A Life Transparent (6 page)

Donna ignored his distress. He made great effort to communicate with his wife, only to be met with silence. The few times she did acknowledge his presence was to reciprocate the staples “I love you” and “Good night.” Even then, he saw the confusion on her face, as though she hadn’t noticed his presence until those precise moments.

He wanted to believe it was a dream, that he would wake up Wednesday morning and discover it was still Tuesday. He imagined waking to find his life the same as before, full of hope and color. Maybe Donna wouldn’t give him the cold shoulder, would make him a nice breakfast, would kiss him on the cheek again when he came home.

But when he woke the next morning, all was not well with his world. He rose at the same time and found himself in the midst of grayness. It shifted back to normal as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He got up, frowned at himself in the mirror, and went about his morning ritual.

Downstairs, he watched in silence as Donna made herself some toast and took a seat at the table. He sat across from her, watching her mannerisms, waiting for her to acknowledge his presence. She did not look up from her breakfast.

Frustrated, Donovan opened the morning newspaper and flipped through its pages. A photograph caught his eye. It was of a young woman with an intense stare. HAVE YOU SEEN ME? it asked. Her name was Alice Walenta, and he recognized it from a radio ad the day before. How quickly he’d dismissed it, caught up in the rush of the morning traffic and hopes of impressing his superiors. He considered how easy it was for someone to vanish without a trace.
Maybe I’m going to disappear
, he thought. The possibility was frightening.

The photograph, with Ms. Walenta’s dark eyes rendered grainy and pale by the newsprint, made him anxious. A deep hum rose up from within his head, causing a slow throb at his temples. He looked away from the photograph. The hum stopped, and the room around him shifted, losing its color. The kitchen’s gray tones deepened, its cabinetry and appliances losing their texture, becoming nothing more than blank slates of empty geometry. Donna’s figure became a shadow, and that’s when he saw it.

A tiny, white figure emerged from behind Donna’s head. It was small, no taller than a few inches, its flesh seemingly rubbery, glistening in the dim un-light of the room. It was bipedal, standing on two stubby legs, hands settled on what might have been its hips. He stared at it, unblinking, unable to move—not out of fear, but out of shock. Just when Donovan thought he’d reached the bottom of his sanity, the floor dropped out from underneath, spilling him further into its depths.

The white thing bent at the knees and sat next to Donna’s ear. It leaned over, put its head against her earlobe, and spoke in a droning language he could not understand. To Donovan’s ears, it sounded like a record played in reverse, tinged with the electronic interference of a bad phone connection.

The kitchen flickered and slowly lost its gray hue. Donna’s features regained their definition. For a few seconds both realities overlapped, and Donovan could see the white thing sitting beside her head. She chewed on her toast, unaware of its presence.

Words found their way up the back of Donovan’s throat. They came forth from his lips in a single, incredulous spate.

“What the hell is this?”

The white thing took notice of him. It looked at him with two black, beady eyes, and said something else into Donna’s ear. She kept staring at the table.

“Get off her,” Donovan said, reaching forward to knock the pale thing from her shoulder. His fingers passed through it. Donna did not move. The white thing grinned at him, extended its thin, white hand, and gave him the finger.

He scoffed.
Fuck you, too.

The overlap of color and gray subsided with another flash. Donovan ignored the prickling of his skin as his kitchen returned to normal. He watched the creature fade from view. Even when it was gone, he could still feel it leering at him.

For the first time since the affliction began, Donovan wondered if what he saw was not a figment of his imagination, but a reality.
No
, he thought,
things like this don’t happen
. Even if they did, the odds of it happening to him were astronomical. Things like this did not happen to Donovan Candle. He’d written about things like this, sure, but for the precise reason that they
couldn’t
happen, least of all to him.

Donovan got up from the table. He looked at Donna, unsure of himself and his sanity. He reached out and put his hand on her shoulder, expecting to feel the form of that creature, rendered invisible by the kitchen’s lively color. His hand landed upon her shoulder. She was warm.

Donna looked up at him, smiled and said, “I love you, too. Have a nice day at work, dear.”

“I didn’t—” he began, then remembered the thing on her shoulder. He remembered the way it whispered its backward language into her ear. Was it filling in the blanks? Was it the reason she couldn’t understand him?

He glanced at the clock, saw he was running late, and made his way to the door. He stopped short, looked back at Donna. She flipped through the newspaper.

“Love you,” he said, and closed the door behind him. He didn’t see her recoil at the sound of his voice.

•  •  •

He agonized over the morning’s incident for the rest of the day. At work, even as he read the sales prompt to a stranger on the line, his mind wandered back to Donna. He could see the white thing on her shoulder every time he closed his eyes. When a potential customer hung up on him, he removed his headset and retreated to the men’s room. He had no urge to go, but this was his most private place to sit and think.

Donovan closed the door, locked it, and sat on the toilet.

You can figure this out
, he told himself.
There’s a logical, reasonable explanation. There has to be.
To this argument, Joe Hopper replied,
Only logic I see in this is that you’re crazy, hoss. How’s that sound?

He didn’t like it one bit. The alternative prospect was also one that filled him with dread. What if he truly were disappearing? What if these things he saw were real? The little thing on Donna’s shoulder was bad enough, but the big ones that lurked in the corners of the office conference room terrified him. A chill slowly worked its way down his back.

When he returned to his cubicle, he saw he’d been gone for almost a full hour. There were no messages waiting for him in his inbox or on his phone. Given all that had happened—and all that
was
happening—he was not surprised. First his wife ignored him, and now his coworkers. With enough time, everyone just might forget he existed.

That thought left a sour taste in his mouth. He looked around the sales floor. His stomach twisted into itself as the room was overlapped by its gray counterpart. Other salespeople became dark shades, and he saw more of the little white things sitting on their shoulders. They turned their bulbous, white heads in a single, uniform motion. Their beady eyes looked at him, into him.
Through
him.

Donovan flickered back into reality. The office returned to its normal, colorful state. He sat and put on his headset, determined to ignore the impossible things he’d witnessed. Unlike those in his immediate presence, the strangers to whom he spoke over the phone lines always seemed to hear him just fine.

•  •  •

“Seriously, man, don’t you ever get bored?”

“Sometimes.”

“I’d say all the time, from the sound of it. Do you always call customers sounding like this?”

“Like what?”

“Like you’ve had the shit kicked out of you six ways to Sunday. Seriously, you sound like you’re completely drained. How long have you been doing this?”

“Nine years.”

“Wow. I dunno, dude. That’s a long time to be making calls to strangers. Did you go to college?”

“I did. Haven’t thought about that in a long time, though.”

“Didn’t you have any goals? Any dreams?”

“Yeah. I wanted to be a writer.”

“I can dig that, man. Well hey, I gotta go, but look, dude, don’t waste your life there, okay? Go write something. Realize your dream.”

“Yeah,” Donovan sighed, “I’ll get right on that.”

“Cool, cool. Oh, and thanks for the introductory offer, but I don’t think I need to protect my identity right now. Peace.”

Click. Beep.

The script for saving a sale lingered on his tongue.
No one ever wants to protect their identity until it’s taken from them.
Donovan cancelled the automated dialer before it could place another call. He ran his hands through his hair. Dozens of calls, and not a single sale. At this point he did not care.

What could he do about the gray visions and his own untimely disappearance? To whom could he turn?

Michael crossed his mind. He imagined working with his brother to track down the cause of the phenomenon. Twin detectives. The notion stirred a dying ember of creativity in his mind.

Yeah, right.
Michael may have been his inspiration for Joe Hopper, but he was hardly empathetic. Michael Candle was more likely to laugh at his plight than help him. That was, of course, presuming his brother could even see or hear him.

Donovan put away the thought of calling Michael. He was desperate, but not
that
desperate. This was something he had to figure out on his own.

His body shimmered. The color drained from his vision. He caught a glimpse of the lanky, white figure standing between two cubicles along the far wall. It saw him, took a series of steps down the aisle, and was gone in a blink. The office bustled around him with full, vibrant life. He checked his watch, gathered his things, and made his way out of the building.

By the time he got to his car he’d forgotten all about his brother. Whatever was happening to him, he understood he would have to handle it on his own—and that, above everything else, frightened him most.

The days grew worse. He saw more of the tall, white things and their Lilliputian counterparts. On Wednesday night he happened to look outside and spot a lanky one on the sidewalk. He turned away from the bedroom window and looked at Donna, but in the midst of the gray sight she was nothing more than a dark specter shrouded in the blankets.

When he turned back he saw the creature beckon to him with a long, scrawny finger. Its mouth shivered open as it uttered a low moan.

It vanished as color returned. Donna was already fast asleep. He tried to snuggle next to her—after all, it was their night to make love and attempt to conceive a child. She rolled away from him. Defeated, Donovan turned on his side and fell into a troubling sleep in which he was haunted by nightmares of the white creatures. In his dream, they chased him down a long, gray staircase. It wasn’t until the albino things were upon him that he realized his efforts were futile. The staircase was really an escalator, delivering him straight into their pale, skinny hands.

Donovan woke Thursday morning drenched in sweat and twenty minutes late. Donna was already downstairs, and like the day before, she did not acknowledge his presence. When the gray sight overcame his vision, he saw the little white bastard sitting atop Donna’s shoulder. Its head was pressed against her ear, and he could hear its backward chatter.

“Stop it.” He wished his voice didn’t sound so weak. The creature’s head twisted around. It grinned, revealing a set of prickly teeth, and
winked
at him.

The kitchen returned to normal. Donna did not look up at him. She ate her breakfast and read the newspaper in silence. He left that morning without saying goodbye, and found that things at work hadn’t changed, either.

At lunch time, rather than sit in the lounge, he spent an hour in the men’s room trying to sort out his troubled life.
What if this is permanent?
he wondered, to which Joe Hopper responded,
What makes you think it ain’t, hoss?

Donovan considered it a fair point. The symptoms of whatever was happening were getting worse. He was isolated now, living among the rest of the world while being omitted from it. The visions, and the question of whether or not they were real, were growing more and more prevalent as well. His “gray sight” revealed monstrosities the likes of which he could never fathom on his own. They were creatures suited for more fortified minds, fictional beings culled from a mind far more creative than his own.

Logic and reason had failed him, left in the past with Monday and some semblance of reality. He wondered if his soul would fade away with the rest of him. He wondered if Donna would remember him once he was gone.

That’s enough. I’ll find a way through this.

He left the restroom strengthened by his determination, but as the day wore on, he wasn’t entirely sure he believed it.

•  •  •

A five-car pileup on the highway made him almost an hour late for dinner. Donna was finished with her meal by the time he arrived home. He tried to apologize and explain himself, but it was in vain. She could neither hear him or see him. What troubled him most about it was that she didn’t seem to miss him, and it was then he remembered the crude thing on her shoulder for the last two mornings. He remembered the way it whispered it in her ear, the way it mocked him.

Were the white things at the root of all this? If they were, then all of this—the flickering, the gray visions, the tall creatures—were very much a part of reality. It meant there was something far more sinister at work than just the gradual breakdown of his sanity.

Donovan chose not to dwell on it, locking himself away in his office to work on his novel. He struggled for half an hour as he tried to begin again, but his mind kept wandering back to the matters at hand.
How would Joe Hopper solve this?
he wondered.
Or Michael Candle, for that matter?
He looked at the phone, contemplated picking it up and calling his brother, but feared he would be met with more silence. Just because the unwitting customers at work could hear him did not mean anyone else could.