The Visible Man (12 page)

Val returned about an hour after she’d left, bathed in sweat. She
closed the door and took off her sports bra in the same motion. Now, I’m sure—as a woman, and maybe just as a person—you find this description creepy. You think it’s sick that I would sit in some unknown female’s apartment and watch her get undressed. But this kind of visual experience was never sexual for me. Never. I looked at Valerie the way her gynecologist looks at her. Was she attractive? Maybe. I don’t think I’m in a position to say definitively. Seeing naked people is just part of my job. I take no pleasure in it.

So, as I was saying … Valerie strips off her clothes and takes a shower. I wait for her in the living room. It’s darker now—almost eight o’clock. Valerie comes out of her bathroom in a robe and underwear. Her hair is fucking bizarre. It’s wet and vertical—it looks like a koala is crouching on her scalp. She checks her voice mail messages. She looks through her snail mail and separates the bills from everything else. She checks her work e-mail on her phone. And then—and this surprised me—she opens her closet and pulls out the biggest Pyrex bong I’ve ever seen. It was three feet high. She lights the carb port, takes a massive hit, and exhales a thundercloud of smoke. The whole apartment gets blue and thick. She walks through the fog and into the kitchen.

This is where the war was waged.

What I would come to discover about Valerie was that she was at war with herself. It was a ground war—a hundred-year war of attrition. She was at war with the size of her body, her desire to smoke pot, and an obsession with eating all the food in the world. She was compulsive about all three, and all three were connected. Thirty seconds after getting high, she was eating spoonfuls of Jif peanut butter, straight from the jar. Her eyes were crazed as she did this, somewhere between ecstasy and fear. I’ve never seen a person enjoy peanut butter so much. After ten minutes of chowing, she smoked more pot. Then she ordered a Domino’s pizza. For the next twenty-nine minutes, she sat on her love seat, listening to the Beatles with her eyes closed; when the pizza arrived, she ate five of the eight slices like a she-wolf. She threw the last three slices away and emptied the garbage. This alone seemed like a full night’s gluttony,
but—once again—she returned to the bong. Again, the room turned blue. She listened to a little more of
Abbey Road
, swaying with herself to “Sun King.” It was charming. But then she surprised me again: She ordered a second pizza. A different kind of pizza from a different pizza place. When it arrived, she did the same thing—she ate a little more than half the pie and threw the rest away.

By now, it’s almost midnight. Valerie smokes more pot, changes the CD to
A Hard Day’s Night
, and softly sings along with “You Can’t Do That.” She gorges on more peanut butter, this time swabbing it on Ritz crackers. Again, I assume the night is over. But suddenly she’s lying on the floor, topless. Now she’s doing sit-ups! She does one hundred sit-ups, rests for five minutes, then knocks off one hundred more. She attacks the bong a fourth time, refogging the apartment like a machine. Eventually, she crawls into her twin bed and falls asleep. She doesn’t even turn off her table lamp. I spend the night watching her sleep in the light. For six hours, we’re equally motionless but unequally bored.

Valerie awakes without an alarm. If she’s feeling haggard, it doesn’t show. Immediately, she’s doing sit-ups. She’s isolating her abs. She does a few push-ups, but she doesn’t do them well. No upper-arm strength. She stretches her hammies and stretches her quads. She puts on her running shoes and pulls on her headband, and—once again—she’s jogging out the door. I’m a little surprised, because yesterday she ran at dusk. It’s only been twelve hours since her previous run. Her morning jog lasts forty-five minutes. When she returns, she showers and prepares for work. No breakfast required. She puts the bong back in the closet, spends ten minutes looking for her car keys, and finally leaves for wherever she needs to be.

I sleep on her floor for most of the afternoon. When I awake, I look for any innocuous food scraps in the kitchen. This is generally how I feed myself when I’m inside a stranger’s home: I eat whatever food seems least likely to be missed. I’m not judgmental. I’ll eat anything, and I don’t need much. I can last days on uncooked pasta and raw sugar. But Valerie doesn’t have either of those items. She
doesn’t have
anything
, except for peanut butter, olive oil, ketchup, and a (now empty) box of crackers.

It occurs to me that Valerie is afraid to keep food in the house.

Valerie gets home early—somewhere in the neighborhood of 5:20 or 5:30. I can’t get a read on what she does for a living, beyond that it requires her to wear pencil skirts. By 5:45, the headband is back on her brain and she’s jogging out the door. Tonight she runs for ninety minutes; when she gets back, I momentarily worry she might collapse. She literally staggers into the apartment, panting like a sheepdog. She needs a moment to compose herself. But Valerie rallies. She takes off her clothes and stands in front of the bathroom mirror, looking at her stomach in profile. When she steps out of the shower, she stares at her stomach again. To me, she looks neither fat nor thin, but I can’t imagine what she sees. Judging from the expression on her face, she’s either mildly concerned or mildly depressed.

Valerie get dressed and starts cleaning her apartment, although cleaning is not really the right word—she just sort of organizes the disorder into four separate piles. Around eight, her doorbell rings. It’s another woman, roughly Valerie’s age but significantly heavier. This is Jane. She has a lot of wavy hair, a lot of teeth, and one of those omnipresent, face-dominating perma-grins that makes her look like a lesser Muppet. Diabolically upbeat. She’s carrying two buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The two women hug hello, but I can tell they’ve seen each other recently; the hug is brief and their conversation is neutral and nonexpository. Valerie asks things like, “What’s Jim doing tonight?” and Jane responds with, “Oh, you know Jim.” They have a brief discussion about when they should start smoking marijuana, and the verdict is “immediately.” They’re comfortable with each other. They enjoy the process of agreeing. They sit on the floor and light each other’s weed. They talk slower, but their personalities don’t change. They start eating the chicken. This must be the thing they do together.

At 9:20 they turn on the television. They’ve digitally recorded that popular program about the good-looking airline passengers who accidentally travel through time. Every so often, they pause the
action to bicker about the plot: Valerie seems angry at the episode because she doesn’t know what’s happening. Jane seems pleased by the episode because she doesn’t know what’s happening.

“Why are they all doing that?” says Valerie. “Why doesn’t anyone ask why they’re doing the things that they’re doing?”

“They’re doing it because that one guy told them it was the only way.”

“But isn’t that guy the same person who wanted to kill them?”

“No, that was the first guy. The guy who can’t die.”

“But why would they follow the other guy? The smoke.”

“I don’t think they’re following the smoke.”

“In this reality, or in all the realities?”

“Yes.”

This goes on for a long time. When the show concludes, they keep disagreeing about what did or didn’t occur. “I think that already happened.” “We don’t know that yet.” “She’s actually his half-sister, right?” “No, that was the woman from the airport bar.” “He was killed a long time ago.” “He might not be dead anymore.” It’s the worst conversation I’ve ever heard two people have about something that wasn’t true. They finish the first bucket of chicken and decide to eat the legs and wings from bucket number two for dessert. Valerie hits “play” on her CD player;
A Hard Day’s Night
is still in the carousel. Jane says, “Have you ever heard that song about the Beatles? It’s not by the Beatles.” Valerie looks at Jane like she’s from Atlantis. Valerie says, “What?” Jane says, “Wait,” and runs outside to her car. She returns with a cassette. “I can’t play tapes,” says Valerie. “I don’t have a tape player. I don’t play tapes.” Jane says, “You should get a tape player.” Valerie says, “But I don’t have any tapes.” Jane says, “But now you have
this
tape.” Their relationship is founded on the repeated deconstruction of meaningless contradictions.

Jane gets ready to go home. She asks if she should leave the remainder of the chicken with Valerie. “Sure,” lies Valerie. “I’ll have it for lunch tomorrow.” Jane walks out the door. Valerie smokes more pot and gets on the treadmill. She runs for three simulated
miles, drinks a huge glass of water, and eats the rest of the chicken. It’s the skin she loves most—she tears it off the flesh and drags it through the gravy. Every mouthful is succulent, decadent fat. It electrifies her spirit as it clogs her ventricles. When the chicken is gone, she returns to the peanut butter, finishing the remainder of the jar. She jams her whole hand into the jar and licks her fingers clean. There’s no food remaining in the house. It’s been erased by her mouth. Upon this realization, she inhales more weed, does forty abdominal crunches, takes another shower, and falls asleep to John Lennon’s
Plastic Ono Band
.

Valerie was the fittest, hungriest, cleanest person I’d ever encountered.
(5.16.08, 10:08 a.m. to 10:33 a.m.)

2
Now, let me ask you a question, Vic-Vick: What’s the most transparently interesting thing about this Valerie person? To me, it’s that she’s a liar. Even to her closest friends, Valerie is lying about how she lives. She doesn’t want Jane to know that she could never save half a bucket of chicken until tomorrow. She doesn’t want Jane to know that she instantly knew she’d eat it all immediately, and that such an action was beyond her control. Instead, she chooses to exercise with the intensity of a decathlete, simply to sustain the physical appearance of normalcy. It’s a hidden cycle: The stress of this fraud makes her want to escape from reality, which prompts her to smoke marijuana, which makes her eat compulsively, which forces her to exercise obsessively and without reward, which makes her original dishonesty so shameful. But I am the only one who knows this. Only I see her secrets. So I find myself thinking: Is this lie the totality of who she is? Is there any part of her personality that isn’t dictated by this cycle? Is her secret the only thing that matters about her?

While she was at work, this was what I worried about. (
5.16.08, 10:47 a.m. to 10:48 a.m.
)

3
On the third day of my occupation, Valerie came home with two boxes of doughnuts, two cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli, and a bunch of bananas. I knew where that shit was going, and I knew it would be gone by midnight. She went out for her evening run and returned to do a few dozen burpies, or whatever they’re calling burpies now, in the middle of the living room. Burpies are what convicts do. Burpies are designed for people in prison cells. She takes her second shower of the day and settles in for another night of smoking and gorging and listening to dead hippies sing about the Maharishi … her life is so calcified. It drives me crazy. How can she not realize how terrible her life is? And yet—she seems happy. I see no explicit depression within her existence. Does she not understand that this is no way to live? I
want
her to be depressed. I want her to want to be different. But she just doesn’t get it.

[I interject to ask Y
____
if he sees his own contradiction; I ask if he sees how his espoused intention to “objectively observe” these subjects seems to be false, and that his emotional relationship to Valerie is greater than his interest in her actual life.]

That’s not true. That’s wrong. Just because I care doesn’t mean I can’t be objective. That’s what’s wrong with the world, Vicky: We’ve given up on the possibility of overcoming our biases. Did I like Valerie? Yes. Sure. Yes I did. But I never
surrendered
to her. That’s the part you can’t comprehend.

Going in, I knew that watching people during their private moments was going to be emotionally confusing. I mean, I watched Valerie go to the bathroom many, many times. When she was alone, she never even closed the door. I’ve watched her defecate, and that’s a pretty humiliating experience, even when no one’s watching. And seeing someone humiliated is always going to make you like that person a little more. If an author wants to make a fictional character sympathetic, the easiest way to make that happen is to place them in a humiliating scenario. Humiliation preys on our
deepest fears of what it means to be alive. So
of course
I was going to like Valerie. I liked everyone I watched. That was just something I had to mentally fight through. Newspaper reporters do this all the time, or at least they’re supposed to. It’s not impossible. The larger problem, at least for me, is the inherent inequality within this kind of relationship. Valerie believed she was alone, so—for her—our time together was neutral. There’s no emotional charge to being alone. She felt nothing, because she had nothing to feel. Meanwhile, I continually spent my time, one on one, with unguarded strangers who act completely open and completely vulnerable. For me, these episodes became extremely intimate. But it’s a one-sided intimacy, and that’s something you can’t prepare for.