I stole a blue light police camera, the one at the corner of Greenmount and 26th Street. I mainly wanted to see if it could be done. I went in broad daylight—I'm not going out to Greenmount in the dark—and used one of those old telephone pole belts that all of the phone technicians used to carry before cherry pickers became du jour. There weren't any wires. I just unscrewed the bolts, lowered the whole contraption to the ground with a length of hemp and a square knot, and rolled it home on a furniture dolly. Nobody stopped me. The blue light on top of the box never even paused its incessant blinking. They must have those things on Wi-Fi.

At home, I cleared a spot for my trophy on my dresser. I thought the big black box with the Baltimore Police shield emblazoned on the side would serve as a constant bolster to my manhood, the urban equivalent of a mounted moose head or a taxidermied trout. After all, when did it become OK for the state to document my every move? Weren't my actions my private property, mine to protect? In the words of Banksy, "What are you looking at?"

I looked at the box. The box said, "24-7 BELIEVE." I did.

But when my wife came home, she walked into the living room after changing out of her work clothes, put her hands on her hips, and said, "What's on your dresser?"

But when my wife came home, she walked into the living room after changing out of her work clothes, put her hands on her hips, and said, "What's on your dresser?"

"A PODSS," I answered.

"A PODSS?"

"A Portable Overt Digital Surveillance System."

Her brow furrowed. "I want it out of our room. I won't sleep in there with that thing."

"Where should I put it?" I said.

"Back."

I cocked my head.

She threw up her hands and headed for the kitchen. "You're not getting any until you get it out of there. I'm not having sex with the police watching."

I thought she was overreacting. If the police were watching, why hadn't they come
to arrest me?

But she slept in the living room that night, and I moved the blue light to the top of our Billy bookcase in the living room the next morning. It turned out I just couldn't sleep with the blue
light flashing.

It wasn't until several days later that the thought that the police were now watching my every move really struck me. I had brought the surveillance into my home! Wasn't that worse? I tried to review every action I had taken in the living room since I'd lugged the blinking contraption in there. I stood for an hour in the doorway picturing each move—from the door to the couch, from the couch to the door, from the couch to the DVDs to the television, or to the bookcase. What had I worn? My twenty-five-year-old Care Bear T-shirt that said "Stare with Love"? That tie with the tomato sauce stain in the shape of a W that no one at the office had warned me about? Nothing? Had I adjusted my crotch? Had I scratched my ass and then smelled my fingers? Had I put my feet up on the coffee table with my shoes still on? There was no way for me to be sure. And who was watching me now as I stood transfixed, trying to remember if I had worn my birthday suit or sniffed my ass or mistreated the furniture? What were they thinking?

I had to accept those days as lost. I couldn't be at fault if I was ill-informed. The police still hadn't come for their damn camera anyway. If they were watching, they were silent. (Just the blinking—blue light—what did it mean—blue light—what had I done—blue light.) Going forward, I wouldn't be at anyone's mercy. I purchased a closed circuit surveillance camera system, a CCT, and set it up in the living room so that anything they could see, I could see. I would have my own record. No more relying on imperfect memory.

My wife watched me install the closed circuit camera from the doorway. She refused to enter the living room now that the police camera was there.

"I need to know what they've got on me," I said, connecting the gold-plated A/V connectors to the monitor/digital recorder. "The best defense is a good offense."

She looked up at the blinking blue light with hatred and daring. "My actions are my private property, mine to protect," she said.

"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," I said.

The surveillance monitor came on and I watched her, the flickering blue cutting shadows in her features. She shifted her gaze to my back. The angle of the closed circuit camera made it hard to read her expression, or mine for that matter.

"What's happened to you?" she said.

I pointed at the monitor. "I'm going to find out."

She turned and left.

So began the reviewing. The closed circuit system recorded directly onto a one-terabyte hard drive. I'd come home from work, sit at the monitor, and watch through as many hours as I could at two times speed. Initially I thought I only needed to watch the hours I was actually in the room and visible to the police camera, so as to be prepared to defend my actions to any interested and/or judgmental parties who were somehow on the receiving end of my PODSS broadcast. But then I began to fear that someone was coming in and tampering with the police camera when I was out of the house. Perhaps it was equipped with a GPS system so the police knew right where it was all of this time. They could come and retrieve the footage during the day while I was at work, and I would remain clueless when I watched at night, reviewing only the segments that I appeared in. I started watching all of the footage. It took me most of the night. The flashing of the blue light on the screen (or maybe it was the actual blue light in the room itself) began to give me headaches, and there I would be, rubbing my eyes and pressing my temples, watching myself, on the monitor, rubbing my eyes and pressing my temples.

My wife spoke to me over the intercom. "If this really were some kind of defiant act against the apparent creation of a police state," her tinny voice said, "then I might understand." Two days later, I saw myself on the monitor, nodding without turning around. "It's as if you want to be watched," my wife had said. I nodded, but it was because I was in pain from the blue glare, not because I was agreeing. "Most people just start a webcam." She paused. I said nothing, watching. "There's no one fucking watching you on that goddamn camera but you!"

It was when I started falling asleep at my desk at work, only to wake up disoriented because there was no flashing blue light, that I had to admit that reviewing the recordings on my closed circuit television was too cumbersome a system. So I hired Jimmy, an off-duty police officer who moonlighted as a security guard. He had a gun license, but the placement service said that would cost $200 a week extra. I settled for Jimmy unarmed. At the end of his first shift, I asked him, "What did you see?" His face remained impassive. "Nothing of consequence," he said, and left.

Jimmy's last guard job had been at the Baltimore Museum of Art. He was well practiced in standing in the corner unobtrusively. During his shift, we never spoke. When I would get the urge to set up the closed circuit monitor again, he would always step in, and say, "Please, sir, no touching."

Before Jimmy left each day, we got into the habit of meeting at the water cooler, the blue light flashing above us. "You don't have anything to say?" I said.

"No."

"You don't have to spare my feelings. I can take it."

"You're paranoid!" my wife cried over the intercom.

"I wasn't asking you!"

"You're pathetic too," she said, and the intercom crackled.

Jimmy left.

It was after a week of my insisting that he must have some opinion about me that Jimmy asked, "Do you believe in God?"
We both looked up at the PODSS. "24-7 BELIEVE," it said.

I looked back at him. "If you study history and human nature with a clear and rational mind, you are led invariably to the conclusion that there is no God."

"Who's on the other end of that camera?" Jimmy said.

"You are."

Jimmy shook his head. "What if I told you no one?"

I said nothing.

"Would that be worse?"

"I already told him that," my wife said from outside the room.

Jimmy drank from his cone of water. "If I'm watching you and yours," he said, "who's watching me?"

Some nights, with my wife turned away from me in bed, I would check the CCT recordings, just for some reassurance. That was how I learned that Jimmy and my wife had begun to have elaborate conversations through the intercom. The closed circuit camera didn't have a microphone, so all I could do was watch the pantomime, and wonder. I began to get the sense that they were both watching me—my wife and Jimmy—all of the time, judging me. And saying nothing.

When I got home from work one day, I walked into a heated discussion.

My wife via intercom: "It's hard enough to have self-confidence without feeling as though you're always being judged."

Jimmy: "But you're innocent until proven guilty. If you always act morally, then there's no reason to fear being watched."

My wife: "But it's just when you think you're acting morally that you find that someone else thinks you're destined for hell. And how do you know unless they tell you? That's why he wants you to judge him!"

Jimmy: "The state can't act as God. Only God can act as God."

The intercom buzzed …

My wife: "Fuck you, pig."

Jimmy let that roll off of his back. He'd heard it before.

It was then that my wife started going to a support group for family members of unbelievers twice a week. It met at Red Emma's, an anarchist bookshop downtown. It didn't matter what your family member didn't believe in; all were welcome. It turned out Jimmy was there too. He said I didn't believe in God or the state. My wife said I didn't believe in her or myself.

So two nights ago I didn't wait for the end of Jimmy's shift. I jumped up off the couch and shouted in his face, "I stole that Portable Overt Digital Surveillance System! Aren't you going to arrest me? Aren't you going to confiscate it? Does no one care?"

Jimmy said, "Please step back from the artwork, sir."

I looked at the police camera. I looked around the living room. I sat back on the couch.

Last night, an old woman was mugged outside of our home. The fright gave her a heart attack, and she died on the sidewalk. When the ambulance arrived, the coroner said that she had been dead between twelve to eighteen hours; he couldn't say for sure.

Tonight, Jimmy and my wife were at one of their meetings. I was left alone at home.

I looked into the unblinking black bubble at the base of the police box. 24-7 BELIEVE. There was no indication that a camera was even there. I raised my eyes to the ceiling, in my mind's eye really peering through the ceiling, through the roof, past the traffic lights, the smog cover, the clouds, looking for an indication that somebody was watching me, validating me. But there was nothing. I pushed the couch over to the bookcase. BELIEVE. I stood up and tipped the whole police box to the floor. The blue light shattered and went out.

The phone rang. A gruff voice said, "Stay there. We're coming for you."

"What have I done?" I asked, excited. Finally.

There was no response. The voice had hung up.

I looked at the broken box, no longer blinking. I felt unsafe. I locked the door.

—Ariel S. Winter is the winner of the Free Press' Who Can Save Us Now? Short Story Contest, and his writing has been featured on McSweeney's Internet Tendency as one of the winners of the Convergence Contest. He is working on a three-volume novel called In Memoriam with Apologies, an ode to the hardboiled fiction of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s.