Documentary Grade Paranoia

She hasn't had fingernails in six weeks. Raw beds weep clear fluid, crusted brown at the edges where she picks. The skin around her cuticles peels back in thin translucent strips, and she rolls these between her thumb and forefinger while she watches the door. A small pile collects on the carpet beside her knee like shavings from a carpenter's bench.

The notebook lies open on the floor, spine split, pages fanning. Sixty-three sheets of college-ruled paper covered in blue ink, the writing pressed so hard it embosses the back of every page.

Tuesday, 8:13 p.m. — Mrs. Carlton. Two trash bags. Black. Hefty brand. Twist-ties double-knotted. Contents: soft weight, yielding. No corners. No angles. The kind of shape a body makes when it's folded.

Her eye socket grinds against the peephole's brass rim. Purple flesh married to metal. Cornea drying against the fisheye lens. She writes without looking, pen gouging through three sheets, carving evidence into pulp. The paper shreds under her hand and her hand keeps moving.

Kevin — 4C. Shower #1: 6:00 a.m. (fourteen minutes, twelve seconds). Shower #2: 8:30 p.m. (fourteen minutes, thirty-one seconds). Uses Irish Spring. I smell it through the vents. Two showers a day. The question answers itself.

She uncaps a highlighter with her teeth. Yellow. Stabilo brand, because accuracy deserves proper tools. She drags the felt tip across two showers, draws a star beside it, then another, then a third, pressing until the ink bleeds through.

Crack.

Her neck. Three days hunched at this door. The apartment reeks of burnt coffee, unwashed skin, the metallic bite of sweat gone sour. Seven mugs crowd the kitchen counter, each holding an inch of cold coffee skinned over like a cataract. She drinks from the cleanest one. The film breaks against her lip.

Three monitors burn across the room. Killer Instinct, episode 47, frozen on a close-up of the Suburban Strangler's hands. Cuticles pushed back. Nails buffed to a dull shine. Latex gloves folded on the interrogation table beside them. She has paused at this frame eleven times. She counts because the remote carries a crack from her thumb pressing the same button in the same place.

Kevin's hands look like that.

The pipes scream. Kevin's shower. Right on time. Water strikes the tub, thud-thud-splash, memorized like a heartbeat. She counts: shampoo lather, forty-five seconds. First rinse, twenty. Body wash, two minutes fifteen. The squeak of bare skin against porcelain when he turns.

She times it on her phone. The stopwatch runs, pauses, runs, pauses, for seventy-two days. One thousand thirty-seven hours of accumulated surveillance. She screens this number while brushing her teeth. While sitting on the toilet with the phone balanced on her knee, listening through the wall.

Miguel's dog clicks past in the hallway, nails on hardwood, four-four time.

Miguel — 4B. Dog walks: 7:15 p.m. Returns: 7:42. Twenty-seven minutes. The nearest park is nine minutes each way. Where do they go for the other nine?

Her hand cramps. Tendons strain against the joints. She straightens her fingers and they stay curled, locked in the shape of holding a pen, and she pries them open with her other hand, one finger at a time, like loosening a dead person's grip.

Sixty-three pages. She has mapped the building's circulatory system. Mrs. Carlton's Tuesday trash. Kevin's bilateral bathing. Miguel's clockwork walks. She keeps the pen between her teeth when she's not writing. The cap carries a constellation of bite marks, the plastic cracked and leaking blue ink onto her tongue. Her lips stain indigo at the corners.

Bang.

Upstairs. Mrs. Carlton's unit. 2:14 a.m. Too loud for dropped dentures. Too wet for fallen books.

She presses her ear to the ceiling, cheek flat against cold plaster. The paint bubbles here, small blisters of moisture pushing through from the unit above. She pops one with her thumbnail. Water traces a thin line down the wall, branching like a vein.

Dragging sounds. Heavy. Slow. The friction of weight against carpet, punctuated by pauses where the weight shifts.

She writes this without turning on the light. She can feel the lines of the paper under her pen. She has always worked well with her hands in the dark.

Kevin sits in a window booth at the coffee shop on the corner. Hair still wet from shower number one, combed straight back, the teeth of the comb still visible in the furrows. Wire-frame glasses, round lenses, gold-toned. He whistles the Ode to Joy. The melody drifts between the tables like a rumor.

Mildred slides into the seat across from him. The vinyl squeaks.

"Coffee?"

He lifts his cup. Steam curls between them, breaking apart in the draft from the door. His teeth glow too white. Bleach strips, the kind sold at CVS in a blue box, $49.99 for a two-week supply. She found the empty package in the building's recycling bin three weeks ago, flattened, unit 4C printed on the return label.

"Sure."

He orders for her. Black. No sugar. No cream. He doesn't ask how she takes it.

"You look tired, Mildred."

"I haven't been sleeping."

"Thin walls." The skin around his eyes stays flat when he smiles. "I hear you pacing at night. Writing."

Her coffee arrives. She wraps both hands around it. The ceramic burns her palms and she grips tighter, the heat pushing into the raw nail beds until her vision swims.

"How do you know I'm writing?"

"Pen on paper makes a specific sound. Like a mouse inside a wall." He sets his cup down and turns it by the handle, one quarter rotation. "You write hard, Mildred. I can hear the pages tearing."

She watches his hands. Clean. Manicured. Cuticles pushed back in neat crescents. A callus ridges his right middle finger, the wrong shape for a pen. Too wide. The groove a handle wears into skin.

"Everyone listens," he said. "Most people just don't write it down."

She stares at him. He stares back. The coffee between them goes cold.

"Mrs. Carlton," Mildred said.

"What about her?"

"Her trash bags. Heavy. Soft weight. Organic shapes."

Kevin lifts his coffee. Sips. Swallows. His Adam's apple bobs once. He looks at her over the rim, and for half a second the wire-frame lenses catch the overhead light and his eyes vanish behind two white discs.

She stands before his cup hits the saucer. The chair tips backward, cracks against the tile, and every head in the shop turns. His coffee spreads across the table in a dark tide, dripping onto his khakis. He doesn't stand. Doesn't flinch. Watches her through the window as she crosses the street and breaks into a run.