Watchlist (29 page)

He has successes too. He catches the Jamesons' cat urinating on the Abelsons' rosebushes, gets little Sally Henderson to sign an affidavit that she left her Frisbee in the gutter.

When we bought this place, Middle Pond houses were valued higher than West Pond and nearly equal with East Pond. Now they are not better than condos in South Creek.

Donald takes a temporary leave from his job. Says he's going to focus on the family, on our protection. The North Lake Proper Property Standards Guidebook is a tome. Donald and his interns keep finding new rules and new violations.

Worse, he thinks the neighbors are undermining his efforts. They keep ripping the cameras out of the streetlamps and snapping the microphones on the fire hydrants.

“It's probably just the teens being teens,” I say over dinner. It's the only time that we see each other anymore. I spend all of my time upstairs in the bedroom, adding men to my folder, while Donald spends it in the basement, monitoring his wall of screens.

Donald doesn't look up from his bowl of noodles. “Youth is no excuse for crime. If you don't stop them now, they'll be watching the world from behind a set of bars.”

T
HE NURSE SQUIRTS
the gel, fires up the machine.

I'm not sure what to think of the little objects on the screen. I know, intellectually, that they are our children. But they look like microbes in a microscope, inscrutable creatures from another world.

“Those are the hearts, those are the brains,” the nurse is saying. She uses a little laser pointer on the screen.

“The checkup comes with prints, right?” Donald asks. “I want to be able to look at these whenever needs be.”

A
S MY BELLY
swells, my searching habits shift. I've gotten bored gathering information on strangers in distant neighborhoods, started to yawn seeing the photos of middle-aged men next to their cars and fireplaces. I move on from SingleMingle to other, more explicit sites. Affluent Affairs, OK-Dungeon, WASPs_Gone_Wild.

I set my zip code to Middle Pond, check in on the neighbors.

Browsing close to home, I have to obscure myself further. I use photo-editing software to change the tint of my skin. I make sure that there are no identifiable objects in the background of my selfies or else decorate my wall with dime-store decorations that I throw away after a snap. I get the latest encryption software to block my IP.

The men on these sites are like me. They do not reveal their faces, don't give away identifying information.

I stare at a hand or corner of a painting caught in the background of a photo and try to figure out who I'm looking at. Is that William Carlson's untanned thighs? Do those pubes curl how I'd imagine James Jacobson's to curl? Is that edge of cheek or lock of hair one I've seen at a neighborhood meeting?

T
HE NORTH LAKE
Committee on Proper Property Standards applauds Donald, gives him an award for excellence in property protection. Donald makes me come to the ceremony. It's the first time we've been out together in weeks. These days, the twins move so much I'm peeing every thirty minutes. For the most part I stay upstairs, logged in.

As usual, Donald's speech is overlong and mawkish, yet sprinkled with some sharp wit. I'm too far along to drink and try to will myself drunk by staring intensely at the glasses of merlot. I pee twice during the speech.

The residents of Middle Pond, however, are not happy with the Neighborhood Watch.

“You scared Sally,” Hubert Henderson says when the Hendersons come by for dinner two nights later.

“She wouldn't be scared if she didn't have something to hide.” Donald chews his pork chop slowly, his eyes rotating back and forth between the Hendersons.

“Look, this has gone on long enough. This neighborhood doesn't need a watch. If anything, you are making people uncomfortable and they are acting out!”

Donald gets up, wipes his chin with a napkin. He goes into the other room.

“Why, I never,” Henrietta says. She turns to me. “You understand our concern, right? You have children on the way. You don't want them spied on all the time, do you?”

I'm not really paying attention to her. I'm looking at the curve of Hubert's elbow, mentally measuring the distance between moles on his neck. Have I seen those body parts digitized before?

Donald comes back and slaps down a manila folder. It's stuffed with papers and has
Hendersons
written on the top in thick marker letters.

“What is the meaning of this?” Hubert says.

When he opens it, the folder is filled with photos of him and his family. Secret shots of Sally not wiping her muddy shoes on the welcome mat, close-ups of fungal infections on the trees, stills of the cat devouring a protected songbird. He flips through them with increasing speed. “This is madness,” he sputters.

T
HE NEIGHBORHOOD ASSOCIATION
cuts off the Watch's funding, but Donald doesn't care. “It just means we are getting to them.”

He shows me grainy footage of neighbors wearing black stockings on their heads and ripping out his cameras. He freezes them, puts them side by side with photos taken from their Buddy Face pages.

I lean forward, fascinated at seeing the same photos that are in my files on his screen.

The next week, Donald takes out a mortgage on our house. He puts the money into three iSpy drones. They can fly up and down the neighborhood for two hours before they need to be recharged. Each has a camera on a swivel base.

“These babies are the future of neighborhood protection,” he says.

I watch the test run from my upstairs window.

Chet and Chad set up chairs down on the front lawn. They cheer each time the drones pass by.

M
IDDLE POND FEELS
like a ghost town. Children are no longer allowed to play games in the streets. No one walks their dogs or barbecues on the lawn. Our neighbors do not want to have every action watched, every interaction documented. They stay inside with the curtains drawn. Most of our neighbors have purchased tinted windows for their cars so that Donald cannot see how many come and go.

The only things that move on the streets are the drones humming in their preprogrammed patterns.

I can barely even move indoors. My belly is swollen, and when I look at myself in the mirror, I don't recognize who I see. I know that it won't be long before the twins are born, and that their birth will mean a change to much more than just my body or our house.

I've installed the Bread Crumb Trail app on Donald's phone. The app shows you a digital bread crumb trail to your device's location so that you can find it if it's misplaced. I use it to monitor Donald's movements, see where he is coming from or going to.

“Donald, maybe you can drive me to the movies. Have a night out for ourselves before the house is full of screams.”

“Can't now, Margot. Things are coming together. I'm connecting the thread. This thing goes all the way to the top.”

He is breathing heavily on the phone. We never see each other in the flesh anymore. The house is divided between our bases of operation. When I ask him for something, Donald sends one of the interns upstairs.

“The top of what, Donald?”

“You don't even want to know.”

*

I
WAIT FOR
the drone to fly past, then close the blinds. Today, I'm finishing up my file on John Jameson. I found him on SuburbanPervs, recognized his sprinkler system in the background of an explicit pic.

It only takes a few clicks to get his credit score, high school GPA, and family tree. I put the details in my spreadsheet, gaze at the figures. You can look at all that data and the picture of a person really does emerge. It really does. I know more about Jameson now than most of his friends, more perhaps than even his wife.

Suddenly, I get a pop-up chat from Jameson's profile, SilverFoxGolfer72.

“I think you've been looking at me,” he says.

I don't reply.

“I've had my eye on you too,” he says.

He puts in a request for video chat.

“If you record, I'll sue.”

O
UTSIDE MY WINDOW,
things are getting ugly. The Neighborhood Watch is opposed by a new group, the Middle Pond Citizens' Veil. The MPCV scuffle in the streets with Chad and Chet. They cover all the Watch signs with their own symbol: a child skipping rope with a hood over her head.

The exact membership of the MPCV is unknown. They wear latex masks that have been fashioned to look like Donald. I do a double take when I see them on the sidewalk in front of our house, erecting a temporary wall.

Donald responds by attaching speakers to the drones and blasting out audioclips of the neighbors admitting their violations and begging for forgiveness that were recorded during secret interrogation sessions with Chet and Chad in our basement.

Donald is secretly receiving funds from the North Lake Committee, who are concerned that the destabilization of property standards will spread beyond Middle Pond. I know this, because I've started monitoring Donald's emails—his password is shirleyandhugh2015, his desired names for our twins and the year of their upcoming births.

Donald, you are our man on the inside
, the most recent encrypted email says.
Remember the three Cs of neighborhood standards: Community, Commitment, and Containment. Emphasis on containment. This can't be allowed to spread.

W
HILE
I'
M TRYING
to use public information to answer Frederick Abelson's uCloudPhotos security questions, a brick smashes through the window. The double-wide crib is covered in shards of glass. I wobble as quickly as I can to the window and see a Donald-faced figure climbing over our fence.

There is a sheet of paper attached to the brick. It says,
Do you want out? Check [ ]Yes [ ]No. Sincerely, the MPCV.

I think about this question for some time. Out of what? The neighborhood? My marriage? My soon-to-be-formed family? My life?

If I could go back and do things differently, well, of course I would. But isn't that true of everyone?

I mark my check. Then place the paper in a paper shredder.

T
HE TWINS ANCHOR
me to my desk chair. I can no longer see my toes when I stand up, and the hormones and chemicals swirling inside me are making me feel as if my body is an alien vessel. The main thing it feels is hunger. Chet and Chad bring me takeout meals, but Donald remains a ghost floating in the glow of his basement monitors. I see him only through a small camera that I tucked behind the washing machine. When I installed it, I saw something that broke my heart just a little bit. Above his workstation there were two images: a map of the neighborhood and the sonogram printout. There are pins and string connecting the image of the twins to the map of our neighborhood, permanent marker notations on the side. I can't make out the chicken scrawl code.

A part of me thinks that when all of this is over, it might not be impossible for us to go back to the life we had. We could delete all the data we've accumulated, purge the audio and video. Live again like our neighbors are strangers whom we simply wave to on the street.

Why not? Every day people reset their lives, move to new towns or take up new jobs.

But then an explosion echoes down the street.

T
HE FLAMING CAR
is not our car. Donald doesn't know what happened, and there is no clear footage as the drones were captured in nets strung between the streetlamps on the cul-de-sac right before the attack.

The explosion pulls the different factions out into their yards. The Neighborhood Watch on ours, the MPCV and sympathizers on the others. The air is thick with both tension and smoke.

“This is a declaration of war,” Chet says.

“Each house is either with us or against us,” says Chad.

“You two don't even live in this neighborhood,” I say.

Chet scratches his ear. “Well, we get college credit if the mission here succeeds.”

Donald pulls me close, moves his body in front of me as if to shield me from the neighbors' eyes.

“I'll find out who did this,” he whispers to me. “I have cameras they don't even know about, feeds beyond their wildest dreams.”

The driver is singed and shouting, “No, no, no! What the fuck?”

No one moves to help him. His clothes are still slightly on fire.

He looks around at all of us. He is wearing a pointed purple hat with embroidered stars. His pointer finger is outstretched and he moves it from family to family, yard to yard.

“What kind of neighborhood is this!” he screams. He says that this was only his first week driving the Wizsearch street-mapping car. Wizsearch has been expanding into online maps and is trying to get real-life pictures of every street. “It's supposed to be a public service. If you didn't want to be mapped, you could have opted out online!”

“Y
OU LOOK JUST
about ready to burst,” Sarah Ableson says. She's standing in my doorway holding a casserole dish. She lets out a high-pitched, forced laugh.

“Still a month or so to go,” I say. I'm thankful that my belly is large enough to obscure my laptop screen. I reach my hand behind my back to close it.

Sarah's eyes dart around the room. She mouths something to me that I can't understand.

“I brought you my famous third trimester tortellini!” She's talking much louder than necessary. “I ate this for a month straight with both Bobby and Susan!”

She hands me the casserole tray and then slides a note into my pocket.

Sarah steps back into the hallway and scans to see if anyone is there.

“Well, I better be going. Hope to
hear
from you soon.”

After she leaves, I read the note. It tells me that they know the room is bugged, so they can't talk. They want to know if I can broker a peace meeting, get the two sides to come to terms.