Disgusting

Maybe my behavior is starting to frighten them.

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.

Previously on I Hear You Watching…

Alex hears strangers following and mocking him wherever he goes. He turned his apartment upside-down looking for surveillance bugs and blew a fuse disconnecting his smoke detector. He called the police, but explaining his predicament only hurt his credibility.

What shitty spies, those cops! True spies would pretend to take my claims very seriously; they’d nod empathetically and placate me with phrases like, “yessir, it’s a big crazy world we live in,” while feeling along every surface in the place, dabbing more sticky eyes and ears into corners, under ledges.

No, those were true-blue LAPD officers, fresh from the Elysian Park Academy, thumbs still wet from sucking.

Get some rest. What did they think I was gonna do next? I’m fucking exhausted.

I need to change the locks, because they clearly have copies of my keys.

The couch slides snugly into the entryway, so even if someone can get through the locks, the door will only open a couple of inches.

From the street comes a clipped honk. The same as when I lock my minivan with the key fob. But my van isn’t visible from the window. I make a mental note—when possible, park within view. I don’t see a police car, either. They might not have come in a car. Maybe they walked, or materialized from a sulfurous mist.

Was it them locking my van with their own copy of the remote?

The window is dark next door. Are the “officers” over there now, slipping out of their uniforms, hanging them in a closet or folding them into duffel bags? High-fiving their buddies?

I’ll search the van in the morning.

For all I know, the honk is an attempt to lure me into the street where—enough is enough—I’d finally go missing. They want me to go check now, at 4:00 in the morning when no one will see.

With the couch blocking the door, window locked, blinds drawn, foil taped, and most importantly the power cut, my bubble of security has re-expanded to the size of my apartment. I breathe deep and feel a surge of fresh energy.

The question of help from an outside party was a weak point. But I know now that things are far too weird to explain to anyone else. It’s only from my position that the stars align to reveal Orion’s arrow pointing at me. Seen from any other angle, there is no Orion.

I brush my teeth in the dark. No light at all, save for the dark purple rectangle of safety glass above the shower, too dim to illuminate anything beyond itself. I turn away from the window and brush my teeth while staring into the black void. The wall is somewhere in front of me, I don’t know how close. I reach, touch it and jump—only inches away.

It feels good to lie down. I’m naked, how I usually sleep. Behind the foil the window is still open just a slit to let air into my protective bubble, and to stoke the soothing crackle of the foil’s quiet metal fire. It makes me sleepy. My eyes burn. My feet are still cold under the sheets. I brushed them off but can feel some grit followed me into bed. I run my hands up and down my torso, my arms, my legs, push my blood around. These are things over which I still have complete control.

My hand rests on my penis, and I feel it come to life a beat at a time. All that blood pumping logic in my head for so long, other parts of me have shriveled with neglect. But now I’m confident I’ve solved enough of the puzzle that there’s blood to spare, to wake those parts from hibernation.

I wish Lili were here with me. We could fuck and both scream loud. Pour white wine on each other and drink it off. I’d probably be free of my toxic thoughts. We’d just be two people using each other’s bodies.

My mind flashes with imagery of past crushes like a zoetrope—I watch a head move up and down on my cock, but each time it rises it’s a different girl, and they go around and around, changing every second. All of them suck me in unison—in celebration. I’m so hard I can feel an aching line through its core from the base to the head. I wish they were all here. What a party we could have here in the dark. We could eat and drink the contents of my fridge and each other. One of them could put a big scoop of ice cream between her legs, then sit on my face and put me out of my fucking misery.

A sound catches my attention. Small and far away. Like howling.

I stop.

I get up, still hearing the sound, intermittent now, and I walk into the living room feeling my newly-sprouted limb bounce and swing with my steps. The sound gets louder, as I suspected it would, and is loudest when I reach the smoke detector. Oh, if only those cops could hear this now. That’s what it took to wheedle them out of silence—a feeling of joy in me, and the fuckers piped right back up.

They say, “Alex, what the fuck? God dammit! Are you thinking about those cops or what, you faggot?”

I pick up the smoke detector, feeling myself at half-mast still heartbeat-bobbing against the pull of gravity.

“You can see me?” I ask.

“We can see everything, you sick fuck!” The voice is tinny and desperate in my hands. This would be the moment to dunk the thing in the sink.

But now I have new information. Probably infrared. I don’t know if omnidirectional thermal cameras exist, or if they have multiple eyes planted in places where I somehow missed them. Placing cameras is a different art than placing microphones, since mics don’t need line of sight.

The cameras roll wherever I am. They probably watched me brush my teeth facing the wall minutes ago. Maybe my behavior is starting to frighten them—I feel my erection returning at the thought. They might watch a bit longer out of morbid curiosity, knowing it’s only a matter of time before I knock on their door again, hammer in hand.

They want a monster? Well…

I put the smoke detector next to the bed and lie on top of the sheets. “You see that?” I ask. “Get a good fuckin’ look.” My erection has fully returned and aches. I stroke it hard, slow, feeling like the skin could split and peel down to reveal a standing iron beam. My other hand cups and pulls on my balls. “Keep watching.”

I see the girls again, and the zoetrope spins slower. I pause on some of my favorites.

A girl from high school lifts her head to curl her hair behind an ear and says, “I always wanted to do this to you, Alex.”

Then she puts her mouth deep on me again and changes into the girl from the tobacco shop by work. “I think about this every time I see you.” She smiles and licks along me.

You’re beautiful. Let me see your chipped tooth.

She pulls me into her smile.

“You have desires too,” she says. “Everyone does.”

We’re only human.

The smoke detector screams, “Fucking gross!”

A girl I saw once in traffic says, “Be gross with me, Alex. Let’s be animals together.”

Disgusting. I want to be disgusting with you.

She grips me tight, out of breath, her eyes stare into mine. “We’re all disgusting, Alex! Be disgusting!”

Then I see Vanessa from the ill-fated webcam session. I force her head down. Choke on it. Put that on Facebook.

“God, what the fuck?!”

The smoke detector’s disgust mounts with my pleasure. Eventually all my muscles tighten, the ache reaches an excruciating pinnacle, and a thick blast explodes through me. I feel it land up to my neck, and I keep working until it’s over.

“Jesus fucking Christ! You sick fuck!”

I tremble, and the dark room sparkles like faint TV fuzz. My toes curl and uncurl. A warm hum sweeps slowly back and forth through my brain.

When the buzz calms, I take my T-shirt from the floor and wipe off, then slip under the sheets.

The smoke detector continues chattering to itself as my eyes close, and the warmth radiating through my body pulses me into a deep sleep.

Next on I Hear You Watching…

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