The show cuts to a commercial and the smile stays. That's the first lie — the image insists on remaining even when the world changes channels.
I hunt for anything online. Instinct, useless until it isn't. Fingers cold, I scroll until a live stream catches my eye: James Arnold — Live Now. He's walking through an empty mall at night, phone held out like a candle. The camera breathes the fluorescent quiet. The music of my living room is a different world away, and yet — and yet — the mall looks like the inside of a skull.
A speaker crackles to life in James's video: "Leave. Leave now." I think security. I think prank. I think nothing that calms me. Then a dozen pale figures fold out of shadow. Not hulks, not monsters — thin, too-peaceful, smiles like set plaster.
They stand. They smile. The camera is calm; the feed is calm. The world tilts.
James approaches. He's curious, the kind of curious that gets people on camera killed or famous. They do not move to stop him. They do not need to. Their smiles are enough. Then suddenly they are not patient at all. They move like a single sick choreography. They take him down. Hands and faces and smiles press at his ribs. He can't breathe, then blood. They force his eyelids open — three minutes — and I watch him stare into camera like someone forcing himself to drown.
Three minutes. The same three that hang in my throat like a curse.
His eyes bleed. It is obscene and precise. Then, as if a switch flips, they lift him up. They tend him with the gentlest of hands. The bleeding stops. The wound is a lie like a magic trick. James blinks, and a smile cracks across his face — the same smile, wide as a nicked moon. The viewer count spikes. His last words on the stream are soft, and then the feed ends.
I close the window but the noise has already crawled under my skin.
A scream — sharp, a neighbor's — stabs the air. I look out. A pale face at the window stares straight at me. The smile is perfect. The sound of someone calling my name blends with static; I run, stupidly, home alone and found the house unchanged, the furniture where it belonged, the TV still speaking with ordinary madness. But my family — they turn toward me and their mouths are slow to move, slow to return to laughter, and when they do it is wrong.
At first I think I am the one who is cracked. Maybe it's exhaustion. Maybe the bleed of James's eyes was a poorly staged effect. Maybe I am dreaming. But the way my mother smiles — like a mannequin learning to be alive — that thing inside my chest that has never trusted anything stronger than superstition tightens into a rope.
I pull them to the window. "Look!" I shout. Their heads tilt and they watch my neighbor's house and then — as if the same cue cued their acting — they look at me as if I'm a stage hand spoiling a play. They laugh, a sound that is the same as the laugh on the television and not the same at all: hollow, too long, a laugh that eats the end of words.
Panic arrives like a cold guest. I shove a bed against the pane, throw shoes to jam the latch. I lock doors. My hands move in a kind of frantic ritual — padlock, chain, deadbolt — as if the metal can keep human eyes honest. My family resists at first. Their hands are soft against mine, then their phones buzz. An emergency alert slides across every screen like a blade:
NATIONWIDE ALERT:
STAY HOME. LOCK DOORS & WINDOWS. DO NOT PANIC. FINES FOR NON-COMPLIANCE MAY APPLY.
Nine thousand dollars flashes in the corner of the notice as if the state itself is bargaining with my fear. Who fines who? It reads like bureaucracy trying to bridle hysteria with a pen.
On social I find a thread: a senior CIA liaison posting from a desert command. He says, bluntly, their unit receives the short calls — the three-minute calls. They are to stay put. The desert is the only place these smiling ones do not reach. He does not say why. He does not say how long they'll hold. He writes in the clipped, official register of men who have accepted the unthinkable and decided to write it down anyway.
The words settle like dust. The desert only place safe. The same desert that might as well be a myth for most of us — vast, empty, unbearably distant.
My house trembles as if some other room in the city is collapsing. Outside, against the window, a face moves across the neighbor's glass. It smiles at me like a benediction. Smiles have become the most dangerous currency; each one now feels like a verdict you can't appeal. I hear my name again — a whisper in the hall — the same voice that announced the three-minute rule. Or perhaps it's my own voice that has learned to whisper in that tone.
I am moving on nerves. I am cataloguing possibilities like an old man counting coins: if the three minutes are a rule, what happens at minute two? If the bleeding stops, is that recovery or possession? If the desert is safe, how many can flee? If I block the windows, does that help? If I call the number, who listens? Will the call cut when it promised? What is the shape of the word we now?
I lock and chain and board, and yet the house feels porous. The smile on my mother's face returns each time she watches TV — a quick reflection of light in her wet eyes — and for a poisonous second I find comfort there, the way a drowning man might hug a stone. Then James's feed replays in my head: three minutes; bleeding; cleansing smile. The town outside keeps pretending normalcy. Cars crawl. Shops close. People whisper to one another and tell their neighbors to "stay calm," the most violent words I hear all night.
And always, under everything, the number thrums like a pulse: three minutes. Three minutes of forced sight, three minutes to lose yourself or to be remade. Three minutes until a man you loved smiles as if he has swallowed the sun and will never need you again.
I stand at the window, the bed blocking the glass, and I press my forehead against the pane until the cold bites. Someone — my neighbor, James, the CIA man — has given me new terms for fear. The city is eating itself politely, smiling as it does.
The live feed is still a live thing somewhere, wolves in lamb-skins moving through malls. The laughter on the TV is a soundtrack looping in my head. My hands shake. Breath like paper. I think of the desert and feel the ocean of my life shrink to a single brittle grain: will I run or will I lock?
And even as I consider running, the smile at the neighbor's window turns and glances in the dark direction of my door.
Three minutes, I whisper aloud. Three minutes. Three minutes. Three minutes.
The word becomes a prayer and a threat.
Outside, something knocks softly on the glass.