Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (36 page)

When I had begun my tour first thing in the morning, there might have been twenty members who had come in to have breakfast or use the athletic facilities before work, but they hurried out again immediately, and for the next few hours there were never more than a handful of them in the building, most of them reading newspapers in the lounge. But around eleven-thirty, members began to trickle and then crowd in, and, knowing that for the next two hours the Club would be as full as it ever got, I retreated up to the roof, where I sat on the edge of the parapet, watching the traffic and the pedestrians below.

At two in the afternoon, when the Club had largely emptied out again, I went back down to the first floor. There, beyond the doorman’s desk and the coatroom, is a small hall with mailboxes and a counter at which members can cash checks or reserve guest rooms or private dining rooms. Opening off that hall is a little maze of offices, in which the manager, the switchboard operator, the bookkeeper, and the clerical staff all work. I spent the entire afternoon there observing the procedures for the reservation and assignment of the guest rooms and trying to determine the schedule for making the rooms up.

At around four-thirty, as the Club was beginning to fill up again, I crept carefully through the open door of the manager’s office. He was sitting at his desk copying numbers onto a spreadsheet. Despite my care, he heard me come in — as people so often do — and looked up, but, seeing no one, he returned to his work. I sat down on the floor in the corner and waited. He toiled on for hours. I cannot tell you how agonizingly boring this sort of thing can be: sitting there without moving or coughing or clearing my throat and with nothing to do but watch the man twitch and pick his nose. Even a telephone call would have offered some welcome excitement. With increasing intensity, I prayed for him to get up and leave.

It was almost quarter to seven before he abruptly stood up, folding up the papers on his desk and stuffing them into a briefcase, and scurried out the door. When the lock had turned and I heard his footsteps retreating, I was finally able to stand up and stretch. Sitting down in the upholstered swivel chair behind the desk, I began pulling open the drawers and going through them.

By the time I realized that the office door was being unlocked again, I barely had time to push the drawers shut before the manager exploded into the room and charged frantically at the desk. It is difficult in moments of fear or confusion to remember that you are invisible — even now I am not sure I have absorbed the fact fully — and as he reached right at me, I instinctively drew my right arm back preparatory to smashing him under the chin. He picked up a stack of letters from the edge of the desk, and, with my fist still foolishly poised to strike him, I watched him turn his back to me and scurry frantically out of the room again.

I sat there for many minutes before resuming my search. It is extraordinary how often people will return to a place moments after leaving it — often several times in succession — to retrieve something they have forgotten. You begin to notice these things when you spend your entire waking life sneaking about.

I went back to work on the desk, and in the back of the lower left-hand drawer I found two cardboard paper-clip boxes full of keys of every sort, some grouped together on rings and some loose. I dumped them out onto the top of the desk and picked through them, eliminating two that were clearly automobile keys and several more that were duplicates. I was left with eleven keys, which I hooked onto one ring and slipped into my pocket. That was the problem: they hung there ridiculously in midair. I could hear people still leaving through the main hall. I would have to wait until the Club had emptied out.

I passed the time going through the rest of the office, concentrating particularly on the personnel files and on an interesting breakdown of Club staffing by hour, day of the week, and season. The most important thing I learned was that for most of the night the only employees were the night doorman and a night watchman, who was seventy-one years old.

Sometime after nine, when I had not heard footsteps or voices for twenty minutes, I unbolted the office door and swung it slowly open, stepping out into the corridor and peering around the corner out through the hall. The night doorman was sitting behind his desk, furtively reading something that he held under the counter.

The first thing I did was to go back and try the keys until I found one that locked the manager’s office. Then, taking a roundabout route through fire stairs and service corridors, I went up to the top of the building and began working my way down through it again, testing the keys against each locked door I encountered. By now I knew my way through the building reasonably well, and I was not afraid to switch on lights, but it still took me nearly five hours, because I had to spend half my time keeping track of the night watchman, who every hour made a cursory tour of the premises. By two in the morning I had identified a passkey which — except for the guest rooms, the manager’s office, and miscellaneous padlocks and cabinet locks — seemed to open everything in the building, including countless closets and storerooms of every possible size, containing goods of every imaginable kind. There were towels, cleaning supplies, athletic equipment, cigars, stationery, wine, clothing, lumber, food, furniture, linen, everything. And in the basement there was a workshop which, although it had a rather deserted appearance, seemed to have been outfitted originally with every sort of tool anyone would ever need to maintain the entire building and all its equipment. The whole place was really far more extraordinary than I had ever imagined: it seemed designed to be almost self-sufficient, a little autonomous world like an old ocean liner, and I became increasingly confident that I would create a secure existence for myself there.

Only two of the guest rooms were empty, but one of the keys opened both of them, and concluding that it would open the others as well, I shoved it into the lining of a chair at the end of the corridor so that it would be there when I needed it. The rest of the keys did not seem to open anything whatever, and I returned them to the manager’s desk and locked his office again, hiding the key in a decrepit fire hose by an emergency exit.

Keeping the passkey with me, I went back down to the kitchen, where I had located a small office in which there was a metal box mounted on the wall, containing rows of further keys to all the cabinets and padlocked freezers. I assembled on a tray what by now seemed to be an exquisite, and also rapidly digestible, dinner of bread and cake and cheese and a bottle of chilled white wine and carried it up the back stairs to the fifth floor. If I heard anyone approaching, I planned simply to set the tray down and clear out. The tray of food would look odd sitting there on the floor, but certainly not inexplicable. On the fifth floor I laid everything out and made a sort of picnic under the sun lamp. Then, after a brief dip in the pool, I went down and let myself into the less desirable of the two empty guest rooms, where I locked myself in and went to sleep between clean sheets again for the first time in two days.

O
ver the next weeks I settled into a comfortable routine in the Academy Club. Each evening I prepared myself a large meal, which I carried up to the fifth floor and ate under the sun lamp. Then I washed and shaved — the most difficult task of the day. Next to the main dressing room there was a large lavatory lined with washbasins and shelves, on which were arrayed razors, scissors, combs, brushes, and every sort of soap and lotion — but no electric razors. The shaving soap did not adhere well to my face, but — as much to show myself exactly where my face was as to soften my beard — I daubed on huge quantities of it, and, gazing intently into the mirror, carved the lather out of the air. Then, since the noise of a shower would have crashed through the whole building — and would have prevented me from hearing anything, furthermore — I washed myself standing in front of a basin.

Afterwards I liked to slip into the pool and swim repeatedly up and down its length in the darkness. It is odd how much I swim now: I never much cared for it as a child. Lonely and boring but cool and pleasant.

Every week or so I did my best to cut my hair around the edges, flushing the trimmings down the toilet. And every few days I washed out my clothes.

I kept track daily of the reservations for guest rooms, and if there were any empty, I got fresh sheets from the linen closet so that I could make up my bed in the morning and then locked myself safely into a room for the night. When the rooms were all full, which they often were during the week, I stretched out on a couch or on bundles of freshly laundered towels.

During the day I would read in the library, selecting my books early in the morning when no one was about and placing them on the shelves in my favorite alcove. I was beginning a systematic study of physics — or, more specifically, of particle physics — a subject that in my opinion has more in common with theology than with science and that you should probably avoid unless, like me, you find it has some immediate application to your daily life. The Academy Club library was weak in the sciences, but it was adequate for a start, and I spent long hours working my way through encyclopedia articles and periodicals. When I grew bored, I looked at the newspapers half-heartedly, although what they described seemed more and more to be utterly unconnected with my existence. Or I slipped up the fire stairs to the roof and slept under the sun.

At first I made a point of going outside every day, usually at noon, when the Club filled up. I had begun to go a bit mad during those days when I had kept myself locked up inside my apartment. It had affected my judgment, made me delay leaving far too long, and I was determined now to force myself out into the fresh air, where I would get some exercise, keep my mind clear. Not lose all perspective.

I usually walked up Madison, always an exhausting feat in itself, and then crossed over into the relative safety of Central Park. The openness of the park and its emptiness — compared to the city streets, at least — made it easy to move around, and, imagining that I was quite safe, I began to take long walks there, sometimes not returning to the Club until evening.

On an overcast afternoon during one of those expeditions, I found myself on a bench at the edge of the fields north of the Seventy-ninth Street transverse. I had chosen what I thought was a safe bench — one with a slat missing — but when a small group of schoolboys approached, I immediately got up and walked out onto the grass. I always retreat from groups of people, especially children. And, proving me right, one of the boys hopped up onto the bench I had been sitting on and walked down the length of it. There were five or six of them, most of them black and none of them more than fourteen years old. They were laughing and exchanging taunts as they drifted along, and occasionally they would poke at each other playfully, pretending to fight.

“You call me ‘sir,’ boy. I’m your father, you know.”

I was not paying much attention to them. The sky had suddenly turned quite black, and I was thinking how unpleasant it would be if I were caught here in a shower, miles from the Club. Stupid to be out at all on a day like this. As I stood there deciding how best to make my way back, sheets of rain abruptly emptied out of the sky, and I was instantly soaked. I stood there in the downpour, dully wondering what I should do next and only vaguely aware of the children shrieking behind me.

“Shiiit, boy! You wet!”

“What about you? Shit!”

Two of the boys had run for the cover of a tree, but their clothing was already drenched. The others, like me, stood there helplessly as the rain cascaded down.

“Hey! Look at that! A waterspout!”

I turned to look.

“Look! It’s moving.”

It took a long instant for me to grasp the awful fact that they were talking about me. The rain was spattering off me and pouring down the surface of my body to create an eerie, but clearly visible form.

“Look at it! What the fuck is it?”

“Hey, it’s alive!”

“Some kind of animal.”

“Looks like a person.
Shit
!”

We looked at each other for a long moment, the boys and I, not moving or saying anything. I had to get way from here. I turned and hurried off across the grass in search of some sort of shelter.

“It’s moving again!”

I had gone twenty yards when suddenly I felt a sharp blow in the back. I wheeled about fearfully, expecting to find something right behind me, but I saw only the boys, following me in a pack twenty feet behind. As I turned to look at them, they held back warily.

“You see that? I hit it! I hit it!”

One of them cocked his arm. They were throwing rocks at me!

“It’s stopped!”

They were all watching me, none of them moving now.

“What is it, Bobby?”

“It’s an animal.”

“No, look! It’s got arms! It’s a person!”

“It’s just a waterspout. Only looks like an animal.”

One of them took a tentative step toward me and hurled something.

“I got it again! Fucking rock bounced right off it.”

Several of them seemed to be holding rocks. I took a step back, and they all edged forward.

“It’s moving again! Come on!”

With fear welling up in me like nausea, I turned and ran. As soon as I started to move, they were after me.

“It’s getting away!”

“Get it!”

I felt something sharp hit the back of my neck. It hurt, and I realized that I was now absolutely terrified. I had to try to think. Running was useless: they could run as fast as I could, and I was only drawing them on. And where was I running to? I turned desperately back to face them, holding my arms up to protect myself.

“It’s stopped!”

“Watch out!”

They slowed up but continued to inch toward me. One of them had found a short but solid-looking dead branch somewhere along the way, and he held it upraised, ready to swing at me. They began to spread cautiously around me. I hesitated, trying desperately to think what to do. Each step I took in retreat seemed to draw them on. I forced myself to take a step toward them. They backed up uncertainly. No one said a word. I took another step. They backed off further, one of them throwing a stone half-heartedly. The boy with the branch raised it over his head. I charged toward them, waving my arms. Two of them turned and ran. But the boy with the branch darted toward me, swung his branch hard down into my left shoulder, and jumped back. I groaned.