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 mocking him wherever he goes. The observers can measure his heart rate and influence his bodily functions. After many attempts to obtain concrete proof, Alex confided in his friend Gavin, who suggested a camping trip with their friend Eli as a change of scenery. While packing, Alex overheard one of his observers take the other hostage. He ignored their cries for help the whole car ride out to the trailhead.
Two other cars are parked at the trailhead—a blue pickup and a brown hatchback. I wonder whose they are and how long they’ve been here.
The sky bruises as we tighten our laces, throw on our packs, and adjust the straps. The close hug of my heavy pack is comforting. It contains all I need for the next couple of days. If I were more skilled, it could be all I need for the rest of my life.
I once captioned episodes of a show that explained basic survival techniques. On the trail I see manzanita trees and think of all the uses for their peeling bark. Our boots clomp over rock shards I could sharpen into arrowheads. Our legs brush past the fleshy, pointed tongues of century plants, which I could saw from their bunches and strip into strong fibers.
Crunchy desert soil grinds on the faces of rock staring up at us. I listen to my breath, listen to the water bottle on my left side slosh because I drank some of it in the car, listen to the straps of our packs whine in time with our steps.
These are the only sounds.
The sun has gone and left a fading blue to the west. Everything else is deep purple. The trail is dark enough that I can only make out differing shades of rocks, dirt, and pockmarks. We turn on our headlamps, which shrink our awareness to bright, slanted circles, and all around us rise cutout silhouettes of pointed, twisted trees.
There are no walls here. I like knowing that if they’ve followed me, we occupy the same space. The only thing between us is air.
“We don’t have to be there, Alex.”
You’re not here?
“It’s not necessary.”
Gavin is in front, then Eli, then me. A giant hand could reach down from the dark and pluck me away.
The headlamp moving over the ground before me is like a hole cut through to another place, a dimension where the air itself is solid dirt and rock. Like Lili’s sunflower world, but in this dirt dimension I wouldn’t breathe or see or move. And neither would anyone else, so even though I might suffocate there, I’d be safe.
They said they don’t need to be here. They don’t. Is that because Gavin and Eli are here? Are they my executioners?
Then is it hubris or stupidity to let me walk behind them? Possibly a strong bluff. A dare. The observers know I have a Swiss Army knife in my pocket. Of course, Gavin and Eli have knives too. And I don’t know what else they have in their pockets. Pepper spray—for mountain lions, they might claim, and I’d have to accept that explanation. A taser hidden in one of their packs. Handcuffs. Rope. Can’t be too careful out here, they’d say. What if we run into a crazy person?
I can’t argue with that.
After two hours hiking, the chaparral is smaller and the terrain is rockier. Trees are dark and spindly with no leaves.
“Oh shit,” Gavin says. “This is the edge of the fire zone.”
I slide my finger along a branch of manzanita, guessing from its shape. It looks like a giant tumbleweed. The tip of my purple finger comes away slippery and soot-black in the light of my headlamp.
“We could probably backtrack into that woodsy part and find a spot.”
They’d prefer not to do whatever they’re planning in the open. I say, “I’d like to stay here. Where we can see the stars.” I look at the land beyond my headlamp, the layers of hills against hills, differing shades of dark. Open space to run, plenty of folds to hide.
“Eli?”
“Honestly,” Eli says, “I’m cool with the fire zone. Another fire’s unlikely, since there’s nothing to burn, and I kinda want to see this place in the daylight.”
“Okay, I’m sold.”
The creek trickles somewhere ahead.
When we gather wood, I move in unpredictable zig-zag paths disguised as meandering, and turn to face them before bending to pick up each piece.
The fire is warm but dim, because the wood is mostly charcoal and prefers to smolder. It lights the undersides of our faces a deep red.
Eli takes out a bottle of whiskey, which we pass around. They both drink first. I watch them handle the bottle.
It feels like we’re in a closed room with black walls, and a floor made from stones and hard-packed sand brought from somewhere else. Only the breeze hints at our being outside. But it could come from a vent in a wall, in a dark corner of the room, our room, beyond the reach of the fire.
“Weird fire,” Gavin says. “But it’s kinda nice like this.”
“I wish I had my hatchet.” Eli rips a yucca stalk from the ground. “Or an axe.”
I’m sure you’ve got something in that pack of yours.
He holds the head of the stalk against the embers, and yellow flames grow. He lifts it like a torch. “This is what fire’s supposed to look like.”
“You wouldn’t be complaining if we had some meat to cook,” Gavin says. “This fire’s fucking perfect for that.”
I wait for them to untuck bibs from their shirts, pull knives and forks from their pockets, sprout wolf snouts and stare, drooling, at me.
“Alex, you’ve got the animal tracks book, right?” Eli says, “Go catch us a rabbit.”
“I wonder if all the bunnies around here burned up in the fire.” Gavin looks at the air. “Poor little fellas. Or at least lost their homes.”
“Gavin, you and Alex find some poop and track a food animal for us.”
Is it us versus Eli? Are we supposed to walk off into the dark so he can shoot us both in the back of the head?
Gavin chuckles. “Food animal? Is that one of those survival phrases like ‘wild edibles’?” He motions for the bottle. I give it to him. “Alex, always remember…”
I say, “You sweat…”
“You die,” he says.
I know what the phrase means, but what does Gavin mean by it right now? Was the embedded message, “you die,” the important part? Or was the whole phrase “you sweat, you die” his way of giving me a friendly reminder—be careful out there—in case I have to flee? Does Gavin know Eli’s an observer, and did he arrange this trip, where there are no buildings and the landscape isn’t alive with agents, to give me a chance to escape with supplies on my back?
Eli drops the stalk curling with flame into the fire and reaches for the bottle. “What does that mean, ‘you sweat, you die’? Is that some kind of code phrase for ‘push Eli into the fire’?”
I look at the glints in his eyes and ask, “Do we have a reason to do that?”
Gavin says, “It’s from a show. Survivorman. And good advice.”
“Never seen it,” Eli says. “My advice is: don’t sweat the small stuff.” He hands me the bottle.
“What is ‘small stuff,’ in your opinion?” I take a long pull. The sterile heat of the whiskey feels good, and my salivary glands squeeze in the backs of my cheeks.
He shrugs and rips another stalk from the ground. “Like when your neighbor saw you jerk off. So what? What’re they gonna do? If they tell anyone, they look like the weirdos for watching you.”
“That’s true,” Gavin says, staring at the fire.
I say, “They could record video and put it all over the internet.”
Eli scoffs and holds the stalk in the fire. “Half the internet is people jerking off.”
I say, “But what if the ‘small stuff’ turns out to be really big stuff?” He must know I’m onto him. I wait for him to swing the torch into my face. If I time it right I can roll back off my rock to dodge the flame and onto my feet to run.
“Like what kind of ‘big stuff’?”
“They could watch me all the time, as part of some government test.”
“What are they testing?”
“They—”
“What could they possibly learn from you that they don’t already know? It’s the government, Alex. They may be a bunch of shitbag hypocrites, but I still think they’ve got more important things to do than post videos of some nobody jerking off all over the internet.”
“Maybe they want to see how I react.”
Eli laughs. “They don’t care how we react to stuff. They don’t even listen when we fucking vote. This is America. As far as the government’s concerned, we’re on our own.” He groans and tilts the torch to keep falling bits of flame from landing on his hand. “Okay, okay, I change my advice to: don’t sweat. Period.” He tosses the torch onto the fire and it flares. Then the flames lower like a demon sinking back underground.
The black hood of paranoia lifts from my head. My forehead relaxes in a way it hasn’t for a long time, and its thin muscle buzzes, and I do feel like a nobody. The center of nothing. Orion, with his arrow trained between my eyes, is just stars and empty space. Eli is flesh-and-blood real, Gavin too, and me—the three of us are nobodies, animals, out here together. I shrink into an infinity of relief. The rest of the world, loud and chaotic, looking all directions, seeing everything and nothing, ends at my skin. I’m another rock, another tree, another star, a bat in a cave, an ant in a hill. I am a drop in a wave, a grain in a dune sculpted by an indifferent wind.
After a silence, Gavin says, “I mean, you could die from not sweating, too.”
“Jesus! Okay, my final advice is: we’re all gonna die! How’s that?”
Gavin laughs, and so do I. Our shared mortality comforts me like the whiskey burn in my throat and the knowledge that I am nothing.
Eli sits on a rock and reaches toward me. “Gimme that.”
I hand him the bottle.
We watch the slow inner flicker of the embers. Lights on in a house at night.
The campsite’s large oak tree is mostly burnt, and some of its larger limbs have been amputated. My headlamp edges the velvet-black branches against the dark sky like ghosts in smoke. I can tell by the size of the tree that the root ball must be massive, reaching down into the dimension of solid dirt and rock beneath me.
“Gotta take a piss, Alex.”
I turn. Eli looks asleep, and Gavin reads a book with his headlamp.
I realize it’s me who has to pee; that was my own thought I heard.
“No, I have to pee too.”
Why are you telling me?
“Because I’m still tied to a fucking chair. You left me like this.”
“He’s fine, Alex, he’ll just piss himself.”
“Fuck you.”
I stand and walk, look over my shoulder to see Gavin still reading and Eli turned away. Near the edge of the half-charred forest there’s a cluster of boulders I hide behind, and I pee as quietly as I can, listening for the rustle of a sleeping bag, the soft crunch of footsteps. The paranoid hood slips down, and I have to pull harder to breathe as if something literally covers my face. My forehead hardens. If Gavin and Eli brought me out here to get rid of me, they already know I don’t sleep much—this is the moment to catch me unawares.
As my tired eyes adjust to the dark, the fuzzy black holes between trees become grottos full of watchers, then tunnels of more trees between trees.
The urine sinks easily into the dry ground. When there’s no more standing liquid I press my boot into it. Forensics will find it. We did a comparison, and it doesn’t match either of their boots. There was a third camper with them. And that print was too clean to be an accident—he left it for us; he knew he was in trouble.
I sit against the rock and wait for the print to dry.
I open my eyes to a stiff neck, a sharp ache in my back, and the sound of steps from our camp. I watch the spaces between the trees to see that they haven’t changed, while I silently unzip my pocket and remove my knife, unfold the blade.
“Alex,” comes a whisper around the boulder. Why would he call to me before killing me?
The patch of ground is still dark, with my print in clear relief. If he sees it…
I grip the knife and lean against the rock to stand. Stinging fuzz swells in my feet. I wiggle my toes to move the blood, ready to run.
“Alex?” It’s Gavin. Blinded by bias, I suspected the wrong friend. Keep your enemies closer…
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Okay. Just checking.” A pause. “You taking a shit?”
In a second he’ll come around and I’ll swing the knife. If they’re working together, Eli might be ready on the other side, so I’ll have to be quick. “Yeah, whiskey shits. You know.”
If I plant it in Gavin’s ribs, it might get stuck. I should aim for the throat.
“Okay, gotcha. You were gone a while. Had to make sure you weren’t eaten by something.”
What is he waiting for? “Nope, just doing this.”
He laughs. “No worries. Take your time.” Footsteps crackle back to camp, a sleeping bag swishes.
He didn’t step into view out of respect for my privacy. My privacy, out here in the wild where anything can happen and no one has to know.
Why is my knife out, ready to plunge into the throat of the one person who still respects my privacy?
We exist in another triangle constellation. But this triangle is skewed, fragile. I’m the far point, stretched and separated from the other two by a wall of rock.
I’d almost gone much further. I could still be walking. Constant steps from the night I was followed a week ago, only stopping to eat and sleep, and I’d be in Las Vegas by now. Or Tijuana. Or withering somewhere in Death Valley.
If I break from this triangle and flee into the forest, I’d become a lone point in a tangle of possible constellations. But if I walk back to camp, our triangle will regain its strong, equilateral dimensions, and point outward at encroaching threats rather than stab inward at itself.
An equilateral triangle fits neatly inside a circle of protection.
I fold my knife and put it in my pocket.
My boot print is still intact, well-formed. If anything happens to us, it will signal our presence. It’s up to me to protect us.
At camp, Eli snores. Gavin reads. The land is quiet.
I get into my sleeping bag and imagine the observers, far away in their room lit with glowing screens, sitting up through the night to watch us.
“Heart rate’s down. He’ll sleep soon.”
I want my body to be a closed-off secret again, like everyone else’s. I fantasize jamming a fork into an electrical outlet to fry the chip.
“Great idea. Short yourself out like your apartment. Solve all your problems.”
In my fantasy, the shock kills the chip but also sends a surge to their computer, and the entire array blinks out.
“Whoa, wait.”
“You saw that?”
“Yeah, what happened?”
“You’ve got this all in surge protectors, right?”
“Yeah, but that screen just—”
“There it went again… What the fuck?”
My heart speeds up. I close my eyes and concentrate on the screen displaying my heart rate.
“Dude, there’s a problem.”
“Holy shit. Is he doing that?”
I imagine a flare from the screen’s power cord.
“It’s on fucking fire! Put it out!”
“Jesus Christ, it’s melting!”
I hear the foamy bursts of a fire extinguisher.
Then I focus on their computer tower, and imagine it explodes in sparks.
“Unplug it! The whole thing’s gonna go!”
“Alex, fucking stop! Stop! Oh my go—”
I hear Gavin turn a page. Breeze skitters sand across stone. The creek is distant and barely audible, but there.
Power sizzles through my nerves to my fingertips and toes. It buzzes in my head. My breathing deepens.
Gavin or Eli swishes in a sleeping bag.
I turn off my headlamp and lie in the dark.
Fire-brittle branches rattle in the wind.
Next on I Hear You Watching…
Impatient to read the rest?
Or share your referral link and get a free copy of the ebook when three people subscribe!
Got a question about the book or my experience with hearing voices and psychosis? Don’t be shy! Join the chat and…
I feel like he's closer to having the insight that this is really being generated from inside his own head, between recognising it was his own thought about needing to pee and 'remote controlling' the electricals with his thoughts.