The Visible Man (9 page)

The next morning he wakes up early. He drinks a 7:05 Dr. Pepper for breakfast and checks his e-mail. He has dozens of messages, but nothing he cares about. Most are left unread. He leaves for work. I stay behind. I immediately turn on his computer, assuming a man who lives alone will not have his e-mail account protected by a password. But Bruce is the kind of man who does. I suppose the kind of guy who buys a four-bedroom home in order to spend his nights in a desk chair is the same kind of guy who protects his e-mail from roommates who don’t exist. I look through his desk drawers and find nothing personal. He has a photo album in his bedroom, but almost all the photos look like they were taken during the same fraternity party. I look for anything that might indicate who Sarah is, but there’s nothing. No trace. Outside of his hard drive, there’s nothing in this house to indicate that Bruce is alive.

The day drags. Bruce arrives home at roughly the same time as yesterday. He walks in the door and checks his e-mail. He goes upstairs to change clothes, strolls back down, and rapidly masturbates. Today is yesterday. He boils a few hot dogs and eats them at his desk, wrapping them in white bread and smearing the meat with chili sauce. He starts playing RISK. He leaves some comments on the political blogs. The only difference is that, tonight, he’s no longer composing a hundred-word e-mail a hundred different ways; tonight, all he does is check his in-box. He checks it constantly. It’s robotic, mechanical. Bruce knows a lot of keyboard shortcuts—he can check and close his e-mail in less than two seconds, and he does so incessantly. He gets messages every hour, but not the one he wants. He downloads Billy Squier’s
Don’t Say No
, listens to half of “In the Dark,” and then he checks his in-box. He attacks Alaska from Kamchatka, and then he checks his in-box. He reads a blog post about China’s environmental policy, follows a Wikipedia link to a list of prominent Chinese entertainers, puts a documentary about Yao Ming into his Netflix queue, and then he checks his in-box.

He shows no emotion while compulsively rereading the message he wrote the night before. I sit on the floor right next to him, unseen; we both reread his letter to Sarah. Neither of us sees anything worth rethinking. Around two thirty a.m., he gives up and goes to bed. When he checks his e-mail the next morning, there’s still no reply. He drinks his morning Dr. Pepper and leaves for work. I was in that house for five days, and Sarah never responded. It was probably the only thing he thought about, despite the fact that he was technically thinking about twenty-five other problems.

Now, what do you think this means, Vic-Vick? Why do you think I told you this story?

I told you this story because I’m curious about what element you view as meaningful. What part of Bruce’s life do you consider to be most important? In my view, Bruce was living three lives. He had his exterior life, which was composed of day-to-day work and shallow friendships: This was his job, the people he had beers with, all the normal daily filler. This exterior life was boring and unsatisfying—I suppose I can’t prove that he didn’t like his day job, but that’s the impression I got. Now, he also had a second life, on the Internet—a life that was simultaneously unreal and fulfilling. It was a life he controlled completely, and it was the means for his escape from the boredom of being a normal person with normal responsibilities. But he also had a
third
life—this hyperinterior life, within his own mind, where he incessantly imagined an intimate, online relationship with Sarah. A life where his first life and his second life were intertwined. Every time he wrote and rewrote that e-mail, he was activating that relationship inside his imagination and fighting the natural, irrational urge to become fixated on a person he didn’t really know. I mean, Bruce was a sane man: He knew his connection to Sarah was not real unless she responded to his e-mail, and he knew he’d be living like a crazy person if he just sat at a desk with his arms
crossed, staring at his static in-box. So Bruce used the Internet to normalize his abnormal existence. As long as Bruce was engaged with his computer, it was not unusual to check and recheck his in-box, or to write and rewrite a single e-mail. That’s what people do when they’re sitting at a computer: They multitask and they daydream and they think about everything at once. One can easily fold obsessive self-absorption into the process of online communicating. In other words, the Internet was doing two things for Bruce—it allowed him to separate from the exterior life he hated, but also allowed him to stay engaged with an interior life he wanted. It was, ultimately, the single most important aspect of who he was: It removed his present-tense unhappiness while facilitating the possibility for future joy. It made the dark part of his mind smaller, but it made the optimistic part limitless. It added what he needed to affix and subtracted what he hoped to destroy. And maybe this was bad for Bruce’s humanity, but I think it was probably good. I think it took a mostly sad man and made him mostly happy. The degree of authenticity doesn’t matter.

Right?

Here’s the bottom line, Vicky: You are an Internet. What the Internet did for Bruce, you do for me. You are the bridge through which I mind the gap between my exterior and interior life. Now, judging from what you’ve told me, you don’t believe my exterior life is real. You think my exterior life
is
my interior life, and that I’m making up a delusion to compensate for some other problem. Personally, I don’t care that this is what you believe. You don’t need to believe what I tell you. My self-esteem doesn’t hinge on whether you think I’m a reliable patient. I don’t care what you think of me and I never have. I never will.
But right now, I need this experience
. I need to have you in my life, because you act as the control. I want to upload these images into someone who isn’t me. And if the only way to make this happen is to meet with you in
person, face-to-face … well, then I will do it. I will come to your office, because I want to keep talking and I don’t want to start over with someone else.

Give me your address.

END OF PHONE SESSION 3

NOTES:
On balance, I’m classifying today’s conversation with Y____ as a success (albeit a strange one). He
is
coming into my office next week, or at least that’s what he claims. That was my goal, and my goal was achieved. But this does not feel like a win. My confidence is shaken. I should not admit this (even to myself), but it’s the truth. I feel uneasy with Y____’s casual aggression. Was Y____ describing himself when he told the story of Bruce? That’s my gut feeling, but such a diagnosis seems imperfect. Did he make the whole thing up? His details oscillate between unnaturally specific and uselessly general. Was I wrong to accuse him of lying? It seemed like the honest move, but perhaps I’ve lost his trust. In general, I’m losing my grip on this process. Y____ is either fabricating his story out of whole cloth or completely believes these falsehoods to be true—I
must
keep both of those possibilities at the front of my mind at all times, and I need to keep them intellectually equal. He’s articulate, but I can’t let his articulation bully me. Perhaps I need to accept that I’m scared of this patient. I still look forward to talking with Y____ every week, but part of me is frightened. I don’t think I’m very good at my job. Does Y____ know this? I fear that he does. I should have made different choices with my life. This is not something I’m good at.
⁷

I was physically introduced to Y____ in the most standard of ways: There was a knock at my office door, and I told the knocker to enter. The entrance swung open and a man stepped into the room. I knew who he was before he told me. There were no surprises.

He was a man. A strange-looking man, but nothing more.

He was tall and he was thin. Cadaverous. Perhaps six feet five or six feet six, but no more than 175 pounds. His head was a skull on a stick; it was shaved to the skin, but I could see a subtle shadow where his hair would sprout. The hairline was receding. He wore an oversized black T-shirt, khaki pants, and garish white tennis shoes. His arms were wiry and unnaturally long. His nose was large, as were his Adam’s apple and his ears. His teeth were jagged and yellow. “Ichabod Crane,” I thought to myself. “He looks like an actor auditioning for the role of Ichabod Crane.” It was a sweltering day in May, but he was barely sweating. I can recall this because I asked him where he had parked his car (at the time, I was in the midst of a minor parking dispute with a neighboring office building and lived in constant fear that my patients might get towed). He mentioned that he had arrived on foot. I could not imagine how a man in a black T-shirt could walk any distance in the 90-degree Texas heat without perspiring, but Y____ was immune. When he shook my hand, it was cool and dry, like a brick from the cellar.

I turned on the tape recorder.

When I treat patients in my office, I never sit behind my desk. The desk creates a barrier, and barriers are the enemy. Instead, I sit in a white Eames chair. My patients have the option of sitting in
an identical black Eames chair or on the couch. No one ever takes the couch, particularly during their first session (too overt). Y____ looked at both options and requested that he sit in my chair. I said, “No, that’s not how things work here.” I don’t know why I used those specific words. Y____ asked, “Does it matter where I sit? Can’t I sit in the white chair?”

“If it doesn’t matter,” I responded, “then why not sit in the black chair, like everyone else who comes here?”

“Because I have a preference,” said Y____. “I prefer white objects. If I express a preference for white objects, why not allow me to sit in the white chair?”

“Perhaps I have my own preference,” I said.

“Do you have a preference?”

“Yes. I prefer the white chair. The white chair is my preference.”

“Then by all means, take the white chair,” said Y____. “I would never interfere with your preference.”

We both sat. I smiled. He smiled back, but only for a moment.

“So here I am,” he said. “You wanted to see me, and now you have. This is your office, and I am here. I’m in your office.”

“You are,” I said. “Thank you for coming in. It’s really nice to see you.”

“Yes, yes. Of course. Of course it’s nice. Let’s talk about how nice it is. This is a wonderful office—you have plants, carpeting, a relatively quiet air conditioner. It’s contemporary in a classic way, or perhaps vice versa. Can we get to work now? Or do we still need to have a pretend conversation about how much your rent is?”

“We can absolutely get to work,” I said. “That’s a good attitude. I’ve really been enjoying our work thus far. The progress has been, you know—
progressive
. But let me ask you something, before we get going: You mentioned that you liked white objects. That’s an interesting thing to like.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Well, what if I think it’s interesting?”

“What if I think it’s not? There’s no meaning here, Vicky. My affinity for the color white doesn’t say anything about me. Look,
we’re not going to do this. You need to accept that. I already understand the process. We both understand the process. I don’t need to slowly grow comfortable with the conceit, and you don’t need to understand why I like white objects. Let’s get to the provocation. Let’s start with what matters: You think I’m telling a fictional story. Your stomach tells you that I’m telling the truth, but your mind insists your stomach is crazy. I’ve been thinking about this all week. When we last spoke on the phone, I realized I misspoke. I said that I didn’t care if you believed me. That’s not accurate. That was my mistake. What I meant to say is that I don’t care if you think I’m
an honest person
. I don’t care if you think I’m a good person or a bad person. But I do need you to believe the specific things I’ve told you. If you don’t believe I’ve done the things I’ve done, it will derail our conversation. You will hear everything I say as an extension of a delusion, and the content will get ignored. I will say things like, ‘I once saw Event A happen to Subject Zed,’ and you will wonder, ‘What is his inner motive for telling that particular story about this particular fabrication? What does this story
represent
?’ But that won’t be what’s happening. Anything I elect to tell you won’t be theoretical or metaphorical. It will be something real that happened in my life. So I need you to believe that what I’ve said—and what I will continue to say—is not untrue.”

Y____ stood up from the chair, jarringly, throwing himself upward by pushing down on the armrests. It was like watching a giraffe awaken from a tranquilizer. “May I walk about,” he asked. He began to pace around the room, erratically, looking down at the floor while gesturing with his hands. This behavior is what I’d come to classify as “the Y____ Character.” Whenever Y____ became “the Y____ Character,” his dialogue would feel rehearsed. It was like watching a one-man show. Though I’d already experienced several of these moments over the phone, this was the first time I witnessed it with my eyes. Over time, I’ve come to accept that the Y____ Character was (probably) the real Y____. It was everything else that was (probably) the show.