Talk to Me
"What do you wanna talk about, you fucking creep?"
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 believes his devices have been hacked with surveillance software. A consultation with a computer specialist and multiple virus scans gave no leads, so he tracked down a working payphone and called his friend Matt for cybersecurity help. The strangers followed and mocked him every step of the way. Now he’s borrowed an audio recorder from his friend Gavin to catch the observers in the act.
Mom put an ornament on the mantle every Easter. A hollow sugar egg the size of a softball, its two half-shells glued together with a wavy crust of purple icing, crowned with a red rosette and blue ribbon. It had a window through which you could see sprouts of green grass, clusters of tiny plastic eggs, a pastel-rainbow wicker basket, and a fuzzy toy bunny sitting on its haunches and staring at you with bulbous pink eyes.
Now the bunny sits on a couch. Rather than plastic eggs there’s a glass of water, a pack of cigarettes, and a jam jar ashtray within his reach. As he stares out the window of his egg, he knows something that you don’t—there’s a recording device hidden from view. You didn’t see him turn the recorder on at a red light on his way home. Nor did you see him place it on the windowsill, which is just deep enough to hide it from view. He seems harmless sitting there. Big pink eyes.
He stubs out a butt and stares at the walls of his egg with a soft smile on his face. You may be surprised to hear him speak, and feel at the base of your skull that he’s addressing you.
“Can you hear me?” I ask the giants peering in. “Can you see me?”
Silence.
I light another cigarette and take patient drags, seeming harmless in my sugar egg.
Then I prop the cigarette in the jam jar and stand. I do tai chi. My hands curl and stretch, pass an imaginary orb from palm to palm, push it away and pull it back in controlled waves, a slow step here, another slow step there. The orb swirls with color like a soap bubble.
A window AC unit somewhere outside clicks on and hums.
“What the fuck is he doing?” a voice says.
Got ‘em. I try not to smile. The AC hum becomes the sound of the orb in my hands.
“Look at this fucking idiot.”
“There you are,” I say. I sneak a look at the neighbors’ window where their Venetian blinds are closed. But I don’t linger, I turn my back to them while cradling the orb in my arms and then push it away with a long exhale. I look again. Did the blinds flick shut? They might be peering through the holes where the blinds are threaded together. Clever.
I move to the coffee table, raise the orb over my head, curl my hands around it, then swoop it down to the table and scoop my phone up, thinking of how it might look to them through the phone’s camera, seeing my hand descend from the popcorn ceiling, grow to gargantuan size and smother to black.
“Now,” I say, “let’s talk.”
“What do you wanna talk about, you fucking creep?”
Holding my phone, the voice is no louder. The phone is not the source.
Turn and push toward the kitchen, then a careful step on sideways foot to my bedroom where I toss the phone onto my bed. My laptop sits wearing its Post-it eyepatch on the desk in a nebula of green paper stars. A graceful pull of the doorknob shuts my traitorous electronics in the dark.
The orb dips low, I lean to catch it like a falling balloon. “How am I a creep? What have I done that’s so creepy?”
“Look at you!” one says. “Dancing around like a fuckin’ faggot!”
There it is. The familiar frequency of the schoolyard in their voices. This is about getting a rise out of me, maybe nothing more.
“Clearly all of this isn’t for money, or you would’ve taken it by now,” I say, calm, eyes on the orb.
“Oh, but it is for money, Alex.”
“We’ve got viewers.”
A tingle sinks from the back of my neck to my stomach.
“Lots.”
“They say this shit’s better than TV.”
“They’re placing bets now.”
I dip to take the cigarette and pinch it in my lips, then lift the orb again. After leaning in the jar for so long, the cigarette has gone gray up one side and tastes stale.
“Alex, we’re livestreaming you to viewers all over the world. You have no idea how much money we’re making. You’re a star!”
It’s hard to keep my movements deliberate. I tell myself I don’t hear them anymore.
“Most of ‘em tune in when you’re jerking off.”
“Yeah, how ‘bout it, Alex, feel like jerking off now?”
“I’ll make a poll in the chat.” Then speaking slow, as if while typing, “Place your bets! Shit… piss… or jerk off?”
I shift my weight from one foot to the other and feel a sting at the tip of my penis. I have to pee, but doing so would look like giving in to their suggestion. They’re kidding about the livestream. How is it happening anyway, if my computer and phone are turned off in the next room?
The air is evening blue. The last claws of pale yellow scratch the neighbors’ wall. Eventually it’ll be too dark to see me. I sit on the couch, cross my legs, and light a fresh cigarette.
I can probably hold it for another half-hour. Be the rabbit, as still as the plastic grass and the colored eggs. Wait for everyone to get bored and go away.
“Alex, you got a message from a girl on that perv site. She’s super hot. You want me to respond for you?”
“Why’re you spoiling the surprise? We didn’t tell him we got into his email.”
“Come on, he knows. He’s not a total idiot, right, Alex? He knows we have his bank stuff. But do you think he realizes that access to his email means access to basically everything else?”
“Everything else.”
“Oh, someone just placed a bet that you’d jerk off in the bedroom instead. Now it’s getting interesting! Will he go to the bathroom or the bedroom?”
I can’t do either now.
“Actually, stay on the couch for a minute while these side bets come in.”
“Oh my god, the chat is going fucking crazy! Who’s gonna win, Alex?”
“The beauty is, we win no matter what. You’re sitting on the fucking couch doing nothing, and no one can stop watching!”
Where’s the camera? It hurts now; I won’t make it thirty minutes.
“Alex, you wouldn’t believe the money riding on these bets. Whatever you do, you’ll make someone very happy.”
How did they get in to install the equipment?
My apartment building is owned by an agency with other properties. To go out on a hypothetical limb, is it possible that my observers live next door, in a house coincidentally also owned by that agency, which they work for—or have connections to—and they used those connections to copy my key and sneak in while I wasn’t home?
Is this a new reality show? A slapdash webstream proof of concept? Will a guy with a head mic and a clipboard knock on the door and ask me to sign a release?
I’ll take the pen and sign his goddamn eyes.
“Alex, if you go to the bathroom right now, someone’ll win more money than you make in a month!”
It hurts to sit still, and hurts even more to move. I could wait for my bladder to split and seep urine into my abdomen, and refusing to satisfy these motherfuckers will cost me my life.
If there’s a viewer out there with half a conscience, they could leak this to the press, and my neighbors would be arrested on counts of voyeurism, harassment, and manslaughter. Or proof of malicious intent could make it homicide. Mine would be the first case of its kind. Someone would play me in a movie, reenacting this exact scene, and the realization would wash over the country that all our possessions have sprouted eyes and ears, that this could’ve happened to anyone. But I wouldn’t get to see my observers’ twisted empire burn to the ground because mine would be a martyr’s death, the kindling of that revolutionary blaze.
“Come on, faggot, let’s go! Everybody’s waiting!”
“What’s it gonna be, Alex?”
“If the people who bet you’d stay on the couch win, everyone’s gonna be pissed.”
“Yeah, boring is bad for business.”
“Dead air is only suspenseful for so long, Alex. Come on, Alex, let’s go, Alex!”
I slide to the edge of the cushion and a pang radiates. If I stand, I’ll lose my careful muscle configuration, it’ll all go into my pants and onto the floor.
Everyone will have a good laugh. Money will change hands, if some were smart enough to bet on this outcome.
The recorder still listens at the window.
But what if this doesn’t work? What if nothing works, and they elude capture indefinitely? Would it be possible to continue living like this? Could I cultivate apathy and ignore the warped faces looming in the terrarium glass?
I rise on weak legs and the ache shifts, but I keep my urethra clamped tight and shuffle to the bathroom.
“Oh, motherfucker’s going for it!”
My zipper takes a moment to pry up and pull down. Some on my pants, some on the rim of the toilet bowl. Better than on the couch and the floor, or elsewhere inside my body.
They laugh.
It hurts to let go—everything stretched to maximum capacity, muscles strained now releasing, relaxing, shrinking. My frayed bladder folding back together is excruciating. I go up on my toes to accommodate the pain.
“Holy shit,” one says. “That’s a ton of money!”
There’s nothing on the recording.
Well, not nothing, but nothing helpful. I hear a faint AC unit buzz, I hear myself move around the room asking questions.
“Now, let’s talk,” I say.
But their responses aren’t there.
The microphone was sensitive enough to pick up the pop in my ankle when I shifted my weight. I turn the audio up high in my headphones and fumble through the EQ menus on the recorder’s LCD screen.
Scrubbing, adjusting, and listening on the recorder itself is like conducting a delicate archaeological dig with a shovel and a broom. A bug scratches at the back of my mind—if I put the SD card into my computer and open the waveform in a program with more range, more tools, I might find the evidence.
But copying the file onto my computer would give them access to it. Not to mention the risk of letting my computer’s voyeuristic tapeworm infect Gavin’s SD card, and later his computer.
In the headphones a door closes, when I shut my phone in with my computer. “How am I a creep?” I hear myself ask. Electric air whooshes. “What have I done that’s so creepy?”
The buzz of the AC unit, the cars on the nearby arterial and distant freeway, the air of the room and the alleyway beyond the window all combine in an eternally-cresting wave that spittles foam into my desperate ears.
“Clearly all of this isn’t for money, or you would’ve taken it by now.”
The wave rushes in. For the rest of the recording, my movements are underwater. I hear the suffocated shick of the lighter. I hear the couch creak under my weight. I feel the sense memory of attempting outward normalcy while I ached and contorted like a tangled marionette. And I hear the moment when I slid from the couch and fell to my knees, then rose, my ankle popping again, and shuffled into the bathroom. Then from the next room the stream growls on denim, breaks on the edge of the porcelain bowl and into the water, sounding my simultaneous relief and defeat.
Breath held to listen, turning the whoosh louder in my ears…
Is that laughter?
Next on I Hear You Watching…
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Love this line: 'I’ll take the pen and sign his goddamn eyes.'
It's an absorbing chapter for sure.