The Visible Man

by Chuck Klosterman

  CALL 2

  “Your machine cut me off. You should set it to record for a longer amount of time. But what I was saying, basically, is that I know what a smart person would do if placed in the position I’m putting you in. I realize how this must sound. Still, I’m hoping you will resist the temptation to interfere. You will have enough things to deal with when this process starts to accelerate. Don’t overthink what’s happening here, Vicky. I am not a swamp monster, Vicky. I’m not an invisible man. I’m not a vampire, and I’m not God. I’m just an incredibly interesting person. Good night, Vicky.”

  The First Meaningful Phone Call

  [After consultation with Dr. Jane Dolanagra, my own therapist and academic mentor, I concluded that the conditions Y____proposed in his message were not as problematic as my gut reaction indicated. What was the risk? Why not allow Y____ to freely say whatever it is he wants me to know? Isn’t the entire purpose of therapy to make the client comfortable? To put the client in whatever position makes them most willing to become emotionally vulnerable? To get them to talk on their terms, so that he or she can eventually have those same kinds of conversations inside their own head? That was my thinking at the time. Obviously, I’m less comfortable with that position now. But Dolanagra and I both postulated that—if Y____ was indeed as intelligent as I believed—he might naturally gravitate toward the same platform I would have pushed him toward.

  Some context: After I opened our April 11 call by saying, “The floor is yours,” Y____ lectured nonstop for forty-three minutes, at which point I informed him that less than two minutes remained in our session. This manuscript does not contain the entirety of that call (or the totality of any of our subsequent interactions), as those single-spaced transcripts stretch to well over 2,400 pages. What I have done (to the best of my abilities) is excerpt the most critical and illuminating passages from each individual exchange. Parties interested in reading the complete transcripts may do so by visiting the basement of the Univ. of Texas Psychiatric Library, where the pages have been archived by local sociohistorian Daniel Arellano. They have also been transferred to microfiche and can be accessed through the attorney general’s office in the William P. Clements Building, 300 West 15th Street, Austin, Texas.]

  [Note to C. Bumpus: For purposes of simplicity and impact, I have elected to present Y____’s speech in a traditional prose style. Certain decisions—when to break paragraphs, when to include italics or employ unorthodox punctuation, when to encapsulate especially unwieldy stretches of dialogue—were dictated by my own peccadilloes. However, all of those decisions were solely driven by the desire to reflect Y____’s thoughts in a manner that best captured my experience. If this is a problem, we can address it later.]

  APRIL 11 (Y____ calls office line, 10:00 a.m.):

  Let’s begin. You know, I don’t mind talking like this. I’m sure you think I’m going to be one of those people who hires a therapist and then spends six weeks talking about how they hate talking about themselves, but I’m not that kind of guy. I’ll never understand why people behave like that. Do they feel some kind of social pressure to prove they’re not self-absorbed, even though the basis of this entire process is a critical examination of one’s own self-absorption? In this day and age, no one would ever say, “Therapy is ridiculous.” Right? Only a philistine would say that aloud, because we’ve all been conditioned to accept the value of this process. You’d have to be a jackass to think like that. Right? Yet when faced with the experience itself—whenever someone opens that interior door to the conscious and subconscious, fully aware they’re paying money to talk about themselves in a completely one-way relationship—everyone feels an urge to say, “I don’t really know what I’m doing here” or “I’m not very comfortable talking about myself” or “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be figuring out.” It’s childish, really. At this point, who doesn’t know what kind of conversation they’re supposed to have with a therapist? You enter therapy in order to confront four-word sentences: Why am I here? Where am I going? What does it mean? It’s not some kind of maze. I understand the expectation. I want to talk about my feelings. That’s what I want. I’ll never fight you on this. I don’t have those prejudices.

  [I attempt to interject in order to mention that there is no expectation. Y____ immediately cuts me off.]

  Stop. Just stop, please. You’re already blowing it. What did we agree to do? Isn’t that kind of interjection the exact opposite of what we agreed? We agreed that this would not be a back-and-forth fabrication. This is not an episode of In Treatment. You’re not Bob Newhart. I don’t need your reassurances. I suppose some of the burnouts who pay your rent need a weekly litany of reassurances, but I don’t. Did I not make that clear? Let me clarify again: If certain questions arise and you feel the need to ask them, either for clarity or because you’re lost, go ahead and ask them. Our conversation will be impossible if you don’t have that option, and I don’t want to confuse you. But we agreed this was not going to be some kind of Nora Ephron chitchat that toggles back and forth while you sit there and nod on the other end of the telephone. That was not our agreement. We agreed on something else. If I misinterpreted our agreement, tell me now. Because that’s the only kind of interaction I’m willing to have. I decide how this will go. I decide.

  If this is acceptable, say nothing. If not, tell me now.

  [Ten seconds of silence]

  Okay then. Thank you, Vicky. I appreciate your cooperation, Vicky.

  Where do I begin? I suppose I’ll begin by saying that my goal in life, pretty much from infancy, has been to understand the truth about human nature. And—yes—I did say infancy. This is not hubris, and I don’t care if it sounds pompous or unrealistic. It’s the way that it was, and it’s the way that I am. My earliest memories all involve staring at people and wondering who they actually were. Staring at my mom, for example, and wondering who she was and what she really felt, and how her mother-centric worldview compared to mine. I didn’t know the definition of the word worldview, but I still had one. My mom was a different person around my brother and a different person around my dad and a different person on the telephone—why would I be the one exception who saw the real her? I would play by myself, alone in my bedroom, aligning my little green army men on the floor or throwing a Nerf ball against the window, doing childish things in a childish way. I wasn’t abnormal. But I’d inevitably find myself thinking difficult thoughts. I’d think, “You know, this is really who I am. Right now, right here. This is me. And this is the only time I’m me.” With my parents, around other kids, sitting in a pew at church, sitting in my desk at school—in all of those situations, I was someone else. I was a version of myself, but not the actual me. I understood this separation before I understood anything else. I understood this before I had the language to explain it to other people, or even to my own consciousness. The question was always there, whenever I went out in public: Who are these people? I knew this was central to everything. I knew I was looking at a world that wasn’t there. I knew I was looking at a simulacrum of life, despite the fact that I had never been introduced to the word simulacrum and wouldn’t be able to define it for more than a decade. This has been the only thing I’ve ever thought about, for as long as I can remember. Everything I did, everything I accomplished … it was all in the service of this one question. So this is where we start: We start with the recognition that the things I have done were done in order to understand the truth about people. If I’ve done bad things, or if we agree that these things could be viewed as bad, or if someone was hurt collaterally because my actions created a domino effect, we always have to weigh those consequences against what was learned. Or—in some cases—what I hoped would be learned, even if that ultimately proved fruitless. I say this only because I want you to feel comfortable judging me, Vicky. Most people hate being judged, but I am not most people. You can judge me all you want. However, I do insist that you judge me accurately, and—in order to do that—you need to be aw
are that nothing I’ve done was committed without cause. My motives have always been one hundred percent good. Now, sometimes, an individual can have totally pure motives and still do terrible things. I’m not discounting that. But keep my words in mind. We’ll both be better off if you do. I will absolutely accept any judgments of my character at face value, but only if those judgments are fair and balanced.

  Back to me: I was always singular. Most children want to believe they’re different, but I actually was. I say things other people won’t even think. The week I started second grade, they skipped me ahead to third grade. When I was supposed to start eighth grade, they advanced me into high school. I graduated at fifteen. Most of the time, this is the worst thing you can do to a child. It makes them insecure. It makes them fragile. I saw it happen to other kids. But that never hampered me, or at least I never noticed if it did. It was a nonfactor. I didn’t mind skipping grades. It made me feel abnormal, but in a good way. Plus, I was unusually tall. I was almost six feet by the time I was twelve. I’m sure that helped. Tall people are naturally confident. History has proven this—Alexander the Great, Wilt Chamberlain, Gisele. The tallest person in the room always runs the show, and I’m a show-runner. When I was fourteen, I applied for a summer job with a telemarketing company. When I showed up for the interview, the little Willie Loman running the shop asked why he should hire me. I said, “Well, for one thing, you could probably fire some of the dead weight around here. I don’t see anyone irreplaceable.” I got that job. I crushed it.

  But you know what? The thing that really made me different wasn’t my height. It wasn’t my confidence, or the fact that I could read fast or multiply three-digit numbers in my head. What made me different was that I didn’t care about socializing with other kids. I never enjoyed the experience of having friends—they always seemed like a bunch of illiterate teenagers pretending to be other people, trying to impress each other, obsessing over bad music and sexually explicit movies, talking too loudly about where they bought their jeans. Outside of my classes and a few of my teachers, the only thing I enjoyed about high school was the gossip. I really, really loved gossiping about other students. I know that’s a lowbrow confession, but it was always the best part. Gossip was the only thing I found interesting about my peer group. We would speculate on who was dating whom and we would talk about why so-and-so thought she was so awesome and about how so-and-so got an abortion, and it was all conjecture and analysis. There were certain kids we analyzed every single day. To us, they were celebrities. Of course, there were also a lot of jejune bozos we never gossiped about, but that demarcation had it’s own little meaning, too—gossipy people define themselves by who they ignore as much as by who they care about. You establish that delineation organically. What can I say, Victoria? I’m a gossip. I don’t deny it. I wanted to be like that, so I was. But what I really wanted was to know. I wanted my gossip to be verified or disproven. I mean, how was I supposed to relate to these people if I didn’t even know what they were really like or who they really were? And I didn’t know those things. I didn’t. I knew how they acted, but that’s not the same thing. I started to wonder: How could I learn the truths that weren’t visible? What was I missing? What was everyone missing? I became obsessed by these questions, so I started following people. I would follow them home and hide in the bushes. People always make jokes about freaks hiding in the bushes, but that’s literally what I did. I was the boy in the bushes.

  One particular memory stands out. There was a kid I decided to observe—a long-haired boy with glasses. Thick glasses, long bangs. I don’t remember why I picked him. I guess because he seemed easy to follow. He lived eight blocks from my house. At night, I would tell my folks I was going to the library at the community college uptown, but instead I would sneak into this boy’s backyard. His room was on the second floor, so I spent the first few nights observing his parents in the living room. They didn’t do anything except watch TV, but then again, his mother and father were always in the same room. They were never alone, so they couldn’t be themselves. My principal target was the boy, so I eventually took a gamble. There was this massive, sprawling tree behind the house, which I climbed. I climbed this tree, sat on a branch Zacchaeus-style, and looked straight into his bedroom window while the kid played Nintendo. It was incredible! I totally remember that first night—it was the first night I was able to see a person who wasn’t me. He was doing nothing, but he was doing it for real. No pretense. No self-awareness. I was seeing him as he really was. And I know this probably sounds like voyeurism, but that’s not accurate. Voyeurism had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t getting cheap pleasure from seeing something I wasn’t supposed to see. I was learning. It was like school.

  Now, this boy, this teenager—I don’t even remember his first name, but his last name was Swanson—he mostly just played video games. Driving games, like Pole Position. That was his modus operandi, and it was unremarkable. But sometimes he did something else. Every so often, and without any forethought, he would pause the Nintendo, turn up his boom box, and physically act out whatever song he was listening to. He’d perform, but only for himself. And he didn’t play air guitar, the way they always make it seem in movies and in rock videos; it was more like a Broadway musical. He would pantomime the lyrics of the song, lip-syncing all the words, jumping on the bed and spinning around the room like a woman. It was always the same songs off the same CD, always played at top volume. When his window was ajar, I could sit in my tree and faintly hear the music he would mimic: Rush. He listened to Rush. 2112. An album that no one at our school cared about. An album I’m certain this boy never mentioned to any of his friends. I mean, I knew this person. I suppose I was his friend, from his perspective. I saw him every day, or at least I saw the version of himself he dragged into school. He sat behind me in geometry and across from me in French. We had P.E. together, two years in a row. I knew what he talked about and I knew the things he pretended to like. And I can assure you, the version of the kid I knew from school did not give a shit about Rush. Not at all. Not in any way. And yet … and this seems so obvious now … he clearly did. He did care about Rush. He loved Rush. It must have been more important to him than all of the things he pretended to adore in public, because that was the music he played when he was himself. 2112 was already uncool and outdated, but it was the one thing he loved, simply for what it was. So I was fascinated by this. I was fascinated by this one minor detail that wasn’t remotely minor—his secret relationship with 2112. His secret bedroom performances, devoid of anything performative. I always wanted to ask him about it. I wanted to just casually walk up and say, “Hey, Swanson. So, what do you think of Canadian power trios? Any opinion? Do they inspire your very being? Any plans to do an oral book report on Anthem?” But, of course, I never did. I couldn’t. Too risky. Instead, I just watched him through his window. Over time, I lost interest and started following someone else. But Swanson was the first. He was the first person I knew.

  This, I assume, is exactly the kind of information you want from me. You want me to go back through elementary school and middle school and high school and college, and you want me to talk about all the things that supposedly made me who I am. And maybe I’ll do that, assuming these sessions go well and we need to keep digging for bones. Maybe I will and maybe I won’t. But—right now—I want to accelerate. I want to talk about why I built the suit and why I developed the cream. You could argue, I suppose, that those things were not necessary. Certainly, there are easier means of surveillance. Wiretapping, for one. Hidden cameras, motion detectors. I had an intense interest in hidden cameras, and I used them on my roommates during college. Very often, hiding under a bed or inside ceiling panels can accomplish the same goals, at least in a limited capacity. But none of those things can truly reflect the sense of being inside a room. If you want to be in a room, you need to be in the room, you know? Even though that’s an infinitely more difficult endeavor. Even though the suit and the cream are uncomfortable,
and even though the physical toll it takes on my body is ludicrous. I’ll never feel the same. I’ll never be the same. But it had to be done.

  [Note to C. Bumpus: In retrospect, I should have stopped Y____ at this juncture and asked him to provide greater details about “the suit and the cream.” He might have complied. However, in my defense, I want to stress that I was still under the impression that “the suit and the cream” were part of Y____’s fantasy life and not tangible artifacts. I was also trying very hard to comply with Y____’s prearranged conditions, which demanded that I not interject during his monologues. At the time, gaining his emotional trust seemed more important than the credulity of his claims. If you’re wondering what I was thinking internally when he started talking about the suit and the cream, my answer is simple: I thought, “This is interesting. I wonder where this is going?” I assumed Y____ was doing something many patients do when they begin to feel relaxed around a therapist—I assumed he was expressing an obvious metaphor about how he viewed himself. The idea of donning a special “suit” or costume is a common symbol for someone hiding his true self from the world. The concept of “the cream” initially struck me as sexual, which was a subject Y____ had never alluded to previously. I was genuinely excited by these revelations and wanted to hear more. Only later did I discover my silence had been a mistake. I waited one session too long.]