The Visible Man (20 page)

The meeting ended after an hour. The group left en masse. I stayed behind, unseen, sort of dumbfounded by what I’d heard. Our world is really backward, Victoria. It’s backward. Look what society does. It takes the handful of people who know how to succeed and makes them feel terrible for being different. Everyone is supposed to be mediocre, I guess. Everyone is supposed to be dragged into the middle—either down from their success, or up from their self-imposed malfunction. These people didn’t need a support group. These people needed someone to tell them they were okay. They needed to be told that the morality they’ve been forced to accept is manufactured and fake, and that their guilt is just the penalty for not being a failure. Do you know who was the smartest president of the twentieth century, Victoria? Do you know who was the greatest intellectual? Nixon. The bipartisan historians all agree it was Richard Nixon. Bill Clinton is probably second. He was a Rhodes scholar. So this means the two smartest presidents of the twentieth century were the only one we forced to resign and the only one we impeached. That’s how it goes. That teenage girl? The one who started the lezbo rumor? She could be president. She’s presidential material. She’s got brains and she’s got guts. But that will never happen. The world will convince her that it’s better to lose half the time, because losers are lovable. That’s the phrase, right?
Lovable loser
.

I tell you what, Vicky: Sometimes it’s terrifying to see how things really are. It makes me want to run away. I mean, I know I’ll never get proper credit for the things I’ve done and the truths I’ve learned. We both know I won’t. People want Santa Claus, and I’m not Santa Claus. I’m more like the guy who invented his magic fucking sleigh. I’m the guy who does the impossible things that need to be done, so that all the normal people can go back to sleep.

Though I am reticent to discuss my own life (even when it unavoidably intersects with my time with Y____), I need to outline a few pertinent details about what was happening to me during this specific period, purely for the sake of transparency.

I will be brief.

As stated earlier, I had not told anyone—including my husband—about what was happening with Y____. I lied to my own longtime therapist (the aforementioned Dr. Dolanagra) and claimed that Y____ had ended treatment without explanation in May. This required an even denser web of lies: I now had to come up with an ongoing weekly serial for Dr. Dolanagra about what was supposedly happening in my day-to-day life. I initially tried expressing boilerplate complaints about my marriage, but that made me more depressed than I already was. I tried talking about my own childhood, but I couldn’t locate any conflict (relative to most, my adolescence was devoid of adversity). I finally made up a crisis about a fictional high school girl I was supposedly mentoring who was considering an abortion (I built a composite “troubled teen” from various ex-patients and tossed in a few plot elements I remembered from
If These Walls Could Talk
—I named the girl “Joan” and focused on the political implications). To my amazement, Dolanagra was totally bamboozled—to this day, she still asks how Joan is coping. I could probably teach an improv class.

My husband, however, was harder to fool. He sensed something strange and hidden; our interactions were now punctuated by long stretches of unnatural silence. Ever since May 9, I’d become a different
person—I spent more time alone and went to bed two hours after John was already sleeping. I’d been in a book club, but I quit; I stopped following the news and avoided phone calls. Everything outside of my imagination seemed gray; the world inside my head was more electrifying than the world I had to live in. I started spending days by myself, walking along the lake to the Congress Avenue bridge in order to watch the bats. Every night, thousands of Mexican bats take flight from beneath this bridge, blanketing the sky like an undulating cape. Three thousand bats becoming one massive superbat, a mosquito-eating sky-creature. I did this dusk after dusk after dusk. It was an excuse to be alone and an opportunity to think about Y____. He had become the center of my professional life (and, by extension, my life as a whole).

In the weeks that followed our meeting outside the Caribou Coffee, I started to question my own feelings toward Y____; I started to wonder if I was becoming too entertained by his stories (and if that was damaging my ability to work with other patients and communicate with other people). When we met on June 20, I waited to see if he’d formally revisit the “misplaced” issues we’d casually discussed. I placed the responsibility on Y____ to bring it up. When he ignored me entirely, I decided it was time to tell John what was happening. Hiding this information seemed worse than anything I’d technically done. Moreover, I needed to know if this was really happening. Was I losing my mind? If I was, I knew John would tell me directly. He never has any compunctions about calling me crazy.

When I told John that I needed to talk to him and that he would need to sit down, his initial response was cold and predictable: “Are you having an affair?” he asked without emotion. I said I was not. “Are you sick?” he asked next. “Do you have a disease?” Again, I told him no. “You are not going to be able to guess what I’m going to say,” I assured him. “Quit trying. And no matter how you feel, this information must remain only between us.”

I told him almost everything.

I told him how my relationship with Y____ had started and what I originally suspected his problem was. I told him about our initial inperson
interactions. Obviously, most of what I told him involved the experience of May 9, which felt liberating to say aloud. It was like removing a megalith from the roof. I recounted every detail I could remember about that morning. By the end, I was almost shaking.

I expected John to disbelieve my story, in the same way I never believed Y____ until he proved otherwise. Amazingly, John did not seem skeptical (perhaps he was, but he didn’t show it). I also expected him to have a million questions, but he had only a few.

“So, he’s not transparent. Am I right? He can be invisible, or mostly invisible. But he’s not
transparent
. True? When he eats, you can’t see the food going down his invisible throat and lodging in his invisible stomach. You can’t see through his invisible skin. Am I right?”

I told him that this was accurate. I reiterated how annoyed Y____ always became anytime I referred to him as an invisible man. Oddly (or maybe predictably), John empathized with that sentiment.

“Is there any chance that this is some kind of hoax?” was his next question. I told him that I couldn’t
prove
that it wasn’t a hoax, but that I was 99.9 percent certain Y____ was the person he claimed to be. I had not seen him with my own eyes.

It was John’s third question that threw me off balance.

“So who is this person?”

I told John I didn’t understand the query.

“You can’t just become an invisible man these days,” he said. “I don’t know if you ever could, but you certainly can’t now. We live in a bureaucratic nightmare. I mean, does he have a permanent residence? People can’t disappear anymore. Does he have a Social Security card? How does he pay taxes? Did he fake his own death? What happens when you plug his name into Google? At the very least, would it be possible to verify his academic records, or his employment in Hawaii? That information must be online. Am I right? I’m right. Who is this person? Who is this person,
really
?”

I told John I did not know the answer to these questions. I told him that our relationship was not focused on those kinds of specifics, and that he hadn’t even filled out his insurance form. I told him I wasn’t a police officer, and that Y____ came to me for help. I told him
that all of those technical details were—on balance—insignificant, particularly when compared with the experience of being inside a room with a person you can’t see. Mostly, I was annoyed by John’s unsupportive posture. I was annoyed by John himself. Why weren’t my personal anxieties worth his concern? I’ll never understand why his first reaction is to immediately ask more questions. It’s like he can’t think about problems in any other way.

“You need to wonder about these things,” John said. “If what you’re saying is all true—and I have no reason to doubt you, because you’re not the kind of person who tells stories—then you need to recognize the import of the situation you’re in. True? This is major. This is a totally new landscape. You are the emotional confidante of a
phenomenon
. This needs to be investigated. You have a civic responsibility to investigate this. Am I right? I’m right.”

I disagreed with John, at least at first. I told him that my foremost responsibility was to the patient, and that I did not treat interesting clients any differently than uninteresting clients (this was a lie, but it’s what I said). John seemed completely oblivious as to why I was telling him about Y____. He never tries to see things from my perspective. He doesn’t have that ability.

“That’s the wrong way to think,” he said. “You’re a smart person, but you’re not being smart right now. Don’t take that the wrong way, but it’s true. You’re overlooking the obvious. This is not a normal scenario. This is a unique case. Traditional rules don’t apply. I would strongly advocate investigating who this person is and what they’re really doing. I mean, look: This man does not seem to be seeing you for conventional reasons. True? It doesn’t even seem like he’s coming to you for the reasons he himself purports. Right? True? Right? You’re not handling this case correctly.”

I was stunned by this accusation. It was consistent with John’s personality, but he’d never before questioned my professional abilities with such directness. It escalated our debate into a far larger argument, much of which gridlocked around issues completely unrelated to Y____: John’s unwillingness to take my career seriously, our unresolved decision to remain childless, the way our age difference
and racial experience creates an imbalance in our marriage (John is thirteen years my senior and African-American), John’s overall condescending tone toward almost everyone we know (particularly my closest friends), and a bunch of complaints and accusations I can’t even remember. We fought all night, and—though we both apologized the next morning—it placed a strain on our relationship that had not been there before. It was definitely the most problematic stretch of our problematic marriage.

When John and I got engaged, I knew we were very different people. I told that to everyone at our wedding, and they all made the proper “opposites attract” jokes during their toasts. But it turns out that we were remarkably similar, at least about things that didn’t matter. I’d been wrong about all the minor differences I assumed would cause friction: We had different politics, but our fundamental perceptions about fairness were the same; we loved different books and movies, but we had similar ideas about what made a book or movie good; we came from different places, yet we had identical views about how our upbringings shaped us. On a day-to-day level, our marriage has been easier than I would have ever expected. But what I didn’t realize on my wedding day—and what John continues to deny, even now, after everything that’s happened—is that we’re profoundly different in one metronomic respect: There’s nothing I care about more than how other people feel, which is the one thing John doesn’t care about at all. Or, to put it more on the nose: There’s nothing I care about more than how other people (and particularly John) feel about their lives, and there’s nothing that interests John less than how anyone (myself included) feels about any issue that doesn’t involve him directly. It has nothing to do with my love or his love or loving or levels of love. It’s just the way I am and the way he is. All my friends saw this when John and I were dating, but I never did and they never told me.

It took me a while to accept this. Maybe I’m still trying.

I expose these things not to embarrass John or myself, and not because I feel any need to live a public life. I expose them because it had an impact on things that happened later.

[What follows is an excerpt from June 27. The session initially dragged, as Y
____
seemed less talkative than usual. During a lull in the conversation, I asked Y
____
something I’d been wondering: What, exactly, did
he
feel he was learning from these observations, since he was always so adamant about the pedagogic component of his invisibility. In other words, outside of any espoused scientific revelations, what was he personally learning about himself? He immediately perked up at this query and became the Y
____
Character, lecturing in his bombastic, self-aggrandizing style. When I read this transcript now, it strikes me as highly rehearsed. He also didn’t answer my question at all. But if this exchange was scripted (and had no relationship to my query), why did he save it until I specifically asked my question?]

Roommate situations were strange. This became a problem whenever I tried to observe someone in their twenties—I’d select a target and I’d follow him into his life, only to realize he wasn’t living alone. So then I’d have this claustrophobic situation where two or three or four people were interacting in a small, enclosed area. It was formal and completely fake. Plus, my likelihood of being discovered increased dramatically. If a person is alone, you can get away with a lot. You can get away with more than you should. You can sneeze, and the person will hear you sneeze, and you will see them hearing you sneeze. It will be abundantly clear that they heard an unexplainable noise. They will perk up and look around. They’ll give the whole room the once-over. But that’s as far as it goes: They notice something, and then they go back to whatever
they were doing before. They assume they’re hearing things. They return to a state of nonnoticing. But once you have two people in the room, every noise is unforgiving. If you sneeze, the couple will look at each other and wordlessly ask, “Did you hear that?” And then they start wondering. People trust their friends more than they trust themselves. That was something I established straight away. And you’d think that would make them feel more secure, but it doesn’t. It has the opposite effect: Unconditional trust destroys relationships. Two people meet as open-minded strangers. They like each other, so they grow closer. It feels good. They become unguarded. Eventually, the two strangers become two friends. But once that boundary of distrust is removed from the equation, they start to learn who the other person really is, and then each starts to resent the other. They end up feeling more distant as friends than they were as strangers. I’ve seen this happen a million times.