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. Desperate to escape, Alex set a trap for them in his apartment and fled miles down the freeway to an empty parking lot, where he searched his body for a chip with tweezers and a magnet. The magnet against Alex’s ears caused the chips to malfunction and screech feedback in the observers’ ears. Victory?
Lili said she leaves for work early in the morning. There’s a single parking spot available on the whole street, waiting for me.
The sky lightens over the houses, birds are noisy in scattered trees.
The observers say their ears are bleeding.
A few people come out of her building. An old woman with a big dog. Across the street a man wearing a reflector vest and carrying a lunchbox leaves a house and drives away.
I hope she uses this door. Maybe there’s another door I can’t see. I could go around the block to check, but then I might miss her coming out the front door. So I stay put, knowing she might be somewhere else.
There she is.
She looks like a stranger. I realize I’ve never seen her like this. The first moment I saw her, when she walked down the sidewalk to my apartment—and even before that, in her photo—she was looking at me. She existed in relation to me.
Here, though, she’s just a stranger walking. A figure painted on the veil. Opaque.
She doesn’t seem concerned that someone might be watching her.
Why can’t I look this way to others? What does she have that I lack? Or is the problem something I have—this parasite gnawing at my brain?
I almost let her keep walking, just to see the natural way she’d walk down the street to her car. How she’d get in and attach her seatbelt, start the car, maybe take a moment to find music on the radio or put on a CD. I don’t know which car is hers. I wonder what it smells like. Especially now—overnight upholstery odor eclipsed by the smell of her clean morning body, icy tea-tree hair, breath of coffee or orange juice or toothpaste.
I only know her white wine breath.
My hand opens the door. The overhead light goes on like a game show podium.
“There he goes,” say people watching from windows. “He’s going after her now. Get my phone in case he tries something.”
She doesn’t look my way. She doesn’t know to look, because she doesn’t expect me. She’s walking away when I shut the door and press the key fob, locking the van with a honk. Her head turns slightly.
“Lili.”
She stops. I see the moment she recognizes me, a look different than the one she gave when approaching my place, different than in the photo. This look knows who I am but isn’t happy to see me, is confused and possibly frightened of me.
I wonder if “old whiteboy” Eric ever did anything like this. I don’t like thinking he might have.
She ignored it when I touched her hair while she held me in her mouth. And despite that, she still smiled at me and invited me into her apartment, into her body. But now, standing outside her apartment building at this time of day, uninvited, this is a transgression.
I agree with the look on her face. I’m the creep they always wanted me to be.
“I’m sorry,” I say, holding my hands up. Purple fingers. “I know this is weird. I don’t mean anything by it.”
She holds the strap of her purse and shifts her stance. “Why are you here?”
“We met under strange circumstances. At least strange for me. I wasn’t expecting to meet anyone on the site, actually.” I hope her eavesdropping neighbors can’t infer what I mean by “site.” But if they can, at least they’ll know I’m not some predator who picked her at random; we have a history.
“Then why did you sign up?”
“Well, I wanted to meet someone, but I didn’t think it would happen like it did. It’s bad timing, because something’s been happening with me, and I don’t want to bring you into it. But I like you, and—”
She frowns. “Then why’d you tell me to fuck off?”
“What? When?”
“The text.”
A horrible tickle crawls through me.
The unknown number.
“I meant that for someone else.” I sound far away.
She just stares.
“I’m sorry, I—”
“I have to go, Alex.” My name is cold in her mouth. The way she’ll say it when she tells other people about this.
She goes, still turning to look at me as I climb into my van. She sits in her car, probably waiting for me to go first so I won’t follow her. Maybe she’ll memorize my license plate.
My parking job was so snug and I’m so distracted that I have to shift back and forth a few times to free myself. Then I come to the end of the block, stop at the sign, and wave to her.
She stares, stone-faced.
I turn and quickly reach the speed limit to show I’m really going.
Next on I Hear You Watching…
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Been waiting for him and Lili to meet again. Really hoping she'll help him work this out. But yeah, he's definitely made that less of a natural response. He must look like an absolute fright as well, making her wonder if he's 'safe' or too mentally unstable as a virtual stranger to be assumed safe.