The Absence at 2:17 A.M.

One of my duties in the general affairs department is reviewing the security camera footage. Every morning, first thing, I fast-forward through the night's recordings to check whether anything unusual happened in the office building after hours. Twelve cameras. Twelve familiar corridors and stairwells. Twelve stretches of empty, silent passage. The first time I noticed it was pure accident.

Camera seven. The landing of the third-floor emergency stairwell. I was skimming through the footage when something about the timestamp — just as it crossed 2:17 a.m. — made me feel that something was *there*, in the corner of the frame. I stopped. Rewound. Froze on that single image. One frame out of thirty per second. And in that one frame, something was caught.

Putting it into words is difficult. It had a center but no outline — that might be the closest I can get. I would place it directly in my line of sight, and the moment I tried to look at it, my gaze would skid away. It had no color, yet it wasn't dark. If you asked me how large it was, I couldn't tell you whether it was near or far. The instant my brain asked *what is this*, thought spun out before it could reach an answer, and all that remained was a cold that settled in the chest. I stared for about ten seconds, then closed the window, feeling foolish. Compression noise, I told myself. A bug crossing the lens.

The next morning, without thinking much of it, I pulled up camera seven at 2:17. It was there. Same position, same frame, the same *it*. A bug wouldn't return to the exact same spot. Noise wouldn't hold the same shape day after day — though shape wasn't quite the right word. I stepped through the surrounding frames one by one. 2:16:59 — nothing. The first frame of 2:17 — there. The very next frame — gone. As though a seam opened in the world for one-thirtieth of a second, then sealed itself shut.

For the first week I told no one. How could I? *There's something strange on the stairwell camera.* *Strange how?* *I can't really explain it.* The only outcome would be people deciding I'd lost my mind. Instead, I checked that single frame every morning. Every morning, it was there. Gradually I found myself opening camera seven the moment I arrived at the office, before anything else. A peculiar compulsion had taken root: the day could not begin until I had looked.

Then things began to shift — on my side. One morning I was staring at the 2:17 frame as usual when I noticed, in the corner of the screen directly opposite where *it* appeared, a wall-mounted emergency hose cabinet I didn't recognize. I went up to the third floor to check. There was no cabinet. Not even a mark on the wall where one might have been mounted. Yet there it was in the recordings, and had been for days. When I tried to remember when it had stopped being there, I couldn't. It felt as though it had always been there. It felt as though it had never been there. The boundary between the two had gone soft, like warm gelatin dissolving.

I understand now that I had looked too long. The act of staring into that single frame had opened a circuit — and through it, something on the other side had begun staring back. Looking always builds a bridge in both directions. Every morning I had brought the full force of my perception to bear on something my perception could not grasp, grinding my mind against the impossibility of it, and through the worn places, the logic of that other side had begun to seep in. The edges of the world started, quietly, to be rewritten.

It was around that time that I lost the name of my colleague Tadokoro. Five years sitting beside each other, and one morning his face and his name simply came apart. While he was away from his desk I checked the staff directory — *Tadokoro*, it said, plain as anything. But reading the characters produced no image, no person. No outline. When I tried to focus, my gaze slid away. The exact texture of that single ungraspable frame. It was only then that I became truly frightened. I decided not to watch the footage that day. I decided not to watch it at all.

But not watching only meant thinking about 2:17 constantly. At my desk, on the train home, lying in bed — behind my closed eyelids, that unresolvable something kept surfacing. Absence had become a stronger connection than looking ever was. On the third night, sitting on my sofa, I glanced toward the corner of my room. The dark space between the television and the bookshelf. It was there. Formless, outlineless, sliding away from every attempt to see it. What had existed only inside a camera feed had seeped, without my noticing, into the hours of my waking life. I looked at the clock. 2:17 a.m.

I stopped going to work. I used up my paid leave. Even so, one morning, unable to stop myself, I went in early, before anyone else arrived. I had to know. I opened the footage. Camera seven. 2:17. — What I saw on the landing was myself. I had not been there. At that hour I had been on my sofa at home. And yet the figure in the recording was looking upward — looking directly at the camera, directly at this side. And where the face should have been was the thing itself: the ungraspable, the outline that slid away from every gaze.

I can no longer look at my own face straight on in a mirror. When I try, it slips away. My wife — though did I have a wife? I have a feeling there was family. I have a feeling there was always only me. The world fills its missing places back in with that soft gelatin, and once filled, you cannot remember that anything was ever missing. So by now, I imagine, a great deal has already been rewritten — arranged carefully so that I would never notice. One frame per day.

Even as I write this, it is in the corner of the room. I am no longer afraid. If you don't try to look at it, it is, as a mere presence, surprisingly gentle. I expect the edges of the world have always had their fissures, and no one ever noticed because no one ever checked a single frame at 2:17 morning after morning. I happened to have a job that required me to open it every day. That was all it took. The bridge was built.

If there are security cameras in your workplace or your home, let me offer you one piece of advice. Do not stare at the same frame at the same time, day after day. Do not exhaust your mind trying to see what cannot be seen. The moment you strain to grasp what cannot be grasped, the other side begins, slowly and carefully, to trace the outline of you — to find the places where *you* are difficult to hold. — By the way. You, reading this. Who were you, just a moment ago? I feel certain I knew. The memory was right there. But my gaze — it keeps sliding away.