DO NOT LIE TO THE HOMELESS MAN ON 7th STREET
It’s kind of hard to know where to really start. I suppose all of this, more than anything, has to do with my twin brother, Peter. Peter lives in DC and I hadn’t spoken to him in a really long time, so I was a little bit shocked to find him knocking on my door three nights ago in the middle of the night.
“Pete?”
“Took you long enough to answer,” he said.
“What are you even doing here?” I asked as he pushed past me into my cramped New York apartment. “It’s four in the morning, dude, I was sleeping.”
He sat down on my couch and looked around the room, “it’s smaller than it looked in the pictures.”
“You’ve seen pictures?”
“Mom sent me some.”
I nodded. Of course Mom had sent him photos. She still couldn’t get over the fact that we didn’t really talk anymore. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, I think brothers, even identical twins, can drift apart once life gets in the way. Pete had gone to work for some big tech firm, loved to brag about all the NDAs he’d had to sign, and I had moved to New York and sold my soul to the finance world.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
Pete smiled. “I’m part of an ongoing investigation. Testing some stuff I’m not exactly allowed to talk about.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Of course. And you couldn’t get a hotel?”
Pete frowned, rubbed his eyes, and shook his head. “I’m… I guess I’m in a smidge of trouble.”
“A smidge?”
“I can’t use a credit card, and I lost all my cash on the way here.”
“What?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Can’t use an ATM?”
“They’ll track that,” Pete said. He glanced out the window. His face was like looking in a mirror. We looked so similar even I had trouble telling us apart whenever I looked at old pictures of us. But he looked nervous.
“I’m sorry, someone is tracking you? What the fuck did you get yourself into?”
“Look it’s not a big deal,” he said.
“Oh yeah, doesn’t seem like it.”
“It’s not,” Pete stood up. He walked over to me and grabbed me by the shoulders gently. “It’s just a bit of corporate espionage, is all. We have competitors, and my boss is paranoid. He doesn’t want me using a credit card or anything, so they don’t know I’m here.”
“You really expect me to buy that?”
“I expect you to let me stay here for a night. I’ll be gone in the morning.”
I sighed.
“You’re sure you’re not in real trouble?” I asked. Pete smiled.
“I am in trouble,” he said. “But just a smidge of it.”
“How’d you lose the cash?”
“Long story. Look, just go to bed. Relax. I’m just here to check on some things.”
“You have to give me something better than that. No way you actually think what you’re saying is going to calm me down.”
“Alright, look, all I can say is the company I work for has some IP at North Brother. I’m just going to go tomorrow to make sure it’s all running smoothly.”
“North Brother?”
Pete nodded. He walked over to my kitchen and started opening cabinets. North Brother sounded familiar somehow, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Not a neighborhood as far as I could remember. Then it clicked.
“Wait isn’t that the island?” I said. Pete nodded as he poured some water into a glass he’d found.
“What the hell is even there?”
Pete turned and laughed. He still seemed nervous.
“Nothing,” he said. “Not that I could say either way, but the people I work with are thinking about buying the land and I’m going to go check it out.”
I nodded slowly. None of what Pete was saying made much sense, but I supposed it was better than receiving zero explanation. As long as he wasn’t in some serious trouble, I guessed I could live with him being intentionally vague.
“Fine,” I said, finally. “I’ll go to bed. See you tomorrow.”
“I’ll be gone by the time you’re up,” he said. “Just need a couple hours rest, that’s all.”
He paused for a moment, then spoke again.
“I have to leave this phone here too,” he said pulling an old iPhone from his pocket. “No electronics allowed on the island for security reasons. I’ll get it back in a few days. Cool?”
“Sure,” I said as I walked into the bedroom. “Do whatever you need.”
——————
Pete was gone when I woke up the next day, no sign of him having even been there the night before. For a second, I thought maybe it had all been a dream. But right as I was about to call him to figure out if it was, his phone, which he’d left on the coffee table, caught my attention.
It seemed like an old iPhone, one of the ones with the little button near the bottom, completely black, and a slightly scratched screen, only this one didn’t have an Apple logo in the back. I frowned, trying to remember if I’d ever heard of Apple removing logos from their phones, and put it back where I found it. That’s when the screen lit up and a notification popped up. It was from an app I didn’t recognize, a completely black square as the logo in the banner and little else. What it said, though, was strange.
“UPP in vicinity. Proceed with caution.”
“The hell is a UPP?” I said to myself. It wasn’t a term I recognized, so I pulled my own phone out and did a quick google search. Nothing particularly interesting came up, something about how much you might contribute towards a pension, a universal phone processor, even ultimate ping pong. Nothing that would make anyone really need to “proceed with caution.”
I thought about my brother, about all the things he said the night before. Everything had seemed so sketchy. He’d looked nervous, more nervous than I’d ever really seen him. There was no doubt in my mind about the fact that he’d been lying to me, but what was he actually up to? Even stranger, why leave his phone here. Did he know I’d look at it or just blindly trust I’d leave it alone on the coffee table? And then there was that island. As far as I could remember there was no way to get there anymore, not legally at least. Following him wouldn’t really be an option, but I could just try and get into his phone, check to see if there was any information I might have missed.
Fuck it, I thought as I tapped on the notification banner and slid my finger to the right. Old phone, but it did somehow have face recognition, and as smart as my brother was, he always forgot that we pretty much had the same face. Pretty convenient.
The app interface was nothing special, just a camera app but without a shutter button anywhere. I tried using the volume controls to take a photo like with a regular iPhone, but nothing happened. There was little else except a small menu bar at the top of the screen. When I clicked it, a password wall came up. Fifteen characters. How the hell was I supposed to guess a fifteen minimum character password? Assuming letters, numbers, and probably one or two symbols, it’d be hard to even remember the damn thing, let alone manage to hack through it. I backed out of the menu and waved the phone around my apartment. Again, just a camera app and nothing more. Nothing about a UPP, no discernable place for a notification center. Strange.
Maybe it was a glitch, I thought. Some sort of game or something that was still in development and that my brother was testing. He had said that was what he was here for. Maybe his company had bought land on North Brother in order to install some servers or something. I shrugged and put the phone back on the coffee table, turned on Netflix, and got comfortable on the couch.
——————
I wanted a burger. More specifically, I wanted one from a little spot on 7th street. So I took the subway from my Brooklyn apartment all the way up to the East Village and started making my way down St. Mark’s Place. I really couldn’t tell you why, but I brought Pete’s phone with me. I guess I’d just absent mindedly put it in my pocket.
So I bought my burger, but the place was full of people. I decided to just take it to go and that I’d eat it, colder, in my apartment. A little disappointing, for sure, but not really the worst thing to ever happen. I stuffed the thing into my backpack, walked out of the restaurant and started making my way back to the subway.
That’s when the phone in my pocket started vibrating. I took it out, looked at the screen and saw the same notification as before:
Upp in vicinity. Proceed with caution.
I was about to unlock the phone to see if maybe the glitch from before had fixed itself when I suddenly noticed a man standing in front of me. He wasn’t very tall and wore an oversized and very worn-down wool coat with a bright red beanie on his head. A bushy beard that covered his face almost entirely. His eyes were black, pupils dilated to the point that his irises were gone, and there was a thick layer of dirt that crusted over his skin.
He was holding an old cup which he held up to me and shook. I heard the sound of a few quarters rattling inside and made a move to sidestep him, giving a quiet “sorry, I don’t have any cash on me.”
That’s when he grabbed my arm.
“Food?” He asked with a dead sort of look in his eye and a strange smile.
“What?” I managed. I could feel the phone vibrating in my hand again.
“Food? I’m hungry.”
“Sorry, I don’t have anything,” I said, managing to shake him off and stepping back. I could feel adrenaline rushing through me, suddenly terrified of this man.
“I’m hungry,” he repeated, stepping forward.
“Sorry, I don’t have anything,” I whispered. I stepped back again quickly, turning around and walking as fast as I could in the opposite direction, crossing the street. I could hear the man repeating the same phrase from behind me in a quiet, sad sort of voice. And my brother’s phone was still vibrating in my hand crazily. I looked down at the screen and saw the same notification repeated over, and over again.
Upp in vicinity. Proceed with caution.
Upp in vicinity. Proceed with caution.
Upp in vicinity. Proceed with caution.
I unlocked the phone and was immediately taken back to the that same camera app. I’m not sure what prompted me to do the following thing, but I found myself turning around and pointing the camera at the man who had just grabbed me.
The shutter clicked automatically the second he came into view; I didn’t even need to do anything. There was no distinct marker for anything, just a super quick flash of the screen and suddenly there was a loading icon. I stared at the phone nervously, wondering why the hell it would take a photo of this man, all on its own. Did it somehow have an ability to know when I’d been put in danger? Had my brother figured out a way to keep people safer or something along those lines?
The homeless man was still repeating the same thing from across the street at me when the phone finally finished loading and a small text window popped up. There was barely any information, just a small bit of text that read:
Upp-3728 identified. Do not lie.
I froze.
“I’m hungry.”
Do not lie? I thought back to my interaction, I’d told him I didn’t have any food when there was a burger in my backpack. What did this mean? Could I somehow be in trouble? Why, or even how, did this thing identify this man? I looked up and watched as a small group walked past the homeless man who stood staring straight at me. They barely moved out of the way, barely avoided him, almost as if they hadn’t noticed him.
I shook my head. No. this was all in my head. Nothing weird was going on. I breathed hard and kept walking down the street, making my way to the subway.
——————
I will never forget that subway ride. I had been standing against one of the doors when we got to the first stop. I looked up as I usually did at the people who got off and on, it was something I’d always loved doing because you never really knew the kind of person that would randomly hop on. But this time I saw the same homeless man standing on the other side of the platform. He was staring straight at me, screaming “I’m hungry” at the top of his lungs. He didn’t move, just stood there. I remember looking around to see if anyone had even noticed him, but they were all just going about their day like nothing was going on.
At first, I chalked it up to just being a total coincidence. Maybe he’d somehow beaten my train to the first stop? I didn’t really care that it seemed impossible to do. How would he have known I’d even gotten on the subway in the first place? How would he have known what direction I was going in, or what cart I was even riding in? It didn’t matter, I just wanted to believe it was just a coincidence.
Then the second stop came, and he was there again. Standing at the edge of the platform, now foaming at the mouth as he screamed the same words over and over again. No one else saw him. No one else reacted. I stared back, terrified, heart sinking deeper and deeper and beating so loudly I could hear it thumping against my ear.
He was there again at every stop, and at every stop he stared at me. I felt him watch me as I got off and sprinted towards the exit, could feel his eyes on the back of my head. He was there, somehow, when I got out of the subway, standing on the other side of the street, and he was waiting for me in front of my apartment building.
“What guy?” one of my neighbors had said when I’d tried to casually point him out.
And now I can hear him outside of my apartment door, screaming that he’s hungry. I tried eating the burger, but it didn’t taste like anything. He started banging on the front door about five minutes ago. I looked through the peephole and he was standing on the other side, screaming and foaming at the mouth.
Pete’s phone has been going crazy too. Still the same notification popping up on the screen but no other information. I don’t have a way of calling him, I don’t have a way of figuring out what the fuck is going on and I can hear the man outside has started trying to open the door.
I don’t know what is going to happen to me, but please, if anyone reads this and sees that man on 7th Street, do not lie to him. He will come for you.