How It Begins

Synchronicity has told a perfect joke.

Dec 15, 2024

This is the first chapter of I Hear You Watching, my novel based on my experience with hearing voices and paranoia.

The book is finished. Chapters post here every week.

A black-on-white line drawing of Alex Porter, the protagonist of "I Hear You Watching." He’s a white guy in his late twenties, short messy parted hair, glasses. He stares straight at you, unsmiling.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I am not what I think I am;
I am not what you think I am;
I am what I think you think I am.

- Charles Horton Cooley
as summarized by Robert Bierstedt

A month from now, I’ll try not to worry whether anyone thinks I’m a good person. I’ll move from my one-bedroom apartment into something called a “micro-studio,” and see it as an upgrade. I’ll get a job at a pet food store, which will force me to speak to people on a daily basis, and I’ll frame it as immersion therapy.

Someone will buy four cans of dog food, and when I ask if he wants a bag he’ll smile and say, “No, thanks, I’ll eat it on the way home!” It’ll be the third time I’ve heard that joke that day, but the small kindness of his smile will move me almost to tears.

An hour later, while “Margaritaville” plays from the ceiling speakers, I’ll cling white-knuckled to the memory of that smile when I hear a voice in the next aisle say they poisoned my sandwich at lunch. It’ll help me doubt another voice that says they’re going to show up after closing and throw me in the trunk of a car.

I’ll walk to work each morning, and home every night, refusing to look over my shoulder, with my heart in my chest like a leaf about to fall.

I’ll have been a target of the universe. A searing pinpoint of light under the vast lens of the all-seeing Eye.

I’ll have died many times, at hands that were mostly my own.

Once buried alive and shot into space.

Once like a pig drained of blood.

Once torn to smaller and smaller pieces by millions of tinier lives.

I’ll have become a multiple murderer, despite my innocence. My victims will grow easier to kill and harder to ignore.

But that’s all a month away.

Right now I’m sitting on the couch in my one-bedroom apartment with my pants around my ankles, blissfully unaware that these are my last few minutes of freedom.

I’ve found a porn clip I like. Nothing rough. The man is out of frame except his legs. The woman isn’t pretending to be someone’s cousin, sister, or stepdaughter. She smiles in the moments her mouth is free, and takes her time.

My right hand starts to cramp up, so I change to my left, and a voice outside my window says, “The stranger…”

I know “the stranger” is what it’s called when someone masturbates with their non-dominant hand, because it feels like someone else.

The blinds are closed, no one can see me. Someone talking outside happened to say the words “the stranger” at the exact moment I switched hands. Synchronicity has told a perfect joke.

But it’s too perfect.

I shrink like an untied balloon, and my hand stays in my lap like a circle of protection. My apartment is on the second floor, so it would take a ladder or X-ray vision to see me—unless the onlooker is in the house next door, which has a window facing mine. I bend, seeking a line of sight beneath my blinds to my crotch, but there isn’t one.

Someone outside laughs.

I pull my boxers up and creep to the window. A look through my blinds proves the neighbor’s blinds are also closed. As is their window. No one in the alley or carport below.

I slide my window shut and lock it.

Then I close the laptop and finish quickly in the bathroom. It’s perfunctory and unsatisfying, because I can’t shake the voice.

The stranger is a grain of sand in my shell.

Grit, lodged in a tender fold.

I don’t know how it got in. Maybe it was always here, unfelt until now.

I’ll turn and worry it in my mind, and soon it will thicken into something altogether different. Something iridescent.

This is how it begins.