We Are Watching Eliza Bright

by A. E. Osworth

  Preston makes a move to interrupt, but Brandon keeps going. “Before you say we’ll just rehire Jean-Pascale, you said it yourself: if he’ll even come back. He might not, because if what you say is true—and I’m not convinced it is, we’ll get to that in a moment—then we fired the guy for no reason and publicized that he doxxed a female employee. We essentially wrecked his career—do you think he’ll agree to work for us again? I don’t, personally, because I wouldn’t. Then we have evidence to consider. Where did you get this statement from?”

  Preston waits for a second to see if he is supposed to answer the question. “Eliza,” he says, after a beat.

  “Exactly. And where did Eliza get her information?”

  “I’m not sure. But I imagine Jean-Pascale.”

  “Right. So.” Brandon starts to pace the office. “On the one hand we have anecdotal evidence from two people whom we have fired. He could have paid her, they could be in cahoots or something, whatever. And on the other hand we have actual data that we collected from our own computers using an outside firm and people whom we have not fired, and that evidence says Jean-Pascale did it. Whom do you think we should believe?”

  Preston grits his teeth. “Personally,” he says, “I’m inclined to believe Eliza. Lewis seems to have gone—”

  “And finally,” Brandon interrupts, his eyes narrow and his voice loud, “even if what you say is true. Even if Jean-Pascale didn’t do a damn thing and Lewis is the fucking spawn of Satan or something, why would we stir the pot? We are just starting to come out of this hole. It’s Christmas. New accounts should’ve been cropping up like wheat in the Midwest and we’re just, just seeing that bump. We are finally, finally getting some good PR here and we are finally seeing some of that Christmas spirit as a result. You”—he points at Preston, who leans back sharp as if he’s been shot—“said it yourself. Just let it die. Just let it die.”

  “Are you hearing yourself right now?” Preston finds himself standing and yelling, something he has never done on the Fancy Dog premises. Is this the precipice? Is this what he feels he’s on the edge of? “Fuck feedback right now, are you listening to your own words? Christ, we started Fancy Dog so we could have a fucking human place to work. So we could be in a place that cared about more than the bottom line—that cared about innovation and fun and the people. But you don’t sound human anymore. This company isn’t human anymore.”

  Brandon crosses his arms and shakes his head and chuckles, sneering. “You buy into that corporations-are-people-too bullshit, huh? That somehow, because we’re running it, this place can operate like some kumbaya hippie’s GI tract? Here’s the thing, Preston. Corporations aren’t people—they’re organizations. They’re made up of a goddamn bunch of people. Investors, employees. I have a responsibility.” Brandon pounds one fist on his chest. “Me, I have a responsibility to the bottom line because I have a responsibility to ‘the people.’” He extends his arm out to the glass wall, palm up and open, dramatic. “You, you’re a fucking pansy. And if it were just you, Preston, and your weird corporate culture and your ideals and your bullshit—it’s all bullshit, we’re still a fucking company—you’d run this place into the ground. You can’t make a goddamn decision to save your life. You’ve been on the third floor being cagey for a week, maybe more. You’ve barely been here. If it were just you, where would all your people be? And you, you have the audacity to stand there and call me inhuman? To call me a robot, is that it? Some corporate, capitalist robot. Well I’m the corporate capitalist robot who keeps Fancy Dog in the black and I say we do nothing.”

  Preston’s mouth bobs open and shut, a fish on land, not quite dead but very much not breathing. Brandon’s hand is still out toward the glass and, for lack of anything better to look at, Preston’s gaze follows Brandon’s gesture. He looks through his wall and everyone is staring, their open mouths mirroring their leader. Everyone, that is, except for Joe. Remember Joe? We’ve met him before. Joe with the hearing aids. Joe with the mad lipreading skills. Leaky Joe, who’s one of us. Who tells us things. Who always knows things first. Joe is looking at his computer. When he finally looks up, he can barely contain his glee. There is something new happening. There is something special about the way he carries his body as he walks up toward Preston’s office. His co-workers look at him with a mixture of awe and fear—what could possibly make him interrupt this fight? We know. We’ve known since it happened.

  “Preston, Brandon,” he says. “The Inspectre found Eliza. She’s on her way to the hospital now.”

  “What?” Preston says. He feels like the floor has dropped out from underneath him. It’s exactly like the Portal demo for the Vive—he was one of the first to try that one—except he’s not standing in virtual reality. He doesn’t have a headset on. This is real. It’s very, very real.

  “Turn on the news. It’s even on cable.”

  Preston’s office does have a TV and it does have cable news. Mostly he uses it to display things from his computer screen even larger, but now he searches for a remote he knows must be around somewhere. When he finds it, he turns on ABC. They barely know anything, these journalists; they haven’t been watching this closely at all. They’re promising contextual interviews with The Women from Last Week Tonight in the next half hour. They’re promising updates. It is like a real news story. Like a real tragedy. Like a celebrity has been hurt. They have interviews with witnesses. They have Suzanne pushing her way through a crowd, refusing to talk, getting in the back of an ambulance with, Preston can only assume, Eliza. They’ve blurred her face in the footage. “Disturbing” is what the anchor calls it. Blurred because it “may be disturbing to some viewers.” Sources say a stalker found her after her former boss posted a photo in which she was present. We say that. That is us. We are the sources. We have happily been in the news since November 9th, and we happily are again. And again. And again. Preston hears the reason, hears his fault. He lunges for his phone and looks at Twitter. Sources say. We say. Preston confirms.

  When he rips his eyes from the phone, the first thing he sees is Joe’s face. He is eating it up. He has one hand on his chest like he is shocked, and a smile on his face. And with a pang, Preston realizes what we already know: Joe loves being this close to a good shitshow. Joe loves a good story. Joe is our mascot, our stand-in. Joe is us. He barely knows Joe, but now he thinks Joe is an asshole. “For Chrissakes,” Preston yells. “Really? Really? You’re smiling?” His body spasms and he stomps the ground with two feet and throws his hands in the air—he looks like a Preston doll dropped by a child. “No,” he shouts. “No, this is over. You can’t even hide that you’re happy.” Joe steps back and his face doesn’t change. “You’re a dick, Joe. You’ve been leaking things from my office since you started here and I thought I couldn’t say anything about it because you’re deaf. I thought you didn’t know what you were doing, that you thought it was information everyone was supposed to have. But no, you’re just a dick.”

  Brandon tries to interrupt, tries to keep Preston from saying something Joe can sue them over. “Now I don’t think—”

  “And you.” Preston rounds on Brandon. “You fire the wrong guy and keep him fired. And you don’t fire the right guy. You say you don’t trust Eliza, you don’t want to rehire her, and you don’t believe her. Well maybe not believing her is what got us here in the first place, did you ever think of that? We’re so behind on the holiday bump it’s going to affect us, maybe for years. And look. You said we’re finally climbing out of the hole, but look at this—” Preston gestures to the television, the coverage repeating now because that is how the world works. When no one has anything meaningful to say, they repeat. They repeat. “This isn’t climbing out of the hole. They won’t even show her face. She might be dead. No one’s said anything about that.”

  “And then there’s the rest of you.” He runs the two steps to the glass wall and presses his hands against it. At any other time, we might laugh: he looks like a mime whose creation had suddenly solidi
fied. “You look at me. You all look at me. Like a fish in a bowl.” We think it is interesting that he chooses fish—he could say shark in a tank. He could say bear in a zoo. But those would be too powerful, wouldn’t they? Because Preston understands, finally, what he is on the precipice of. This is the second moment we’ll zoom in on. The feeling of edgeness, of closeness, is replaced. It is sudden, the change. Binary. Yes, no. True, false. Precipice, falling.

  No. Not falling. That’s not the right word. Because Preston finally decides that he will not be a fish in a tank, not be on display for us to look at. Fishes in bowls have no agency, and he will take that agency. He will take it back. “Falling” is not a word that implies agency. No. Precipice, leaping. Precipice, flying.

  Preston imagines how he sounds to those on the other side as he screams—the wavy, octagonal sounds that shouting makes underwater, when syllables crash together, words sound like they’re being spoken into tin cans. Everyone’s ears and eyes are satellites, listening for the syllables of his opening mouth, marveling at how stupid he has been. How he got Eliza caught. How Brandon thinks he’d run this company into the ground. But it isn’t just the glass wall. It isn’t just his physical space. It is everything. The whole office is watching; the whole internet is watching; we are watching.

  “This was your choice,” Brandon says. And it is unclear what he means—what the choice was. But probably he is referring to the transparent wall. Or starting a company. Or being famous enough to draw our attention.

  “No, it’s not. It’s not my choice anymore.” Here it is. The leap. “I quit.” Preston shouts until his throat feels red.

  “Preston, this is your— You can’t just—”

  “Yes,” he says. “I can. I can just not show up to work until you fire me—until the board votes me off the island. I can resign. Publicly! Or I can—” and Preston begins to laugh. He laughs so hard he doubles over. He throws his arms out wide and hugs himself around the middle, stomps his feet again. Brandon joins Joe in backing away. But we don’t. We stay right up in his face. We stay right up in his mind. It seems crazy to the outside observer, but we sense something else here. Triumph. Or the thrill of emotional cliff diving. Or finally getting free of Eliza’s siren song. Or finally succumbing to it in its entirety.

  “Preston, man, let me—” and we think perhaps for a moment Brandon is truly concerned for his friend, because this is not a way he has ever seen Preston. No one has, because this is not a thing Preston has ever done. Brandon does not get to finish his sentence, though, so we remain—will always remain—a little bit in the dark on this one.

  Preston pops up with the enthusiasm of morning toast. He runs behind his desk, still laughing, and he grabs his desk chair with both hands. Laughing and laughing, tears streaming down his face from all the deep belly heaves it takes to maintain hysteria. Wheels first, he throws his chair into the glass wall. Everything shatters. Let it shatter, he thinks. Let the whole thing shatter.

  Brandon is at Preston’s desk in an instant. He leans over and grabs the phone. “Security,” he says. His eyes are wide and he does not turn his back to Preston, his former captain and former friend.

  “Don’t bother,” Preston says. He starts for where the door would have been, but stops. Instead he steps over the low metal fitting that once held his office wall. His shoes crunch the jagged fragments—everyone is silent. Everyone hears. It is very final. It sounds like a car accident or a man stalking away after an explosion. He calmly walks to Dog, re-leashes him, gets in the elevator, and leaves.

  Chapter One Hundred Fourteen

  It is the sound Suzanne will never un-hear: the dull thud, almost like being hit with a baseball bat, combined with a sound like cutting meat. She doesn’t have much time to think or to see—she only has the instant to hear and react. She has never fired a Taser before. She points the weapon at the kid with half a bottle, bloody, in his hand, white wine pooling with red at his feet to make a horrid zinfandel, and she pulls the trigger.

  His body goes rigid and he drops the jagged glass remnant—the pop, the electric buzz and the second crash set people screaming again. Two run out—some duck and hide in aisles. She doesn’t know how long she should keep tasing him, but we know. We have Google. Thirty seconds. She doesn’t hold it for that long. She finds it very disturbing to tase someone.

  She releases the current and, as he’d been turning around to face her, he topples into the metal aisle stand. He and all the snacks go down in a thunder, topped with a crinkle. He doesn’t move immediately.

  Suzanne’s first priority is Eliza, but she sees someone is already there. A big block of a man in a white uniform and covered in deli meat, grease and ketchup kneels over Eliza and covers the mouthpiece on his phone—not a smartphone. He is the butcher. “The police and the ambulance are on their way,” he says to the unconscious woman—the woman without a face, with gaping cuts and holes and broken teeth where just moments ago she’d had features. Eliza’s eyes crack open. We aren’t sure if she’s truly conscious or if it’s a bodily response, something her brain doesn’t have to tell her to do. We wonder if she is on the way to being dead. “No,” he says. “No, don’t do that—keep ’em shut. Trust me.” Her head moves almost imperceptibly up and down, the tiniest nod.

  “Her neck—is she bleeding? Where’s she bleeding from?” Suzanne asks him. She’s looking right at her friend, but somehow she can’t see any of it. It’s as if her mind is censoring it. Her eyes are simply not telling the rest of her what’s going on.

  “No,” the giant man says. He sounds like a cartoon of himself, a rumbling voice made quiet and bookish by a gentle nature. “There’s actually not as much blood as you would think,” he says. “Everything is just fine. Just fine.”

  The Inspectre begins to stir amid the bags of chips and cookies and boxes of crackers. Suzanne says, “Fuck,” because she could’ve grabbed zip ties, but she hasn’t. So she drags The Inspectre off the rack by his ankles, plants him facedown in the middle of the floor, and sits on him, cross-legged.

  “Miss, miss,” the cashier says. “Do you need some water or something?” He wipes his hands against his pants. Suzanne attempts to respond and finds herself shaking, dry in the mouth—probably that’s what the cashier sees in her, why he asks. She clears her throat. “Yes,” she says, trying her best to sound calm. She notices her own voice sounds far away in her ears. “Water would be great. Thank you.” She tries to say this as if she isn’t sitting on a person, a person who is now twitching and trying to buck her off.

  “Don’t even think about it,” the butcher growls. The Inspectre goes limp.

  With her water in hand and the sirens echoing, bouncing off buildings, she texts Devonte:

  “im fine. eliza hurt. tazed inspectre. police coming.”

  Suzanne sips her water.

  Chapter One Hundred Fifteen

  It is for this reason Our Frequently-Absent-But-Doing-His-Best Friend Devonte doesn’t see Preston’s Meltdown—

  He is at work when he gets this text and he runs to the elevators and pushes the close-door button over and over again while blood rings like bells in his ears and he calls Our Suzanne when he gets outside and he completely forgets his inability to deal and that he’s been distancing himself from the situation because when it comes to an Emergency he is Present and Ready

  “What happened?” he says without saying hello

  “We’re headed to Flushing Hospital in Queens—Can you go back and get her clothes and her toothbrush—oh maybe not that—maybe take care of her laptop?”

  “What does that mean, take care of—”

  “No time they’re here we’ve gotta go”

  “Does that mean bring it or—” but Our Suzanne is already off the phone as Devonte is shouting the question into the receiver

  “Shit” he says and he hails a cab because it’s faster than calling a Lyft

  We all know what’s happened by the time he gets to Us and We open the door for him immediat
ely upon his arrival

  Have you seen this? We ask and We pull him to the giant television We so rarely use for cable and there it is—the same news coverage the others saw with Preston

  “Oh Fuck” Devonte says “oh Fuck oh Fuck oh Fuck”—he finds himself grabbing the sides of his head like Preston does “How bad is this?” he asks the air or Us or maybe even God because he doesn’t know and it is this inability to assess if his friend got punched or if his friend is about to die that is so scary and destabilizing and We do not answer him because We do not have any answers and after a few seconds he says “oh I need to get her stuff—I need to go—where—?”

  But before he’s finished asking the question We are already leading him to the elevator—Eliza’s bag is in the corner and he grabs clothes and starts getting organized and that’s when he sees the computer on the bed and this story might go very different if he simply shuts it and puts it in a bag but as he doesn’t know if the drive is standard or solid state he sits down to power it off before turning it sideways and that’s when he sees the janky program and the now-grey dot on the map and with an almost audible click he knows what “take care of her computer” means

  “No—No no no Suzanne—no” he softly pounds his head into the mattress

  What?

  Devonte squints up at the elevator doors—the curtains are pulled back and We are all here, the Entirety of Us, and We look in as One—flashes of worry echo across Our collective faces like small electric signals as though together We make up one computer or one brain

  “Suzanne tased The Inspectre—she said she tased him and that means she’s probably going to be arrested because it’s illegal to have a Taser in New York and it’s even more illegal to use it”

  Oh We know but We don’t call the police around here—no one does

  Devonte sighs and says “well they might be here anyhow to search for things if she gets arrested which means”—he gestures to Eliza’s computer—“this is a real problem”