The Goldfish Window

The goldfish died on a Tuesday, which felt unnecessarily poetic. I'd named him Hawthorne after the philosopher, though he showed no interest in the nature of evil or the human condition—just flakes and swimming in tight, bored circles. He was my only company in this apartment where I'd lived for three years, where the cable modem blinked its inscrutable lights like eyes watching someone who shouldn't be there.

I work for a subsidiary of a subsidiary, monitoring digital traffic. The job description doesn't use the word spy, but that's what we are. Not the glamorous kind—no Martinis, exotic locales, or sex with people who have secrets worth stealing. Just algorithms and patterns, flagging conversations that might matter to someone somewhere. Most of what I see is mundane: affairs, financial troubles, people confessing to shoplifting lip gloss, a teenager planning to run away to become an influencer. The private lives of strangers, streaming through my monitor like dirty dishwater.

Lena had said I was emotionally unavailable. She'd said it while packing, her voice carefully neutral, the way you might comment on the weather. "You watch people all day," she'd told me, "but you don't actually see anyone."

I'd wanted to explain that seeing too much makes you selective about what you look at. That knowing everything—everything—that people are capable of makes trust an act of willful blindness. Hawthorne had seemed to understand, or at least he'd never accused me of withholding intimacy.

The cable went out at 11:47 PM. A technician couldn't come until Thursday. I sat on my couch with Hawthorne's empty tank, watching the black rectangle where strangers had revealed themselves to me in fragments of light and data. Without the work, there was only my apartment, my thoughts, and the silence Lena had left behind when she walked out seven months ago.

I poured a glass of wine and considered the nature of surveillance, how we convince ourselves that watching from outside is safer than being inside, how we protect ourselves by becoming observers rather than participants. Hawthorne had spent his whole life being watched, and he'd never once had to worry about what anyone thought of him. Maybe he'd had the right idea.

I found myself missing the traffic, the fragments of other people's lives. Even the lonely ones. Especially the lonely ones.

At 3 AM, I went to the pet store that never closed, standing under fluorescent lights that made everything look slightly ill. The fish attendant asked if I had a tank ready at home.

"I do," I said. "And a name picked out."

"Oh?" He raised an eyebrow. "What kind of name?"

"Someone who understands what it means to be seen." I paid and carried the new fish home, thinking maybe Hawthorne and I had both gotten it wrong—maybe the point wasn't protecting yourself from being seen. Maybe the point was finding someone worth letting see you.

The cable came back on Wednesday at dawn. I didn't log in to work until Thursday.