The Visible Man (8 page)

[On this point, I concede that Y
____
is correct. I apologize. I proceed to tell him my actual reasoning for wanting a face-to-face meeting: It’s because I do not believe the things he is telling me, and I suspect he needs a different kind of help. I tell him that he is not a bad person and that I can sense his intellect, but that his intellect is the reason he came to me in the first place—he
knows
that he has significant mental health issues. As such, he also knows it’s not too late to become the man he used to be. I tell him that I am probably not the person who can provide that help, but that I can connect him to someone who can. Again, I reinforce the likelihood that he already knows I’m right about this. Y
____
listens without interrupting, and then he says this:]

This is interesting, Vic-Vick. I’m surprised to hear you state your feelings so directly. I’m not surprised you
thought
these things, but I am very surprised you said them. I’m actually impressed. I’ve kind of been waiting for this.

I’ve told you who I am and I’ve told you why I called you. And you don’t believe me. You think, “This is some kind of new insanity.” Or maybe you think it’s just the old insanity, repackaged as bad television. This is what your mind is telling you to believe. You view yourself as a therapist, which—in a broad sense, from your perspective—makes you a certain type of scientist. A rationalist. You view yourself a rational being who assists other people in driving their flawed relationships toward rationality. That’s essentially your job, isn’t it? Your job is to talk to people who see their lives irrationally, and you try to coax them toward a rational balance. You can’t
tell
them how to feel or how to think, even if that’s what they want. You can only ask them leading questions that force them to talk to themselves. “If they could just hear what they themselves are saying,” you think to yourself, “they’d see how their view of the world is skewed.”
That the view they hold is unrealistic, or maybe unnaturally personal. In order to do what you do, this is how you need to think. So when I call you up on the telephone, and I tell you I’ve done these unbelievable things, and I explain how I am unlike every other person you’ve ever met, you can’t accept what I say. Your whole self-identity tells you that my unbelievable stories are
literally
unbelievable, and that I’m just a normal person with a delusion. So you ask me to come to your office. You want to prove to yourself that I have a different problem than the one I’ve outlined over the past two months. Now, honestly, I think you know that everything I’ve told you is true. I don’t think I’ve said one thing that you don’t believe. But there’s no way you can admit that. It would make your own relationship with rationality unmanageable. So maybe you want to avoid the collision. Maybe you think if you demand my physical presence, I will refuse to comply, thereby ending our relationship on your terms. Or maybe you think I will show up at your office door and admit that this has been an elaborate hoax, perpetrated by one of your colleagues, and you will be a little embarrassed and a little relieved. You’re in a peculiar position right now: You can’t believe what you believe. And you want to void that feeling, so you’re changing the rules. This is by no means irrational. I understand completely. I do it all the time.

Let me tell you a story. I don’t know if it will help you understand where we’re at, but I’m going to try nonetheless. It happened in Cleveland. This was a few years ago. Three years ago, if I recall correctly. I spent four months in Cleveland, following a variety of random Clevelanders. This was difficult, because absolutely everyone in Cleveland drives. It’s like L.A. It was hard to find a decent mark, because I’d have to find an unlocked car in the afternoon, wait in the vehicle for several hours, and then stow away in the backseat while they drove home. Then I’d have to figure out a way inside their house, and—very often—the homes would be in suburban areas, like Lakewood or Mayfield or
Cleveland Heights. The upside to this was that it’s much easier to sneak into a freestanding home than into an apartment, because modern houses have a lot of vulnerable openings. The mechanics are pretty simple. But the downside to watching someone in a suburb is that you’re often trapped in the middle of nowhere. If things went wrong, it would take forever to get back to the center of the city, which is where I was temporarily living. Sometimes I’d have to walk the whole way back, because there’s really no public transportation in Cleveland and I didn’t like the risk involved with stealing cars. But these details don’t matter right now. What I want to talk about is a particular guy I watched for almost a week. His name was Bruce.

I first noticed Bruce at a bar. Bars are good places to begin following someone. If the person you start following is already a little drunk, you can take more risks. For example, it’s easy to sneak into a really intoxicated person’s vehicle: All you have to do is trip them while they’re opening the driver’s side door. You just step on their outside foot and push them down with your shoulder, all in one motion. It doesn’t matter if they feel something pushing them—they inevitably assume it’s their own fault. Drunks always blame themselves. If a drunk person can’t see who knocked him down, he immediately assumes he’s just more wasted than he thought. Sometimes they lie on the ground and laugh at themselves, because drunkards love being drunkards. It feels great to be drunk, right? That’s when you slip into the passenger seat. Granted, you then have to ride home with a person who’s too drunk to realize he was just assaulted. It’s sketchy. But people are good at driving drunk, especially in Cleveland. That’s another thing I learned—drunk-driving laws are way too stringent in this country. Or at least they are in Ohio.

I didn’t even have to knock Bruce down, though. He required no work at all. I found him in an Irish pub, late in the afternoon.
It was autumn. The sun was low. He was having drinks with a few people he worked with—it was easy to figure out what was happening, because they all got to the bar at the same time and they were all dressed identically. There were five of them, all men, all in their late twenties. I watched them through a window and tried to figure out which one I wanted to trail. Two of them had wedding rings, so they were immediately out. Remember: I watch people when they’re alone. That’s my thing. Of the three who remained, I thought two looked like viable candidates; the third guy was too handsome and gregarious, so I assumed he was either in a preexisting relationship or sleeping with a whole bunch of random hookups. I wasn’t interested in those scenarios. I wanted people who looked like they had no important friends. Bruce fit the equation. Bruce had that sad, distant stare of a man who missed college too much. So did the guy sitting next to him. Neither one talked much as the group drank three or four beers. None of the five got drunk. They all left together, at the same time. My initial plan focused on the other loner—the quiet guy who wasn’t Bruce. He just seemed swarthier and weirder—he had a strange haircut and thicker eyeglasses. He looked like someone who might have played in a ska band when he was sixteen. Bruce’s principal upside was that he had less character. Bruce was just an American guy. Nothing about him was obvious.

Now, because my original target was not authentically intoxicated, and because it was still dusk, my best option was to distract him when he opened his driver’s side door. I was going to wait until he started to climb into the driver’s seat, and then I was going to kick the back fender of his Nissan as hard as I could. My hope was that he’d get out of the car to check on the mysterious thud, and then I’d scoot around and jump in the vehicle while the door remained ajar. My life is filled with these kinds of momentary misdirections. They only work twenty-five percent of the time, but how else can I do it? It’s all trial and error. This time, however, I got absurdly
lucky: Before I even had a chance to put my plan into action, Bruce opened the door of his own car and just absentmindedly walked away from it. Left it wide open for at least fifteen or twenty seconds. He opened his car door, walked over to one of his drinking partners, and said, “So, are we going to make this trade or not?” The other guy said something along the lines of, “I don’t know, man. Anquan Boldin always gets hurt. Let me look at the schedule and think it over.” It was too easy. By the time Bruce turned his ignition key, I was already in the backseat. Bruce was oblivious. Oblivious Bruce. I would say it was like taking candy from a baby, but babies scream. This was easier.

We finally arrive at his house, which is way the fuck out in somewhere I’d never even heard of. Most single twenty-five-year-old men don’t own four-bedroom houses that are seventy-five minutes from the office, but Bruce did. He was an odd one. Bruce parks in the garage and waddles inside. I follow about five minutes later. The screen door isn’t locked. He’s already at the computer, masturbating. That might seem perverse, but you’d be amazed how common this is: Men get home, change clothes, and masturbate. There’s nothing remotely sexual about it. They just need to get it out of the way. It’s like taking out the trash. I’ve probably watched three hundred different guys masturbate, and not one of them seemed to enjoy it. I’m sure they did, but you wouldn’t know by looking at them. I don’t even think that pornography plays a particularly important role. It simply saves them a little time. Men are so lazy. They’re too lazy to imagine naked women.

Anyway … so now I’m inside his house. This is always the most thrilling moment, because it means everything worked. I always spend so much mental energy trying to get into this position that I never know what to do with myself once I’m actually inside. I always want to celebrate, to congratulate myself for being so goddamn clever. But I can’t. I just have to find a comfortable spot
in a corner and sit down. I have to control my breathing. I have to keep it shallow. I also need to prepare myself for the inevitability of utter boredom: Very often, single people don’t do shit. They do nothing, all night long. They sit in a recliner and watch TV. I’ve probably watched more television than anyone you’ve ever met, and I don’t even own one. Terrible shows, good shows. Golf tournaments in Cancun. C-SPAN. Hours of Oprah.
Law and Order
. Lonely people love
Law and Order
, for whatever reason. They prefer the straight narratives. They’ll also rent the entire run of a TV series on Netflix, and they tend to rent whatever Netflix promotes as popular. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen every episode of
The Wire
, but never in the proper sequence. I have no fucking clue what’s supposed to be going on there.

Bruce is a different kind of guy, though. Bruce doesn’t watch TV—he owns an awesome one, but he never turns it on. Bruce is one of these people who lives on the Internet. He has a house full of leather furniture, but he spends the whole evening in his desk chair. He plays RISK over the Internet for hours—he’ll have sixty or seventy games happening simultaneously, all against strangers he’ll never meet in person. He steals music constantly—he’d rip a live Paul Simon album, listen to the first track for thirty seconds, and then never play it again. He follows a bunch of political blogs and seems to comment on every post, usually with bitter sarcasm but sometimes with an LOL. He looks at YouTube clips and types terse, lowercase critiques of any videos that underwhelm him. His updates his Facebook page about ten times a night and elects to “like” some photo of a dead porcupine lying next to an empty champagne bottle. He never reads books, but he put a lot of effort into a website called goodreads.com: He looks at other people’s reviews on Amazon and writes his own reviews from whatever he gleans. Bruce has, relative to a lot of the other people I observed, a relatively rich life. He isn’t dark or depressed, or at least he wasn’t while I was there. Never sighed, never cried. But I noticed one omnipresent aspect about his online activity: It
was constantly interrupted by Bruce’s ongoing attempt to write an e-mail. One e-mail, to one person. He would open his e-mail account, type a few sentences, delete a few sentences, and then close it back down and do something else. At first, I thought he was writing a bunch of different e-mails to a bunch of different recipients, but it turned out that he was only working on one. It was a single e-mail to one woman, maybe a hundred words long. The woman’s name was Sarah. He would work on this e-mail like it was a sculpture. He’d type, “Long time no talk,” and then he’d delete that and write, “Been a long time since we talked.” Then he’d delete that and type, “It’s been awhile, no?” Completely innocuous stuff, but he’d type different variations of these words and pace around his living room, saying these phrases aloud, testing them out. He kept trying to craft a joke about how his job was more boring than her job, but he was obviously paralyzed by the prospect of offending her. During the first night I was there, he probably built and rebuilt that e-mail five hundred times—yet he never worked on it for more than five consecutive minutes. He’d add something or delete something, and then he’d go back to the Internet to waste another quarter of an hour. He’d always return to the e-mail, fixate over its contents for another five minutes, and repeat the process all over. He finally sent the message at about two a.m., and when he did, it was the most bland, nonmeaningful letter you can imagine. I read it over his shoulder. Nothing romantic, nothing humorous, nothing clever. Zero insight. I watch him punch the “send” button. Bruce sits motionless and breathes through his mouth. It’s like he’s watching a person die in a hospital bed: He wants to do something, but there’s nothing to do. So he ends up doing the only thing anyone can do once they’ve sent a message they can’t stop thinking about: He goes back and rereads his own sent e-mail for another forty-five minutes, parsing and reparsing every line like it’s the book of Revelation. It was excruciating. I felt terrible for him. It was eating him alive. He was eating himself alive. I was so relieved when he went to bed.