Just last month, over two thousand viewers logged in to watch the live feed: four identical roads, crossing each other at this intersection and then branching out toward the different corners of the world like dirt-beaten tentacles.

The museum administration had put up the cameras out front about six weeks ago, though not much has happened since. Most days, the only thing that hints at the passage of time is the occasional appearance of a dog or a walker, never both. Sometimes, teenagers are caught making out in the park to the north. Rarely, grownups meet up, too. The morning donut rush marks peak activity for most towners, especially on the weekends, when I usually wake up too late and fall asleep too soon to be a part of anything meaningful, really.

I spend all day, every day in this security room shaped exactly like the tube monitor I’m being paid to stare at. I don’t mind the work as the work is not at all that different from looking out the window of my home. The screen in front of me is divided into four smaller screens, each revealing a different part of the outside world like panes. Each sub-screen is neatly geotagged, so I don’t have to break a sweat to tell where and when those pixels are being filmed. To tell what they look like. How they behave.

The real problem is having a read on them. To parse where those pixels are running to and from. How far they date back in the world. When or where they belong. They are not at all like the artifacts in this museum, I can tell you that much. They are uncertain, unpredictable at best—those pixels. Unstable, incalculable pixels. If those pixels had any voice at all, it would have been concealed in the rustle of their electromagnetic waves. They can be problematic at times, too—those waves. They can muffle what the chunk of pixels underneath wishes to say. So one has to pay closer attention, to hear out those pixels.

Curious, curvy pixels. Colored pixels. Black pixels.

Dead pixels.

Forty-two viewers are watching the live feed this morning; forty-three, including me. Four of those pixels are strolling along the intersection: a chubby old man in a polka-dotted hospital gown; a middle-aged woman in a white hoodie flailing her arms up and down like a fake nun doing aerobics. Two high-school girls are carrying tennis rackets and an extra pair of shoes for what must be an invisible third friend. They are shooting their fingers up at the woman like a proud salute, or like the unkind gesture that suggests an unpleasant afterlife.

There’s a fifth pixel in the park to the north, seemingly asleep in the canopy of two electric poles. There’s nothing surprising about the spectacle, about the pixels sleeping outside at night. It’s a time-honored tradition in this town. Be it runaway kids or rednecks burned out on cross-burning and booze, one can spot them on roadsides or under bus-stop benches, blanketed all over with sand like beached baby whales. No one complains. Not really. For over the course of time, those pixels have become like a natural part of the vegetation cover of the land, going as undetected to the eye as the indigenous myrtle trees or the dandelions that invade most front yards. Nearing the morning, those runaway pixels would usually get up one by one within minutes and sometimes hours apart, either due to a car’s honk or a mad dog’s bark, and head back to their homes before the sanitation workers would arrive to pick up the actual litter.

That’s probably why, for fourteen hours straight, and four into my shift, not a single soul in town has suspected that whoever it was lying motionless in that triangular shade between the electric poles and the park entrance was in fact the body of a person who was dead as the grass it lay on. A dead pixel, by all means, all seemingly black and sinewy. Not a single car or person frequenting the park or the adjacent marketplace has stopped to check up on it. Not one civil servant or a deputy. Neither did Reverend Jessum, whose church stands right across from the cameras, which were set up with his help.

Neither have I nor the online viewers, for that matter: now ninety-six of them—minus one.

And counting.

Gossip is that nobody knows who the dead pixel was. Nobody has come forward to identify or claim their body afterward. It turns out they were nobody’s daughter or son. Nobody’s father or mother. Cousin or niece or nephew. Aunt or uncle. Friend or bestie or valentine. From where I sit, it’s even harder to make out whether it was a kid or an adult.

Though if I had to go with guesswork, I would have pictured the dead pixel as a she. If tall, then as a lanky, glassy-eyed woman with bleached blond hair and a baby blue satin blouse who would constantly lie about her age and have started displaying some European eccentricities over the years, like kissing people on the cheek three times and hugging them twice. If of medium-build, then as a wholesome, curvaceous lady who would wear at all times a size or two too large bohemian sweaters laden heavily with Middle Eastern patterns that deftly arbitrated her fleshy figure. If petite, then as a buoyant, youthful goddess of vandyke brown hair and dark-side-of-the-moon eyes, who, in the Spanish balcony of her one-bedroom apartment with few ethnic touches, would sing ancient ballads and popular old songs with her velvet voice and thin frame that would blow away the minds of those passing under.

Perhaps it was a he, after all. More likely a man of divine youth: an Axel or a Titus or an Apollo. A Greek statue in the making, whose parts and limbs would escape the dry audacity of his icy blue eyes, with which he would appear as much dead even when he was alive. He would offer a new kind of beauty and ugliness, a new marriage of look and smell, a new form of brightness and silliness that would attract as many men and women in this part of the world as it would repel. A unique yet ordinary body that would defy all templates and define none in their place. An unpredictable stance that would define a turning moment in the lives of those who bumped into him; a before and an after, so to say, or a better and a worse, forming about like overcast clouds.

But, no: he or she was surely none for now. He or she was just ink on paper, a scribble on the ledgers that involve many names like hers or his, the names of those who have gotten straight down to the business of escapism by dying, or better to say, by choosing not to live. In any case, he or she would be dead and dead only and wouldn’t be humble enough to share this room with me, to hold my hands, my legs, my wrists, my nerves from skipping and my boredom from seeping out of my pores, out of the room, out of the museum, out onto the street, and onto the intersection that would finally expose my presence to all those other pixels out there watching.

Near noon, two of those pixels, two pencil pushers—one male and one female, both claiming to be detectives—visit the museum to check the footage from the day before. Both have on their wrists the bracelets customarily given to the museum visitors, which make frictional sounds as their pens actively hover over their notepads. As much as their presence enlivens the room, their perfumes—smelling of lavender and overtime workers—intensify the stuffiness of the air. They arrive at eleven-forty, just ten minutes before my lunch break, and, throughout the two hours of their stay, their questions pale the color and taste of the baked potatoes in my backpack. I would have liked to say something on the matter—about the dead pixel lying out there on the screen, about the circumstances that surrounded its death—but lacking the right words, or the right sequence of words to deliver anything meaningful at all really, I decide to keep it all to myself.

To my surprise, the footage shows that the dead pixel wasn’t even there the evening before the incident, or better to say, wasn’t dead enough yet to stand out through all those other pixels on the screen to be claimed as such. When I arrived at the museum earlier in the morning, the clouds were still as crimson as my sleepless eyes. Now, on my way out, they seem to have coalesced into a mourning-blue plateau of fog under the night sky. From where I stand, the town looks like an inverted heaven, minus the initiation rites and hovering angels. Everything around me, the intersection included, is trapped in a condensing void, in some kind of a pastel vortex that removes any sight of the horizon. The walkways are tattered with heaps of dead leaves and lively pixels clashing with the guilty pleasure of being outside and free. The roads are littered with frogs and darkly feathered ducks cautiously venturing out when and where there’s little human traffic. The rain is pouring down in buckets as if the skies want to sweep away all the sadness.

By the time I reach the park entrance, I’m bristling with a sense of lateness already—though for what, I’m not so sure. Despite restoring the air like a fresh pair of lungs, the rainfall always gives me a sense of urgency that the sunlight does not. The spot where the body was found is now decorated with ribbons and candles as if it’s an ancient burial ground. The moonlight lends the surrounding trees a blue haze, turning them into totems and tombstones.

To my left, some colored threads stretch out into the unmoving, green-tinged blackness of the woods and I retrace them—what I believe were the footsteps of the dead pixel before it became a dead pixel. I walk and walk until time becomes one thing and I another. Barely any starlight hits the earth under the leafy forest roof, and I’m stripped of even the slightest grasp of my whereabouts. Past some witchy branches and high weeds, the undergrowth of an oak tree affords passage to a clearing near the bend of a ravine. The hot streams of sweat ooze down my cheeks in lazy rivers, and I feel weak in the knees. Flung on a flat rock down the bend is a pair of pants without a body attached, roughly folded in a shape that suggests a prematurely halted action. Around the pair are some other items whose irregular distances from one another are probably no accident, each standing where they shouldn’t like the spilled-out guts of a patient: a book resting facedown, its pages fluttering like shot wings due to mild breeze; the patches of dense bush and clay lump partly shrouding a spiral notebook, its cover wavy and rippled due to rainwater.

As soon as I pick up the notebook, some shreds of yellowed paper pop out from between the pages, serenely floating down on the rain-beaten grass like dead leaves. I kneel to take a closer look. The scatter of newspaper clippings brings news from a different time and place of the world, alongside a PVC-coated card that glistens through the thinner layers of newsprint and dirt. The card is designed in three vertical stripes, rotating between red, green, and white. There’s the illustration of a golden eagle in the center of the card, which makes it look more like a flag. In bold, uppercase letters, some words in what I believe to be Spanish are typeset in the lowermost right corner. I think back on Rosa, my one and only true love. I wonder what happened to her after she left me, if she was still alive.

Later that evening, I turn and turn in my bed to no end. Halfway between sleep and wakefulness, I try to carry the dead pixel into my dreams. I try to speak with it; not too often I receive a reply. Sure, some pixels, like some people, are more responsive than others. More attentive; understanding. Though in this case, I can’t really tell what this pixel was all about. I can’t make out its beguiling, strange personhood. The kind that has almost tricked me with its stunt actor resemblance to a living being, save for a few unlucky pixels here and there that have gone stray at some point.

The detectives come back the late next morning, just before my lunch break, to go over the same routine, again. Each time, they hope for a different result, to no successful end. Every time they rewind the tape, it only helps increase the number of new viewers on the live feed. In the absence of a conclusive outcome, the figures have tripled since the discovery of the dead pixel, way exceeding the population of our small town. In less than three days, over seventy thousand pixels have flocked to the live feed of the intersection, like flies under a ceiling lamp.

Six-thousand-and-forty-five of them today. Six-thousand-and-forty-six, including me.

Minus one pixel. And counting. ∎