Fantasy

by Rich Horton

  “Quite the special evening, don’t you think?” said Tom, if that was his name.

  Ray had his hand out and managed a smile. Tom looked somewhat startled, nodded curtly, then brushed past to shake the hand of a man behind Ray. Ray wiggled his fingers as if stretching them, then stuck his hand back into his pocket.

  Janice tugged at his sleeve. “Let’s just go inside,” she said, strain in her voice. But Ray didn’t think he could move.

  The lights blinked twice, and he was thinking there might be a power outage when he realized, of course, they were signaling the curtain. The crowd pushed forward and he felt himself dragged along, Janice’s hand clutched in his.

  When the curtain rose and the music started—an impressive storm of violins and horns—they craned their necks looking for Molly. The bandleader tended to move her for almost every performance. Ray always had the fear that she would be left out, that she’d be depressed that evening and hide out in the bathroom (she could be surprisingly dramatic for an offspring of such parents), or that she’d be miscued, misplaced. He was always prepared to defend her with his anger, for it was one thing to ignore him, or to ignore Janice, but it was beyond bearing for the daughter they both adored to be ignored, to have her feelings hurt.

  But there she was! Second row back, close to the end of the row, her black bangs whipping as she vigorously sawed with the bow. He could feel Janice settle back with relief. He sighed and started to lean back himself when he heard the high cry of a violin and looked up, already knowing it was Molly, playing the first solo part of the night, her eyes streaming. Leaning so far forward he could breathe the warmth of the woman’s head in front of him, Ray felt himself beginning to cry and buried his face in his hands as his daughter’s violin made that sweet, lonely sound floating high into the rafters and beyond.

  He barely heard the rest of the concert, but it sounded impressively professional. Not that he was qualified to judge, but it had none of the rough, slightly off-key flavor he had expected. Nothing to impress the way Molly’s moment in the spotlight had, but quite good, surely, none the less. He and Janice decided to sit through the break, not wanting to wade into that crowd scene again. He watched the audience: some still on the edges of their seats, some leaning back in bored, awkward semblances of relaxation. A few with heads bowed, touching each other, as if praying.

  Did any of these people realize they were being watched? In their private moments did they imagine they, too, were invisible?

  He glanced back up at the stage. Molly was staring at him. He felt a rush of embarrassment, hoping she didn’t think he had been ignoring her performance. She looked smaller, younger, and it made him think of when it seemed she had been mostly his and not this almost-adult traveling at the speed of light out of his world. Claire didn’t invite me to her sleepover and I’m, like, her third-best friend! The way she had looked up at him that night, surrounded and embraced by toys she’d soon find babyish, he had thought she was demanding some explanation. It was as if she’d suddenly discovered she’d inherited his leprosy—why hadn’t he told her before?

  “These things happen, sweetheart.” Of course they do, especially in this family. “I’m sure she didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.” Because she wasn’t aware of you or your feelings. “Sometimes you just have to be the organizer, the party-thrower, and invite her.” It had been good advice, but he had prayed she wouldn’t follow it. What would he say to her when they ignored her invitations?

  In fact, Molly did not follow his advice, and he never heard another word from her on the subject. Perhaps she understood better than her parents. A child prodigy in the realm of invisibility. If she had friends after that, if she were invited places, she didn’t share that information.

  After the concert they made their way backstage to congratulate her, even though the seeming aggressiveness of the crowd agitated him. Janice pressed herself as close to the walls as possible, her cheekbone practically rubbing the brick. Finally they stood huddled together backstage as rivers of people flowed around them, spinning off into laughing, celebratory groups. Ray scanned the room for Molly, thinking that of course none of this should be any cause for anxiety, but he felt a rising tide of nervousness, beginning with an itchiness in the bottoms of his feet, tightening his calves and creating small but intense shooting pains in his knees. He held his head up stiffly and gulped for air. The room grew suddenly gray, the people moving around him outlined in ice and silver. He held one hand out, the skin ragged around the outlines, fading.

  “Daddy?”

  Molly stepped out of the bright light and into his reach. She carried her violin folded into her arms like a baby. Her eyes were wide, frightened, but they did not blink, did not avert from him even for a second as she looked at him, looked at him.

  He pulled her to him and the three stood close together, not hugging—none of them good about hugging in public—but making sure they maintained contact as the world spun and jerked and solidified in its slow return to the real.

  * * * *

  Molly hardly spoke on the way home, turning away their compliments with uninviting syllables, grunts, and nods, even refusing her father’s proposition of hot dogs and sundaes at a neighborhood shop. She retired early, but they could hear her playing her romantic classical CDs softly, rearranging furniture, “doing her inventory” as Janice called it, packing for college and the life to come. She’d been packing for more than a month, trying to decide what bits of her old life to bring forward. The plan was she would leave in three weeks for a summer job at a music camp in upstate New York, and from there to school in the city. They had argued for months over whether they would drive her—it felt wrong not to be there with her for the big transition. It seemed all terribly too grown-up and recklessly premature to Ray, who already missed her to the point of physical pain. But something about Molly’s determination that she do this alone finally persuaded him, and Janice reluctantly went along. Now Janice refused to speak about it.

  The most difficult part of it all was that he was almost thrilled she was leaving. He imagined her going north, being absorbed into the life of the city and coming out of it a success, a famous person who had escaped the sick anonymity passed down from her unfortunate parents. In his imagination she became a fabulous, soaring star, and even as his heart was breaking in anticipation of her absence, his lost, invisible voice inside was saying go, go, go, don’t look back…

  Even with that sense of hope, however, they could not escape what their lives had become. An hour later Ray and Janice were ready for bed. They lay down together in loose-fitting pajamas, pushing off the bedclothes lest they bind and constrict. They both could feel the pain approaching, as if from a long distance gathering speed, its mouth open and the night wind whistling through the narrow gaps between its needle-like teeth.

  They clasped hands as their spasms began, Janice’s rocking her body almost off the bed. She clutched his hand until he cried out, which triggered even worse convulsions in the both of them, bodies snapping at the ends of whipping arms, mouths pulled back in fish-expression grimaces, tears and sweat burning across their faces and softening the roots of their hair. He willed his body to stay together, to remain solid, begged it to stop its flow across the bed and onto the floor, as every skin cell fought against transparency and his mind battled evaporation.

  They bit their lips until they bled, clamping their mouths to prevent the escape of their cries. They had decided long ago that Molly must not know, that if she weren’t told she might even escape this. And if she were to overhear, what could they say to her? For how do you explain the terrible pain of invisibility?

  * * * *

  A month later Molly was gone as planned. Another week and she’d still not called to check in. It bothered them both, but perhaps Janice the most. Now and then he would catch her visiting in Molly’s room, but she would not speak of any of it.

  Eventually Janice quit her job without notice. She’d been there fifteen years,
but she said she’d “never felt welcome.”

  “Never? Not even in the beginning?” Ray couldn’t quite believe it. He was a little angry with her—they needed the money, and she hardly seemed ready for job hunting.

  “In the beginning I pretended. I don’t know why, but now I can’t pretend anymore. I go in and I shut my office door and I cry all day.”

  “All day?” He wanted to be sympathetic, but he was too shocked. He’d believed she’d been happy until the last few years. She hadn’t been like him-she’d seemed to have friends, she talked as if there’d been a camaraderie at work, her opinions were respected. He’d always suspected that the invisibility she’d felt these few years had been something she’d contracted from him. “I’m so sorry…I had no idea.”

  She collapsed in his arms. He wanted to tell her he understood, that he knew how she felt.

  Finally, a few days later, Ray decided to call the place Molly worked. At first the person on the other end claimed never to have heard of her. Ray sat down on the edge of the couch, holding the phone to his chest. Then someone else came on who knew her, then finally it was her voice, distant yet energetic, interested in a way he’d never heard in her before, and yes she was all right, she’d just been busy, yes she would write, but she was just so busy.

  Ray didn’t tell her that her mother had quit her job. He said they were doing wonderfully; they had so many things to do they couldn’t fit them all in. He went so far as to make up the name of a couple they’d recently met, with similar interests, and the events they had attended together.

  Molly responded with a few stories of social events of her own. He had no idea if she was telling the truth, but he decided to believe her, and she did sound convincing. She sounded as if her parents had no further place in her life. Although this brought a note of genuine sadness into everything he said to her after that, he still cheered her on, and actually hoped, God help him, that she stayed as far away from them as possible, for her sake.

  He told Janice about the call, making it seem that he and Molly had talked far longer than they actually had. She nodded as if disinterested, but he could see the wetness of her eyes, the stiffness in her features. She wouldn’t talk about it.

  That night the spasms were more violent and painful than ever before. Janice’s sweeping arms broke a bedside lamp, and he spent half the night comforting her and bandaging her wounds.

  At work Ray made himself say hello to everyone in his office every morning. It was part of a plan to make himself present. Never mind that he had tried similar tactics before. He used to keep a journal of such attempts: times he’d said hello with no response, times he had been ignored in conversations, obviously excluded from invitations. Stores where he had been unable to get sales assistance, restaurants where the waiters ignored him even when he waved menus in their faces, times cars had almost struck him in pedestrian crosswalks, days in which he’d had absolutely no human contact before the daily escape home to Janice and Molly.

  Now he pulled this journal out of his desk and threw it into the trash, determined once again that these things wouldn’t happen to him again or, if they did, he would ignore them. He would be his own company, if need be. The best of companions.

  That afternoon the building had a fire drill. He walked out with the other employees, offering up his own jokes to match theirs. He couldn’t be sure whose jokes were being laughed at, and whose ignored. Too much noise and confusion. But he at least felt like part of the group.

  Out in the parking lot the group of employees separated into two groups, one on either side of him. He looked around: he was at the exact center, the point of separation, standing with neither group. He turned to the group on his left, listening to the general conversation, seeking an opening. Finally he offered up some comment about the hot pavement. He could almost see his words slide by their faces, catching on nothing, drifting beyond the group. He turned to the group on his right, wondering aloud how long the drill was supposed to last. The group appeared to stare up into the hot sun, preferring to blind themselves rather than to acknowledge him. When the all-clear sounded, the other employees returned to work upstairs. But Ray climbed into his car and went home.

  Another month passed and he noticed Janice seemed to have less and less to say to him when he called home. Then there was a period of days in which she didn’t answer the phone at all. After work he would walk into the house to confront her, and her excuse would be she must not have heard the phone ringing, she’d been out working in the yard (their yard, layered as it was with gravel and wood chips, seemed to have little to work on), or she’d been out shopping (but what did she buy?).

  Then there came the morning Ray called home every ten minutes with no response.

  A few minutes after his last call he found himself loitering outside his boss’s office door, coughing, trying to look as ill as possible. He felt like a kid. He winced dramatically as he walked through the door, then looked up to see his boss hadn’t noticed. Of course.

  Ray cleared his throat. No answer. “Excuse me, Jim?” Jim appeared to be hypnotized by whatever he had up on the screen. “I’m feeling really ill. I have to leave!” He practically shouted it.

  His boss looked up in surprise, said, “Sure, do what you have to do,” and turned back to his computer.

  At first he couldn’t find Janice. She wasn’t in the kitchen, and the living room TV was cold. He called her name from the bottom of the stairs, but there was no answer. He went outside and walked around the yard looking for signs of her supposed gardening activities. The yard looked as sad and neglected as he’d expected. He felt compelled to look into the shrubs, pull back weeds and search the ground for her body. He found some of Molly’s old toys: a yellowing Barbie and a toy ice-cream truck. They must have been hiding out there at least a decade. He looked up at the house. It appeared abandoned. The roof was badly in need of repair. How long had it been deteriorating? He looked at his hands, half expecting them to be an old man’s hands. Had he been asleep? How many years had he lost?

  Finally, in their bedroom, he found her.

  She writhed in pain, an insect pinned alive to the bed. Her arms and legs wriggled, her mouth opened and closed silently. He’d never imagined she did this alone—this was something they’d always shared.

  He looked more closely. Some distortion of the body. Then he realized she had no hands, no feet.

  * * * *

  Ray called in sick the rest of the week and stayed home with Janice. The week after, with her no better, he applied for two weeks of sick leave. On the phone his boss again seemed nonchalant. Do what you have to do. As if Ray really had a choice. Did his boss even know Ray was married? Ray didn’t think the man had ever asked. Ray wore a ring, but it was pale yellow, blending into his skin. Invisible if you weren’t really looking.

  He saw no evidence, however, that his remaining home did her any good. During her better times she would lie there, staring at the ceiling, her skin glowing with the gray of fish in shimmering pools. Now and then one piece or another of her would fade into shadow, or bleach to the color of the surrounding sheet, making of her body an archipelago as she slept. These bits would fade back into visibility as she awakened, and sometimes she would be reinvigorated, getting up and walking around, fixing herself something to eat.

  At her worst she shuddered and convulsed, gripping the sides of the bed with hands that weren’t there, the skin on her arms and legs flickering in and out of existence like quick bursts of lightning. Despite his growing horror at touching her, he would lie down next to her and embrace her, hold her tightly as if to anchor her to the world. The irony was that he rarely convulsed himself during this period and had not been aware of his own painful invisibility for some time.

  “I’m taking you to the doctor,” he said one morning. “It’s ridiculous that we’ve waited this long.”

  “You can’t,” she said from under the covers. She’d pulled them up over her head, so that all he could sens
e of her was her frail voice, a few rounded shapes, stick-figure limbs beneath the quilt. If he went over and pulled the covers back, would he see anything?

  “Why can’t we try?”

  “He won’t believe you.”

  “Maybe there have been other cases, and they’re not letting on because it would cause a panic. Besides, he’ll see the spasms, he’ll see what happens to your body, your skin.”

  “Do you really think he’ll see anything? Do you think he’ll notice anything at all?”

  Of course not. But he would not say it. “We have to do something. I have to do something.”

  “Stay with me. That’s doing something.”

  And he did.

  One night he awakened to her coughing. He lay watching her, her naked back glowing, pulsing with each cough. There was a pearly green aura he thought strangely beautiful, and he felt guilty that he could think it beautiful. She sighed. The coughs grew softer, the color shifts more subtle, a gauzy, greenish cream. She seemed to recede from him into the other side of the bed. Cough. Into the wall.

  And then he was looking at the bare wall, the empty plain of bed beneath it. He held perfectly still. And waited. He gave it time, gave her time to come back to him. Waited an hour. Then waited two hours. And then began to cry. And then began to sob.

  * * * *

  He did not leave the house for several weeks. This was a conscious decision. Not out of grief. He wasn’t even sure he was grieving. His ­reasons were investigative. Experimental. Since she had vanished so suddenly, couldn’t she reappear suddenly as well? He could be sitting at breakfast, and she might suddenly be sitting in the chair across from him, sipping her coffee and reading the morning paper. Or perhaps she’d show up at the front door, knocking, since she hadn’t had her keys when she disappeared. Or perhaps he’d wake up one morning and she’d be lying in bed beside him, her face nuzzled against his arm, because their bed was the last place he’d seen her.