Three years ago I was looking at the local job classifieds online when one of the ads caught my eye, not because of what it said, but because it said so little. Best I remember, the ad just read “Job available. Good pay. No benefits. Discretion required.” It then listed an email address and that was all. At the time I was managing a music store, but I had already started hearing rumors we would be shutting down within the next year and the likelihood of a transfer to another store was slim. I had been morosely looking at job listings for the last few days, but this was the first one that stood out, if only because I was bored and it was weird.
So I sent an email.
Half an hour later I had a response, telling me to go to a particular office building in an upscale part of the city at a precise time for my “screening”. I went, and after waiting for a few minutes in the lobby, I was taken into an office where I was given a series of forms and questionnaires to fill out. They collected them and told me they would be in touch.
I had almost forgotten about the whole thing until a month later I got a call saying I had moved on to the second stage of the hiring process. I was again given an address and time, and when I arrived (this time it was a different nice office park twenty miles away from the first one), I was met by a man who introduced himself as Mr. Solomon. He escorted me into a large room that contained a chair and a desk. On the desk were two large monitors, a keyboard and mouse, and a bolted down metal box with two oversized buttons on it: One red and one green.
He told me this room was a model for the place I would be working if I took the job. He described the job as follows.
I would be working seven shifts of six hours every week. My job would be simple. I would arrive at work ten minutes early and enter an outer area that was like a locker room. I would have my own personal locker. I would store all belongings in the locker and change into the provided work clothes. I was never, under any circumstances, to carry any item of my own into the surveillance room. I was never, under any circumstances, to take any item with me from the surveillance room.
As for what I was to do in the surveillance room, I was told that the monitor on the left would constantly show a live stream from a high-definition camera in a remote location. My job was simply to watch the camera. Once an hour I would get onto the computer attached to the right monitor and enter a brief log describing anything interesting that occurred in the last hour. I would have no pens or pencils or paper, and I should never try to take any kind of written notes about the work.
As for the red and green buttons, the red button was only to be used if there was an emergency. This meant something on the video or in my workspace that required outside help. The green button was to be hit if I saw something on the video feed that was particularly noteworthy. It would tell other people somewhere that, at least in my opinion, something interesting was going on. Solomon stressed that while I was given discretion on when to use this button, I should err on the side of only using it if and when something “of real significance” occurred.
He pointed out the camera on the ceiling of the room we were in. He said the real room would be the same. My work would be observed, and other people were watching the room on the video feed as well. He said I was only a redundancy in case other systems failed. He then smirked and asked if I knew what he meant by redundancy.
I nodded, trying not to show my irritation. I don’t talk that good to people, so sometimes they think I’m dumb. That’s okay. Let him think that if he paid me good enough.
The pay was very good. Thirty-five dollars an hour.
This worried me. I was already thinking this was some kind of psych experiment or secret government job, which I was okay with. But that kind of money to sit and watch a screen? My mom always told me that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is, and this was seeming too good to be true.
I asked if I was going to be doing anything illegal. Solomon laughed and said no. I asked if anyone was going to get hurt. Again, he shook his head no. He said the reason they were paying so much was because they needed employees that were motivated to be professional and discrete. The work they were doing was important, and for various reasons it couldn’t be discussed. If I took the job, I would have to sign papers promising I would never discuss my work there or I could be sued or locked up. I’m only breaking that now because of everything that’s happened.
So I took the job, and because they wanted me to start right away, I had to quit the store with no notice. I felt bad about that, but I was excited about the new job too. It was a lot of money and seemed like easy enough work, if a bit boring. I was nervous that there was something more to it, but I told myself I would just have to see. No point in chickening out and wasting a good chance because I let my imagination go crazy. I was given the location of the job itself, and when I went there, I was amazed that it really was just like the model room I had been shown with only a few differences. There was a locker room you had to pass through to enter the surveillance room and there was a small bathroom attached to the real surveillance room also. The real room had a small water cooler in the corner, but because I wasn’t allowed to bring anything in with me, I had to eat before or after every shift. The biggest difference, of course, was that the monitors were turned on.
The right monitor was just a black and white terminal like you see in movies some times. I could type in my logs, but no internet to look at or anything like that. The left monitor…
It was video from a room. You would call it a bedroom I guess, because it had a bed in it, but it had lots of other stuff too. A T.V., a sofa and chairs, a couple of tables, and plenty of empty space in between. The camera must be high up in a corner, because I could see pretty much everything except for the far sides of furniture. At first though, I didn’t notice any of that stuff.
All I saw was her.
She looked to be a little older than me and was very pretty. When I first saw her, she was laying on her side on the sofa. That was the part of the room farthest from the camera, but the picture was very clear and I could tell that she was sleeping. I found myself leaning into the monitor more so I could see her better, and then I thought about what I was doing and felt embarrassed. It’s like I was spying on her. A Peeping Tom, my mom used to call it.
I didn’t want to be a Peeping Tom, but I didn’t want to be silly either. I needed to think about it slow.
It was a good job. And I wasn’t doing anything wrong, right? I wasn’t hurting anybody. The woman looked fine. And the room was nice. She probably agreed to be there and it’s all some experiment or something. I was just overreacting.
So I sat down in the chair and began my work.
It didn’t take long before I understood more. The woman, I took to calling her Rachel, wasn’t there of her free will. I never saw her hurt, but it was clear that she never left that room except to go into what I think is a bathroom area that my camera couldn’t see. Well, she never left the room on her own. Periodically, usually a couple of times a week during my shifts, men and women in strange-looking outfits would come in and take her from the room. Sometimes she would struggle, but usually she would just go along with her head hung low.
They would always bring her back, though the times when she wasn’t brought back during my shift were always the worst for me. I would worry about her until I got to work the next day and saw her in the room watching T.V. or painting. She never looked hurt or even that upset except for when they took her, and even when she fought, they were always gentle with her.
Still, I knew something was wrong. I considered quitting the job, or hitting the red button and getting someone to come so I could get some answers. Or calling the police and showing them what the camera was showing me.
Except I was scared. Scared of losing my job, and scared of what these people might do to me if I quit or told on them. Solomon had told me when I took the job that part of being discreet was not asking questions. I would never be asked to do more than I had already been told, but I could never tell anyone what I did or saw, and I could never ask questions about what I was doing or why.
So I made excuses. It was all an experiment. She was crazy or sick and they were trying to help her. She was doing a job just like I was. Or if she really was a prisoner somewhere, at least I was watching to make sure that she was okay. If they ever tried to hurt her, or I saw that she really didn’t want to be there for sure, I could get help then. In a way, I told myself, I was helping to protect her by watching.
I don’t expect you to think much of my excuses. I don’t think much of them myself, especially now. But in my defense, when things changed, I didn’t ignore it or try to explain it away. I knew something had to be done.
Rachel would usually paint for an hour or two every day, and it seemed to always be during my afternoon shifts. The room had no windows as far as I could tell, but I guess she either used a clock or her own body’s time to keep to a kind of schedule. I always liked to watch her paint—the thing she was painting was always facing the wrong way for me to see it, but I could see her face as she worked. She always looked peaceful and happy when she was painting, and seeing her that way, smiling serenely from time to time as she got something the way she wanted it, always made my day.
I first noticed something was wrong when she started painting more frequently a few weeks ago. Her expression was more focused and serious, and there was a tension to her movements that I wasn’t used to seeing. At first I thought she was just really trying to work hard on something, and I wanted to tell her not to worry. Every few weeks the others would come in and take the old paintings out anyway, bringing in a new stack of…I think the word is canvas.
But it was more than her being focused. Something was wrong. She didn’t look happy and she was going for hours at a time. In the span of three days, she had finished four paintings.
I had been growing more and more worried watching her work, and when she finished the fourth, I found myself telling her to just stop and rest awhile. I had grown accustomed to talking to the monitor, talking to her in my own way. But she didn’t stop. Instead she began moving the paintings. Arranging them on the back and seat of the long sofa at the far end of the room.
This was the first time I had gotten to see any of the paintings. Even when the others were taking them out, they always seemed to be turned away from the camera. I was still worried about her, but I was also happy to finally see something she had worked on. Happy and amazed.
They were beautiful. One was a beautiful green forest. Another was an old stone well. A third was a house sitting alone on a small island. The last was an old-fashioned looking movie theater. All of them looked like something out of a dream, with trailing lines of color mixing in the air around them like leaves caught in a wind. It was only when I looked close that I realized the lines of color weren’t random. They were words. Easy to miss if you weren’t looking close, and by themselves, they didn’t seem to mean much. Just the ghost of a word somewhere in each of the paintings, easy to lose in everything else that was being shown.
I leaned into the monitor and squinted, trying to read the words. Then my heart started thudding as I made them out. Blinking and rubbing my eyes, I looked again, reading them out loud in order—left to right, top pair then bottom.
“Please.”
“Help.”
“Me.”
“Thomas.”
I pushed back from the monitor, my hand over my mouth. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how any of this could be happening. It wasn’t just that she was asking for help, though that was a big part of it.
It was that my name is Thomas.
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Credits
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