From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative
Subject: NEW: What the Camera Saw (1/1)
Date: 9 Feb 1996 01:04:15 -0500


What the Camera Saw

*     *     *

They poison her tea with dilute chloral hydrate
(sweetened with saccharin to soften the taste)
and when she drinks the darkness...sleeps...(her
tangled autumnal head resting on the kitchen table, 
dreaming uneasy dreams of sullen blue skies)
they creep
     cloaked in black
          into her house 
and remove her bathroom mirror,
substituting a prism of half-silvered glass
--reflecting apparent truth (but transparent on one side)--,
and tucking a camera into the alcove behind it.
Whirring, insectile thrum in the dark, it records,
observing shadowed beige fittings, clean white tiles,
unlit fluorescent tubes, a cool sterile dimness of
bars of soap, striped toothpaste and towels...and they withdraw.

It is the only way he can be close to her.

>From that camera's unblinking cataract lens
runs a fiber-optic cable no thicker than a vein
in a junkie's arm; it spells her out in pixels
on a washed-out television, tinged with violet; and he watches
--sitting in an overstuffed leather womb, wedged into
West 46th Street, whorls of stale cigarette smoke
clinging infantile to the walls, tobacco mosaics
folded in a halo around his hooded gleaming eyes--
an hour later, staring at the monitor, 
staring at her, her virginal image,
as she enters her bathroom, hair clinging to her neck
skin milky smooth and eyes puzzled
--beautiful, so beautiful, even in the fisheye lens--
those eyes (azure and clearer than a cathedral Madonna's)
that hair (russet-copper-auburn, chestnut-sherry-cinnamon)
that she runs her fingers through, pulling it back 
from her forehead and securing it with a barrette,
washing her hands in the sink, splashing water onto her face,
wiping off her makeup with a towel...
That woman.
He sits and watches, puffing sparks, as she looks into the mirror,
their gazes locked eye to eye; she looks at herself
but looks into him as well, unknowing,
those blue eyes burning coolly into his own
(...god...his own eyes...gone yellow from ruin...),
two pairs of eyes separated by 
mirror 
     camera 
          cable 
               monitor
and an asphyxiating helix of his own mistakes.

Her eyes testify to everything he's lost.

Then the moment ends. She exits, flicking off the light...

But he cannot stop staring at the screen.