The Visible Man (13 page)

Easy example: Our fourth night together. It rained that day, all afternoon and all night. Valerie couldn’t run outside, so she used her treadmill. It was unnerving to watch how hard she ran—she was going nowhere, but she was getting there fast. She sprinted. And she sprinted
loud
—she took these heavy steps that went
boom boom boom boom boom boom boom
, like an automatic weapon with the trigger jammed, banging away for almost two hours. Val has an OCD tic about the treadmill: There are three LCDs on the machine, and she won’t quit unless they all fall on perfectly round numbers. Like, she would hit her goal of four miles on the “distance” gauge, but she wouldn’t stop because the “minutes” gauge might read 36:33. She’d decide to keep running until the minutes gauge was exactly 40:00. But the moment that LCD read 40:00, the “calories” gauge would be at 678, so she’d need to push it to exactly 700. But then the distance LCD would be at 5.58, so she’d need to make it exactly 6.00. This never balanced out, of course. It was hopeless, and it was exhaustive to watch. After she finally gave up and showered, she got high and boiled a massive bowl of spaghetti, which she ate with butter and black pepper and string cheese. She ate a bunch of Twix bars, too. But something else happened that night. It was the kind of something that makes me feel bad about myself. And I still don’t know why I feel that way, which is why I’m talking to you.

Sometime around ten p.m., woozy and stuffed, Valerie started looking through her closet. At first, I had no idea what prompted this seemingly random, seemingly spontaneous decision. But she got down on all fours and really went at it. This was a dogged, focused search—the kind of search that can only be conducted by the very worried or the deeply stoned. After twenty minutes, she pulls out a clock radio. “Ah ha,” she says to no one. I have no idea what her intentions are, because Valerie already has her own internal alarm clock. Besides, this is a massive, ugly clock. Unwieldy. Almost like a boom box, but not quite. Very much from the eighties, when plastics were bigger. No one would accept such a monstrosity today. But she plugs it in, and it blinks “12:00.” She doesn’t fix the time. And—suddenly—I know why she needed to locate this device. It’s because it has a cassette player. She is going to play that cassette Jane gave her two days ago.

Now, the song on this tape, the song that Jane wanted her to play—I don’t know how to describe it, really. It’s barely a song. It’s just drums and a singer and an accordion, or some instrument that resembles an accordion. The singer sounds broken, but not in the way we typically use that term. He literally sounds like a mentally handicapped child. And this song—well, it’s almost like the singer is trying to be sarcastic, because it’s just a straightforward explanation of who the Beatles were and what they did. One of the lines in the song is “They really were very good. They deserved all their success.” Whenever the guy says the word
Beatles
, he sings it with a bad Cockney accent. None of it rhymes. It seems like a song written extemporaneously. Any listener’s natural impulse would be to hate it, or to laugh at it. But Valerie kept playing and rewinding this same song. She probably played that song twenty times in a row, and she could not stop smiling. It was the happiest I ever saw her—even happier than when she was eating Jif. And this is because that song is fucking
profound
. It’s like this quasi-homeless guy had tapped into the most primitive explanation as to why Valerie liked the Beatles, or, I suppose, why anyone likes the Beatles. There’s a few lines where the singer mentions how the Beatles’ career is like
a fairy tale, and that the trajectory of their fame and their impact on the world would seem completely implausible if it were presented in a fictional context. That was the part that made Valerie smile the most—the not-so-obvious idea that the Beatles were not imaginary. It’s so not-so-obvious that only an insane person could conceive it.

Now, for Valerie, that night was just about the song itself. There was no subtext. There was only text. She was just a spaced-out person, sitting in a love seat and listening to low-quality audio from a crappy clock radio. There was no exchange of feeling, beyond how she felt about the song. Her feelings were her own, and they were shared with no one. But the experience was different for me. I felt extremely close to Valerie that night, even though she had no idea I was in the room. I could hear the rain against the window, intertwined with the fragility of the music. I could see her amorphous affection for the Beatles being demystified—and then amplified—by this one weird song, and to see someone love one thing is to see someone love all things. She was alone, but we were together. The intimacy was overwhelming. Every time she rewound the tape, I felt like we were burrowing deeper and deeper into a hole. Was it the most romantic night of my life? No. That would be an overstatement. But it felt
important
. And Valerie didn’t care at all. She couldn’t. It wasn’t like unrequited love. It wasn’t even like having a crush on a person who doesn’t know you exist. It was more like being seduced by an amnesiac. It was like she was forgetting who I was, while I was still there. It was terrible. I mean, I was really seeing this person. I was truly seeing who she was. Someday, Valerie will fall in love. She will get married. But her husband will never see her the way I did. No one will ever be as close to her as I was that night, because no one else can ever be with her when she’s alone. Only I can do that.

So what is your real question, Victoria? Did I
like
Valerie? As I said before: Yes. But I probably didn’t care about her. I’ve barely even thought about her since the last time I saw her. If I wasn’t talking about her to you, I probably wouldn’t be talking about her at all. Maybe I’m lying to myself, but I doubt it. I eventually found that
song she played online, and it’s by a local named Dennis Johnson (
sic
).
⁸
A pretty hopeless case, from what I can tell. That song doesn’t even sound good to me anymore. I never want to hear it again. But now I’m left with the memory of having heard it that night. It feels like we shared something. But we didn’t. I know the truth. I understand the truth. We didn’t share anything. Valerie was in the room, but what happened to me didn’t happen to her. And I know that I need to understand this. (
5.23.08, 10:32 a.m. to 10:42 a.m.
)

4
You’re looking at me like I’m lying. You’re looking at me like you think I’m saying the opposite of what I really mean. Either that, or you’re looking at me like I’m some kind of terrible person. Like I’m some kind of brilliant troll.

[I tell Y
____
that I am not looking at him in any particular way.]

Well, good for you. Great. Whatever. You can certainly say that, and maybe you’re being honest. I can see how you’re looking at me, and I’m never wrong about these things … but, you know, I understand your reactions. You’re wondering why I could be so uncaring toward Valerie, and why I almost seem proud of my emotional detachment. I seem inhuman to you. Your eyes tell me everything. Your eyes are like a search engine.

I get the impression that talking about Valerie has actually made you more confused about what I do and why I do it. You probably think I’m just a sick person who likes to spy on strangers, and that I’ve created this elaborate, faux-sociological framework to justify my behavior. You can tell me if that’s what you think.

[I tell Y
____
that I don’t know what I think.]

Yes, you do. You’re thinking without even trying. You can’t stop yourself from thinking. But here’s what you
ought
to be thinking:
“What was gained from this observation? What do we now know about human nature that we didn’t know before?” That’s what you should be thinking. Those are the questions you should be asking yourself.

[I say, “I would love to know the answer to those questions.”]

Don’t pressure me. I’ll answer your questions, but only when I’m ready. You won’t really understand, anyway. The information will be useless to you.

[I say, “It seems like you want me to ask you questions, just so you can decline to answer them.”]

That’s not true. You lack self-confidence. We’re almost out of time, anyway. The session is basically over. Wait a week. Next week. I’ll talk about this next week. And I don’t appreciate your tone, Victoria. It makes me think you’re against me. (
5.23.08, 10:44 a.m. to 10:46 a.m.
)

5
I started to feel responsible for Valerie. She might have been comfortable with her life, but I wasn’t. I didn’t like where her life was going. She didn’t realize how enslaved she was. Here was a single woman with no obligations, but with a life devoid of freedom. She didn’t even understand what freedom meant. There are convicted murderers with more freedom than Valerie. I truly believe that.

Did she like exercise? No. She exercised only so that she could smoke pot and gorge herself on pizza. Did she like being high? Probably when she started, but not anymore. Now it was just a ritual that accelerated her hunger. Did she enjoy food? No. If she loved food, she would not be shoveling canned ravioli down her throat. Did she enjoy the
process
of eating—the chewing, the swallowing, the filling of the stomach? No way. All that did was remind her that she needed to exercise again. I’m not even sure if she really liked
the Beatles. I think she
thought
she did, but how would she know? She clearly sucked at knowing things about herself. I think it’s more likely that she believed the Beatles were simply what a person like her was supposed to listen to. Valerie had no agency. I don’t care if she didn’t realize that. I realized it for her.

This, my Vic-Vick, is the type of realization that can happen only through surveillance: If anyone else had been in the room, Valerie would have “become” happy. She wouldn’t have
been
happy, but she would have acted happy and assumed that her actions were somehow related to feelings. Jane came by again—the following Tuesday, just as before—and they watched their little TV show that didn’t make any sense and argued about a sequence of numbers and laughed and got excited and chewed on fried chicken skin. I’m sure they thought they were fulfilled, but they were wrong. That was not fulfillment. It was just another way to avoid the cognition of their imprisonment, and their banal interaction made that easier. They could feed off each other’s fabricated joy. But when Valerie was alone, I saw the desperation she could not comprehend. She was running herself into the grave, just so that she could space out and pig out and not care about things that mattered. It was pathetic. She deserved better. I saw potential in Valerie that she refused to see in herself, but she was too busy being Valerie to see anything that wasn’t already there.

So—now—I had to make a decision. I had to decide if watching Valerie was more important than helping Valerie. Did I have a responsibility to this person? Jesus would say, “Yes.” Nietzsche would say, “Don’t ask a question when you already know the answer.” But let’s not get political. I had to decide for myself. And what I elected to do would be—at least in theory—beneficial to both involved parties. I decided that I would help Valerie
in order to observe Valerie
. That was my plan. I thought that moving this person from a bad life to a good life would make her core qualities more clear, because those would be the only qualities that’d remain unchanged. I still see the logic in this. I do.

The way to help Valerie seemed obvious. What I needed to do was alter the sequence of her unhappiness cycle: I had to stop her
from exercising, stop her from smoking pot, or stop her from eating. If I stopped one, the other two would cease to exist. In order to stop her from exercising, I assumed I would need to physically injure her. That struck me as wrong, even if my motives were good. What if I accidentally paralyzed her? What if her health insurance was shit? The risk was too high. Stopping her from smoking marijuana was flat-out impossible—her whole life revolved around that experience. If I threw away her marijuana, she’d just call Jane or buy more. But there
was
a way to stop her from eating, and that’s what I pursued.

As I mentioned before, I always carry stimulants whenever I’m on an observation. This is done out of necessity: I need to stay mentally alert, and I need to stay awake for long periods of time. I can’t sleep at my own discretion. As a consequence, I’m never hungry. I can barely remember what being hungry feels like. What I needed to do was make Valerie feel the same way I did. So when Valerie went to work, I turned her weed into an appetite suppressant.

It seemed like the best solution.

Val kept her pot in a music box, inside the freezer. And she had a ton of it—she was clearly the kind of nervous addict who always bought four or five months’ worth whenever she saw her dealer. It looked like a soft, green brick. Now, like I said before, I had a whole buffet of stimulants at my disposal: Adderall, oral meth tablets, Ritalin, Dexedrine, medical coke, modafinil. I’m my own pharmacy. I always keep a little of everything on my person, because I don’t like to use the same stimulant for too many days in a row. I can’t risk addiction. So here’s what I did: When Valerie left for work, I made a speed cocktail. I combined everything I had in a plastic bag, and I found a rolling pin under her sink—I’m not sure why a person with no food would possess a rolling pin, but Valerie had a nice one. It was perfect. I crushed all this coke and speed and meth into a powder. It was a sandwich bag of zombie dust. There ended up being a lot in there, way more than I expected—there was enough granular stimulation to make a Clydesdale climb a Christmas tree. And I poured
all of it
into her dope. I used my fingers and a fork to really drive it inside the buds. I had to make sure every future hit housed
a modicum of speed. Obviously, this process caused the brick to disintegrate. It no longer looked like a brick. I started to worry that she’d notice how different it looked, because stoners tend to be meticulous about their weed. It’s usually the only thing they really pay attention to. But then I had a moment of divine inspiration: I remembered that one of the only household items Valerie happened to own was olive oil! It was like organic gorilla glue—one tablespoon was more than enough to rebuild the brick. To this day, I’m kind of shocked how lucky I got with Valerie. When I needed a rolling pin, she inexplicably had a rolling pin; when I needed olive oil, it was pretty much the only item she had in the kitchen. It was almost like she unknowingly wanted me to save her life.