Going For a Beer

by Robert Coover

  He was also obliged to stay away from cold places. Though his nakedness was apparent to no one and he himself was accustomed to it, it was a reality he could not ignore. Cold winds drove him inside, air conditioning out. Sometimes, to warm himself or to conduct some business or other such as fencing his stolen goods, or perhaps simply in response to a deep longing, he made himself visible with masks, wigs, and costumes. So as not to have to steal these things over and over, he bought a house to store them in, and took up stamp and coin collecting and growing orchids on the side. There were many choices amongst his costumes, many characters he could be, and this added to his existential angst: who was he really? Without a costume, he was invisible even to himself. In the mirror he could see no more than anyone else could see: a blurry nothingness where something should be. “You are a beautiful person,” he would say to it, more as an instruction than a comment.

  When costuming himself, he had to dress carefully from head to toe. One day he forgot his socks and caused something of a sensation when taking his seat on the subway. “Sorry, a . . . a kind of cancer,” he explained to the people staring aghast at his missing ankles, fully aware (he exited hastily at the next stop) that the mouth on the mask was not moving. On another day in a crowded elevator (when visible, he loved to mingle with the human masses, feel the body contact, something that usually had to be avoided when invisible), his scarf fell off, which was even worse. A woman fainted and the other passengers all shrank back. “It’s just a trick,” he chuckled behind the deadpan mask, which no doubt appeared to them to be floating in midair. He riffled a deck of cards enigmatically in his gloved hands, and when the door opened, he turned his empty eyes upon them to mesmerize them long enough to make his escape. After that, he took to wearing body suits as the first layer, a kind of undercoat, much as he hated getting in and out of them.

  Mostly, though, he went naked and unseen, committing his crimes, indulging himself in his manipulative and voyeuristic pleasures. Women fascinated him, and he loved watching them do their private things, frustrating as it was at times not to participate. Even when they were most exposed, they remained unfathomably mysterious to him, and an unending delight. And it was one day while hanging out in the ladies’ room of a grand hotel during a hairdressers’ convention that, when things were slow, he stepped into a stall and raised the seat to relieve himself, only to have the door open behind him and the seat lower itself again, and he knew then that he was not alone in his invisibility. Was she (he assumed “she”) sitting on the seat or was this merely a gender signal and a warning? Taking no chances, he backed out silently, hoping he wasn’t dripping, the opening and closing of the stall door no doubt telling her all she needed to know.

  After that, he began to feel pursued. Perhaps she had been following him for some time and he hadn’t noticed. Now he seemed to sense her there whether she was or not, and whether or not, he had to consider his every move as if she were. She might still be an active crime fighter, just waiting to apprehend him or to avenge some crime that he’d committed in the past. He retreated from more than one burglary, sensing her presence in the room, and sometimes it seemed there was another hand in the pocket he was trying to pick. He watched the women on the street carefully in case she, like he, occasionally made herself visible, and they all appeared to him to be wearing masks. He was jostled by absences, felt a hot breath often on his neck. His income dropped off sharply and he was even inhibited from acquiring his daily necessities. Her possible proximity made him self-conscious about his personal hygiene and interfered with his voyeuristic routines. He felt especially vulnerable inside his own house and went there less often, with the consequence that the food in his refrigerator spoiled and his orchids died.

  How did she know where he was if she couldn’t see him? By following the clues the invisible always leave behind: footprints in the mud, snow (of course he never walked in snow), and sand, bodily excretions, fingerprints (he couldn’t wear gloves, nor carry them without getting them messy), discarded costumes and toothbrushes, mattress indentations, floating objects, swirling dust, fogged windows. She could watch for places where the rain did not fall and listen for the noises his body made. He had always stumbled over things; now he could not be sure she was not placing those things in his path to expose him, so just moving about was like negotiating a mine field. He had to eat more surreptitiously, not to exhibit the food flying about before vanishing, and so ate too fast, giving himself heartburn. But when he started to steal a packet of antacids, he thought he saw it move as he reached for it.

  Then it occurred to him one day that she might not be a crime fighter after all, merely another lonely invisible person seeking company, and as soon as he had that thought, she disappeared, or seemed to. He should have felt relieved, but he did not. He found that he missed her. Though she had not been exactly friendly, she was the nearest thing to a friend he’d ever had. He went back to where they’d first met and raised and lowered the toilet seat, but there was no response. He should have spoken up that day. He did now: “Are you there?” he whispered. No reply, though the lady in the next stall asked: “Did you say something?” “No, dear, just a frog in the throat,” he wheezed in a cracking falsetto, then flushed quickly and swung the door open and closed before the woman could get up from where she was sitting and peek in. But he remained in the stall for a time, reflecting on how something so ordinary as a toilet seat can be transformed suddenly into something extraordinary and, well, beautiful . . .

  Now he left clues everywhere and committed crimes more daring than before. If she was a crime fighter he wanted to be arrested by her. If she was not, well, they could be partners. She even had more room to hide things, they could tackle bigger jobs. As he moved about, he swung his arms freely, hoping to knock into something that did not seem to be there, but caused only unfortunate accidents and misdirected anger. Twice he got shot at in the dark. He figured it was a small price to pay. Perhaps if he were hurt she’d feel pity for him and make herself known. He began to see her, even in her invisibility, as unutterably beautiful, and he realized that he was hopelessly in love. He thought of his adoration of her as pure and noble, utterly unlike his life in crime, but he also imagined making mad impetuous love to her. Rolling about ecstatically in their indentations. Nothing he’d seen in his invisible powder-room prowls excited him more than these imaginings.

  Still, for all his hopes, she gave no further evidence of her existence. In his house, he left messages on the mirrors: “Take me, I’m yours!” But the messages sat there, unanswered, unaltered. When he looked in the mirrors, past the lettering, he could not see his cheeks but he could see the tears sliding down them. His love life, once frivolous, had turned tragic, and it was all his fault. Why had he never touched her? A fool, a fool! He was in despair. He hung out in bars more often, drinking other people’s drinks. He got sick once and threw up beside a singing drunk peeing against a wall, sobering the poor man up instantly. He knew that rumors about him were beginning to spread, but what did it matter? Without her, his life was meaningless. It had not been very meaningful before she came into it, but now it was completely empty. Even crime bored him. Voyeurism did: what did he care about visible bodies when he was obsessed by an invisible one?

  He tried to find some reason for going on. Over the years, he’d been collecting a set of antique silverware from one family, a piece at a time. He decided to finish the set. He didn’t really want the silverware, but it gave him something to do. He successfully picked up another couple of pieces, operating recklessly in broad daylight, but then went back one time too many and, with a soup spoon up his ass, got bit on the shins by a watchdog the family had bought to try to catch the silverware thief. He got away, doing rather serious damage to the dog (in effect, it ate the soup spoon), but he bled all the way home. He supposed they’d follow the trail, didn’t care if they did, but they didn’t. Maybe they were satisfied not to lose the spoon.

  But the wound was slow to heal and
he couldn’t go about with it or the bandage on it exposed, so he donned the costume of an old man (he was an old man!) and spent his days in cheap coffee shops feeling sorry for himself and mooning over his lost love. He went on doing this even after the dog bite had healed, drawn to coffee shops with sad songs on their sound systems. He no longer stole but bought most of what he needed, which was little, but now included reading materials for his coffee shop life. He avoided newspapers and magazines, preferring old novels from vanished times, mostly those written by women, all of whom he tended to think of as beautiful and invisible. He would sometimes sit all day over a single page, letting his mind drift, muttering softly to himself, or more or less to himself, all the things he should have said when she was still in his life.

  Then one day he saw, sitting at another table, also greatly aged, an old police captain he used to work with back in his crime-fighting days. He made himself known to him (the captain did not look surprised; perhaps he’d been tailing him) and asked him how things were going down at the station. “Since you left, Invisible Man,” said the officer, “things have gone from bad to worse. You became something of a nuisance to us when you took up your new career, but it was a decision we could understand and make allowances for. Now there are gangs of invisible people out there committing heinous crimes that threaten to destroy the very fabric of our civilization.” The Invisible Man stroked his false beard thoughtfully. “And since I stopped being a crime fighter, have you had help from any other . . . person like myself?” “No. Until these new gangs came along, you were unique in my experience, Invisible Man.” So, he thought, she might be among them. “It’s why we’re turning to you now. We’re asking you to come back to the force, Invisible Man. We need you to infiltrate these gangs and help us stop them before it’s too late.” “You’re asking me to turn against my own people,” he said, somewhat pretentiously, for in truth he never thought of himself as having people. “These aren’t your people, Invisible Man, it’s a whole new breed. They create fields of invisibility so even their clothing and weapons and everything they steal is made invisible when it enters it. And now they’re into bomb-making.” This was serious, all right; but he was thinking about his beloved. His former beloved. He understood now that she might have been trying to recruit him for her gang, but had found him unworthy, and he felt hurt by that. “They think of you as old-fashioned, Invisible Man, and have said some very unflattering things about you. In particular, about your personal habits, of which of course I know nothing. But they also look up to you as a kind of pioneer. And though their power is greater than yours, their technology is less reliable. They’ve suffered catastrophic system crashes, and we want them to suffer a few more. It’s a dangerous job, Invisible Man, but you’re the only one we know who can handle it.”

  So once again he took up his old life as a crime fighter, but under cover of renewed criminality, drifting somewhat cynically through the city in his old invisible skin, targeting the city fathers for his burglaries and vandalisms, dropping inflammatory notes to draw attention to himself, and even, with help from the captain, blowing up the captain’s own car, which he said was anyway in need of extensive clutch and transmission repairs, so he was glad to get rid of it—in short, making himself available, waiting to be contacted. Would she be among them? He felt misunderstood by her, undervalued, and in some odd way misused. A victim of love. Which he no longer believed in, even while still in the grip of its unseen power. And if he found her again, would he crash her system? Or would she succeed in seducing him into the gangs’ nefarious activities? Who knows? He decided to keep an open mind about it. The future was no easier to see than he was.

  THE RETURN OF THE DARK CHILDREN

  (2002)

  When the first black rats reappeared, scurrying shadowily along the river’s edge and through the back alleyways, many thought the missing children would soon follow. Some believed the rats might be the children under a spell, so they were not at first killed, but were fed and pampered, not so much out of parental affection, as out of fear. For, many legends had grown up around the lost generation of children, siphoned from the town by the piper so many years ago. Some thought that the children had, like the rats, been drowned by the piper, and that they now returned from time to time to haunt the town that would not, for parsimony, pay their ransom. Others believed that the children had been bewitched, transformed into elves or werewolves or a kind of living dead. When the wife of one of the town councilors hanged herself, it was rumored it was because she’d been made pregnant by her own small son, appearing to her one night in her sleep as a toothless hollow-eyed incubus. Indeed, all deaths, even those by the most natural of causes, were treated by the citizenry with suspicion, for what could be a more likely cause of heart failure or malfunction of the inner organs than an encounter with one’s child as a member of the living dead?

  At first, such sinister speculations were rare, heard only among the resentful childless. When the itinerant rat-killer seduced the youngsters away that day with his demonic flute, all the other townsfolk could think about was rescue and revenge. Mothers wept and cried out the names of their children, calling them back, while fathers and grandfathers armed themselves and rushed off into the hills, chasing trills and the echoes of trills. But nothing more substantial was ever found, not even a scrap of clothing or a dropped toy, it was as though they had never been, and as the weeks became months and the months years, hope faded and turned to resentment—so much love misspent!—and then eventually to dread. New children meanwhile were born, replacing the old, it was indeed a time of great fertility for there was a vacuum to be filled, and as these new children grew, a soberer generation than that which preceded it, there was no longer any place, in homes or hearts, for the old ones, nor for their lightsome ways. The new children were, like their predecessors and their elders, plump and happy, much loved, well fed, and overly indulged in all things, but they were more closely watched and there was no singing or dancing. The piper had instilled in the townsfolk a terror of all music, and it was banned forever by decree. All musical instruments had been destroyed. Humming a tune in public was an imprisonable offense and children, rarely spanked, were spanked for it. Always, it was associated with the children who had left and the chilling ungrateful manner of their leaving: they did not even look back. But it was as though they had not really quite gone away after all, for as the new children came along the old ones seemed to return as omnipresent shadows of the new ones, clouding the nursery and playground, stifling laughter and spoiling play, and they became known then, the lost ones, the shadowy ones, as the dark children.

  In time, all ills were blamed on them. If an animal sickened and died, if milk soured or a house burned, if a child woke screaming from a nightmare, if the river overflowed its banks, if money went missing from the till or the beer went flat or one’s appetite fell off, it was always the curse of the dark children. The new children were warned: Be good or the dark children will get you! They were not always good, and sometimes, as it seemed, the dark children did get them. And now the newest menace: the return of the rats. The diffident pampering of these rapacious creatures soon ceased. As they multiplied, disease broke out, as it had so many years before. The promenade alongside the river that ran through the town, once so popular, now was utterly forsaken except for the infestation of rats, the flower gardens lining the promenade trampled by their little feet and left filthy and untended, for those who loitered there ran the risk of being eaten alive, as happened to the occasional pet gone astray. Their little pellets were everywhere and in everything. Even in one’s shoes and bed and tobacco tin. Once again the city fathers gathered in emergency council and declared their determination to exterminate the rats, whether they were bewitched dark children or not; and once again the rats proved too much for them. They were hunted down with guns and poisons and burned in mountainous heaps, their sour ashes blanketing the town, graying the laundry and spoiling the sauces, but their numbers seemed not t
o diminish. If anything, there were more of them than ever seen before, and they just kept coming. But when one rash councilor joked that it was maybe time to pay the piper, he was beaten and hounded out of town.

  For, if the dark children were a curse upon the town, they were still their own, whereas that sorcerer who had lured them away had been like a mysterious force from another world, a diabolical intruder who had forever disturbed the peace of the little community. He was not something to laugh about. The piper, lean and swarthy, had been dressed patchily in too many colors, wore chains and bracelets and earrings, painted his bony face with ghoulish designs, smiled too much and too wickedly and with teeth too white. His language, not of this town, was blunt and uncivil and seemed to come, not from his throat, but from some hollow place inside. Some seemed to remember that he had no eyes, others that he did have eyes but the pupils were golden. He ate sparely, if at all (some claimed to have seen him nibbling at the rats), and, most telling of all, he was never seen to relieve himself. All this in retrospect, of course, for at the time, the townsfolk, vastly comforted by the swift and entertaining eradication of the rats, saw him as merely an amusing street musician to be tolerated and, if not paid all that he impertinently demanded (there had been nothing illegal about this, no contracts had been signed), at least applauded——the elders, like the children, in short, fatally beguiled by the fiend. No, should he return, he would be attacked by all means available, and if possible torn apart, limb from limb, his flute rammed down his throat, the plague of rats be damned. He who placed himself beyond the law would be spared by none.