Things I Move Before I Click

It is past midnight and the radiator is still pushing out that stale heat it keeps long after I've stopped wanting it. I open the preview window first, before anything else, because I like to see what I look like to no one yet. And there it is: the cable shadow. A thin dark line laid across my neck like someone drew it there. The charger cord, dangling from the desk edge, throwing a shadow that makes me look like I've been marked. I don't like it. I move the cord. The shadow slides off my throat and onto the wall where it can do whatever it wants.

Then the angle. The laptop sits too high and the camera looks up at me, which is the worst, the up-the-nose hour-of-the-werewolf angle. I lower it. Not with anything proper. I have two paperback novels here, soft and bent, and I slide them under the front edge of the laptop so the screen tilts back and the camera comes down level with my face. The books are the kind you buy in an airport and never finish. They hold the weight fine.

The pharmacy bag is in the frame. White, crinkled, the receipt still stapled to the top, and I don't want a stranger reading my errands off a bag, so I take it off the desk and put it on the floor behind me where the camera can't reach. It makes a sound when it lands. Plastic settling. I notice a gray sock under the desk while I'm down there and I leave it. Some things are not for tonight.

Now the permissions. Knot.chat asks for the camera and the microphone the way every one of them does, polite little boxes, and I sit with the settings longer than I probably need to. Camera yes, because that is the whole point of the thing. The microphone I turn over in my head. I leave it on but I lower the system volume on my end first, some private superstition, as if a quieter speaker means a quieter me. It doesn't. I know it doesn't. I do it anyway.

Then I test what they could hear. I tap the desk. I say a word into the room, just one, my own name said flat, and I watch the little level meter jump green and fall. The radiator clanks once. That would carry. The pipe in the wall does its slow tick. That would carry too. I hadn't thought the room had a sound until I went looking for it. There is a chipped green bowl near the keyboard with lemon cough drops in it, the waxy yellow ones, and when I shift it the wrappers crackle and the meter twitches. So that's a sound I make without meaning to. I move the bowl an inch further from the mic. Not away. Just further.

The name field. I go and look at it. The thing I'd typed in once, half a year ago maybe, some name that isn't my name but is close enough that it bothers me now to see it. Three letters off from the real one. I change it. I make it nothing, a word that points at no one, the kind of name that could belong to anybody at this hour. It feels better immediately and I distrust that it feels better, but I keep it.

There's a torn coaster on the desk, the cork kind, a crescent missing from one side like something bit it. The printer behind me is unplugged — has been for weeks, the cord coiled on top of it like it gave up. A loose key sits by the mousepad, brass, belonging to a lock I can't picture anymore. The calendar on the wall is turned to the wrong month. April, when it isn't April. I keep meaning to flip it and I keep not flipping it, and tonight, framed up there over my shoulder, it would tell a stranger nothing true. I almost reach for it. Then I think, what does it matter. Let them think it's April. Let them think anything.

I check the frame once more. The radiator heat is making the back of my neck damp. Everything that could say something about me has been moved or muted or renamed, the bag gone, the cord rerouted, the name dissolved, the mic tested against my own quiet room. It should feel clean. It mostly does.

But the bowl stays. The chipped green bowl with the lemon cough drops. I decide this almost without deciding it. I had been about to push it out of frame with the rest, and I stopped, because a bowl of cough drops at one in the morning is the most honest thing on this desk. It says I have a sore throat, or I'm afraid of getting one, or I just like the lemon ones and eat them like candy. None of that is dangerous to know. None of that is a name or an address or an errand. It's just a person who keeps cough drops in a chipped bowl. If the stranger sees anything of me, let it be that. Let it be the one true thing I didn't hide.

So I leave it where it is, the green catching the screen-light, the wrappers folded into themselves. The printer stays unplugged. The sock stays under the desk. The calendar stays wrong. The cursor is hovering over the button now and the room is as ready as a room gets, which is to say it is full of things I chose not to fix.

Before I click I pick up the loose brass key, the one for the lock I forget, just to have something in my hand. Then I set it back down exactly where it was, in the small clean ring it has worn into the dust, and I let go.