Kaleb Nation: Harken

“So yeah,” my mom said. “ Tammy is waiting. Your sister might afford Harvard after all.”

“It’s not Tammy, it’s Mrs. Milo.” I spat. “She’s the only one with our house number.”

“Either way, take care of it.” She shrugged. “ Eye Guy .”

She tossed the phone to me and started to leave, but turned back to glance around the room again. Perhaps a quick eyeball of my stuff for weapons of mass destruction was enough to make her feel like she was doing a better job of parenting. There were stacks of lights with cubical diffusers, tripods freshly knocked over, two or three cameras and a shelf holding lenses lined up like a cabinet of drinking glasses. This was where most of my birthday and client money went: that shelf of glass and tubes I used to take pictures.

These, however, were hardly noticeable when placed against the most obviously unnatural part of the room. Almost every inch of every wall was covered with photographs, going along the edges of the furniture and even onto the ceiling around the wobbling fan. They were pasted up carefully with double-sided tape; their edges lined up as perfectly as a ruler—my best photos from my countless albums and computer folders. The crinkled edges of the papers made it look like the old house was peeling, and the splattering of color and black-and-white rectangles sometimes took the form of a mural.

Every picture was of a person: men and women and children, old and young, of every ethnicity I’d come across in LA, captured through the lens of my camera. They were all portraits but none had names, because the names didn’t matter to me, most of them cropped from the neck up. I didn’t really care about their faces so much either; what was important were their eyes. Most people might have easily thought it was just an art project, something I did to convince myself that I was unique and creative. But it was far more than that. This was my life of study: my Great Work .

Or maybe they were more proof to the world that I really was a fine, budding psychopath. The phone beeped to remind us someone was on hold. My mom lingered but I refused to answer the phone while she was still there. She huffed.

“On my way out.” She disappeared and I swung the phone up to my ear.

“It’s Michael.” I got to my feet and nearly tripped over my blanket that had fallen to the floor in my sister’s mini-skirmish. The aged house creaked under my feet.

“Michael!” came the voice of Mrs. Milo. I sighed—of course it was her. She’d been my teacher in fifth grade, but now she worked in the office at my high school. Like the game Duck Duck Goose , there were many things I wished I could have left back then.

“Have you done something to Tammy?” I asked.

“Listen, there’s no Tammy,” she whispered, words racing in her native Alabama drawl. “I didn’t want your mother to get suspicious or anything, so I faked an accent.”

“She knows who you are,” I said. “You call here a lot. It’s getting creepy.”

I glanced at the caller ID. “You’re calling from a Tammy’s number. Please tell me—”

“It’s my cousin’s phone,” she said. “I figured when you didn’t return my calls you might have accidentally blocked my number.”

“That feature is commonly activated by accident.” I wrestled with my jammed dresser drawers. “Now I’ve got to get ready for school, and I’m sore from a car crash, so—”

“I need you to do one more check of my husband,” she whispered frantically. “He didn’t come home until three AM last night. Lately he isn’t home at all. Like he’s avoiding me.”

“No idea why anyone’d do that,” I thought aloud.

“I have a bad feeling,” she burst. “I think he’s running off with some other woman.”

“I already told you he isn’t,” I replied. “We did this last month, right? Remember?”

“But it’s worse now,” she insisted. “He’s going out for golf Thursday evening. I want you to come with me. I’m gonna go surprise him. You can snap a picture of him from the car when he sees me. I’ve got it all planned out.”

“I’m busy Thursday.”

“With what?” she asked wildly.

“I’m recording snail sounds,” I said, exasperated. “Come on, you’ve already gotten me to look at eight photographs and I’ve met him three times. I’m sick of seeing the man.”

“I’ll pay more,” she said. “I’ll double your rate.”

“No.” Doubling the rate wouldn’t help me when it ended up as my sister’s money.

“I’ll…I’ll get you a new camera,” she begged. This offer stood for 0.03 seconds and I hadn’t declined it. She leapt onto it as her chance.

“The one with the most megapixels!” she blurted. “I know you love megapixels!”

Her bribes weren’t swaying me, though they were tempting. It wasn’t money, so that was a loophole in the The Rules, right? She sounded so distraught I knew she’d soon be selling her house to pay private investigators if I didn’t put her mind to rest.

“Fine,” I relented, slamming the drawer shut. “Don’t bother me after then.”

“Not once,” she said. “And if he’s cheating, I swear I’ll do it quick, with a tire iron or—”

I hung up before she could incriminate me any further. Adults—that was still a strange type of work. It wasn’t like I advertised. Word of mouth had just gotten around with the people at school, and then that had spread to me needing a website so people didn’t show up at my house. My reputation of being right was too solid for them to resist knowing the truth. Not long ago, I’d only been approached by classmates at my school. But adults? Their secrets wrecked more than just social lives.

This was how sturdy my confidence in my skill was. There were no mistakes, ever. I’d lived with it long enough that it didn’t feel odd—it was just a part of me, the same way that some people could pull a train with their teeth or other could gauge distances miles away down to the inch. I knew eyes. I didn’t know the parts—the lenses from the pupils from the zonular fibers. I knew eyes. Girls would bring me photographs of their boyfriends and I could see if he loved the person who took it, or secretly hated her, or had secretly cheated on her and didn’t regret it and was planning to break up with her that afternoon. Business owners would have me lurk at an opposite table in a coffee shop while they met with potential investors so I could detect any hints of treachery.

And that was the true nature of my Great Work. Because the photos on my walls weren’t just pictures of people’s faces lined up in no particular order. If everyone could read eyes as I did, they’d see just how plainly sorted they were. In those eyes—every single one of them—I could see exactly what the person had been thinking and feeling at that moment, printing their Glimpse on paper. With the careful attention of a scientist, I had divided emotions onto my walls. Joy , next to my bed. Sadness , going around the door so people couldn’t see them when they first walked in. On the wall with my desk were pictures of eyes showing Anger , and across from that were photos of Fear —those faces had a way of disguising themselves, but I could see straight through that. My ceiling, patchiest from missing the most pieces, had photos of faces showing Love . Eyes of love are the hardest to find. Love is the emotion most-often faked.

One day, when my walls were finally covered, I planned to take all of them down and turn them into a book. I’d have every human emotion ever expressed in it, and show the world just how many shades there were between them. Like primary colors mixing, joy and surprise might be relief , or sadness and love could be bittersweet . Maybe then my obsession wouldn’t seem so crazy.