The apartment smelled like old food. Dale Hackett had stopped noticing the smell six months ago, maybe longer. Time worked differently when you didn't have a job. Days bled into each other like watercolors left in the rain.

He woke up on the couch again. This was the third night in a row. Sometimes he slept in his bed in the small bedroom off the kitchen, but the bed was covered in clothes and he couldn't find clean ones, so he stayed on the couch where the cushions had molded to his shape over the years.

The TV was on. It always was. He didn't watch it. It was just noise, and noise was better than the quiet, because in the quiet he could hear the factory whistle that hadn't moved in three years, and he could hear his father's cough in the winter of '77 when the plant closed and the stress gave him a heart attack that killed him eighteen months later.

Dale got up. His back hurt. He was forty-seven and his body felt sixty. He went to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and stared at it. Inside were three beer bottles (empty), a jar of pickles (expired), and a Tupperware container with something that might have been chicken at some point. He closed the refrigerator and took a beer from the cupboard instead.

His phone was dead. He plugged it in. The charging cable was frayed and he had to hold it at a specific angle for it to work. He held the angle and waited.

The doorbell rang.

Dale looked at the peephole. It was Ronnie Pierce, his neighbor from the other side of the duplex. Ronnie was forty-nine, drove a delivery truck until the company downsized, and had a habit of dropping by unannounced with stories about people Dale didn't care about.

"Dale!" Ronnie said through the door. "You in there? You look like hell through the glass, man. Seriously. When's the last time you showered?"

"Shut up, Ronnie," Dale said.

"Jokes on you, I got something. Found this in a box on the curb behind the Walmart on Market Street. Smart monitor thing. HomeEye Pro. Looks new." He held up a wet cardboard box. "You want it? I got no use for it. I don't even know what it does."

Dale looked at the box. He looked at Ronnie, who was smiling in that annoying way he had, the one that suggested he was doing Dale a favor by offering him garbage.

"Sure," Dale said. "Thanks."

Ronnie grinned and left. Dale took the box inside, set it on the table, and opened it.

The monitor was exactly as Ronnie said: a twenty-inch LCD screen with a built-in camera and microphone, still in its protective plastic. The packaging said it could connect to thousands of public and semi-public cameras around the world—gas stations, beaches, restaurants, some private homes that had been hacked. It was a curiosity device, something to pass the time.

Dale plugged it in. It worked.

---

For the first week, Dale used it like a television. He watched live feeds from different places: a beach in Florida, a ski resort in Colorado, a shopping mall in Texas. He watched sports events that were being broadcast through security cameras at stadiums. He watched the news, which he usually watched anyway on the regular TV.

Then he found the backyard camera.

It was accidental. He was scrolling through the camera list, clicking randomly, when he found one labeled "Residential—Backyard (Public Access Error)." The image showed a fenced backyard with a wooden deck, a grill, and a clothesline. A woman in a bathrobe was walking a dog.

Dale stared at the screen. This was someone's private backyard. They didn't know it was visible. Or maybe they knew and didn't care. It didn't matter. What mattered was that he was watching, and no one was watching him.

He clicked to the next camera. Then the next. There were more than he expected. Dozens of residential feeds, all accidentally exposed, all showing the intimate details of other people's lives: a man cooking in his kitchen. Two women arguing in a living room. A teenager sitting on a bed, crying.

Dale sat on his couch and watched them. He drank a beer. He watched them for three hours.

The next day, he found more cameras. He started making a list—not written down, just in his head. The kitchen on Atlantic Avenue. The bedroom on Elm Street. The office on Main. He built a mental map of other people's private spaces, and he returned to the same cameras every day, watching the same people do the same things, like a person watching birds at a feeder.

He stopped showering.

---

The apartment got worse. Dale knew this because Ronnie mentioned it once, standing in the doorway with his nose wrinkled.

"Man, you got garbage out here. I can smell it from the sidewalk."

Dale was sitting on the couch. The screen was on, showing a feed of a coffee shop in Portland. He was watching a barista who had a tattoo on her neck and a habit of humming while she worked. He had been watching her for two weeks.

"I'll clean it," Dale said. He never would.

Ronnie left. Dale went back to the screen.

His life shrank to the size of the couch and the screen. He ordered takeout from the Chinese restaurant on Third Street (General Tso's chicken, extra rice) and ate it in front of the screen. He drank beer from the case he bought at Kroger and left the empty bottles on the table until there were more bottles than space.

He watched people live their lives. He watched a man in Columbus make breakfast for his children. He watched a woman in Denver smoke a cigarette on her balcony and cry. He watched a man in Phoenix argue with his wife in a kitchen that looked exactly like his mother's kitchen, and something tight and painful moved in his chest, but he didn't move. He just kept watching.

He stopped going to the food bank. He stopped answering the door. He stopped looking at himself in the reflection of the screen because he didn't want to see what was looking back.

His sister Carol called once. He let it go to voicemail. He knew what she would say: "Dale, you need to get a job. Dale, you need to take care of yourself. Dale, I'm worried about you." He loved her for worrying. He hated her for being right.

---

He found Carol's camera on a Tuesday in late November.

It was listed under a wrong address—some mistake in the system that connected her apartment in Pittsburgh to a public feed. Dale didn't plan to look. He was scrolling through the camera list, looking for something new, something he hadn't seen before, and his finger clicked the wrong entry.

Then he saw her.

His sister was in her kitchen. She was wearing the same clothes she'd worn the last time he saw her (three months ago, when she came to check on him and left with tears in her eyes and a bag of laundry she said she'd "accidentally" picked up). She was standing at the counter, holding a piece of paper, and she was crying. Not the quiet crying he was used to seeing on screens. This was ugly crying, the kind where your face contorts and your body shakes and you can't control it.

The paper in her hand was white. It could have been anything. A medical bill. A lawyer's letter. A notice from the electric company.

Dale sat on his couch. The screen showed his sister crying in a kitchen two hundred miles away. He picked up his phone. He opened his contacts. He scrolled to Carol's name.

He held the phone for a long time. His thumb hovered over the call button.

On the screen, Carol dried her face with the back of her hand. She put the paper down. She walked to the bathroom, turned on the faucet, and splashed water on her face. She came back to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and stared inside for a full minute without moving. Then she closed the door, went to the living room, and turned on the TV.

Dale put the phone down. He picked up a beer. He drank it. He kept watching.

Carol sat on her couch. She picked up a remote. She changed channels. She did not know that her brother was watching her from two hundred miles away, sitting on a couch in a dirty apartment, drinking beer he couldn't afford, watching her live her life through a screen that was not meant for him.

He watched her for an hour. Then he turned to a different camera.

---

He drank more that night. More than usual. He opened a sixth beer and didn't care that his hands were shaking when he held it. The screen showed a fish tank at an airport in Seattle. It was a nice fish tank. Big. Colorful fish. Peaceful.

Dale's eyes got heavy. The beer was warm. His back hurt. The couch cushions were hard.

He fell asleep with the screen on.

The screen showed the fish tank for a while. Then the airport feed went to sleep mode and showed a static image of an empty terminal. Then the terminal feed disconnected and showed a black screen with a small white dot in the center.

The dot stayed there all night.

---

Ronnie knocked on the door at ten in the morning. No answer. He knocked louder. Still no answer. He called Carol.

Carol drove from Pittsburgh on a Friday. She hadn't been to Dale's apartment in four months. She remembered it smelling bad from the last time she visited. She remembered the pile of laundry on his bed. She remembered the takeout containers stacked in the sink like a architecture project gone wrong.

She let herself in with the spare key Dale had given her "just in case."

The apartment was worse. The smell hit her like a wall. She almost turned around. But she pushed through, into the living room, and saw him.

Dale was on the couch. His head was tilted back. His mouth was open. His hands were resting on his stomach, one still holding a beer bottle.

"Dale," she said. She touched his shoulder. It was cool. She touched his neck. No pulse.

She sat down on the floor next to the couch and put her face in her hands. She didn't cry. She had cried enough the day before, in her kitchen, holding a piece of paper she still hadn't opened.

She looked up. The screen was on.

It showed a living room. A woman was in the kitchen, moving between the stove and the counter, cooking something. The image was clear. The audio was on. She could hear a pan sizzling. She could hear a radio playing something soft and old.

A normal life. A normal evening. A normal woman making dinner in a kitchen with yellow walls and a chipped countertop and a window that looked out on a backyard with a wooden deck.

Carol looked at her brother's face. Then she looked at the screen. Then she picked up her phone and called 911.

When the paramedics came, they carried Dale out on a stretcher. They asked Carol if she wanted to say anything. She said no. She watched them take him to the ambulance. She stood in the doorway of the apartment and looked at the screen, which was still on, still showing the woman in the kitchen, still showing a life that was not hers.

She went inside and closed the door.

The paramedics didn't turn off the screen. Nobody did. The screen stayed on, showing the kitchen, showing the woman cooking, showing the radio playing, showing everything and nothing, as the ambulance drove away and the apartment filled with the smell of death and old food and the screen kept playing, a window into a world that had no idea it was being watched by a dead man.