We Are Watching Eliza Bright

by A. E. Osworth

  By the time he’s finished with his sentence, about half of Us have disappeared because We can think of several other things that would definitely be problems and Devonte’s brain begins to spin its wheels—what does he do with the computer? a small ugly voice whispers between his ears that he could just leave it and We can see this journey written on his face and on his body—the girls broke the law—the girls broke the law so so many times and he hasn’t yet and he doesn’t have to—he can feign not understanding and leave the computer here or bring it with him—but no he’s already mentioned it to Us so Our Suzanne would surely find out and then his Friendship with both of them would truly be over—and he is correct that We would certainly tell but that isn’t what stops him from doing it—the next voice in his head is less ugly and it says that’s not the kind of person you are and it says you are Noble and Good and Fuck the law and Fuck the cops and be a Renegade and be a Friend

  He picks up the computer and wonders how to dispose of it Thoroughly and Completely? he exits the elevator and walks in a circle twice with the open laptop balanced on his hand and he heads for the front door—into the river maybe?

  Here We say and he looks up—one of Us stands in the doorway with several other faces peering out from behind and We hold out a baseball bat—There’s a good floor for it this way and when We’re through We’ll each take pieces in our pockets and dump them

  Devonte steps through the door into the large room with the aerial silks rigged to the ceiling with the recording studio at the back which one of Us ducks into and We press a few buttons and the song “Still” pumps through the speakers piped into the bigger rooms and piped into everywhere—“Really?” Devonte says with caustic judgment masking terror because he is about to destroy evidence and it is the first illegal thing he’s done since college when he let himself know better—when he started to internalize that the rules the white boys followed weren’t the same standards to which the world holds him and this one feels like a much bigger deal with both the action and the consequences in meatspace—nothing virtual about it

  Devonte takes a deep breath and he delivers the initial blow to the offending computer and he is Scared and he is Elated—Glee rises in his throat because there aren’t many times in one’s life that one gets to wreck something and enjoy pure destruction—it is Cathartic in a way virtual destruction only dreams of being—Devonte and Us—Us and Devonte—We take turns slamming Down and Down and Down Again until the technology is Pulverized and We are all sweaty and Laughing and it no longer seems so all-encompassing when it’s Reduced To Pieces—to Trash—Our Devonte is now one of Us like Our Suzanne and Our Eliza and We will hold him forever—We sweep pieces into sandwich bags and slip them into pockets and We all leave together and as Devonte sets out for the hospital he imagines the debris snaking through the city—deposited into garbage cans and dumped onto streets—impossible to reassemble

  Chapter One Hundred Sixteen

  And now, a partial list of things that happen so we can move time forward very quickly to the important bits. The end bits. The bits we remember and take with us, instead of the bits that are simply bits:

  When Eliza gets to the hospital, her attentive parent is informed. Well, both are informed, but her attentive parent responds. Her mother gets into a cab immediately. We haven’t met the mother yet. We forgot she had parents.

  Suzanne is allowed to ride with Eliza to the hospital, but when the police show up, she is handcuffed and taken away.

  Eliza is actually doing better than expected. She is pumped full of morphine while she waits and is finally wheeled into surgery, where they repair much of her face. They will do her teeth later—she will get dentures, then implants. Her jaw is broken; it is wired shut. She is stitched up. They do their best not to give her one hell of a facial scar, but that isn’t really possible.

  Devonte pays for Suzanne’s bail. When Suzanne gets home, she PayPals him a large sum of money, but he decides the instant she sends it that he will never accept the payment.

  Reporters call everyone. When they call Samantha Delphine Stewart, she agrees to go on television. That cunt, that shrewd cunt—she looks good on camera and she knows it. People will see it. She has already capitalized on her proximity, and she will again and again and again. The only thing worse than the Elizas and Suzannes of the world are the Delphines, the ones who seem like they are for us, with us, and then turn around and stab us from behind while we are fixated on their goodness, their kindness. Someone breaks up with someone. We want it to be JP who does the dumping; we are not sure it is.

  Suzanne and Devonte go back to the Sixsterhood, where Suzanne asks what happened to the computer and, wisely, no one will tell her. Suzanne gets dressed for real and they head back to the hospital. They wait in a waiting room while Eliza’s mother watches her daughter’s eyes crack open. Mrs. Bright leans in close to her face and whispers two things: “I’m so glad you’re alright,” and “You’re quitting.”

  That gets us to about eight at night.

  Chapter One Hundred Seventeen

  Let’s skip to midnight. Or rather, to a few minutes before. 11:58 or 11:59. We promised we would get here.

  Lewis doesn’t really drink, not outside the game. He doesn’t care for it, the feeling of losing control. But he weaves as he walks along the George Washington Bridge. He is not drunk, not off of alcohol, but off of deep regret and severe insomnia. It has taken him all day to get here with us. He knows nothing about Eliza, nothing about the crack in her face. He knows only that she is right; he knows only the few stars he can see through the light pollution. There are more than he thinks there should be. He wonders how many of them he’s hallucinating.

  We don’t want him to do this. It is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. There are many of our cast we would tell to go kill themselves—Eliza, Suzanne, Devonte once he’s back openly defending the other two. But we don’t want Lewis to kill himself. Because most of us? Most of us are most similar to Lewis. This loss stirs in us the same feelings as seeing our deep tendrils sunk into The Inspectre, or perhaps his deep tendrils sunk into us. We think of ourselves one way, but how much of ourselves do we not see? What does it say when one of us is so rigid he breaks? How close are we all to the same? How important is it, that unbendable sense of self? Of right? Where is the line between being walked on and being adaptable? How bad are we right now? And if we are wrong about so many things here, what else? What else are we clinging to, desperately, that will, after our tortured demises, prove to be incorrect?

  We feel complicit in this, this death. If we keep watching, if we keep reading, if we keep writing, then he dies. It is almost easier to stop telling the story before that—to let him sink into the river on his own time, without us pushing forward. Pushing him forward. But then, we think, if we do that, if we stop, this whole moment is nothing more than voyeurism. We want to elevate it to witness. So this is the truth; this is what happens. And because it happens, we will tell it.

  Lewis steps to the edge and looks at the sky. He thinks of nothing. Or he thinks about how wrong he’s been, about the damage he’s caused, about Dog’s tail and being plagued by an ever-present severing, getting Jean-Pascale fired, how worried his mother will be, about everyone but Eliza. Or he does think of her—he doesn’t know about their histories in games like we do, but maybe he does get the sense of similarity. Maybe he does think about the thin line connecting them, the one he put there when he decided to create himself in opposition to her. To people like her. Or maybe he thinks only the phrase “you’re right.” Or “you win.” But we don’t want to believe that; we don’t want to think of him as petty in his last moments.

  He steps off the edge at 12:01 on Christmas Day. He realizes, weightless, in the air, that when he hits, when he breaks the surface, he will be surrounded by water. He will be in a tank of his own construction, one from which there will be no escape. Or he realizes he has been in there this whole time. He comforts himself by looking skywa
rd, by counting and recounting, in this infinite moment, the stars.

  Lewis Fleishman is dead. Long live Lewis Fleishman.

  Chapter One Hundred Eighteen

  Eliza’s face is broken. Her jaw, her nose, her teeth spidered and cracked like the wine bottle she’d been hit with—her once-convex mouth is now concave, pushed in as if it were nothing but soft wax. Her eyes are blackened, brilliant shades of purple that are almost pretty. Her face is lined with slices, paths, gashes; later Eliza will describe this feeling as her skin falling away in ribbons. We will all shudder and touch our faces; we will wonder what that feels like.

  After surgery and stitching, her jaw is wired shut and she is stoned on painkillers. This is unfortunate, as her mother talks like a tempest. Her mother, just as petite but much prettier, hailing words against the silence. These words are all about packing Eliza’s apartment up, about her moving back to Westchester, about finding a new industry where people don’t get smashed in the face with wine bottles.

  It doesn’t take long, of course, for one of us to tweet that @BrightEliza was asking for it. Or perhaps @BrightEliza deserved it. All the websites cover the response—tech, business, feminist. The televised news outlets added social media tickers to their already-graphic security camera footage. Across the bottom of the screen, broadcast by an algorithm, run scathing tweets we type through hissed teeth. For twenty-four hours we all watch as the anchors warn us of the graphic nature of the footage to follow. We watch Keith Mackey, with his skinny arms and blonde transparent eyelashes, glance to the wine bottles and heft one up. We watch Suzanne Choy throw her arm out. We watch soundlessly as his arm rockets toward Eliza’s face—it almost looks sped up. Some of us cover our eyes, some of us don’t. But the channels cut away from the footage before too much blood runs onto the floor. The anchors never really discuss the tweets, which we like. Providing “context” for our written thoughts usually means liberal bullshit when it comes to mainstream media. Leaving them there for viewers to truly decide what they think about them; that’s exactly what we want. Our numbers grow.

  One of us rips the security camera footage and puts it on YouTube. Whenever we Google “Eliza Bright,” it is in the top section of the results—playable, with a triangle smack in the middle. The views on it tick up and up and up. One of us sets it to music. It is taken down due to copyright infringement.

  When the police come to speak to her, she is barely conscious and can’t talk. From her perspective, their words sound mushy, amorphous, like vinyl played backward and watered down with pain and opiates. Moist. Everything is moist and slippery and she can’t hold on to them, those words. Instead, she sleeps. Time passes. She is not sure how much.

  Suzanne and Devonte come, after Devonte bails Suzanne out. Mrs. Bright begrudgingly lets them in when Eliza’s eyes shoot open. They bring her pens and a journal and the tablet from her apartment. Suzanne, under the guise of comforting her, leans her head close: “We never hacked anything. I knew where you were going. Got it?” Eliza ticks her head slightly, up and down. Not enough to jar anything, but enough to feel the pull. She is green with the sensation.

  It is Devonte who sees the tweet and reads it to the room: @SeeNoMonkey [verified]: We stand with Eliza Bright #raisetheshield #enough.

  “I guess you still have the job,” Devonte says. “I guess they’ll wait for you.” But Eliza is already asleep.

  Mrs. Bright, however, purses her lips. She says nothing. In fact, she does not say one word to either of them, no matter how many times they visit. She nods and grunts when they address her. Mrs. Bright makes no distinction between us and Eliza’s two comrades. To her, we are all the same thing: dangerous, the reason her daughter near about has no face. We should also zoom in on what’s not said: by now, everyone knows about Lewis. Everyone except Eliza. The TV is kept off in favor of audiobooks, podcasts on subjects so far away from the internet or technology or games that neither she nor Lewis will ever be mentioned. That’s her mother’s doing.

  Her father finally comes, which is no good at all. She drinks her meals through a straw and listens to their plans for her future. “You’ll take it easy for a while, rest and heal,” they say. “Then we’ll find you a job—one of our firms will have something open. Of course you’ll move back with us for a while, until you’re up again. Oh, won’t that be fun?” they ask to the air and they mean it, from the place where clueless people believe things. Eliza tries to grimace, then grimaces because her attempted grimace makes her grimace in pain; her face constantly hurts and she hasn’t looked at herself in the mirror yet—she can’t see her mouth underneath the bandages anyhow, and even so. She doesn’t want to. Not yet.

  Her parents begin to leave for more and more of the day, but they always end on the same note: “Why didn’t you tell us this was happening?” Eliza can only shrug. She won’t reach for the tablet or the journal, won’t clarify her position—she wonders why they didn’t know, without her running to them like a child. They are trendy people—they should have heard about it. “We had no idea. It’s just games, after all. We didn’t think it would be a war zone.” Eliza has to admit they have a point there.

  During one of these sessions where her parents talk and Eliza listens, Devonte and Suzanne sit in the corner eating fries out of a paper bag. Eliza keeps staring at them darkly, eyeing each wonderful potato as they so easily pop each crispy strip into their mouths. This makes Suzanne hide a giggle behind her hand. Devonte stares straight into Eliza’s eyes and chews, deliberate. If Eliza could, she’d smile. But she can’t. So she settles for flashing them her middle finger.

  The whole crew stopped by unannounced. She wants Devonte and Suzanne to stay, but she wants her parents to leave. There is nothing to be done about it. Devonte and Suzanne keep their heads close together as they listen to the monologue, the hand-wringing, and finally their goodbyes. Still, Eliza types nothing. But she is having a lot of thoughts. We can tell; so can her friends.

  “Is that really what you want?” Devonte asks as he uses a straw to break the lid perforation on some sort of smoothie. He tries to mix it a little better before handing it over—the protein powder is still visible in nasty clumps. “To quit and go back into advertising or PR or whatever the fuck that was?”

  Eliza can’t move much of her face, but she risks the pulling sensation to raise a single eyebrow. She gestures for the tablet and he hands it over instead of the smoothie.

  Eliza: im not quitting

  Eliza: i wish i could say those words with my mouth. i think they’d feel more…something.

  Eliza: monumental.

  Eliza: something.

  Eliza: i wasn’t sure before, but now im sure

  Devonte’s and Suzanne’s heads are pressed together, better to see the screen in real time. Suzanne lets out a hissed “yes” at the appropriate moment.

  Devonte waits until the end. “You better tell See No Monkey,” he says.

  Eliza: i already did

  Eliza: smoothie please

  She takes a sip.

  Eliza: this is abysmal

  Eliza: wtf are you guys doing eating fries in here

  She stares darkly at the brown bag and looks straight into Suzanne’s eyes as she sips her meal through a straw. “Don’t hate me because my jaw is ambulatory,” Suzanne says. She flips her beautiful hair and shoves a handful of fried potato in her mouth. She smiles, the food sticking out in all directions. Devonte mock gags.

  They are back, this group. We won’t say to normal, but they are back. They still haven’t told her about Lewis. When will it be time for that? We are full of resentment. They get joy; Lewis doesn’t.

  Chapter One Hundred Nineteen

  This is where Preston disappears—after Our Devonte and Our Suzanne tell Our Eliza about what they’d heard from work about his glass-smashing crack-up and she tries to text him but all the texts go unanswered

  The Reddit Men do not know where he is but We at the Sixsterhood do—he and Dog don’t even have to
sell much to pack a car full of every possession Preston holds dear and they drive across the country to rural Oregon where Preston lives alone with his dog in a farmer’s cottage which is entirely free of Wi-Fi in exchange for his help with the beekeeping and he is actually very good at it—among other new hobbies he also learns to brew beer and on his first night there he throws his phone into a pond and he doesn’t miss it at all but one day he will and he will return sometime in the nebulous and distant future—he will return when he has filled three journals with Ideas and the first thing he will do is hand the journals to his new creative team whoever they may be and it will be a Gift—an Offering—an Invitation to use them all—All The Ideas—with abandon because the bees and the buds and the beer will teach him the thing We already know—there will always be More if he just keeps Making

  Chapter One Hundred Twenty

  See No Monkey: I must admit, it’s weird to do hiring via G-Chat.

  See No Monkey: it’s absolutely no bother, of course, but all the same.

  Eliza: Yeah, I know what you mean. But no worries, I can move my mouth enough to talk a little now! It just hurts after a while. This isn’t permanent, though, I’m told. Plus I don’t sound great—it’d be really hard to hear me over the phone.

  (“Ugh, Eliza, delete most of that, no one wants to know, don’t hit send.” “Okay, Devonte.”)

  Eliza: I agree. No worries, I’ll be back to talking in no time.

  (“Yeah, that sounds good. Like it ain’t no thang. Don’t roll your eyes at me.”)

  See No Monkey: Well this brings us to the last part—constructing your team. We happen to have a lot of openings—our growth has been almost exponential as of late, and we’re on-boarding like crazy. Is there anyone you’d like to recommend for hiring at See No Monkey to work on Project Roam?