Up in the far corner I saw something, a little dish attached to the ceiling, the same bone-white color as the paint, and it had on it a little blinking red light.
I stepped back into the kitchen.
It might not have been a camera. It didn’t much look like one.
Of course, you can’t be too sure about that, because a camera can really look like anything, especially a sneaky surveillance camera that you aren’t even supposed to notice.
So I felt I couldn’t risk it.
There was another door, not too far from the one I’d peeked through. It was shut. I thought it was a closet. There was also a back door, leading out to a deck; I could see some of that through a window. But I knew I couldn’t open the back door and go outside because of the alarm.
I went to the shut door and opened it just a fraction of an inch.
It wasn’t a closet.
I looked through the crack, and I saw a long hallway with a hardwood floor and a thin red carpet leading all the way to what I thought was the front door. I saw archways along the left wall opening to other rooms, but I couldn’t see inside the rooms at all. The hall was empty except for these glass stands with several levels. Some had old books on them arranged very neatly. Others had these little figurines, kind of like the splashy glass things—or I suppose they were crystal—on the dining room table. I didn’t see any photos.
I stepped back again, but I left the door open an inch.
I knew this was the only exit. There was just no other way.
But what I didn’t say was that there was another one of those cameras—or possible cameras—on the ceiling up by the front door, just over it. I couldn’t actually see it—it was too far away and the same color as the paint, just like in the dining room. But I saw a red light blinking every few seconds.
If it was a smoke detector it didn’t matter.
But what if it wasn’t?
The big thing about hiding—I mean about hiding when everybody can see you—is to just blend into the surroundings. A lot of that has to do with how you dress, how you hold yourself, and the sorts of gestures you make.
You don’t want to be too sharp with anything. Just be dull.
I mean just sort of play it nowhere, and unless the people around you are trained by the FBI, they won’t have a clue that you’re there.
Of course, on video you might not get away with that. You just might need a disguise. I mean to really blend in.
If there really was some guy in an office somewhere actually monitoring these cameras—and I suspected maybe there was—then more precautions were in order. I needed a disguise. I figured this was necessary even if the guy was hardly paying attention, which I did sort of have to factor in, because sitting around in an office with your eyes glued to a video monitor must be the most boring job in the world.
So I looked around the kitchen. I was thinking about the red carpet out there.
Scratch that.
Actually I was thinking about a gorilla.
I don’t mean a gorilla somehow popped into my head—I mean this video with a gorilla in it, that really is the best hiding video in the world. It’s this video on YouTube, and if you ever want to learn to hide, you’ve just got to watch it.
I don’t know who made it. I think it was probably made by a bunch of top-notch behavioral psychology types at MIT, or maybe Stanford. Anyways, it tells you at first in this title that you’re going to be seeing a bunch of guys playing basketball, and you have to count how many baskets they make.
No, how many passes they make.
There are two teams, you see, and one’s dressed in black jerseys, and the other is in white, I think. And I can’t remember whether you’re supposed to count the guys playing or just how many passes they make, but if you pay really close attention, you come up with a number like eleven—eleven players or eleven baskets or passes, one or the other—and then a title comes up and says something like “The answer’s eleven—did you get it?” And you nod and sort of smile and say yes, you did, and you’re really thinking that this whole video was totally pointless and stupid and made by a bunch of total morons who had no other ambition but to waste your time, until another title comes up that asks you something like “Did you see the gorilla?”
And the point is that you never did.
Now, I know that because I just told you about it, the first thing you’ll do if you go on YouTube and look this up—which you can find just by entering “gorilla/basketball,” I think—is that you’ll of course now just look for the gorilla and the whole thing will seem obvious and totally stupid. But had I not told you anything, you wouldn’t have seen the gorilla in a million years, though of course now if you go look it up all you’ll do is wait for the gorilla to arrive and not count the passes at all.
And let me tell you, it’s not just some gorilla way in the background who peeks out behind a wall or something. It’s this guy in a gorilla suit, and about thirty seconds into this video he sort of shuffles out and turns and looks right at you and even bangs his chest—literally bangs his chest right at you for god sakes—and you never even knew he was there. It’s a complete surprise, because what these guys at MIT or Stanford know is that if you pay attention solely to one thing, all your attention is sort of hogged by it, and you won’t notice something else that in retrospect looks
