monitor on the desk, except it was the first thing he saw. The view of the top of his head was just long enough to tell him that he’d been in denial about how much he was thinning up there. Then the screen blinked and he saw the girl from the record store had come in. Blink: someone was at the table outside looking through the box of prints and it wasn’t Kitty. He rushed into the store. The girl glanced at him but he barely noticed. There was no one at all at the table looking at anything.

Dov started toward the stool behind the counter but some impulse made him turn around and go back to look at the monitor. Two of the cameras had a view of the table; the one in the far corner showed no one standing there. The one over the office door, however, said there was. The person was mostly hidden behind the front door frame but Dov could see enough to recognise the coverall. He could even see part of the sign on the truck and that she had left the back doors open.

He went out to the store. No one was there; the truck was gone. Still, he went all the way out to the table and stared at it for some ridiculous length of time. Two teenaged girls who had been looking through a pile of old postcards stopped to give him a wary look. Dov flashed them a perfunctory smile and went back to the office.

The far corner camera showed him what he had just seen; the other was still watching the woman from OnWatch flipping through the prints.

And the camera across from the counter showed him sitting behind the counter, reading a paperback.

Dov and the display blinked together. He fidgeted through fifteen seconds before the screen showed there was no one behind the counter. Something flickered or twinkled in the lower lefthand corner of the monitor but it was too small to make out even with his reading glasses. He had to get the magnifying glass out of the drawer to see they were numbers, tiny little white numbers changing so quickly they were flashing. Would a time stamp have that many digits? Before he could see whether they were going backwards or forwards, they disappeared.

He straightened up, rubbing his lower back although he felt the ache only distantly.

The woman said they archived the recordings. Maybe they’d been re-running the feeds to synchronise them. Maybe the clock on that thing was out of step with the one at OnWatch.

Only then did he realise that the woman had never answered his question about how far back the recording went.

He heard a single, polite
ding
! from the bell on the counter. The screen showed the girl from the record store waiting at the register from three different angles and then his own back, as transfixed as a dog watching a light beam play over a wall.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said, hurrying over to wait on her. She had two of the old restaurant-style creamers, one with a blurry pink floral pattern, the other with two thin austere green lines around the base.

“I see you’ve got them, too, now.”

He paused with his fingers on the register buttons. “Pardon?”

She pointed at the camera behind her, nodded at the other two.

“For the insurance company,” he said with a nervous laugh. “Don’t ask me, I just work here. You know?”

“Yeah. I heard some places just have dummy cameras. They print up stickers with a company name that sounds authentic but it’s fake.”

“Good luck to them, I hope their insurance company never finds out.” Dov wrapped each small pitcher in a sheet from the financial section, then discovered he was all out of bags, except for the ones he used for Kitty’s prints. He hesitated, then searched the shelves under the counter more thoroughly. Still nothing, probably plenty back in the office –

The girl was eyeing the cameras with an odd, wary expression.

“They’re all real,” he told her. “Personally, I try to avoid looking directly at them.”

Her eyebrows disappeared under her bangs. “You do?”

“Yeah. You know, like
Ghostbusters
. Don’t look directly at the streams.”

Her puzzlement intensified. “I thought it was don’t
cross
the streams.”

The idea bloomed all at once and fully-formed in his mind. “Maybe you’re right and I’m thinking of something else,” he said, and gave her an extra twenty-five cents with her change.

The ladder was old but solid; he used it hundreds of times to change lights, put up shelves and take them down again but he hadn’t ever needed to do anything up near the ceiling before. And he didn’t need to now, either, insisted the still, small voice of his common sense. Ignoring it was – dared he even think it? – fun. Weird, silly fun, which would probably end right sharpish when he got a call from OnWatch asking him why he was tampering with the cameras.

He could tell them he’d thought the angle looked wrong, like maybe they’d slipped a little.

Oh, good, claim Fabiola had done shoddy work, get the poor woman in trouble – was he a
mensch
or what?

He decided to compromise – he wouldn’t touch the office camera or the one pointed at the counter, just the other two. If they’d even move – for all he knew, they were nailed, screwed, and glued in one position.

But they weren’t. The range of movement was limited but just enough that he was sure each camera could see the other two. He adjusted them, readjusted them, paused to ring up a Coney Island plastic tumbler and a black and brown serving tray with an only slightly scratched bamboo pattern, and re-readjusted them before finally allowing himself to check the results on the monitor.

He stared for a while, then tried again, changing the positions as much as he could without tearing the cameras out of the brackets. Then he changed the third camera so it was pointed at the other two.

The result was the same. Which was to say, the displays were at less-than-optimum angles to view the store but showed the areas on the walls up near the ceiling perfectly. The feeds were as clear as ever and still changing every five seconds. They just didn’t show any cameras. The cameras saw everything except each other.

Dov left them that way for an hour. OnWatch did not phone demanding to know what he was up to. Finally, he put them all back the way they had been, or as near to it as he could remember, checking the display for each one. When he was satisfied, he found an old sweater on a coat-hook and threw it over the monitor till McTeer came in.

It wasn’t until he was almost home that he realised he hadn’t seen Kitty even once.

She came the next day before he had even opened, materialising on the sidewalk just as he put up the trestle table.

“Early for you, isn’t it?” he said with a broad grin.

“You, too.” Kitty looked at the watch pinned to her scrubs. Pale blue floral today, over darker blue trousers; they didn’t quite match.

“I woke up at five-thirty and didn’t feel like going back to sleep.” He glanced at his wristwatch, did a double-take, and held it to his ear.

“A
ticking
watch?” Kitty’s eyes twinkled with amusement. “How retro.”

He saw she had the same time he did: 8:15. “I’m an old-fashioned boy. I like a watch I can wind.” He gave the tiny knob an extra twist before he went in to get the prints. To his surprise, there were only about half as many in the box as there had been yesterday. There was always a little variation in the number of prints beyond what he sold but never anything this large.

Kitty had never mentioned coming back to buy prints when he wasn’t there but he supposed she did, and if so, she was under no obligation to report in to him about it. Nor was it impossible that other people also bought them from McTeer or whoever took over for him at six. For all he knew, the store had a whole different life after he left, with regular customers unfamiliar to him buying inventory he wouldn’t recognise. Maybe the night staff kept the place open past ten till two or three in the morning or held raves on Sundays when it was supposed to be closed. Then they cleaned up after themselves and by the time he came in the next morning, he saw only what he expected to see. There was no way of knowing –

Yes, there was.

He stood in the doorway with his arms folded, looking at each of the cameras in turn. Possibly for five seconds each but he wasn’t counting.

Kitty’s quiet voice broke his rhythm. “You seem very serious today.”

Dov’s smile was perfunctory. “Why didn’t you come yesterday?”

“Busy day,” she said, not looking up from the box. “The ER’s part organised chaos, part systematic crisis, part random lightning strikes, running on coffee, adrenalin, and the triage nurse’s last nerve.” She paused at one of the prints, hesitated, then flipped past it. He waited for her to say something about there not being as many in the box as usual but she didn’t seem to notice.

“What happens when the triage nurse’s last nerve goes?” he asked.

Her eyes twinkled as she glanced up at him. “By then they’ve all grown back.”

“That’s amazing.”

“It’s a gift.” She slipped two prints out of the box and held them out to him. “I’ll take these.”

Number 82 and number 11 were both black-and-white photographs. The former showed an enormous cloud of thick, dark smoke and, at the bottom in the centre, a lone firefighter seen from behind, spraying a stream of water into it. The latter showed a gigantic Ferris wheel caught either by the shutter or in fact at a forty-five degree angle between the white sky above and the city below. Dov fetched a bag for her, trying to remember the last time Kitty had bought even one photo and couldn’t. If there’d been a camera out here, he’d be able to keep track.

As if she had caught a sense of his thoughts, Kitty said, “So can Big Brother see me from in there?”

“Only partly – the door jamb’s in the way. Were you worried?”

“Just curious.” She traded him a couple of crumpled bills for the bag.

“Well, for what it’s worth, you haven’t shown up on the monitor at all yet,” he said, laughing a little. “Whereas I’m the star of the sh –” he cut off, remembering the glimpse he’d had of himself behind the counter. It had to have been a recording, of course. “Star of the show,” he finished.

Instead of hurrying away, she lingered, watching him put out the photos and the postcards along with some novelty bookends and a tray of assorted picture frames. He was about to make a joke about her breaking routine and buying something other than a print when she said, “I bet the last thing Orwell ever imagined was that we’d make Big Brother into a game show.”