Watchlist (28 page)

But the tiny scientist on Moonless saw it too. She blinked into her viewfinder, pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, then turned the telescope in the opposite direction, a full half circle, so that when it stopped it was pointing directly up at me. She wrote something in her tiny notebook, her tiny hand trembling. I didn't go back into the basement for a while after that.

But basements can't be avoided forever. When I did return—with a basket of laundry so ripe you could practically see the wafterons rising off it—I saw that the tiny scientist had built a gigantic ray gun. She was taking potshots at my Christmas lights. Zapped a light and tiny glass tinkled onto cardboard. I told her to knock it off. She zapped another one. “Or what?” she said. “You're going to destroy this planet too?” Maybe I was. I told her not to test me. “Oh I'll test you,” she said. She wheeled the gun around and fired a shot that skimmed my nose. The second one hit me dead on. It stung a lot. I ducked the next salvo and raised my hand to swipe her planet out of existence. She set her chin, bracing for the blow.

But I was not a destroyer of worlds. Not really. I had destroyed one world, singular, and it was just a very small one. I hadn't even meant to create it. What I'd intended to do was make a star, a modest white dwarf, something beautiful just to see if I could do it. Maybe I also wanted to have something to show off to girlfriends when I brought them down to my basement, something that would help get them to hop into my bed. I didn't want to contribute to the grand unhappiness. There was already too much of it in this world. Just today I'd read about a kid in Ohio who shot another kid in school. In Japan someone had taken a knife into the subway and stabbed five people to death. At work I'd found Dr. Hu crying alone in a bathroom stall. He had stage four prostate cancer, inoperable, spreading.

Still, perhaps it was all unavoidable. Maybe whenever you made something—stars, planets, people, whatever—you always made a little sadness, a little death. There was no such thing as pure creation. I told the tiny scientist that I was sorry about the planet but either I was going to destroy it or I was going to be destroyed by something else. That's how it worked: that was science, that was the natural order of things.

“That's bullshit,” she said. She said that I was a coward and a chicken shit. She said that her husband had been on that other planet on an expedition. I had killed him. She asked how I wasn't responsible for that. “Look,” I said. “I'll make it up.” I pulled some fur from the back of my cat, dunked it in some water and rolled it into a ball, which I set in orbit around the dwarf.

The ball came undone. It drifted into the star and burned to ash. “Pathetic,” she said. She looked at me, angry and disappointed, just like every moony Lindsay or Sarah or Kara or Jen looked at me when something came undone between us. But it was just a little thing, an insignificant thing, barely worth dwelling on because it hardly even existed. A small planet; her husband, a small man.

“I'm sorry,” I said and I guess I was. “But what do you want from me? I can't fix everything. I'm not a god.”

Even then I think we both knew that wasn't true, not entirely. For after the tiny scientist grew old and died, and her children died, and her planet's sun died, and everyone died, I continued making new stars. I made white dwarves but also other types because my techniques had become more advanced. Sometimes new planets coalesced around these stars and sometimes the planets made life. I continued to flick away the inferior or disappointing ones, or I'd feed them to my cat. Of those that remained I watched tiny people spread out and inhabit all the corners of my tiny universe, until the universe became too full to contain them and so I'd wipe them all away. Sometimes there were other tiny scientists with very powerful telescopes who would look up and out at me. When they saw me there were always questions about who I was and what I wanted. Was I good or malevolent? Omnipotent or indifferent? A god of death? I was just a man, I'd say to them, just as I'd told the original scientist. But like the original scientist, the more they studied me, the more they watched, the more they became unconvinced. Not because I had power over life and death, destruction and creation—which I did. But because there was only one of me. The god of my own isolation, my own unhappiness. A man with a cat in a basement. What is a god if not alone?

When the incidents start, my husband decides that what our neighborhood needs is a Neighborhood Watch. “We need to watch our assets as closely as we're gonna watch the twins,” he says, tapping the baby monitor screen. The screen is dark and blue. It shows two pale teddy bears in an otherwise empty crib.

The next morning, I come downstairs and see Donald slinking in the corner with a black trench coat and fedora.

“What do you think?”

We're low on disposable income and, as usual, he bought a size too large.

“It looks a little conspicuous,” I say.

“That's the idea, Margot. I want them to know someone is watching.”

My husband buttons the top button of the coat, puts on a pair of sunglasses.

As I slide the toast in the toaster, I see him out the window. He's sneaking through the bushes in the neighbor's backyard.

T
HE REASON WE
are low on cash is that we poured our savings into buying house #32 in a neighborhood called Middle Pond. Middle Pond is located between West Pond on the east and East Pond on the west. All three are part of North Lake, which is itself a subset of the Ocean Shore suburb.

It looks perfect on paper. It has a stellar school system and all the amenities.

“Normally, I'd say we should wait and see,” the real estate agent said, “but if you don't snatch this now you'll watch it go bye-bye.”

Donald downloaded an app called HausFlippr that estimates property values in exclusive neighborhoods. Each time the Middle Pond score went up a full percentage point, Donald cooked rib eyes on our new five-burner grill.

He hasn't cooked rib eyes in months.

O
UR NEIGHBORS ARE
not as worried about the declining rating. “My father used to say, ‘Markets fluctuate like fishes swim,'” John Jameson says at the neighborhood improvement meeting. It's our week to host and I'm placing triangles of cheese beside rectangle crackers.

Several of the other wives are insisting on helping me.

“We'll make sure this is the last time you host until after the miracles pop out,” Mrs. Jameson says.

“Can I see?” Alice Johansson asks while lifting up the hem of my blouse.

“There's nothing to see, I'm not even showing.”

In the other room, Donald is raising his voice. “Well
my
father always said you can never be too careful when it comes to property and prosperity. Plus, I already bought the trench coat.”

The three of us walk back in holding the one tray.

“Okay, if it will make you feel better, we'll take a vote.”

Donald is a tall, muscular man. He knows how to use his body, how to loom. The vote is tight, but Donald stares down enough neighbors that his budget is approved.

“Let's move on to the question of acceptable dye colors for next month's Easter egg hunt.”

“I refuse to participate if metallics are allowed again,” Samantha Stetson says. “They hurt my eyes.”

T
HE CRIB IS
temporarily in my office. This means that the baby monitor camera is temporarily in here too. It is shaped like a purple flower and situated between the plants on the windowsill. The monitor is downstairs in the living room. I've adjusted the angle of the camera so that it can see the crib, but can't see my computer screen.

I can't allow Donald to see what I look at online.

T
HE PROPERTY VALUES
in Middle Pond are based on the reputation of the neighborhood, which is determined, in large part, by the official score assigned by the North Lake Committee on Proper Property Standards.

We are never told the qualifying factors, but judging from the way the inspectors inspect, the list is long and varied. They inspect the level of seed in the bird feeders, observe the height of the grass in each lawn, and mark down rule infractions during the games of hopscotch on the street.

Our neighbors probably thought that Donald would get bored after a week or give up when the score increased. But the score keeps declining and by mid-month Donald has an entire operation set up in our basement.

“Look at those paint stains in the driveway of the Johnsons'. And see how the Stetsons keep every curtain drawn?”

I'm maneuvering the laundry basket between his monitors and stacks of notes.

He calls me over, makes me watch a time-lapse progression of black cars entering and leaving the Jacobsons' garage.

“I'm going to see if the neighborhood board will increase the Watch's budget. I need at least a dozen cameras. What do you think?”

I want to tell him that my bladder hurts and my back aches and I don't care about the neighbors' driveways. I want to tell him that he was supposed to be helping me during the pregnancy, not getting in my way. Mostly I want to tell him that he should be looking at me, not the neighbors.

O
R THAT'S WHAT
I know I'm supposed to feel. In fact, I don't mind that Donald isn't looking at me. After five years of marriage, my own eyes have started wandering.

I know that every marriage goes through those phases, where you look at the other person and can't remember what you ever saw in them. I know that it will pass, and that the babies will give us something new to look at together. But they aren't born yet.

When Donald starts pinning evidence to his corkboard, I creep upstairs and open my SingleMingle account. I gaze at the pixelated men. Some of them are smiling with salt and wind in their hair. Others are introspective, reading a novel in a leather wingchair. When I click next, a new one materializes. I click next again and again and again. There is an endless number of these men. My favorites are the ones who don't have shirts on. Some even crop their heads off, leaving just their disembodied, under-tanned torsos moving across the screen.

Donald's operation starts out small, and consists mostly of warning signs that Donald posts around the neighborhood. These signs show a dark figure with glowing eyes and the words
You Are
Seen.

Nevertheless, during the inspector's next visit, while he is measuring the dampness of the cul-de-sac gutter, somebody keys the inspector's car.

T
HE NEXT DAY,
HausFlippr changes our safety rating from A to A- and drops our overall score five points.

Donald's budget is quickly tripled.

He buys a dozen cameras from Discountsleuth.com and hides them around our property. One is slinked through the hose, looking out at the street. Two face our immediate neighbors' houses through holes in the fence that Donald drills with an old dentist drill. One is hooked to the weathervane at the top of the house, providing a rotating view of the neighborhood as the wind blows.

The cameras snake down into the basement, where they are monitored by Donald and his two interns, Chet and Chad.

I
USE A
fake zip code on my SingleMingle account. My user info is a lie. My height is shrunk an inch, my status marked “seductively single,” my eyes labeled hazel instead of green. I use photos that obscure my features, angles that make my nose look bigger or my hair a different shade of brown.

If anyone who knows me saw my profile, they wouldn't be able to recognize me.

Still, I make sure to browse strangers in other neighborhoods like North Forest and South Beach.

A man with the username OceanShoreStud27 catches my eye. His profile doesn't have much information, but I want to know more. I plug his user photos into reverse image search, find his other profiles on other sites. His name is Derek Carrington. He's thirty-seven, a Libra, works in finance, has a blog devoted to his sport fishing catches. I check out his most played songs on BoomboxFM and a list of every movie he's rated on Moviemaniacs.com.

What gets my heart truly racing is the satellite photo of his house. It's only a few miles away and has a back porch and a pool. I zoom in as far as I can until the pool's blue hues are giant pixelated blocks. I imagine myself sitting by the pool with Derek, our twins splashing in the abstract art.

I come.

I organize the files on Derek, zip and encode them on a folder in my external hard drive.

Then I start searching again.

“C
ORRUPT ASSHOLES
!” D
ONALD
is pounding his fist into the refrigerator.

He notices me in the doorway, gazes at my stomach.

“What are the three of you craving? Fried chicken? Tacos? I can get one of the interns to make a run.”

I tell him Thai, and he sends Chet out. He looks at me with that serious expression he gets when he is unsure if I can handle what he wants to say. It's my least favorite expression of his.

“A dog attacked Chad when he was affixing a new camera to the yield-to-children sign. We got a photo, but none of the neighbors will identify it.”

“People get protective of their pets.”

“The bastards are trying to stonewall me!” He hits his own palm with his fist. “It's not just that violation, Margot. It's vandalism. Crime. Drugs. Lord knows what else.”

He mistakes my bemusement for worry. He comes over and touches my stomach with the backs of his hands.

“Don't worry, I won't let anything happen to any of us.”

He continues to rub my belly with his knuckles. I try to think of the last time those knuckles touched me in a place I wanted to be touched.

“I wish I could see what was going on in there,” he says without looking up.

D
ESPITE DONALD'S EFFORTS,
the incidents don't stop. Someone toilet-papers the Thompsons' oak tree. A raccoon spills garbage all across our cul-de-sac. Four yards have grown well beyond the allowable length. Donald calls in a half-dozen noise violations, but can't pin down the sources.