Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (20 page)

This was the first person to whom I had been able to tell what had happened to me. Perhaps it would turn out to be the only person.

“And what did you do while you thought that?”

“What did I do?” I returned blankly.

“Yes. Did you pray? Or were you waiting for some sign, some revelation? … You must, at least at that moment, have seen everything differently.”

“I suppose so. Look, David, I know we should all think about these things more, but I’m theologically kind of a bumbler. All thumbs. Anyway, right at the moment my main concern is to get off by myself for a bit. I’ll get back to you soon and we can chat then.”

“Of course,” he responded reasonably.

As he spoke, I took one careful step backwards. His eyes were scanning the ground again, and it seemed to me that he was looking straight at the point where I had placed my foot. I brought back the other foot beside it. I could see blades of grass slowly straightening up where the foot had been and others being crushed as I put it down. Jenkins’s eyes were fixed on the spot.

He stepped casually forward. I crouched down as low as I could get. Both his hands shot out suddenly toward me, the right hand open as if to shake mine, and the left hand reaching out around where my torso had just been, as if to give me a friendly clap on the shoulder. Encountering nothing, he looked a bit foolish, but he left his arms extended for a moment, in what looked like a gesture of supplication. From my crouching position I extended one leg as far back and to one side as I could. I shifted my weight carefully onto it, and then took another giant step. After his initial disappointment and confusion, Jenkins had begun to search the ground again for some sign of my new position.

“Just remember, we’re here to help you,” he said earnestly.

I took several more careful steps back away from him. As I turned to walk away, he was still studying the ground before him.

I would have to confront the problem of the fence now. Somehow I would have to get over it or under it or through it. I realized that, although I had had the fence in the back of my mind all day, I still had no real plan, no real idea how I might accomplish this — nothing but a vague vision of myself slipping through the gate unnoticed or crawling through a depression under the fence like an animal. Now that I actually had to do something, the whole enterprise seemed quite implausible. The area was sealed off and guarded more thoroughly and ruthlessly than a prison camp. Looking around me, I had no idea of what to do, where to begin. I was going to be shot. And if I wasn’t, I would be caught and caged. I had to keep moving.

The first thing was to look at the entire fence systematically, then decide what to try. Whether to try. Perhaps something would suggest itself. I walked back to the building. Clellan and Morrissey were finishing up the floor plan of the second story. Working now without any protective clothing, they were moving extremely quickly and they seemed particularly miraculous, adroitly stretching out their pieces of string like magicians, ten feet up in the air. I went straight through the reception room and around to the janitor’s closet for the stepladder, which I brought out onto the lawn. Opened up, it was about five feet high, wonderful for changing light bulbs but not of much use for climbing over ten-foot cyclone fencing.

I folded up the ladder again, hooked it over my shoulder, and walked out to the gate. I set it up to one side of the gate itself and about six inches from the fencing. I climbed the steps carefully, rocking forward and back a little so that the legs would dig into the earth. In my experience, stepladders are never adequately steady. In order to see over the top of the fence, I had to climb right up onto the top of the ladder, so that I had nothing to brace myself against. I felt myself teeter sickeningly. More for balance than support, I held a strand of the coiled barbed wire between the thumb and index finger of my right hand, being careful not to move it and attract the attention of the men below.

Directly behind the gate, an area thirty feet long and ten feet wide had been fenced in and covered with sand. The sand was wet and there were men raking it smooth. As they drew their rakes across it, each tine left a perfectly clear fine line. Each step left a beautiful footprint. On either side were low platforms on which men in uniforms stood holding what I assumed to be automatic weapons of some sort. Very unpromising. Sickening.

I could not see very far because of the way the perimeter curved, but in both directions the ground had been cleared in a ten-foot band along the fence, and sand was being spread. I wondered how far they had gotten and how much longer it would take to get all the way around. Not far off, I could hear chain saws. Closing in. Chances contracting. Along the fence, each on his little platform, stood one guard after another, holding his gun. My sense of balance seemed to evaporate, and I felt myself teetering. I had a vision of myself tilting out over the lawn, my feet pushing the ladder into the fence to draw the gunfire onto me.

I kept hold of the strand of barbed wire and slowly, unsteadily, bent myself at the knees until I could slide one foot off the top of the ladder and lower it to the next step. Much better. Another step down, and then I bent over and got the top of the ladder with my hands. I clambered down to the ground. The relief was wonderful. I could have laughed out loud. Except that I still had to find a way out.

I folded up the ladder and started along the fence, looking for any flaw that might offer an opportunity worth the risk. I watched especially for any depression in the ground that might leave an opening I could use to work my way under the fence. I looked in vain for a stream crossing the perimeter. The fencing seemed to be everywhere set well into the ground. They had been very thorough in screening the view through the fence, and nowhere could I find so much as a crack to peer through. About fifty yards along from the gate I could hear that I was opposite the chain saws and mowers. I risked mounting the ladder once more to survey their progress; at the top I raised myself up on one foot for only an instant and immediately lowered the other foot back onto the penultimate step. A momentary glimpse was enough. It would not take them long. The fence ran for most of its length through fields, so that there was very little for them to cut. They would be slowed down, however, on the east side where the fence bordered a wood. It was there that I would have my best chance, and I worked my way around to that side, inspecting the fence carefully the entire way.

Twenty minutes later I had found what I wanted. I made one more brief, precarious ascent of the ladder to get a full view of the area. I didn’t like my prospects particularly, but I decided it was worth the risk. Worth a shot, as the unfortunate expression goes. Keep moving.

I placed the stepladder directly in front of the nearest fence post so that I would be able to find it again. It is extraordinary — maddening— the way even the largest objects can be impossible to find when they cannot be seen. Ask Colonel Jenkins.

I returned to the building, where Clellan, Morrissey, and the Colonel were all hard at work. Each of them sat in a different room, diligently writing at an invisible desk, Clellan and Morrissey upstairs and the Colonel downstairs — a troupe of levitating pantomimists representing office workers in an imaginary building. They were making lists, cataloguing all the objects in all of the rooms. I wondered why, of all the tasks they might have undertaken in this extraordinary situation, this particular one had been chosen. But they were, as the Colonel had pointed out, all in government service: it must spring from some primal bureaucratic drive.

I went into the building to look for tables. They had made my task as easy as it could be under the circumstances. Each chair, table, and desk had been marked off by a neat little loop of wire around the bottom of each leg, and with the help of those outlines I could immediately locate everything worth inspecting in each room, and I could carry out what I wanted now without stumbling into walls and furniture. I moved around with confidence, making very little noise and never entering an occupied room.

Most of what I found was useless. The desks were too heavy to move alone, and the typewriter stands would be too insecure. I might have done better in the laboratory, but I was unwilling to risk being cornered either there or on the second floor. In the ground floor offices I knew I could always escape through a window if they heard me and blocked off a door. In three of the offices I found small tables, one of which was more than four feet long and two feet wide. The other two were smaller, but at least all three seemed to be the same height. In the reception room in front of the couch I found a splendid low, narrow coffee table six feet long. From the tops of these tables I removed magazines, computer terminals, coffee cups, papers, and telephones, all of which I carefully set on the floor underneath them. I then slid the pieces of wire off the ends of the legs, leaving the outlines on the floor as neat and rectilinear as possible. Then I lowered each table out the nearest window and carried it to the fence where I had left the stepladder.

Unable to find any more usable tables, I went to the conference room and carried off two wooden folding chairs. Finally, I returned to Wachs’s office, where I got down on my knees and, with the help of my penknife, prized up the edge of the carpeting and pulled it back so that I could inspect the undermat. It was rubber, about an eighth of an inch thick. Exactly what I wanted. With the penknife I carved off several large pieces of it and then pushed the carpet back in place as well as I could, although I didn’t much care if they noticed my work. I couldn’t imagine what they would make of it. On my way back with the matting, I stopped at my hiding place and searched through my sacks until I located a ball of twine. I would have preferred some real rope.

Back at the fence I set about experimenting with different arrangements of the furniture I had assembled, but when I placed the first two tables together, they made a sound that seemed to me as loud and vivid as an auction gavel. I listened several minutes for any indication that I had agitated the guard. I could not afford to take unnecessary risks: I had to take the trouble to do things right. Disheartened, I laboriously carried all four tables twenty yards away from the fence to where I could experiment in relative safety.

Fifteen minutes later I was ready to carry them back again. I positioned two of the tables end to end, parallel to the fence and about nine inches out from it, so that they formed a platform seven feet long beside it. I cut off pieces of twine and tied together the two pairs of adjacent legs, wrapping each pair half a dozen times. Then I opened up one of the folding chairs and used it to climb up on top of the tables. I stood with my feet over the joint of the two tabletops and bounced gingerly up and down to drive the legs into the ground. Then I shifted my feet to first one and then the other pair of outer corners and did the same thing. I could see clearly each of the holes made by the table legs. They were the only visible sign of my work. I spread the largest piece of rubber mat over this platform as a tablecloth to make the next layer of my structure less likely to slip. Then I lifted the larger table and set it up at one end of the platform. On the part of the surface that remained free I placed one of the chairs, to create a step between the two levels of tabletops. Then I set the remaining chair on the ground at the end of the entire structure so that I had a sort of stairway composed of chair, table, chair-on-table, table-on-table.

I got the twine and began tying everything together as best I could without being able to see the twine or the furniture or even my own fingers. I had no idea whether I was accomplishing anything, whether the whole thing would work, but I felt much better now that I was working feverishly at a concrete task. Although I had a crude picture of the whole structure in my mind, there was of course nothing to see and no way to determine what could most usefully be fastened to what, but I lashed tables and chairs together wherever I could, hoping that it would prevent the whole structure from sliding disastrously apart. When I checked over what I had done, I found that much of the twine was already slack. Ominous. I retied everything.

I took another piece of rubber mat and, climbing up onto the first level of tables, laid it over the upper table. I decided to climb up the rest of the way, both to test the security of the whole structure and to get a look at the other side of the fence. The surface of the top table was less than six feet above the ground, but standing on it I felt as if it were sixty. I suppose the structure was still reasonably stable, but I could feel the soft ground yield under it. And I could see nothing, neither myself nor what I was standing on. My sense of balance faded, and I was not sure whether I was standing or falling. I got down on all fours. I mustn’t lose control of myself. I had to keep working along. Stand up. Look at the guards. Chain saws still not in sight. Get down. Never think about falling or the sick feeling in the belly. Keep moving.

I climbed all the way down and brought the stepladder over. The whole thing seemed implausible, but I wasn’t going to think about it. I got up onto the first level of tables, lifted up the stepladder, and centered it on the surface of the highest table. I got out the twine and lashed the ladder legs to the table legs. I cut off a small piece of rubber mat and draped it over the top of the stepladder. My stairway had reached its full height. When I climbed up onto the top table again to check it, I was relieved to find that the top of the ladder was several inches higher than the barbed wire coiled along the top of the fence.

I clambered down once more and dragged the coffee table over. Holding onto it I climbed up until I was crouched on the top table again. I hauled the coffee table up carefully and balanced it on one end next to the step-ladder. The whole structure was at its most unstable, and the next few minutes were hateful. I had to climb up to the second stair of the ladder and slowly lift the coffee table up to chest height, twist it around over the fence, and try to hook it over the branch of the maple tree on the other side. As I extended the table out over the fence, I could only guess where the legs were, and I was terrified of catching the top of the fence with them. Unsure even of whether the table would be long enough to reach the branch, I lowered it slowly. Held out at that angle, the weight of the table became almost unsupportable, and I was afraid that if it did not catch the branch, I would be unable to lift it again and would have to let it fall onto the fence.