Through the Wormhole

"You're so far outside the lines you're drawin' on the fuckin' table!"

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. He searched his apartment for surveillance bugs and got skepticism from the police. The observers can measure his heart rate and influence his bodily functions, which they proved by inducing a panic attack. Desperate to escape, Alex set a trap for them in his apartment and left.

A red car passes me on the freeway. Could be them.

My office shares a wall with the sign printing company next door. That’s probably where they’re rushing to, to get their equipment ready to receive the direct feed from my chip. To watch my heat map blob through the wall as I sit and type, go to the restroom, make coffee, repeat. To watch my computer screen through my eyes.

Near the office I turn on my phone.

“He has his phone with him?”

There are a couple more missed calls from Dad’s number.

There’s also a text message from a number I don’t recognize. It says, Hey. You should come over again soon. ;)

It’s timestamped just after I went to the neighbors’ house. I’m surprised they hadn’t tried to mess with me in text messages before this. Maybe they didn’t bother because I was ignoring my phone. I’m also surprised they didn’t have their shit together to grab me when I knocked earlier, and now they hope I’ll come back.

Many possible responses come to mind, but since I’m driving I keep it short: FUCK OFF.

Then I call the office.

My supervisor answers. He sounds tired.

I explain that I’m still sick and that I thought I’d feel better by now, but I don’t.

“What the fuck? He’s not going to work.”

My supervisor recommends that I see a doctor in the morning, in case it’s serious.

I tell him I’ll definitely do that, and drive past the office. No cars parked at the sign company. Maybe they parked somewhere else.

“Shut all this down, we’ve gotta follow him! Quick!”

I power my phone off as I turn onto the arterial. The next light is red, so I turn right to keep moving.

Yellow streetlight beams wipe the minivan’s interior and make me feel like I’m gaining speed. I’m not, of course. With my luck I’d get pulled over by the two goons who came to my place last night.

I rejoin the freeway going northwest. No one follows me up the ramp, nobody changes lanes near me, I merge left and join a preexisting flow of strangers like I’ve been driving this freeway all day, all my life.

I let five exits go by before I unroll the passenger window and toss the smoke detector cylinders over the center divide. I’d love to see them dance through traffic to get their shit back.

“He dropped the bug.”

“Fuck it, stay on him.”

That car? Or that car? None look like the red car that passed me before, but it probably wasn’t them anyway. I should’ve looked at the license plate.

Neighborhoods gather and disperse like clusters of stars seen through a wormhole, a futuristic superhighway paved and dotted with pools of cold, white light.

They’re silent for a while. I’m a dot moving on a map. Their own dot is somewhere behind me, hopefully with distance growing between us.

I hum to see if they comment.

When they say nothing, I sing. Softly at first. “Hello… my baby…”

I wait.

“Hello… my honey…”

Still nothing.

“Hello, my rag… time… gal…”

“He’s fucking singing.”

I grin and sing louder. “Send me a kiss by wire… Baby… my heart’s on fire…”

“That crazy fuck.”

“If you refuse me… honey, you’ll lose me… Then you’ll be left alone, oh, baby…”

“Where the fuck are you going, Alex?”

“Telephone… and tell me I’m your own!”

“He’s lost it.”

Then as loud as I can, “Hel-lo, my baby! Hel-lo, my honey! Hello, my ragtime gal!” They’re somewhere out there. “Send me a kiss by wire! Baby, my heart’s on fire!”

“His heart is racing.”

I press my fingers to my throat. They’re right. “If you refuse me, honey, you’ll lose me…”

Signs sweep by for San Fernando.

Then I’m out of San Fernando and heading toward Santa Clarita.

The office buildings and warehouses thin out. Neighborhoods huddle with little lights through curtained windows. Large, slow hills of rock and brush grow around me. The wormhole road tilts up, weaves serpentine ever skyward.

Metal nets cling to rock faces stretching up into the dark. If they want to stop me they could cut those nets and send boulders down to block my path or crush me.

I pass other cars on the upward grade. They can slither across the whole continent with no concerns, stop for gas or food and take their time. Everyone else in the world can take their time everywhere, and spit on the sidewalk without shame.

The road levels, tilts down, and the milky orange grid of Santa Clarita rises into view. The van sinks back toward Earth.

Still, I feel I’ve passed through a membrane they didn’t expect me to pierce. Like a tuna who braved a stretch of open sea with sharks on my tail, and now before me swirls a glinting new school in which to hide.

“You need to stop for gas, Alex.”

Had they seen the gauge out the corner of my eye? Or did they plant a sensor in the van somewhere?

“You don’t want to know.”

You know what I’m thinking, don’t you?

“Yes, of course we do, you fucking moron! You still seem to think this is fucking amateur hour! We’re the real deal!”

Rumbling tension blooms at the back of my skull. I pray that isn’t where the chip was planted. I picture a latex-gloved hand holding a melon baller.

“You want us to tell you where it is?”

Anything you tell me will be bullshit.

“Yup. Or the truth disguised as bullshit!”

Exactly.

Suddenly I’m tired again.

“Gonna just drive till you run out of gas?”

I say nothing, try to think nothing.

“Hungry, too?”

It’s an unfamiliar feeling. I’d mistaken the emptiness in me for agility, like how birds have hollow bones. But now a void expands in me. My dyed demon fingers are cold and stiff. Somehow this needs to be resolved before the gnawing darkness on the outside meets the expanding nothing on the inside. I suddenly understand animals who take their food somewhere hidden to eat.

An exit appears, but at the last second I swerve left and surprise a car on that side. It honks.

If I act before impulses become ideas, my thoughts might remain unreadable, my actions unpredictable.

“Sure Alex, you could kill yourself, too! That works just as well for us!”

If there’s an accident, they’d arrive at the scene before any paramedics. Haul my body away to dig out the chip and dispose of me. Maybe they’d rip off my jaw and leave it in the car, spray the car with government-grade accelerant and set the car ablaze. The jaw would match my dental records, and investigators would assume the rest of me had burned away.

Next exit passes.

I could call the paramedics to report an accident, wait until their lights appear in the distance, then—on purpose—ram myself into a wall. The paramedics would be there to take over immediately, and I’d be put under hospital care. They’d do X-rays and find the chip.

“First of all, it won’t show up in an X-ray. Second, we own the hospitals.”

“Yeah, what makes you think we couldn’t just send our own doctors to look at you? Give you a pill or a needle and then do whatever the fuck we wanted?”

There’s one more exit before the end of Santa Clarita and the beginning of empty hills for miles.

“Yeah, Alex, we could drug you up and throw you in a giant maze.”

“You think you’d be good at a maze?”

Freeway dividers and guardrails, plastic bumps and painted lines, and the rest is rough impassable landscape. I’m already in a maze.

“I think he’d try to climb the walls and tire himself out.”

“Yeah, you’re not good at following rules and staying inside the lines, are you, Alex?”

To the left a silhouette of scrubby hill moves aside to reveal the lit ribbons of a roller coaster bunched on the horizon. Magic Mountain.

“Or he might chew off his feet.”

On an impulse I check my mirrors, look out the windows, and veer right.

“What’s he doing?”

“Whoa, whoa, he’s getting off!”

Acting in advance of my thoughts will take practice.

“That’s what we mean by coloring in the lines, Alex. You’re so far outside the lines you’re drawin’ on the fuckin’ table!”

At the bottom of the exit ramp, I turn right.

The parkway is a seven-lane field of concrete.

The next light is red. I wait.

“Aw, you’re no fun, Alex! What happened to the chase?”

How’s that for following the rules?

Two pairs of headlights appear and grow in my rear-view mirror. One changes lanes to slide up on my left—an older man in a dark blue Mercedes. The other—an SUV—slows to a stop far enough behind me that their headlights smear my back window.

I watch my left, expecting to see a gun. He shifts in his seat as if readying to draw. Or maybe he heard me think that and is anxious because he thinks I’m the one who’s armed.

I watch the right too, to make sure no surprises have crept up from the SUV.

The light turns green. We three move at the same time.

The guy on the left goes faster then slower, eyes ever-forward. A consummate naturalist performance. He’s probably running the dialogue, Look, I’m just a guy, it’s late, and I’m just trying to get home, over and over behind his eyes.

I’m playing that game too, while the SUV’s headlights blast my rear-view mirror.

“Too bright for ya?”

The preliminary bubble of a response rises in me, but I sink the thought back down with a word written in extruded lead: NOTHING.

“What the fuck does that mean? Hey, did you hear me, Alex? I said are we makin’ you nervous, you fucking pussy?”

NOTHING.

I slow and watch if the guy on the left turns his head or speaks into his collar. The SUV honks to scare me.

But it doesn’t work, because I think NOTHING and change lanes behind the man.

He glances at me in his mirror.

I turn left, leaving the other vehicles to their straight-line inertia. Their taillight eyes watch helplessly, shrink, and are gone.

---

The vast, empty parking lot is like a rest stop for the freeway wormhole, spotted with the same pools of cold light. I park in a pool at the center. Dark sentinel trees edge the lot. No movement out on the road.

Light drapes a circle of protection over the minivan. The hood and windshield glint and flare.

The lot is for a Target store. The lit bull’s-eye logo on the building rises like a red sun in my mirror and stares. Another circle of protection? An evil eye?

I climb over the seats to the very back, where there’s a duffel bag containing jumper cables, tools, bottles of water, a box of expired protein bars, and a first-aid kit. I take the first-aid kit, a protein bar, and a screwdriver back to the front seat.

The protein bar is supposed to be vanilla flavor, but it just tastes chalky and thick. Sticks in my teeth. My cheeks sting and salivate.

I use the screwdriver to remove the passenger-side visor, which has a mirror in it. I tilt it next to my ear to catch its reflection in the rear-view mirror, but can’t get the angle to work.

I push my pinky finger into each ear canal, careful for the poke of a foreign body, maybe the amplified rustle of my finger brushing the mic.

With the flashlight on the dash, pointed at my face, I peel open the pink valleys between my lips and my gums. I look into my throat where my tonsils cower and pulsate. I search my molars for signs that one is artificial, maybe replaced years ago when I had my wisdom teeth pulled. I tap each tooth with the tip of the screwdriver, listening for a false note. I clamp the flashlight between my legs, flare my nostrils, and search the tangle of nose hairs for a glint of metal. I peel my eyelids up and down, roll my eyeballs to see if the edge of something peeks out behind them.

Dread hardens in my chest—if it’s not accessible through one of my orifices, it must be surgically embedded somewhere. Maybe it’s a piece of nanotech they put in my food that, once inside, jabbed a neat little path through my organs to wedge itself between my clavicle and vocal cords. Or it could be plugged directly into my spinal column. My hand massages the vertebral hump at the base of my neck.

Strange contours of bone, muscle, and fat shift against each other beneath my skin. Tendons stretch like twine down my arms and legs and spider out in the backs of my hands. For nearly three decades organic material has ballooned, stretched, congealed, and accreted in various spindles and bulbs to make my personal geometry.

That thing could be anywhere, concealed in my weave of lumpy, knotted fibers.

If I find it, should I try to cut it out right here in the van? And then drive to the emergency room? Or will I feel it, pinch its contours to make sure—yes, it’s a tube, or a disk, or a square, or whatever intrusive shape—and then drive to the hospital in ecstatic terror, with one hand still pinching the thing beneath my skin to make sure it doesn’t move?

“Where does he think it’s gonna go?”

“He thinks it’s some kind of robot that’ll climb out of his mouth like a bug, or drill out of his skin and fly away. Check this out, he’s imagining what it looks like.”

“Lemme see… Whoa, you’re right, that’s wild! I wish we had shit like that!”

I massage the hunk of muscle in the arc of my jawbone. The glands at the top of my throat feel like giblets in a hairy leather bag.

“Alex, you should make movies or something. This insect robot idea is fucking crazy.”

“You waste all this time yelling at us and having your paranoid freak-outs, when you could be writing this shit down.”

“Fuck you.” I slide my hands under my shirt, press on the flesh between my ribs. It might be somewhere behind the bone, or in my back where I can’t reach.

“Yeah, you could be a writer or something, but all you do is smoke weed and go to your bullshit job. You called in sick, so you’ve got all this free time right now, and what are you doing? You drove to fucking Santa Clarita in the middle of the night to sit in an empty parking lot and shine a fuckin’ flashlight up your nose!”

“Fuck you!” My voice is close and loud in the van.

“See how easy it is for us to fool and manipulate you? You’ve got no integrity! No volition! You’re already dead!”

“Shut the fuck up!” I watch my mouth stretch open in the mirror, cavernous, hoping I can shout loud enough to hurt their ears. “You fucks, shut the fuck up! Get the fuck outta my head! Shut up!” Of course, they knew I’d yell, so they probably turned the volume down.

The quieter I imagine they hear me, the less air I feel in my lungs. I take heaving breaths between sentences. “Leave me alone!… You fucks!… I’ll fucking kill you!…” My volume lowers, thick quilt after thick quilt settles over my head. I recline my seat and close my eyes, “…shit…” my heart’s footsteps are loud in my ears as it runs right off the edge of the cliff.

Next on I Hear You Watching…

Impatient to read the rest? Two options:

Here’s a complete list of posted chapters.

---

Got a question about the book or my experience with hearing voices and psychosis? Don’t be shy! Join the chat and…