Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (8 page)

With no warning the lights went out and we found ourselves in total darkness. For an instant I thought that the Students for a Fair World had already struck, but from the startled silence emerged the excited, rapid-fire voice of Wachs, intoning: “Accustomed as we are today to think of magnetism as the vector of spins and orbits of subatomic particles, it is often with considerable astonishment that we discover how entirely differently men at other times in history have viewed the set of phenomena that we tend to group together under the term ‘magnetism.’ As early as the sixth century’ B.C., the Greek philosopher Thales observed the extraordinary ability of lodestone to attract other pieces of lodestone, as well as iron.”

From the back of the room came a sudden commotion of clicking and whirring, and a picture of a large stone appeared unexpectedly and incongruously at the front of the room.

What in the world was going on? This must be Wachs’s idea of how one explains things to people outside one’s own field. We were getting part of the lecture course in the History and Philosophy of Science for humanities majors.

I was going to have difficulty sitting through much of this. My hangover was rapidly being intensified to an insupportable level. The contrast between the piercing brightness of the images on the screen and the darkness of the room was aggravating an already evil headache, and every time the slide machine would click and grind, violently wrenching yet another image onto the screen, I would feel a little wave of nausea, a sort of motion sickness. I began to cringe at the advent of each new slide.

“In the year 1785 the Frenchman Charles Coulomb…”

Whirr. Clack. An incomprehensible instrument appeared which could have been used as an illustration in the history of anything. Gunnery. Contraception.

After ten or fifteen minutes of this, we were still not out of the eighteenth century. I was sure a lot of important work had been done in the nineteenth century. If I could slip out of the room for a while, I might find a lavatory or go outside and clear my head. I could still be back in plenty of time for the twentieth century. I clambered out of my seat and felt my way to the door. When I pulled it open, the light in the corridor illuminated me, and I felt the gaze of everyone in the room on me. I leaned over to the person sitting nearest the door and apologized in a loud half-whisper.

“Excuse me. Feeling a little bit off. Be right back.”

I pushed the door shut behind me and hurried back down the corridor toward the entrance. Just moving around would make me feel better, I thought. I was wrong. There was no one in the reception room now: everyone must be attending the lecture. Perhaps some fresh air, a walk on the lawn. I pushed open the door and stepped out onto the porch. There was a steady, uninviting drizzle. The students, undeterred by the weather, were right there on the lawn in front of me, erecting some part of their fair world. One of them looked at me and waved; he started toward me as if he wanted to ask me something. I waved vaguely back at him and retreated quickly into the building again, locking the door to be safe. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. An insupportable wave of nausea flooded over me. Really what I wanted was a lavatory. After that I might come back and curl up on the couch in the reception room. Just for a few minutes. I tried the door to Wachs’s office. Locked. I went back into the corridor and pulled open the first door to the right. Janitor’s closet. The next door, however, opened into an enormous and quite splendidly equipped bathroom, which had, in addition to all the usual plumbing, an open shower stall and a sauna. There was a stack of freshly laundered towels and along one wall a row of hooks from which hung running suits and other random pieces of clothing. The employees of Micro-Magnetics must have used this as a sort of locker room.

I went to the W.C. and tried to precipitate whatever purgative convulsions my body was capable of. When I was done I felt much better. But my headache was, if anything, worse. I leaned my head into the wash basin and turned on the cold water. Try to clear my mind. The water was too cold and the position extremely uncomfortable. There was a medicine cabinet over the washbasin. In it I located a bottle of aspirin and took three. I noticed that there seemed to be a sort of continuous, high-pitched whining sound just inside the auditory range, but I could not decide whether there was really such a sound or whether it was a sort of overtone incorporated in the pain of my headache. The lights seemed to be swelling and dimming with the throbbing in my temples. The pain in my head was really quite extraordinary. Making it hard to think. I decided there
was
a whining sound, but I couldn’t make up my mind whether or not the pitch was actually shifting up and down rhythmically.

I straightened my clothing and looked dully at my own image in the mirror. I realized that my entire body was sweating. I turned and looked at the shower. A quick shower and then back to the press conference. Plenty of time. A bit presumptuous of me to come in and use their bathroom like this. Embarrassing if someone walked in. But they would all be watching the slide show. And it would make me feel much better. I took off my clothes and hung them carefully on one of the hooks. It annoyed me that there were no hangers. Weedy people, scientists, I thought crankily. Soon everyone will be an engineer or a computer programmer and there will be absolutely zero demand for dry cleaning. I should find out who makes dry cleaning equipment and go short. I folded my socks and underwear and set them carefully on my shoes. I stepped into the shower and ran it first warm, then cold, then very hot, then cold again, then off. I felt very much better. I stepped out of the shower and, taking a towel off the stack, began slowly to dry myself.

Somewhere within the building an electric bell went off. It was the kind of harsh, overwhelming bell that announces the end of class at school— everyone closes notebooks, gathers up books, retracts ballpoints, shuffles out into the corridor — and for an instant I thought inanely that Wachs’s lecture must have ended. No, it was some sort of alarm bell. It went on ringing, like one of those burglar alarms that go off in the middle of the night and ring continuously, sometimes for hours, until the shop owner or the police come. It is always a marvelous relief when one of those alarms suddenly stops. I wished this one would stop. I really did feel much better, I told myself, but my head was still not at all clear. Above the sound of the bell there was still that painful throbbing whine. Someone ran by in the corridor, shouting something.

All the commotion would have something to do with the Students for a Fair World. Probably they had shut off power to the building. No, the lights were still on. Perhaps just the power to the laboratory. Or perhaps they had simply set off a fire alarm. That would make sense. What they mainly wanted was to get everyone outside so they would have an audience for their demonstration. As I thought about it, I was more and more disinclined to give them that satisfaction. I could hear a lot of shouting and slamming of doors throughout the building; people were trooping down the corridor. Really, all this was nothing more than a school fire drill. If I stayed out of sight, I might spend the entire time comfortably inside while everyone else was herded out into the cold drizzle. I went over and locked the door by which I had entered the bathroom. To make sure, I hid my clothing under one of the sweatsuits. The thought of coming out so well compared to my fellows made me feel better.

I pulled open the door to the sauna and peered inside. It was warm; someone must have used it that morning. I turned the heat all the way up and went out and got four towels from the stack. I laid out two of them as a sort of mat on the cedar bench which ran around the inside of the sauna and folded up the other two to serve as a pillow. I unscrewed the light bulb inside the sauna and lay down in the darkness to let the heat soak through me.

I must have lain there for ten or fifteen minutes, floating between consciousness and sleep. With the door closed the sound of the alarm bell was pleasantly muffled, and the commotion in the rest of the building seemed remote. I was therefore startled when the door I had locked clattered open and a man burst into the center of the lavatory. I raised myself on my bench inside the sauna and peered out at him through the window of the sauna door. He held what must have been a passkey in his hand and wore on his head a white helmet with some sort of insignia. It was presumably prescribed dress for running up and down corridors during fire drills — or perhaps he had it in case of aerial attack. He shouted officiously, “Anybody here? Anybody here!” The real unpleasantness of emergencies is often not the emergencies themselves but the occasion they provide for normally tolerable people to dress up in uniforms and bustle about issuing arbitrary commands. I remained silent. The man, from his position in the center of the room, peered intently around and found nothing out of order. Evidently he could not see me in the unlit sauna. He turned, walked partway across the room, and for some reason peered down into the bowl of the W.C. Fortunately, I never forget to flush. A good traditional upbringing always stands you in good stead. He continued across the room and pulled open another door, which seemed to open directly into Wachs’s office.

“Anybody here? Anybody here!” Apparently not. He returned back through the lavatory, closing each door behind him.

During this intrusion, it came to me for the first time just how unpleasantly embarrassing it would be if I were discovered now. It is normal enough when visiting someone’s home or place of business to use the W.C. — and to use the washbasin as well, in a limited way, to wash up — but people do not generally expect you to barricade yourself in the bathroom and take extended showers or naps in the sauna, should there be one. It would seem a bit arrogant, I supposed, no matter how diffident and vague my explanation. And by now I had probably broken some set of fire regulations which someone or other was sure to take very seriously. Worse than that, the fellow in the official helmet would want to force me, for my own safety, to vacate the building. I had a vision of myself standing naked on the lawn, clutching my clothing ridiculously in my hands, while overprivileged children lectured me on my political failings. It was a press conference of sorts: there might even be a photographer to capture the moment. On the other hand, the man with the helmet had come and gone. It now seemed pretty certain that I would get away with it, entirely unnoticed, and I felt particularly smug at the thought that, unlike everyone else, I would not have to stand foolishly in the rain.

The only unpleasant thing was the incessant sound of the alarm bell and the pulsating whine above it.

When I no longer heard any movement in the corridor, I climbed out of the sauna and turned on the shower again, starting it very cold and gradually adjusting the temperature upward. I hoped that by the time I was finished, all the revolutionary confusion would be concluded. Surely everyone else was out of the building by now. I wondered if I would be able to hear the simulated atomic blast. I turned off the shower and began drying myself.

With no warning the lights went out and the alarm bell mercifully stopped. Evidently the revolutionary vanguard had managed after all to cut off power to the building. Undismayed, but inconvenienced by the darkness, I groped my way to the door into Wachs’s office and pulled it open. That admitted enough sunlight so that I could dress. With the alarm bell extinguished I noticed more clearly that unpleasant, piercing, whining sound. Some piece of equipment must still be operating. I got my clothes on and used the mirror over the washbasin to comb my hair as well as I could in the semidarkness.

Then I was startled by a series of short, powerful horn blasts of the type you hear in submarine movies — and conceivably even in real submarines. As I recovered from my surprise, I think I laughed out loud. How and why had they ever assembled all these improbable noisemakers? And what were they meant to communicate?

As I think back on it, I wish they had found one which could have communicated to me a sense of blind unreasoning terror — something to drive me in panic from the building.

Taking what would turn out to be a last casual look at myself in the mirror, I went into Wachs’s office, where I would be able to see what was going on through the windows. Staying in the center of the room to avoid being noticed by anyone outside, I surveyed the pageant unfolding before me. I felt again pleased with myself. If it weren’t for that excruciating whining sound. There was a fire truck on the lawn just beyond where the drive turned toward the parking lot, although as far as I could tell there was no sign whatever of any fire. Well, if there was in fact a fire, it would be an easy matter for me to get out: I was on the ground floor. There were two state police cars: Anne and the Students for a Fair World must have been relieved to see them. There were several people with white helmets. Everyone with any kind of uniform appeared to be gesticulating or shouting instructions, but none of them seemed to have succeeded in establishing any authority or order. The people who had been driven out of the building milled forlornly about on the lawn, glumly looking at the Students for a Fair World or at the fire engine. A steady drizzle descended on them all.

Evidently, the atomic blast had not yet taken place. A few yards from the building the demonstrators had laid out a sort of metal tabletop which was apparently to be the site of the explosion. In the middle of it there was some sort of device nearly two feet high, covered with plastic, perhaps to keep it dry. From under the plastic, electric wires ran approximately ten yards to a spot on the lawn where most of the demonstrators had clustered around an assortment of cartons and random equipment. Several of them were hunched over and seemed to be attaching something— presumably some sort of detonating device — to the wires.

Two of the young people in the group were attempting to stuff a cat into the cage that had been in the van. The cage, in my opinion, had been too small even for the guinea pig, and the cat seemed quite a lot larger. You would have wanted its full cooperation to get it through the door of that cage; but whereas guinea pigs are apparently rather tractable creatures, cats are not. This cat in particular seemed entirely disinclined to function as a guinea pig — much less as a symbol of all victims of capitalist oppression and nuclear death technology. It writhed, clawed, and snarled. Gradually it captured the full attention of the bedraggled crowd on the lawn, who seemed both dismayed by the treatment of the beast and confused by its description on the banner as a guinea pig.