Neighbourhood Watch

The four hundred and thirty-second monthly meeting of the Stoneborough Neighbourhood Association was slightly better attended than the four hundred and thirty-first. Joanne had taken her usual seat in the back-left of the Stoneborough Library Community Service Hall, under an embossed plaque thanking the Embassies of Norway, Sweden, and Hungary for their generous financial support. Around her, people talked about the over-structured tyranny of their Wednesdays; their new cross-country skis.

Joanne had bought a new pair that week, with an electric blue, faux-fur underside that crimped to the snow when you walked up a hill. She did not know how to bring this up to the women sitting next to her without sounding desperate. Besides, she hadn’t used them yet. She studied a brochure for a children’s ballet class until Council President Laura cleared her throat, imperious.

The upcoming meeting was long, Laura explained, and it was imperative that everyone stay until the end, but first, she asked everybody to take a moment of silence. The All-Seeing Eye Of The Stoneborough Neighbourhood Association had died the night before.

The Eye had been very old, of course, Laura said gravely, and had devoted the last fifty of her years to Watching with a perpetual, vein-straining stare that left no time for her to bear children, or even for her to attend the monthly meeting of the Stoneborough Neighbourhood Association, where they said a prayer of thanks for her at the end of every gathering. She was very old, and had worked very hard, and so her death was not a tragedy, rather a movement akin to a high school graduation: a slipping-out, not unpleasant, from one’s previous phase of life.

Still, Laura passed out Rice Krispie squares studded with carob chips, a small comfort of the mouth. She explained that if anyone was suffering more profoundly than expected from this collective loss, Councilmember Pearl, who made her living offering cognitive behavioural therapy sessions to small business owners, had opened up a few spots for the community at a reduced rate this week.

Pearl smiled, and licked the varnished sugar off her Rice Krispie square.

Of course, Laura continued, a new Eye would have to be chosen at once. Strange behaviour was already taking place in the now-unmonitored neighbourhood. The line for the free-swim freshwater pond at the bottom of the valleyed basin was almost twenty secondhand cars long. Today, a family not from the neighbourhood had stayed there till eleven minutes past closing time, catching frogs and slipping them back into the sand. When they finally left, barked away by the provincial policeman employed by the Stoneborough Neighbourhood Association for exactly this purpose, they dawdled past the four-story houses as they crawled into their car, wondering aloud how much they might cost, dripping their desires all over the pavement like pond-scum.

In order to prevent further incidents of that kind, each dues-paying member of the neighbourhood association would have the opportunity to put their name forward for election to the position of the Eye. The ideal candidate would be childless, so as to be more suited to watching other people’s. The ideal candidate would not require glasses or contacts to see. And the ideal candidate, above all, would have a patience as still and abiding as the frogs in the freshwater pond, the ones who kept their eyes open even when they blinked.

Joanne considered the loss of the Eye and was surprised to find herself feeling a kind of peripheral grief, as though she had lost an infrequently-used back tooth.

Her husband, Dan, had mentioned the Eye on their first date. He’d grown up aware all the way to the inner part of his skin that every scraped knee and stolen wallet around him pulsed in somebody else’s optic nerve. Once, he’d stopped with a friend to buy butter tarts from the supermarket at the bottom of the hill, leaving their bikes unlocked by the sliding doors. When they came outside seven minutes later, they found a pile of charred and leaking bones next to the bike rack and knew the Eye had intervened. It was motherly. It was intimate. It made him feel loved.

I mean, not loved. But it was nice. I mean, it’s just the Eye. He’d pushed his dinner round on his fork: pad thai, Joanne’s choice, later much-ridiculed. Everywhere has one, right?

No, said Joanne, who had grown up twenty-four minutes away by car and thus sidestepped the Eye’s peripheral vision. No, I don’t think so.

When Laura asked who among the assembly might like to be considered for the sacred and venerated position of the All-Seeing Eye, Joanne was the only one to raise her hand.

They voted fruitlessly in slips—little backsides of paper cut from over-printed issues of the neighbourhood bulletin, crisp and white and always cut, not torn. Laura took each one by hand, palming it into the library’s wicker wastebasket and then reading it, not moving her lips, and when she had done this seventy-three times for all seventy-three dues-paying and present members of the Stoneborough Neighbourhood Association, she cleared her throat and announced that Joanne had won it.

Afterwards, everybody wanted to know her. People she had never spoken to before wanted to know the colour of the fur on the underside of her skis. Women offered her their uneaten Rice Krispie squares, the indented perforations of napkins pressed faintly into the carob chips. They took her hand in both of theirs. Thanked her, murmured to her, wept. She had saved them from loneliness, from unprotection. They stood, motherless, their underbellies exposed to the cold, cruel drift of the world, and she had saved them. What was her name again? She was going to love it there, as the Eye on the top of that hill. She was going to work so hard and strong and bravely. She was going to have so much fun.

Joanne smiled, and slipped her hands from theirs. It felt good to be wanted, good to be furiously thanked. Her mouth was not accustomed to having compliments placed into it, and after a while, she excused herself, and she got in her car, and she drove home, driving down the middle of the road to avoid the jagged rocks that residents placed at the edges of their snowbanked lawns.

Monthly meetings of the Stoneborough Neighbourhood Association were held at 6 p.m., when most husbands were still commuting home, knuckled to their BMWs or catching their clipped suit pants in bicycle gears. News therefore generally took several days to get to the heads of the men who were not in the Stoneborough Neighbourhood Association: it had to be typed and re-formatted and delivered by paper post in the Stoneborough Neighbourhood Association Weekly Bulletin, where residents scanned the spread for photos of themselves or their loved ones, then filed them away. Tonight, though, the women carried this new upheaval home on their tongues, serving it for dinner with the peas. Something had changed, but it was all going to be alright again, soon, very soon. Yes, I think her name was Joanna.

Dan ran his architecture firm from home, hunched over the barstool seats at the marbled kitchen island and letting formless faces of coworkers glide over his screen. She’d always wondered how somebody could create houses without touching them, without digging his hands in dioramas, working only in the software’s remove. But he was doing something right. He’d built half the neighbourhood from this abstraction.

Dan’s house had a large and lumbering front room, which allowed for expansive coat storage options, and making conversations without eye contact. Hi, she said, as she came through the door, shook the snow off behind her. He said nothing.

Had he finished the sausages yet? she wanted to know. She did not yet move to unpeel her coat. She looked at the white wall.

No, he admonished from the living room, unseen. Jesus, fuck, it’s Lent. We’re off flesh, remember?

Dan wasn’t Catholic, but thrilled at the idea of restriction. Lent had begun with his decree that they were off alcohol, the week after that, sugars, which also extended to the now-banned consumption of fruits. Now it was meats. The mandates landed randomly, but Joanne’s compliance was essential.

She apologized, tightened her breath and unlaced her boots, picking slowly at each loop. Trim beige Timberlands for the slush and swell of the city’s late-March salt. When she came round into the living room, Dan was sunk into the back elbow of the couch, watching a coastal British murder mystery with the sound off.

She told him that the All-Seeing Eye had passed away.

A swig from his beer: nonalcoholic, a browned lime clogging up its bottleneck. Don’t be stupid, honey, he chuckled. The Eye can’t die.

Well, she did, Joanne said, It’ll be in the bulletin. So they voted, and I’m taking the job for a little while.

Dan’s anger, though sudden, varied, and unpredictable, was never a surprise. It took everything in like an open shutter. It came into every room with him, stepped in the scuffs left by his shoes. This was why, Joanne reasoned as he pitched the bottle of nonalcoholic beer at the wall like a bad drama, she was no longer as scared as she used to be.

She was a fucking liar, he wanted her to know, as he generally did. She was a fucking liar, and an upstart, and she thought she knew everything, and she needed to look at him. Look at me. He’d hurt her if she didn’t look at him, he said, hitting her anyways, the open heel of his hand on her cheekbone, which thudded against itself. This made something go out of him, and the anger stepped to one side and became embarrassment, the curled-in child-state in which Dan’s anger slept.

He was up to bed. She could follow if she wanted to. And the doorbell camera was making weird noises again. She needed to check that out before she went to bed.

On the British murder mystery show, a man with a kind face rewound footage taken by a local birdwatcher’s camcorder. The man’s mouth moved in a way that suggested Scotland. Joanne did not unmute the television to see if she was right. Instead, she washed her face in the big bright kitchen sink, then ate cold sausages from the jar. Their greying skins split between her under-straightened teeth.

She opened her phone to look at what had happened on the doorbell camera. Everybody in the neighbourhood had one, wired into the Eye’s contraction and dilation. Its function was to identify unwelcome visitors at the door and decide if they needed to be disposed of via a spoken warning, a tranquilizer dart, or a more permanently incapacitating thing, buried in the soft hollow of an intrusive neck.

Joanne’s job was to review the camera footage when things went wrong, which they didn’t. Somebody she didn’t talk to—probably Marisa, who had come to clean twice a week since Dan was a baby—generally came to dispose of the bodies.

Watching the video on her phone, she realized quickly that something had gone wrong. A raccoon had been fired at by a tranquilizer dart that missed, clipped its ear off at the root. Now furious with pain, it launched itself at the camera, over and over again, until its bones and blood were all on the outside. There was no sound. The camera shook. It trained itself, once all the moving and the sound and the fury were over, at the ground where a slushed swell of crazed blood and raccoon fur lay. Joanne had a feeling in her like she was supposed to be appalled.

Joanne would tell Marisa about the body tomorrow. She chewed on a strengthened sausage end.

She had one day to prepare for her new position as the All-Seeing Eye. The instructional packet she’d been sent home with offered intimate directives on how to cleave her life to allow for this new opportunity, but she did not follow it. She did not give notice at her job, because she did not have one, and she did not linger long when new mothers stopped her at the park, and she did not tell the nice gay man she ordered her coffee from at the nice shop just past the elementary school treeline. She packed a small bag, with very few things.

The elected members of the neighbourhood association came for her the next morning, wearing blank beige robes that held the suggestion of more interesting colours in the half-moonlight. They wore their hair in bonnets, or tied-off scarves for the younger and less married wives. Joanne saw them gathering at her stoop through the window and shifted her weight off the bed; made no intrusion on Dan, who didn’t reach for her in the dark.

She noticed, as she took her place at the front of the parade, that the raccoon bones were still splattered, gelatinous, round her door.

They took her up the hill. She watched the Dan-made city recede into diorama, and thought of how intimately she would soon know it, from above.

The house was small and made of yellowed clapboard. Ants swarmed at the stoop, their plump bodies like blackberry pips. Joanne considered their edibility.

Laura nodded her through the front door, and Joanne understood that she was to go through alone. Thank you, she said, mumbly, to Laura as she stepped through. Thank you for choosing me. Laura ignored her and asked Pearl if she thought Alice was using illegal pesticides on her front lawn again.

She crossed the threshold, and she almost threw up at the stench inside. A hundred decaying raccoon bones. Pans cluttered every surface, in ten-layer sediments, crusted under curdled Kraft Dinner and Rice Krispie wrappers.

Light washed the room from an enormous window, the kind that took up an entire wall. It curved and bubbled into the air before it, like a glasses’ convex lens. The light was lucid and insistent and added precision to every crinkle in each wrapper. She knew that through the window she could see each thing that mattered, and not a bit more.

A small, stooped body stood at the stove. It wore a boxy, floral dress and last century’s shoes. Its hands were clenched in rigor mortis around the oven handle, and Joanne wondered if the Eye had died closing the oven or opening it. Its ordinariness was so at odds with the way men and women spoke about the Eye: an all-souls benevolence, a mothering thing.

But the body was peripheral to the house’s main attraction. Out of the corpse’s desiccated face grew a vast, bulging vein, which strained towards the house’s enormous window. It was here that the Eye, spherical and overwhelming, five feet across, languished, lifeless on a sanded floorboard.

Joanne understood what to do. She curled her fingers into the soft divot under her browbone, pressed over her eyelid, and dug in until something popped. She trailed the eye from her face, felt her vision go unsteady, focus, shift and blur.

When she suctioned it to the big and overlooking window, it sharpened until she saw everything at once.

Before, Joanne had been worried about who was going to clean up the Eye’s corpse, how often she was fed. Now, she felt the glass, smudgeless as air, cold on her cornea, and she felt her body shudder to her toes. It felt good. It felt a little bit like sex. She came to see the trees in the park and the trees on the riverside bicycle trail and her body fell away from her entirely, like a stomach dropping. Shed from her pure-centred mind. All that she knew and needed turned in cold currents under the windowpane.

She could see the whole neighbourhood at once, the swoop and turn and curve of Dan’s ever-wider streets, and she could see the unattractively mangled tail of the black squirrel outside the residence home for retired nuns, and she could see the condensation on Dan’s insistent bedtime carafe of water, which she filled for him every night. She could see the grocery store outside which she now understood that the Eye had disposed of bicycle thieves over the years on more than one occasion, and she could see the pride for this city—for she understood it to be more than a neighbourhood, rather its own municipality, its own kingdom—and how it knitted cul-de-sacs together in collective. She could see a child’s bright bleed of ketchup on its bowl of Kraft Dinner, and she could see that if danger ever befell that child, she would rearrange the earth in retaliation.

Something pricked in the centre-nerve of her eye. Something was in the pond: three bobbing children and a father and a mother and she knew them by the shape of their unbelonging. Their fingers jammed into the water of the pond at wrong angles. The fish shuddered in rebuke.

She knew what the Eye was gathering. She knew they had been warned too many times. She felt, for the first time, the squeak and sting of the glass against her eyeball; wet fingers on a whiteboard. She thought of the raccoon on her doorstep.

She tried to close her eye.