Page 70 of Total Exposure

Her breath hitches. Not remnants of her crying, but brand-new sobs. “It’s just… that was the first time I’ve been out during the day in a long time.” She sniffs loudly. “The first time I’ve been around people and didn’t want to die. The first time I wanted to be out with people, X. I didn’t want it to end so soon.”

I exhale, not sure how to handle that part. I’m not a fucking therapist. I’m not even supposed to be talking to her, let alone setting her up on little excursions to fulfill some latent voyeuristic fetish she never knew she had.

“Well, you handled it badly,” I say. “I don’t even know what to think right now. Do I call this off? Have them come take you out?”

“No,” she says. “No. Please. Don’t do that. I’ll fix the cameras.”

I laugh. “Just go to bed.”

“I don’t want to be alone. You’re all I have now.”

Jesus Christ. What the fuck have I done?

“Please,” she begs again. “Please don’t call anyone. Please don’t tell them.”

Sighing, and not really sure where to go next, I press the intercom one more time. “Then do what I say.”

Her body hitches from the sobs again. But she nods and begins walking up the stairs in silence.

I lean forward, panning the camera, then switching to the undamaged ones upstairs, keeping track of her as she reaches the top, turns left, and heads down the hallway. I wait for her in the bedroom, all five monitors in front of me showing the bedroom door open. Her crying is just soft whimpers now. She doesn’t take a bath, she falls forward on the bed, hugs the pillow to her face, and cries harder.

I sink back in my chair and watch. Wait for her to exhaust herself and sleep. But thirty minutes later she’s still crying and I’m torn between speaking to her again—to try to smooth things over—and letting her get it out.

Obviously that tantrum had some meaning behind it.

I am a goddamned child! she’d screamed. Some pent-up thing from when she was little, I guess. Pressure to perform, maybe? Lack of friends? I mean, her life has been pretty out of the ordinary. Special, for sure.

And terrifying too.

“What happened to you?” I ask the screen.

She turns onto her side and I zoom in, training the camera on her face. Her eyes are bloodshot and squinting, like it physically hurts her to keep them open. But still, she stares up at the chandelier camera, defying my last command to the very end.

Almost an hour later, with nothing more from her but soft sobs, she loses her battle. Turning onto her back, arms falling open like dead weight, lips slightly parted with her heavy breathing. She sleeps.

I leave the control room and go upstairs to see the damage first-hand. It’s a mess. Motherfucking mess.

Quietly, I clean up the glass first, then start picking up camera pieces. Some of them actually can be repaired by splicing the wires she tore out back together. Others—the ones with cracked lenses—are trash. And that’s exactly where they go.

I end up with three additional fully functioning cameras, one that only has video, but no sound, and one that only has sound, but no video.

I’ll take it. Not like I have a choice. I can’t exactly go buy new ones and install them without her seeing me.

But I have no eyes in the kitchen at all. Which will not do. So I take one from the hallway and remount it in the corner so I’ll have a view of the island counter where tomorrow, the notebook will be waiting for her.

In fact, that jolts my memory and I grab the notebook from my control room and read her poem again.

Have you ever felt like a number?

Just a number on a line, at a time

when no one else is there to see you stumble?

Anonymous child with preposterous guile

and an innocence that wants to take you under?

Well, I have.