Sulphur Springs

"So your neighbor's a perv."

Dec 29, 2024

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…
During an intimate moment alone, Alex heard a voice mock him out his apartment window. It still bothered him that night at work, as he wrote the closed-captioning for a reality game show called All By Myself, in which the contestants live in complete isolation. Alex pondered contestant Number Eight’s simultaneous loneliness and lack of privacy. He also decided to tell his friends Gavin and Eli about the stranger out his window on their upcoming camping trip.

A black-on-white line drawing of Alex Porter, the protagonist of "I Hear You Watching." He’s a white guy in his late twenties, short messy parted hair, glasses, and a floppy-brimmed hat. He stares straight at you, unsmiling. Behind him is a patch of tall, dry, golden grass with patches of sunlight filtering through skinny-trunked trees.

Gavin shucks strips of bark from his walking stick with his folding knife. “So your neighbor’s a perv.”

“But you couldn’t see him.” Eli vaults himself to sit on a fallen tree.

“I didn’t see anybody.”

“Huh.” Eli thumps his bootheels against the trunk. “I’ve never had anything like that happen.”

“Me neither.” Gavin finds a rough spot on his stick and slices it away.

Eli says, “I’m pretty careful about that stuff.”

I swirl my metal mug. “So am I.”

“Eh, not careful enough.” His eyebrows raise at me.

The blinds were closed, the laptop’s volume was turned down—what else could I have done?

My black tea is gritty, bitter with iodine, and full of invisible corpses. Bean-shaped giardia, tentacled hydra, cluster-eyed daphnia, amoebas, and who knows what else. “I read about a woman who swam in a creek and got water in her nose. Two weeks later an amoeba had eaten most of her brain.” I close my eyes and watch the sun and branches flicker red through my eyelids. “She was in a coma for a month before she died.”

“So…” Eli says, “your point is, just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”

“I was changing the subject.”

“You brought it up.”

“It’s a funny story, that’s all. Just a coincidence.” The shadows move through my eyelids. “If people still lived out here in the open instead of in little boxes stacked up in the city, we’d probably see each other jerk off all the time. Wouldn’t be a big deal.”

“Heh. Could be,” Gavin says.

Eli says, “I think I prefer jerking off in my little box, thanks.”

Gavin unbuttons the floppy brim of his hat against the sun. “Given the choice, I prefer sex with a real person, to be fair.”

“I don’t have that choice at the moment,” I say.

“You’re over what’s-her-face, right?”

“We slept together twice, it wasn’t a relationship. At least not to her.”

“So talk to some girls.”

I smile and run a hand through my hair. “Hi there, ladies. My name’s Alex. I work five nights a week typing what people say on TV. Maybe someday I’ll manage the people who type what people say on TV. How ‘bout we go to my shitty one-bedroom apartment and get to know each other?”

Eli kicks his dangling legs. “I’d fuck you.”

Gavin says, “My brother just got on a new dating app. Fire, or something?”

“Tinder,” says Eli.

“There’s dating apps now?” I ask.

“Full of loner creeps.” Eli tucks his knees against his chest, perched like a vulture.

Gavin closes his knife. “No, really, they’re becoming a thing. I thought of signing up myself.”

“If you wanna meet a fifty-year-old married man.” Eli’s heel slips on the log, but he catches himself.

I raise my arms. “I’ll just flap my wings and puff my throat sac.”

“The internet’s a big place.” Gavin draws a slow squiggle with his walking stick. “Lot of people out there in the same boat.”

Another sarcastic joke rises in my throat, but I swallow it back to let the subject die.

For a while before our day hike to the hot springs, Gavin and Eli strut around making whoosh-whoosh sounds in their convertible hiking pants, consulting their altimeters and compasses, trading 48-hour predictions about the weather.

I think of contestant Number Eight on All By Myself and how complete his isolation must’ve felt despite knowing so many people were watching. Or maybe he felt alone because they were watching.

Sulphur Springs is about an hour’s walk from our campsite. Five small pools step down a rocky hill, their edges built up with stones and clay to hold the warm, rotten-egg-smelling water trickling from pool to pool on its way to the bottom where it finally spreads shining across a cracked rock plane to join the river.

Most of the pools are only big enough for two or three people. Among them are an older couple with floppy hats and zinc oxide on their faces, a set of college-age hikers split vertically between two pools (guys in the upper splashing girls in the lower), and some parents who’ve wheeled a cooler next to the pool they’re sitting in. They drink beer and tell their kids playing on the wet rock below not to slip.

A bald man with his eyes closed sits alone in the large pool at the bottom. Water from above splashes around the fleshy stone of his head. He opens his eyes, sees us, and scoots to the end, his underwater body foreshortened and jiggling.

I sit next to him and nod a thank-you. He closes his eyes again.

Our faces hover close to the water and the sulfur smell is strong. My fingers slip through wisps of green algae. I look out the corner of my eye at the man, who’s sitting so still he looks like a decoy to attract other humans.

I have to pee.

If I get out now, I’ll have to explain myself within earshot of the man and everyone else. Then I’ll try to find a secluded spot, but all these strangers will know I’m peeing.

I observe the expanse of the canyon. Oak leaves shiver in the sunlight, the creek glitters, and the children stomp in the water flowing across the rock floor. The water is so warm, I wonder how many of the people above us have peed into the stream filling our basin. Maybe none, maybe all of them.

I release a little urine and sneak a look down to see if it’s visible. The sulfur water is cloudy, so no. I release the rest in small, carefully spaced bursts, and I look at Gavin and Eli and say, “Pretty good,” using it like magician’s patter to distract them from suspicion.

Gavin says, “Yup.”

Would they be angry at me if they knew? Secretly peeing on people is the kind of thing a “loner creep” would do.

My relief turns to shame.

The grain of sand scrapes in my shell.

I squirm.

Later we leave the pool and walk to the river. It’s cold and clear. We duck under and undulate like otters, and the sulfur water slips from our skin and rushes away in the current. The change from hot to cold makes me have to pee again.

Eli says, “You guys know about that fish that can swim up your urethra?”

Gavin says, “If you pee, it swims up the stream, right?”

“Yeah, and it’s got barbs that lodge it in there.”

Are they saying this because they’re peeing now, or because they know I did?

“Good thing those’re only in South America,” Eli says, looking at me, and he lets out an exaggerated moan.