National Pornographic

It starts as a joke.

Miller High Life sweating through napkins. O'Malley's on Wisconsin. The kind of bar where the urinal cakes smell like nostalgia and the bartender's been dead for three years but nobody's told him yet.

Jake leans forward. Samsung Galaxy reflecting off his pupils. Three missed calls from Mom.

"You know what'd be funny? Like, if we made National Geographic, but for porn."

The words hang there. Formaldehyde in the air. Mark peels the label off his bottle. Budweiser. Red white and blue coming apart under his fingernails.

"Yeah, like, we could do those wildlife voiceovers. Talk about the mating habits of, like... people. Just film them going at it. Call it National Pornographic."

Silence.

Then laughter. The kind that echoes in police stations at 4 AM.

No one says don't.

Two weeks. Jake's MacBook Pro. Retina display. AppleCare+ because he's careful about the wrong things. The cursor blinks. Black screen. Helvetica Neue: Exploring the mating rituals of the modern homo sapiens.

NationalPornographic.com. GoDaddy domain. Cloudflare protection. All the infrastructure of modern violation wrapped in Terms of Service nobody reads.

Mark shows his Canon 5D Mark IV. Telephoto lens. 70-200mm f/2.8. The kind wildlife photographers use for lions. Jake runs Final Cut Pro. Color correction plugins. Noise reduction. Professional tools for amateur sins.

I handle logistics. The spreadsheets. The schedules. The sight lines. The ethics... or the cavity where ethics used to live before we scooped them out with a melon baller.

The plan is pure: We don't ask. We just film.

This is how it starts.

The Petersons

First marks. Two doors down. Crate & Barrel welcome mat. Live, Laugh, Love in cursive on their kitchen wall. The kind of people who have throw pillows they're not allowed to use.

Tuesday. 9:17 PM. We're testing equipment. Rode VideoMic Pro. Manfrotto tripod. Everything professional. Everything wrong.

Through their window: a marriage in cross-section. She's reading Eat, Pray, Love for the third time. He's on ESPN.com checking fantasy football stats. Eighteen inches between them on the West Elm couch. Continental divide measured in throw pillows.

9:34 PM. She closes the book. He closes the laptop. They look at each other like strangers remembering they used to be friends.

The camera rolls.

What happens next takes seven minutes. Lights off. Mechanical. She counts ceiling fan rotations. He thinks about his secretary. Both wondering when sex became another chore between emptying the dishwasher and checking the smoke detector batteries.

Jake adds the voiceover later. David Attenborough if David Attenborough had a stroke and woke up believing in nothing: "Here, we observe the elusive male in his natural habitat, performing the ritual known as 'settling.'"

Upload button. Progress bar. A fuse burning toward something.

First comment: thirty-seven seconds. "Fucking hilarious."

Second: forty-one seconds. "Real life is porn."

Third: forty-five seconds. "Can't wait for the next one."

View counter: slot machine physics. Jake refreshes. Refreshes. Refreshes. His thumb developing a callus.

This is how it spreads.

The Girl in 3B

Brittany. Though we don't know her name yet. Just 3B. Georgetown Law hoodie. The kind that costs two hundred dollars and comes pre-stressed to look authentic. Sallie Mae statements stacked like suicide notes. Adderall prescription. Thirty milligrams. Extended release.

Half-eaten Sweetgreen salads create a graveyard on her desk. She studies until the words blur. Constitutional Law. Torts. Criminal Procedure. Learning to defend a system she's already drowning in.

10:47 PM. She stands. Stretches. Removes the hoodie.

Jake adjusts the lens. Zeiss glass. German engineering perfected during wartime. She's unconscious of her body the way only beautiful people can be. No performance. No awareness. Just existing in space like she owns it. Or like it owns her.

Mark takes the mic: "Here we observe the solitary female, a creature of habit, performing her nightly grooming rituals. Notice the absence of a mate, a sign that her species has adapted to thrive in isolation."

He laughs. I laugh. The sound tastes like pennies. Like blood. Like the future.

She moves through her routine. Cetaphil cleanser. The Ordinary retinol. Drunk Elephant moisturizer. Three hundred dollars of skincare for a face that will age anyway. Checks her iPhone. Instagram. Tinder. LinkedIn. The holy trinity of modern loneliness.

Takes two melatonin.

Masturbates to something on her laptop. Quickly. Efficiently. Like solving an equation that has no solution.

Sleeps.

We upload.

Comments metastasize:

"Dude, the grad student is HOT."

"She's so real, like, not fake like the Instagram models."

"More of her, please." "

What's her @?"

"I think I know her."

That last one. Jake screenshots it. Deletes it. But we all saw it.

This is how it escalates.

Static

Three weeks in. Fifty thousand subscribers. Discord server. Subreddit. Fan art. The ecology of violation fully formed.

But something's wrong with the footage.

Tuesday: Static in the corner of Brittany's window. Just a flicker. Like someone else is watching.

Wednesday: The Petersons' video has a shadow that doesn't belong. Human-shaped. Wrong angle for the streetlight.

Thursday: Audio picks up breathing that isn't ours.

"Probably just interference," Mark says. But he's checking the locks. ADT Security. Schlage deadbolts. All the theater of safety.

Jake's editing when he sees it. Frame 4,847 of the Peterson video. Reflection in their TV. Behind us. Someone standing in Jake's apartment.

Behind. Us.

We check the footage. Rewind. Play. Rewind. Play.

Nothing.

Frame 4,847: Empty.

"I swear to fucking—"

"It's nothing."

But Jake's already ordering new locks. Nest cameras. Ring doorbell. Building a fortress against something already inside.

4D

Apartment above Jake's. We hear them through the ceiling. Voices carry through drywall like confessions through priest screens.

She throws something. Ceramic. Wedding china maybe. He responds with silence louder than screaming.

"You're just like your fucking mother!"

"At least my mother didn't fuck the pool boy!"

"He was a lifeguard, and nothing happened!"

"Right, nothing happened. Just like nothing happened with Brad from accounting. Or Steve from the gym. Or—"

The sound changes. Voices to bodies. Anger to something else. They fuck like they're trying to break through to something true beneath all the lying.

The ceiling fan rocks. Dust falls. Jake films the shadows. Rorschach tests in real-time.

Mark's voiceover, flat as roadkill on Arizona asphalt: "The alpha male asserts dominance after a territorial dispute, while the female responds in kind. A ritualistic act of aggression masked as intimacy."

We upload at 3 AM.

By 6 AM: hundred thousand views.

By 9 AM: quarter million.

By noon: news aggregators picking it up. "Viral Website Documents Real Couples" "Is 'National Pornographic' Legal?" "The Dark Side of Voyeur Culture"

Jake's phone vibrates. Unknown number. Doesn't answer. It vibrates again. Again. Again.

Text message: "Check frame 7,235."

Frame 7,235: The man from 5C. Standing in the corner of 4D. Watching them. Watching us watch them.

But that's impossible. We filmed this from below. He can't be in their apartment. He can't—

The Watcher

5C. Gregory Walsh according to the mail we've stolen. Sorted. Replaced. Comcast bills. AARP newsletters. Condolence cards from three years ago. Wife's name was Linda. Cancer. The slow kind.

We set up surveillance. Real surveillance. Not our amateur hour bullshit. Motion sensors. Infrared. The works.

Monday: He waters a dead plant.

Tuesday: He watches TV that isn't on.

Wednesday: He stands at his window. Six hours. No movement. No blinking. Taxidermy with a pulse.

Thursday: He's gone.

Friday: He's back. Standing at the window. But facing the wrong way. Facing into his apartment. Like he's watching someone behind him. But the apartment's empty. We checked. We've been watching. The apartment's empty. The apartment's empty. The apartment's—

Saturday: Jake's editing. Finds something. Our footage. But not ours. Same angle. Same subjects. But filmed three days before we started.

"That's impossible."

But there it is. Time stamp. Three days before we bought the camera.

Mark checks the metadata. Created: Three weeks ago. Modified: Three weeks ago. Accessed: Right now.

"Who the fuck—"

Greg's at his window. Holding a sign. Printer paper. Sharpie marker.

"YOUR TURN."

Jake zooms in. Greg's not holding the sign. It's taped to the window. From the inside.

Greg's behind us.

This is how fear tastes. Like copper. Like electricity. Like tomorrow already happening.

The Ending

Drunk. Mezcal. Dos Hombres. Breaking Bad branded.

"What if we did someone we know? Like, really know."

Jake's reaching for his laptop. Stops. The screen's already open. Browser window we didn't launch. Our site. But wrong.

New video. Posted three minutes ago. We didn't post it.

Thumbnail: A woman at a vanity.

Jake's hand freezes over the trackpad. "That's not—"

Click.

His mother.

Through her bedroom window. Sixty-three years old. Silver hair she won't dye because "God made me this way." Humming. Baptist hymns. The kind you learn before you learn doubt.

Cold cream. Ponds. The same brand since 1974. Removes makeup in circles. Counterclockwise. The same motion she used to clean Jake's face when he was small. When she was young. When his father was alive.

The timestamp: Three months ago.

Then: Two months ago.

Then: Last month.

Then: Last week.

Then: Yesterday.

Then: Tonight. Two hours ago. While we were drinking. While we were here.

"What the fuck?"

"It's just content."

But Jake didn't say it. The voice comes from the video. Jake's voice. Edited. Spliced from our recordings.

"That's your mom."

Mark's voice now. From the video.

"It's just content."

"Jake—"

My voice.

"It's just fucking content."

All our voices. Frankenstein-ed together. The watcher's been listening. Recording. Learning our patterns.

The video keeps playing. Jake's mother, night after night. Praying. Crying. Calling Jake's phone while he ignores it. Looking at photos of Jake's dead father. Taking Ambien. Xanax. More than prescribed.

One clip: She's at her window. Looking out. Directly at the camera. Like she knows. But behind her, in the mirror, another reflection. Someone in her room. Watching her watch the watcher.

The comments arrive instantly. But they're all from the same user:

"Dude, your own mom?" - GregoryW_5C

"This is some next-level shit." - GregoryW_5C

"You guys are sick. I love it." - GregoryW_5C

"Is she single?" - GregoryW_5C

"MILF."

"I know her. She teaches Sunday school at First Baptist." - GregoryW_5C

"I've been watching her longer than you've been alive." - GregoryW_5C

That last comment. Jake stares.

Refresh. Site changes. New design. Professional. Our logo but different.

Hundreds of videos. All tagged with dates. Going back years.

Jake age fifteen: masturbating.

Jake age sixteen: first girlfriend.

Jake age eighteen: the accident he never reported.

Jake age twenty-one: buying Adderall from Mark.

Jake age twenty-three: installing cameras in his girlfriend's apartment.

Mark's videos. My videos. Our parents. Our sisters. Our exes. Our—

Text appears on screen. Helvetica Neue. Our font.

"Check your subscriber count."

We check. One subscriber. Username: TheOriginalWatcher.

New video uploads. Automatic. We're not doing it. It's uploading itself.

Thumbnail: Three men at laptops.

Title: "Episode 1,247: The Boys Who Think They Watch"

The video starts. It's us. Right now. This second. Jake clicking play. Mark dropping his phone. Me backing toward the door. Real-time.

But the angle's wrong. It's from inside the apartment. Multiple angles. Cutting between cameras. Professional.

"Here we observe three young males, discovering they were never the predators. They were always the prey. Notice the dilated pupils. The increased heart rate. The primal recognition that they've been content since birth."

Jake turns around. Slow. Like he already knows.

Cameras. Everywhere. In the smoke detector. The outlet. The ceiling fan. The mirror.

Red lights. All blinking. All recording. All streaming.

This is how it ends.