The Invisibles (8 page)

“I just don't want to be that woman,” she went on. “I don't want to go after married guys because it's safer, you know? I just don't want to be a victim.”

“I see,” he said flatly, unable to hide his disappointment. Really, he had expected more from her than such a sordid little fantasy.
He wondered if he had ever been on the same date with her, or if he had always been alone at the movies, sitting with a stranger in a friendly looking disguise. She was in the middle of saying something, but he cut her off. “Look, I should go. We're wrapping up my daughters' party.”

There was a violent intake of breath on the other end. “Michael, don't be like that.”

“Maybe I'll see you later.” He touched the End button before she could say more. He turned and saw Tristan coming up the sidewalk, smiling at him. The younger man had spilled a little soup on the front of his shirt, and it had stained yellow. Aware of his swollen eyes, wondering if he looked as if he had been crying, he gulped and mustered a big smile to match the freshness of his voice. “Hey Tristan. You guys about finished up?”

“Yes sir. You know, Mister — ”

“My name's Michael.”

“I just wanted to say I was sorry for what I said to you during the game. It was really inappropriate, and I hope there are no hard feelings.” He held out his strong right hand, its skin still uncreased and tight. “I totally didn't mean to disrespect your house.”

He accepted the handshake and dropped his chin ironically to show the gesture was unnecessary, because there was no problem, never had been. “Don't worry about it, Tristan. I wasn't really angry at you anyway.” He reached into his pocket and brought out his wallet. Shaking his head when the caterer held up a hand, he pulled out four twenties and gave them to him. “Here's a tip for each of you. You going out tonight?”

Tristan was still looking at the bills, holding them tight in his hand. “Um, yeah. I'm going to the Highlands.”

“Have one for me,” he said.

Tristan squinted in happy confusion, then looked back at the van, where the other caterers were climbing in. “Definitely, man.
I definitely will.” Beginning to blush under the attention he was getting, he looked back at the door they had left open and mumbled, “Well I better go. I guess we're going now. Thank you, sir. It's really generous.”

“Call me Michael,” he said. “That's my name.”

But the caterer was already halfway down the sidewalk, running as though his coworkers might depart without him. When he reached the open door, he hopped into the backseat and, without looking back, pulled on the handle behind him. The door slid shut with a firm bang. The driver pulled the front end away from the curb, and a moment later the white van was racing with a faint bounce up the street.

The block lay quiet, its trees in gentle motion. A golden dusk was descending. He looked up the sidewalk, mentally retracing his steps, passing through the gate, and reentering his lavish house. Inside, his absence would have gone unremarked. The mothers were gathering their daughters, who were begging to stay overnight. Cindy was in the kitchen handing out goody bags, and the twins were plotting to extend the party. The night lay ahead, and he could do as he pleased. Tomorrow meant getting on another airplane, checking into another hotel. That part would be easy. This past January, curious, he had performed a rough count, and found he had done it more than a thousand times.

Now the snow poured down so Mason only glimpsed the road between wiper flaps. On the windows the snow built to ridges and fell away, and when he looked out seeking a familiar glimpse of flat, snowbound farmland, there were only individual flakes whipped out of a slurry of descending whiteness. He'd been alone on the road for almost an hour, a privacy he'd used to cry about Wendy at first, though the grief had passed, giving way to a feeling of giddy excitement. He was going home for the first time in thirteen years.

The freeway was closed, and there had been no patrol cars since the announcement, back before the radio voices turned mushy. He doubted he would see one before he reached Mansfield. It was Christmas Eve, and the slashed state budget meant fewer cops all over.

A deejay had described the storm stretching from the Canadian Rockies to the Appalachians, dumping snow on central Ohio until tomorrow afternoon, delivering more white than anyone wanted for Christmas. Mason had laughed. Like a snow globe, the pun contained the entire Midwest. He opened the ashtray and got out the baggie of crushed cocaine. He had it tied off with a twister around a red cocktail straw for easy access while driving, and he took a snort, never taking his eyes from the vanishing and reappearing road, careful to miss nothing.

It was four o'clock and growing dark. In his parents' house the furnace bellowed in the basement. His older brother was opening dessert wine and his mother dusting the cookies with powdered
sugar while his father stood by the tree at the living-room window, gazing out on the weather with the military sternness that was his mainmast. That was how it had been thirteen years ago when Mason returned from college at about this hour. He had come in lugging a bag of dirty laundry, prepared to deliver a rehearsed speech about how he'd failed out his first semester. He was not ready to see his mother so happy, wiping her hands on her apron so she could take him by the ears and kiss his forehead and cheeks, or Leonard waiting behind her with a second glass of port, or his father drifting in, a smile breaking through his solemn features. All that week Mason was unable to tell them, and afterward he'd driven back to school and worked in the tire shop, avoiding their calls until he found a job at a resort in Kentucky and started making his way south. No doubt they came looking for him, found the empty apartment they'd been renting. He might have been in Memphis then. It was hard to say, it was so long ago he felt more embarrassment now than guilt — he had been a boy then. Eventually he'd reached New Orleans and called that home, though these last few years, when he was feeling especially rotten and desolate, he'd taken to monitoring his family on the Internet. He thought about calling sometimes, but it felt like a lame gesture, and he was more interested in them, anyway, than in telling the story he sensed they'd want to hear about him.

Tracking them was easy, given his brother's tendency to post family news on his blog, even though no one posted comments save for the occasional fat cousin from Michigan whom nobody saw. Mason had been watching them for some time now. He knew all about them, felt as if their lives had been restricted to a small compartment of his consciousness. Sometimes he felt he might be connected to them in a way modern science couldn't explain. He knew details, his father's heart congestion, his mother's struggle with her bone density. He knew Leonard had lucked into a managerial
position at Toyota and was seeing a woman who had a little girl. He had seen pictures online — the woman, Tanya, was good looking, surprisingly so, given Leonard's characteristic dullness and expanding paunch, and the daughter, a blonde child with gapped front teeth, was exceptionally cute. He felt he knew Tanya and her daughter intimately, though he'd never met them, and though people in his hometown frowned on mystical thinking, he sensed that if he kept his mouth shut when he met them they would find themselves mysteriously charmed by him. They had been planning for some time to go to his parents' today and open presents, and Leonard had mentioned it so many times on the blog that Mason wondered whether his brother wasn't really posting secret messages to him. Of course Leonard would never do this consciously; he was too jealous, too attuned to his local frequencies. But maybe some part of him, something spiritual, reached out to Mason while the dumb body labored on. He imagined Tanya's daughter shrieking with delight as he threw her into the air and caught her repeatedly, while Tanya and his parents looked on, amazed by his way with kids, and Leonard unable to conceal his envy. It was not too late, he thought, never too late for family, for even if he had been the troublemaker, he had always been the favorite. Long before his troubles began, he saw himself in the story of the prodigal son. He was the carrier of his family's joy. He reached for the baggie in the ashtray.

They were going to be so surprised. Maybe too surprised. Maybe he should call from his cell phone to diminish the shock of his arrival. There was his father's heart to think about. His mother's ticker probably wasn't shipshape either. He picked up his phone and nearly called, but then he remembered he was driving in extremely hazardous conditions, and then he remembered his earlier reasoning that it would be better to wait until he had stopped the vehicle before he broke a thirteen-year silence. A shiver of pleasure
ran from his throbbing head down through his spine and arms and butt. It was a good thing he wasn't any higher.

He glimpsed a passing exit leading up to what must have been a country highway. This couldn't be Mansfield, not yet, and even if he wanted to stop to rest, there was nothing out here but farmhouses and barns and silos scattered over vast tracts of snowy farmland, and if you had asked Mason to guess how many of those structures had been abandoned for decades he would wager more than half, the rest inhabited by couples of a vanishing generation, people so old they were probably already tucking themselves in for the night.

He had to push on another couple of hours at this slow-going speed, which with the coke would be no problem. He would slow and make the gradual turn into his parents' driveway, and the people inside would see the headlights. He had presents, a backseat filled with them, gift-wrapped in shining silvery blue paper and red ribbons this very morning at a mall in northern Kentucky. Shopping had been a revelatory experience. Wandering among the stores, he had been seized by a spirit of generosity and serendipity that felt new to him. He found himself spending twice what he had vaguely budgeted, but it didn't matter; he could always pour more drinks, and people would give him money. That had always been simple enough. He found he had a talent for choosing the right gifts. There was a book on history's greatest military campaigns for his father, a copper-clad sugar boiler for his mother, a new bass fishing rod for Leonard. Though he had yet to meet Tanya, he was sure he knew her better than his brother did, reading beyond the observations in Leonard's blog, and he had picked out a sleek leather jacket for her, figuring her for a size six — if he was wrong, there was always the gift receipt. For the little girl, he had picked his favorite board game, The Game of Life, in which you started out with a single plastic peg representing a person
and rolled dice to advance along squares in a road on a cartoon landscape while acquiring a car, an education, a job, a family, and a fortune. While you could choose certain things, like whether you wanted to retire, your ability to do what you wanted depended on luck, the roll of the dice, the card of fate. It was just like real life, Mason thought as he reached for the baggie in the ashtray, except it only lasted an hour or so, and you could play as many times as you wanted, be as many people as you wanted, and there were no real consequences to what you did. Which wasn't like real life, contrary to what the salesman in the toy store entrance had tried telling him.

Just thinking about it made Mason furious all over again.

The guy was from India or Bangladesh or someplace like that, this salesman whose eyes had sought Mason's from across the store filled with children, tired parents, noisy video games, and mechanized singing teddy bears. He was in his late forties, his face clean shaven, his black hair turning white around his ears. He beckoned for Mason to come to the folding table he'd set up in the doorway of the shop. He was sitting in front of a steel box with a meter divided into fields of blue and red. The meter's red plastic arrow rested just to the left of the zero in the blue field.

“How are you, sir?” the man asked in a solemn unaccented voice, as if they had embarked on a costly business transaction. “Enjoying your shopping?”

“Merry Christmas.” It occurred to Mason the guy might not celebrate the holiday, but then what the hell did he expect, selling whatever he sold in a mall the day before Christmas? He set down his clutch of plastic bags and put his hands on his hips. He was feeling the need to duck into a bathroom and get the baggie out of his coat's inner pocket. After he learned about this steel box. “This looks like a Geiger counter or something. What's it measure?”

“Stress,” the man told him.

Mason laughed. New Age shit — he should have known. “How does it do that exactly?”

The man stood and offered him two small steel rods with steel buttons on their top ends. The rods were connected by wires to the Geiger counter thing. “Take a wand in each hand and let it rest there. When you are ready, rest your thumbs on the indicators on the top of each wand. The meter will determine your stress level and show us with the indicator arrow.”

The rods were the weight of supper knives. Mason felt doubtful holding them, pressured to buy something. He wished he had refused to hold them. “These are going to measure my stress?”

“Yes. Rest your thumbs on the indicators when you are ready.”

Mason felt nervous. The things were probably rigged so that your stress reading was through the roof. The man regarded him with the detachment of someone confident of his superiority. He was probably selling herbal remedies or something. Mason put his thumbs on the steel buttons and looked down at the stress meter. The red arrow swung rapidly through the blue field and into the rightmost quadrant of the red field and wavered there at a spot between the numbers seventeen and eighteen. Great, he was probably about to have a heart attack right here.

“What the fuck does this mean?”

The man took the wands. “It means you have a great deal of stress in your life.”

He thought of Wendy again and felt the clamp of guilt. He was getting irritated with this stranger. It was none of his business. The certainty in the man's voice disgusted him. “How the fuck does this machine know?”