Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (58 page)

“Why?” asked Alice, smiling beautifully.

“Because it’s an underlying principle of all rational thought. It’s a precondition—”

“You know, I’ll bet you’re a Capricorn,” said Alice. “You think like a Capricorn.”

From the annoyance that flickered momentarily in Donald’s face, I decided that he probably was a Capricorn — whatever that might be.

“Anyway,” Alice continued, “what would you do if a ghost appeared to you now? I mean, with incontrovertible sense-data and all that? Suppose it stepped up and gave you a good pinch so there wouldn’t be any doubt?” She gave Donald’s cheek a playful pinch, causing him to blush brilliantly.

For all Donald’s pompous certitude, his reasoning was absolutely correct, and I felt a bit sorry for him. Apparently, no one had ever explained to him that reason does not win arguments. Or for that matter, that winning arguments is not everything — or even much of anything. He should have counted himself lucky to be standing there basking in Alice’s smile.

“Well,” Donald replied, “I would be quite amazed, to begin with. I would have to extend and reorder the categories and concepts with which I think, in order to accommodate sense-data that were inconsistent with—”

“So you see my point of view is much more useful and flexible. If a ghost pinched me, I wouldn’t have to be amazed at all, and I wouldn’t have to rearrange a thing, or—”

I have never before or since pinched a woman’s bottom, and I am not precisely sure what moved me to it on this occasion — whether it was to vindicate Donald’s unfairly discredited argument, whether it was the attraction of her hips moving beneath the silk as she incessantly shifted her weight, or whether it was only the irresistible opportunity offered by the course of the conversation — but I reached out and took a fold of silk and flesh between my thumb and forefinger and held it for a long delicious moment.

Alice stopped speaking, and her entire body stiffened, especially the bit of it in my fingers, which I now released. Then with an effort she resumed.

“I wouldn’t be amazed…” She was looking at Donald resentfully, as if he were guilty of employing an unfair tactic. She looked down at his hands, which, as he was standing directly opposite her, could not possibly be culpable. Her gaze turned uncertainly to the men on either side of her.

This is wrong in every way, I thought. I should not be doing this. But lust and the logic of the situation drove me on. With my two hands I gripped her upper arms, pressing them against her sides. Her gaze traveled over the hands of the men standing around her. All in plain view, holding drinks or just hanging there harmlessly. She continued shakily.

“There are more things in heaven and earth…”

She turned about suddenly, and I withdrew my hands. No one there. Nothing. She turned back to face the others with a look of vaguely defiant puzzlement. I gently took hold of her arms again. She looked down at her right arm where my fingers made little indentations in her flesh, and she turned quite pale. I leaned over and kissed her exquisite neck. She shivered.

“Are you all right, Alice?” one of the men was saying.

“When you say something exists,” Donald was going on, “what you’re really saying is that it—”

“Do you want to sit down for a moment?”

“No… No. I have to go…”

“Do you want me to get you into a cab? Or take you home? I could—”

“No… I’m… I’m meeting someone now. I have to go.”

She walked straight out of the apartment, as if in a trance. I stayed right with her, my hand on her arm.

“Bye, Alice!” someone was shouting. “Where are you off to?”

“Is anything the matter?”

Alice kept going without looking back or answering. When the door closed behind us in the corridor, I turned her around so that she faced me and kissed her. She was utterly limp in my arms. Then, tentatively, she raised her arms and felt with her hands to see whether there was indeed some more or less human form there. Finding one, she folded her arms around me uncertainly.

I kissed her forehead.

“Oh God,” she said, “I can’t believe this is happening to me.”

I kissed her again on the mouth and suddenly she clutched me tight. I held her to me, feeling the entire length of her body, her thighs, her breasts, her ribs, pressed hard against me. I too could not believe this was happening to me.

Down the corridor I heard an elevator door slide open.

“We have to go,” I said.

“Oh my God!” she said, and I realized that this was the first time she had heard me speak. It seemed to startle her more than anything else that had happened. I put my arm around her and felt her trembling. As I walked her toward the elevator, she kept looking at me — or through me.

“Don’t speak to me in front of other people. You have to act as if I weren’t there.”

She nodded dumbly. Someone passed us going down the corridor, but neither of us paid any attention. I never even considered walking back down the stairs. I didn’t care what risks I took now. I pressed the elevator button, and when it came we got into the empty car together. A woman got in at the seventh floor, but Alice went on staring straight ahead in a daze.

What could she imagine? What had she imagined standing there at that party and feeling the invisible hands touch her mysteriously, then grasp her, pinning her arms to her sides? Feeling the mouth, somehow alive in the transparent air, kiss her neck. And what could she have thought when she fled, only to feel the inexplicable presence following at her side, seizing her in the hall, the unseen force crushing her, the phallus swelling up against her, the tongue pushing into her mouth. And then when it began to command her. “We have to go.” A voice out of the air. “Don’t speak to me.”

We walked through the lobby together and out into the street, both of us half delirious. I still had my arm around her, and I kept looking at her. She was extraordinarily beautiful. I turned and kissed her there in the street, and she must have looked quite odd with her head tilted back and sideways and her mouth strangely flattened and gaping open, because there was suddenly a doorman beside us, saying, “Are you all right, Miss?” I took her by the arm and led her down the street.

“Do you live alone?” I asked.

She nodded and then said. “Oh God. I can’t believe this.”

I kissed her again and she ran her hands around my body — as much to verify again that I was actually there as out of any passion.

“You should hail a cab,” I said softly.

We are not going to get into a discussion of the ethics of all this. If we did, I would be relying mainly on the argument that consenting adults can do as they please, although you might want to raise the question of whether it would be strictly applicable here and whether her consent could be described as informed. You might argue that I was taking advantage of my situation — although I had to date found precious few opportunities to take advantage of it — or that I was only interested in my own gratification and I did not even know her, but the last argument would not be pertinent for long, and besides, Alice was very beautiful. And my desire was enormous and just about the only thing in my mind.

When the taxi stopped, out of habit I opened the door for her. Fortunately, the driver did not notice, and it seemed to add to the dreamlike quality of the whole episode for Alice. I climbed in after her and pulled the door shut. The driver turned and waited and then finally had to ask Alice where she wanted to go. As soon as she had told him, I leaned over and kissed her again. She moaned and wrapped her arms around me, and I completely lost sight of where I was.

The driver — some time later I became aware of his eyes, but I could not bring myself to care — watched in the mirror as the girl in the back seat writhed about in the most extraordinary positions, twisting over to one side and extending her arms up into the air. Her mouth opened strangely. She stuck her tongue out and twisted it around grotesquely. Her bosom seemed to flatten inexplicably as she writhed. She panted and grunted. Somehow the front of her dress pulled open and a breast was exposed and deformed itself, assuming one shape after another. Her dress was up almost around her waist, and her legs spread open, and her hips tilted and twisted. She was emitting a succession of little moaning sounds, and when we pulled up in front of Alice’s building and I turned and looked at the driver, I saw that his eyes were wide open and his face was contorted with some unusual combination of sexual excitement and terror.

I pulled Alice’s handbag down out of sight behind the back of the seat, found a five dollar bill, and shoved it into the tray. Alice gathered herself more or less together as the doorman appeared, and I pulled her out of the cab, so that she appeared to lurch impossibly across the sidewalk and through the lobby into the elevator. I was beyond caring what kind of impression we made. I did not for that matter care if this was the last night of my life. All I wanted was this woman, right away, and I might have made love to her in the elevator or the corridor, but somehow we made it into her apartment.

When she saw her clothes lifting off her body and flying across the room, she began half laughing, half sobbing. “Oh God. Oh God.” As for me, I almost wept to feel her smooth skin under my hands — her breasts, the hardened nipples, her buttocks, her thighs. I kissed her body everywhere. And when finally I spread her legs apart — it was the most exquisite moment of my life — and pushed slowly into her, she was half hysterical, quivering with fear or pleasure or amazement, until she began to explode, her hips and loins convulsing rhythmically. She was emitting screams or sobs and holding me as tightly as she could. Mind and body, I felt like a bomb bursting into oblivion, into a thousand irretrievable fragments.

I found, eventually, that I was lying dazed upon a bed, and Alice lay next to me, weeping softly.

“Who are you?” she asked through her sobs.

“No one,” I said, for some reason imagining that this would comfort her.

Her sobbing intensified. I laid an invisible hand upon her breast to soothe her. She gasped. She propped herself up on one elbow and, with an anguished look upon her face, stared at the space I occupied. There was a light on somewhere across the room, and she could clearly see that she could see nothing.

She reached over and began to run her hand over my body to verify again that it was all really true. And as her hand slid over my groin it collided with the rigid protrusion. She started skittishly, then grasped it, and in a moment I was over her and inside her again, and we were rocking slowly into each other. I could see her looking at herself, at her knees up in the air and her hips tilting forward. She wrapped her legs around the small of my back, and she watched herself, opened up, rolling forward and back. She got her hands around my head and suddenly found my mouth and began kissing me frantically. What could she have thought? Mastered by the brute blood of the air. Or whatever. I cannot remember that that pleasure ever subsided, but it must have, because I remember it starting up again, and we went on and on until we lost track of everything.

I
n the morning I awoke to the sound of Alice straightening up the apartment and picking up the clothing she had been wearing the night before. It was the most miraculous awakening I had known since the morning I had discovered my invisibility. There before me I saw, almost naked in underpants and brassiere, a beautiful woman, with whom I had made love just a few hours ago. Yesterday it would have seemed inconceivable that I should ever again enjoy such a moment. I would have liked to speak to her, but we had said hardly anything to each other the night before, and finding myself unable to think of anything sensible to say now, I lay there in silence, watching her.

From the way her skin glistened, I decided that she must have just bathed. I was struck by the practicality with which she busied herself about the apartment so soon after what must have been the most bizarre experience of her life. But as she moved around the room, she kept looking over at me — or rather at the bed covers where they molded the lower half of my body — with an anxious frown. She hung up the dress she had worn the evening before and came out of the closet with another, which she pulled on, depriving me of the sight of her long, naked legs. The dress had buttons up the back, so that she had to reach behind to fasten them, arching her breasts forward, tilting her head, and unfocusing her eyes the way people do when they are concentrating on a manual task they cannot see. She stepped into her shoes, walked up to the bed, and stood next to me, looking down at the mound of bed covers and the depression in the mattress. She put out her hand uncertainly, as if deciding whether to touch me or not, whether to assure herself once more that it was all true.

“Good morning,” I said finally.

She started. “Good morning. I thought you might be awake. How did you sleep? I mean, you
do
sleep, don’t you?… Of course you do. I know that.”

“I slept very well, thank you… How did you sleep?”

“Very well… Thank you.”

The conversation did not seem to be taking flight. There was a long, uncomfortable pause, during which I lay there supine, staring up at her, feeling quite awkward, and she stood staring uneasily down at me— roughly at my sternum, as it chanced.

“My name is Alice Barlow,” she ventured finally. “Maybe you already knew that.”

Without thinking, I started to tell her my name.

“I’m Nick— Just Nick, really. I only use the first name now.” For some reason my name seemed to distress her. She opened her mouth and hesitated, as if she were having difficulty formulating her question.

“What’s going to happen to me?”

I struggled to understand what she might mean by the question, but the only thing that occurred to me was that she was somehow concerned about possible gynaecological consequences of the night before.

“Happen to you?” I asked inanely.

She seemed extraordinarily nervous. She was looking away from me now.

“I mean… It sounds ridiculous… But then it
is
ridiculous — in some way or other… I mean, have I forfeited my soul or something?”