The Visible Man

by Chuck Klosterman

The next two days passed without irregularity. I was still upset and out of sorts, but each day got easier; I started to wonder if we’d all overreacted. John had phoned a security company the day after his alleged collision, but now we weren’t sure it was necessary to schedule an appointment. The more I thought about it, the less hazardous Y____ seemed. Perhaps he was just lonely and I’d become his only friend. Maybe I misled him. Maybe I gave him the wrong impression about my intentions. Maybe I was scared of him only because he was smart enough to do the impossible, and maybe I was punishing him for being different than other people.

  These are the kind of thoughts I entertained, because I was just smart enough to be totally stupid.

  It was a Thursday. I was with a patient. I can’t write too much about this individual, as she has her right to privacy and I have an obligation to protect that right. However, this patient’s problems were so common they’d be impossible to tag on any specific person: She was an attractive young woman with irrational body issues, she wasn’t sure what she wanted as a career, and she was often devastated by anonymous comments posted on her blog. At the time, I probably had five other patients exactly like her. She talked about her life for forty minutes, I responded with five minutes of commonsense advisement, and she left to go home. The door to my office slammed shut and I began typing a few details from our session into an e-mail addressed to myself. And then, from across the room, I heard the voice.

  “She’s pretty awful,” it said.

  I was startled, but I was getting used to being startled. I was sick of being startled. I was more angry than surprised. I took a deep breath and tried to be the adult.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said slowly. “I can’t believe you’d do this. I can’t believe you’d interfere with my work. I can’t believe you’d completely disregard what I do for a living. And I can’t believe you’d judge a perfectly nice woman who has legitimate problems, but I suppose that’s just the person you are. I can’t believe you’d come here. Get out. Now. I never want to be around you again. Get out of my office or I’ll call the police.”

  “Oh, quit pretending you care,” said Y____. “You can’t fool me. I know you. You’re concerned about this woman? This woman? Do you honestly believe either of us learned anything meaningful about her fake life? At least you got paid. I could solve her in two minutes. She has body issues because she has a body. Tell her to cancel her magazine subscriptions. She doesn’t have a career because she isn’t interested in working. People write cruel things on her blog because she’s a lazy thinker who actively courts the attention of self-loathing strangers. These are all things she intuitively understands. Haven’t you noticed how she always answers her own questions? All she wants is a temporary friend who’ll tell her that she’s no different than anyone else, and she knows you have to be that person as long as her father writes you checks.”

  “I’m calling the police,” I said, and I picked up the phone.

  “Turn on the tape recorder,” Y____ said.

  “What?”

  “Turn on the tape recorder. Let’s get this on the record.”

  It was so like Y____ to make that request. It was so like him to demand indulgence. My microcassette recorder was on the desk. I picked it up and pointed it at him like a handgun. I hit RECORD with my thumb. I don’t know why I made such a dramatic gesture, but I did. I’m sure it looked ridiculous, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to shoot him.

  I recorded only the next minute and fourteen seconds. This is the only segment of the interaction that isn’t a reconstruction from memory.

  Y____:

  Is the red light on? It is. Excellent. You know, not that it’s any of my business, but you should really buy a digital recorder, Victoria. It’s going to be impossible to find microcassettes in a few years. But I digress. Victoria, please tell the jury why you met me on a Saturday afternoon, recreationally, without informing your husband of who you were seeing. Or who you were not seeing, since that’s probably something you’d like to say in order to seem clever.

  VV:

  Come on. Really? This is what you want to do?

  Y____:

  Are you denying that we were together?

  VV:

  What does that have to do with anything?

  Y____:

  I’m just curious over whether you view our time together as social or professional. Because, you know, you didn’t charge me anything. We didn’t talk about my life or my problems. We went to a record store, a bookstore, and a bar. We went to a bar. Is that the accepted standard of care for licensed therapists in the state of Texas?

  VV:

  You know, you’re pathetic. This is sad.

  Y____:

  No. No, not really. Not sad. Curious. I’m curious about your side of the story. Obviously, our relationship is broken. I’m just trying to understand who’s at fault here. I want to hear both sides. I’m that kind of open-minded dude. You act as if this situation was entirely predictable. It strikes me that—

  [I turned off the recorder. I had to stop giving him what he wanted.]

  “Stay out of our house,” I said in the most threatening way I could muster. “Don’t come into our house, ever again. I’m not playing around. Stay out of our house.”

  “I’ve never been in your house,” said Y____ (or words to that effect). “Why do you think I was inside your house? I don’t even know where you live. What’s your address?”

  “Stay the fuck away from our house! Jesus Christ. Are you deaf? Stay away from this office, and stay away from me.” I was losing my handle, so I took a few breaths and tried to become the person I was supposed to be. “You can’t come into our house anymore. You just can’t. My husband will hurt you. He’s more upset than you realize. This is not a funny situation or an interesting situation or whatever type of situation you want to pretend that it is. This is serious.”

  “Your husband will hurt me? Your husband,” said Y____. “Does he intend to shoot me with a musket?”

  “Don’t come into our house. I’m begging you. What do I need to do to convince you to stay away? Do you need me to start seeing you again professionally? If I have to keep seeing you, here, in my office, I will. But stay away from the house.”

  “So you do want to spend time with me. That contradicts what you just said, Victoria. Are you sure your thoughts and feelings are the same? Because you never think mine are.”

  It was no use. There was no way I was going to convince Y____ of anything, and all he was going to do was contradict everything I said in a desperate attempt to keep us talking. In his mind, that was the only way to keep our relationship from ending. As I listened to his regressive arguments, I had a flashback to my freshman year at Davidson: I remembered how impossible it was to break up with my boyfriend from high school, and how he seemed to believe that starting a nightly fight over the telephone was not terribly different than being together as a couple. I realized this had already gone way too far, and the only remedy was to detonate every bridge we’d ever crossed. I chose the nuclear option. I told Y____ that I loved my husband, even though our marriage was not perfect. I told Y____ my interest in his life was solely a product of what he’d done scientifically (and not remotely related to his qualities as a man). I flatly told him, “You’re not a good person.” I explained how I was not physically attracted to him, and that it was no coincidence he had to be invisible in order for me to spend time with him in public. I said I sometimes enjoyed talking with him, but not enough to put up with his thoughts and actions. I said that I didn’t want to know who he really was, because that person was probably worse than the person he was pretending to be.

  I could not see how these words affected him. I could not see his face. But I knew. I could see him, in my mind.

  After I finished my speech, there was a wordless gap that felt louder than the conversation. Eventually, I heard a few scrapes from across the room (he must have been sitting on the floor against the wall and was finally standing
up). For a moment, I thought he might just walk out without saying a peep. But that, of course, is not his way. He had to say something. He couldn’t stop himself.

  “I was too kind to you,” he finally said. “You liked me when I insulted you, because you like men who treat you like shit. That’s your problem. As soon as I started treating you like a real person, you lost interest. I know I have problems, but your problems are worse.”

  With that, the door to my office unmagically opened and unmagically closed. “Are you still there?” I asked aloud. I had to make sure he was gone, even though I’d never truly know. But I received no response, and I took that at face value. It was an agonizing brand of relief; I felt sick, but I also felt better. It was over. I really believed that. I don’t know why, but I did. I guess I’ll always be an optimist, even if that makes me a fool.

  The Worst-Case Scenario

  What happened on the night of September 18 is, for understandable reasons, painful to re-create. Though the event lasted only minutes, it’s become the central fracture of my existence; I now see my life as having two distinct halves. It will probably seem that way forever. I hope I’m wrong about this, but I doubt it.

  Whenever I’ve anecdotally described what happened that evening to other people, they inevitably ask the same question: “Did it seem like a movie?” I know exactly what they mean by this, and I understand why it’s something they’d ask. Our exposure to media makes everyone believe they can conceptualize certain popular impossibilities; by now, we’ve all seen so many “invisible man” movies that we assume we can imagine the unimaginable. But that’s not how it was. It wasn’t like a movie, except at the very end. So my stock answer to the question is this: “Not at all, except when it was.” This allows people to laugh at something that isn’t funny.

  After my disturbing office conversation with Y____, I counseled two more patients and returned home. I immediately told John what had transpired. He was not surprised. When I told him that things were really over and that I might have (finally) hurt Y____ in an irreconcilable way, he scoffed. “We’re installing a motion detector next week,” he said. “The security people are coming Monday morning. I’ve already scheduled an appointment.” John knew less about Y____ than I did, but—in many important ways—he understood him better.

  The early part of our evening was fine—uncharacteristically idyllic, to be totally honest. I made chicken stir-fry. John and I did the dishes together. I asked John if he had any work to do, but he said, “Not tonight.” We took a walk around the neighborhood as the sun went down. After we returned, we watched a documentary titled Visions of Light on IFC. I think we went to bed around eleven p.m. We both read for an hour and fell asleep. As I drifted away, I remember being pleasantly surprised by how little I’d thought about Y____ that entire night. It really seemed finished. My mind was clear. Sleeping was easy.

  But something woke me up.

  I don’t know what that something was—it could have been a sound, it might have been the sense of being watched, or perhaps both. But something woke me up and I immediately felt sick. I felt like I was about to have a car accident. I sat up in bed. I looked toward our open bedroom door. The doorway was empty, but it didn’t look the way an empty doorway should: Within an utterly dark room, the doorway looked darker. The blackness had a shimmer. I reached for my glasses and put them on my face. The shimmer disappeared, but the darkness did not. My scalp felt hot. My palms were damp.

  “John,” I said. “John.”

  John woke up like a patient after surgery.

  “There’s someone here, John.”

  In an instant, John was vigilant. He grabbed his glasses and reached for the hammer below the bed. He jumped up from under the covers and said, “Where? Where?”

  Now, this is mildly embarrassing, but it needs to be said for transparency: John doesn’t wear clothes when he sleeps. I typically wear sweatpants, but I always sleep topless. When I looked at John, it did seem a bit tragically comedic—there he was, an old, nude man with eyeglasses on his face and a hammer in his hand, crouched at the knees like a high school shortstop. “This is going to end badly,” I thought to myself. “We are not ready for this.” But we had no choice. This was happening. I got out of bed and pointed at the doorway. “There,” I said. “He’s there. Or he’s out there. He’s either there or out there.”

  John rushed the door and swung his hammer through the open space. It struck nothing. He swung again, wildly. Again, nothing. He walked through the doorway onto the second-floor landing. He swung in every direction. Nothing. I turned on the reading lamp next to the bed and followed my husband through our bedroom door.

  Why did I turn on the reading lamp? No idea. Habit, I suppose. But it made a huge difference. The dim light emanating from our bedroom cast huge shadows across the rest of the house. My five-foot-five body generated a thirty-foot shadow on the living room floor. John’s shadow was just as large. And now we could see a third massive shadow, longer than either of ours. I grabbed John by the arm and said, “Look at the walls!” For a moment, I thought I was a genius. I’d cracked the code. But then Y____ simply said, “I’m right here.”

  The voice was calm and the voice was close. He could not have been more than ten feet away, standing on the same second-floor landing, looking at two naked people who had run out of ideas.

  “Call the police,” said John. I’d left my cell phone in the kitchen, so down the stairs I ran. Despite everything that was happening, I still felt self-conscious about Y____ seeing me topless. Certain insecurities never disappear. Upstairs, I could hear my husband yelling at Y____, unleashing a concentration of profanity I’d never heard him utter. I could also hear Y____ laughing and asking sarcastic questions about the hammer. I dialed 9-1-1 and pleaded for assistance. When the operator asked what my emergency was, I only said, “There’s a man in our house. Please get here soon.” There was no sense in trying to explain.

  Before leaving the kitchen, I should have grabbed a carving knife or a rolling pin. But I didn’t. The thought never even occurred to me. I rushed back into the living room and looked toward the banister on the second level. It was like John had taken LSD: He was naked, standing on the landing, raving like a lunatic, yelling at nothing. “I’m gonna fucking kill you, you fucking cunt,” he said. “I’m going to rip off your fucking head and jam it down your faggot throat.” But Y____’s voice never changed. He never seemed nervous. He didn’t seem menacing. He just seemed like a jerk.

  “I’ve grown fond of your wife,” said Y____. Even now, he talked like an asshole. “And she’s falling in love with me. Now put down that hammer and get some clothes on. Let’s talk about this like men.”

  “I’m not gonna fucking talk to you,” yelled John. “Get out of my house!”

  “No,” said Y____. He sounded bored.

  “I’ll kill you,” said John.

  “You won’t,” said Y____. “Don’t try.” And with that, John rushed forward, straight toward Y____’s voice, swinging the hammer in a huge diagonal stroke across the front of his body. Once again, he hit nothing. He was thrown off balance, like a boxer who’d overpunched his target. And then it happened: I saw John’s lithe body lift off the floor, float over the banister, and fall twenty-five feet, straight down to the wood below. He tumbled end over end, like a bowling pin knocked into the air. His body rotated 270 degrees as it fell.

  It was absolutely the worst thing I’ve ever seen. The fall seemed to last longer than our marriage.

  For one terrible instant, it looked like he would hit the hardwood headfirst. That would have killed him instantly. But his body kept rotating, and he landed on his tailbone. He screamed. I screamed. I rushed over to him. He said, “Get away!” I didn’t know what to do. I looked up at the second-floor landing, and (of course) saw nothing. What did I expect to see? Human nature is impossible to overcome.

  I could hear Y____ walking down the stairs. He was taking his time. I looked around for the hammer, which John
had released as he fell. I was going to kill Y____, or at least I was going to try. That was my final decision. A lot of problems I’d been grappling with suddenly seemed simple.

  “We can go now,” said Y____.

  “Are you out of your goddamn mind?” I screamed. “You just killed my husband.” This wasn’t exactly true (and probably didn’t give John a lot of confidence about his condition), but my mind wasn’t right. John was still on the floor, moaning.

  “Come with me,” said Y____. I’ll never get over how calm he sounded. “They won’t be able to find us. I can promise you that. They’ll never find us.”

  “You’re so sick,” I said.

  “We’re running out of time,” said Y____. “We can’t have one of those conversations where we go back and forth about why I’m right and why you’re nervous. We need to leave now. Everything will be okay.” It was as if he did not even hear John’s groans. He was blocking them out entirely. To Y____, John was already a carcass.

  “You’re fucking crazy,” I said.

  “Don’t do this, Victoria,” Y____ said. “We need each other. You know that I’m right.”

  “Kill yourself,” I said. “You’re a liar.”

  As I knelt beside John, I looked at Y____. He wasn’t there, but I could see him as clearly as I could see the body of my broken husband. I’d never seen him so easily. And Y____ could tell. He knew I could see him now. That’s why he was in my house.

  It was at this point that my existence became a movie, if only for five seconds. John’s hammer was laying in the middle of the rug. In a flash, it levitated off the ground. The hammer hung in the air like a cheap special effect from the unpopular eighties, bobbing and weaving, cocked and loaded. It was an amazing moment. What can I say? It was an amazing thing to see. But it was also terrible, because I thought it was going to crush me. “This is it,” I thought. “This is where Y____ beats me to death.” Maybe he’d torture me. Maybe he’d rape me first, or maybe he’d do it after I was dead. I had been wrong about Y____ so many times that nothing seemed off the table. I waited for his attack and wondered if I could fight him off long enough for the cops to arrive; I wondered what the cops would do when they saw a topless woman wrestling with herself on the floor.