Face-to-Face

"Hi, I'm your neighbor."

Apr 15, 2025

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. It’s worse in his apartment. He scanned his computer for surveillance viruses with no success. He tried recording the strangers, but their voices were too quiet to register. But he thinks he knows who’s behind it.

A black line drawing of Alex, the protagonist of "I Hear You Watching." He is white, short messy parted hair, glasses. He stares straight at you, unsmiling. In the background is the side of a cracked stucco apartment building with iron-barred windows and clusters of long green succulent spikes stretching sharp shadows across the wall in golden evening light.

After the first knock it’s too late to turn back. Maybe this demonstration of bravery will prove that I know who they are and I’m serious about getting them to stop. They could take the hint, and we could save ourselves a confrontation.

But since it’s 10 p.m. on a Monday, and I’m standing in front of their quiet house lined up with all the other quiet houses, lights on and curtains closed, their other option is to pull me in and make me disappear. If they have the means to torture me at a distance, they have the means to torture me in person.

Matt expects me to call when I get to work tonight. If he hears that I went missing after our conversation—for which I sought the last working pay phone in Los Angeles—he knows enough to give the authorities some rocks to turn over.

I’ve got the recorder’s SD card in my pocket on the off chance they’d use this moment to sneak into my apartment and mess with the evidence.

I knock harder. If they answer or peek through the curtains, I’ll have a face to remember.

The deadbolt springs back, the knob clicks and opens.

A young guy stands there with blond hair buzzed short. He’s got eyes like holes cut in cardboard, somehow both flat and sunken-in. They make him look defiantly illiterate. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t good with computers. Maybe his eyes got that way from scanning pages of hacker tips, reading all that broken, impersonal coding language computer people trade online. It’s probably been a long time since he’s read a whole, unadulterated sentence.

His eyes narrow, or maybe they’re always like that. I search them for signs of recognition. He says, “Yeah?”

Without it sounding tinny and distant, I can’t compare the voice. I say, “Hi, I’m your neighbor. Alex Porter.” I wait.

“OK.”

“Look, I know what you guys are up to. I don’t know if it’s you or your housemates, but I’d like to call a truce. What do you think?”

His tongue flicks over his lip. His eyebrows go up in the middle like a golden retriever’s when it can’t find a stick you only pretended to throw. “What do you mean?”

“I’m the guy. From over there.” I point at my window.

He looks but can’t see my window past his hedge. Then he looks back at me. “And?”

“And I want my privacy back.” I don’t even feel the urge to make my language more severe. This clearly isn’t the response he expected.

“Dude, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” He frowns and runs his tongue over his lip again.

That’s one of the tells, isn’t it? Proof someone’s lying? The tongue thing, and looking up to the left? One side means lying, the other side means trying to remember something. Lying is to the left, I think.

“I’ll bet your buddies know what I’m talking about.”

“Well, they’re not home.”

“So you admit you’ve got housemates.”

“Yeah. What does that mean?”

“Are they just cowards, or what?”

He shakes his head like an Etch A Sketch to erase me from his doorstep. “Look, dude, I don’t know what your problem is, but whatever it is, it’s not us.”

“You sure they aren’t home?” I look past his shoulder. It’s dark in there. I see a couch with clothes draped on the back. There’s a heavy wood coffee table and burgundy recliner—ugly, found, frat-house furniture. Video game console and controllers on the floor with jumbled cords like a disemboweled alien.

“They’re at work. Do you work?”

“Nights.” I smile. “But you already knew that.”

He just squints at me.

I return his squint. “Do you work?”

“Not right now. But I’ve got other shit to do.” He closes the door, satisfied it’ll wipe me from view. But just before the bolt catches he adds, “See ya, creep.”

He said creep.