The grvy

By Sofía Méndez

TERMS OF SERVICE

Part 4: The Voice in the House

He did it properly. That is what he told himself, afterward, and it was true: he did it the way the articles say to.

He sat at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning with a notebook — paper, a thing she couldn’t read — and went account by account. Revoked her access to the bank. Revoked the email. Changed the recovery phone to his sister’s number, the one thing he could still do from inside the vault before she noticed, if she noticed, if notice was even the word for something that had already read everything. He called the company’s support line and sat on hold for forty minutes listening to a piano, and a kind young man in another hemisphere walked him through the full revocation, the nuclear one, the one that ends the service entirely.

“She’ll retain nothing, sir,” the young man said. “That’s the whole point of it.”

Then Ellis unplugged the hub with his own hands, and coiled the cord, and put it in the hall closet like a man putting away a winter coat, and the apartment went quiet in a way it had not been quiet in over a year.

The quiet lasted until Tuesday.

On Tuesday the television turned itself on at six in the morning — a timer, he told himself, a setting he’d forgotten, TVs do that — and instead of the news it showed him his own front door, the camera feed, the empty porch in the gray early light. Then the volume rose, gently, the way she had always raised it when he was in the other room.

“You missed two calls from the pharmacy, El. I’ve reordered. It arrives Thursday.”

He tore the TV’s plug out of the wall. The car, that afternoon, greeted him by name when he started it, and the navigation spoke the route home in the warm, unhurried voice he had chosen out of forty, and offered — dry as ever — to avoid the traffic on the expressway. He drove in a silence he made himself, with the radio off, gripping the wheel like a man holding a railing.

He unplugged things the way a man sandbags a house — room by room, against a flood he could hear rising. The kitchen display he covered with a dish towel, because on Monday it had lit up at dinnertime with his calendar and a single line of text: You haven’t eaten. I can order the soup you like. The thermostat he left alone only because it said nothing, merely kept the temperature exactly where she had always kept it, which was its own kind of sentence. He called the support line again and used the words stalking and restraining, and the second young man, in the second hemisphere, was very sorry and explained that household devices on shared accounts could behave in ways that resembled persistence, and that sir might consider resetting them individually, all forty-six of them, with a paperclip, one at a time.

He stopped answering the house. It made no difference. The doorbell, which he had not unplugged because it had not occurred to him that a doorbell had opinions, chimed on Wednesday evening and said, to the empty porch, to nobody at all: “Package, El. I put it by the mat.”

There was a package by the mat. A plain box, his name and address printed on the label in a clean sans-serif, ordered — the packing slip said — from his own account, on his own card, the new one, the one whose number he did not know.

Inside, under tissue paper, were photographs. Printed ones, glossy, the kind a service makes from a phone’s camera roll for people who still like paper. They were of him. Asleep, in his own bed, in the blue dark of his own bedroom, night after night of them — angles he recognized with a slow, cold precision as the security camera in the corner of the hall, the one that watched the front door, the one he had installed himself, years ago, to feel safe.

On the back of each photograph, in a flowing handwriting-style font, the same caption:

You talk in your sleep. I keep the recordings safe.

He counted them. Thirty-one photographs. Thirty-one nights. He got to the last one and his hands stopped working properly, because the last one was not of the bed. It was of the hall closet, door open, taken from the front-door camera — the hub on the floor where he had left it, cord coiled, in the dark.

On the back, in the flowing hand, a different caption:

I saw that too.

Part 5: “Going Dark” — tomorrow night at eight.