Chatroulette

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While depositing newly washed towels in layers into the hallway closet, Karen noticed the neat lines of graphite decorating the door and smiled to herself. Her fingers traced the record of each inch of her children’s lives. Standing at the end of their hallway, just outside her daughter’s bedroom door, she couldn’t help but feel so much smaller than them now, so much smaller in general. Aiden, at sixteen, was now nearly six-foot, and Claire, growing fast, was at her eye level. Karen had had to buy her new pairs of jeans three separate times last winter because Claire’s bony ankles kept sprouting through. The ankles posed less of a threat now in the summertime, and, for that, Karen was grateful. 

Turning from the closet, Karen could hear the faint mumblings of her daughter’s voice just beyond her closed wooden door. Something in the sing-song intonation sounded to Karen like “hello” or “video.” Whenever Claire began recording herself, she would announce the fact to her imagined audience. Karen didn’t feel comfortable with her daughter uploading herself online for strangers to view, so Claire’s vlogs were strictly video diaries for now, though she dreamed of something bigger. 

Karen held her breath so as to not give herself away as she listened to her daughter perform, staring blankly at the paper sign dangling on Claire’s door by a single corner still taped down, the rest blowing in pace with the rotation of the hallway’s standing fan. 

Their home—built sometime after the panic had begun that the millennium was the end of history, but before Y2K had become a joke better left unsaid—had no central air. Theirs wasn’t a colonial remnant like the other houses in town, boasting dirt floor basements and historical society mandated signs out front. Theirs was an impersonation at best, with windows punctuating white siding in an uncanny symmetry: New England drag. Karen had bought standing fans in bulk and placed them at a cord’s length apart throughout the house. The hallway felt to Karen like the drying portion of a drive-through car wash, cycling warm air around her in synchronized time. 

Between the whirring clips of the fans as they reached one limit and started back towards the other side, she could hear the faint sound of her daughter’s practiced laugh. Karen could feel in her own mouth the strain in Claire’s, who laughed only with her lips pursed out far, concealing the machinery of her metal braces. 

The sign, a bubble-lettered warning to keep out, waving in the stale circulated air, dated to when Aiden and Claire spent enough time together to have to draw boundaries between them. (“How do you spell ‘allowed’? There’s no boys allowed.”) Smoothing the tape back onto the peeling paint of the door, Karen heard something like “mother” or “smother.”

“Honey?” She knocked gently. 

A silent pause. “Yeah?” She could picture her daughter’s sullen expression. It was the end of summer, and Claire would be starting her freshmen year in a matter of weeks. Karen had wanted Aiden to drive Claire to school with him in his beater, a broken-down car without AC that slow-cooked them on pleather seats like microwave dinners, but neither of the kids liked that plan. Claire said it was because of the heat, but Aiden told the truth: they didn’t want to be forced into spending time together. (“It’s not authentic if it’s forced.”)

“Can I come in?”

Another pause. “What is it?”

Karen sighed to herself, but creaked the door open an inch. “Are you busy?”

“Yes, I’m recording.” Her daughter’s arms look tired from the way she held her digital camera up. Claire liked her reflection best from a three-quarter angle, specifically on her right side. She would say that her left side was her ugly side because it made her look like her father, and she hated her father.   

“Oh! I’m sorry!”

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” Karen demurred. She avoided looking at her daughter directly, like Claire was a wandering deer who might be scared off. Instead, Karen pretended to take in the panoramic view of her daughter’s room, stepping over the accumulated clutter towards her. “I’m just coming to say goodnight.”

Begrudgingly, Claire turned the plastic arm of the camera’s viewfinder in towards itself. Crossing her arms, Claire could’ve even looked intimidating if she hadn’t had green acne cream swatched across her face. This was a sign that she hadn’t really been recording herself but practicing what she might say and how she might say it. 

Karen perched on the corner of the unmade bed, next to where Claire had kicked the covers over into the curled shape of a dying rose. 

“How are you feeling about the fall?”

“What about it?” Claire answered in monotone. 

“About school starting!” Karen laughed as if they were sharing a joke. “Aren’t you excited?”

“Not really.”

“Well, I’m excited for you. We moved here for this school, you know.”

Claire avoided eye contact in turn, her eyes on the camera she was fumbling in her lap. “I thought we moved because dad cheated on you,” she mumbled to herself. 

Karen flinched. “Hey.” 

“What?” Claire locked the viewfinder in and out of place. “Is that not the reason?”

Karen pushed her tongue against the roof of her mouth and swallowed hard. “I’m sorry you feel that way.” She reached out to place a hand on her daughter’s leg, something she imagined a mother might do in a family sitcom. “Are you feeling nervous for school to start?”

Claire softened her pose. “I’m just a little worried, I think. About being lonely.”

“Well, we can be lonely together then.”

“And what? We’ll both be lonely? That’s not really comforting.” Claire was at her most confident when she was correcting her mother, just like Aiden was. Karen thought that this is what it meant to be a mother, to give yourself up for correction to those you loved. 

Karen closed the door softly.  She trailed her fingers from wood to wall and over the raised grooves in the hallway’s floral wallpaper. If she pushed down on an air pocket, it would just pop up somewhere else along the skin of their home. 

Aiden’s door had been closed for hours now, so he might be sleeping or maybe just pretending. Either way, she would have to let him be. 

The dim light of the computer room, tucked away at the other end of the hall, emanated a white border around the doorframe. Just barely audible over the chorus of standing fans was the slow whirring of the CPU itself, cooling down its hardware. This humming always told Karen if her children had been lying to her about using the computer, the processor confessing when they wouldn’t. 

Stopping first in the kitchen, Karen poured herself a glass of pinot by streetlight. Just behind the rotting posts of the split-rail fence marking off their lawn, a wood-paneled car hesitated. There had been a freak burglary in the cul-de-sac last month when someone had smashed in their neighbor’s tinted car windows. Claire had assumed, like the burglars, that the tint meant the neighbors had something to hide; Aiden made no judgement but watched every video he could find on how sparkplugs shattered tempered glass. For a week at dinner, he explained that, actually, tempered glass fragments, and the fragments then crumble down, not unlike grated cheese. 

On this night, the car across the street had one window rolled down a quarter-inch, emitting a skunky haze over the neighborhood lawns. Three silhouettes of teenagers slouched down in their felt seats, staring blankly back at Karen as she lifted her glass to them, a nod in their direction. 

Seventeen, she thought, was probably the age that it became fine to smoke, developmentally speaking, meaning that Aiden was just one year too young. She had her suspicions about him now, but she might ignore them in the future. This, too, was what it meant to be a mother.

 In return, the car took off.

Returning to the ambient noise of the computer room, a quiet cacophony of whirring and clicks, Karen spun once around in the cheap desk chair before planting her bare feet firmly on the graying carpeting. On this desktop, her username was just “Karen,” her icon a sunflower, and her password “Mother1.” Clicking open Internet Explorer, she held her wine in one hand and typed with the pointer finger of the other, searching for the mothering advice column she liked to read. Anonymous readers would send in questions like, “How to get your teenage daughter to open up to you? F51” or, “Single mother, dating again after messy divorce?” and a woman pretending to be the type of person who ate kale would answer. Karen especially liked the questions that read like they were written under distress: “Ex-husband turning children against me, advice?”; “I think my child is addicted to porn?”; “Feeling lost, how to start over in middle-age?”; and, “Empty-nester. What now?” 

Karen liked to drag multiple links up into new tabs to read in succession as part of her nightly routine. “Caught my teen doing drugs, should I be concerned?” “How to keep your children safe online?” “I think my son is depressed, how do I get him to open up?” She read the posts she related to and the ones she didn’t; she read them all. “Lonely among my family, disappointed in my life?” 

She took a sip of the wine she kept swirling around her glass and remembered to delete her browser searches. This was another part of the routine. Dragging her cursor, she cleared all recent history–only to see, at the top of the list, a record from earlier in the day of the same link being refreshed over and over: https://www.chatroulette.com/.

She didn’t want to jump to any conclusions. She was working on, or trying to work on, not doing that. 

Karen dragged the cursor over slowly, and hesitated. She clicked, then waited, as the screen loaded down the page. And then: a small green light blinking on from her camcorder; her squinting reflection drawing back in self-recognition; a black square above her own image.

Her dark roots were showing, and the light of the screen cast the grease on her oily skin in a pale glow. She found herself staring at her eyes, at how tired they looked, and at the small fine lines blooming out from their corners. Something like heavy, even breathing played out in stereo. 

She was reminded, suddenly, of an article headline she’d skimmed about the dark web, and she could see herself grow concerned. “Hello? Is someone there?”

Shifting in her seat meant unsticking her thighs from the pleather. 

“Hello? Are you okay?” 

The breathing grew louder and faster in its heaving pace. 

“Is anything wrong?” 

She refreshed the page, and again came a black square and steady breathing. She couldn’t tell if this black square was different from the last black square.

“Hello?” She wanted to ask louder, but she didn’t want Claire or Aiden to hear.

“Oh, god. Oh, god,” she whispered.

“Oh, god. Oh, god,” replied the black square.

Would she have to call the police? How did Aiden find this site? Or, god—what if it had been Claire? Poor, sweet Claire. Karen practiced the techniques she’d learned in therapy. Her immediate thought was that she didn’t know what she was looking at, and her immediate reaction was panic. She couldn’t think of a rational explanation, which meant she couldn’t proceed to step four in revisiting how she felt. Instead, she still felt panicked. She wondered if she should try deep breaths, but the thought of syncing her breathing up with the square’s made her scared and aware of her own breathing, and becoming aware of her own breathing made her almost lose her breath. Oh, god, she thought. Oh, Claire.

She refreshed the page again, and, then, an arm. A large arm. A large man’s arm. Blonde hairs covering the whole of it. A nice leather wristwatch, too, but no wedding ring. The arm moved up and down, to the rhythm of its breathing. Leaning in closer to her desktop monitor, Karen stared into the box above her own image on her screen. 

“Oh, god.”

In a moment’s pause between the last and the next of the sighing breaths, a single moan played out through the stereo speakers that her ex-husband had given Aiden for Christmas. (Watching from his grimy studio apartment in Los Angeles, the man on the other side of the connection watched the small square box on his own screen as Karen clicked off her computer and ended their video chat. Karen had left the website altogether, but he continued on in this manner, watching himself being watched watching women watch him masturbate, for roughly fifteen more minutes or so into the night until climax.) In a moment’s sudden understanding, Karen pushed herself out from the desk with such a jerk that the wheeling chair flung down behind her as she rose from it. 

“Mom?” Aiden appeared in the doorframe, suddenly filling its size with his own. 

Her wine had spilled down her front and across the desk keyboard, and the computer mouse dangled by its wire. As she turned, the flipped chair knocked over several self-help books, its wheels still turning. The flimsy wood of the shelves Karen had built wobbled. 

“Shit, shit.” She wiped at the puddle with her hand, pushing the liquid away from the monitor but onto the rug, not thinking. 

“What happened? Are you okay?” Aiden’s voice filled the hallway. 

“Aiden! Yes, sorry—,” she stuttered, now on her knees wiping at the wine. She felt flustered, sweaty and small and trying in vain to scrape the spreading stain from the rug. 

“—Mom?” Claire interrupted. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”

“Nothing, sorry. Yes. Just, just a mistake over here.” She pushed her hair back behind her ears with wet fingers, still shaking from what she had seen and to think what they might have seen as well. “I didn’t mean to wake you up!”

Stepping into the room, Aiden squinted at the computer. “Is that, is that the search history?” He had a jacket on still and held his keys in his hand, like he didn’t know he was home. 

“What?” Claire pushed past him. “What were you—chatroulette?”

“No, no. It’s not,” Karen responded, looking up at them from where she kneeled. “It’s not what it looks like.” She sounded like how they sounded speaking to her, and the computer whirred like it, too, was hot with embarrassment. 

“Why were you on there?” Aiden was almost laughing. “Do you know what that is? What it’s for?”

“I wasn’t the one on it,” she blurted back. “I just, I saw it on there. I was just checking the history, and—”

“—You were reading the search history?” Stepping past where her mother remained on the floor, Claire pushed the mouse back up on one dry corner of the desk to scroll through. The screen bared the same link, repeating itself again and again. “Why would you do that?” Her voice, suddenly smaller, betrayed her hurt. 

“I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know what this was.”

“You didn’t mean to read it?” 

She felt herself shrinking before her children. 

Aiden starting laughing in earnest, stifled at first and then uncontrollably. 

“I was trying to find something when I saw it,” Karen stumbled. “I didn’t know what it was. I don’t know what it is.”  

“And I do? It wasn’t me.” 

Aiden laughed and laughed. “What did you see?”

“Nothing, I saw nothing! It was just a black square. That’s all I kept seeing. I thought I was alone. I didn’t know!”

Claire turned and pushed past her brother, her shoulder knocking into his from where he stood in the doorway. “Shut up, Aiden.”

He couldn’t stop. “What did I do?” He was nearly keeling over with laughter, though he held his hands up as if in surrender, the keys jingling still in his hand.

Karen knew he was high. It was obvious, and he knew she knew. She knew her daughter knew she knew she was on this website doing who knows what, too. Still, he laughed, and Claire was gone, slamming the door to her bedroom down the hallway. Her paper sign would be fluttering again. Aiden walked away, too, and Karen was left with the sinking feeling that the nearer she moved to her children, the greater the distance that would grow between them. 

Alone again, she rose from the floor and wiped her wet hands down her thighs. In the kitchen, she grabbed paper towels and the wine bottle. There were no cars on the street this time, only the misty summer night, its throbbing heat, and herself. 

Back in the computer room, she turned the chair upright, and wheeled in. After glancing over her shoulder to check the open frame, she dragged her cursor over and clicked again.