It was the first time Braden Chapman had seen her.

She lived in apartment 713, one building over, across the street.

An elderly Jewish man had lived there before her.  Dozens of photographs from the Holocaust had hung on his apartment walls, specters of a haunted past.  Braden had watched the old man slowly wither away in that apartment, each day giving a little more of himself to images ingrained in his mind.  A poem called “The Past Is Tomorrow,” based on the old Jew and his photographs, had come almost effortlessly to Braden.  Then a month ago, the old man had died.

Braden had written this in his notebook:

Forty years of nightmare specters,
Of rictus masks, of degradation …
Still breathing on and on through time.
Now he sleeps …
Side-by-side with nightmares past.
Because without the one …
There cannot be the other.

Now those same sad walls held paintings by Quinn and soft air-brushed photos of dancers in leotards, and they were brighter walls, because now 713 was her apartment.

Braden peered again through the Linitron telescope that was set on a tripod in front of his living room window, twenty-floors above the San Francisco streets.  It was nearing seven o’clock on a Wednesday night.  Nightfall had darkened the sky above the city, washing away the dirty gray walls, bringing forth the brightly-colored neons that painted buildings in spurious facades.  Sometimes when he looked out over the city it seemed as if nothing were real, as if everything were one illusion draped brightly over another.  No substance, just glitter.

The new tenant in 713 stretched.  The soft, air-brushed dancer in the photo on the wall behind her seemed to shadow her slow movements, reaching ceilingward, arching her back, then slowly lowering her arms again.  She wore white, skin-tight leotards that were absorbed by the contours of her slim body as she moved.  Her limbs were long and graceful, delicate and wing-like.

Braden looked up from the telescope, thinking how different she was from the old man who had lived there before her, what a contrast of character the two of them made.  One old, one young.  One rigid, one flexible.  One living in the past, one living for the future.

He took a notebook from the bookshelf next to the window, folded back a page of penciled doodles and disjointed notes.  On a fresh page he wrote: statute dancer, liberty chancer.  Thinking for a moment, he circled the words dancer and liberty, then tapped the tip of the pencil against those two words because there was something there he thought he might be able to use, but it wasn’t clear to him.  Not yet.

When he looked up again, she was gone.  He waited to see if she might return, and when she didn’t he wrote at the top of the notebook: Golden Gate Apartments, 713.  6:53 pm.

=====[2]=====

You do something long enough, often enough, it becomes almost a compulsion.  Like absently sitting through “Survivor” or “Joe Millionaire,” too weak of mind or will to turn the television off or at least change the channel.  You do it because it’s something you’ve grown comfortable doing, because it requires so little of you.  The television was always on in the apartment.  It kept Braden company.  But it wasn’t the television that drew him.  It was the telescope that was his compulsion.

Braden stood at the window, a cup of coffee in hand, and stared out across the city night.  Up and down the nearby apartment buildings lights had begun to go on.  Behind every one of those lights was a story.  He downed the last of the coffee, placed the mug on the windowsill and sat on the stool behind the telescope.

The dancer in Golden Gate 713 wasn’t home.  The young couple in Aladdin 1620 was in the kitchen making dinner.  The UPS driver in Montgomery 322 had just arrived home to a hug and kiss from his wife.  The recently-divorced woman in Golden Gate 918 was curled up on the couch beneath a quilt, watching television.  The man in Aladdin …

A cold shiver rode up Braden’s spine on a shot of adrenaline.  He rose up over the telescope and gazed across the street with his naked eyes.  The Aladdin was buried in nightshades of black and gray shadow.  Oddly out of focus and dream-like without the telescope.  Couldn’t be, could it?  He peered through the Linitron again, and yes, it was true … the man in that Aladdin apartment was looking back at him, through a telescope of his own.

The notebook slipped off Braden’s lap.

Caught looking where you shouldn’t have been looking.

Braden sat up again, his heart feeling as if it might explode out of his chest, out into the stale apartment air.  Someone was watching him.  Someone was …

The phone rang suddenly, and Braden nearly fell off the stool.  He made a grab for the receiver before it could ring a second time, and came away with it trying to remember who lived in that Aladdin apartment, what the man looked like, what he did for a living.

“Braden?”  It was his sister, Diane.  “You quit saying hello when you answer the phone?”

“Sorry,” he said quietly.  “I was distracted a moment.”

Across the street, the Aladdin stared back at him through hundreds of window-eyes.  Dark, shadowy pupils.  Fluorescent sclerae.  Each eye looking so much like the next that for a moment he nearly lost track of the one that had rattled him.

“I think someone’s watching me,” he said with.  “Across the street, in the Aladdin.  Through a telescope.”

“You’re kidding?”  Diane laughed.  Her voice was always free, light as a song, but sometimes it could sting, sometimes she would break out laughing without even realizing what she was doing.  “Feels different when you’re on the other side, doesn’t it?”

Braden moved around the telescope and stood at the window.  He counted … six floors up from the street, across the face of the building right to left, past the marquee, to the sixteenth window.  “He’s just sitting there, watching me.  Like he’s waiting for something to happen.  Why’s he watching me?”

“Maybe because you were watching him,” his sister said.  She sounded faraway.

“Yeah, maybe,” he said absently.

“You need to get out, Braden.  Get yourself a girlfriend.  See the world without looking through that damn telescope all the time.

It was easy for Diane.  She was three years older than him.  Outgoing.  Friendly.  Sure of herself.  Everything he wasn’t.

“You can’t cocoon yourself inside your apartment forever,” she said.  “It’s not good for you.”

“I know.”  He couldn’t take his eyes off the sixth floor, sixteenth window.

“You aren’t hearing a word of this, are you?”

“I just don’t get why anyone would be watching me.”

Diane let out an audible sigh.  “I called to get you know there’s a PBS documentary on graffiti tonight.  Ten o’clock.  Thought maybe you’d find it interesting.”

“I’ll try to catch it.”  Vacantly, Braden replaced the receiver.  The call had seemed more dream reality, and he put it out of his thoughts almost immediately.  He stepped back behind the Linitron, leaned forward, and checked to see if he was still being watched.

The Aladdin apartment was gray and black shadow, lighted by a single table lamp in the background.  City lights glimmered briefly off the telescope’s lens.  The figure behind the telescope was standing, not sitting.  His face was buried in shadow.

Barely able to keep his hands from trembling, Braden gazed through the lens, hoping to get a decent look at his counterpart.  After awhile, with little success, he gave up and closed the living room drapes.  The television was one, a rerun of “CSI.”  He plopped down on the couch, drawn instantly into the story.  At the commercial break, he got up and went to the window to see if he was still being watched.  The stranger hadn’t moved from behind the telescope.  He raised a hand and waved.  Braden closed the drapes again, the breath emptying from his lungs.
He would get up and check again at every half-hour commercial break until well after midnight when the light in the Aladdin apartment would finally go off.

Then Braden would turn off the lights in his own apartment and go to bed.

He would leave the television on.  He always left the television on.

=====[3]=====

The watcher was back again the next morning.  Even in daylight, with the sun nearly overhead, he was a faceless, almost formless dark shadow.  Not a person now—did he eat or sleep?  Did he go to the bathroom?  Empty his bladder?  His bowels?—but a thing.  Like a guard from one of those old Holocaust photographs that had been mounted on the walls of Golden Gate 713.  Not human at all.  Just a mindless thing.

Braden took in a sharp breath, then closed the drapes.  In his underwear, he sat in the recliner in front of the television in the living room, his notebook open in his lap.  CNN was on, mostly for the background noise.  When Diane pestered him about the television being on all the time, he would tell her it kept him company.  But that was only part of the truth.  The rest of the truth was this: the television had to be on.  He was its audience.

In his notebook, Braden wrote:

They’re watching.
A thousand midnight eyes.
Looking out,
To see who’s looking in.
Past magnifying lens.
Past iris, green and blue, brown and hazel.
Past dilated pupil.
Inside.
Because they want to know who’s in here.
Where darkness is mute, silence is black.
Where secrets are kept.
But it’s not the thousand midnight eyes I fear.
It’s only your eyes.
Because you know.

He stopped, pen in hand, then scratched absently at a rash that had broken out on his forearm sometime during the night.  He thought there would be something more of the poem coming—maybe something about how frightening the unknown could be—but it never seemed to gel and after awhile it didn’t seem to matter.  All that really mattered were the two eyes he knew he’d find looking back at him if he peered out the window at the Aladdin apartment across the street.

=====[4]=====

Braden knew he was different.

He had no roots.

He had been raised in a small southern Oregon town, where his father did handyman work and his mother sold homemade crafts at a local crafts mall.  They were honest, hardworking people who stayed to themselves.  When Braden was seven, his father had died in an auto accident.  Later that same year, his mother had died from pneumonia, refusing to go to the doctor until it was too late (Diane had always believed she’s let herself die, unable to go without their father, and Braden had thought she was probably right).  It had been a long succession of foster homes after that.  Some good.  Others a nightmare.

Diane had learned to copy by getting along.  She became what one foster mother had termed a “social butterfly,” involving herself in as many activities, making as many friends, as possible.  Braden, on the other hand, had withdrawn into the safety of himself.  He began to live on the fringe.  Observing.  Making notes.  Feeling safest when he was alone in his room.  Making certain he never grew too attached to other kids of new foster parents because those relationships never lasted.

Nothing lasted forever.

He had learned that much.

=====[5]=====

It was 6:40 p.m.

Daylight was slipping into dusk.

The lights were off, the apartment darkened except for the dim glow emitting from the television.  Braden sat on the stool behind the Linitron, the notebook in his lap.  The curtains were drawn around the eye of the telescope, blocking out the last of the sun, and more important, hiding him from the view of the watcher.

It had become a game now.

The watcher and the watched.

Braden scratched at the rash on his arm.  It had spread up past his elbow; he thought it might be an allergic reaction to something he’d eaten.  The heart of the rash was a bright red, like a sunburn, except moist.  Around the edges, the skin had been turning gray, around the gray … white.  Absently, he rubbed the side of his pen around the edges of the irritated area.

A heaviness had settled over him.  He thought it was the emotional strain beginning to take a toll.  What if the watcher never stopped watching? he wondered.  What if this went on for a week?  A month?  Longer?  Or worse—because a quirky kind of expectation was growing inside him now—what if the next time I pull back the curtains, there’s no one watching?  What then?

That was how crazy he was beginning to think.

All along the block, streetlights flickered, then buzzed on.  It was closing in on 7:00.  Night shadows were beginning to fall impressionistically across the faces of the buildings.

Braden leaned forward, put his eye to the telescope again, this time looking in on the dancer in Golden Gate apartment 713.  There she was … one leg propped up on a chair, her arms reaching high overhead then slowly descending downward until her fingers were nearly touching her toes, her face touching her knee.  She was beautiful, her movements graceful, yet she seemed different tonight.  In the past, when he had watched, her body had seemed as if it could do anything she willed.  But tonight, she seemed …

Somehow less flexible.

Not quite as open or free.

Almost arthritic.

Next to the word liberty, which Braden had written the night before, he penciled in the word flexible, and under that, arthritic.  In a way he couldn’t quite identify, it was as if she were becoming like the old man with the photos of the Holocaust on his walls, succumbing to something within herself.

Braden wrote: The apartment: what if there’s something twisted and evil inside the apartment?

Funny how sometimes you looked past the obvious.  There had been a handful of times when he had sat back in his chair and wondered if he were watching the old Jew slowly collapsing into himself.  The man had survived death camps, had stood eye-to-eye with the glowering face of death.  Could you ever be free of that sight again?  Maybe the Holocaust had haunted him until he could no longer resist its stare.  Then after it had taken the old man, maybe it had made its home in that Golden Gate apartment, where the beautiful young dancer filled her lungs and stretched and danced in its cold breath.

Braden wrote:

Whose breath has filled these old, bare rooms?
What air has grown stale here?
Taken in from ancient Egypt, from German Reichs and evil minions.
Sent out again to drift through time, through moons and years and generations.
Who’s filled his lungs with this stale air and what it holds?
What has it done to those unenlightened souls?

=====[6]=====

His dream that night was a nightmare, and he couldn’t quite remember it by the time he got out of bed the next morning.  Those were the worst nightmares, when he couldn’t remember them clearly.  Those were the ones that were trying to tell him something he didn’t want to hear.  They were the ones that always kept coming back.

He went through the routine of getting dressed, brushing his teeth, taking note of how much farther the rash had spread.  Something was wrong, he could no longer deny that.  The discoloration covered all of his left arm now, and half his upper body.  There were bits of flesh around the edges that looked as if they had been charred … black and flaky and dead.  No pain, though.  That was only thing keeping him from a visit to the doctor.

Braden splashed water on his face, stared at himself in the mirror, and thought about Golden Gate 713.  Death had been at the soul of that old man.  Fifty years ago, he had weaved himself a protective cocoon, only to emerge surrounded by a gallery of horrible memories.  They had become a part of him by then.  The same way the fear of growing old had become part of the young dancer who had taken his place.

An unveiling was going on down the street from him.

Not because there was something magical about the Golden Gate apartment, but because anytime you watched something close enough, long enough, a natural unveiling took place.

The nightmare was starting to come back now.  He couldn’t see clearly.  Everything was buried in dark shadow.  He had to squint to see his reflection in the bathroom mirror.  A Schick disposable razor was in his right hand.  A thick fog of steam rose from the sink.  He felt a need to hurry.  Don’t want to miss the young dancer, because she’s going to start aging tonight.  She’s going to stretch out to touch her toes and the skin’s going to loosen, then wrinkle, then start flaking off her arms like dandruff.  The razor felt heavy, like a scythe.  He placed the blade against his cheek, took a long, slow swipe and … a sweeping sheath of flesh came away.  Underneath, there was … nothing.

A black hole.

No muscle, cartilage, bone.

Nothing.

Then Braden had started to scream.

=====[7]=====

Now, he pulled back the living room curtains and stood in front of the window, looking out.  It felt as if it had been a long time since he had last seen sunlight.  Across the street, the Aladdin apartment was buried in morning shadow.  The sky, the shadows, even the city itself, held a cool purple impression that reminded him of late fall mornings along the beach when he had been a boy.  Those were mornings when he had felt as if he were the only person left on the good earth.  Lately, that sense of solitude had come back to him, spent a day or a week, sometimes even a month with him.

Through the lens, the Aladdin began as a grayish-white blur, like an indistinguishable thunder cloud against an already-gray sky.  He focused.  The gray-white tint darkened, and he could see the dull aluminum frame around the window.  A reflection of light from somewhere on the street below glinted off the glass as if it were a mirror.
Braden felt his stomach tighten.

He cupped his hands around the eyepiece, and saw the dark outline of the man standing behind a telescope, looking back at him.  Braden took a deep breath.  His counterpart took a deep breath.  Because our breaths … they’re one and the same, aren’t they?

Puzzled, Braden rose up and looked across the wide city divide.

What was it that bothered him about this guy?

He looked through the Linitron again, and caught a glimpse of the man’s face this time, his first glimpse, and the man looking back …

The man looking back was his twin.

Except the Braden Chapman in the Aladdin had no eyes.  He rose up and looked back across the wide city divide through two huge holes, black as night, endless as the universe.  The side of his face was covered with a patch of redness, peeling gray around the edges, pasty white around the gray, like a dry sugary crust.

=====[8]=====

It wasn’t until after nightfall when Braden was finally able to reach Diane by phone.  Sometimes during the day—he couldn’t remember when—he had stripped off his clothes and was naked now, pacing back and forth in front of the living room window.  There were little bits of dry skin flaking and falling off him like fluttering white butterflies.  His notebook sat open on the chair.  Across the yellow paper he had scribbled the hard-to-read words: an empty soul.

“You believe in yin and yang?” Braden asked.

“What goes around comes around?” Diane said.

“More like everything has a certain balance, a certain symmetry.”

“Never gave it much thought.”

“And the soul … you believe in the soul?  That we all have some part of us on the inside, buried beneath the flesh and bone, that’s the real essence of who we are?  Something that carries on after we die?”

There was a long pause on the other end.  “Are you okay, Braden?”

“Just answer the question, goddammit!”

“You need me to come over?”

“No!”  He glanced out the window, across the street in the direction of the Aladdin.  It was all city lights and neons out there.  No substance at all.  Just glitter.  When he couldn’t look at the night any longer, he forced himself to face his reflection in the living room window.  He was shedding his skin like a snake, one flaky layer at a time.  Underneath, he could see raw patches of tissue.

“Braden?”

“No,” he said again, softer this time.  “No need to come over, sis.  I’ll be all right.”

“You sure?”

He thought for a moment, not about her question—he wasn’t sure of anything anymore—but about what was happening to him.  “You ever think what I do is wrong?”

“What do you mean?”

“Looking at the world through my telescope.  Being a spectator instead of a participant.  If you really think about it, what I do is feed off people.  Sometimes I wonder if that’s because deep down inside it’s empty, there’s nothing for me to draw on.  So I feed off others, and they suffer for it.”

“Where do you get this garbage, Braden?”

It wasn’t garbage.  He was sure of that much.  “Guess maybe it sounds a little weird.”

“You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine, honest.”

“I can come over.”

“No, really.  There’s no need.”  He asked her about how her day had gone, about what she had done over the weekend, about her newest boyfriend, and several other polite, superficial questions.  After that Braden said goodbye.  When he hung up, he found himself standing all alone again in the living room.  The window looking out over the world, his world.

The stool behind the telescope was cold when he sat down.  Across the street and down the block, in Golden Gate 713, the dancer would be going through her stretching exercises soon.  A little older tonight than last night.  Because anytime you watch something close enough, long enough, a natural unveiling takes place.

The flaking had spread over his entire body now.  He brushed a hand across his thigh, watched a storm of white, dead skin kick-up, and noticed a small spot where the last layer of flesh had finally peeled away.

Much longer and there wouldn’t be anything left of him—like there hadn’t been anything left of the old man after he’d caught the gaze of death during the Holocaust.

Around the edges of the raw spot there was a fillet of dying skin.  Braden took a pinch of it, pulled gently, started to peel back the final layer of himself.

Anytime you watch something close enough …

It was going to be dark under there.

A black abyss.

Endless.

Because that’s what emptiness was like.

Because for Braden Chapman, there was nothing left in the world he wanted to see.