The Room on the Card

The camera I bought had a price sticker over the part of the box that called it a baby monitor. I peeled the sticker back in the store aisle to check the specifications. No wireless connection. No cloud storage. A microSD card, a small screen, and a battery rated for twelve hours.

The clerk asked whether I had a baby.

“No,” I said. “I have a room.”

He nodded as if that explained more than it did and rang it up.

At home, I read the manual twice. The camera had a motion-detection mode, but I turned it off. I wanted continuous recording. Motion detection would make a decision about what mattered, and I had already had enough help with that.

I set it on the highest shelf, angled down so it caught the bed, the door, and my computer desk. The small screen showed the room in a slightly greenish tint. I walked through the frame, sat on the bed, and waved both hands. The camera recorded all of it. I removed the card, checked the video on the camera’s screen, then put the card back.

There was no network to disable. There was no account to sign into. I checked the box for a hidden microphone and found none. It still felt like I was trusting a machine because its manual said I could.

The footage from Morrow Cup sat on my phone. I watched the man with my face turn toward the entrance camera again. The clip looked worse on a small screen. I enlarged it until the pixels broke up, then closed it.

That image could have been me. It could have been a person who looked enough like me to make a tired employee certain. It could have been a recording with a time offset. The careful answer was that I did not know. I kept finding myself at the edge of that answer, looking for somewhere to put the word impossible.

I set the camera to record at ten and put my phone on the kitchen counter. The old sleeping medication was still in the bathroom cabinet, in its original bottle. I checked the label and took the dose I had been prescribed. I did not want to be clever about the test. If I stayed awake watching the room, I would only have another account of what I thought I saw.

My computer was off but still plugged into the wall. I considered unplugging it. Then I looked at the camera’s screen, where the monitor sat in the corner of the picture, and left it alone.

I went to bed.

I woke to pale light through the curtains and the dry feeling the medication always left behind. For a few seconds, I did not remember the camera. Then I saw its status light and got up too quickly, catching my knee on the bed frame.

The recording was still there. I removed the card and watched the first few minutes on the camera screen. Me entering. Me checking the door. Me lying down. The image was grainy but stable. I stopped and put the card in my pocket.