Meat Puppet

"Well, he's gotta take a piss or eat sometime."

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. He flopped onto the bed and decided to masturbate, which disgusted the observers so much that Alex felt a new surge of confidence and drifted off to sleep.

“Maybe he’s dead.”

“He’s not dead.”

“The pleasure was too much for him, and his brain exploded.”

“That was fucking disgusting, I can’t believe we had to watch that. But he’s not dead.”

“Alex, are you dead?”

Seconds pass.

“See? Heart attack or something. Stroke, maybe.”

“His heart’s still beating.”

“Ah, good. Then I guess we keep going.”

“Sure, I’m in for the long haul. Hear that, Alex? We’re here to stay.”

Initially I think I’m dreaming. Hearing my name tugs at my attention.

“Come on, Alex, we’re bored. Do something.”

“He is doing something. Look. The beats are closer together. He’s awake.”

“Alex, we know you’re alive. Yawn to confirm you can hear us.”

My throat shifts in the back, pulls cool air through my teeth, expands, and exhales.

“Oh, my god, he did it!”

Laughter. “God dammit, I can’t believe that worked!”

“Look, his heart’s going faster.”

“Are you scared, Alex?”

My heartbeat thumps in my ear against the pillow. I slow my breath to try to slow my heart.

“Yes, breathe. Is that working? Are you less afraid?”

“Holy shit, calm down, Alex, your heart is going crazy.”

Breathing isn’t working.

“Man, I thought this was gonna be boring, but this is already pretty fucking fascinating. Alex, now stretch your legs.”

My legs do feel tight. I was too distracted to notice when I awoke. I still haven’t even opened my eyes. Now I feel an overwhelming urge to roll on my back and extend my legs.

But I don’t. They can’t be right. Don’t make them right. I don’t have to do anything but breathe, just keep breathing, and listen to my heart. Gain control of that first, and the rest will come easier.

So I lie still, feel my dewy legs stuck together, hairs pressed itchy between them, and the longer I stay like that, the more I prove that their suggestions don’t mean control.

How long must I wait to ensure that stretching my legs is my idea and not theirs? I don’t have a way to time anything. I can count seconds—what number is high enough? Several minutes, I suppose.

How many heartbeats go into five minutes?

My heart is fast again, so a lot in five minutes.

“He wants to. You can tell he wants to.”

“Alex, are your legs cramping up yet?”

“Just stretch ‘em. You’ll feel so much better.”

“Oh, man, wouldn’t it feel good to stretch your legs? Maybe roll over? You’ve been in that position for hours, Alex. Doesn’t your body ache on that side? Roll over and get the blood moving.”

“Come on, up and at ‘em, tiger!” Laughter.

I am the plastic bunny in its sugar egg. My joints will fuse in this position like petrifying wood.

My grandparents had a Ripley’s Believe it or Not book from the 1950s. It was full of amazing people—a guy with a hole in his skull that he used as a candleholder; a guy with two pupils in each eye; a boy born with his heart on the outside of his ribcage, pumping like an alien blister on his chest.

But the one I remember best was an Indian fakir who held his arm straight up in the air, wrist bent and hand cupped, and he held it there so long that his whole arm fused in that position. Supposedly a bird built a nest in his hand.

The book had a pen-and-ink drawing of this man, his nether regions wrapped like a diaper and his head wrapped in something like a turban. His arm was a thin vertical beam, the muscles atrophied, knobby balls of bone at the elbow and shoulder. The nest was held aloft in his hand. It even had a couple of eggs peeking over the edge. One egg was open, and a tiny beak strained skyward. The parent bird swooped toward it with a worm in its mouth.

I will be like the fakir.

My side aches where it presses into the mattress. I can only imagine the pain the fakir experienced in the weeks it took for his muscles to turn to jerky. But if I keep it up long enough, mine will give up too. My heart rate will find an equilibrium, there will be peaks and valleys, moments of pain and panic, but the observers will lose interest in watching those. I will be a still life.

“Well, he’s gotta take a piss or eat sometime.”

I do have to pee. I was so focused on my legs and heart that the ache in my bladder felt like just another pain. But if I don’t move soon, I’ll pee in the bed.

“Is that it? Did we nail it? That series of blips there means we’re right? He’s gotta pee.”

“By all means, Alex, when nature calls. But you should stretch your legs first.”

I toss the sheet and slide off the edge of the bed, staying curled. The side of my body beats and aches. The room is dark except subtle leaks of sunlight at the foil’s edges. I walk to the bathroom, still hunched from the pain in my bladder. My legs zing like static and steel wool.

The wall clock says 7:00.

I slept for two and a half hours.

The bathroom window holds blue sky and creamy light in its net of chicken wire safety glass. I sit on the toilet and pee. I flex my legs and feet and shoulders. I’ve failed to resist. It’s the beginning of another day and possibly the rest of my life with them.

The wall clock ticks.

From the toilet I see the dim mess in the living room, the place where the couch should be, grains of rice scattered like insect eggs. I’m disappointed things aren’t somehow back to normal.

“Is he taking a shit, or is he sitting down to pee? Alex, we know you’re our bitch, but we didn’t expect you to become an actual bitch!”

I press my face in my hands, massage my temples, feel my feet turn the cool tile warm.

There’s the ceiling hole with the wires hanging out, and I remember I have no power. As further proof, I notice a moth faintly outlined against the bathroom wall. Probably the one I saw fly in last night.

If I had resisted and stayed in bed, the moth might’ve come to rest on my shoulder or my face, nibbled at my hair, eaten away the sheet draped over me.

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Rinsing the shampoo from my hair, I stare at the yellow calcium haze at the bottom of the cheap plastic shower curtain, and looking down at my fleshy, hairy body I know that I’m a mass of meat washing off its bodily excretions. I get the feeling I’m a pig at a slaughterhouse. I watch the water fall around my face, stare at the bumps and ridges of my feet, my fleshy pads pressed against the basin of the tub. And beyond the shower curtain, someone is waiting.

I stand there a long time, and nothing happens. I wonder if they’ll turn the water off and call through the curtain. “Come on.” A close and empty voice. I’ll pull the curtain aside to see not what I long imagined was my bathroom, but a giant concrete building with conveyor belts and hooks on chains, swarming with flatbed electric carts driven by men in bloody overalls. One such man will be standing next to my shower stall. He’ll have a hairnet on his head, another over his beard, and I’ll see only his eyes looking through me. He’ll lead me out of the shower basin, one in a row of identical basins. “C’mon, let’s go,” he’ll say. And I’ll go wherever he tells me to go. Because somehow everything will make sense.

I’m having a drawn-out dream of life as a human, but the illusion only lasted so long, is now breaking down, and the world of the dream and that of my reality are now superimposed in harsh clarity.

How else could they monitor things like my heart rate and breathing? I search my body. An internal chip. When was it put in? Did I eat it? Did they drug me and install it? Somewhere in my gut or far up my nose? In my ear? Ever-present and so close, just millimeters from my fingertips yet completely inaccessible unless I damage myself to reach it.

When I turn the shower off, it’s quiet. I pull back the curtain and feel overwhelming relief and disappointment to see my bathroom. No answers. There’s no one here to lead me to the next phase. It’s not over, keep going. My legs weaken, and I crouch in the tub and stare at the mess in the next room. Everything is still here.

The observers stay quiet while I brush my teeth and get dressed. Return things to the cupboards and drawers. Sweep the floor.

I even open the blinds—just a bit—to let in some light.

Energy expended the day before hangs in the air, almost literally rings in my ears. I think of the words and phrases I repeated. I had filled the air with them, enough to warm the walls with sound. The recordings prove my stamina. I know it’s impressive how long I went. It wasn’t a day or a year, but impressive.

I keep the couch in the slot of the entryway and lie down on it, stare up at the walls boxed around me and the narrow strip of ceiling, and I think about how snugly I fit here.

“He’s relaxed now.”

“First time in a while, I think.”

They speak softly, like young parents over a crib.

“Alex, the experiment is over.”

“We can’t share the results with you, because they still require quite a bit of analysis. But let’s just say things got very interesting.”

“Yes. A lot of things we didn’t expect to happen.”

“We’re also very pleased to see how you maintained through it all. We haven’t had many subjects, but you’re the strongest we’ve seen so far.”

I chuckle to myself, remembering how frightened I was in bed earlier. If only I’d known it was so close to being over. A couple hours more would’ve seemed like nothing, but I didn’t know, so I prepared for forever.

Light comes golden through the blinds and stains the wall yellow. Slits of bright blue in the window. I might go for a walk later, if this all wraps up in time.

I chuckle and say, “You guys are fucking assholes, you know that?”

“Yes, and we’re sorry.”

“So, what finally did it? Why now? Was it me figuring out about the chip? Or having the will to clean this place up? Keeping my cool? Or was it actually when I found the smoke detector, but you decided to keep stringing me along?”

“We’ll explain everything very soon.”

“Are you coming now?” I ask.

“Yes, just let us get some things together here and then we’ll head over to you. Thank you for your patience.”

“No problem. I’ll be here. Just knock or say something so I know when to move the couch.”

“Yes, don’t worry, we’ll stay connected on the microphone so we can speak, if necessary. You don’t mind that we leave it on for now?”

“Hey, you’ve already seen way more of me than most people ever have, or would ever want to see.”

A chuckle. “You’ve got that right. You really put us through the wringer. But I think if I were in your position, I would have done the same.”

Next on I Hear You Watching…

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