We Are Watching Eliza Bright

by A. E. Osworth

  “It isn’t the same,” he doesn’t yell, exactly. It is more a forceful talk, a theatrical voice that rises from the belly. She nearly drops the phone when she realizes The Inspectre is imitating Lewis; at least, imitating the voice Lewis uses for Doctor Moriarty. “It’s being taken over. It used to be a safe world, a better world. But with every one of you who worms her way into it, it becomes more and more like reality. Like—” he stops. Suzanne’s breath catches in her throat.

  A low huh-huh-huh emanates from the phone. Suzanne wants to throw it far away; he sounds so much like Lewis hamming it up, performing for his fanboy spectators. We wonder how long The Inspectre has been watching them—the employees, Preston. Everyone. Because this kind of imitation, it can’t have started with Eliza, with 80085, with all that followed. It’s too detailed. Too practiced. How long has he been obsessed and no one’s noticed because this is normal? “You are not Eliza,” he states. He sounds extremely sure.

  “Yes, I am,” Suzanne asserts, but her voice is shaky.

  It doesn’t matter, though, because a red dot blinks into existence on Eliza’s screen, marking her digital map around the corner and down the road. Suzanne leaps up.

  “Cunt!” The Inspectre or Keith Mackey hisses into the phone. His voice loses the angelic quality and becomes hard-edged, mean like razors. “I’m coming for you next.” He hangs up.

  Suzanne bursts into the dining room with the phone still in her hand. The Sixsterhood all turn their many heads and stare at her as she screams, “Taser! Taser!”

  One of them stands immediately, no questions asked, and rummages through a drawer. Another does have a follow-up question. “Here?”

  “No, no. Out there.” And perhaps there are more questions to be answered, but at that moment someone passes her the weapon and, like a sprinter being passed the baton, she is once again out the door. The Sixsterhood sits in silence at the breakfast table for a breath. Two. Then they burst into frenzy.

  Chapter One Hundred Twelve

  It’s hard to decide who to follow, with everyone converging like this. Everyone’s slamming into each other, many pinballs in a machine, ricocheting. And it’s hard to parse. What if even the parts they talk about later are falsehoods, built for public consumption out of half-truths and public relations strategy? But we’ll start with Eliza, who puts her hands in her jean pockets. She realizes she isn’t wearing a bra, but her coat hides it, so she doesn’t much care. She tries to decide where to go, with her half hour and her fraying nerves, her buzzing fingers and face. She feels pins and needles on her lips. She is angry or she is upset or she is relieved that she can still set foot in the world. She walks in a giant circle. Walks in another giant circle.

  She decides that she will get snacks. Snacks that she picks, with her own hands, and not skimming from the Sixsterhood’s communal fridge like a mooch. She has a little cash in her wallet still from the women, the ones from Last Week Tonight. She has her heart set on a few bags of chips, each a different flavor, and perhaps some onion dip. The kinds of things the Sixsterhood would never have in favor of homemade sourdough and artisanal granola made in a ceremony on Saturdays. No, Eliza feels she (and Suzanne) deserve some honest-to-goodness junk food. So she strolls into the bodega on the corner. A police siren wails by and she jumps, turns around.

  This is when The Inspectre arrives outside the warehouse. He phones Eliza, and we’ve already heard the conversation he has with Suzanne. But what’s important to know is where he walks—he realizes he hasn’t brought anything. No snacks, no bottle of wine, no nothing. It’s rude to do that, to show up at someone’s house, especially on Christmas Eve, without bringing something to share. At least flowers. Because then Eliza will know it’s just a joke, just a puzzle, just for the lulz. He pictures sitting down with her, with Suzanne, and they will be so impressed that he found them. Perhaps they will introduce him to everyone, to Black Hole and Doctor Moriarty and Human Man, even. Perhaps he will get hired—everything he’s done has been genius level. He’s resisted giving her any way to figure out where he was—in a hostel not too far from here. They’ll see he’s not a monster; his only crime is being smarter than everyone, needing the challenge. And as long as she confesses her sins, says she won’t try to ruin the world for his brothers again, he doesn’t see why they couldn’t be—

  But wait. They are lying to him. They are trying to humiliate him again. His fantasy comes crashing down around him. Because as he is browsing for a bottle of wine and talking on the phone, he looks out over the aisles and sees Eliza, absorbed in rows of neon bags, trying to select chip flavors that complement each other. The kind of caloric waste served at a fifth-grade sleepover. She actually giggles, her spirits lifting at the thought. It will be a fine Christmas Eve after all. Perhaps they can watch The Muppet Christmas Carol all together in the living room. In pajamas. Things are looking up.

  “Cunt!” he hisses into the phone. “I’m coming for you next.” Keith Mackey hangs up and grabs a bottle of wine at random. They think they can fool him. But he knows what Eliza looks like—they think he is an idiot. Both of them have to pay for that. And Eliza has to pay especially for giggling. Giggling, he thinks, at having devoured Preston Waters perhaps. Does she maybe take delight in her evisceration of this great man, her invasion of the gaming territory?

  Or no. Perhaps not that violent, not right away. Here is something we know about Keith: as he grabs the bottle of wine, he isn’t sure how exactly he is going to make her pay. He thinks perhaps he’ll confront her—give her the opportunity to compliment his prowess. He imagines she’ll admit her own inferiority. She might say something like “You really had me going there.” Or “Good game.” And in return he will be magnanimous. He will say, “All this is okay, little lady, just don’t go ruining any more games.”

  Before he rounds the corner, before he comes up behind her with that bottle of wine in his right hand, strangled by its neck, he thinks about what winning the game might look like: she quits. That is what he wants. If Guilds of the Protectorate is his favorite universe, then See No Monkey’s Ancient Magic is a close second. He has subscriptions to both. Eliza’s taken down one—he wants to make sure she doesn’t take down the second. He wants her to leave Preston Waters alone so he might eventually recover and return, triumphant, as Human Man. Every man. If she had just quit instead of moving companies, he could’ve gone home. He could’ve stopped. If she’d sat down quietly, he wouldn’t need to keep hunting her down, need to keep teaching her a lesson.

  He imagines Eliza will then apologize for wrecking the game. That maybe other would-be sirens will stay out. He doesn’t think girls don’t belong in games, exactly—they just should make their own, play their own, and stay out of his. Or they shouldn’t change the culture. It’s thrived without the influx this long, after all. The niche has always been healthy. But what happens when it all becomes mainstream? What happens when the kids who beat the shit out of him when he was little grow into games? What happens when the girls who laugh at him, who tease him, who would never date him invade as well? His palms begin to sweat when he sees her body closer. It is small. Smaller than he imagined before. Smaller than we imagined before.

  There are legitimate fears here. The fear of your unique culture being sublimated, being overrun. The fear of dilution. But they’re all mixed in with what The Inspectre does next. And so we ask ourselves, does one lead to the other? Is that how we got here, with us running the world by accident? But we like to think we wouldn’t do what he does next. Would we? We are afraid; we are so afraid. And if we have reason to be, doesn’t that mean we should be allowed to defend ourselves? We are more marginalized every day; it’s not a good era to be us.

  He is behind her now. He clears his throat. “Eliza,” he says. He is doing his best to imitate Black Hole. He succeeds to a point—even the faintest touch of Jean-Pascale’s accent, the pronunciation of Eliza’s name as Ee-liza. But his voice breaks because he is nervous.

  Eliza is in the m
iddle of reaching for barbecue chips when she jumps and turns, both startled and half expecting to see Jean-Pascale, though this voice is crackling and much higher than his. For two confused blinks, neither speaks. Eliza runs her eyes up and down The Inspectre. Here is where we finally meet Keith Mackey’s physical body. The young man who the world nudges closer and closer to acting out with every #YesAllMen, with every desexualized game, with every subreddit that autobans KotakuInAction participants. He is our tragic hero too. Set in motion by circumstances beyond his control.

  If we weren’t, on the whole, so averse to describing men in terms of food, we might say that Keith resembles a clear glass of half-and-half. But it’s not only the half-and-half that is important here, it is also the glass: a translucent quality. He lives, stereotypically, in a basement. He is very pale. He blinks widely whenever he forgets his sunglasses upon exit, like some sort of burrowing creature when faced with the hard, harsh light of noon. Eliza takes in his skinny body, his short stature, his blonde almost-see-through eyebrows. And his obvious youth. At his oldest, he could be nineteen. Maybe twenty.

  “You’re The Inspectre?” she asks. Let’s zoom in here, because that question mark is important. If Eliza instead states a breathy “You’re The Inspectre,” things would go differently. If she’s wearing a dress and stockings and an elegant pea coat with shining buttons; if she looks like an ingénue but with Lara Croft lips, maybe. If she sighs and swoons with fear or admiration, almost definitely. But Eliza stands before The Inspectre with sweatpants and a puffy down coat and barbecue chips and, above all, a question mark. Punctuation is important. Her mouth twists into a grin. “But you’re a kid.” Her glee reaches fever pitch. Her fear need not be so strong; her life has not gone to shit nearly as much as she thought.

  The almost-translucent Keith Mackey turns the tomato red of a classic Nintendo 64 controller. “I—I,” he says, his voice vaulting higher with each syllable. We know he is trying to say, “No. I’m nineteen. Not so much younger than yourself.” But we also know why he can’t get it out. The anger at the dismissal, the disdain. Eliza is turning the dial up with every breath, every word, every smirk, every movement of her eyebrow. Everything about Eliza makes Keith Mackey furious.

  A laugh is on Eliza’s lips when Keith turns away. A giggle is boiling up, evaporating into the air when the bell rings on the bodega door once more. “Eliza!” Suzanne shouts, turning her head in all directions. She looks like an owl meme.

  Eliza begins to shout back, “I’m fine, he’s just a kid. It’s all just kid st—” But her mouth is stopped by a full bottle of wine, smashing her face and shattering. Eliza feels her face crack from ear to ear, the warmth of what was once inside coming out. This is how pumpkins must feel, she thinks, during Halloween.

  Chapter One Hundred Thirteen

  Preston walks Dog to the corner and takes a Lyft to work. He isn’t sure exactly what he’d been expecting. But he’s grateful to flee.

  He dreads walking into the office. The new normal, since Dog, since Eliza, since all of it: everyone watches him, and not in the good way. Not in the popular way. He barely has to move eight feet, from the elevator to his glass room, and yet. And yet. He feels every single eye touch his skin. It is the strangest sensation, being watched that way by everyone on his floor. Everyone in the collaboration rooms. The wide-eyed pity; everyone hushed quiet as though they’d been talking about him seconds earlier. The weight on Preston is obvious and so we look. Whisper. Everyone afraid to break him.

  Today, he exits the elevator to the same stunned silence. He keeps his gaze turned to the floor. He jumps when he hears the first clap. Other hands begin clapping. It’s a sputter, then a cheer. He looks up—people are standing at their desks and clapping. Dog’s stump isn’t pointed between his legs either. He whips his cone around, trying to take in all his favorite people. Preston begins to smile. His employees are clapping his dog back into work. And Dog likes it.

  Preston feels like his old self for a second. He puts his hands up. “One at a time, one at a time. He’s still pretty shaken up.” But he lets Dog off the leash and Dog accepts his audience gracefully, even when people break the rule and pet him two or three at a time. He licks. He jumps up onto people’s thighs. Preston watches the transformation and thinks perhaps they’ve turned a corner here. Perhaps things aren’t so bad at Fancy Dog anymore. Especially since he’s got something he can do now, immediately. Something he can put right.

  He gets to his desk and sits. He G-chats Brandon. They haven’t spoken face-to-face since Dog. Brandon sent him an Edible Arrangement the day after. That was it. And they certainly haven’t had a face-to-face meeting since Preston started virtually schtupping Suzanne (they must have done, we think). He would never tell Brandon. And that is the first moment in this whole exchange we’ll dive into: Preston realizes that he and Brandon aren’t friends anymore. It is obvious to us, but he realizes something less obvious: he and Brandon aren’t even really co-workers. With the entire HR department in the middle of replacement, Brandon dealt with Lewis on his own, and he did it poorly—a work-from-home arrangement until Lewis’s meds are fine-tuned, but Lewis is still expected to shoulder the backbreaking load of an unofficial team leader. If Preston had been more present, would things be different now? Midnight tonight might go very differently. But we can’t really know, because it didn’t happen. Preston abandoned his company, his child, and Brandon ran things as Brandon does, and not once did they talk about it. Let’s instead look at the G-chat: “want a meeting. come ASAP.”

  “be there in ten,” Brandon types back.

  An eerie calm washes over Preston and he knows something is about to happen. He is close to something. He sips his coffee and looks out the window. He thinks his life might go better now, might go differently. And if he’s feeling it internally, then external factors will go his way as well. When he gets home, he’ll call Eliza. He’ll call Suzanne. Or email, he’s not sure just yet. But he’ll wholeheartedly apologize. He’ll invite her back. He’ll hire a security guard or something. A security detail, even. Hell, he’ll figure it out. It’s that kind of morning. The worst is over. He is excited: this feeling of being right on top of something he doesn’t know yet is the same feeling he had before he outlined Guilds to Brandon while getting high in their dorm room. He stands like this for a while, barely breathing, his skin buzzing with newness. With proximity to realization. He doesn’t want to scare the feeling away.

  “Preston.”

  Preston turns and finds Brandon at the door. He doesn’t know where the ten minutes went, but half his coffee is gone. He figures the time must have passed. “Brandon,” he replies.

  “I wanted to tell you in person that I’m truly sorry about Dog.”

  Preston cocks his head to the side, so much like Dog in the photo. “He’s here, you know.” He gestures out to the clump of employees. Dog is getting the pet of his life.

  “Oh. I didn’t see, sorry. Well, congratulations. Everyone loves him. You’ve seen the hashtag, right? Long Live Dog?”

  “Uh. I used it this morning.”

  “I think a woman who works here started it. Susan? Her handle is—”

  “Yrface. Yes. Suzanne.” There’s an awkward silence and Preston rubs his temples. “Do you want me to have a talk with her about it? It probably breaks, I dunno, some policy, but I don’t think it’s conduct unbefitting of a—”

  “No, no. Why would I want that?” Brandon interrupts, his slash of a mouth tilting sideways, a smirk. “Preston, Dog’s story and that hashtag have done more for us, publicity-wise, than any press release we’ve put out. We’re getting calls for you to do the talk show circuit about all this—which, I’ve given you some time, but you’re doing, by the way—and we’re at our normal steady holiday increase in account sales for the first time since all this started. If anything, you shouldn’t give that girl a talking-to. You should give her a raise.”

  “Brandon, I am not going on talk shows to describe how a psych
o stalker chopped my dog’s tail off. He’s doing much better now. I’d really prefer to let this die.”

  “We’ll talk about it later.”

  Preston sets his coffee on the desk and frees his hands up so his body language can be direct, convincing. Leader-like. “It wasn’t Jean-Pascale who doxxed Eliza. It was Lewis Fleishman. We have to take care of this.”

  Brandon pauses, tents his pointer fingers in a here-is-the-church-and-here-is-the-steeple style. He touches the steeple to his lips. “Why?” he asks.

  Preston shakes his head. He must not have heard correctly. “What do you mean, why? Because Jean-Pascale didn’t do it and Lewis did. We need to fire one and apologize and attempt to rehire the other, if he’ll even come back.”

  “I have a better idea,” Brandon says. “We do nothing.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We. Do. Nothing.” Brandon holds up one hand and ticks his fingers off with the other. “Right now, we have one tried-and-true dev on team B. That’s Lewis. The other two are trainees—brand-new to the company, even. If we fire Lewis, that leaves us with two brand-new people and a spot to fill.”