White Space Season 2

“Sal,” that Stephen was able to piece that much together on his own. For the most part, he let his attention drift when people signed their full names, or did anything to identify themselves. Because, for the most part, Stephen didn’t want to know the patients’ real names, and didn’t think Conway Industries wanted him to know either. He never wanted to be that involved. His subjects were work, thinking of them as Patient Numbers so-and-so was always easier.
    Rarely assigning names to faces also made it easier when Stephen ran into his patients in his off hours, which despite spending most of his time at the Conway facilities, he still did, and more often than he’d like. Not remembering their names made it far less likely that he might accidentally greet one of them by name and make them suspicious. It was always unsettling, seeing someone in person after spying on them for so long. He often wondered if someone could somehow sense that he had seen them through the raw vulnerability of their most intimate moments. Every now and then Stephen would get caught staring, eyes wide and fixed. He’d have to quickly adjust everything from his body to face, act as if he hadn’t been staring, bolting his attention to something else, so as not to seem like a weirdo.
    But for some reason, Stephen had always thought of Sal by his name rather than his number.
    Sal was a retiree, spending most of his days sailing, bird watching, and dating a steady procession of the island’s single women, ranging in age from early 40s to late 50s, depending on their amount of surgery. Sal never stayed with anyone longer than a few weeks. Twenty-two days was his record, at least since Stephen had been watching.
    He wasn’t sure if Sal was trying to avoid a long-term relationship, or was merely incapable of keeping one. Stephen only had access to what the patients said, heard, and saw, not what they thought. And with Sal, it was tough to tell when women broke up with him, which they always did, if he was surprised and hurt, or if he had so carefully orchestrated the splits that he managed to flee his union without looking like a jerk and making them feel like the guilty party. Either way, Sal always bounced back, which Stephen figured either meant he intended the breakup, or was a man who refused to live with regrets.
    Overall, Sal was one of Stephen’s happier subjects, at least that’s the way it seemed until one night six months ago when he started staring into the mirror and pursing his lips into whispers, just like Patient 0319. Difference lay in the escalation, which Sal did so quickly that he spilled his bottle of crazy to empty before Stephen had a chance to make the call and have him brought in.
    “You think you can get away with spying on me?” Sal growled into the mirror, just three days after his first suspicious whisper. “I will not be spied on!”
    Sal pulled a screwdriver from his right pocket — a screwdriver Stephen had unfortunately missed seeing in time — and jammed it through his right eye.
    Stephen jumped back from the monitors, screaming through his shock, helpless as he stared at the screen, watching through Sal’s one good eye as he stared into the mirror at the blood spurting onto the glass, gushing from his socket and running down his face into the white sink below.
    Patient 0466’s right eye was entirely gouged. As protocol prompted, Stephen reported the incident immediately to the Director of Control, told him what was happening, and said that Sal was still standing in his bathroom, breathing heavily as he stared in the mirror, looking like he was seconds from stabbing himself in his one working eye.
    After watching for 10 excruciating minutes as Sal screamed into the mirror, cursing whoever was watching in silence, asking why they’d drove him to this, and what did they want from him.
    It was awful, but Stephen had seen plenty of terrible things during his time as a Watcher, and would have likely forgotten the horror eventually, if not for what happened next.
    Sal bellowed a final anguished cry, grabbed the screwdriver from the bathroom counter, roared, then stabbed his left eye and turned Stephen’s screen to black.
    All the darkness in the world could do nothing to hide the sounds of Sal’s anguished screams, silenced three seconds later by a single gunshot.
    When Sal’s death was reported by the news three days later, it was said that he killed himself after writing a lengthy suicide note.