He doesn't know about the crawlspace in the basement. He's so busy jerking off over Shane that he never notices when I slip through the side door, down the stairs, into that spidery damp space between the walls. From down there, I watch him watch us. I’m not at his level yet, but I’ve watched him edit and play God at his little workstation, tossing of our lives around like salad, splicing and dicing.

I’m like God. I’ve watched every second he’s recorded, seen everything he has. And the beauty of it is that no one would dream me capable of it. And that, that feels fucking good, because the joke is on them.

It’s scary how easy it was to buy a camera, a transmitter, put it above his workstation. Once the shock wore off, of course, of seeing our grainy images sleeping and reading and fucking 24/7.

The footage has changed with time. He's bought a higher-resolution camera. Added audio to Shane’s room, but not mine. Zoomed in on her until her black and white image becomes grainy.

I can play the new footage side by side with the video of him watching it. That’s always interesting. He leans forward, raptly trying to capture the essence behind her black and white image. He watches her with all the fire of a poet or painter. He is obsessed. He wants to taste her grit and her bruises and her fear, which, when she is alone, blooms like a palpable thing, filling the whole room as she tosses and turns and gets high.

Since she was beaten up in Venice he’s changed. I can just feel him tracing the lines of her face, her hair, her lips. He zooms in on her face when she stares pensively at her bruised reflection in the mirror, stares so long it becomes clear that the things she is looking for aren’t on her surface.

I watch him staring at her as she stares at herself, and it gives me a shameful, Machiavellian pleasure to know that the buck stops with me.

Mark came here with the intent to observe us, use us for his crappy Dykes Gone Wild videos, but the joke is that I am the one gleaning the rich character studies, and when I write the story based on this even Charlotte fucking Birch will shit herself.

I think he wants her because she’s impossible. And I think he just may be falling in love with her. I think about that and laugh. Oh my. He wants Shane like he wants to breathe, and how funny is that?

.

I hate Carmen. I play with her now. I will admit it’s because she hurt me when I didn’t think she was capable of it, and because I was really starting to care for her. Because she was the embodiment of my naivete, the brass ring I reached for. One of the first things I saw through Mark’s setup was her telling Shane I wouldn’t know the real thing if it bit me in the ass.

And she was right. I didn’t know a using, duplicitous bitch when I saw one.

Well, it bit me on the ass that day. And now I may be many things, a notch below Mark for watching all of this, but at least I’m no longer naïve little Jenny, she who fell off the turnip truck.

I play with her now, when we are naked in my bed and she thinks she’s in control. I get off knowing that I’m playing her and with every touch of her body I’m playing Mark, who’s filming it, imagining his bigger hands on a paler body. Two birds with one stone, all while coming like a freight train, and like a junkie, I know the power is lame but I don’t care because it gets me off.

It was gratifying to see him tweaking the footage of Carmen and I in bed, images of me knowing that I was being filmed and enjoying it, and think that the joke was ultimately on him. That I had him picking his nose and beating his meat to stills of Shane and that I’m the real puppet master, not him. I have him by the balls.

It was gratifying, however shameful, to be the one on top. But now it’s ruined because he wants Shane and Carmen wants Shane and everyone wants goddamn Shane, and no one wants me.

When he leaves for work I go to his workstation and watch. By kismet we have the same computer, so I can easily copy all of it to mine. Some of it I don't copy. Like Shane.

She is the only one I'm haven't been pissed at, as much as I would like to be. As much as that would make it easier.

She's a fucking wreck. She is an unholy, pixellated, beauteous mess of her own making, blooming into dysfunction. I watch her cry and do coke and smoke something in a pipe. I watch it and think, damn, now I have something to write about besides the damn circus.

And in this mess she is the only pure one. Like some kind of parody phoenix from the fire that fucks the rest of us up.

It amuses me that Carmen is the peon of our dubious little Pantheon. Carmen is the dulcet-toned two-faced liar, unaware that she's being played in two different ways. She's gone, as lost as Mark is over Shane, and she has no power.

There’s Mark, the opportunistic voyeur who was just stupid enough to fall for one of his subjects, torn like a salivating dog between making a buck and penetrating the lesbian intrigue. Mark who wanted to be Prometheus and steal the fire of the lesbians. Mark, who meant to exploit but wound up being changed so profoundly that who knows, maybe he will become a decent guy after this is over.

I am the doubly treacherous one pulling everyone else's strings, high on the potent newness of it like a green kid doing her first smack, so happy to be someone other than Jenny the naive bumpkin who tries to write about the real world. I have no delusions that I'm not just as pathetic. And that makes me feel sort of... as if I'd sold my soul, but that I've gleaned something hard and shiny and real. That I'm credible as a storyteller. I like it.

The three of us are losers, the player who got played, the gobsmacked lovesick fool who will never, ever get what he wants, and the girl who traded her goodness for an illusion of control because she couldn't handle the harsh sting of truth.

Shane, however, shines, even in her misery. She is just the poor fucked soul trying to get through it. She's the only clean one among us, for all the junk she puts into her scrawny little body. She grapples with her demons night after night. I admired that. I admired the hell out of it.

But, after watching everything unfold, the corruption spreads to me, and I start to hate her for that too. I'm not big enough to keep my jealousy from tainting the way I see her.

Everything is soiled. And under our roof, everyone is watched, everyone lies, be it to themselves or others, and no one is happy.