Being Invisible: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  After his wife left, Wagner had dreaded being seen in the elevators and corridors of the apartment house in which he lived, for there were fellow tenants who were inclined to strike up a conversation when in proximity to another human being of local residence. Wagner had himself been of this taste. He had mildly enjoyed the small-talk about sports with Marvin Benderville, who lived somewhere around the bend of the hall in circumstances of which Wagner was not aware and in fact had no interest in learning, and exchanging complaints with a cadaverous-looking man named Todvik about the absentee management of the building, unreachably remote except when the rent was due, and the all-too-evident though practically useless super, not the sullen, cynical type so often to be found in such employment but rather a young man whose habitual high spirits were encouraging, till one began to suspect, from his failure to accomplish any task he undertook, they were either chemically induced or the symptom of mental impairment. Whichever, after the ritualistic reference to this functionary’s latest stunt (“Know what Glen did today? Threw a lot of old paint cans down the incinerator. Firemen put it out before the walls got too hot to touch, but the building’s been cited for the black smoke that covered the neighborhood. We’ll pay for that with the next hike in rents”), Todvik often added, “I certainly keep my daughter out of the basement.” Though in Wagner’s judgment Miss Todvik, who looking thirty-five was seventeen only if you had been so informed, was more than a match for Glen, physically or in force of character. She had the foulest mouth Wagner had ever encountered in a female; reeked, in the close quarters of an elevator, of hops and smoke; and once, perhaps drunk or worse, had intimated to him that she was available for sexual purposes though not for free.

  There were more attractive females in the building, and he knew some of them well enough to exchange bromides en route through hallways or lobby. Two were roommates and shared an apartment with still a third young lady whom Wagner had never actually seen owing to her demanding schedule of college plus job. The two he knew, Ellen Mackintosh and Debbie Fong, worked for the same bank. They were both genteel and well dressed. The latter was presumably Chinese but pretty obviously native-born, speaking Standard American. Though both women were attractive, Wagner had never desired either—or, more’s the pity, anyone else except Babe, whom, to his knowledge, they had never met, for their hours would have been different from hers: she worked in an art gallery that didn’t open till late morning, and never used the basement laundry room. Yet since his wife had left him, he found meeting Ellen and Debbie unbearable. Perhaps it would have been easier with either alone, but together they represented the kind of team to which he himself no longer belonged.

  The other woman with whom he was slightly acquainted was named Sandra Elg. She had red hair, ivory skin, a large bosom, and formerly a handsome, sinewy-necked husband who sold expensive imported cars and was thought to have been a racing driver in his prime, which obviously had been not long before. Wagner was no authority in this area, being licensed to drive only those cars with an automatic transmission. As it happened, Elg had died suddenly, out of town, only a few days earlier, as Mrs. Elg had informed him when, despite his efforts to slip down the hall to the incinerator at a time when he was unlikely to encounter any of the other tenants, namely, one o’clock in the morning, the elevator door opened just as he was passing it and she emerged, overdressed as always, with the usual décolletage and heavy scent. She was not in mourning attire but spoke in a melancholy tone when she told Wagner of her loss.

  Such is the ruthless nature of the human heart, the news made him feel better, though certainly he hoped that this truth remained well hidden behind his remarks of condolence. But he could not expect to run into only Mrs. Elg from now on, and anyway he doubted that her sense of bereavement would endure as long as his own, which was perhaps unfair of him, but he was simply unable to believe that a female of her endowments could have his depth of feeling. After Babe left, Wagner honestly never expected to attract another woman his life long. Perhaps that, more than any other reason, was why he decided to try to become invisible—though it would be a misrepresentation to say that one ever makes an altogether conscious resolve in such a matter.

  He had happened to be standing, naked, before the full-length mirror on the inside of the bedroom door, when it began. He had only just got out of bed on a Saturday morning, to face the rest of the day, indeed the weekend, alone. With no one to see him, he found he was unable to assume a good posture: he could throw his shoulders back but he could not keep them there. Though actually underweight, he was developing a small paunch: this was due not to an accumulation of fat but rather to the relaxation of abdominal muscles that comes naturally with the years but can be arrested simply enough by regular isometric tensing of the stomach, you don’t even have to work up a sweat. But at this moment Wagner couldn’t do that, either.

  He had assumed, without putting himself to a possibly humiliating test, that he was impotent at this period, but to have lost the command of his body in other respects was too much to endure. He sank, in articulated segments, to the floor, where he reassembled himself into what was supposed to be a rigid unit, and in one supreme effort tried to do one genuine pushup, as opposed to the weak-kneed kind, and failed.

  The only force strong enough to raise Wagner to his feet was the thought that drinking a cup of coffee might give him strength: this would have been the suggestion of his mother had she still been alive and not gone to an early death to which years of caffeine overloading had probably contributed: You’ll feel better after a cup of coffee.

  But only a quarter-teaspoonful of powdered coffee remained in the jar. Babe had been responsible for maintaining the kitchen supplies; Wagner handled the liquor, the garbage, the laundromat run. Babe had done most of the cooking, that is, defrosting, except when he opened the necessary containers and did the stovework for spaghetti, franks & beans, or baked chicken with a coating acquired when shaken in a plastic bag. Babe had suggested the movies; he subscribed to the magazines. Babe had selected many of his ties. After four years all the duties and privileges had been allocated efficiently, at least in the well-managed marriage such as theirs. Babe certainly had not left because of disorder.

  Still naked, Wagner had returned to the bedroom and was once again staring at his body. He wasn’t built all that badly. He was a bit underweight, especially since Babe’s departure. He could have used some sun. His legs looked almost blue behind the dark hair, but they were well shaped and straighter than those of any number of the parenthesis-limbed movie stars so often depicted in bathing trunks and underpants. If only he were able to assume a respectable posture, he could pass, at a distance, for the old Wagner, but alas this was still too extravagant a hope: his most ardent efforts could not correct or compensate for the degenerate slump that began at the bridge of the nose and continued in a broken line to his insteps.

  He must now get himself together and go out for a jar of coffee. Suddenly he wished he could do so invisibly! He startled himself, he who had never been given to the fanciful. That was his father’s way. If a sailboat was hauled by trailer down their street, Dad, seeing only the top of the mast from his dinner-table chair, might say, “What if we lived on a canal, Fred? Go everyplace by water, not blacktop. This very home might be a houseboat. How about that?” Not even as a child had Wagner found such fantasies especially entertaining. If he went along with them it was only for the sake of his father, in whom an infantile streak was prominent. Looking out the window into a thick fog, Dad might say, “Like we’re suspended from a balloon! Scary: what if the cables break and we plunge earthwards at an ever-increasing speed? Can you imagine that, Fred?” Wagner couldn’t, but he usually pretended otherwise, at least until a natural feeling of charity towards his father was exhausted in the middle years of teenhood when most human males surrender to meaner tendencies.

  Dad, no longer living, would have been proud of him now. “What if I were invisible, Dad, and could go everywhere unseen? Wouldn
’t that be something?” Play tricks on family members, fool friends & policemen, as the mail-order copy of yore said in touting the instructional manual on ventriloquism.

  How could India-Indian fakirs walk on red-hot rocks? By telling themselves they can. I wish I were invisible, said one Wagner to the other in the looking glass, who was not exactly himself, for the parting of the hair was on the wrong side, as was the scar on the knee, the arched eyebrow, and the longer half of the scrotum. His real feet were quite different one from the other, but that fact was not evident at the moment, for his right foot, the left one in the mirror, could not be seen. He was standing on air on that side, his leg ending at the ankle... no, at about mid-shank... but soon the entire calf was gone, as was most of the other leg, which suddenly had caught up and passed its twin.

  Wagner was inexorably disappearing before his own eyes. However, as soon as he recognized that fact and reacted to it with an access of emotion in which fear was predominant, the process was promptly arrested and he stayed visible from waist to head. As yet he had looked at himself only in the mirror: it might well be (and he was praying for that state of affairs) that what he saw, or rather did not see, was some trick of or flaw in the silvered glass: this effect was surely of the fun-house kind, though how and why the mirror had been altered was inexplicable.

  He bent now and stared at his actual feet, that is, where they had been, where indeed they certainly must still be planted, else he would not be standing. Despite that truth of physical law, when he could not see his feet or legs he immediately lost his balance and fell to the bedroom floor.

  He lay there for a while, breathing as though he had been doing heavy labor, then, ingeniously, this half a man pulled himself by clawed hands and digging elbows near enough to the bedroom door to swing it open to the point at which the mirror went back into its own dark corner against the wall.

  With his reflection no longer before him, Wagner had no trouble in rising to his feet. Yet he would not look down for a while. First he went to the liquor cabinet, in the living room, and took a draught of the only bottle left therein: a half pint of kirsch, which Babe had purchased as long as nine or ten months before in response to a newspaper food-page suggestion as to how to transform a mélange of frozen fruit into a grand luxe dessert. Kirsch taken neat was sufficiently revolting to make him feel less unworldly. He drank some more, grimaced not as violently as the first time, for his tolerance was already building, found the courage to look towards the floor, and saw both his old familiar feet. Even the persistent corn on the left little toe was now a friend.

  Wagner refused to believe he had been hallucinating, though that would have been the obvious assumption of many a man. He simply wasn’t that sort. Reality might be unsatisfying, but he had yet to find an acceptable alternative. Half his body had been invisible for a while—yes, it was back now, as he had finally had the courage to ascertain without taking a third drink of kirsch—but it had been gone for a few moments anyway.

  He had not been in a condition to go out for coffee until almost noon.

  2

  BEFORE HIS NEXT EXPERIMENT Wagner drank the remaining quarter-inch of kirsch, with a purpose to settle his nerves before facing the full-length mirror. It was amazing how quickly, as a nondrinker, he could feel the alcohol. He stripped, went before the glass, told himself to become invisible, and did so. He had forgotten he was holding the little bottle from which he had drunk, but the vessel vanished along with his person. The implications of this event were interesting.

  He returned to visibility, put on clothes, and easily disappeared again. One problem with fictional invisible men had always been the clothing or lack thereof: they had to remove it to be unseen, which is to say, could vanish only when naked. This was an inconvenient state of affairs in wintertime, and when rained or snowed on, the man’s corporeal outline could be seen. Wagner also believed he could remember from one of the movies on the theme that the police caught an invisible malefactor by spraying empty space with opaque liquid or fine powder. He now dusted his head with talcum but could not see it, then shook his hair clean and next inundated his crown with water. He and his clothes were soaked, but all remained unseen. Anything, any substance or object that came in contact with the invisible Wagner, was perforce itself put into a state in which it was undetectable to the eye.

  Anyway, to his own eye. At this point the process had yet to be tried on anyone else. And for a while it seemed as though this might never happen. Suppose it was only an illusion of his own organs of sight? He could easily make a fool of himself, thus aggravating the very situation from which he wanted to escape through invisibility. Therefore some days passed before his gift was even exercised elsewhere in the apartment. Despite many complaints, Glen the super maintained a practice of making only the most perfunctory, almost inaudible knock and then letting himself into one’s apartment with a passkey. Glen was one of the last people Wagner would have liked to catch him in a failure of invisibility. So it took a while before he went even as far as the bathroom.

  When he at last did so he discovered some effects he had not anticipated: e.g., urinating when invisible is somewhat like doing it in the dark: you cannot watch the stream falling. However, he could see the disturbance in the water in the bowl, and thus oriented, did not pee on his feet.

  Brushing the teeth was better done with the eyes closed, as was shaving electrically according to the gauge of the fingertips, but one of Wagner’s weekend pleasures, a gracious old-fashioned shave with warm water from a mug and an antique cutthroat razor—presents from Babe at a bygone Xmas; she had a genius for giftgiving—had to be forgone if he couldn’t see his face.

  In the kitchen, when at last he felt comfortable enough to go there invisibly, there were other problems. If he lifted a boiling teakettle it could no longer be seen, and though the operation was the most common of those he performed in that room, he had the greatest difficulty in pouring unseen hot water onto the instant powder in the visible cup. Scalding fingers or even his wrist was routine. Of course, slicing tomatoes or a loaf of bread would have been perilous, so it was just as well that fresh tomatoes or a genuine loaf had not been in his possession since Babe’s leaving, though it was true enough that there was no law compelling him to become invisible. At any time he could have said the hell with it and simply never done it again. Aside from giving him a hobby with which to squander his evenings, his ability to assume a state in which he could not see himself had brought him no profit whatever.

  And then came the episode in the post office, his first public performance, at which he had actually lost money, followed by the inadvertent voyeurism in the elevator, which made him feel filthy and distracted him from his work all afternoon. For hours he tried without success to write new copy for an item that had been listed in a particular catalogue for several seasons but had never, according to the client, sold as well as it should have: a combination ball-point pen and flashlight, the light mounted so that it illuminated what was written by the pen. Obviously it would be of use in a darkened room, perhaps to be kept on the bedside table for jotting down those nighttime inspirations that cannot otherwise be remembered next morning. God knew Wagner had had many of them. When he sat down with the manuscript of the novel he had been working on—seventeen pages, accumulated over, could it have been?, six and a half years, but he had been a late beginner—his imagination immediately packed its valise and left on a tropical cruise. But just let him retire for the night! His brain would proceed to furnish, unasked, far too much for one sleepy man to handle, sufficient dramatic events, vivid characterizations, and complex moralities for a multi-volumed Comèdie Humaine de notre temps.

  Of course, little of this could be brought to mind as late as next morning. By the time he had the courage to confront his manuscript again, which might not be for weeks, it was as if he had never thought about it once during the interim. This certainly would not be the case were one equipped with the Write-Light Combo. So anyway he beli
eved when he first saw the item (sometimes the client would provide samples of inexpensive products; less often these could be kept). He took it home (to do this openly one had to get Jackie Grinzing’s OK), put it on the bedside table, and for the next five nights went quickly to sleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. But on the sixth and seventh came a succession of incandescent ideas like glowing pearls in long strands. The light-pen proved its worth, and in an ad hoc shorthand, a literal translation of the idiom in which his mind was dictating so rapidly, he recorded the lot.

  Both mornings after, he woke to notepaper covered with nonsensical hentracks such as: “G dcs N w/ mplsmcz. Lake. 12-13. mem flg d. Larry Rdwqnq, & P. Etc. etc. H.O.” Not even the two comprehensible entries served any purpose: there was neither a lake nor a Larry in the fragment of narrative he had accumulated over the years.

  This experience had its effect on his efforts to write the new catalogue copy. People were probably not buying the Write-Light because, wiser than he, they correctly assumed that the idea that does not assert itself at an appropriate time comes not from the brain but the lower parts of the nervous system, the same that are responsible, especially in adolescence, for erections for which there is no apparent stimulus.

  A hand cupped his shouldercap.

  “I see the Muse isn’t spreading her legs this afternoon.” It was the unwelcome voice of Roy Pascal, a colleague who had the mistaken conviction that because they worked in the same office they were friends. Pascal had an instinct for arriving at moments when his presence was just enough to provide a negative solidification for a situation that until then had still retained a potential for movement.