Sanctuary

CCTV cameras were positioned in every nook and cranny of Wren’s lilliputian apartment, one of hundreds observing the brain injured residents of the mammoth Michigan Semi-Independent Living Center. Remy’s first task, as a volunteer, was to perform a remote health and safety check on patient Wren. He punched up her apartment and was rewarded by the monitor wall streaming feeds from every camera in her apartment. Remy controlled everything with a joystick. He scanned Wren’s living room for signs of living.

Patients didn’t typically hide or hightail it when the red camera light began blinking, indicating monitoring in progress. If patients knew Remy was behind the camera, they liked to tease him. Pantomiming sex acts to embarrass him. Doing real life bong hits. Anyway, there was no reason to hide. As a volunteer, Remy wielded zero disciplinary power. That’s what separated them. That and the head injuries. Also, Remy liked to think he was visually discernible from the White Coats, who ruled by fiat and script pad; or from the “Behavioral Techs,” who kept patients in line with threats of isolation and invisible acts of violence. Painful, but no marks. He selected the “God’s Eye View” camera.

Remy had streamed enough Hoarders to recognize the warren of a packrat. Wren’s apartment bore the clinically recognized symptoms; the agreement of nine-out-of-ten-psychiatrists; and the textbook signs of childhood mental illness stemming from trauma – compounded by a catastrophic car accident. God’s Eye blazed static.

Swap cameras. Push deeper into Wren’s nest. Remy paused at the kitchen. His viewfinder captured streams of what he could best describe as sculptures, stacked shoulder-to-shoulder like the Terracotta Warriors of Xi’An. Each was birthed with the help of non-perishable rubbish: newspapers, magazines, spent devices, paint cans, junk mail, milk crates, et al. Pulling back, Remy saw another Roman-style keystone arch, fabricated using the byproduct of Wren’s lust for pizza. Years of Little Caesar’s pizza yielded Wren an incomprehensible number of boxes, which were her primary source of materiel. Remy could really go for a slice right about now.

He was beginning to see that Wren was more than a hoarder. She was an artist of sorts. Sure, she might be a tad mental, but weren’t all artists? What if, instead of being a hoarder, she just needed a bigger studio space?

Some artists used paint or clay. She treated each Little Caesar’s box with reverence because it would become part of her work. The condition of Wren’s apartment could be the physical manifestation of her rehab; evidence of a hard-working, brain – creating fresh neural pathways around the damaged. Rehab wasn’t in her vocabulary. (No, that’s not a shitty joke.) Wren believed herself much closer to independence than the White Coats. Remy panned to the bedroom door.

Under another pizza box arch, this one sagging sorrowfully in the middle, Wren’s bedroom door appeared.

Snake CAM: towers of pizza boxes and stacks of consenting whatnot, Remy spotted the glitching television under the bedroom door. Pushing in, he saw pilasters of yellowed magazines, a couch of duct-taped shoeboxes, the coffee table a work in progress – her apartment was a different reality. On her dresser, a shrine: a Jesus Saves candle illuminating photos of her completing each step of recovery and rehab to date.

Candy wrappers littered the sticky floors like autumn leaves gone glutinous. Plastic bags brimming with still more plastic bags were hung from the ceiling like Potemkin clouds. Yet, still more unrecycled bags blew about the apartment like urban tumbleweeds.

Bedroom cam: dirty plates were stacked high on her television, the common dish seemed to be rancid cartons of what, in their previous incarnations, were take-out Chicken Vindaloo. Following the stack of dishes to the floor, Remy was rewarded with a glimpse of Wren. She lay on the floor, legs crossed. She crossed and uncrossed them like she had to urinate, minus the urgency. There was rhythm to her rhyme. The monitor blinked red: Wren’s pulse went feral. Her face still frozen inches from her phone. She was passive, chilled despite what Remy imagined must be the chaos reigning her mind. He pushed in as far as the camera allowed and saw Wren holding a phone. She was captivated. She changed angles and was finally rewarded with a perfect view…he snaked closer. Wren was watching Remy in the Security Office. As Remy was watching her. Watching Remy.

Swap cameras again, this time with a mirror in the frame. I could see Wren watching me as I watched her. Through the looking glass of her phone, I could see myself peeping her. While she peeped me right back. The feeling reminded me of being in a restaurant with mirrors on every wall, where you could see infinity wherever you looked.

Remy’s eyes went wide in shock. Breathless. There he was on the monitor wall, one big picture of his head and shoulders with the wall of security monitors behind him. Lit professionally, this could have been a magazine cover or an advertisement for a future where a pernicious Big Brother policed your every move.

As the fates occasionally benevolent whims would have it, Wren worked security in her previous life. She had installed more surveillance cameras in more offices than she could remember (again, not a shitty joke). Within Wren, lay the will to live despite the obsession to create sculptures out of Little Caesars boxes. She felt ten times dumber than the people around her. That’s why she had backed up her own memories by surreptitiously installing dozens of her own cameras in the building, including in the sanctum sanctorum of the Security office, where she had a front row seat to everyone’s movements – including her own. In this way, she worked to make her memory full again. Just now, she was watching Remy. Just watching him. Watching her. Watching Remy back. She had one-upped Remy without even trying. He felt unimaginably violated. And impressed.