Soap

I make him promise that he's my friend.

Aug 12, 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.

🎉 BIG NEWS! 🎉

The Literary Salon’s Book Club is reading I Hear You Watching in August!

Want to join the discussion and find out how the story ends before everyone else on Substack? Grab a copy of the book and join the Literary Salon’s Slack space!

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 believes he found and glitched chips in his ears with a magnet. He surprised Lili with an unwelcome visit, then got a fast food breakfast and shouted at the other patrons, who he believed were actors hired by the observers.

A black line drawing of Alex, the protagonist of "I Hear You Watching." He is white, short messy parted hair, glasses. He stares straight at you, unsmiling. He has a five-o’clock shadow and bags under his eyes. Behind him is a freeze-frame from a glossy soap opera showing a man and woman with serious expressions.

I sent pleas into the air all the way to Gavin’s apartment. They consisted only of the word itself, “please,” because thinking directly about Gavin would give away my impulse to go to him. As soon as his face flashed in my mind I pretended he didn’t exist, and I pictured a hardware store a few neighborhoods away to throw them off the scent. I made a mental shopping list of raw materials for weapons, traps, and reinforcements. I imagined tripwires in my doorways, buckets of corrosive solution poised to fall, strips of clear tape holding nails point-up on my floor. All while saying, “Please, please, please…” and driving to Gavin’s instead.

Outside his building I stopped pleading aloud to avoid looking crazy, but I still shaped my breath into the word, a silent seamless mantra—someone would hear it only if they put their ear to my lips.

Now I stand at his door clutching a rolled copy of the PennySaver, mustering the courage to knock, imagining that after I knock he might not answer, and I imagine all the ways I might find him “silenced”—whole or in pieces, cut or blown apart, hung or suffocated or poisoned to look like a suicide.

He opens the door, travel mug in hand, and screams.

“I need your help, please.” The expression on my face feels much worse than what I saw in the restroom mirror. “Please, can you help?”

He pats his heart. “Jesus Christ. Of course, sure, what’s going on?” He steps aside, and I enter.

“I need to lock myself somewhere. Can I hole up here?” I squeeze the PennySaver, willing him to shut and lock the door. “No one’s been here since I was here yesterday, right?”

“No—what? I mean, yeah, I had a date over last night.”

“Do you trust her?”

“What?”

“How long have you known her? Did she leave anything here?”

“Sit down. What the fuck are you talking about? Do you need water or something?” He stays by the door, still holding his mug and keys. “Hey, breathe. You gotta slow your breathing down.”

He looks at my purple-dyed fingers, and I’m embarrassed. They make me look like I put my hand in something strange.

I speak softly so my voice doesn’t carry. “Shut the door, please. Lock it. I’m really sorry. I didn’t want to bring this here. I just can’t do it myself anymore.”

He shuts and locks the door. But there are still the windows. There are still ducts and vents and spaces between the studs in the walls. Closed cupboard doors, crevices under the boards under the carpet, apartments under the floor, rooms behind me, rooms around corners, entire streets and cities of stacked-up, closed-box buildings. So much of the world is invisible all the time, infinite places for them to hide.

I sit against the wall under a window, which conceals me on that side, and out the other window is empty blue sky.

“What’s going on?”

“Close those blinds, please.” A drone painted sky-blue would be invisible beyond a certain distance, and able to zoom in on me through the window. A red dot could appear between my eyes.

Gavin draws the vertical blinds, which sway and reveal scissoring slices of blue, then settle. He says, “You gotta tell me. What.”

I make him promise that he’s my friend. That no one ever approached him about me or any kind of test or observation. I have to believe we were set up as college dorm roommates by luck of the draw, not within the parameters of some grand experiment. I have to believe that during our years living together, he wasn’t keeping notebooks or videotapes.

He promises that he knows nothing about anything like that, and that he’s my friend.

I ask what he knows about Lili.

“Who’s Lili?”

“Gavin, I have something inside me that monitors everything I do. And I think it could control me completely if I let it. Thoughts, actions, everything.”

“You mean… your brain?” He’s not joking.

I feel safe enough in the spotlight of his incredulous stare to relax my own vigilance, if only a little. The muscles loosen in my neck and my knees. “Do you have a flashlight and tweezers?”

“Yes… Why?”

I sit on the lid of the toilet. Gavin stands over me, shines a penlight down into my ear canal and takes pictures with his phone. He shows me each image as it’s taken. At first glance, the glint of a hair or the shadow of a hump always looks like metal.

Something about having someone I trust shine a flashlight on me—into me—puts me in another circle of protection.

While he searches, I narrate a tangled version of important points from the past two weeks, starting after our camping trip. He’s impressed to hear about the sex site, says he never thought I’d do something like that, and he’s proud of me for taking such a leap into the unknown. I don’t like hearing this, because it means my actions were somehow extraordinary, which makes me a good candidate for observation.

He wiggles his eyebrows and asks if “Lili” is someone I met on the site. I tell him she was the Skype scammer, and that I haven’t met anyone from the site in person. I don’t know why; it feels easier.

After we’ve confirmed and reconfirmed that there’s nothing in either ear, nor in my nostrils, nor at the back of my throat, he says, “I think you’re good.”

He’s probably worried I’ll make him look in my ass. I hesitate, but there’s no way to do a thorough search without special tools. And he’s already been gracious enough to take his day off to search my head.

He gives me a sleeping pill and insists he’ll stay home with the door locked while I sleep.

His couch is an L, so I lie on the long part and he sits at the short end. He flips channels. I’ve got a pillow from his bed with a clean pillowcase from his closet. He has cedar chips in his closet, and the combined smell of cedar and closet must on the pillowcase teleports me into my kitchen cupboard. Then when I open my eyes I’m back in Gavin’s living room. Both are places of relative comfort.

As I sink into sleep, a familiar voice says, “You thought you could get rid of me. Well, you should know I’m here to stay, baby.”

The slow wave of sleep breaks against a rock wall. I open my eyes.

On TV a woman in a torn jogging suit, with dirt smudges on her cheeks and forehead and a few leaves in her carefully-mussed hair, points a gun at a man with spiky gelled hair and a jutting chin of contoured stubble.

“Posey,” the man says, “it wasn’t my idea! I love you!”

Gavin’s phone rings. He takes it from the coffee table and goes to turn off the TV.

“No, it’s cool,” I say, “leave it on.”

He takes the phone into his bedroom and shuts the door. I get up and creep closer to hear what he says. It’s work-related.

“Don’t lie to me, Clayton,” says Posey on TV. “You and the Scartellos always wanted to get rid of me.”

I take my PennySaver from the coffee table, slip it into my pillowcase and lie back on the couch.

“But I haven’t been involved with the Scartellos since Dorothy came out of her coma! And they were only using me to find out what I knew about Mayor Branding’s reelection campaign!”

The show is a soap opera called Time and Again. I remember captioning this episode.

After the long, backstory-infused argument they’re having now, Posey shoots Clayton in the leg. He falls, knocks his head on the desk, and passes out. Then Posey ties him up and enlists the help of Dorothy’s father—Reverend Jonathan Millsmith—to put Clayton in a burlap sack with several raw steaks, and they hang it from a tree in the woods far outside of town.

Posey won’t find out for another three episodes that it wasn’t Clayton or the Scartellos who drugged her post-workout smoothie and buried her alive, but her own brother Hank, come for revenge after their parents died and left their entire estate to Posey.

Still, after ditching Clayton in the woods she worries that he’s innocent. She tries to relax in a bubble bath but is tortured by flashbacks from being buried alive, plus visions of a ghostly, judgmental Clayton with dark circles around his eyes and clumpy white makeup in his stubble.

Meanwhile, a well-trained bear walks onto the soundstage set of fake trees drenched in blue nighttime light, and the bear takes an interest in the hanging sack.

A guilt-ridden Posey jumps in her car and speeds out to the woods. When she arrives, the bear attacks her car and pops two of the tires. She finally scares it away by flashing her headlights and honking the horn.

Then she unties the sack and frees Clayton. She apologizes profusely, and he is strangely understanding. He’s a skilled ER surgeon, so he uses strips from the burlap sack to bandage the gunshot wound in his leg.

Posey’s cell phone is dead, and Clayton strikes two rocks together to make a fire to keep them warm through the night. In the car trunk they find a leftover bottle of wine from her parents’ funeral. She splits it with Clayton to dull his pain, and they take the steaks from the burlap sack to cook over the fire.

The last shot of the episode is them kissing by the fire, seen through a tangle of leaves. Her brother Hank watches from the bushes.

But this time I only see as far as the end of the argument, when Clayton is shot and knocked out, before the tide in me swells over the rocks and spills across my consciousness.

I drift as Posey wipes the tears from her eyes and Reverend Millsmith consoles her. “This son of a bitch will never hurt you again, Posey. We’ll make sure of that.”