The Visible Man and Other Stories

by Gardner Dozois

  Later that evening, while unpacking his suitcases and arranging his belongings—mostly clothes—in the bedroom, John is submerged in a silence so deep and profound that it seems to manifest itself as a low hum, a steady buzz felt with the back of the teeth rather than heard. There are none of the settling of floorboards or knocking of waterpipes expected in a house this old, and the absolute quiet is disturbing. He finds himself wishing for a radio or a phonograph, anything to keep his ear from straining constantly in anticipation of sounds that never come. He would even welcome a barrage of that tinny “swing” music that always sounds as if it is being played underwater a million miles away, or one of those endless, dully foreboding commentaries on the danger of American involvement in Europe. At least they would be company, and their taste of the mundane and the absurd oddly comforting when balanced against the alien perfection of complete silence. The human voices would remind him that life is still going on in the ticking world, that he is not, as it feels, suspended in a limbo between creations: a tiny detail from an obsolete continuum that has been overlooked and not yet swept into the melt for the new.

  As he is closing the lid on the last empty suitcase and putting it into the closet to store, he thinks he hears a noise downstairs: the slamming of a door, and rapid, heavy footsteps—passing underneath, headed into the living room. The noise is so clear and loud after the hush of the past hours—and such a sudden, unexpected answer to his strained listening—that he starts, and knocks over his bag. Leaving it, he goes out the door and down the corridor toward the stairwell, puzzlement changing to an unreasonable, unexplainable fear as he goes, metamorphosing more completely with every step. His heart thumps against his chest, like a fist from inside. Slowly, he goes down the stairs into the living room, not understanding who such a late visitor could be—the man from the agency perhaps?—and not understanding why he is afraid.

  No one is there.

  John stands for a moment at the foot of the stairs—one hand on the railing, head tilted—and then walks through the living room and the writing room to the kitchen, stepping with the exaggerated caution of one who expects a viper to strike from concealment. There is no one in the house. Bewildered, he returns to the living room.

  As he nears the fireplace, he hears the footsteps again—this time they are upstairs, just as loud, just as distinct. They pass overhead as he listens. There is an unpleasant rasping quality to them now, as if the feet are too heavy to lift and must be scraped along the floor. Clearly there is someone upstairs, but no one has passed him in his sortie into the kitchen, and there is only one stairwell leading to the second floor. He feels the short hairs bristle on the back of his neck and along his arms. He forces himself to go upstairs, pausing after every other tread to listen, telling himself that at worst it is only a tramp looking for something to steal. But there is no one upstairs either. Although he searches the entire second floor—closets, linen cabinets, the bathroom—and even, with the help of a chair and a flashlight, peers into the crawlspace between the ceiling and the roof, he can find no one, nothing, and no way for anyone to have avoided him.

  That night he sleeps uneasily, feverishly, fighting his bed-clothes as if they are snakes. In the morning, he cannot remember his dreams.

  ● ● ●

  The next day is hot and clear, and John decides to go outside. He wants to look over some of his old notes, to see if he can assemble something workable out of the shambles of his career, and it would be pleasant to read on the lawn. He stands in the doorway of the porch, blinking against the furnace glare of the sunlight, smelling heat and raw earth. Suddenly he is reluctant to leave the shelter of the house. At some point in the morning, John has stopped thinking of the house as desolate and menacing, and has begun to consider it comfortable and peaceful, its cool, restful half-light infinitely preferable to the hot welter out of doors. He is not aware of the change in his thinking. Almost he turns to go back into the kitchen, but he reminds himself irritably that he is here for his health, after all. He finds the idea of sunning himself distasteful, but he has been told pointedly that it is healthy to “take the sun,” so take it he will. He steps over the threshold. Warm air swallows him, a golden pear sliding over his skin. His nostrils are flared by the strong resin smell of grass. His eyes dilate. Blinded, he stumbles down the porch stairs to the flagstone path.

  Blinking and squinting, John moves away from the house. His shoes click on flagstone, then swish through grass as he strays from the path. The grass whispers around his legs, caressing his ankles, rasping abrasively against the material of his trousers. His vision returns slowly, and as it does he feels the earth roll majestically under his feet in a long sea swell, like a giant’s shoulder shrugging uneasily in sleep. The sky is a brilliant blue. He can sense the house behind him, the top half rising up and over him, a cresting wave about to topple. Now it is the house that is distasteful—again it seems brooding, mournful, unwholesomely confining. This time he is aware of his change of attitude, and dimly puzzled by it.

  John plows across the lawn, leaving a flattened wake behind him, like a boat. There is a toy wagon on its side, rusted almost solid, a few flecks of red paint still showing; it is tied down firmly by grass, a robot Gulliver. John nudges it with his toe, and a wheel spins a tired protest in a shrill voice of rust. A rubber duck next to the wagon, dead, eaten away by weather, the side of its face distorted as if by acid. The shadow of the house lies across the lawn here, and it is cooler and less murmurous. John’s fingers work uneasily on the buttons of his shirt. He turns and walks at an angle to his previous path, the house roof seeming to describe a backwards arc against the sky as he watches, until the sun pops into view again above the roof peak, a hot copper penny squeezed from between an invisible thumb and finger. Its heat makes his bare arms tingle pleasantly, and he blinks again, almost drowsy.

  There was a garden here once, by the rear of the house. He steps into a ring of faded white stones, careful not to wrench his ankle, as the ground inside the circle is a little lower. At the far end of the ring is a chinaberry tree, a white oak, a few silver birches. He touches one of the birches: it feels like coral, sharp, unfriendly, dead—stratified. Startled, he snatches his hand away. He had not expected that type of texture, it is not congruous with the texture of the bark that he can see with his eyes. It should not feel that way. A sun-dog winks at him from an upstairs window, under the eaves. Uneasy again, John walks on until he comes to the dirt access road that circles the house. He scuffles the toe of his shoe in the dust, as though testing some earthen tide. He is reluctant to cross the road. Somehow, it is a boundary.

  He can feel the house behind him. Without turning his head, he can see it: the high peak of the roof, the windows like eyes, the door like a gaping mouth—growing up out of the earth and shrouded in its turn with rank growth. A troll, with dogwood in its hair and rhododendron in its beard. Very old, very strong, patient as mud.

  Irritated by this nonsense, John strides back toward the house. He has come here to recover from irrational fancies; he does not need new ones. He spends an hour or so making a mental list of the household repairs he will have to accomplish, rummaging around to find the proper tools, and dragging an extension ladder up from the dank, low-ceilinged basement. Then he discovers that his energy has leaked away, absorbed by the morning as by a blotter. In spite of his effort to keep his mind on practical things, he is again awash with jittery, contradictory emotion that makes the thought of attempting repairs intolerable. He will read his notes then after all, he decides grimly. He will not be defeated by the day.

  John wades to the center of the lawn with his notebook, and sits down determinedly, in the sun. Sitting, the grass comes up above his waist, and he has the illusion that he has just lowered himself into a tub of sun-warmed green water. For the first time, he notices how overgrown the grounds actually are. Weeds and wildflowers have sprung up and proliferated everywhere, and John is submerged in an ocean of growth. He finds this a sens
ation both terrifying and dizzyingly exultant, and, sitting in this breathing tabernacle, this beating green heart, John feels oddly ashamed.

  Uncertainly, John takes off his shirt, and lets the sun bake his back. He moves uncomfortably, uncrossing and refolding his legs, lifting the binder from his lap and placing it in the grass before him. He is painfully aware of the unhealthy pallor of his skin, and he begins thinking, in a disjointed fashion, of sickness, of enclosure: of decay embodied in the image of a wax flower yellowing with age—death so gradual, so subtle and imperceptible that it is not so much a transition between states as an intensifying of a long-existing condition, and even the soul involved may be unable to tell when life ended and death began, or if it yet has, or even if there is any difference between the two. He stretches an arm out along the grass, fish-belly white against new green, and has to reassure himself that he can still feel the blood throbbing in his neck, at the temples, in the wrists; that he still breathes, that he has not forgotten to live.

  Birches sigh and toss overhead, and he looks up. The perfection of the weather is somehow alien, even more so than the gray, distorting twilight that had greeted him upon his arrival. Everything within the limits of his vision is endowed with an excessive clarity. There is a feeling of craft behind each incidence of light, the fall of every shadow, the position of the smallest rock: as if the world was some fantastic simulacrum—three-dimensional and discernible by all the senses—painted over another and more complex reality.

  This thought disturbs him greatly, and he looks down again. He is suddenly afraid that if he continues to watch he may see the world waver and go out like an abruptly extinguished candleflame, and that beyond the guttering of the universal ember he will see—something else. What that something else, that other thing, may be he does not know. He is afraid of that moment of clear sight.

  Silly, he thinks. Naive and juvenile, as have been all his moods and preoccupations since coming to this country house. He can imagine the scorn of his intellectual friends in London and Boston, the curiously similar—although differently motivated—contempt of his stolid, cannery-owning father, the needle-sharp disdain of his former fiancée, tough-minded, intensely practical Marilyn. But he cannot control the swing and scurry of his emotions. Like nervous fish, they dart where they will, unpredictably, and he cannot stop them.

  To distract himself, John opens his notebook, selects a page, flattens it out with his hand. He bends close over the page, feeling the sun like a heel on the top of his head. But, to his dismay, he discovers that he cannot read. The ability is gone, wiped away as if it had never existed. There is a year’s worth of work in the notebook, the only remains of his once-promising career, and he cannot read it. He can admire the words as objects, but he cannot decipher them. The shadows of the tall grass can be seen on the lined paper—one scheme of order imposed over another—and he watches them instead, in bemused. fascination. The calligraphy of the shadows is exquisite: they look like actual brush strokes on the page, clean-bordered black lines. The sun also casts the silhouette of an insect onto the page—a shadow spider crawling along a blade of shadow grass, a reflection of some negative and polar universe. He lifts his gaze slightly to locate the real spider, and then manages to watch both it and its doppelganger at once: the real spider crawling up the grass blade and away from him, while the shadow spider crawls down the page toward him, simultaneously. An insect in the grass, the earth spinning in space—both mated by shadow. He tries to touch the silhouettes of grass and spider. He cannot—there is nothing but the feel of paper under his fingers, and the shadow spider now clambers distortedly over his knuckles. Neither can he feel the ink that forms the words on the page, though he knows that it, too, is there.

  As he watches, a word pulls itself up out of the paper and scurries away.

  There is a moment of vertigo, and then he realizes that it is a beetle that has been resting quietly on the page and has been disturbed by the movement of his hand: he has mistaken it for an ink-blotted word. Not reassured, he eyes the remaining script with a new suspicion, half suspecting that it intends a mass rebellion and exodus. His stomach churns with nausea: fear of that breath of wind that will extinguish the world, dread that he may have just seen things swim and shiver in a premonitory eddy.

  John puts the binder down and slowly gets to his feet. He sways, drained of all strength. The impressions of the afternoon are beyond his ability to analyze or interpret. They call up only a welter of ambiguous and contradictory emotion. He hurries to the house, following the flagstone path, thinking only of rest and sanctuary, hoping he will not fall. He has gained the shelter of the back porch before he realizes that he has left his notebook behind, on the lawn.

  He does not go back for it.

  That evening he is assaulted by sound. As soon as the sun has disappeared completely behind the horizon and darkness is absolute, the noises begin—all at once, already at full volume, as if they have been turned on by a switch: the chirruping of crickets and the strident peeping of tree frogs, the soughing of the wind and the tossing and scratching of tree branches against the walls, at the windows. They are all normal, expected sounds, but tonight they seem horrescently, unbelievably loud: a wailing, baying, screaming cacophony. Even the boards under his feet cry out, moaning like lepers, groaning and shrieking with every step. “Settling”—so he tells himself, and even he is not sure whether he intends irony.

  A heavy branch begins to pound against the side of the house, setting up a giant, rattling reverberation that makes him think of the parable of the bridge and the soldiers marching in step. He feels embattled against the noises, menaced by them—they seem alive, directed by malice: certainly they are probing and slamming against the walls in search of a weak spot, trying to find a way in, to get at him. The clamor is as solid as a hedge—he can visualize it surrounding the house, curling in a cap over the roof, pressing tightly against the windows, waiting for a pinprick hole, waiting to fill the vacuum.

  Windowglass buzzes and vibrates behind his head; he will not turn around to look. He has been sitting in the writing room, at one of the mahogany tables, trying to compose a letter to his friend in Boston, the friend who has lent him the use of this house during his prolonged “vacation” away from the city. His recovery, he thinks, not believing that either. He puts down his pen, crumples the piece of paper he has been writing on and throws it away. The trash receptacle, and the area surrounding it, are littered with similar balls of discarded paper. He knows that he should write a letter to his friend, indeed that he is obligated to: to reassure the friend that he has arrived safely, that all is “well,” to assuage, however insincerely, any fears the friend might have as to John’s mental and physical well-being. At very least a note to the friend and the friend’s wife, congratulating them on the new child. But he cannot write the letter. On all the discarded pieces of paper he has managed to write no more than the formal, salutatory heading.

  Disgruntled, John gets up and goes into the kitchen. The wind follows him from window to window, rattling the panes. For the first time since his arrival, he opens the liquor cabinet. He finds a dusty bottle of Hennessy cognac at the back of the shelf, breaks the seal, and pours himself a large drink, in a water glass. Holding the glass in one hand, the bottle in the other, he returns through the writing room to the living room. He stands before the fireplace for a long time, listening to the unnatural howl and clatter outside, the crickets that sound as loud as barrages from siege-guns. Then he sips his drink, wincing at its harsh savor. He puts the bottle down on the mantelpiece and selects one of the leatherbound volumes from the shelf, opening it at random. The words crawl across the page, cryptic and indecipherable—they are totally alien. He is even beginning to forget what they are for; he can remember that there is a purpose behind them, but he is no longer sure exactly what the purpose is, or why he should remember it. He puts the book back sadly, as if he is packing away a world. He knows that he will never open another one. He ta
kes a deeper drink, lowering the level of the glass by half an inch. He carries the glass and the bottle upstairs with him to his room, closing himself inside again. This time he leaves the lights blazing on the floor below. They remain on all night.

  The following morning is gray and wet—a thick ground mist encircling the house, the birches dimly visible behind it, like ghost ships through fog. Somewhere behind the mist is the sound of a light rain. John stands in the kitchen, waiting for a pot of coffee to perk, listening to the unseen rain, watching moisture bead on a half-opened window, on the dusty webbing of the screen. The sound of the rain is a low, melancholy murmur, like water mumbling down the mossy sides of an ancient well. The sound makes him unexpectedly sad. He pulls his robe tighter around him, gathering it at the collar. The wind through the open window is chill and damp, smelling somehow of the ocean—of salt flats and tides and depths—although he is hundreds of miles from the shore. It almost seems that he can hear patient waves slap against the side of the house, behind the mist, behind the morning. If the mist should burn away now, he knows that he would see a shining, placid sheet of ocean stretching endlessly away on all sides of the house, over the foundered hills and fields, the branches of trees waving above the surface like the dead and beckoning arms of the drowned.

  He shivers, and lights the gas oven for warmth: the sharp, sudden hiss of the gas jet, the rasp of the kitchen match, the solid thunking whoosh as the jet ignites. The blue glow washes back over his face, smoothing out the deep hollows of his cheeks, striking reflections from his eyes, painting unknown cabalistic symbols across his forehead in light. He shakes the match and throws it away. He stands before the open oven door for a while, rubbing his hands, flexing his fingers. The room is filled with the pungent, strangely pleasant smell of escaped gas, and with the hiss of the burning jet.