The Other Side

I slowed the recording until the four minutes facing the wall took nearly an hour.

At normal speed, my body had seemed motionless. In the slowed version, the camera’s automatic exposure made the image pulse every few seconds, brightening the wall and then dulling it again. My outline stood in the same place, arms at my sides. I watched the position of the shoulders, the angle of the head. Nothing changed.

I stopped the video and enlarged the audio track.

The camera had a cheap microphone, mostly useful for picking up the room’s hum. I had expected to hear the refrigerator and traffic. Instead, the waveform showed three small peaks at 2:13:06. They were too faint to hear through the laptop speakers. I raised the volume and played them again.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The sounds were dry and close. I checked the recording before the interval. The refrigerator made a steady low buzz. A pipe clicked once at 1:52. The three taps were different: spaced evenly, with no rumble underneath them.

I played the section again, this time with headphones. After the taps, there was a pause of four seconds. Then came a soft scrape.

I returned to the video and advanced it one frame at a time. My right hand had moved. Barely. The fingertips shifted inward, then held still. I had missed it on the first viewing because the movement was smaller than the camera’s compression artifacts. I looked at the clock. The hand moved three times, each movement just after one of the taps.

I sat back from the screen.

The body had been facing the wall. The recording showed nothing there. But it had answered.

I wrote down the timestamps and checked the rest of the interval. At 2:14:21, the same sequence happened again: three quiet taps, a pause, then the slight motion of my fingers. The sounds were fainter this time. I had to remove the room noise with a filter to make them clear. The taps had not come from the body. The microphone was on the camera, four meters behind it. They sounded as if they came from the wall.

I shut the laptop and went to the studio.

The building manager had left the entry code in a message after I asked to retrieve a cable. I used it, let myself into the narrow hall, and stood at the studio door with the key in my hand. The room was quiet. I could hear the elevator machinery through the concrete floor.

Inside, the bed had been stripped. The white tape was still marking the center of the mattress. The glass stood on the table where I had put it that morning. I set my bag down and went straight to the wall.

It looked the same as it had during the test: off-white paint, one faint gray scuff near the baseboard, no pictures or shelves. I measured the position from the bed. My body had stood about a hand’s width from the wall, facing a blank patch just above my eye level.