Surveillance

By Louis Kasatkin

Louis is editorial administrator at www.DestinyPoets.co.uk and founder of Destiny Poets and in his spare time is a civic, community, political activist, blogger and general nuisance to the status quo!
Louis Kasatkin


He watches the lives of others through the end of a telephoto lens.
It's 5:42 a.m. on an ordinary suburban housing estate and he's been squatting for the past 6 hours in an unmarked delivery van when he catches a fleeting glimpse of a window-framed face. The same face that's appeared at the same time at the same window on each day that he's been here.
Parked in the driveway of the house opposite, he's taken on the role (at least in his own imagination), of ethnographer studying and recording for academic posterity the esoteric habits and rituals of an hithertofore unknown indigenous society.
He records in the neatest handwriting the ephemera of the lives of others.
Their daily routines timetabled in line-ruled pocket notebooks of which he keeps more than sufficient under his seat.
Outside his ethereal realm as disembodied observer, in the lives of others a telephone rings.
Its receiver is lifted. It's followed by a rush of silence.
He adjusts his earphones and enters a menacing voicelessness.
The spools of his tape-recorder engage.
"Click, click " as though a conductor is tapping his baton bringing an orchestra to order.
There is to his mind a haunting absence of noise. When telephones ring and their receivers are lifted, conversations follow. Except when they don't and he catches another fleeting glimpse of the window-framed face that he saw just a few minutes ago.
Inexplicably, the receiver is replaced,
"Click“. The tape-recorder stops.
It's 5:52 am and across the city in a sound studio on the fourth floor of an otherwise unremarkable office building the voices he'd captured less than 24 hours ago are on playback. Their rhythms and cadences mimic the lives of others.
They hear him listening to them, listening to him listening.
Observed. Recorded. Collated. Analysed.
"Click".

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