After Dachau (20 page)

“What’s in the syringe, some kind of psychotropic?”

He laughed again. “You really are a scream, Mr. Tull. Next you’ll be asking if I’m going to put you into a trance.”

I got out my own billfold and counted out seven hundreds and six fifties.

“Take off your jacket and roll up a sleeve.”

He carefully swabbed a spot with alcohol from one of the two vials, then filled the syringe from the other. After administering the shot, he taped a bit of cotton over the puncture and helped me don my jacket again.

Then, having repacked the case, he sat back, looked at me with a pleasant smile, and said, “I see you, Mr. Tull.”

I knew he did. By then—after a mere thirty seconds—the revelation was mostly complete, having no connection to whatever drug I’d been injected with. It had all come clear as the steel slid into my vein. It was as though the needle had been the conduit for enlightenment rather than some clear liquid.

As I’d dressed to go out an hour before, Mallory had asked where I was going. When I didn’t answer immediately, she said, “Never mind. Forgive me for asking. It slipped my mind that you’re the invisible man.”

Now at last I got it.

I’d thought I could visit Dial’s bookstore and be invisible. I’d thought I could make a very peculiar purchase there and no one would remark on it. I’d thought I could have a portentous conversation with a news editor at a globally influential
paper and our words would vanish into the ether. I’d thought I could promise a sensational story and beg for an opportunity to discuss it, and no one would take notice of this or think it worth analyzing as an interesting event in its own right.

I had acted as if Edmund Dial would think of my visit this way: “When I walked into my office, I expected to see Jason Tull, but it wasn’t Jason Tull after all, it was someone else.”

I carried and gave out personal cards all the time. Naturally they said, “Jason Tull, Jr.” What they should have said was, “
NOT
Jason Tull.” Because I was
NOT
Jason Tull, it somehow followed that I was invisible. I could go anywhere and do anything without being noticed. People looked through me as if I were a sheet of clear glass.

I knew only who I was
not
.

This was what Uncle Harry intended to demonstrate by having Clay lift the two books from my bedside table:
Behold! You are
SEEN
. You are
NOT
invisible. Behold! I’ve come here this evening to purloin two books out of the three that you are
KNOWN
to have purchased. I even know which two I want to take in order to demonstrate your visibility
.

As this went through my head, I didn’t take note of the fact that I was fading out, disappearing into a sort of vast mind-numbing cloud.

The last thing I clearly remember was shoving my thousand dollars across the seat into Clay’s hand.

I WOKE DYING
, or at least wishing I was dead, on a cot in a tiny room with a boarded window. My throat was raw, and judging from the taste in my mouth, this was the result of throwing up everything inside of me. My head was pounding in a way that carried pain outward to the very surface of my throbbing skin and eyeballs. I wanted water, but I wanted to relapse into unconsciousness even more.

I turned over, away from the wall, prayerfully imagining that some saintly person might have left a bottle of water within reach, and there, by God, it was—a quart. I fished it up from the floor, opened it, finished off half of it in one swallow, and plunged back into unconsciousness.

I woke again in another four hours or twelve hours. There was enough light seeping through the window to convince
me it was day. The blessed bottle was there on the floor at my bedside, and I finished it off in another long gulp. My headache was only a memory, but it was still a potent one. I wasn’t ready for three sets of tennis, but I was ready to get out of that room. At least I wasn’t a prisoner. The door to the room stood open, revealing a hall outside.

Not more than five minutes were needed to explore the entire building, which appeared to have served at one time as a military or scientific installation, permanently manned by two or three people but occasionally visited (I surmised) by another dozen, who used a sort of office or classroom at the front. Of more immediate significance to me was the fact that the building stood in the center of a vast, featureless wasteland that have might have been the moon if it weren’t for the scruffy vegetation that extended on all sides to the horizon. There were the remains of automotive ruts leading to the west (as I judged it to be, since the sun was steadily rising in the other direction), but there were no fresh tire tracks to be seen. Incredibly, it appeared that I’d been airlifted in.

Once it was established that I wasn’t going to leave on foot, I went back inside to consider the setup of the briefing room at the front of the building. At the back of this room was a low platform with a swivel chair positioned on it. The chair, unlike the other furniture in the room, was clean and new—an obvious import. A freshly cleaned chalkboard was mounted on the wall behind the chair, and several objects were arranged to face it: two floodlights, a video camera, and a television set, all connected to massive commercial batteries. Sitting down in the chair, I saw that the camera and the television set were both turned on.

The screen showed a scene that was almost a mirror
image of the one I was standing in, with an empty desk and an empty chair behind it. I sat down and fixed my eyes on the screen, waiting for something to happen. Nothing happened.

Obviously something was
going
to happen. Why else assemble all this equipment here and all that equipment there (wherever “there” was)?

I waited. I watched.

I said to myself,
obviously they didn’t expect me to recover consciousness this soon
(whoever “they” were).

I still had my watch (along with everything else). It said it was eleven, manifestly in the morning, though I rather doubted I was still in the Eastern time zone.

I went on sitting there, waiting, watching. Nothing went on happening.

At noon, all the water I’d taken in had filtered down to my bladder, and I went outside to get rid of it. While I was there, I took the time to survey again the bleak desert surrounding me. At the end of the rutted road, which disappeared in the haze at the horizon, no cloud of dust was being raised by an approaching vehicle. No helicopters were clattering their way to me.

I went back inside, sat down at the desk, and watched the screen, as empty-headed as a lizard on a rock. I was like someone in a movie theater waiting for the lights to go down and the show to start. The only things going through my mind were equivalent to
Where is it?
and
What’s the holdup?

On the screen in front of me absolutely nothing was happening. There wasn’t even a clock ticking off the seconds on the wall behind the empty chair.

At two o’clock I could no longer ignore the fact that I was
ravenously hungry. Surely whoever had deposited me here had left some food to go with the water. I wasn’t intended to perish, after all … surely. There would be a box somewhere, with something edible in it, even if it was only candy bars and crackers. Fruit, maybe, or even something tinned. I could picture it as clearly as if I’d already seen it—a corrugated cardboard box, kraft brown. It would be really terrible, I thought, if they’d forgotten to include a can opener. Such things happen.

But of course there was no box. There was a kitchen of sorts, still furnished with heavy dishes and a few battered pots and pans, but bare of food, except, absurdly, for a box of rice, hard as a brick and with the dust of decades on it. Predictably, nothing came from the tap in the sink.

I went back to my vigil in front of the television screen.

By five o’clock I realized I was beginning to lose control, partly because five o’clock is “quitting time,” when whoever was supposed to be sitting in that chair on the screen would be knocking off work to go home to dinner.

Who did these people think they were dealing with? Some nobody?

I went on watching for another two hours because there was absolutely nothing else to do.

At seven, when I took another bathroom break outside, the sun was still high in the sky, confirming my notion that I was a lot closer to the Pacific coast than to the Atlantic. I eyed the road, wondering what was at the end of it. If, as I’d always been assured, the horizon was twenty miles away, then it would, I estimated, take me five hours of walking to reach the vacancy that was presently visible to me—with no guarantee that anything besides more vacancy would be
visible from that vantage point. And even if something besides vacancy
was
visible, would I be able to cross this desert without a drop of water?

The thought of water sent me back inside to see if the bottle I’d sucked dry in the morning really was completely dry. Except for about three drops I was able to coax from the bottom, it was. But in desperation I got down on my stomach to check under the cot and found a treasure: another quart bottle, half full, that I’d evidently gulped at before I was entirely conscious. The cap was only lightly screwed down, and I gave it another hasty twist, as if the half-quart were going to evaporate before my very eyes.

I’ve heard or read somewhere that the thing to do in this situation is to drink down your water reserves straightaway. However logically or physiologically correct this advice may be, whoever formulated it is a damned fool. There was no way in the world I was going to empty that bottle, no matter how much I longed to.

I took a quick sip and screwed the cap down hard.

Then, feeling decidedly heartened (and having nothing better to do), I went back to my watching post. Nothing had changed. The room on the screen remained brightly lit and utterly empty.

In two hours
, I said to myself,
I’ll have another sip
, and set the bottle down firmly in the center of the desk, so that even if some malign force were to tip it over, no harm would come to it.

Night fell, eventually. I considered turning on the battery-powered lights that were trained on me but shrugged the idea off. What was there to see, after all?

In the dark, facing only the lighted television screen, I
realized belatedly what point Uncle Harry was making with it (for I had no doubt whatever that he was behind all this). I, seated in a chair behind a desk, was looking at another chair behind another desk. Harry was holding up a mirror for me to look into, and, looking into this mirror, I was seeing myself, seeing what someone would see looking into the room in which I sat: a vacant chair. Or, alternatively, an invisible man.

There was certainly no argument about that. I’d been living for a long, long time as an invisible man. In a sense, my work for the Fenshaws was designed to reduce my invisibility, for certainly
they
saw me. They didn’t know my father from Adam. They knew
me
, and me alone.

But who exactly was that?

What would they say if someone asked them who I was?

“Oh … Jason? Terribly nice chap. Earnest, intelligent, conscientious, well-educated. Perfect manners, delightful sense of humor—not pretentious at all, though he’s supposedly very well connected, important family, all that.” Could they conceivably say more than this?

I thought about the people closest to me. My father was Somebody, no doubt about that. My mother was Somebody. Uncle Harry. Both the Fenshaws. Mallory, even in a state of deep psychological shock, was Somebody.

How exactly had this result come about?

My father, Harry, the Fenshaws, and Mallory were driven … by ambition, goals, dreams. Certainly that was part of it—but not all of it, since Mother wasn’t in the least driven, by anything. If the Tull fortune were to melt away overnight, she would be less devastated than my father. She
would shrug and carry on exactly as before, except without the wherewithal to maintain a baronial lifestyle. She was self-possessed. She possessed herself and needed no more, though she certainly knew how to use more if there
was
more.

Had I missed a course in school—
How To Be a Person?

Was the key that they all
cared deeply
about something? It was certainly true that each had a center around which his or her life revolved. But what was mine? Did I deeply care whether I actually someday made a Golden Case for the Fenshaws? Not really, I had to admit. Would making it fill (to even a slight extent) the yawning vacancy within Jason Tull, Jr.? This seemed doubtful. But what would fill it? What in fact
did
I care about?

Even at the time, I didn’t imagine that these were profound thoughts I was having. They seemed more like the thoughts of a schoolboy who has failed to get a date for the prom, and the only profound effect they had was to make me long for sleep.

When I dragged
myself into the briefing room the next morning, I headed straight for the bottle of water, which I had thought prudent to leave sitting on the desk. Only after taking a swig did I notice that a change had taken place in the scene on the television screen. A man was sitting behind the desk reading a book. When I sat down, he looked up, set the book aside, and said, “Good morning, Jason.”