The Visible Man (29 page)

But something woke me up.

I don’t know what that something was—it could have been a sound, it might have been the sense of being watched, or perhaps both. But something woke me up and I immediately felt sick. I felt like I was about to have a car accident. I sat up in bed. I looked toward our open bedroom door. The doorway was empty, but it didn’t look the way an empty doorway should: Within an utterly dark room, the doorway looked
darker
. The blackness had a shimmer. I reached for my glasses and put them on my face. The shimmer disappeared, but the darkness did not. My scalp felt hot. My palms were damp.

“John,” I said. “John.”

John woke up like a patient after surgery.

“There’s someone here, John.”

In an instant, John was vigilant. He grabbed his glasses and reached for the hammer below the bed. He jumped up from under the covers and said, “Where? Where?”

Now, this is mildly embarrassing, but it needs to be said for transparency: John doesn’t wear clothes when he sleeps. I typically wear sweatpants, but I always sleep topless. When I looked at John, it did seem a bit tragically comedic—there he was, an old, nude man with eyeglasses on his face and a hammer in his hand, crouched at the knees like a high school shortstop. “This is going to end badly,” I thought to myself. “We are not ready for this.” But we had no choice. This was happening. I got out of bed and pointed at the doorway. “There,” I said. “He’s there. Or he’s out there. He’s either there or out there.”

John rushed the door and swung his hammer through the open space. It struck nothing. He swung again, wildly. Again, nothing. He walked through the doorway onto the second-floor landing. He swung in every direction. Nothing. I turned on the reading lamp next to the bed and followed my husband through our bedroom door.

Why did I turn on the reading lamp? No idea. Habit, I suppose. But it made a huge difference. The dim light emanating from our bedroom cast huge shadows across the rest of the house. My five-foot-five body generated a thirty-foot shadow on the living room floor. John’s shadow was just as large. And now we could see a third massive shadow, longer than either of ours. I grabbed John by the arm and said, “Look at the walls!” For a moment, I thought I was a genius. I’d cracked the code. But then Y____ simply said, “I’m right here.”

The voice was calm and the voice was close. He could not have been more than ten feet away, standing on the same second-floor landing, looking at two naked people who had run out of ideas.

“Call the police,” said John. I’d left my cell phone in the kitchen, so down the stairs I ran. Despite everything that was happening, I still felt self-conscious about Y____ seeing me topless. Certain insecurities never disappear. Upstairs, I could hear my husband yelling at Y____, unleashing a concentration of profanity I’d never heard him utter. I could also hear Y____ laughing and asking sarcastic questions about the hammer. I dialed 9-1-1 and pleaded for assistance. When the operator asked what my emergency was, I only said, “There’s a man in our house. Please get here soon.” There was no sense in trying to explain.

Before leaving the kitchen, I should have grabbed a carving knife or a rolling pin. But I didn’t. The thought never even occurred to me. I rushed back into the living room and looked toward the banister on the second level. It was like John had taken LSD: He was naked, standing on the landing, raving like a lunatic, yelling at nothing. “I’m gonna fucking kill you, you fucking cunt,” he said. “I’m going to rip off your fucking head and jam it down your faggot throat.” But Y____’s voice never changed. He never seemed nervous. He didn’t seem menacing. He just seemed like a jerk.

“I’ve grown fond of your wife,” said Y____. Even now, he talked like an asshole. “And she’s falling in love with me. Now put down that hammer and get some clothes on. Let’s talk about this like men.”

“I’m not gonna fucking talk to you,” yelled John. “Get out of my house!”

“No,” said Y____. He sounded bored.

“I’ll kill you,” said John.

“You won’t,” said Y____. “Don’t try.” And with that, John rushed forward, straight toward Y____’s voice, swinging the hammer in a huge diagonal stroke across the front of his body. Once again, he hit nothing. He was thrown off balance, like a boxer who’d overpunched his target. And then it happened: I saw John’s lithe body lift off the floor, float over the banister, and fall twenty-five feet, straight down to the wood below. He tumbled end over end, like a bowling pin knocked into the air. His body rotated 270 degrees as it fell.

It was absolutely the worst thing I’ve ever seen. The fall seemed to last longer than our marriage.

For one terrible instant, it looked like he would hit the hardwood headfirst. That would have killed him instantly. But his body kept rotating, and he landed on his tailbone. He screamed. I screamed. I rushed over to him. He said, “Get away!” I didn’t know what to do. I looked up at the second-floor landing, and (of course) saw nothing. What did I expect to see? Human nature is impossible to overcome.

I could hear Y____ walking down the stairs. He was taking his time. I looked around for the hammer, which John had released as he fell. I was going to kill Y____, or at least I was going to try. That was my final decision. A lot of problems I’d been grappling with suddenly seemed simple.

“We can go now,” said Y____.

“Are you out of your goddamn mind?” I screamed. “You just killed my husband.” This wasn’t exactly true (and probably didn’t give John a lot of confidence about his condition), but my mind wasn’t right. John was still on the floor, moaning.

“Come with me,” said Y____. I’ll never get over how calm he sounded. “They won’t be able to find us. I can promise you that. They’ll never find us.”

“You’re so sick,” I said.

“We’re running out of time,” said Y____. “We can’t have one of those conversations where we go back and forth about why I’m right and why you’re nervous. We need to leave
now
. Everything will be okay.” It was as if he did not even hear John’s groans. He was blocking them out entirely. To Y____, John was already a carcass.

“You’re fucking crazy,” I said.

“Don’t do this, Victoria,” Y____ said. “We need each other. You know that I’m right.”

“Kill yourself,” I said. “You’re a liar.”

As I knelt beside John, I looked at Y____. He wasn’t there, but I could see him as clearly as I could see the body of my broken husband. I’d never seen him so easily. And Y____ could tell. He knew I could see him now. That’s why he was in my house.

It was at this point that my existence became a movie, if only for five seconds. John’s hammer was laying in the middle of the rug. In a flash, it levitated off the ground. The hammer hung in the air like a cheap special effect from the unpopular eighties, bobbing and weaving, cocked and loaded. It was an amazing moment. What can I say? It was an amazing thing to see. But it was also terrible, because I thought it was going to crush me. “This is it,” I thought. “This is where Y____ beats me to death.” Maybe he’d torture me. Maybe he’d rape me first, or maybe he’d do it after I was dead. I had been wrong about Y____ so many times that nothing seemed off the table. I waited for his attack and wondered if I could fight him off long enough for the cops to arrive; I wondered what the cops would do when they saw a topless woman wrestling with herself on the floor.

But he didn’t attack.

He didn’t even talk.

He dropped the hammer, and the hammer went thud. I heard him casually walk toward the door, and I watched our deadbolt unlock
itself. The door swung open and swung itself shut. I started crying uncontrollably. I tried to help John stand, but he couldn’t move. I ran into the kitchen (still crying) to fetch him a glass of water; when I returned, I could see rolling blue and red lights through our picture windows. I sprinted to the front door, opened it wide, and yelled, “Get an ambulance,” at the first cop I saw.

I went back inside, covered John’s midsection with a towel, and tried to figure out how I was going to explain my life to other people.

It would be wrong to classify John as “paralyzed.” He still has some feeling in his feet and lower extremities, and he can pivot his right ankle forty-five degrees. If he were truly paralyzed, he’d have no pain around his coccyx, and the pain is definitely there, every minute of every day. But he can’t stand and he can’t walk, and he’ll spend the rest of his days in a wheelchair. We both accepted that certainty very early on, immediately following his surgery. However, he can still read and he can still write, and—if the pain subsides by next fall—he’ll resume teaching full-time. He’s excited about that. John’s become a totally different person. Amazingly, there’s been an upside to this incident, something I could never have imagined. But before I get to that, I need to explain what happened in the wake of Y____’s final, destructive cameo.

Try to put yourself in the position of the first police officer on the scene: You’ve been summoned to investigate a home invasion, but when you arrive no one is there except the two residents. One resident is injured, seemingly from a fall. He’s in no position to explain anything. The other is topless and hysterical. You’re informed that a man was in the house, that this man was familiar with the homeowners, and that he’d escaped (on foot) just minutes ago. But you’re also told that any attempt to search for this man in the immediate area will be completely useless. You ask, “In what direction did he flee?” You are told, “That doesn’t matter.” You start to wonder what’s really going on here; you start to wonder if this is some kind of domestic dispute, or maybe that drugs are involved. You start to wonder if you need to take the hysterical woman into custody, so that’s what you do.

After John was rushed to the hospital, I spent six hours in Austin City Jail. They never charged me with anything, probably because they didn’t know what to charge me with. I never got the sense they saw me as a perpetrator, but they were certainly confused. The next morning, I began a series of interviews with Detective Paul LaBour. To his credit, Paul never seemed to doubt any detail of the story (even when he admitted there wasn’t much he could do about it).

Knowing what was at stake, I explained the situation like this: I told Detective LaBour that the intruder had been my patient. This, right away, seemed to remove any suspicion about my motives. I was conscious not to use the word
invisible
—it dawned on me why Y____ had always been so careful about using that word flippantly. It hijacks every conversation. Instead, I said that this patient had detailed a long history of entering people’s homes, and that he was exceedingly adroit at urban camouflage. I mentioned the “heavy dudes” case in Minneapolis that Y____ had described in June, and the authorities were immediately able to confirm that such a crime had occurred.
¹⁶
I described the events of the previous evening as accurately as possible, once again avoiding the word
invisible
(instead, I would use phrases like “we could not really see him”). I also made an off-the-cuff decision that proved invaluable: I told Paul that he could interview John immediately after he recovered from his emergency spinal surgery, even before I had a chance to see him myself. This was an extremely difficult decision, and perhaps a bit cruel. Considering his condition, I’m sure John wanted to see me even more than I wanted to see him. But it was the rational move. Paul needed just five minutes with John to conclude that the details of our stories matched.
¹⁷
Had we not done this, I wonder if
they’d ever have believed a word of what we said. Beyond the broken latch on our back door, there was no evidence of anything. The finger smudges on the hammer were useless—they matched nothing in the FBI database.

The hunt for Y____ continues to this day. But it’s a feeble hunt, devoid of doggedness. In my opinion, the authorities have lost interest.

It is, I suppose, a paradox: Despite listening to Y____ talk about himself for nearly one hundred hours, I’d learned almost nothing useful about him. I knew his name, but it’s a common name and probably fake. I had his previous cell phone number, but the number was registered to a person who’d been dead for years. I didn’t know Y____’s specific address or where he was born. He paid for everything in cash. I turned over all the audiotapes in my possession, and investigators have scoured the transcripts for any clue that might illustrate who this person was. Yet every time they find a useful detail, it’s inevitably contradicted by something different Y____ would say later. His deception, it seems, was conscious.

Our strongest lead, certainly, were the dialogue passages about his time at Chaminade as a researcher. That period was key to every crime he would later commit. But this presented its own kind of problem: Whatever happened in that Hawaii laboratory has been artlessly stricken from the public record. The school has no information about the program, and the building where such research would have been conducted has been converted into married student housing. On his own, John has tried to ascertain details about the espoused military program through the Freedom of Information Act, but the FOIA documents we received were useless: All the names of the researchers have been blackened out, and the explanation for what was being studied is so simultaneously vague and technical that it’s virtually unreadable. We didn’t learn anything, beyond proving that some kind of military program did, in fact, exist in Hawaii.