Small World
Daylight bleeds in at the edges.
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. He made many failed attempts to obtain concrete proof, and finally discovered he could use telekinesis to manipulate the observers. He consulted a psychiatrist, whose advice proved to be helpful. Now he has to escape his “haunted” apartment.
The day I visit the micro-studio is the day I start to feel side effects from the risperidone. I know it wasn’t switched with sleeping pills, because I still can’t sleep more than a few hours at a time. When I close my eyes for longer than a blink they dart around in their sockets, watching an invisible tennis match at 100x speed. My thighs ache.
The voices threatened to cancel my visit. Said they’ll pretend to be the landlord and I’ll never know. That could be true.
How do we know that the biggest crowd we’ve ever seen isn’t actually all the people that exist in the world, and each person we see over the course of our lives isn’t just someone from that group playing a different part?
They say it’s a small world.
I walk onto the lot where the micro-studios stand in a row—a single building divided into a linear hive—and I shake the landlord’s hand.
The voices tell me, “He’s got a boxcutter in his pocket.” I don’t look, half out of stubborn trust of this stranger, and half out of dread that they’re right. Maybe I already saw it, unconsciously, and that’s how they knew to mention it. So of course I would look down, and lo and behold there would be a blade.
“He’s gonna use that boxcutter to get our chip back.”
“Hi, I’m Alex.” I smile into the man’s eyes and feel the calloused edges of his hand.
His eyes smile back. His name is Lawrence. He’s a Black man in his late fifties or early sixties. His gut pushes at the buttons of his plaid shirt, and he has suspenders clipped on his jeans.
The unit is the second-to-last in the row, which means it shares walls on both sides.
Lawrence wipes his feet on the mat before climbing the two wooden steps into the front door. I do the same. Our shoes on the vinyl floor are loud and close in the small space. There’s a window next to the front door, and about five paces from it is the back window. Stretching my arms at my sides, the fingers of each hand are only a foot from the side walls. The ceiling is just a bit higher than I can reach with flat feet.
“Yeah, it’s a small place.” Lawrence says. “Something to get used to, not for everybody. But the rent’s cheap.”
The chemical stink of fresh paint lingers. Everything is L.A.-apartment beige.
Through the walls come muffled voices and sounds—on the right a TV plays, on the left someone talks on the phone.
Lawrence notices me listening. “Once you’ve got furniture in here it’ll dampen sound from the others a bit.”
“Oh, I actually don’t mind.” I realize I’m smiling. “The place I’m in now is actually worse.”
If I put my desk at the window it might just clear the doorframe. A narrow bed could go along the wall behind that. A single shelf about a foot and a half deep crowns the entirety of the room, even above the front door.
It’s like a tomb. The burial chamber of a pyramid, full of the mummy’s possessions. Everything they’ll need in the afterlife.
When Lawrence turns to show me the back of the unit, I do a quick squat to stretch my aching thighs. I wonder if that gesture would still be possible with furniture in the room.
The back is divided into two spaces. Straight ahead is the kitchen, with a waist-height counter and a tiny sink beneath the back window. It looks like the sink in an airplane toilet. The whole kitchen has the standing room of a phone booth.
Lawrence moves to its center, sucking in his gut, and says, “Room for microwave, toaster, what-have-you,” with flicks of his hand as if to conjure each device. “Got a mini fridge down there, comes with the unit, but we can store it if you’ve got your own.”
I crane my neck to see the fridge behind his legs. It cowers in the corner next to where the trash can would probably hide, by a metal dish towel hook that’s lumpy with the ubiquitous beige paint.
“And then the bathroom.” Lawrence has nowhere to go with me standing outside the kitchen, so he just nods at the dividing wall.
I back up to look. He flips a switch in the kitchen that illuminates a plastic dome light in the bathroom. Another phone booth, with a plastic floor and a toilet in the center. A wall-mounted shower head points down at the toilet. The floor slopes toward a drain in the back corner.
At least in this place, the debate about shitting before or after showering is over.
“You’d probably want to keep your TP in here.” Lawrence pats the kitchen counter, which is within reach of the toilet. “Just to keep it dry when you shower.” He pulls the shower curtain from behind the dividing wall, closing off the bathroom. Then opens it again. “It takes some practice showering sitting down, but I know some people prefer it.”
“Sounds relaxing.”
Lawrence chuckles.
“Watch that boxcutter, Alex,” they say.
“He’s about to push you onto that toilet and cut the chip out of your head.”
Behind the row of units is tenant parking, next to an old wooden shed that’s divided into coffin-sized segments, each with a padlock-able door.
“This is extra storage, comes with the unit. Keep anything you want in here. Put your own lock on it.”
My own lock. My own space. Living sandwiched between other real people. Real sounds, ambient sounds, innocuous sounds. The human equivalent of cricket chatter.
A place with no hidden corners. Micro-studio surveillance only requires a turn of my head. I’ll be like a snail in my home built for one.
When Gavin helps me move in he adds, “But you’re like a snail that can’t go anywhere.”
I hope my new neighbors don’t hear him say it. A couple of units have their windows open. Someone is typing.
I’d asked Gavin to keep the router from Matt hidden in his kitchen cupboard until I moved. Now I put it up on the shelf and make a mental note to call Matt to check the settings before I use it. I’ll do that at the office again, since my new neighbors can probably hear everything I say, including router settings, SSIDs, and passwords.
But knowing they can hear me feels better than wondering if they can.
I’m closer to the river than my previous apartment, but also further downstream, where the runoff channels combine in a concrete trough the size of a freeway, and castaway plant matter grows in gooey aggregate islands.
I try to run along the river each morning after my shift. Running is good for endorphins and dopamine, aggression relief, and to deepen my sleep, but mostly I’m trying to get my legs to relax.
The risperidone tightens my thigh muscles so much that sitting feels like holding a stretch. My legs bounce constantly during my work shifts to keep themselves occupied. One night a coworker complains that my desk is rattling.
Dr. Devnet responds to my email and says an antihistamine can reduce the side effects. I try it once, and it makes my brain feel like cork.
I go on 3 a.m. jog breaks around the office block but feel no change. My legs crave either a run to the end of the world or a nap for the rest of time. No matter my level of fatigue, when I lie down to sleep my eyes jerk around watching pitch-black fireworks.
I threw away the aluminum foil shade when I moved because my new apartment has small curtains. Daylight bleeds in at the edges.
When I do sleep, it’s still only for a few hours. Mostly I listen to the neighbors shuffle around in their own tiny boxes, and I feel a throb of comfort when I can tell they aren’t talking about me.
I’ve met one of them. Her name is Shannon. Her usual look is a messy blonde bun and a sweatsuit with a logo across the breasts and butt in sequins or rhinestones. She smokes long, thin cigarettes. She says she’s thirty-two, but I’m convinced she’s almost forty. I hear her repeating one-sided conversations; I think she’s practicing lines.
She sometimes has sex with a guy in his fifties who speaks with a vague Eastern European accent and wears an old black leather jacket rubbed soft at the seams.
Coming home from work one morning, I see him sitting on the curb a block from our apartments with a bloody nose. After I park, I walk back and pull him to his feet, almost falling over myself. He’s drunk, can barely stand, and leans so far into me that we almost hug. I don’t know if he recognizes me as Shannon’s neighbor.
I still haven’t met the guy on the other side. I’ve waved, and he’s nodded.
He’s maybe in his early forties, very tall, and his knobby legs make every pair of shorts look like swim trunks. He has close-shaven black hair and intense eyes, and he often moves things back and forth between his locker and his unit.
The voices try to tell me he’s another chip victim who’s further along in the process.
Lawrence and I cross paths occasionally. The voices rattle off lists of things they want me to say. They’ve placed bets on how long it’ll take to get me to offend him.
I’m winning, for now.
I’m embarrassed to admit that exchanging niceties with Lawrence triggers a little buzz in me, a ding on a karmic scoreboard. The higher that number goes, the more I’m somehow absolved of the awkwardness I inflicted upon Lili.
Before my move I sent her a message saying, Hey, I’m sorry I got weird. I was having a tough time, and it had nothing to do with you. No hard feelings?
She hasn’t responded.
I know she has no idea what’s happening in my life, and probably doesn’t care. She doesn’t know where I’m living. She doesn’t know Lawrence. She and Lawrence don’t convene for secret meetings to consult the karmic scoreboards and share their evolving opinions of me and other white people in their lives.
So why after a polite moment with Lawrence do I hope that Lili can feel it too, wherever she is?
Do I win points for having good intentions? Or do I lose points for secretly hoping that people take notice of my cordiality and label me “one of the good ones”?
Maybe thinking of human interaction as a test means that I am, in fact, failing the test.
Next on I Hear You Watching…
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Lightly woven into this novel is a sort of white/black discomfort, indicating to me that for some Americans, black and white folks really don't mix much and the sense/suspicion/awareness of cultural and human 'difference' between the groups is very palpable to some - Alex being among them.