The Watch
28 Aug 2020
It had been a week since Eliza learned the gossip on the toilet. “The security said he followed her home every day,” she heard, before the brief dialogue was terminated by a series of crispy footsteps. It was the producer; her high heels knocked on the ground like a blade, tough and austere. As she entered the lavatory the air froze, and all of a sudden the silence created a sense of implication—Eliza sensed it—at that very moment the ambiguous pronoun clarified itself, as though an actor showing up from the depth of layered curtains. That evening Eliza left the office later than usual to witness the producer’s black Benz driving out from the parking lot and ended up discovering nothing. She regarded that day as an exception, and therefore grabbed every chance to peek at the producer’s compartment on the next day. She was waiting for a critical clue that would solve the ambiguous riddle in the toilet and, more importantly, elevate her position on the hierarchy of knowledge.
Gossip, after all, didn’t deserve the name of knowledge. But the current one did guide Eliza to approach the nature of information once again, especially after she devoted her life to a career dealing with information. In a newsroom facts were transformed into numbers—45 seconds for a car accident; 30 frames showing the wounded; 160 words summarizing the driving recorder, the sobriety test, and the perpetrator’s pretentious guilt, like an underlength essay. Eliza was so good at playing with these numbers that she knew everything about the news but nothing about the incidents, for all the true stories appeared fake behind the plain narration on the flashing screen. And now the rumor climbed out from the screen. It located only several meters away. She hardly remembered the voice in the toilet, since it was the subject that mattered and therefore impressed her. After all, it had always been difficult to trace the origin of a piece of news.
When was the last time some vivid event disturbed her waveless life? She thought of the mug with an emoji on her desk: It was given to her by a rookie editor who broke her old one. That happened three weeks ago. No. A month. He splashed coffee on Eliza’s white shirt, which put her under the spotlight for an entire day. He certainly felt guilty, otherwise he wouldn’t have given her the mug. It kept reminding Eliza of that day ever since—The laughing emoji was mocking her, but she had not yet found a reason to throw it away, unlike her shirt. She eventually abandoned it because the stain remained irremovable.
Thinking of her own experience helped her understand that the value of information depended on its distance from life. On her way home she was accompanied by “Every Breath You Take,” imagining herself stalking the producer’s car. Eliza always enjoyed listening to songs from several decades ago while driving, and today the gossip leveled the pleasure up to an entirely new level: Facts meant more than numbers to her now. She felt the flow of the world slowing down while driving though the running traffic stream during rush hour, as every second vibrated along with Sting’s voice:
Every single day and every word you say,
Every game you play, every night you stay,
I’ll be watching you.
And now her watch began. Eliza never knew before that the producer always had a Starbucks at nine and another at half-past one, and that she dined one hour later than everyone else. She categorized people entering the compartment, as though selecting significant events to deliver on headlines. On Tuesday she noticed that the producer came back fifty minutes later than usual after the conference, followed by a man she had never seen. Strangers’ visit wasn’t rare, and yet what she knew endowed what she saw with new meanings. During break time she asked another editor if she knew who he was. “He’s from upstairs. I’ve seen him twice.”
“I thought he wasn’t our staff.” Beneath Eliza’s surprise lay a smile of triumph.
Her colleague didn’t seem to understand her joy, but she found the emoji on her mug smiling back to her. After brief hesitation she decided not to unveil her discovery, since she still awaited an evidential sign—maybe a video clip, or a screenshot, that would prove her speculation. She was certainly good at keeping secrets, like the newsroom; providing information distracted people from vital messages, which she took almost a year to realize. On the day Eliza somehow figured this out her passion for work died, because she felt she was living in a massive bubble of lie, and by doing her job she participated in the production of the sophisticated fraud. Since then, her career had become a desolation, and herself a withering bloom within. The moisture for her soul would never arrive.
Now her excitement overwhelmed her like a waterfall. She noticed it when she behaved too patiently—even with a smile—to another stupid question brought by the rookie editor. Eliza never started their conversation actively, and their conversation was never long. He must have noticed the unusual vitality, for their chat lasted longer than three pieces of breaking news. “You look very pleased today,” remarked he.
She shrugged. “Perhaps because I’m wearing a new shirt.”
His eyes drifted away embarrassedly; perhaps she reminded him of the shirt on which he left a coffee stain again. Or maybe he was simply bad at interacting with others. “Do you know if…” Eliza’s voice hung in the air, as the familiar voice of high heels approached. She winked at him, and he submissively sneaked back to his seat.
This time the producer was accompanied by another man, thinner, and younger. During the hour they spent behind the frosted glass of the compartment, Eliza reviewed all the clues she collected so far only to find her deduction doubtful. When the stranger left, he somehow nodded to Eliza, but she soon realized he was greeting to the rookie editor, whose seat located right behind hers.
“You know him?”
“Myles? He’s a software engineer from downstairs.”
She frowned. He explained, “we were recruited at the same time. I knew him in the interview.”
“Four months ago?”
“Six.”
“I see.” That’s way longer than I expected, she thought. “Do you know him well?”
The rookie editor’s eyes squinted into two slits, in which lay a perplexing expression too complicated for her to interpret. “Don’t you tell me you’re interested in him. He’s married.”
“Not in that way. I’m simply wondering why he visited the producer, since I’ve never seen him before.”
“Isn’t it normal for the producer to communicate with other departments?”
Eliza found everything he said reasonable and therefore turned back to her desk. Yesterday the emoji on the mug once smiled to her out of triumph; now it was watching her empty mind, mocking her out of pity.
The remaining working hours flashed through like a lightning. She kept going over her inference, looking forward to a better route, until she became one of the last few people soaking in the dying sunlight of deep dusk. For the first time she said goodbye to the rookie editor, who said he was going to stay for another one or two hours to finish the column before the meeting on the next day. Perhaps the next day would bring me new clues, she told herself, even though she knew it was wrong to regard every trivial event as a clue. Her job taught her nothing but amplifying the significance of information. When people spend hours and hours peeking at others’ tragedies from recorders, they know nothing about the government, the world, and even their own life.
She had always considered herself better than others in terms of being aware of such ignorance, until she realized the disability of making changes marked her as vulgar as those she once despised. Right after driving out from the parking lot she encountered a red light, as though getting stuck right after deciding to probe into the gossip. The street was empty. A car slowed down behind hers, and together two vehicles stranded in the stagnant flow of the city.
It took only a sentence to trap Eliza in a puzzle she might never solve. She didn’t even know its addresser or addressee.
She suffered insomnia that night. The second cup of warm milk at 4 a.m. brought her to the producer’s compartment in her shallow dream. The producer was scolding her for messing up details between a theft and a robbery. Someone knocked the door. A man walked in—with an inconstant identity—and joined the awkward dialogue which had started before she could even notice. Don’t bring the boom to the toilet. It’s too long. Don’t trust the build-in microphone of the camera. It’s good enough for a short interview. Be better prepared. You don’t even know who you’re about to talk to.
Then they—along with five colleagues coming out of the blue—rushed to the toilet. “The security said Myles followed the producer home every day,” they heard. Everyone stopped. The producer turned to Eliza, with fury in her eyes. It can’t be. He’s married. She tried to yell and yet failed to make a sound. So she begged her with a gaze as innocent as possible. But the producer’s eyes dragged her closer and closer, finally swallowing her in the profound darkness in her pupil.
Eliza woke up ten minutes before her alarm could wake her. It was rainy, and she felt extremely thirsty.
Was that merely a dream, or did it count as a nightmare?
She had no answer to it, so she did everything ten minutes earlier than usual, as if adopting her own version of daylight saving time. When she stepped in the office, she seemed to cared less about the gossip. The fragmented memories from the night reminded her of the unreliability of the fragile facts she learned so far. All of a sudden, the sentence where everything started lost its significance. It landed in Eliza’s mind like a stone landing in the middle of a lake; now the ripple had ceased, and yet the lakeside remained too far to reach.
Later in that morning, she ignored the producer when she carried the first Starbucks into her compartment. She also chose to neglect the extra lunchbox she prepared. Events scattered around, but Eliza lost both motivation and ability to put them together.
So she surrendered herself to life once again, as if the epilogue of another period. After all, it had carried her forward for years, and life without stimulation still counted as life.
It was her most severe mistake. After the lunch break, Eliza would hold her mug to the drinking fountain, and she would hesitate because something went wrong. It would take her a few seconds to recognize the instinctive, amorous stink, and she would finally realize that she could never see the whole picture of the gossip because, instead of watching another recorder, she was playing the main character in this piece of headline. The spotlight triggered her panic; her belly convulsed, her hands shivered, but her mouth silenced. She looked at the emoji. It was watching her. As she sensed the blazing sight running through her horror from the desk behind, she would see the creamy white gel diffusing at the bottom of the mug, like a sinful bloom of lust.
Now she knew her dream was more than a nightmare.