The Star of the Show
Everyone else at the grocery store is preparing for something.
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 following and mocking him wherever he goes. He tried recording them, but their voices were too quiet to register. He confronted the prime suspect—his next-door neighbor—who denied the accusation, but Alex wasn’t convinced.
The conference room computer is old, shows me those generic, green nowhere hills. I disable its internet connection and plug my router into it.
I blow dust off the desk phone and wipe the handset on my shirt, leaving a thick gray stripe.
Matt answers. Right away he says he’s got good news and bad news.
The good news is that he found a PDF of my router’s user manual. He learned that there’s a “superuser” login that allows advanced configuration. This is how we’ll boost my security.
The bad news is that by default the superuser password is “password.”
Of course, it would’ve been a good idea to change this password when I got the router. I’m lucky the hackers haven’t already changed it themselves to lock me out.
“We’ll fix that when we’re done here so they can’t get back in,” Matt says. “But first, you know when you turn on your computer’s wifi and it shows a list of available networks? We’re gonna make it so yours doesn’t show up in that list.”
“Yes! Invisibility! Please, how do I do that?”
“See the checkbox that says ‘display SSID’?”
“Yes.”
“Uncheck it.”
“It won’t let me. It’s grayed out, permanently checked.”
“Gray?” A pause. The sound of dead air is too familiar. “You’re in the superuser preferences, right?”
“Yup.”
“Ah… Shit. Sounds like someone did get in and fuck with things.”
My hands go cold. The worst of the good news is that I’m not crazy. I hadn’t just spent the evening talking to myself in my apartment. I hadn’t listened to two hours of the neighbor’s humming AC unit for nothing. I was on a quest for proof, and now with Matt’s help I’ve found it.
He says I need a clean device, and to avoid this happening again he’ll configure a router he has handy and send it for me to use. I give him the office address, which is more secure than my apartment.
Walking back to my desk, my compromised router sags like roadkill in a grocery bag tied shut. Old CRT monitors lurk in dark rooms along the corridor, slivers of hall light reflected on their glass faces. The tower in the manager’s office is silent and hidden in shadow except for its tiny green light. Asleep or awake? Our big room has twenty desks, each with a PC tower. Screens hunch like flat-faced gargoyles.
I imagine if I peel away the face of my screen, I’ll find eyes staring back from a howling void.
They might be the navel orange eyes of my neighbor. Behind him I’d see his room. Unmade bed, clothes everywhere, a backpack hung on the doorknob, posters on the walls for stupid movies or shitty bands.
He and his housemates might be surveillance or tradecraft hobbyists.
They could have suitcase-sized electronics stacked against the wall. A battery bay plugged in and charging, blinking red and green lights. Headphones. A filing cabinet labeled with my name full of documents concerning me, my behavior, and the behavior of others around me. Records of things I bought, maps of places I went and the paths took to get there.
Matt said as long as my phone isn’t jailbroken, only people with NSA-level clearance could get into it the way I fear they have.
What if they do work for the NSA? What if they’re young interns or new hires training for a job in surveillance? After a series of tests in controlled, closed-circuit conditions, wouldn’t they eventually have to prove themselves in the field with a live, unpredictable subject?
Maybe theirs is a special assignment: does mocking a rat’s attempt to navigate a maze impair its ability to solve the maze?
Everyone else at the grocery store is preparing for something.
I would say I can see it in their eyes, but I’m making a conscious effort not to look at anyone’s eyes. I move around and past people like they’re wheeled furniture on a rocking ship. No one rushes, but in my hair follicles I can feel they’re biding their time. I’m their countdown clock. Carts and baskets packed with family-sized bags of chips and jars of dip, boxes of beer, ribbed bricks of hot dogs, pink mounds of chuck, buns for meat of all shapes, pretzels, popcorn… Spectator snacks.
My own cart is full too. Among the staples are beer and ice cream to celebrate my imminent freedom. You don’t want to miss the series finale, folks.
A mother pushes a cart with a baby in it, and a little boy of about four dances beside her, pulling cans off the shelves and then putting them back per her request. He wobbles near and looks up at me. I don’t look at him, but I can feel his sticky gaze on my cheek. Then he turns his back to me, puts a few cans on the floor and squats down to stack them. In the blurry part of my view I see his shirt rise to reveal a band of flesh dimpled by shadow in the middle. Obedient as a wind-up toy. Disgusting, to wrap children up in this twisted experiment.
“Is he looking at the ass?”
“I can’t tell. Can’t see his eyes.”
Tightness at the back of my head, blood rumbles in my eardrums. Don’t run. They’ll see what they want to see: a sweaty, white-knuckled pedophile fleeing the scene of a near-crime. Well, I’ll show them I can stay planted in place, happy to focus on my task. That kid may as well be a pack of canned beets.
“He’ll look, if he didn’t already.”
Olives on the top shelf. I don’t need olives, but there are gratefully enough brands and varieties for me to play-act a discerning shopper.
“He’s resisting for now. Give him a minute… Oh, reading the label on those olives, huh? What’s in there? Hmm, vinegar… oh, right, and olives… Seem pretty good to me. Are they good for you, Alex? Lotsa vitamins? How the fuck can he look at that label for so long? Should you buy those olives?… Ah, didn’t think so. Yeah, put it back. Maybe no olives today, you fucking pervert faker bullshit artist.”
As soon as I put the jar back on the shelf, I defiantly take a jar of the next brand and put it in my basket.
“Oh, need olives after all? Hope those are good ones, Alex, you didn’t even take the time to read the label!”
“What if they’re bad for you, Alex? What if they’re poison?”
“One of the jars on that shelf is poisoned. Did you pick the right one?”
Laughter.
“You think he’ll put the jar back now?”
“Probably not now. Maybe later.”
“How long before he puts it back, you think?”
“Probably when that lady with the butt-kid is gone.”
Doesn’t the mother hear them? Shouldn’t she react? I arc my stare over her son. She peruses the mustards. Don’t you usually just grab a mustard and go? Most people have a brand, right? There aren’t many options—bright yellow, goldenrod, or goldenrod with the little seeds in it. She’s avoiding my stare and ignoring what they say, playing her part in their sting operation.
“Disgusting,” I say to her.
Her son looks at me, but she doesn’t.
“Hell-o.” I wave.
She turns. “I’m sorry?”
“Disgusting.” I point at her son.
Her son looks back at her. They clearly didn’t cover this scenario when they coached him.
“Jeremy, come.”
The boy stands and walks to his mother’s outstretched hand, turns to look at me.
“Let’s go,” she says.
“You all know I’m onto you, and you can stop right now.” My voice never rises above speaking volume, but my delivery is firm enough that the mother turns her cart around and leaves the aisle, watching over her shoulder, visibly shaken.
Maybe they collect volunteers on Craigslist. Desperate amateur actors who don’t know what to do when the mark goes off script. Are the posts labeled “scientific study,” or do they list them among the acting gigs?
I can’t tell who is and isn’t a plant, but everyone else in the store avoids my stare. Maybe the mother and son were the only plants and the rest are viewers, eager for me to check out and leave so they can race home to their TV sets. Then, seated on couches and in armchairs, kids on cushions on the floor with bowls of popcorn, chips, and pretzels, the sliding glass door open to the patio where meat sizzles, they’ll see me walk onto their TV screens, entering my apartment with my own groceries.
“There he is, Dad,” a kid on a cushion will shout without turning from the screen, “he’s home.”
And the reply from outside under the sound of sizzling meat, “I’m coming. Tell me if something happens.”
All the world abuzz over how long before I crack. Money sealed in separate envelopes marked with prognoses like a demented game of Clue…
In his bedroom with a rope.
Or, in the public library with underwear on his head.
Or the signature option of this brave new century, any public place with an automatic weapon.
I could climb the shelves and scream and tear off my clothes before they finalize their bets. Take me away. Put me where you want. Leave me the fuck alone.
The only people who meet my gaze are printed on cereal boxes. The cereal box people are at ease with being watched; they smile back at me, wink at me, laugh with me. My laughter is internal, of course, to avoid drawing attention.
If they haven’t died since taking these photos, these people are somewhere out there right now, worrying like everyone else. Self-conscious when they reach for something sugary in full view of a wall of themselves scooping into a bowl of muesli.
But the most sympathetic cereal box people are the cartoon characters—birds, rabbits, leprechauns, et cetera—because they don’t have real-life counterparts weighed down by obligation and judgment. Their smiles are always the right kind. And they’ve already gone crazy—cuckoo, silly, whatever the individual case. Society encourages their weaknesses, insanity burns bravely in their wild eyes.
They never blink. They gaze back, grinning, while dust collects on their painted eyeballs. Stab forks into them and they’d still be last to blink. Their stares would endure through creeping flames.
But TV proves that they too are prodded and tested. After hacking through miles of jungle, dodging poisonous snakes and spiders, surviving deadly booby traps of darts and pits in some long-lost temple, and finally standing before a holy grail of neon corn balls and slow-motion milk cascading from the mouth of a monolith, what do they do when a bunch of giggling kids show up and snatch it away?
On the boxes they smile through their anger, goggle-eyed, oblivious that their treasure sits just behind them, through a thin layer of cardboard and plastic.
Next on I Hear You Watching…
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I feel really sorry for him in this scene as his confirmation bias kicks in. I can see how this scenario could easily lead to him being arrested and charged for one offence or another. Remind me of the timeline - this is early noughties? Mid-noughties?