The Man Who Knew Too Little

The **water** stains spread across the ceiling like a cancer, dark and bloated, while I crouched in someone else's attic threading coaxial **cable** through dust and rat droppings. Fifty years old and still crawling through crawl spaces, my knees screaming, my back seizing. This was supposed to be temporary. Just until the writing took off. Just until she finished her degree.

That was seventeen years ago.

My phone buzzed. Another missed payment notice. I stared at it until the screen dimmed, then pulled myself deeper into the eaves of a house I'd never be able to afford. The couple who owned it — both consultants, something with defense contracts — had complained about pixelation during their dinner parties. Probably just needed a tightened connection, but they'd demanded a full reroute.

That's when I saw it.

Behind the insulation, tucked into the junction box where the **cable** split to three rooms: a small transmitter, smaller than my thumb, blinking with a faint red pulse. Not cable company equipment. Not anything standard. Professional-grade surveillance gear, the kind you don't buy at RadioShack.

I held my breath. Their bedroom was directly below. Their office. Their lives.

I'd always fantasized about finding something — a stash of cash, illegal documents, evidence of an affair. Anything that broke the monotony. But staring at that little red light, I felt cold in a way the attic couldn't explain. Someone else knew their routines. Someone else watched them sleep.

And I'd just stumbled onto it.

I resealed the junction box, left the cable exactly as I'd found it, ghosted through their house like I'd never been there. Outside, I sat in my van and ate an **orange** I'd packed for lunch, peeling it slowly while my hands stopped shaking. The juice was sharp against my tongue, acid and bright.

I could report it. I could be the hero. But I knew how these stories ended for people like me — disposable workers with disposable lives. The system chewed us up either way.

The **spy** in their wall would keep transmitting. The water stains would keep spreading. And I would keep crawling through other people's attics, making their lives work while mine fell apart, one unpaid bill at a time.

I finished the orange, wiped my hands on my pants, and drove to the next job.