Social Science

“Social Science” was first published in Tuesday Magazine

It is the early morning. A man, dressed in a suit, walks alone to the bus. He feels a pleasant and uplifting sense of solitude, but slowly becomes aware of a matched sense of desolation. He sighs, his feet feeling heavier than before. A researcher, hidden in the tree across the street, observes this sigh through binoculars. He makes a note of it.

–

A woman enters her own bedroom, in her own house. She is, for one moment, alone, separated from the demands of her husband and children. Knowing that they will not even bother to listen, she allows herself to begin sobbing, quietly, still restrained by a sense of propriety she can neither define nor defend.

A researcher, hidden in her dresser, listens carefully. With a precision stopwatch, he measures the time between her sobs.

–

A man, a high-ranking manager, masturbates violently in the single-occupancy handicapped bathroom near his office. As he ejaculates, he screams as if in pain. Afterwards, he weeps openly for several minutes.

A researcher, disguised as a cockroach, notices this turn of events. Later on, the man is asked in a survey by a second researcher whether he has ever done such a thing. He lies glibly, smoothly. “Of course not.”

The second researcher looks at him with disappointed eyes.

–

Late at night, a small child sneaks into her own back yard. She pulls off her clothes and steps carefully into the backyard pool, which glows an eerie blue. She floats atop her own reflection, naked in the water, and asks herself what it will be like to be a woman.

No researcher is needed to observe this. It is known already.

–

A man dreams of walking down an endless corridor, pursued only by his shadow. He considers opening one of the doors to either side, but knows that he will find an identical corridor behind it. He knows this because he has dreamed this dream before. He is not afraid, not even of his shadow, which seems to be gaining on him.

When he awakes, he writes this brief description in his dream journal. His dream journal is a researcher. So was the shadow in his dream.

–

Alone, late at night, the head researcher of the study consults and compiles her notes by the light of a solitary desk lamp. The clock ticks by, shaving away seconds of sleep that the head researcher will regret missing. She reaches the end of the compiled notes, and with barely a hesitation, begins to record her own feelings, confronted by these stories. And then her own feelings about recording her feelings.

This is poor experimental procedure. Later, she will be censured. But the bulb of the lamp is another researcher, and its findings prove most useful.

–

A man, sitting on a train, reads this document. The train is full, and its rattle and sway causes his fellow passengers to bump into him. Nevertheless, while reading, he is completely alone. He finds himself intrigued, yet distressed, by the research model described here. A single bead of sweat forms unnoticed where his neck meets his jaw, and snakes down to hide itself inside his collar. Then he reaches this passage. Recognizing the format of these vignettes, he slowly turns to look behind himself.

Of course, he sees nothing.

Louis Evans is a writer living and working in New York City. His fiction has appeared in Interzone, The New Modality, and The London Reader, and has been long-listed for the BSFA Awards. He is probably not being watched.