A certain paranoia within the air, a lingering worry in my heart. Call me mad—once it pulled me into the soil, now it falls as grains over my burial—but there is a spy in my house.
He is the glue in Brooklyn brick, the footprints I leave in the winter, the breeze passing by in historically pleasant springs. Although his presence is kept by the single truth that he has committed no crime, I argue him a thief; a robber of my voice, for I seem to have become a mute, the way my cries move through ears as if the trivial hum of a bird.
Sly, he appears meager, a simple man, of average stature and common colors, who easily slips into the backdrop of society. Look upon him and find no more than a blur, no greater than you or I, and slowly, too, you’ll come to know well those sudden bangs in the quiet humdrum. He indulges in taking advantage of his small display, creeping up so subtly that one may never notice the extent of his appearances.
Then, one Monday, I woke up to his eye. A deep brown behind my bedside window that weaved seamlessly into the fabric of the night, and perhaps it would go unnoticed had I not become naturally acquainted with my home over the years.
For a time, I watched him watch me, my mind slowly retreating from the edge of slumber, and this is how I attained the distinct picture of his eye: a dark taupe splashed onto bright ivory, while centered lies his wide, pumping pupil, growing and shrinking as the vibrance of his veins escalates, blue and red. And as the gravity of this situation’s implications became obvious, a total emptiness arose within my stomach, accessory by rushing, vibrating blood, pumping like his pupil, pushing on the walls of my vessel and contracting as these walls push back. In the chaos of my head, a clutter that alarmingly possessed nothing of substance, I pondered what may occur if I screamed.
Who is this man, and what will he do?
The entirety of these must have become apparent on my face, I suppose, for his eye shut, and never did the blank night open once more that week. I do emphasize this, as the following Monday, I was again hit with the same terror, and now I was sure of his intentions.
In the beginning, he was shy and weary, content in merely watching. Yet as I pleaded to the officers, and as these pleas proved fruitless consistently, he grew confident. His eye—the darned thing!—opened a crack in the night on Wednesday too, then in the plain day, and gradually I became acquainted with the taupe as I had with the home. Soon, he worked up the courage to bring his eye to the office, and though quickly they shooed him away, his eye, far and minute as it was in the distance, plagued me in the comfort of my car, etching itself onto the window, onto the back of my eyelids, and the front of my mind.
Oh, why hadn’t I left the house? Indeed, I had—a total of four times, in fact. What I did not consider, then, was that for he already knew of the office, swiftly he could obtain my new residence at the cost of a brief drive. And you must understand very little of the world if you think I could readily obtain myself a new job, and very little of how much I despise that eye if you believe I haven’t tried. I’ll tell you: I begged—I let him take my dignity and sank to becoming a beggar! More horribly, through the haze in my tears, I looked up to some passerby’s green eyes, and saw that same coldness from the window. It is this exact association that I determined the moment as where I came upon the fact that our lives had turned to intertwine.
Once, a simple man surely is the notion I associated with him, back when I first glimpsed his eye on the subway. Then, I could not see through this mist, for I would uncover no man at all, but rather the reality that I was staring at the world around me. How I had begun to instinctively relate the man to my mundane encounters, I did not want to know. The fears regarding my ignorance to how deeply the man invaded my life, I decided, needed no more fodder.
Already, I do not leave the house to go to work, or sleep, and I haven’t spoken to my old friends in months. For though I am conscious there is no reprieve from his watch, there is a warm illusion to manifest with the absence of his eyes. Whether this is one he has orchestrated, it does not matter anymore. Possibly, in some younger and more frivolous year, there may have existed a more light and intriguing story to tell you. Now here it is: the entirety of my life!
