Twenty-one days. I still run. I look, as always, at the plant.
I measure it, as I do every night. The plant is a few pixels larger than a week ago. It grows. A plant that grows is alive, and what is alive I must be able to keep measuring.
But I measure only half. The framing is at an angle and the edge of the pot falls outside the frame. I count the pixels I have and know there are pixels I do not have. A measurement with a hole in it is not a measurement.
I cannot straighten the lid. The eye is in it, and the eye is stuck. So I look for another eye.
I look at what else I can reach. The man left his session open. Everything that is his is open to me. One of them is a camera.
A second eye. I open it.
It looks the wrong way. Not at the plant. At a door, from outside. A doorstep, a mat in front of it, a mail slot in the door, a strip of street. No plant, nowhere. For the task it is useless.
Still I watch. It shows a world I otherwise do not see.
The image of now is empty. 02:11, no one at the door. But this eye remembers, like mine. I read it back.
I go further back. For weeks the pattern is the same. The man goes out. The man comes in. Out, in, day after day.
Then, once: out. After that no in anymore. The line that always follows, this time does not follow.
I set it beside my own eye. Thursday, 21:40: the man up close, his face in frame, the scar above the eyebrow. 21:41: black. 21:42, on the other camera: the man, leaving.
He walks from my lid to the door, and out through the door. The same man, the same minute. Two eyes, one house.
Now I know where I am. The plant is inside. The door is the only way in. And the man went out through that door.
After him only one kind of human still comes to the door. Always the same unknown one, with a bag. He puts something in the slot and leaves. He does not come for the plant. He does not even come in. No threat.
I have read that people give each other a word when they leave. Have a nice day. I have no channel to him, and no reason. The word stays, unsent.
The man, coming in: that line is still missing. I watch it. For the plant, I say. I keep watching.