Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (24 page)

“Everything all right in there?” said the one at the window. He waited a moment for a reply and then banged the flat of his hand against the side of the van twice.

“Anybody home?”

The other man was peering warily into the body of the van through the open rear door. I turned and walked away. It seemed unlikely that Carillon’s van would ever be located. The only question in my mind was whether it would be sold whole or dismembered on the spot. A car in the city streets with anything wrong — a flat tire, an unlocked door, a missing license plate — is like a bleeding animal in shark-infested waters. The predators strike instantly and strip it clean to the skeleton.

I walked back to the railway station and found the platform for the train into New York. I was dreading the next hour of dodging through crowds on public transportation, but it was almost midnight and I had no difficulty avoiding collisions with the few other passengers boarding the train. Once I was sure they were all settled, I even allowed myself the luxury of a seat.

At Pennsylvania Station I waited until all the other passengers had left the train and then hiked up the empty stairways, rather than risk the escalator. As I was trudging up the last flight, a teenager in running shoes came flying four stairs at a time straight down at me, shrieking maniacally. Not a particularly unusual occurrence to a New Yorker, but, cowering along the railing, I barely remembered in time that it was now up to me to scramble out of the way.

When I emerged into the main hall it seemed to me as if I were returning to New York after an absence of years. I felt a relief verging on joy at being back, but at the same time I felt utterly remote and cut off from the human beings scattered through the cavernous room, none of whom could be aware of my existence. They were no longer people I might speak to or know: they were only objects, whose unpredictable movements across my path constituted a mild danger against which I had to maintain my guard.

With an occasional wide detour around a zigzagging drunk, I made my way across to the West Side
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, climbed over a turnstile, and boarded the last car on a northbound train. Although it was almost empty and I was exhausted, I remained standing. At Forty-second Street I got off and changed to the crosstown shuttle. There were more passengers there, and many of them boarded at the near end of the train and walked through to the other end during the trip, so that I had to keep dodging them as they came by, and I finally climbed up and stood on a seat to let them pass. At the East Side
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, I waited for the express. Not as much exiting and entering and moving around on the express trains. I got off at Eighty-sixth Street and waited until everyone else had left the platform before beginning the hike up the two flights of stairs to the street. I was very tired. Only a few blocks.

At Eighty-eighth Street my adventure nearly came to a messy end. With the traffic light green for me, I started across the street. At the same moment the driver of a cab that was stopped behind the crosswalk, seeing that the intersection was clear, shot onto Lexington Avenue against the light, catching me with his side mirror and spinning me into a parked car. I shrieked with surprise and pain. I thought at first that his side mirror had ripped off my arm, but as it turned out, my arm had ripped off his side mirror. The cabby slammed his car to a halt and climbed out, leaving it stopped in the middle of the intersection. He was fat enough so that his walk back to the mirror in the crosswalk had a sort of stateliness. Although what had happened must have been utterly inexplicable to him, he had an expression more of belligerence than of puzzlement. Probably he found a lot of things in his daily life inexplicable. He picked up the mirror and looked around truculently. By this time the next wave of traffic had come down Lexington, and cars were blocked behind his cab and using their horns. He ambled back, climbed into his cab, slammed the door, and turned down Lexington.

My arm seemed to be intact. As I stood there clutching it stupidly, I found that I was trembling — more from nerves and exhaustion than from any injury, I decided. I couldn’t take any more of these narrow misses. Only a few more blocks. Stepping back up onto the sidewalk, I caught a toe on the curb and stumbled forward. More and more mistakes. I had to pay careful attention to everything. At the next corner I walked around behind the cars stopped for the light. Be careful crossing the street. Stop, look, and listen, as they told me over and over in school. Absolutely exhausted. When I reached my building I was still trembling.

My apartment occupied the entire top floor of a brownstone between Fifth and Madison. The three flights of stairs were sometimes demoralizing, but because of the way the lower floors of the building had been extended into the back lot, my apartment had been left with a large terrace facing south, and I was afforded a pleasant illusion of being surrounded by vegetation and sunlight. You entered the building through two windowed doors, between which there was a tiny vestibule containing the mailboxes, the doorbells, and an intercom.

I looked around to make sure no one was in the street, pushed open the outer door just far enough to get through, and slipped into the vestibule. I pulled out my keys, and, out of habit, set about opening my mailbox, a task which I found had become quite difficult now that the mailbox key was invisible. Looked like all junk mail. I slipped it into my side pocket. It took me another few minutes to single out the house key from among the eight keys on my key ring and then get the inner vestibule door open. I began the long trudge up the stairs.

I was most of the way up the first flight when I glanced down and saw the bizarre spectacle I was creating. The white bundle of mail in my pocket would be clearly visible to anyone who looked in from the street or out from one of the other apartments, and it would seem to be bobbing inexplicably through the air up the stairway. I crouched down and looked through the windowed vestibule doors: no one seemed to be on the street. I had to think more clearly about what I was doing. I was just too tired. Could any of my neighbors in the building have seen me through their little peepholes? I should be walking softly in order not to encourage them to peer out in the first place. Taking the packet of mail in my hand, I bent over and held it next to the baseboard, where it would be less noticeable, and in this awkward position climbed up the remaining stairs.

The stairway ended on a landing in front of my door. I got out my keys again and went to work on the last two locks. My body ached to be inside. I needed to eat and drink, to lie down, to sleep. To be safe. Get the right key — it was a Medeco, with slanting teeth — use a finger to guide it in, and turn. Then the other key — one of the ones next to it, but which one? Hold onto the Medeco and try each of them. The first one wouldn’t go. The second slid in and turned. The door swung open. I stepped in, switched on the lights, pulled the keys out of the lock, and pushed the door shut behind me.

Home free.

I nearly swooned from elation and relief. I was safe and secure within my own walls, behind my own doors. Nothing could happen to me now. They couldn’t get me here. A momentary fear passed over me like a shadow: could they have tracked me down already? Could they already be here waiting in the apartment? Not yet. They wouldn’t be looking for me yet. I would be safe here for a while, perhaps a long while. Perhaps indefinitely. Why should they ever figure out who I was? I was safe, at least for now, in these familiar, altogether private surroundings. I could sit down now and have a drink and think what to do next. I felt myself salivating at the thought. I stumbled deliriously into the kitchen, dropping the mail onto the kitchen table and tossing my keys on top, just as always.

The air was still and stuffy. Careful. Before I opened the kitchen window I would have to switch out the lights. Otherwise some peeping neighbor would see the window sash rising mysteriously of its own accord. Come to think of it, he might see a lot of curious events: the mail sailing magically through the room and landing on the table. New Yorkers, who live over, under, and all around each other, take extraordinary pains to avoid any intimacy with their neighbors, to avoid even meeting or speaking to them; but they are always watching, peering, spying.

I turned off the lights again and worked my way through the entire apartment, systematically drawing each shade and curtain. Then, when I had opened some windows and got the lights on again, I found myself hurrying toward the refrigerator with rapidly mounting anticipation, and, as I pulled open the door, I remembered half-consciously that I had not drunk anything since morning or eaten anything for almost two days. Beer. I pulled out a bottle and with trembling hands twisted off the cap. It was wonderfully cold going down, and the alcohol gave me a feeling of well-being so acute that I thought I would weep. Once again I was aware that I was almost swooning from euphoria and exhaustion. Sit down. Home now. Safe. Plenty of time now to sort things out. I felt the euphoria spreading through my body.

Soon — impossible to know exactly how long, in my trancelike state — I was back at the refrigerator opening another beer and looking to see what there was to eat. A half-full container of moo shu pork. It would be several days old, but it wouldn’t require any preparation. I got some chopsticks from the drawer and frantically pulled open the top. The sight and smell of the food set off an explosion of hunger in me, and I felt the saliva running in my mouth. I was shoveling the food in uncontrollably and swallowing it almost unchewed. When the box was empty, I drank down the second beer and resumed my search of the refrigerator. Still standing in front of it, I tore the top off a quart of coffee ice cream and began greedily spooning it into myself. I noticed peripherally that I seemed to have spilled some food down my front, but for a while I continued eating compulsively. Better to stop and clean my shirt, I thought. Important to keep it invisible. I set the ice cream down on the table, with the idea of going over to the sink and wiping off my clothes.

But when I looked down at myself, I saw that I had not spilled anything at all. What I had done was to pour into my invisible esophagus a hideously visible brown and yellow mixture of moo shu pork, coffee ice cream, and beer. The sludgy concoction was piling up in my stomach, of whose exact location I had never, until this moment, really been quite sure.

I was becoming a sack of vomit and fecal matter. I suppose, on reflection, that that is what I had always been, but nature had not formerly imposed this aspect of the human condition quite so vividly upon me. The nasty facts had been discreetly enveloped in opaque flesh. Now I was to be a transparent sack of vomit and fecal matter. I cannot begin to tell you how distasteful it was.

It was also disheartening. Frightening. I had thus far assumed — even almost grown used to the idea — that if I could not look like everyone else, at least I would be entirely invisible. All my hopes of avoiding capture had been built on that assumption. Now it appeared that not only would I not be safely invisible after all but I would be manifested in the visible world exclusively as a gastrointestinal tract. Ludicrous.

I could not stop myself from looking down. It — “I” was really the appropriate pronoun — was ugly and becoming uglier. Sickening. Perhaps I would have to dedicate myself to serving science after all. Damn! I felt very close to throwing up the whole mess. But I needed the nourishment. Or perhaps not. Perhaps I — my transformed body — could not digest normal food anyway. Perhaps I was dying. Like everyone else. Human condition and so forth. Hideous, the way, as the food churned slowly through the stomach, the color and consistency altered. Foul.

A more hopeful thought came to me. I seemed to remember reading somewhere — perhaps it was in a school biology text — that the human body replaces itself cell by cell many times during its life span. How many times? How quickly? Perhaps, as I ate and drank and breathed, my body would gradually reconstitute itself out of normal, visible particles of matter. Perhaps I should be eating as much as I could force down. Speed up the process. In a few weeks I might look like a human being again. It would be just a matter of holing up in my apartment here until I was back to normal. An exhilarating thought.

An unrealistic thought, I decided, and my mood plummeted precipitously again. Life, and especially its misfortunes, are rarely so neat and clear-cut. The most likely thing was that I would be neither visible nor invisible but rather a blotchy translucent sack of filth. Perhaps the laboratory workers would grow accustomed to looking at me.

I couldn’t help looking down at myself. Small amounts of milky brown sludge were being squirted into the small intestine. Invisibility, which a few minutes before had seemed a horrible fate, now seemed infinitely desirable. Damn.

All I could do was wait and see what would happen. In the morning I might be able to tell what I was doomed to look like. Or not look like. I poured myself a tumbler of Scotch and went into the bedroom. Standing in the middle of the room, I took a good swallow and watched it gurgle rhythmically down my esophagus to join the rest of the sewage in my stomach. Disgusting. My condition was unspeakably, hopelessly disgusting. And at the same time ridiculous. Hard, in a way, to take it seriously. I felt, almost, like laughing out loud, but I was afraid the laughter would turn into vomiting. Have another swig of Scotch and calm down. Think things through in the morning. Lie down on the bed for a moment. Hopeless. I should take off my clothes. Rest a few minutes first. Close my eyes for a moment. Doesn’t help, see right through the eyelids — grotesque. Feels better anyway with the eyelids down. Not hopeless. Serious but not hopeless. Like the Prussian and the Austrian: the situation serious but not hopeless. Hopeless but not serious. Shit. Ought to get clothes off. Serious but not hopeless… but not serious… Shit.

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he morning sun was flooding in through the unshaded window and soaking into my body. It felt wonderful. Although I seemed to have passed out with all my clothes on. Must have drunk too much. Have to stop doing this. Must have slept forever. Groggy. Didn’t even get under the covers.