Memoirs Of An Invisible Man

To J

I
f only you could see me now. you can’t and couldn’t, but i’m here. And although the explanation is banal, the effect is altogether magical. If you were to walk into this room now, you would find it quite empty — an empty chair before a desk empty save for a pad of un-lined paper. But above the paper you would see the pen, unheld, dancing over the surface, forming these words, pausing now and then in midair reflectively. You would be entranced, or terrified.

Unfortunately, I am holding the pen, and if you were quick enough and I were not, you could get a perfectly solid grip on me and satisfy yourself by sense of touch that an unseeable but otherwise unexceptional human being was in the room. Or you could pick up a chair and beat me senseless with it. I am sorry to say that this would not be an unusual course of action under the circumstances, for my condition, although perfectly anonymous, is undeniably bizarre. It provokes curiosity, and curiosity, I find, is a fairly vicious instinct. This is a trying existence. It is generally best to keep on the move.

In fact, this should probably be described as the “adventures” rather than the “memoirs” of an invisible man. Certainly I have no intention of going on about my childhood or the particular agonies of my particular adolescence, which was doubtless no more nor less interesting than your own. Nor will we need to discuss the specifics of my entirely ordinary intellectual and moral development. Nothing of this sort would contribute to my quite genuinely exciting and superficial story. Nor would it shed much light on the human condition, I am afraid. I understand that you only love me for my disease, so to speak, so that everything before its onset is irrelevant. For the first thirty-four years of my life I was exactly like everyone else, and while those years seemed compelling enough to me at the time, you would presumably not be reading a narrative entitled “Memoirs of a Securities Analyst.” Anyway, right in the middle of my rather ordinary way through life, a minor but altogether extraordinary scientific mishap rendered a small spherical chunk of New Jersey utterly invisible. As chance would have it, I was at the critical moment included in that spherical chunk. I, together with my immediate surroundings, was instantly transformed: just as in a petrified fossil the structure of the original organism is exactly reduplicated as an arrangement of mineral particles, so my body was exactly reduplicated as a living structure of minute units of energy. It functions very much as before— with, as far as I have been able to determine, only minor differences. But you cannot see it at all.

The point is that it could have been absolutely anyone. I know that each of us is utterly unique and so forth — like snowflakes or leaves. Although, as the wind scatters the proverbial generations of leaves to the ground, it can sometimes be hard to find much metaphysical comfort in one’s own peculiarity. Anyway, no peculiarity of mine made it more likely that I should wind up in this condition than you. An improbable and very poor roll of the cosmic dice. God’s eye was doubtless on the sparrow at the time.

Whereas I had my eye mainly on Anne Epstein and on her lovely breasts, over which her silk blouse slid wonderfully when she moved. I could see the nipples through the blue-green print, and when she turned to look out the window of the railway car, I could see the delicious white flesh where the shirt front opened between the buttons. We were on our way from New York to Princeton on what you might call the fateful morning. Looking back on it, that morning did have an appropriately ominous quality, with dark storm clouds and bright April sunshine in continual and dramatic alternation, but at the time I noticed mainly the sunshine. I had drunk too much and slept too little the night before, so that it all had a euphoric, dreamlike vividness, and although I knew from experience that this feeling would soon mature into a piercing headache and an uncontrollable desire for sleep, at that moment my mind and body felt nothing but intoxicated, aching delight in the brilliant spring morning and Anne’s smooth white skin.

Because we were traveling against the tide of commuters into the city, we found ourselves alone in the decrepit railway car. It had the old seats that you could swing to face either way, and I had pushed one of them around so that we sat facing one another without enough room for our legs. I hadn’t sat like this since I was a boy on one of those wonderful long train rides home that began every school vacation, and that association, together with the exhilarating knowledge that I was playing hookey from work on a wonderfully inane pretext, added an additional note of childish, illicit pleasure to the day. She had folded her left arm up over her head, pulling the silk taut over her breasts and ribs. I reached carelessly across and ran the fingers of my right hand clown her side, from beside her breast to her hip. She continued to talk but there was a flicker of annoyance and pleasure.

What was she talking about? I remember that she had the
Times
open on her lap — she worked for the Times — and she was explaining to me something that was of great interest and importance to her. It seems to me that it had to do with an attempt to redraw local election districts somewhere in the Midwest. There were the two usual parties, but one of the parties — or perhaps both — had factions, and one faction was offering extra patronage to one ethnic group if that ethnic group would support redrawing the district lines to defraud some other ethnic group in order to take something away from another faction even though it would help the other party. It was all meant to be particularly significant because the particular combinations of ethnic groups and parties and factions were not the usual combinations, and the whole thing might therefore portend a major shift in our nation’s affairs.

To me it sounded more like a pack of thieves making a deal, but then to me no human activity is so reliably boring and shabby as politics. For Anne, on the other hand, politics seemed to be the only dimension in which human thoughts and acts could attain true meaning, and so I furrowed my brow to indicate concentration and interest; from time to time I nodded at the sound of her voice, which went skidding past me with the same dreamlike and incomprehensible vividness as the dark clouds floating across the window. When it seemed appropriate, I asked small meaningless questions in an earnest voice. As she talked she became more animated. She had extremely fine features and although they became sharper, even harder, when she talked about politics, it only made her more exquisite. Her shoulder-length brown hair and her crisp clothing always seemed to fall casually but perfectly into place: she looked more like an anchorwoman on the evening news than a newspaper reporter. She leaned forward; she unfolded one long, nearly naked leg from the cramped space beneath the newspaper on her lap and braced it against the seat next to me; as she spoke, she gestured with the index and middle fingers of her right hand held together, and when she made a particularly telling point the strong slender fingers tapped the newspaper, her mouth formed into a knowing, ironic smile, and she looked into my eyes for corroboration. And even if I could not quite manage to maintain my interest in what she was saying, my heart and mind were absolutely flooded with interest in Anne herself. She was altogether beautiful.

She also had a sense of humor — extending at times even to herself — and I had found that if I could get through to it, I could sometimes dispel these moods of political intensity. But that could be a delicate and risky operation, and I decided in this instance to try to shift the topic gradually. I asked her the most complicated question I could contrive about the way stories were assigned in the business section. I knew that the answer would have to be more interesting to me than the day’s political news and I knew also that Anne would enjoy giving it, because the only thing that was as important to her as politics was her career, and she had just recently been assigned to the business section. Before that she had worked for the sports section, where her main responsibility had been reporting on professional basketball, and before that she had spent four years at Yale, where, as far as I could determine, she had never attended a basketball game or acquired any single piece of information related in any way to business or economics.

But really, it was because of the gaps in her education and the inscrutable personnel policies of the
Times
that we were now together. Less than two weeks before, I had found myself seated next to her at dinner. We had been introduced once or twice before over the past couple of years, but she still found it necessary to ask me what I did, and — despite her striking appearance — my initial interest in her must have been unexceptional, since I remember answering her question straightforwardly. Normally you do not tell people you are a securities analyst unless you want to see their eyes begin to shift about the room in search of someone or somewhere to escape to. For social purposes it is pretty much the same thing as being a chemical engineer. But Anne had startled me with a conflagration of interest. It was probably because of her new assignment at the
Times.
Confronted with a source of useful information, and perhaps also to annoy her fiancé — the origins of love are complex and mysterious — she had put her hand on my arm, looked straight into my eyes with a stunning smile, and begun to ask questions about business and economics, one after the other. The topic of the questions may make it sound quite un-romantic to you, but I remember very clearly her wonderfully attentive gaze: she had the reporter’s trick of asking questions you wanted to answer and giving you the feeling that she was fascinated by your reply. And she really was altogether beautiful.

I was, of course, immediately possessed by the usual feelings and desires, and I do not recall thinking seriously of much else for the next week. I devoted myself to getting her to lunch with me, to drinks, to dinner, wherever I could get her. She was agonizingly elusive, somehow never able or willing to get free for more than a few hours, whether because of her work, about which she was relentlessly diligent and ambitious, or because of her personal life, in which I tried to show an earnest but not intrusive interest. There was a friend or a fiancé or “just someone I’m terribly close to” — his role seemed to shift continuously — with whom she had some sort of troubled understanding or misunderstanding, but then there was also the fact that she was simply a very difficult person — a quality which set off her extraordinary beauty nicely. It seemed that she was always standing up at the critical moment and saying goodbye — looking straight into my eyes and leaving me crushed beneath her overwhelming smile. (No one now can look into my eyes. In an unusual moment of safety and intimacy, someone might smile uncertainly in my general direction.) On the other hand, when she was there she always gave me her full, dazzling attention. She loved to interrogate me, and the longer my answers were the better she seemed to like them. Just as she had earlier made herself terrifyingly knowledgeable about basketball, Anne was now setting out to accumulate as much fact, theory, and opinion about economics and business as she could lay her hands on.

I enjoyed her greedy questioning: everyone enjoys being asked a question to which he knows the answer. It is true that it sometimes annoyed me that the usual priorities seemed to have been somehow inverted in Anne’s mind — with opinion in highest demand, theory a distant second, and fact possessing only a sort of decorative charm — but her employer would surely not have wanted it any other way. And as she was very clever and unrelievedly ambitious, she was quickly acquiring an imposing store of information. I told her so repeatedly, and the compliment always pleased her. As for me, I was enchanted by her quick acquisitive mind, her difficulty, her long limbs, her hand on my arm. I posed some questions of my own and listened to her answers with patient, aching interest. I asked about her job, her ambitions, her friends. I asked her to make love to me. From time to time I ran my fingers along her bare arm, and asked her whatever came into my mind. I watched her fine mouth and full hips move.

Now, with my right thumb and fingers I encircled the slender ankle braced against the front of the seat next to me. I ran my hand up the long calf and let it spread my thumb apart from my fingertips. I slid the hand around and over her knee and up along the outside of her thigh. The thumb was still spread so that it ran up the front of the thigh, under the newspaper, and under the linen skirt until it reached the crease of her hip.

She twisted herself in her seat away from my hand and withdrew her leg, crossing it over the other leg at an angle to me. Her mouth set itself in an exquisitely prim expression.

“About last night,” she said. “It’s not right.”

Last night, which despite several hours sleep had not so much ended as spilled over into the morning, had been the first — and, as it would turn out, the last — night we spent together. Our week of lunches, drinks, dinners, flattery, pleading, caresses, smiles, and assurances had culminated finally in her bed overlooking the East River. But now she seemed to be saying that the delicious battle would be resumed and the same ground would have to be retaken. I contemplated this with a mixture of frustration and pleasure.