The Visible Man (24 page)

On the Sunday following our July 18 session, I traveled to Missouri to briefly visit my mother (who was ill with shingles). Around eleven p.m., my husband called me on my cell phone; this was surprising, as John rarely calls me (or anyone) on the telephone, even if I’m away for weeks at a time. We don’t have the kind of relationship where talking on the phone is necessary. But he called on this night, agitated and terse.

“Someone was in the house,” he said. “Your patient was in my house. I know it.” John is immune to panic, but I could detect traces of alarm.

I asked why he believed this.

“Because an invisible man was in this house, and you have a relationship with an invisible man. It’s not like this is a mystery. I don’t need Basil Rathbone to explain what just happened.”

John says he was working in our upstairs office when he “felt” (
his word
) someone else in the room. He insists he could “feel” (
his word
) someone’s “presence” (
his word
). These were strange words for John to select—he regularly criticizes the use of such words in other people’s arguments, particularly in historical and persuasive writing. He said he turned on every light on the second level of our home and loudly asked, “Who’s there?” He claims he asked this question ten or fifteen times. After several minutes without response, he considered calling the police. “I am going to call the police,” he said aloud, although I doubt he seriously considered doing so. He returned to work. It was at this point that he heard someone (or something) tumble down the stairs. He rushed out to
the second-floor landing and looked toward the base of the staircase (these stairs descend into our living room and have about twenty carpeted steps). He saw nothing. He walked down the stairs, picked up a poker from the fireplace, and jabbed around the floor of the living room. He says he stabbed every square foot of the living room floor. It was at this point he heard (or claims to have heard) someone exiting our residence through the kitchen door (which leads into the backyard). However, that door was locked from the inside when he later checked it.

John was outraged by what he believed had transpired. He was demanding and performative. At the time, I remember thinking his anger seemed funny.

“You will end your professional relationship with this person,” he said. “You will end it this week.”

I told him I could not and would not. I told him that I did not believe Y____ had been inside our house.

“Then explain what happened tonight,” John said.

“Nothing happened tonight,” I responded. “Had I not told you about Y____, this entire hallucination would have never even occurred to you.”

“You’re overlooking the obvious,” John said. “You’re refusing to see what’s obviously happening here. There was a deranged person in our home, and it’s your fault. If something happens, it will be your fault.” He hung up the phone. I called him back immediately, but he declined to pick up.

I didn’t sleep much that night. I was annoyed at John and skeptical of his motives (and I was tired of feeling those things on such a consistent basis). I didn’t believe Y____ had entered our home. I wasn’t 100 percent certain, because anything is possible. I didn’t discount the prospect entirely. But it seemed unlikely. I refused to believe he was there.

Here, of course, is where I see the irony and absorb the shame: I can’t make a good argument as to
why
I felt that way, particularly since breaking into strangers’ homes was the main thing I knew about this person. He’d told me dozens of stories that were either
bald-faced lies or disturbing truths, yet I still found myself trusting him more than my husband. I’m tempted to say it was because we were (finally) making real progress with our therapy and because Y____ was (finally) seeing me as something approaching his equal. But as I look back now with clearer vision, I realize those arguments contradict the veracity of my denial; the fact that our relationship was improving probably amplified the likelihood of Y____’s home invasion. Sad as this sounds, I probably thought Y____ was innocent simply because John believed the opposite. John is the type of person who’s always certain about his perceptions; the fact that he
suspected
Y____ was there was all he needed for that to become true. John never doubts himself. Granted, his arrogance is not without merit—he’s a brilliant man, and he doesn’t make accusations without cause. Even his most vitriolic academic critics concede this. But brilliance can make the unreal seem reasonable. I believed John was just smart enough to be totally wrong.

Tuesday afternoon, I returned from Missouri. John apologized for the way he’d spoken to me over the phone, although he still wanted me to end my work with Y____. I told him I’d consider doing so, but not before directly asking Y____ about the alleged incident. It was my intention to do exactly that when I met with Y____ on Friday. However, the moment I saw him on July 25, I could tell he’d done nothing wrong. If he’d been in our house that Sunday, his behavior would have been different—he would have immediately told me he was there, or he would have acted nervous and evasive, or he would have come across as too casual and nonchalant. He would have volunteered an alibi without any prompting. He definitely would have done
something
. I would have noticed
something
. But he seemed exactly the same. If anything, he seemed extra chipper and unusually polite. I never even brought it up.

When I returned from work that evening, John asked what Y____ had said when I asked if he’d been in our home. I told him that Y____ had traveled to Corpus Christi that weekend to observe a collection of born-again Christian oil drillers he’d read about in the newspaper. Y____ had returned with a brutal second-degree sunburn,
I insisted, and he spent most of our session peeling the dead skin off his arms and shoulders. “It was a little disgusting,” I noted. “It was unseemly. There was dead skin all over my office carpet. I had to use the vacuum after he left.”

At the time, John believed me completely, or at least he said he did.

It was a nuclear detonation, and it was my fault. A superstructure of shallow feelings collapsed into one bottomless feeling, and we both lost control of who we were and what we were doing. I don’t like to think about it, but now I have to.

“Television is a form of one-way entertainment,” Y____ said in the middle of our August 15 session. What made August so convoluted was that we quit talking about problems and more often just
talked
, about nothing and everything, exactly like we had on the afternoon outside the coffeehouse. It wasn’t anything close to therapy. I didn’t even realize how much things had changed until I went back and listened to the tapes. “Television is a form of oneway entertainment, but that’s not how people want to think about it. They want to believe they’re somehow involved. This is why they talk back to the TV. This is why they get upset if certain characters don’t behave in a likable fashion. This is why they complain when the story moves further from their own personal definition of interesting. This is why they criticize boring episodes on the Internet and expect the show’s writers to study their thoughts and care what they think. This is why they love shows that involve voting. They believe their personal experience with television effects what television is. But television is the only place where this belief exists. Within their actual life, they feel powerless. They believe voting is frivolous. They think caring is a risk. They assume they have no control over anything, so they don’t even try. They perceive reality backward.”

I don’t watch much television, but I knew what Y____ was talking
about. It was what I was doing with him (and I’m sure that’s why he brought it up). Y____ was a television show. He would come in each week and talk about his life, and he’d treat me in whatever manner he chose (with no regard for how I felt). I would accept that treatment, because I was somehow convinced my reactions had an impact on future episodes. Over time, I treated him like a poorly written television show I wanted to adore—I changed the meanings of things I could not control and ignored the things I could.

During our five sessions that August, Y____ continued to tell anecdotes about the strangers he watched and the data he gathered. But he no longer lectured me; now he dropped these snippets into conversation like insouciant scraps of meat, and I chewed them like a puppy who’d earned a reward. There was the story of a man named Byron who lost his job because he couldn’t resist pulling practical jokes around the office; he was fired when he filled a co-worker’s desk with tampons (the co-worker had been on leave for sexual reassignment surgery). He mentioned a woman who threw a cat out of her third-story window every night, apparently because the cat enjoyed it (Y____ saw this as some kind of allegory for the economy). He detailed human sleeping patterns and graphically described the sound of grinding teeth; he told countless stories about acts people had committed on Ambien, most notably a woman who’d pour herself full glasses of vodka and tell her boyfriend it was “dream water.” He mercilessly mocked any homeowner who adopted feng shui design principles. He exhausted twenty minutes of one session outlining the strengths and weaknesses of various U.S. airports (Pittsburgh and Portland were his favorites). My favorite story was about an obese woman who mentally masturbated while watching horse racing on television. “She didn’t even touch herself. She didn’t need to,” said Y____. “What I could never figure out was the catalyst for her pleasure. Was it the horses? Was it the jockeys? It might have been the race itself, because she always seemed to orgasm at the precise moment the lead horse approached the finish line. ‘And down the stretch they come,’ or whatever. I think she was from Saratoga. Some sick childhood thing, I suppose.”