Estimated reading time — 10 minutes

“Have you ever felt like you’re being watched?”

It’s odd to be 21 and still checking my closet and under my bed. My friends teased me about it when I told them, but it’s a habit I can’t shake. I lock my door. Even when my parents are home. I’m not hiding anything, but I like the feeling of knowing the space is truly “my own.”

There is one intrusion. My phone. That little circle near the top. The camera. If it turned on, I wouldn’t even know. And maybe all it would see is the ceiling or the desk, but now and then it could see my face. My eyes. Exactly where I’m looking on screen.

Every time I go online, I’m reminded that my privacy is an illusion.

When I go to sleep, I put my phone under my pillow. So I know it can’t see me.

There was one night I remember, when I had to get up and piss. My bathroom is right beside my bedroom, so it’s not much of a journey, but I remember as I stepped out of my room, my eyes drew to the stairs.

The stairs in my house are steep, a straight drop to the dining room, and right outside my door. We have a night-light on the landing, this little orange flame battling against the dark. But it doesn’t pierce down those stairs. They drop straight into pitch black.

I remember being stuck there. Feet glued to the floor. Staring. The dark was shapeless and flat, just an impenetrable wall. It was like a painting where you’d dragged brushstrokes over and over until there was no discernible end or beginning. It was just black. I knew there was nothing in that dark, but I couldn’t shake the thought that if I looked away. If I turned my back on the stairs. Then whatever was in the dark would know it’s safe to come out. And then it would follow in step, right behind me. And I would never know it was there until I turned.

But that was a long time ago. Maybe 10th grade. Which was around the time I developed this phobia. I had a buddy named Miles. We’d meet after class for the Card Games Club. We were some of its only members besides a girl named Sophie, Alex, and I don’t remember the others. After club, he’d come back to my house, and we would surf the internet on his beat-up laptop. At this time, my family had a child lock on my phone. I’d found a few ways to subvert it, but many sites and a general sense of “freedom” on the internet were out of my reach. Except when Miles came over with his laptop.

We wouldn’t browse anything seedy, just whatever funny bullshit we thought of. Memes and Reddit. Or watch a bunch of YouTube videos that led us nowhere. Miles did have a fascination with “accident” videos. Never the violent stuff. But we’d watch a lot of car crashes. It’s weird seeing someone scream in real life. In movies, people shriek their heads off. But in real life, the scream gets stuck in your throat, and it comes out more like a guttural breath. A gasp. Because no one thinks they’re gonna crash, until they do. It’s never real until it’s right in front of you.

Miles was a weird kid, but I loved him. He had a lot of odd habits. His lips were always chapped, but instead of bringing lip balm with him, he would bite the flaking skin off and chew it. He was weird. We never ate together because classes didn’t line up. But we’d pass in the halls and fistbump.

I remember one time when I passed him, he was really excited. Eyes wide, hands moving. He was buzzing with energy. We didn’t even fistbump; he grabbed my hand and said he had “something new to show me,” then ran off before the bell.

When I met him afterschool he was still buzzing. And we walked to my house faster than ever before.Instead of going to search for something, he went to his laptop’s camera folder and pulled up a video. He hit play, and I had no idea what to make of it.

It was this guy’s back facing the camera. He was walking outside, it was night, and there were some streetlamps on. But the footage was dim, speckled with digital noise that looked like stars. The sound was rough. It sounded like it was windy, so the audio kept clipping. And there was a rumbling, like low static. At first, I tensed for the car accident. Where was it going to come from? From the side? From behind?

I waited, hands clenched and sweaty. And waited…And waited.

I don’t know how long it was, but this guy had been walking for a while, and nothing had happened. No accident, no jumpscare. He was turning from street to street, never passing anyone else. So I started to notice the little things. He was on a sidewalk, and around him were short houses, spread evenly, no shops or stores. It looked like suburbia, but different from our own; the houses had more of an orangy hew and they seemed to fall further and further into disrepair as he went.

Peeling paint, missing shingles. Fences surrounding overgrown lawns.

And despite the hazy footage, I could tell he was wearing earbuds. His hair was cut short, so whenever he shifted his head, I saw small white bulbs in his ears. He never turned around to face the camera.

And I realized, the camera would adjust from time to time. Gently zooming in and out. Whoever was following this guy was watching from afar, not near him. I don’t think he even knew he was being watched.

After a while, he turned and entered a building. It was a 2-story house, it’s siding falling off in a corner. There was a light on inside, shining through the windows. The rest was hard to make out in the dark. The camera hesitated outside the house. Not following the Man inside. Then it turned off. I glanced at Miles, but he shushed me and gestured to the screen.

It was still dark. But darker than the street. There were no streetlamps anymore. And then there was a shuffle. Like clothes shifting. And the darkness creaked open. The camera must have been moved into a closet. There were dark shapes on the side of its view, like t-shirts or the edge of a door. And it was peering into a small bedroom. An unmade bed.

The Man from the sidewalk re-entered. He was in boxers, his skinny pale body exposed; a tattoo on his side was visible. An anchor. Miles snickered. But I didn’t know what was so funny. At this point, my mind started to drift to whether I was mad at Miles for showing me this. The guy sat down on the bed, took out his phone, and scrolled.

He was stuck that way for maybe five minutes, eyes glued to the screen. Then he set his phone down and turned off the light by his bed, dipping the room into darkness. It was punctuated by the faintest outline of his body and those multicolored stars made of camera noise.The Man settled under his covers. And then stopped moving. He stayed still for a minute, then another, and another. His chest began to rise and fall under the covers in rhythm. He was asleep. And everything was so quiet. The sound of the wind was gone now, leaving only the faint static and the Man’s breathing.

My eyes fluttered. I was falling asleep myself. His breathing formed a gentle song that lulled me closer and closer. Miles had settled his chin into his hands. His eyes were heavy, too. The afternoon had that effect on a kid.

It was so quiet, and his breathing was so loud. Even the static rumble beneath had its own gentle pulse. A rise and fall. Almost like breathing.

And a thought crept in…what if it was breathing? Whoever was operating the camera, it was their breathing. It never occurred to me until then that someone was operating the camera. That someone was in that room with the Man, hunched in his closet, watching him as he slept.

I turned to Alex and asked him how long the video was. He moved the cursor so the play length displayed. It said 9 hours. I asked him what happened at the end. He said he hadn’t watched that. So I took the cursor, and before he could stop me, skipped forward to the last minute.

It was day now. Sunlight beaming through the windows. And the Man was sitting on his bed, stretching. He twisted his neck, cracking it, and glanced to the closet. He stood and stepped towards it, towards the camera. And as he did, the camera seemed to rise, higher and higher. If it were on the shoulder of a person, they’d be towering over the Man.

The Man stepped up to the closet, still unaware of the camera. It couldn’t have been less than a foot away. He placed a hand on the closet and pushed the door open. Light streamed in, flaring across the screen. His eyes traced across the clothes, searching, until his eyes locked with my own. His pupils dilated.

He saw the camera, his mouth opened-

Then the video was over.

I asked Miles where he found it. He pointed to something in the corner. A series of letters I must have glossed over, but had always been there. He said he didn’t find it. That it was broadcast in real-time. That on some forum, he’d read about a website that was loading most of the time. But if you waited long enough, you might see a stream start. A livestream of somebody, somewhere, completely unaware that they were being watched.

The camera would follow them, trying to get as close as possible without being noticed. And when it was noticed, the stream ended.

He said he’d looked up the website, not expecting anything. That when it had finally loaded, it was a circle of blinking eyes. Spinning in the dark.

He said he was halfway asleep when he heard a synthetic beep, and the stream started. So he screen-recorded it on his laptop. When he awoke, it was still recording, so he just ended the video.

I didn’t know what to say to that. He said he could show me and punched it into his keyboard. The same name as the little letters in the corner of the video.

LIVE.

Because it was a life captured in a live broadcast.

It took a second, the screen buffered, and went black. Then there was a slight electronic whirr, like the computer was struggling to render, and a little circle of eyeballs appeared. About ten eyes, nine of them closed, one of them open. The open eye traveled around the screen, indicating it was loading.

I couldn’t help but snicker at the strangeness of it. Miles, however, looked dead serious. He said this was it and quickly clicked away from the website.

My ceiling fan was off. So that night, as I stared at it, I took to counting all the metal bars enclosing it. I was finding any distraction. Even pinching my fingers till they stung. I didn’t want my attention to drift to my closet. I didn’t want to think of someone inside there. Crouched with a camera. Watching. I didn’t want to think that the breathing I heard as I closed my eyes wasn’t my own, but some voyeur.

So I looked up the website. I was surprised it wasn’t blocked on my phone, but maybe that was a good sign. It was just the eyeballs, spinning.

Sleep was fighting to take me; my whole mind felt like static. But past that static was this cold, resting on the small of my back. A chill that radiated through my whole body in slow sweeping waves. I couldn’t go to sleep. I had to keep watching. To know. To make sure. Every time that eyeball completed its round, I knew I was safe, at least for a second. I knew no one was in my closet.

But I was so tired. Everything seemed to flicker in and out. Like I was watching myself on a TV across the room. But the connection was bad, and everything kept fading into static. It was so far away.

My eyes closed. Then I heard a beep. I opened them, and I saw a boy, maybe my age, standing in a bathroom. The lights were out, but his phone flashlight was on, bouncing off the sink and giving me the vague shape of his face. He was leaning towards the mirror, toothbrush in his mouth. A white opaque curtain drifted in front of the camera. I was watching from the shower.

The Boy spat and washed his mouth, then exited the bathroom. The camera shook with two heavy steps as I exited the shower and moved out into the hall. Then stopped. The Boy was near the end of the hall, hand on his doorknob. He muttered something to himself and stepped inside, leaving the door slightly ajar.

I floated down the hall. The camera taking my view to the sliver between his door and the wall. His room looked much like my own. Posters for some comic book films, a short bookshelf. An Xbox tucked under a small television. And a fishtank that glowed with a greenish hue, illuminating the room. The water caustics passed over the walls. With every wave of morphing light, the walls seemed to shift. I wasn’t even sure if I was awake or dreaming anymore.

The Boy slipped into his bed and held his phone to his face. The screen ignited, and I could see clearly: it was Miles. It was Miles in bed. It was Miles being watched. And then the door moved. And the camera stepped inside, and Miles looked up. All the way up. At whatever now towered over him.

And that breathing. That horrible, low rumble filled my chest. I could feel my heart beating through my hands.

And Miles screamed. But it caught in his throat. Sounding more like a gag than a shout.

When I woke up that morning, I was drooling. My phone was on the floor. It had fallen, and a crack now spiderwebbed across its screen. I immediately snatched it up and pressed the power button. Thank god it still worked. I checked my search engine and found nothing. I checked my history and found nothing. I thought to look up the website, I typed it out, and everything, but my finger stayed stuck over the ENTER button. I’d rather not look.

I anticipated passing Miles in the hall. Telling him about the weird dream I’d had. He’d laugh at it, saying I was worrying too much, then we’d go back to my place and watch some idiot reverse into a light pole and never think about that website again.

But I didn’t pass him in the hall.

I never passed him in the hall again.

My Mom told me his family moved away a few months later. I didn’t see them leave. Miles never had me over to his house. I only knew he lived in the neighborhood. For all I knew, he simply stopped going to school. I asked my Mom, and she only said she’d heard nothing about Miles, good or bad.

I did search the website again. A little after his parents moved away. And it just loaded. I stayed up all night waiting for the livestream to start. To see the outside of my house and watch as the camera made its way inside, through the kitchen, through the living room, up the stairs, and to my room.

But those stupid eyes just kept spinning. And nothing happened.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s seen me already, and I just haven’t noticed. Maybe it’s seen you, and you just haven’t looked behind. Maybe it’s watching someone else, in another state, in another neighborhood, on another street, in another room. Not paying attention to how their closet door is creaking open.

Maybe on some dinged-up laptop in some kid’s room, two girls or boys or whoever are watching with wide eyes as a camera watches some total stranger. Going about their life. Unbeknownst to how their privacy isn’t so private.

Maybe they’ll feel that breathing, that tingle down their neck. And they’ll know, they’re LIVE.

Credit: NoahMangos

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