Of Course

Kill the head, and the body will die.

Jun 24, 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 mocking him wherever he goes. He searched his apartment for surveillance bugs and got skepticism from the police. The observers revealed they were measuring his heart rate and influencing his actions, then suddenly declared their “experiment” finished. But before they could debrief, Alex’s friend Gavin paid him a surprise visit, and to keep Alex from divulging the experiment, the observers induced a panic attack.

A black line drawing of Alex, the protagonist of "I Hear You Watching." He has short, messy, parted hair, glasses. He stares straight at you, unsmiling. Beneath his outline is a black background, and two skewed copies of his line drawing—one orange-red, the other red-purple—repeat superimposed over themselves larger and larger until their faces loom large over his shoulders, and their final, largest iterations are drawn in white.

“He’s gone,” I tell the air in my living room. “Are we doing this?”

No response.

“Hey. Guys. He’s gone. Come on over.”

I still spin scenarios of Gavin getting jumped in his apartment. They could’ve been hidden further inside. But they would’ve told me; they love to gloat.

Plus they heard us, so they know I said nothing incriminating. They have no reason to hurt Gavin. Killing him would be messy.

But in the worst-case scenario they wouldn’t kill Gavin, they’d adopt him as a new subject in the experiment. They could knock him out and implant a chip, or put it in his food, or do whatever they did to me.

Unless he’s already involved.

What if Gavin was the original subject? Maybe he’s more stoic than I am, and he’s trying to get me to admit what’s happening because he’s afraid to bring it up himself. Or maybe he hasn’t connected the dots yet. Maybe his dots are different than mine. Maybe they don’t use his chip to talk to him but to do other stuff, like make him have to shit while he’s out running.

If he’s cooperating with them, maybe the shit story was just to scare me or strengthen my trust.

“I’m prepared to learn the truth,” I say.

Gavin is too old and close a friend to willingly double-cross me. Using him to get to me would’ve required years of grooming, starting the moment he and I met, or before.

He wouldn’t do that to me now.

“Ready when you are,” I say.

Maybe Gavin’s visit was meant to do exactly this—make me believe he’s involved and not to be trusted. Is this a final test? Have they planted that ugly seed and now sit silent, awaiting my reaction? Do they want me to shrink from everyone until I implode?

They could be standing outside with a cake and party hats; all I have to do is open my door for the cherry atop this grand, twisted experiment. Congratulations, Alex, you chose the path of no fear! We had hoped for this outcome but didn’t believe it possible until now!

I don’t expect them to present me with an oversized cardboard check or anything, but I do think I merit a handshake, maybe an approving nod of surprise. They said it themselves—others haven’t fared as well as I have. I still don’t know what that means. A couple hours ago I was close to stepping out of my shower and living out the rest of my life as a pig to slaughter. Is this success?

“Hey, guys.”

The window across the alley has its blinds drawn. I crack my window open and listen for voices from their house or their fenced-in backyard.

Ah, but the question answers itself, really—if you could focus a beam onto a specific individual and drive them to such a depth of self-loathing, fear, and paranoia that they find it more plausible that their life is the desperate fever dream of a sick animal on its way to the blade, wars could be skipped.

Kill the head, and the body will die.

I imagine a future wherein a despot paces his private quarters, wringing his hands and repeating certain words and phrases under his breath, until something fragile cracks inside him and urges him to the door. He opens it to find two men dressed in bloody overalls and hairnets. He gives them a look of resigned recognition and climbs into the back of their electric cart. They drive him to a concrete room with a drain in the floor.

“Hey,” I say. “He’s gone. Coast is clear.”

It’s been quiet for so long, I have trouble placing the sound. Like a creaking. I look to my door, but it’s still closed and locked. No, it’s a giggle in my ear.

“There you are. Are you guys coming now?”

The giggle blooms into laughter.

“Alex, you are hands down the fucking stupidest person alive.”

Tremors rack my body, my head empties, my volition rises from deep inside and thrusts out of me like a silent scream.

We imagine the moment of death as a separation. In movies, a glowing phantom version of the person rises from their inert body like double-vision. The phantom looks around, suspended in midair and surprised to find itself there. And they fly. They haunt others. Throw chairs. They have jealousy or sadness or anger—unfinished business. They are pure volition.

But when it happens to me, my awareness stays with the rest of me, limp on the couch, still staring out through my body’s eyes, still feeling the weight of my bones, muscles, and organs. The difference is that I feel nothing else. No sadness, no anger, no fear. And I have a thought. I believe everyone must have this thought the moment before their energy scatters in that final pump of the heart, the final crackle of electricity through the mind, those several seconds of awareness they say occur in a head freshly chopped, when it’s lifted by the hair to stare at a jeering crowd.

I think, Of course.

Death is freedom. It’s like being alive, but you don’t care. You’re not too warm or too cold, you don’t get hungry or thirsty or tired. Opinions don’t matter; there’s no wrong way to be dead.

It is boundless relief.

I wonder if dead people piss and shit themselves, not because their body has ceased to fire the electrical impulses to stimulate their muscles into holding waste material inside, but because they stop caring. They no longer worry about aiming it into a toilet, or what other people will think if they release it wherever they are. They don’t feel or smell anything, so they don’t mind the mess. For them it’s not a mess.

Dead people are nihilists.

The dead even surrender the task of breathing to all the little creatures in their bodies. They bloat, because the breathing creatures are not just in the lungs but everywhere. Those tiny lives dismantle the dead and go every which way. From our perspective they are destructive, but among themselves they are builders. If it were up to everything else in the universe, they’d take us all apart and make something new.

“You are an absolute fucking goddamn idiot.”

I barely recognize it as speech anymore. It’s like wind howling or beams creaking in an old house by the sea. It’s as ever-present as scratches dragged through the floorboards of that house. Ubiquitous and eternal. I know those scratches well. I was there when they were made, though I can’t remember the shape of the furniture that made them or who moved it. Sometimes it was me.

“Alex, we’re government scientists.”

“Yeah, we’re doing an important study. For the government.”

The roof leaks in this house of the dead. If I were still alive, I’d hold up my hand to catch a drop of rainwater in my palm, cool and slipping down my wrist into my shirtsleeve. I’d think, Should replace that shingle when the weather clears up—the living call it “planning”—and I’d foresee how I’d collect a hammer and nails and a new shingle, and taking care not to slip, I’d climb a ladder and patch the roof.

But I’m dead and don’t care. Shingles or not, it doesn’t matter. Let rain seep through the roof and drip into my ear. Let the drops tap a slow hole through my head to the floor. Let the wind push and weaken this house. Let it flex the walls and crack the windows. Let water puddle around the foundation and eat its way into the basement with soft teeth of black mold. Let the dark corners flourish with mushrooms. Let fauna find shelter here. Let them eat of my flesh and take me with them to be filtered through their own bodies, mingling with plants and fruit and pieces of other animals, and let them deposit me in dissolution far from this place to feed a patch of wildflowers, or a field of nettles, or the roots of a great tree.

“The government is paying us a fuck-ton of money to video you jerking off.”

“They’re paying us to make you go crazy, Alex. And it’s working. We thought it’d take a lot longer, but you’ve progressed quickly.”

“Yeah, we’re proud of you, Alex.”

“So proud, you stupid piece of shit.”

Let the skeleton of this house weaken and collapse around my remains, and let its heavy mound squeeze the gases and fluids from me.

“Alex, how the fuck could you actually believe we were government spies?”

Let it press me into the rubble, hidden away. Let me seep into the broken wood and the soil.

“We were just bored, really. But we’re so glad we found you! My god, what were the chances we’d meet such a freak? It’s like watching a fuckin’ movie.”

Bed me beneath a thick carpet of moss. Let me feed tiny life that doesn’t know my name and has no tongue to speak it.

“We never want this movie to end.”

I’m tired. Let me sleep.