The Visible Man and Other Stories (20 page)

Bradley walked to the viewphone. It was handsome, done in polished artificial wood and steel, with a wide screen. Trembling, he sat down.

The company representative had not even bothered to pretend that his spiel was not a spiel, that he wasn’t speaking it from rote. He explained the merits of the new viewphone network in a rehearsed tone. Bradley listened numbly. They were both bored. It was all a formality anyway. Bradley had received a bonus for seniority—he had to rent something new whose cost would correspond to the bonus. He had to: there could be no such thing as a credit unbalance. The only initiative he could execute was in the selection of the item. He could choose from about five equally priced items. The company rep seemed to be pushing the viewphone network, maybe because they were overstocked—

Bradley activated the network, waited for the set to warm up. He opened a drawer, took out an address book, looked up a scribbled number. It had taken him three days this time to find the right girl, to follow her home, to find which apartment in the hive was hers so that he could look up the code number. He had been terrified every waking second of those three days, and he had almost been stopped and questioned by a security guard. Every time it got harder, every time he came a little closer to being caught. The viewphone hummed. The dialing pattern appeared on the screen.

The greatest advantage of the viewphone network, the company representative had told Bradley mechanically, is its intimacy. It can save you a great deal of unnecessary travel. Its every bit as good as being in the same room with the person you want to talk to. It enables you to perform all your social and business functions—

Bradley punched out the code number. Six short, savage jabs of his finger. He counted each click distinctly to himself. The dialing pattern disappeared; static swirled on the screen. With one hand, he reached down and opened his pants, unsealing the magnetic flap along the front. He had become excited, thinking of what he was about to do—he took his erection in his hand, squeezing, feeling the blood throb under his fingers. His mouth was painfully dry, and he was quivering with tension. Static condensed, became a young woman’s face. Pretty, long dark hair, big golden eyes. “Yes?” she said, not recognizing him. Bradley stood up, letting his pants drop down around his ankles. Her eyes widened. She stared at him in shock—but there was also a quick flicker of fascination behind her eyes, and something else. Recognition? Longing? Love? It is love, he wanted to tell her, it is you and me, it is us. We touch here. But he only thrust his pelvis, a little more forward. She watched in fascination, lips parted, tongue against teeth. After a second, she dutifully—almost reluctantly—opened her mouth to scream. He flicked the set off. Silence echoed. As her scream must be echoing now, in her own apartment, in her own hive. Gradually, he lowered himself back into the chair. He sat there with his pants bunched around his ankles and listened to the clock tick in the kitchen.

—in the convenience of your own home—

Then he began to cry.

The Storm

THE SKY HAD been ominous all that afternoon—a lurid yellow-green to the south, darkening overhead to blood and rust and soot. East, out over the ocean, there were occasional bright flashes and flares in rapid sequence, all without sound, as though a pitched artillery battle were being fought somewhere miles away and out of earshot. To the north and to the west, the sky was a dull dead black, like an immense wall of obsidian going up to heaven. The boy’s house was silhouetted against that black sky, all slate and angles and old wooden gables, with a single silver light coming from the kitchen window. The house was surrounded by several big old horse-chestnut trees, and, to the boy, the moving silhouettes of their branches in the gathering wind seemed to be spelling out a message to God in some semaphoric sign language that he could recognize but not entirely understand. He wished that he could decipher the movement of the trees, because the same message was being whispered and repeated down through the long soughing fields of summer grass, and retold by the infinitesimal scraping of twig on twig deep in the tangled secret heart of the rhododendron and blackberry thickets, and rehearsed in a different register by the flying black cloud-scuts that now boiled out across the sky, and caught up and reechoed and elaborated upon in the dust-devil dance of paper-scraps and leaves along the blacktop-and-gravel road to town. Spirits were moving. Something big was going to happen, and spirits were scuttling all about him through land and sky and water. Something big and wonderful and deadly was coming, coming up from behind that southern horizon like a muted iron music, still grumbling and rumbling far away, but coming steadily on all the same: coming inexorably up over the horizon and into the boy’s world. The boy wished with all his heart that it would come.

“You stay close to the house, Paulie,” the boy’s mother called from the kitchen door. “This’s going to break soon.”

The boy didn’t need to be told that there was a storm coming, nor did he need to go into the screened kitchen porch to know how fast the barometer was dropping. If the testimony of the hostile sky were not enough, then he could feel the storm as an electric prickling all along his skin, he could almost reach out and touch it with his fingertips. He could smell it, he could taste it. It was in the air all around him; it crackled around his feet as he swished them through the grass, and it thrilled him to his soul. If the boy had been magically given wings at that moment, he would have flown unhesitantly south to meet the storm—because it was marvelous and awful and even the rumor of its approach awed the world, because it was the greatest concentration of sheer power that had yet come into his life. The boy had made a brief foray down to the sea wall a few moments before, and even the ocean had seemed to be subdued by the power of the storm. It had been flat and glossy, with only the most sluggish of seas running, more like oil than water, or like some dull heavy metal in liquid form.

“Paulie!” his mother repeated, more stridently. “I mean it now—don’t you go running off. You hear me, Paulie?”

“Okay, Ma!” the boy shouted.

The boy’s mother stared suspiciously at him for a moment, distrustful of his easy capitulation. She started to say something else to him, hesitated, shook her head, and almost wiped her face absent-mindedly with the dirty dust rag she was holding. She caught herself, and grimaced wearily. Her hair was tied back in a tight, unlovely bun, and her face was strained and tired. She pulled her head back into the house. The screen door slammed shut behind her.

Released, the boy slid off through the trees.

With the canny instinct of children, he immediately circled the house to get out of sight. A moment later, his mother began calling him again from the kitchen door, but he pretended not to hear. He wouldn’t go very far away, after all. His mother called again, sounding angry now. The boy wasn’t worried. This side of the house was blind except for the windows on the second floor, and his mother would never go all the way up there just to look for him. She was easy to elude. Unconsciously, she seemed to believe in sympathetic magic: she would keep looking out the kitchen door for him, expecting to find him in the backyard because that was the last place she had seen him, and she couldn’t really believe that he was anywhere else. The boy heard the front door open, and his mother called briefly for him from the front stoop. That was her concession to logic. Then the front door closed, and, after a moment, he heard her calling from the kitchen again. The boy had never heard of the Law of Contagion, but he knew instinctively that it was safe to play out front now. His mother would not look for him out in the front yard again. Somewhere inside she had faith in the boy’s eventual reappearance in the backyard, and she would maintain an intermittent vigil at the kitchen door for hours, if need be, rather than walking back through the house to look for him again.

He sat down on the front lawn to think, well satisfied with himself.

There were other children in the neighborhood, but none of them were outside today. The boy was smugly pleased that he was the only one who had been able to dodge parental restraint, but after a while he began to feel more lonely than elated. Now that he had his freedom, he began to wonder what to do with it. He was too excited by the approaching storm to stay still for long, and that ruled out many of the intricate little games he’d devised to play when he was by himself, which was much of the time. The Atlantic was only a quarter-mile from his kitchen door, through a meadow and a stand of scrub woods he knew in every twig and branch, and ordinarily he would have gone down there to hunt for periwinkle shells or tide-worn pebbles or to run dizzily along the top of the seawall. But the thought made him uncomfortable—it would be cheating too much to go down there. He’d promised his mother that he would stay close to the house, and he only meant to bend his word a little, not break it. So he set off down the road instead, kicking at weeds and watching the ominously spreading bruise in the sky that marked the distant approach of the storm.

The neighborhood was more thickly settled down this way. It was about four hundred yards along the road from the boy’s house to Mr. Leidy’s house, the next one down. But just beyond Leidy’s house was Mrs. Spinnato’s house, almost invisible behind a high wall of azalea and ornamental hedge, and beyond that were three or four other houses grouped on either side of a little street that led away from the main road at a right angle. The boy turned off onto the side road. It had a real paved sidewalk, just like in town, and that was irresistible. The road led eventually, he knew, to a landfill in a marsh where the most wonderful junk could occasionally be found, but he didn’t intend to go that far today. He’d be careful to keep his house in sight across the back of Mr. Coggin’s yard, and that way he’d be doing pretty much what his mother had said, even if the house did dwindle to the size of a matchbook in the distance. And he could do without the dump, the boy thought magnanimously. There were sidewalks and driveways and groupings of houses all along this road, and a hundred places to explore—no matter that he’d explored them all yesterday, they could very well all be different today, couldn’t they?

After a while, he found a feather on the sidewalk.

The birds hadn’t needed to be told about the storm, either, the boy thought as he nudged at the feather with his toe. They had all flown north and west that morning, rising up out of the treetops like puffs of vapor in the sun to condense into bright feathered clouds that stretched out across the sky for miles. Later, in another county, it would rain birds. Pigeons, sparrows, crows, robins, jays, wrens, a dozen other species—the boy’s world seemed amazingly empty without them. Even the gulls were gone. On an ordinary day you could almost always see a gull in the sky somewhere, rising up stiff winged from the land as if on an invisible elevator, then tilting and sliding down a long slope of air to skim across the sea. They hung above the fishing docks in town in such a raucous, fish-stealing, thousand-headed crowd that the boy usually could hear the clatter and cry of it all the way out here. Today they had all vanished before noon. Maybe they had gone far out to sea, or way up the coast—but they were gone. All that morning the boy had watched the birds go, and the scissoring, semaphore beat of their wings in the sky had been the first thing to spell out the message that now the trees and all the world repeated.

He picked up the feather.

A few feet farther on, he found another feather.

And then another one.

And another.

With growing excitement, the boy followed the trail of feathers.

Surely it must be leading him to an enchanted place, surely there must be something mysterious and wonderful at the end of the trail: a magic garden, a glass house, a tree with a door in it that led to another world. He began to run. The trail led diagonally across a driveway and disappeared behind a garage. There were more feathers to be found now, two or three of them in each clump.

At the end of the trail of feathers was a dead bird.

The boy stopped short, feeling a thrill of surprise and horror and supernatural awe. Involuntarily, he dropped the handful of feathers he had gathered, and they swirled around his ankles for a moment before settling to the ground. The bird had been struck by a glancing but fatal blow by something—a car, a hawk—and it had fluttered all this way to die, shedding feathers across the sidewalk, fighting to stay aloft and stay alive and losing at both. This was the enchanted thing at the end of the trail: a dead pigeon, glazed eyes and matted feathers, sad, dowdy, and completely unmagical. An emotion he could not name swept through the boy, making the short hairs bristle along the back of his neck. He looked up.

The southern sky was still a welter of lurid color, but there was more red in it now, as though blood was slowly being poured into the world.

Paul himself could not have told you why he first began to withdraw from the world. Breaking up with his fiancée Vivian—a particular sordid and drawn-out process that had taken almost half a year all told—certainly had something to do with it. His best friend, Joseph, had recently become his most bitter enemy, and was now busy spreading poisonous tales about him throughout the rest of Paul’s circle of acquaintances and colleagues. Much of the blame for these ugly affairs was unquestionably Paul’s—paradoxically, that knowledge fed his guilt without abating in the least the hatred he now felt for Vivian and Joseph. Paul’s father had just died, still bitterly unreconciled with his son, and that left an unpleasant taste in Paul’s mouth. All his relatives were dead now. He had quit his job, ostensibly because he wanted to. But his career had been dead-ended by business adversaries, and he’d had no place to go in it but down. And he had been ill. Nothing major: just a case of flu—or rather, a series of flus and colds running in succession—that had stuck with him throughout the entire fall and early winter and had left him feeling wretched, dull, and debilitated. These were the obvious reasons, at least. There were probably hundreds of others that Paul himself did not consciously know about—small humiliations, everyday defeats, childhood tragedies, long-forgotten things that had settled down into him like layer after layer of sediment until they choked his soul with sludge.

Above all else, he lived in Manhattan, and Manhattan was a place that fed you hate, contempt, bitterness, and despair in negligible daily doses that—like cleverly administered arsenic—became cumulatively fatal.

Paul had an apartment on East Tenth Street between First and Avenue A, a neighborhood that is depressing even at its best. In January, with the freezing winds skimming down the avenue like razors, and the corrugated gray sky clamped down like a lid, and the first sooty snowfall coming down over the frozen garbage on the sidewalks, it is considerably worse than ‘depressing.’ Even his seamy fifth-floor walkup began to seem a more desirable place to be than the frozen monochrome world outside.

He began to “stay in.”

He had few friends left in the city any more, and certainly none who were worth sallying out through a Manhattan winter to visit. His bank balance was too low to afford him luxuries like movies or nightclubs or the theater, or even dining out. He had gotten out of the habit of going to the newsstand for newspapers or magazines. He wasn’t looking for work, so he didn’t need to go out for job interviews. And he had become a bad-luck magnet—every time he left the apartment, disaster followed at his heels: he tore a ligament falling down the stairs, he sprained an ankle on a slushy sidewalk, he was bitten by dogs, drenched by the freezing gutter-water thrown up by speeding cars, knocked down by a bicycle on First Avenue, splattered with garbage, and mugged three times in two weeks. It seemed that every time he went outside now he caught another cold, and had to suffer out the next few days with chills and headaches and congestion. Under these circumstances, it was just easier to stay inside as much as possible, and even easier than that to let the days he spent inside turn themselves almost unnoticed into weeks. He fell into the habit of doing all his shopping in one trip, and planning frugal meals so that each carton of groceries would last as long as possible.

He no longer went out for any other reason whatsoever.

This self-enforced retreat of Paul’s might eventually have turned out to be good for him if he had been able to do any work during it. He had ostensibly quit his advertising job in order to write a novel, but the typewriter sat idle on the folding table in the living room for week after week. It wasn’t so much that he could think of nothing to write, but that everything he did put on paper seemed banal, inconsequential, jejune. Eventually he gave up even trying to write, but left the typewriter set up in case sudden inspiration should strike. It didn’t. The typewriter became covered by a fine film of dust and soot. He watched television almost continuously then, until a tube burned out in the set. He didn’t have enough money to get it fixed, so he pushed the set against the wall, where it glowered out over the apartment like the glazed eye of a dead Cyclops. Dust settled over that, too. He read every book he owned, then read them again. Eventually he reached a point where he would just sit around the apartment all day, not doing anything, too listless even to be bored.