AND THEN IT appeared. Photo 4,209 of 4,344. I was skipping quickly through the image gallery, barely paying attention, worried because I had lost the signal on three more cameras.
So I skipped over it. From 4,209 to 4,221 until I noticed that the person who had entered on the left side of the frame had passed behind the grave only to end up retracing her steps and standing in front of it with her back to the camera, staying there without moving.
First I went through a phase of denial—which must have lasted two or three seconds—as if I distrusted the veracity of those images or didn’t know that person—whom I obviously knew. Then I felt a sudden euphoria, when I realized that my first move, which had been to place a camera in front of Chris’s grave, was the one that had given me the most definitive clue up to then, and that the person who showed up there, the guilty party to use another term, was on my list of suspects. I heard the crying of a baby, Chloe, and on one of the monitors, I saw, from the fishbowl in Miriam’s kitchen, that she had gotten dizzy, from what looked like hypoglycemia—it had affected her a time or two when she’d been with me—as she was warming up Chloe’s puree in a pot of warm water while she cooked something in a pan. Miraculously, she hadn’t fallen, because she’d caught the edge of the counter. She tripped and hit the pot with the baby food with her elbow, knocking it on the floor and frightening the baby, making her cry. She stood up with difficulty to go to the refrigerator and get a glucose shot she kept for such occasions, but she didn’t make it in time and passed out, hitting her head on the refrigerator door as she fell. Miriam had told me some time ago that her hypoglycemia was especially nasty, that it never showed any symptoms before an attack. On the contrary, she felt magnificent, like a person kayaking through calm, crystalline waters, with the current, not anticipating a waterfall a few yards away—a metaphor I identified with closely. She always kept a couple of sugar packets in her pocket, but more than once, she hadn’t had time to get to them. And the only thing she missed about Mike was the calm she felt knowing she had someone with her in case it hit her, particularly when Chloe was around.
I waited. A little, but I waited. I couldn’t intervene. I wasn’t supposed to be seeing that. I waited to see if she regained consciousness, took something for her blood sugar, turned off the fire and consoled Chloe. But it didn’t happen, and when the frying pan started to burn, I ran over there.
I ran an average of six miles a day, and every half-mile I would run full speed for thirty seconds. I was in really good shape. Even so, for the barely one hundred yards between my house and Miriam’s, it was like one of those nightmares in which you can’t move forward no matter how hard you try.
When I entered the kitchen, the column of fire from the frying pan had caught onto the wallpaper and was devouring the floral motifs adorning it, threatening to spread to the cabinets. I grabbed the frying pan. I dropped it immediately because I burned myself. I repeated the operation, protecting my hand with a washcloth, and threw it into the sink. I put out the flames with water. I cut off the burners on the stove and used the same frying pan to throw water on the scorched wallpaper.
I had to push Miriam roughly because she was blocking the door to the fridge. I knew where she kept the Glucagon, the glucose injection for times like the, I had seen it on numerous visits. I didn’t know the proper way to give the injection, but I assumed that in case of emergency, any part of the body would do. I gave it to her in the stomach, which is where they always inject insulin. While waiting for it to take effect, I rolled Miriam over, made sure she was breathing and didn’t have her tongue or vomit covering her throat, and felt her head to make sure she wasn’t bleeding. Then I went for Chloe, who was still crying, disconsolate. I took her in my arms and tried to calm her down.
“It’s over now, Chloe, it’s over.” I put her in the playpen while thinking that if Miriam died, I would happily keep her. Twisted thoughts always occurred to me in those situations. “Don’t cry, baby, it was just a little scare.”
Then Miriam regained consciousness. She smiled at me like someone who’s awakened from the best and most pleasing of dreams.
“Hey . . .” she mused. “Where’d you come from? You’re not here, right? I’m dead.”
“The fire alarm went off and I heard it,” I lied in a whisper. Chloe had stopped crying and had fallen asleep, overcome by the stress.
“I love you so much, my guardian angel,” she said with all the love her weakness permitted.
I went back home drunk on the euphoria of having saved two beloved lives. Playing God felt really good. I was always questioning the point of all my spying, and suddenly I felt justified. It had been worth it. Was that my purpose in life?
Being the god of the island, the all-seeing eye, the one pulling the invisible threads that controlled the world, my world, the island. I had made clocks to get inside the houses. Now the island itself had become a clock, and I had access to the internal mechanism that controlled everything.
But then I went into the house, saw the door to the attic open and remembered what I had seen before the accident. I had completely forgotten. The ecstatic sensation, my delusions of grandeur and my otherworldly airs vanished at the drop of a hat. I was paralyzed in front of the door, not knowing whether I should enter or not. What if I was wrong? What if the person in photo 4,209 wasn’t who I thought it was? The photos had good resolution, but they were taken from fairly far away. And I hadn’t zoomed in to confirm my suspicions; I hadn’t had time because Chloe’s crying had caught my attention. Well, go up and confirm it, come on now. What scares you more: if it is or it isn’t? But you know damn well who it is.
Ruby was in the living room in her playpen. She’d stopped playing and was standing up holding on to the railing. It was the first time she had stood up alone. She looked at me in silence, curious to know what I would do, what my next stop would be. It seemed like she was trying to send me a message. As if she had acquired the ability to stand up some time back but had decided to wait and show me on a certain date, at an important moment.
I closed the door to the attic and locked it.
Olivia was at Beth Yoxhimer’s birthday. I called Julia to ask her to pick her up—Oliver had gone too—and take her home with them. Of course, no problem. But are you OK? You sound a little weird, she said. I was speaking slowly because I was having trouble getting the words out and I didn’t want to mess up. Yeah, of course, I’m good. I’ll come pick her up later. And I hung up before she could go on making conversation.
I spent the afternoon sitting in the chair in the kitchen where I had fed Ruby before putting her back in her playpen so she could take a nap, looking in the direction of the attic, as if there were a monster inside that I was afraid would come eat me. Cause, effect. You put out a camera; you get a result. Photo 4,209; no, better yet, 4,221, the one where she’s in front of the tombstone with her back to the camera, not showing her face. That’s right, I won’t show her face. No one will recognize her. I won’t even recognize her. No, from now on, I’m going to ignore her—yes, it’s a her, a woman I’m going to forget what I know about her. That treasure chest’s not getting opened. That part of the island isn’t getting investigated. That mystery isn’t getting solved. I wondered whether it was really so important to know. I shielded myself in my respect for Chris, in preserving his privacy, but it was ridiculous to take refuge at that point. My refuge was Chris’s lie. That was my only truth, and it was only a matter of time before I went back to those photos and followed that clue.
I abandoned my command post in the attic, avoided peeking at the fishbowls on the monitors because one of the spy clocks—still active—was in the living room of the woman from photo 4,209. That, not looking, was why I missed an incident that would have grave repercussions. Immediate ones.
I just wanted the day to be finished. But the day was going to finish with me. When a knock came at the door, it was already late at night. I was relieved to see it was Miriam when I looked through the peephole. I opened the door.
“Hey, Miriam.”
I was so tired that I didn’t notice what she had in her hands until her serious face and the omission of a greeting made me ask myself what was happening. She had a clock in her hand. The clock shaped like a moon that I had given her.
“My fire alarm hasn’t had batteries in months. It was always going off . . .”
Dread. Why did I say what I had about the fire alarm? I could have told her I had gone there for salt or just for a visit. I didn’t need an excuse to stop by her house, just like she didn’t need one to come to mine.
“What are you doing? Was it Mike? Did he tell you to record me, to watch me? Was it him? Are you helping him take custody of Chloe away from me?”
Tell her, Alice. Tell her the truth.
“No, it wasn’t Mike,” I said coldly.
“Then what? Are you a pervert? Do you get horny watching me? How many people have you done this with? Do all the clocks you sold have a camera in them? Show me where you have everything. I want to see it. You have it inside, right? In the attic. Mom’s Island, that’s where you’ve got all of it, right?”
You saved her life; she owes you. And she loves you.
“I don’t have to turn you in,” she went on in the face of my disturbing silence. “It’s enough if I tell one person, just one person, and in a matter of seconds the whole island will know. Is that what you want?”
What comes now is going to be very hard, probably the hardest part of all: the truth. You need an ally, an adult, a friend.
“You’re not going to say anything? You’re not even going to try and make an excuse?”
“I saved your life and your daughter’s,” I finally said, putting on my grandiose airs.
“You were spying on me! Me and my daughter! Why?! Tell me why! Whatever you wanted to know, I would have told you. I HAVE told you. I’ve told you my WHOLE life. Shit, you’re my best friend! Why are you spying on me?! Why?!”
Miriam was crying, and I was about to. I needed to give in, but I was fighting with myself.
I don’t remember if she slapped me in the face and called me a bitch from hell or if I just wanted her to. I closed the door and leaned back against it. Then I gave free rein to my nerves and started sobbing and trembling, trying in vain not to make noise.
I rushed to the attic meaning to break everything down. Thankful, in part, that it would help me forget what I couldn’t forget. Or at least to put it off. Now there was something much more urgent, and that was eliminating anything that could give me away. But when I went up the stairs and saw everything, I froze. It was impossible to shut down the operation in a matter of minutes: the computers, monitors, routers, signal relays, the table set up to assemble the clocks, all the different gadgets I had been accumulating, the chalkboard, the maps, the books, the videos, the notebooks, the notes, the lists. I had left the island full of bodies, of blind fishbowls, of deaf snitches. My house of cards. And a gust of wind had blown it over. Just a gust of wind? The cameras dying out, photo 4,209, Miriam and her accident. Three gusts of wind in a row. I had wasted lots of time and money, for what? To put my life, my world in danger. Everything had gone to shit. My extra lives were used up. Your videogame is finished. Over. Idiot. Moron. Fool. Loser. Out of my sight. Fade to white.
I didn’t want anything left, not a trace.
I went back over the recording from Miriam’s fishbowl. This is what I had missed during my absence from the attic:
Miriam is cooking a pie, probably for me, to say thanks.
She puts it in the oven and adjusts the temperature.
She starts thinking.
She looks at the roof for a few moments.
She gets on a chair to try and reach the fire alarm. Even on her tiptoes, she can’t reach.
She gets down and comes back with a little four-step ladder. Now she reaches it.
She takes down the fire alarm.
She gets down.
She takes off the top of the battery compartment to confirm what she suspects: there aren’t any inside.
Her first instinct is to pick up the phone. It seems like she is going to call me and talk it over normally, even laugh about it, because there must be some other dumb explanation for how I ended up there and she was just curious. I had probably said something else and she had understood me wrong because she was groggy.
But she stops before dialing.
She looks around without knowing what she’s looking for until her eyes focus on the clock on the wall. The lunatic clock, as she calls it.
She goes over as if she doesn’t want to frighten it.
Looks at it carefully.
Takes it down.
Looks at it again and turns it around.
The image of the camera goes black as soon as she puts it on the table.
Sound of a drawer opening.
Sound of a hand digging through the drawer looking for a knife.
Sound of a knife unscrewing the top of the clock. It doesn’t work.
Sound of another drawer opening.
Sound of a hammer banging frantically on the top, knocking off slivers of plywood.
Silence.
The image comes back.
Shot of Miriam looking into the spy camera she’s just discovered.
I didn’t want to lose Miriam. She had been my greatest support on the island. And though I knew everything was unstable, because my big lie made everything a fiction, I wanted to do right by her. And sincerely, I wanted to make sure that she wouldn’t turn me in or tell someone.
I looked at a half-finished clock on the shelf. It was one of my multiple failed attempts, one that didn’t met with my quality standards. It was shaped like an electric guitar, but I had abandoned it because I wasn’t happy with the way the neck and the frets had turned out, too small in proportion to the body. But now it seemed perfect for what I was trying to do. Now my standards had gone down noticeably because I didn’t have time to lose.
That year, I had been very afraid, all the time, in almost every way, but I never felt fear for my physical safety. Until that day, when I took that detour. I wished I had a gun, but I knew I’d never win going down that road. If Mike discovered I had a revolver on me, he could justify whatever he did as self-defense. Your revolver is your clock, Alice. And your bullet is your camera.
When I arrived at WasteWorks, it was noon and the neon sign reading “Someone’s got to do it, right?” was still turned on. I had left Ruby at Tina’s daycare. I felt weird without her on my back. Shorn. Unprotected. But I thought she might be a burden, especially as I wasn’t totally sure how far my actions would take me or Mike’s would take him. Even so, I wouldn’t leave there without what I came for.
Mike was the boss and owner, but hey, he hardly ever had to get his hands dirty; he only went on service calls when the two kids he had with him—his cousin Pat and his cousin’s friend Junior—couldn’t handle it on their own. So Mike had more time for what he really liked: lying on the sofa watching TV in his underwear even in the dead of winter, drinking, smoking, staying up all night and dealing drugs. Since I saw him picking up the goods on New Year’s Eve, I hadn’t tracked him again. I wasn’t interested, to tell the truth. I had enough things to investigate without wasting time on that. Until now.
Since their separation, Mike lived on the premises: he had set up—so to speak—the back room. He’d put in a sofa bed he never closed up—why waste time?—and a seventy-inch LED TV, perfect for any drug dealer worth his salt. Luckily for me, when Mike opened the door and invited me in, he had already downed a few beers.
“What an honor to have you as a visitor, miss. I thought you had blacklisted me because of my ex. Step back, Satan!”
“Well, yeah, I did. But you know, if the house starts to smell like a sewer and I don’t really know where it’s coming from, I gotta do something about it.”
“I find the scent of shit calming. If you smell shit, you can control it. Shit that doesn’t smell is worse. And when you least expect it, it swamps you and you drown in it.”
“Well, anyway, I’d like you to take a look.”
“To tell the truth, I don’t know if I feel like it. We can’t say you’ve treated me particularly well . . .”
I was usually very discreet, but with Mike I never hid the disgust I felt when I crossed his path.
“That’s why I brought you this. Let’s say it’s my way of offering you a peace pipe,” I said, handing him the electric guitar clock. It still smelled like fresh paint.
“You made this yourself?” he asked admiringly.
“Since I know you’re a musician and the guitar is your favorite instrument, I thought you’d like it.”
“Shit, Alice, that’s cool, right? That’s some present . . .”
“Glad you like it . . . Well, I’ll leave you be. I’m sure you’re really busy.”
“No, wait, wait, help me put it up, OK? Choose the best place in my little mansion. You’ll help?”
I knew he was going to bite. I was convinced he’d invite me in, especially if I insisted on leaving soon.
When I went in, my eyes wandered discreetly around the room searching for Sandy the dog or at least some clue to show she was still alive. Where could he have her hidden? Was he really capable of killing her?
I decided the best place for the clock was between a stolen Route 66 sign and a neon sign from Foxy Girls, a topless bar in Vegas.
“No sweat, this is perfect, between your hunting trophies,” I said, making Mike laugh. He’d already had another beer. I’d turned down the offer. “All right, now I am going . . .”
“No, wait, wait . . . You can’t offer me the peace pipe and leave. You don’t offer the peace pipe; you smoke it. If we don’t smoke, the peace will never be sealed, Alice. And the scent of shit in your house will never go away. You’ll see.”
Once more, he took the bait. It was pretty gross to me to sit on his unmade bed with dirty clothes all over. Mike came back with a box shaped like a chest. By then he was on his third beer—plus the ones he had had earlier and the night before. I finally said yes to one because I was afraid of smoking on an empty stomach. I know beer isn’t the best form of nourishment, but I needed to calm my nerves a bit. I wanted to seem easygoing, for Mike to be relaxed and trust me so he would do what he ended up doing.
“Say what you want about drug trafficking on the Mexican border,” he said while he packed marijuana into a bong, “but the border between Canada and Maine, that’s a regular free-for-all.”
“So you bring it to the island? Like your motto: Somebody’s got to do it, right?”
“You got it . . .” he said, laughing at my wit. “But hey, I also deal in local goods. I have a little weed plantation in a hothouse I set up in the garage. Come, see for yourself.”
He lit the weed, sucked through a tube and passed me the bong. It had been a long time since I’d smoked marijuana, since my stay in Madrid—at a party so Diego wouldn’t think I was a prude. Since then I hadn’t tried it again. When I took the bong, my fear of fainting started up immediately. Right then would be the worst time and place I could lose consciousness. I hoped that my racing heart and the adrenaline rush I had at that moment would compensate for my phobia’s effects. I breathed through the tube. Fuck it, God’s will be done. If I faint and he rapes me, at least I’ll have it on camera, I thought.
“Good shit.” It really was. “Well, that’s that, peace pipe smoked.” I felt relaxed immediately. It went to my head. I hoped the fall wouldn’t be harder and more vertiginous. “So, what other treasures do you have in that chest?”
Though I already had enough material recorded for my purposes, I wanted him to fuck up, to slip in his own shit like the pig he was.
“Well, I’ve got a little sample here of anything you might want. Gotta try the merchandise, right?” Good job, Mike, keep talking. “Perks of the job.” He laughed. And opened the box. “Let’s see what we got here: coke, oxies, weed, angel dust, blue meth. Breaking Bad made it fashionable; it’s a disaster the way we flip out with this shit we see on TV. What else? Anabolic steroids; Propofol, the shit that killed Michael Jackson, haven’t tried that. And let’s see, let’s see, ah, my favorite, MDMA, the love drug.” He winked. “You down?”
“I thought you were going to make it harder for me,” I said, smiling. You just fell with your whole team, moron, I wanted to hiss in his face. I was so ecstatic inside I took another hit from the bong.
“Now tell me, Alice, my dear, why would I make it hard for you?”
I don’t really know how I managed to get out of there in one piece because I was so stoned I don’t remember. But I did. When I got home, I realized that in my purse I had a bag with a baggie of marijuana, two MDMA pills, and a Propofol I flushed directly toilet the drain. I kept the rest as evidence.
I edited the video to take out the parts where he named other people on the island. Because after showing me his arsenal, Mike started running down his extensive client list. I wasn’t wild about knowing Conrad took Propofol sometimes to sleep—which explained how he’d scared me when I thought he was dead—but just on the weekends when the bank wasn’t open, probably to get rid of the void and the solitude he felt; or that Reverend Henry took angel dust now and then because it made him feel closer to God; or that Lorraine and Peter took ecstasy to fuck like animals in heat; or that John, yes John, had bought MDMA from him—Mike thought it was to take it with Karen, but I knew that wasn’t the drug’s final destination; or that a lot of the kids on the high school sports teams were taking anabolic steroids. He didn’t make any of these drug transactions in person, but with time and experience, he had ended up figuring out who was who. There are people who leave their orders for me in the mailbox at the office, but now almost everything’s done through the internet, he told me, and next thing I knew, he was explaining that WasteWorks’s website had a chat area where you could leave comments or ask questions without registering or anything. People made up an anonymous username and made their orders, indicating their favorite pickup spot. For example: Ecstasy, fifty bucks, Wampanoag tribe totem pole. He would send the kids in the van with the order, and there, under the plaque, they’d find the fifty dollars. If the money’s not there, we don’t leave anything, obviously. They’d leave the drugs, and through the chat room, they’d let the person know that the order was available. End of transaction. Boom. Cool, right? Did I set it up good or did I set it up good, Alice? I was very tempted to tell Chief Margaret what was happening. But the video wasn’t for her. Besides, who knew whether she wasn’t hiding behind some anonymous username to take who knows what drug, sometimes she looked pretty amped up in relation to the apparent—only apparent—calm and slow lifestyle that reigned on the island.
“What the fuck do you want?” Miriam said to me, very serious and hurt, when she opened the door to her house and saw me.
“You know very well I can’t stand Mike, and I’d never do anything that might hurt you. I want to ask your forgiveness for doing what I did to you. I’m very sorry, really. I’m sorry I betrayed your trust. It will never happen again.”
I should have told the truth and thrown myself, crying, into her arms, and asked for counsel, complicity, comprehension. But all I did was hand her a pen drive with Mike’s confession and the video that showed him kidnapping Sandy.
“Here, this is so Sandy will come home and in case Mike ever tries to take custody of Chloe or stops paying his child support.”
Miriam didn’t say anything, just took the pen drive and closed the door. She did it softly because she must have intuited that what the drive had on it would prove vital to her and that eventually we would clear things up between us.