Читать книгу Panopticon - David Bajo - Страница 20

From Motel San Ysidro he traveled one trolley stop north. Pressed amid Mexican passengers heading toward noon jobs, Klinsman called up the billet on his notebook. The next assignment left for him by Gina, listed after the Luchadors and room 9, was for him to do that story on park surveillance. This puzzled him, even after speaking with Oscar. The story was old. The Review had run a number of pieces on the various impacts of public security cameras, one story by him, others by better street reporters. London had its Ring of Steel, and New York was unveiling its own version. Several movies and novels had already saturated media with the subject, had shown how frightening it was that the average American was recorded two hundred times per day. No one seemed frightened.

Heading into the morning in Amsterdam, you could stroll past a sidewalk projection and wave to pedestrians in Tokyo, heading into the night, waving back just the same. You could get to know someone that way, someone on the other side of the world, passing by her life-sized image every day, maybe develop a crush, exchange a look, tip hats.

Maybe he was supposed to put some cultural spin on the subject, to make it into something that might be viewed as art. To consider the possibility that the city was inadvertently composing a true portrait of itself with its myriad devices for self-surveillance, with its cameras above freeways and traffic lights to catch speeders and red-light runners, with its sonar and visual sensors gridded about the borderlands to monitor illegal immigrants and smugglers, with virtually every public space and every place of economic exchange under a collection of online eyes.

But even that angle felt tried. Perhaps for his finale Gina wanted him to give what she called “that special Klinsman twist” to the entire landscape of his work for the Review. This was to be his summation, his farewell to covering the eccentricities of his homeland. There was no way to confirm this. Gina was gone, not there for anyone, it seemed.

He looked over the passengers, tried to see between those who had to stand in the overstuffed car. His shoulders were pressed by commuters on the seats next to him. His wrists were forced into angles above the keyboard, his fingers brushing the keys. He spotted the security eye atop the front bulkhead of the car, the lens as nonchalant as an eight ball. Someone had drawn a bit of graffiti beneath it, a black-marker rendition of a blunt-tailed reptile nosing the dark glass.

He looked for one of Rita’s salamandros, some paling Latino youth oddly dressed, someone briefly out of his cave. But everyone he could see was dressed for work, their eyes glazed with the inevitability of it, the breadth of it. They could see the ocean.

He got off the trolley at the Iris Street station and walked to Silver Wing Park. The giant metal wing was propped on end, reaching high enough from its hilltop perch to require an aviation light on its tip. Klinsman sat in its shadow, beside the stone monument commemorating Montgomery’s first fixed-wing flights in 1884. The Otay mesa slope the aviator had used was now this park, a wide sweep of lawn that blended into Little League and soccer fields. Klinsman noted one camera mounted on the bottom of the wing, two above the basketball courts atop the slope, three above the distant parking lot on the far end of the park. The cameras looked like storks, poised and waiting for prey above shallow water.

With his notebook he activated interface software from Viper Lab, a variation on VideoJak and UCsniff. It was an update on the program Oscar had given him the first time he had covered park surveillance. Oscar had gotten the information while covering the Defcon conference in Vegas. “The software’s there for us. For you. For free,” he told Klinsman, trying to get him to go deeper on the park story. “A kid can do it. Actually, kids are the ones doing it, most times.”

The main difference between him and Oscar had something to do with faith. Klinsman had faith in technology, a blind faith, like most people. Oscar didn’t; he needed to know how things work, so maybe he could rework them, or make them work better for his purposes. But Oscar had an odd faith in people, some people, those few who could follow their own unique imaginations. Those few open to the ideas and imaginings of others but able to stay true to their own visions and creations. The journalist in El Paso who kept vigil on Juárez. Gina, with her gift for leading and then letting go. Rita, whom Oscar almost feared because he had so much faith in her aim, her art. And Klinsman, for no reason other than his befuddled, bejumbled, insomniac view of this city, what it had been and what it had become.

Beneath the loom of the wing monument, Klinsman jacked his way into the security feeds and brought up an image from one of the far parking lots. Except for the playground, which was alive with toddlers and moms and nanas, the park was empty because school was in session and the neighborhood was at work. On his screen Klinsman could see his own tiny self on the hilltop opposite the parking-lot camera, a hunched silhouette against the blue sky, a man about to be crushed by the silver wing tilting over him.

He clicked around for another view, not knowing which camera corresponded to which number. His image leapt forth, caught, it appeared, by the camera fastened beneath the wing. He saw a man with disheveled hair, an unshaven jaw creased by lack of sleep, dressed in a Western shirt from Tijuana not tucked in. If it weren’t for the laptop glinting in the sun, he could have been taken for a noontime park regular, concerned as a toad.

He walked the mile north to the next park. This one was a sloped rectangle of grass surrounded by a sea of sand-colored rooftops, treeless housing tracts. This one had no name but was commonly known as Ranch Park, after the ranch that lay beneath it, the Klinsman ranch. On the courts men on lunch break were playing Mexican basketball, nine-on-nine, everybody in. Their calls were sparks of sound in the ocean air, seagulls hailing one another.

Klinsman noted two cameras above the courts, two more perched atop seedling light posts. This park was newer than Silver Wing, and its cameras were smaller, sleeker, little black domes looking like forgotten thermos caps.

He sat on a stone picnic bench and clicked into the cameras. He called up the basketball courts, watched the games, the ball swimming over a mosh pit of dark arms and heads. He clicked around, searching for the view holding himself. Except for the basketball game, the park was empty and still. Finally he reached the camera aimed at his bench.

He wasn’t there.