The Visible Man (16 page)

•
On being unable to see one’s own body:
“It took a long time to be comfortable with that. I mean, imagine trying to turn on a table lamp in a completely dark bedroom. It’s difficult, and
we reflexively assume it’s difficult because we can’t see the lamp. But it’s also difficult because we can’t see our own hand—we can’t gauge the relationship between the object and ourselves. We can
feel
our hand, and we
know
where the lamp is. But we reach for the switch and we miss. This happened all the time when I first started playing around with the suit. I had to imagine hands and feet I couldn’t see. Getting up and down stairs was a trial. Even now, I’d never attempt to run down a flight of stairs. That’s a death wish.”

•
On the suit itself:
“It gets a little disgusting because I loathe to wash it. It operates so much better when there are multiple layers of mist on the surface—those trace remnants of cream harden into something that’s almost like a polish, and nothing refracts light like polish. Every time I clean the suit, I’m basically starting over. But, of course, I sweat like a boar in that thing. I’m essentially wearing a second skin that doesn’t breathe. To cover the smell, I try to spray down the inside of the suit with scentless Lysol. It really eats at my skin. My thighs will never be the same.”

•
On the notion of using his ability for the common good, potentially in the vein of a stereotypical superhero:
“That’s funny. The thought never occurred to me.”

•
On mishaps:
“It wasn’t uncommon to have a minor crisis. You can’t control how people live. I had a hilarious, terrible situation near Houston. I was observing a nervous middle-aged man—he couldn’t sit still. He never stayed in place. His movements were hard to anticipate. He had ants in the pants. I was hunched in the corner of his living room, and he started walking directly over to my corner so that he could jiggle the cable plugged into his stereo speaker, because the bass kept cutting in and out. At least that’s what I thought his intentions were. When I saw him coming toward me, I stood up and moved a little to my right to clear the area. But at the last possible moment, he changed his mind and turned ninety degrees to his left. He walked right into me. We collided,
head on, skull to skull. It sounded like two coconuts.
Bonk!
Our heads went
bonk
. We were both knocked to the floor. He jumped up and started swinging his arms, punching the air, saying all these outrageous things to whoever or whatever he imagined was there. I stayed on the floor, which seemed safer. But then the guy goes into his bedroom and comes back with a fucking gun. This was a huge gun—I think it was a .357 or a .44 Magnum. A Dirty Harry gun, for all intents and purposes. And now ol’ Ants in the Pants is filling the chamber with bullets in the middle of his living room. He’s looking all skittish, breathing through his mouth, sweating under the armpits. There’s nothing like watching a nervous man load a gun. Of course, he doesn’t
see
anything, and by now I’ve crawled into the kitchen. So now I’m watching ol’ Ants in the Pants from the other room, peeping my head around the doorway. He’s waving the gun around, trying to figure out what the hell just happened. He
knows
someone was in his living room. He knows his skull hit a skull. He knows it. But he’s also not going to randomly shoot up his own house. His eyes dart from corner to corner to corner. For some reason, he gets the idea that whoever broke into his home must be hiding in the basement. I have no idea why this possibility occurred to him, but I suppose he was grasping at straws. He opens the door to his basement, gun in hand, and slowly creeps down the stairs. I hear them creaking as he walks. When he got to the bottom of the staircase, I just sprinted out the front door. There was no way I was playing around with that motherfucker. Owning a gun doesn’t make the average person safer, but it makes the average person safer from me.”

•
On fear:
“The one thing that constantly terrifies me is crossing the street. I mean, if anybody ever hit me, I’d just have to lie on the pavement and die. Every other car would drive right over my body. I’d probably have to hope that somebody drove over my head and put me out of my misery. The worst was
when I was in west Florida: Crossing the street there is flat-out impossible. No crosswalks, lots of old people driving blind, and no other pedestrians. I was more relaxed in Detroit!”

•
On troubleshooting:
“I completely miscalculated how cloaking would impact my shadow. We all did. We were all working under the assumption that shadows would be no issue whatsoever, because—in theory—the light I relocate should negate the absence of light we recognize as shadow. But it didn’t work that way. The suit absorbs a tiny percentage of light, so it doesn’t refract the full one hundred percent of what remains. This wasn’t something I realized until I started wearing it on a regular basis: People can’t see me, but the sun can. I still cast a dim, undefined silhouette. It’s almost like projecting a shadow through a funhouse mirror. There are ways around this, though. If I’m traveling outside, I do my walking at night or at noon, or on days that are overcast. When I’m inside a room, I always stay cognizant of any windows that face directly east or directly west, and I try to avoid walking in front of south-facing windows during the afternoon. It’s really more of a hassle than a problem. And like I said before—you’d be surprised by what people see, yet refuse to notice. I think about that a lot. Like, have you ever heard of a Mexican tribe called the Huicholes?
⁹
The so-called Running People of Mexico? There’s a great book about these freaks. They’re this hermetic society known for two things. The first, as you might expect, is running—the Huicholes are the craziest athletes in North America. Members of this tribe regularly run forty, fifty, a hundred miles at a time, barefoot, over unspeakable terrain, subsisting only on corn beer and mouse meat, purely for pleasure. No one knows how they do it. But—interestingly—the other thing they’re known for is invisibility. They live in caves around the Sierra Madres, and
these people can virtually disappear into the rock. The first time a nineteenth-century explorer came across the Huicholes, he walked straight through one of their villages and didn’t see anything. They were right there in front of him, and he didn’t see one person. So if it’s possible for an explorer to overlook an entire tribe he’s actively searching for, imagine how difficult it is for an untrained person to see one stranger they don’t expect to be there.”

•
On who could wear the cloaking suit:
“Are you asking me if you can wear the suit? Because you can’t. No one can wear it but me. I’m sorry if that disappoints you, but that’s just how it has to be. You can’t wear my suit. You can’t.”
(Note to Crosby: At no point did I ever express a desire to wear this garment. I’m still not sure why Y
____
inferred that this was something I was angling for.)

•
On side effects and addiction:
“Because there was no way to test this stuff, I have no idea if continually covering myself with an aerosol mist is basically going to guarantee I’ll eventually get sick. I’m sure it’s a bad idea to live like this, but I don’t know to what degree. At first it burned my nostrils, but that stopped after a while. Of course, I was also taking a lot of stimulants at the time … the idea of becoming addicted has never been an issue. I understand my body. I got used to the stimulants gradually. Now they’re just a tool, no different than a pen or a camera. The only people who talk about the dangers of drugs are the people who can’t handle them. How does that old Richard Pryor line go? ‘I know guys who’ve used cocaine every single day for ten years and never got addicted.’”

•
On the nature of this ability:
“What I do is not metaphysical. It does not transcend science in any way. It only feels metaphysical because no one else can do it. I’m sure the first person to build a fire with a flint seemed to be dabbling in the metaphysical, too. What I do is much closer to illusion. I relate to people like David Blaine: We both do something visually confounding that demands physical endurance. The only
difference is that I’m doing something essential. Magicians only want to get laid.”

•
On what he wanted:
“You call me invisible because you can’t comprehend this any other way. I suppose that’s fine. It’s the wrong application of that term, but I understand why you keep using it. For you, any person who can’t be seen is invisible. But there are invisible people in plain sight, Victoria. Most of the world is invisible. I wanted to see the visible man. That’s what’s happening here. That’s really all it is.”

[This content emerged from a rambling one-hour session on June 13. I’m including portions of the conversation not because it seems revelatory to me, but because it seemed so important to Y
____.
There was an element of nostalgic desperation to his storytelling. I’ve elected not to log the specific times these statements were made, although I have kept the passages in chronological order. Conscientious readers may have already noticed how Y
____
oscillates between past and present tense; this may have been accidental, but I suspect it was not. As such, I’ve kept it faithful to the original audio. I got the sense this encounter had happened in the very recent past—perhaps as recently as the previous week. But when I asked when it happened, he said nothing, nor would he explain why he declined to answer.]

1
Elderly people present unique problems. It’s harder to get inside their homes, because they’re more cautious. They don’t leave doors or windows unlocked. They don’t trust people. The world gets scarier. Now, granted, once you’re inside, old people are incredibly easy to observe. They don’t hear footfalls and they’re less aware of their surroundings. But the real problem is that they never fucking leave. They’ll stay inside the house for two, three, four days straight. It’s like working a double shift with no overtime.

2
I once had an old woman die while I was watching her. Died on Thanksgiving morning. She just never got out of bed. I decided to stick around until someone found the body, because I wanted to see the reaction of whoever discovered the corpse. I wondered how quickly the visitor would recognize that they were in an apartment with a dead body—would they sense this instantly? Would they check for a pulse? Would they cry? I was especially curious to see if the person who found the body would
talk
to the corpse, which we’ve all been conditioned to do by TV. On television, people are always talking to the dead. “Live, dammit. Come on, live!” “No, grandma, please don’t leave us!” That sort of thing. But after two days, I started to suspect no one was going to show up, and the bedroom started to feel awkward and stale. We would all have a less romantic view of death if we regularly had to smell it. It seemed wrong to be there, and kind of gross. I left on Saturday. I left the front door wide open. Seemed like the right thing to do.

3
There was one old man I really liked, though. He lives right here in town. Liked him. Liked him a ton. A half-Mexican. I genuinely liked him. He lives not far from here, out beyond the Mount Calvary Cemetery. A barrel-chested half-Mexican. I broke into his house in the morning, when he was out watering the lawn. I remember watching him drink from the hose after I slipped through his sliding door. He must have been at least eighty years old, although that’s a hard thing to tell with half-Mexicans. He wore flip-flops and suspenders and he walked with a slouch. He had a gray mustache. These details don’t matter, but I remember them. He was in great shape for someone who probably shouldn’t have been alive.

4
It was a nice house. It fit the universally accepted definition of “nice.” There were pictures on all the walls of people who must be his kids. He must have had multiple wives, because there were at least three different women in the various photos and some of the kids look totally unlike the others. Some of the kids
looked like borderline albinos! He had several framed pictures of himself, but they were all in the bathroom. No idea if this was irony or vanity. The picture over his toilet must have been taken when he was nineteen or twenty. As a younger man, he was handsome. I remember thinking, “I bet this guy used to run the show.” He was standing in front of a Chevy with a cigarette and a Lone Star, posing in the way people from that era always pose in photographs: No smile, hand on hip, one eyebrow raised. Now, obviously, all old people seem cool whenever we see black-and-white images of their younger selves. It’s human nature to inject every old picture with positive abstractions. We can’t help ourselves. We all do it. We want those things to be true, because we all hope future generations will have the same thoughts when they come across forgotten photographs of us. But this codger had genuine charisma. I’m sure of it. His cigarette looked delicious.