You don't see the birdhouse as you walk by, but the birdhouse sees you. A closed-circuit camera nesting in place of birds' eggs. A clutch of discarded images.

This is Rummie's birdhouse, in Rummie's garden, outside Rummie's house, snapped tight between the mountains and the deserts of New Mexico. The land of photographers and painters, Ansel Adams and Georgia O'Keeffe, him in black and white, her in color, but the CCTV always shoots monochrome. Of course Rummie is in D.C. these days, but still, the house must be watched.

Forget Iraq. It's the Boonies you want to worry about. You never know what these frontier types will get up to, with their tequila-whipping Wild West ways. Surveil and Survive.

The Watcher is paid to keep his eyes fixed on the TV screen till night, then he climbs the crab apple tree, rubs his hand against concubine pink, smells her blossoms, lets her petals fall in his ears. The tree blossoms are the pink of a bra strap, and through the pink he sees the round mother flesh of an adobe house, curved as a peach.

The Watcher has no concubine and he has no mother. His father lives in Miami with a new family. Those kids all went to college and were honored with white coats and stethoscopes, briefcases and fat gold pens. The Watcher fought in Vietnam, came home with a razor hair cut and a razed heart and tried to write poetry. He fell in love with a woman ten years older who left him for a vacuum salesman.

The Watcher started to collect stamps to make his mind orderly, sticking the stamps on a page with small wax paper hinges. He arranged the stamps by country, in alphabetical order, from America by way of Argentina and Trinidad to Vietnam. One day he tore them all out and started again, sorting the stamps by color, then by the value of their currency, and finally by picture, from animal by way of flower and fruit to vegetable. His mind was still not ordered so he threw the stamps on the fire and toasted marshmallows on their flames. The marshmallows were pink, and as the pink grilled dark over the stamp flames it turned into the pink of crabapple trees in New Mexico, burned deep by summer.

When the Watcher got this job behind the adobe house on the hill, he misunderstood at first. He thought the man in the black suit with a face shaped like a violin wanted him to climb into the birdhouse.

"How big is this birdhouse?" asked the Watcher, seeing in his mind a high pole and on top of it a wooden hut big enough to house flamingos and storks, pelicans flying.

Then he understood and took his place in front of the screen, a flat square screen like a stamp on a page, filled with moving pictures. He could use the lever in front of him to turn the camera lens from side to side, three inches at a time, and so he did when he was bored to create the illusion that he was shaking his head, no, no, while he watched the garden and the woman with the wild white hair and the big smile wave her arms at him.

"I've just come to paint," she shouted. There wasn't any microphone with the camera so he only saw her mouth move, but even behind his screens the Watcher smelled hibiscus tea and oil paints and lavender for peace and a warm trace of dog. He watched her as she set up an easel, glancing over her shoulder to the birdhouse, rubbing the flat of her hand over her head. Then she picked up her canvas and paints and walked round to the side of the house, where he couldn't see her anymore, where she was alone with the pink crab apple tree that was his. He climbed into it at night and lay cradled in withered bark arms and pretended it was his mother.

In the picture painted by the woman with the white hair there are shadows on the wall, and one of the shadows belongs to the Watcher. He's crept round to watch her, a live body making live, wide waves with her arms, instead of an electric screen picking up chipmunks and holy sunsets that he can't touch.

His shadow is pasted on the wall. His head is turned due west. Tonight he sees the sunset for himself, and nobody watches the screen at all, and the camera clicks and whirrs in the birdhouse and curious finches fly by.

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TANIA CASSELLE is a freelance writer from London who fell in love with the Golden West on a road trip to New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. The trip also provided her with a) the idea for her novel in progress, thanks to a lonely night road somewhere near the Four Corners, and b) her future husband, who she met over a rattlesnake in the New Mexico sagebrush.