Every Screen in the House Showed the Same Face

I was halfway through a movie I’d already seen twice, the kind you leave on so the house doesn’t feel so empty, when the television coughed out a soft pop and went silent. No dramatic bang, just a hiccup that left the actor’s open mouth frozen for a moment and then a cut to black. The room took on that sudden, old-fashioned quiet where you hear things you never do—the dry rub of the furnace settling, the little tick inside the thermostat. Outside our cul-de-sac was as thin as paper: no cars, just a porch light three houses down with a halo of bugs around it. Upstairs, the bedroom door I’d shut to keep the heat in made a faint click as it cooled. I had one socked foot tucked under me, the other on the ottoman, and in the second after the screen went dark I realized the refrigerator’s hum had also faded, and that sharp, purged stillness dizzied me a little.

I reached for the remote to tap a button and check for life when the wrong thing happened. Not just the TV waking up like it does after a brief outage, but every screen in the house turned on at once. The phone I’d tossed onto the couch cushion lit up face-down, a pale oval bleeding through the fabric. The laptop on the coffee table bloomed from sleep with a hush and a cooling fan’s whisper. In the kitchen, I watched the reflection of the tablet’s glow rise on the dark glass of the microwave. The little numbers on the oven went to 12:00, all zeros, and held steady. Even down the hall, the baby monitor we keep around from when my sister visits with her kids snapped from black to a washed gray, a low breath of static.

I expected scrolling updates or a system logo—anything routine. The television came back, but not to the menu. There was no input banner, no bouncing brand. Instead, the black softened into a muddled, close-up picture that didn’t fit the shape of anything I knew. At first I thought the screen had held onto some afterimage from the movie, but the gray blocks shifted and settled and the pattern of them became something like skin under a dirty lens, the sense of a nose and a mouth too near. It was a face, but not correctly there, like a person leaning in too close to a webcam in the dark. The picture crawled with compression, edges fluttering into squares, and the whole thing sat in that almost-color between blue and not-blue that LED panels get when they don’t know what to be.

The laptop chimed the way it does when the charger reconnects. Its screen, set to a blank login normally, wasn’t blank. A face again, very nearly the same one, but this time the tilt was different, as if the person had cocked their head an inch to the right. My laptop’s webcam LED, which I cover with a sliver of tape, glowed solid green under the tape’s edge, turning that strip a poisoned emerald. The keyboard caught some of the TV’s light and reflected it back up in keys picked out like teeth. I moved a finger and the trackpad was slick with the sort of cold that doesn’t come from temperature.

On the couch, my phone pulsed with a notification that wasn’t a notification. I flipped it and the lock screen wasn’t mine. No clock, no little icons clustered in the corners. There was only the same vague face framed tight, the same poor contrast, but with one ear visible on this one, the curve of cartilage breaking into blocks. The cheek’s plane ran through a mess of artifacting like a path through tall grass. The pupils were softened into small, liquid holes. The glass felt warm under my thumb the way it does when you’ve been charging from a bad outlet. My own reflected knuckle hunkered in the black around the picture like a small white moon.

From the kitchen, a rectangle of light threw itself across the tile. I stood to see around the doorway. The tablet I leave on the counter for recipes had come alive with the same face, too, but angled higher, as if whoever was on the other side had lifted their chin for that one. The edge of a forehead cut the top of the frame and a stray hair strand jittered into and out of existence with the scrambling pixels. It wasn’t that I recognized the person. It wasn’t even a person as I know them. It was suggestion, the way you see someone peering through frosted glass and know it’s a someone. The sameness of it across the screens was what made my stomach fold, each face an echo at a slightly different pitch.

I called up the stairs, not loud. The house made my name come back thin. No answer. The walls had that dense, sealed-up quality winter gives them, like the drywall has swollen with it. I stood in the living room caught between screens, and I realized there was no sound anywhere. Even the monitor had gone breathless. On the television, the mouth had the soft white look of being slightly open. On the laptop, I could see the suggestion of nostrils. On the phone, a cheekbone. On the tablet, the span of eye and a fold of lid. I had the sudden, clear idea that these were all the same person at the same moment, like I’d walked into a room and four different cameras had been trained on them, only the cameras were my things.

I stepped back. The carpet gave under my heel with its familiar grit from the day. Whatever was in those pictures, whatever jittered there between blocks and light, wasn’t quite looking at me. Not at first. On the TV, I thought the eyes were fixed past my left shoulder. On the laptop, past my right hip. On the phone, lower, toward my hands. It was like walking into a portrait gallery where none of the frames had caught you yet. Then, without a blink I could see, the eyes in each picture moved. Not a jump, not a refresh stutter. A movement. They shifted in their little blue-gray worlds and turned toward where I was, across everything at once, like a compass aligning. On the TV the gaze dropped a degree to meet mine; on the laptop the angle ticked down and left; on the tablet the lid lowered just enough to make it feel like a glance from above; on the phone the pupils rolled up off the bottom edge in a slow, indecent climb until they topped out and settled. The feeling was exactly like being seen by a stranger through a pane of glass you hadn’t known you were standing behind.

My breath did something small and embarrassing in my throat, a squeak of rubber. I had the wild idea that if I backed out of the room, if I stepped to the side, the eyes would track me. I tested it the way you test a lake with one toe: a lean, a half-step. The pupils traveled with quiet patience across all four panes. The nose on the laptop grew a little narrower as the angle changed; the ear on the phone became briefly more; on the tablet the forehead shined a little more; the mouth on the TV parted further and then closed again, but with the almost-compression of a streaming video choking on bandwidth. I thought of my neighbor’s porch light and whether it could see in. I thought of the way our street looks in winter, flat, everyone inside, the sky sitting on the roofs like a wider roof. I thought of how, if you had to describe the feeling right then, you could do it without monsters or religion. It was only a wrongness. Wires that had crossed without touching.

Then everything died, as if someone had cut a ribbon neatly. The lights that were still on in the kitchen winked to black. The tablet vanished. The TV didn’t fade but snapped to off. The laptop fan spun down so quick you could hear the bearings stop. My phone went to hard dark with that tiny, internal thock. I was in a clean pocket of night so suddenly I could hear the change in my own ears. The only light left was the neighbor’s porch far through the blinds, unhelpful. I stood there with my hands doing nothing at my sides, and in that thick gap of nothing I had the thought that I should call someone, and then laughed a little out loud at the idea, the sound like a cough in a church.

The hum returned in pieces, like a shop reopening. The fridge clicked back up. The furnace’s fan. Somewhere a relay inside the wall snapped. The television came on by itself to the brand screen, then to the input menu. The laptop woke to a login like it had meant to all along, the green LED now dead under its tape, the keyboard waiting. My phone lit to my regular lock screen with my boring photo of the backyard pine after snow and the temperature under it in small font. The tablet in the kitchen chimed and went to the page I’d last used for a stew recipe weeks ago. The oven clock stuttered at 12:00 twice, then carried on. Everything was behaved and indifferent. The eyes were gone as if they’d never had anywhere to be in the first place.

Upstairs a floorboard creaked with the sound of someone shifting their weight. I said, “Power blip,” up the stairwell and the dark gave my voice back normal. “I thought so,” came flatly in reply. I considered trying to explain beyond that, and then couldn’t find the words for anything that wasn’t weird, and we left it. I made a small circle of turning everything off properly and laying the phone back down where it had been, screen up this time without thinking. I sat a minute longer than needed and watched the blinds, how the neighbor’s light striped them and pressed the stripes into the carpet like sewed pleats. The house settled again around the sound of the furnace, the steady normal that makes you forget there is anything but steady normal.

In the morning the clock on the stove told me the outage had lasted fewer than ten minutes. I made coffee and told myself not to think about it in any kind of organized way. Work was a blur of small, stupid tasks that pull at you out of proportion to their size. Around lunch, without deciding to, I opened the Photos app on my phone. The Recents album glared with the usual run of pantry labels I take pictures of to remember and the porch in spring and the dog from last week’s walk. Nestled in there was one image with a thumbnail that seemed darker than the others somehow, like it had soaked up a little of last night.

It was a screenshot. The phone says so in the corner with the little icon and the exact time down to the minute. I don’t take screenshots by accident. You have to press two buttons together on this model, and it plays a chirp. I hadn’t heard any chirp. The image itself was the thing from last night but steadier for having been frozen: the same compressed face dead center, all gray and blue and not-right, the mouth just open enough to make a thin shape, the pupils darker than everything else. No clock overlay, no camera icon, no white bars. Just the face. If I zoomed in, the squares crawled but didn’t resolve to more than blocks. The pupils, though—they were crisp enough. In the screenshot, they weren’t looking at me. They were set a fraction to the left of where they had been when I stood there. Lined up, it seemed, with the bottom of the stairs.

There was a strip of black at the bottom edge of the screenshot, the kind of dead space you get when the capture grabs a little more than the display. In it, faint as breath on glass, you could see my living room reflected in the TV behind me, or you could invent that you could: the light-colored rug, the arm of the couch, the bare patch of wall where we still haven’t hung anything. No person, just the suggestion of a room with a person in it somewhere out of frame. The album’s face-recognition bubble hovered at the bottom, a polite little square around what the phone believes is a person, a soft prompt to name them as if they were a friend. I don’t name it. The screenshot sits there with the rest, looking like any other picture you might forget to delete. Sometimes when the house is quiet at night and I pick the phone up to check the time, I see the thumbnail too quickly and think for a second that every screen will lift its eyes again. I don’t know what I’d do if it did. I don’t know if the screenshot would change to keep up.