This is a chapter from I Hear You Watching, my novel based on my experience with hearing voices and paranoia.
But you can jump in here! The “previously on” will get you up to speed.
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Previously on I Hear You Watching…
Alex hears strangers mocking him wherever he goes. The observers can measure his heart rate and influence his bodily functions. After a harrowing night in which he “glitched” chips in his ears with a magnet, paid an unwelcome visit to Lili, and blew up at strangers in McDonald’s, he rushed to his friend Gavin’s, got some much-needed sleep, and confessed to Gavin some of what’s been happening.
At my desk I feel like a different person.
Gavin lent me one of his T-shirts, since I’d stunk up my own by cleaning the mess in my apartment, driving miles through the night, sleeping all day on his couch, and anxiously sweating throughout. I showered with his soap, dried off with one of his towels, and brushed my teeth with his toothpaste on my finger—not as good as a toothbrush, but it gave me the fresh taste of having slept, and it chilled my teeth in the night air when I left.
The smallish collar sits higher on my throat than my own shirts. I hook a finger, careful not to stretch it as I pull it away from my neck. The shirt is red and has a logo of jagged yellow letters: RZT. I don’t know what it means, but I never thought to ask until now, since I’m wearing it. The shirt had spent months draped over the back of Gavin’s chair in our dorm room, where it wasn’t a shirt but part of the environment, a piece of his presence in our shared space. Now it’s like a talisman from that time—an invisibility cloak.
I wonder if my wardrobe change fooled the observers.
Seeing red at the bottom of my view, I think about how I don’t have any red shirts. Nothing so bright in any color, really.
When I emerged from his apartment tonight, for a delicious moment they may have kept their eyes fixed on his door or his window, still waiting for a glimpse of my sorry face, when I had in fact already slipped away.
The clattering of keyboards fades down the dark hall and laps at the bright chamber of the kitchen.
As I wash the coffeepot in the sink, a voice says, “Alexsssss…”
I close the tap and hear laughter. “Hello?”
“You wanna be someone else now? You think wearing your friend’s clothes will make us go away?”
“I thought fucking up the chip with the magnet made you go away,” I say.
“Yeah, you fell for it, you stupid piece of shit! Like every other time. Hey, I want to show you something. Listen to this…”
A tone fades up in the background—the feedback tone that had supposedly hurt their ears so badly the night before.
“It’s a fuckin’ keyboard, Alex! Gotcha again!”
The pitch of the feedback jumps around, plays Mary Had a Little Lamb, then blurts some dissonant chords punched with a fist.
My body becomes heavy, and I walk differently back to the coffee machine. “I didn’t come rushing to your house, did I?”
“No. You were gonna let us sit here in torture.”
“Of course I was, because fuck you.”
“Machine acting up?” A different voice, not tinny and muffled.
“Huh?” I turn.
Aaron stands in the doorway.
“Yeah, I couldn’t get the—but there it goes.” I push the pot into place below the nozzle.
Aaron goes to the sink. “Feeling better?”
“Yeah, it was a food thing probably, or flu, I don’t know. But yeah, way better.”
“Keith said there’s a package for you.” Keith is the day shift supervisor. “He would’ve put it on your desk, but he saw it on his way out. It should still be at the front door.”
“Great, thanks.” A package? Direct communication? The grand finale?
While the coffee trickles into the pot, I walk past reception to the front door, a door we night shifters never use because the parking lot is in the back. Through the glass door I see a box out in the cold night air next to the standing ashtray, as if it’s taking a break. Written on it are Matt’s name and return address. It’s the router he configured.
I’m touched he went to the trouble, but I stare at it the way the ghost of a person who starved to death might look at a bowl of hot soup left at the feet of their corpse.
I don’t know how long the box has been here. Even if it was originally from Matt, it’s been outside where anybody could grab it, open it, tamper with or replace its contents. Maybe I’ll open it to find the router smashed and a Post-It note saying, gotcha again! Or they used Matt’s box to conceal a bomb or toxic gas. Maybe opening it will trigger a burst of glitter with a card on a spring reading: FAGGOT.
But the worst-case scenario is to open the box and find an internet router, normal in appearance, and to plug it in and find it in working order. Because that could mean yet another parasite that I won’t discover until later, possibly never.
I’ll have to get on the phone with Matt before I use it so he and I can compare the configurations he made with its current settings. Unless the observers made it lie about its settings…
I’m tired again. Like cresting a massive sand dune only to find that the land ahead rolls up and down similar dunes into the horizon, past the curve of the planet, on and on.
I open the door—watch the street, the bushes, the dark shapes of parked cars—and use my foot to nudge the package into the building like a stray cat that might bite, or have fleas, or shed flakes of mange, or shit writhing tapeworm segments everywhere. And I take the box to my desk, turning it over in my hands, examining the tape for signs of having been opened and re-taped. I wait to hear hissing gas or see smoke. Check the labels to see if they were pulled from another box. At any second, it could explode in my face. Then I slide it under the far corner of my desk and walk back down the hall to the bathroom.
It’s bright. White walls. No cameras, unless the fire sprinkler in the ceiling has an eye. Maybe one behind the grate of the heat vent. Or in the floor drain. The sink and mirror are on the wall shared with the sign company next door. I look at the mirror. Knock on it. Would be easy to cut through the wall and make this a two-way mirror.
One of them could be standing on the other side in the dark, staring back at me. So close. If I stare long enough, maybe I’ll catch the shine of a computer screen, I’ll see part of their face or some of the room. I could thrust my fist into the mirror and grab them by the neck, pull them through the jagged hole and kill them with my bare hands.
Then I’d have proof—a parasite successfully extracted, crumpled and dead on the floor. The others would stand framed in broken glass, horrified, then flee to burrow somewhere else. I’d turn the dead one over to the authorities. Those two cops. They’d see. They’d analyze the body to identify it. Maybe it would have no identity. A drone, animated and spoken through by something else, something bigger.
“Can you see us?” The voice is low in timbre now. Calm. Confident, but curious.
“Show me.” I speak quietly because there’s no lock on the bathroom door, and I don’t want someone to walk in on me talking to myself again. “Shine a light on your side.”
“There is no light on our side.”
They feel almost tangible behind my reflection. What do they mean, no light on their side? Are they not in the building next door, but inside the wall? Or between here and another place? If I could see them, would I only see pieces of them, shifting in and out of my world from somewhere else? What would those pieces look like?
I look at my own form and imagine it straddling dimensions.
Against my better judgment, I check my email. There’s a two-day-old message from Dad. It says:
Hey, it’s me.
I tried calling, but it keeps going straight to voicemail. If your phone is turned off and you’re still having trouble with it, could you just respond to this so mom and I know you’re okay?
Matt told me about your router, apparently someone did something to it? Probably just to leech free internet off of you. He said he’s sending you a new one he’s configuring himself. I think that’s a good idea. He said it should arrive in the next couple of days, so hopefully that will do the trick.
He said you thought your phone might be hacked, but he told me that’s not really something just anyone can do. It’s more for the government to find terrorists and things like that.
That isn’t to say I don’t believe you. You know more about what’s happening than I do. But do you ever wonder if maybe the router problem got you thinking, and now you’re imagining the worst case scenario? You’ve always had a powerful imagination. It’s one of your strengths. I know I have trouble shutting my brain off once I start thinking about something. You probably got that from me. If that’s the case, I’m sorry about that.
We love you, and we’re proud of you.
Love,
Dad
“Alex, as one of the government scientists being paid to watch you shit and jerk off, I’d like to say we’re proud of you too.”
I open a reply and write, I’m sorry I didn’t respond. I’m fine.
“Ha, fine. You think you’re fine?”
I’ve had my phone turned off this whole time. I don’t know if Matt told you, but I called him from a pay phone just in case. He was very helpful, and I’m eager to get the router and have a clean connection.
Of course, I’m not sure I should even take it home.
I’m writing this on my work computer because I’m still offline at home. I’m tired of feeling like they’re seeing everything.
“You didn’t believe us when we told you—we see everything.”
The router is a good start. And I’ve got another idea that I won’t mention here in case they see this.
“Can’t wait to find out what that is.”
“Are you getting any of it?”
“It’s too fuzzy to make out. We’ll have to wait until he focuses on it.”
“He’s probably bluffing anyway.”
But everything is fine.
“The witnesses at McDonald’s submitted their videos to the police. The girl you almost raped agreed to testify. They traced your license plate and found where you work.”
I’ll call you once this is over.
“They’re waiting for you outside.”
I love you too.
-Alex
Next on I Hear You Watching…
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"One of them could be standing on the other side in the dark, staring back at me. So close. If I stare long enough, maybe I’ll catch the shine of a computer screen, I’ll see part of their face or some of the room. I could thrust my fist into the mirror and grab them by the neck, pull them through the jagged hole and kill them with my bare hands.
Then I’d have proof—a parasite successfully extracted, crumpled and dead on the floor. The others would stand framed in broken glass, horrified, then flee to burrow somewhere else. I’d turn the dead one over to the authorities. Those two cops. They’d see. They’d analyze the body to identify it. Maybe it would have no identity. A drone, animated and spoken through by something else, something bigger."
He's so unhinged now. I can't wait for this to be over for him.
Chilling.