The Visible Man and Other Stories

by Gardner Dozois

  After a while, he found a feather on the sidewalk.

  The birds hadn’t needed to be told about the storm, either, the boy thought as he nudged at the feather with his toe. They had all flown north and west that morning, rising up out of the treetops like puffs of vapor in the sun to condense into bright feathered clouds that stretched out across the sky for miles. Later, in another county, it would rain birds. Pigeons, sparrows, crows, robins, jays, wrens, a dozen other species—the boy’s world seemed amazingly empty without them. Even the gulls were gone. On an ordinary day you could almost always see a gull in the sky somewhere, rising up stiff winged from the land as if on an invisible elevator, then tilting and sliding down a long slope of air to skim across the sea. They hung above the fishing docks in town in such a raucous, fish-stealing, thousand-headed crowd that the boy usually could hear the clatter and cry of it all the way out here. Today they had all vanished before noon. Maybe they had gone far out to sea, or way up the coast—but they were gone. All that morning the boy had watched the birds go, and the scissoring, semaphore beat of their wings in the sky had been the first thing to spell out the message that now the trees and all the world repeated.

  He picked up the feather.

  A few feet farther on, he found another feather.

  And then another one.

  And another.

  With growing excitement, the boy followed the trail of feathers.

  Surely it must be leading him to an enchanted place, surely there must be something mysterious and wonderful at the end of the trail: a magic garden, a glass house, a tree with a door in it that led to another world. He began to run. The trail led diagonally across a driveway and disappeared behind a garage. There were more feathers to be found now, two or three of them in each clump.

  At the end of the trail of feathers was a dead bird.

  The boy stopped short, feeling a thrill of surprise and horror and supernatural awe. Involuntarily, he dropped the handful of feathers he had gathered, and they swirled around his ankles for a moment before settling to the ground. The bird had been struck by a glancing but fatal blow by something—a car, a hawk—and it had fluttered all this way to die, shedding feathers across the sidewalk, fighting to stay aloft and stay alive and losing at both. This was the enchanted thing at the end of the trail: a dead pigeon, glazed eyes and matted feathers, sad, dowdy, and completely unmagical. An emotion he could not name swept through the boy, making the short hairs bristle along the back of his neck. He looked up.

  The southern sky was still a welter of lurid color, but there was more red in it now, as though blood was slowly being poured into the world.

  Paul himself could not have told you why he first began to withdraw from the world. Breaking up with his fiancée Vivian—a particular sordid and drawn-out process that had taken almost half a year all told—certainly had something to do with it. His best friend, Joseph, had recently become his most bitter enemy, and was now busy spreading poisonous tales about him throughout the rest of Paul’s circle of acquaintances and colleagues. Much of the blame for these ugly affairs was unquestionably Paul’s—paradoxically, that knowledge fed his guilt without abating in the least the hatred he now felt for Vivian and Joseph. Paul’s father had just died, still bitterly unreconciled with his son, and that left an unpleasant taste in Paul’s mouth. All his relatives were dead now. He had quit his job, ostensibly because he wanted to. But his career had been dead-ended by business adversaries, and he’d had no place to go in it but down. And he had been ill. Nothing major: just a case of flu—or rather, a series of flus and colds running in succession—that had stuck with him throughout the entire fall and early winter and had left him feeling wretched, dull, and debilitated. These were the obvious reasons, at least. There were probably hundreds of others that Paul himself did not consciously know about—small humiliations, everyday defeats, childhood tragedies, long-forgotten things that had settled down into him like layer after layer of sediment until they choked his soul with sludge.

  Above all else, he lived in Manhattan, and Manhattan was a place that fed you hate, contempt, bitterness, and despair in negligible daily doses that—like cleverly administered arsenic—became cumulatively fatal.

  Paul had an apartment on East Tenth Street between First and Avenue A, a neighborhood that is depressing even at its best. In January, with the freezing winds skimming down the avenue like razors, and the corrugated gray sky clamped down like a lid, and the first sooty snowfall coming down over the frozen garbage on the sidewalks, it is considerably worse than ‘depressing.’ Even his seamy fifth-floor walkup began to seem a more desirable place to be than the frozen monochrome world outside.

  He began to “stay in.”

  He had few friends left in the city any more, and certainly none who were worth sallying out through a Manhattan winter to visit. His bank balance was too low to afford him luxuries like movies or nightclubs or the theater, or even dining out. He had gotten out of the habit of going to the newsstand for newspapers or magazines. He wasn’t looking for work, so he didn’t need to go out for job interviews. And he had become a bad-luck magnet—every time he left the apartment, disaster followed at his heels: he tore a ligament falling down the stairs, he sprained an ankle on a slushy sidewalk, he was bitten by dogs, drenched by the freezing gutter-water thrown up by speeding cars, knocked down by a bicycle on First Avenue, splattered with garbage, and mugged three times in two weeks. It seemed that every time he went outside now he caught another cold, and had to suffer out the next few days with chills and headaches and congestion. Under these circumstances, it was just easier to stay inside as much as possible, and even easier than that to let the days he spent inside turn themselves almost unnoticed into weeks. He fell into the habit of doing all his shopping in one trip, and planning frugal meals so that each carton of groceries would last as long as possible.

  He no longer went out for any other reason whatsoever.

  This self-enforced retreat of Paul’s might eventually have turned out to be good for him if he had been able to do any work during it. He had ostensibly quit his advertising job in order to write a novel, but the typewriter sat idle on the folding table in the living room for week after week. It wasn’t so much that he could think of nothing to write, but that everything he did put on paper seemed banal, inconsequential, jejune. Eventually he gave up even trying to write, but left the typewriter set up in case sudden inspiration should strike. It didn’t. The typewriter became covered by a fine film of dust and soot. He watched television almost continuously then, until a tube burned out in the set. He didn’t have enough money to get it fixed, so he pushed the set against the wall, where it glowered out over the apartment like the glazed eye of a dead Cyclops. Dust settled over that, too. He read every book he owned, then read them again. Eventually he reached a point where he would just sit around the apartment all day, not doing anything, too listless even to be bored.

  He didn’t realize it, but he was changing. He was being worn away by an eroding process as imperceptible and inexorable as the action of the tide on soft coastal rock.

  Now, when necessity drove him out on a shopping trip, the world seemed as bizarrely incomprehensible and overwhelming to him as it might have to Kaspar Hauser. Everything terrified him. He would slink along the sidewalk with one shoulder close to a wall for comfort, shrinking from everyone he met, his eyes squinted to slits against the harsh and hostile daylight or strained wide so that he could peer anxiously through the threatening shadows of night, and he would shake his head constantly and irritably to drive away the evil babble of city sounds. Once in the store, he would have to consciously remember how to talk, explaining what he wanted in a slow, slurred, thick-tongued voice, having to pause and search through his memory like a Berlitz-course linguist asking directions to the Hauptbahnhof. And he would count out the money to pay for his order with painstaking slowness, penny by penny, like a child. When at last he did get safely back inside his apartment, he would be t
rembling and covered with cold sweat.

  At last, he made a deal with the landlord’s teenage son: the boy agreed to deliver a cartonful of groceries to Paul’s apartment every other week, for a price. For a few dollars more, the boy eventually agreed to pick up Paul’s rent check when it was due and deliver it to his father, and to carry the garbage downstairs a couple of times a month if Paul would bag it and leave it outside his door. In effect, this deal meant that Paul no longer had to go outside at all, for any reason. It was much better that way. Perhaps his savings would not hold out long at this rate, but he could no longer worry about that. It was worth it to have to cope only with a wedge of the world—the crack of a half-opened door.

  Behind that door, Paul continued to erode.

  Supper was beans and franks and brownbread. The boy didn’t mind the beans and the brownbread, but his mother had insisted on boiling the frankfurters, and he hated them that way—he hated watching them plump up and float to the surface of the boiling water, and he especially hated the way they would split open and ooze out their pinkish innards when they were done. His mother had been making beans and franks a lot the past few months, because they were cheap and very quick and easy to make. Once she had made more intricate meals, but she was so distracted and tearful and busy lately.

  Now she was always having to leave him with Mrs. Spinnato while she went into town unexpectedly, or talking on the phone for hours with her voice pitched low so that he couldn’t overhear, or talking in that same low voice to Mr. Halpern the lawyer as she served him coffee in the parlor, or to her cousin Alice or Mrs. Spinnato or Mrs. DeMay in the kitchen, the bss bss bss of their whispering filling the air with moth wings and secrets.

  And so supper was usually late, and he got beans and franks, or what his mother called “American chop suey,” which was a frying pan full of hamburger and garlic powder with a can of Franco-American spaghetti dumped into it. Or TV dinner. Or hamburgers, or tuna-fish salad. Or spaghetti noodles with just butter and garlic on them instead of spaghetti sauce with ground meat. Any of which he liked better than boiled frankfurters, but his mother was still being mad at him for running off, and she wasn’t in a mood to listen to complaints or to let him get away without finishing his supper. So he ate, affecting an air somewhere between sullen and philosophical.

  His mother ate only half of her own meal, and then sat staring blankly at the stove and pushing the rest of her food aimlessly back and forth on her plate. Too restless to sit down at the table, she had pulled a stool up to the kitchen divider to eat, and she kept getting up to pace across the kitchen for condiments she subsequently forgot to use. She had been packing and cleaning all day; her eyes were shadowed and bloodshot, and there was a grimy streak across her forehead. She had forgotten to take off her apron. Some hair had pulled loose from the bun she’d tied it in; it scraggled out behind her head like an untidy halo, and one thick lock of it had fallen down over her brow. She kept brushing it out of her eyes with absentminded irritation, as if it was a fly. She didn’t speak during supper, but she smoked one cigarette after another, only taking a few nervous puffs of each before she stubbed it out and lit another. The ashtray in front of her had overflowed, spilling an ash slide out across the porcelain countertop.

  The boy finished his supper, and, getting no response at all when he asked if he could be excused, essayed a cautious sortie toward the door. His mother made no objection; she was staring at her coffee cup as though she’d never seen one before. Encouraged, the boy pushed the screen door open and went out on the porch.

  The lurid welter of color in the south had expanded to fill half the sky. The boy stopped on the bottom step of the porch, sniffing at the world like a cautious, curious dog. There was no wind at all now, but the crackly electric feel of the air was even more pronounced, as was a funny electric smell that the boy could not put a name to. The sun had been invisible all day; now it showed a glazed red disk just as it was going down behind the western horizon. It looked wan and powerless against that smothering black sky, as if it was no longer able to provide either heat or light—a weary bloodshot eye about to close at the edge of the world. But the landscape was bathed in a strange empyreal radiance that had nothing to do with the sun, a directionless undersea light that seemed to come from the sky itself, and which illuminated everything as garishly and pitilessly as neon. In that light the big chestnut trees seemed dry and brittle. Their branches were still now, held high like arms—thrown up in horror. There was a halcyon quiet everywhere. The world was holding its breath.

  “Don’t think you’re going to run off again,” his mother warned. She had come up behind him silently on the porch.

  “I don’t, Ma,” said the boy, who had been thinking of doing just that. “I ain’t going nowhere.”

  “You bet you aren’t,” his mother said grimly. She glanced irritably at the threatening sky, then glanced away. The eerie light turned her face chalk-white, made her lips a pale, bloodless gash—it almost seemed as if you could see the shadow of her bones inside her flesh, as though the new radiance enabled you to see by penetrating rays rather than by ordinary light. “The only place you’re going now, young man, is up to bed.”

  “Aw, Ma!” the boy protested tragically.

  “I mean it now, Paulie.”

  “Aw, Ma. It ain’t even dark yet.”

  She softened a little, and came forward to rumple his hair. “I know you’re excited by the storm, baby,” she said, “but it’s only a storm, and you’ve seen storms before, haven’t you—this’s just a bigger kind of storm, that’s all.” She smoothed down the hair she’d ruffled, and her voice came brisker. “Mrs. Spinnato will be coming over in a little while to help me pack the rest of the china, and I don’t want you underfoot. And I know what you’re like on a long car trip, and I don’t intend to have you all tired and crotchety for it tomorrow. So you go to sleep early tonight. Get on up to bed now, young man. Scoot now! Scoot!”

  Reluctantly, the boy let her herd him back inside. He said goodnight and went into the parlor, headed for the stairs. He felt spooky and oddly out-of-place in the parlor now, and he transversed it as quickly as he could. The furniture had been moved back against the walls, and the room was full of boxes and cartons, some only partially packed, some sealed up securely with masking tape. Dishes and glasses and oddments were stacked everywhere, and the curtains had been taken down and folded. The parlor looked strange stripped of all its familiar trappings, knicknacks, paintings, lace doilies, things that had been there for as long as the boy could remember. Without them, the parlor was suddenly a different place, alien and subtly perverse. Seeing the room like that made the boy sad in a way he had never been before. It was as if his life was being dismantled and packed away in musty cardboard boxes. Tomorrow they were going to Ohio to live, because his mother had family there, and after that he wouldn’t have a father anymore. The boy didn’t understand that part of it, because he knew his father was living in a house on Front Street, but his mother had told him that he didn’t have a father anymore, and somehow it must be true because he certainly wasn’t coming to Ohio with them.

  The boy went upstairs and changed into his pajamas, but before going to bed he got up on a stool and peeked out of the high bedroom window. The clouds in the southern sky had thickened and darkened, and they were streaming toward him like two great out-thrust arms. Although the trees outside were still not stirring, the clouds were visibly moving closer, as though there were a wind blowing high in the sky that had not yet reached the earth.

  One gritty, rain-filled morning Paul was roused from a somnolent daze by a loud hammering at the apartment door. He swam up from the living-room couch, bewildered by the sound. Automatically, he crossed to the door, and then stood shivering and bemused behind it, his fingertips touching the wood. More pounding. He snatched his hand away from the vibrating door-panel, hesitated, and then looked through the spyhole. He could see nothing outside but a hulking, shapeless figure standing too cl
ose to the lens.

  “You in there?” came a muffled voice from the corridor.

  Cautiously, Paul opened the door a crack and peeked out.

  It was the landlord. Behind him were two men in work clothes, hung about with tools and loops of wire cable.

  Paul could not think of anything to say to them.

  “We come in,” the landlord said rapidly, without a question mark. “Gutter’s clogged up ona roof ana roof’s filling up with rain. Water’s coming down inta the apartment down t’otha end d’hall. See?” He pushed forward, shouldering the door wide. Paul backpedaling to get out of his way. “Cain’t reach it up ’are but maybe wecun git through to t’sonuvabitch frumin y’apartment, right? Okayifwecumen,” he said in one breath, and without waiting for an answer he was inside, followed by the two plumbers. They pushed by Paul and went into the kitchen.

  In a daze, Paul retreated to the living room.

  They were stomping around inside the bathroom now. “There’s an airspace behind this bathroom wall here,” one of the plumbers was shouting. “See, it used t’be a window and somebody plastered it over. We knock a hole through the plaster, we can get out inta the airspace and get a pump extension up to that outside drain on this side, right?”

  The other plumber came back with a sledgehammer and they began knocking the bathroom wall down. They dragged in cables and a spotlight, an electric drill, and a long hose-and-pump contraption that came up the stairs and snaked all the way through the apartment to the bathroom. Soon the air was full of dust and powdered plaster, the smell of wet ceramic-covered pipes and damp old wood. The spotlight dazzled like a sun in a box. Machines whined and pounded and snarled; people shouted messages back and forth. The pump thumped and thudded, and made a wheezing, rattling sound like an asthmatic gargling.