Upright Beasts Read online

  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.

  “Corrupt assholes!” Donald 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 Indian, and he sends Chet. He looks at me with that serious expression he gets when he’s unsure if I can handle what he wants to say. It’s my least favorite expression of his.

  “A dog attacked Chad while he was attaching a new camera to the Yield to Children sign. We got a photo, but none of the neighbors will identify it.”

  “People are protective of their pets.”

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

  He mistakes my confusion 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’s going on in there,” he says without looking up.

  Despite Donald’s efforts, the incidents don’t stop. Someone toilet papers the Thompsons’ oak tree. A raccoon spills garbage 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.

  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’re no 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 violations. Worse, he thinks the neighbors are undermining his efforts. They keep ripping the cameras out of the street lamps and snapping the microphones on the fire hydrants.

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

  He 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 bars.”

  The nurse squirts the gel, fires up the machine.

  I’m not sure what to think of the little objects on the screen. Intellectually, I know they’re 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 I need to.”

  As 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, OkDungeon, WASPsGoneWild.

  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 there are no identifiable objects in the background of my selfies, or else gussy up my wall with dime-store decorations that I throw away after a snap. I get the latest encryption software to mask my IP.

  The men on these sites are like me. They don’t 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. Are those William Carlson’s pale thighs? Do those pubes curl how I’d imagine James Jacobson’s curl? Is that edge of cheek or lock of hair one I’ve seen at a neighborhood meeting?

  The North Lake Committee on Proper Property Standards applauds Donald, gives him an award for excellence in property protection. He 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 sharp wit. I’m too far along to drink but I 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, 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’re making people uncomfortable and they’re 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. This isn’t the inner city. 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 before?

  Donald comes back and slaps down a manila folder. It’s stuffed with papers and has “Hendersons” written on the front in Magic 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 failing to wipe her muddy shoes on the welcome mat, close-ups of fungal infections on the front-yard trees, stills of the cat devouring a protected songbird. He flips through them with increasing speed.

  “This is madness!” Hubert sputters.

  “It’s a reckoning,” Donald says.

  The neighborhood association cuts off the watch’s funding, but Donald doesn’t care. “It just means we’re on to something.”

  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 FaceFriends pages. I lean forward, inspecting these same photos from my files on a new screen.

  The next week, Donald takes out a home equity loan. 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 on the front lawn. They cheer each time the drones pass by.

  Middle Pond feels like a ghost town. Children are no longer allowed to play games in the streets. No one walks their dogs or barbeques on their lawn. Our neighbors don’t want to have every action watched, every interaction documented. They stay inside with the curtains drawn. Most of them have purchased tinted windows for their cars so Donald can’t 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 i
s swollen, and when I look at myself in the mirror, I don’t recognize myself. I know 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 app on Donald’s phone. The app shows you a digital trail to your device’s location, so that you can find 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 us 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 threads. 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 call him for something, Donald sends one of the interns upstairs.

  “The top of what, Donald?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  I wait for the drone to fly past, then close the blinds. Today I’m finishing 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 emerges. It really does. I know more about Jameson now that most of his friends, more perhaps than even his wife.

  Suddenly, I get a pop-up chat from Jameson’s profile, Silver_Fox_Golfer. “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 a video chat. “If you record, I’ll sue.”

  Outside, 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 a group of Donalds on the sidewalk in front of our house, erecting a temporary wall.

  Donald responds by attaching speakers to the drones and blasting out audio clips of the neighbors admitting their violations and begging for forgiveness, which were recorded during clandestine interrogation sessions with Chet and Chad in our basement.

  Donald is secretly receiving funds from the North Lake Committee, whose management is concerned the destabilization of property standards will spread beyond Middle Pond. I know this because I’ve started monitoring Donald’s e-mails—his password is ShirleyandHugh2016, his desired names for our twins and the year of their upcoming birth.

  “Donald, you’re our man on the inside,” the most recent encrypted e-mail says. “Remember the three c’s of neighborhood standards: Community, Commitment, and Containment. Emphasis on containment. This can’t be allowed to spread.”

  While I’m trying to use public information to answer Frederick Abelson’s uCloudPhotos security questions, a brick smashes though the window. The double-wide crib is covered in shards of glass. I wobble 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 I place the letter in a paper shredder.

  The 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 my body feel like an alien vessel.

  The main thing it feels is hunger. Chet and Chad bring me take-out 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 were pins and string connecting the image of the twins to the map of our neighborhood, permanent marker notations on the side. I couldn’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 that 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.

  The 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 street lamps 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 its sympathizers on the others. The air is thick with 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’s 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 shouts. 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!”

  “You look just about ready to burst,” Diane Abelson says. She’s standing in my doorway holding a casserole dish. She lets out a forced, high-pitched laugh.

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

  Diane’s eyes dart around the room. She mouths something that I can’t make out. “I brought you my famous third-trimester tortellini!” Now she’s talking much more loudly than necessary. “I ate this for a month straight with both Bobby and Susan!”

  She hands me the casserole dish and then slides a note into my pocket. She 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 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. “There is a phone in a plastic bag in the middle of the casserole. Use it outside, and Donald won’t be able to monitor it. Call us if you can help end the madness.”

  I drag all of my files—every neighbor I’ve gathered data on, each .doc of their life and .xls of their history—and place them in the recycle bin. I tell myself it’s unhealthy to spend so much time monitoring the lives of others and so little time looking at my own. Plus, when the twins finally arrive, I won’t have time to look up my neighbors and video chat with masked faces. I’ll be shaking brightly colored toys before their newborn eyes or watching to make sure they don’t eat rat poison or loose nails.

  I hover my cursor over the trash can icon. I click on it, and my breath gets short. I h
it undo, sending the files flying back to the proper folders. There will always be time to delete them after the twins are born. I’ll be able to make a clean break when that happens.

  Until then, I fire up the browser and log back in.

  And then one morning I wake up and the neighborhood is quiet. I don’t hear the drones flying past. I don’t hear Chet and Chad struggling with masked Donalds. I don’t even hear the sounds of cars driving quickly down the street.

  I get up and pee, wash my hands with antibacterial soap. I struggle to the window.

  At the end of the street, I see two people being shoved into a patrol car. The rest of the houses have their driveways blocked off with police tape.

  I move to my laptop, do a Wizsearch News search for “Middle Pond.” No results.

  I look over at the casserole phone still in its plastic bag. I dial the preprogrammed contact, listen to it go straight to voicemail.

  Someone taps spryly on the door.

  Donald extends a handful of roses. His face is shaved, and he’s wearing a new suit that fits just right. He looks nothing like the disheveled figure hunched over his charts in the basement I’ve been monitoring.

  “It’s all over, baby. We won, you and me.”

  My heart is beating quickly, and I’m unsure what combination of fear, relief, and confusion is mixing in my head.

  He hugs me and tells me he’s taken down the cameras and will be renting the drones out for overhead photos of upscale weddings. “The North Lake Committee asked me to give you this.” He hands me a pendant of an eye surrounded by a white picket fence. The bottom says, “Sponsored by Wizsearch.”

  “There will be a ceremony later, of course.” He pins it carefully to my blouse. “Margot, I have to say I had my doubts about you for a little while. I thought you were looking for kicks elsewhere, but I couldn’t see the big picture. Obviously you knew I was monitoring your online activities. You knew I’d copy your files. Your research was the key to the whole operation’s success. The data you had on the neighbors exposed it all: tax fraud, drug use, and everything else we needed to take them down.”