Being Invisible: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  By now Wagner had reached a remote back hallway devoid of other people, and he therefore vanished, for it would seem impolitic in this era, damnably, for him to be seen even in the accountants’ facility.

  However, no sooner had he got there without incident and positioned himself before the nearest urinal than in burst a large man so bluff-mannered as to have begun to unzip his fly before he pushed open the door, and had Wagner not leaped away he would have been soaked, for this person performed as though extinguishing a brush fire otherwise soon to go out of control. Nor could Wagner have used the remaining urinal without apprehension, for it was mounted too near the other if one’s neighbor were as hearty as this guy, whose akimboed left arm not only intruded into the next space but also fanned the air as if it were an element of a pump that was emptying his reservoir.

  Wagner fled into one of the toilet stalls and at last found relief. The sound he made was of little concern, for the other man could not have heard it over his own Niagara, but there came a moment when the latter had finished and Wagner couldn’t stop.

  “Artie?” The man was obviously directing his question, somewhere between a loud whisper and an undertone, towards Wagner’s stall.

  Since he had to keep going for another moment and if he remained vocally silent his questioner might stoop in search of a pair of feet beyond the stall-door, Wagner without hesitation, and assuming a gravel voice, said, “Al. From maintenance.”

  “Oh, sorry,” said the other and was soon heard rinsing his hands and departing.

  Wagner hoped he would not have to go to these extremes every time nature called, but until the air cleared and the real culprits were identified, he should probably do well to drink less coffee during working hours.

  Back at his desk, visible again, he found in his Out box a new sheaf of assignments. Under the rule of Jackie’s predecessor each copywriter or, in the case of an exceptionally large book, two writers might be assigned to do all the text for the same catalogue. If there were two, they could divide the task as they wished, each taking the items individually preferred. Jackie changed the old system, which in her theory had produced uninspired copy. By the end of a catalogue a writer’s energy had flagged. Obviously the tendency was to deal first with all those products that were easy to write about and leave the tougher ones to the end, when of course the deadline was near. Thus it was often true that the very items the client wanted to push, because of the novelty that made writing about them an unusual effort, got either short shrift or what was perhaps worse, a description that was the issue of laboriousness and desperation. Anyway that was Jackie’s opinion. She offered it with a self-righteousness based on (1) her own experience as a copywriter, which was hardly unique, and (2) her current power, which was.

  Next she had given each practitioner an area of focus: the copy for all products falling in or near any such, in all the catalogues prepared by the firm, would be written by her or him whose specialty it was. Wagner for example had bathrooms. Were this policy still in effect he would have had the self-draining soap dish with which Mary Alice was now struggling. Delphine, raised as a city girl, could not drive; she was assigned to automotive products. Pascal was obliged to supply the texts for eyebrow tweezers, depilatories, dress shields, etc. Athletic equipment, jump ropes, medicine balls, and so on, went to two-ton Meg Mulhare, who brought a daily bagful of midmorning snacks and waddled out to an enormous lunch.

  The incongruity was not by accident. Jackie’s theory was that that person to whom a given product was foreign would write about it with exceptional care and clarity.

  The policy was not successful. Meg was profoundly hostile to barbells, and at one point Delphine made the rare application to Wagner for assistance. “Maybe I don’t get the point of this: a pump you attach to an electric drill, with a hose that goes down into the motor and pumps out all the oil. Wouldn’t all the gas get pumped out too, and if so how would the car run?”

  As to coupling Wagner with bathrooms, he had never been a lingering habitué of either water closet or bathtub and thus had little sympathy with the cylindrical transistor radio that fitted inside a toilet-paper roll, enabling the owner to tap his toes to the beat while at stool, or the likes of bubble-bath dispensers, neck-pillows, heated towel racks, loofah mitts. What had the merchants made of the place to void wastes and wash one’s hide!

  The current system had been in effect for three weeks now. Its conditions were “simplicity itself,” as Jackie was wont to say: everybody did anything. Each item for all the catalogues currently being compiled was given a special code number that identified the catalogue to which it belonged, and the manila envelope in which the information about it was contained was collected by Gordon the messenger and placed to join the scores of others in a big bin at his work station. In compliance with the rule by which all occupations, pursuits, have each its own jargon, the coding was called “tagging”; Gordon’s pickup, “catching,” and his delivery, “dropping.” The specifications of the products, the photos, etc., in the manila envelopes were “research.”

  Periodically Gordon went about the cubicles wheeling a wire cart, similar to the supermarket kind, and from the bin that rode thereon he would take at random sufficient “research” envelopes to bring the number to five in any copywriter’s In box.

  While Wagner was at the men’s room near the accounting department, Gordon had “dropped” two new envelopes. Wagner opened each and peeked inside, hoping to find more attractive products to deal with than the three he had had at hand, which happened to be: a set of hand puppets; a calendar with a pseudoreligious one-liner for every day of the year (e.g., “Though you have no shoes, thank Him who has left you with feet”); a collapsible luggage cart that when folded up fitted into a briefcase. He had been working on the copy for the last-named before he went to the toilet. Distracted by his other cares, he had not got far. It seemed to be a useful device until you thought about it: you wheeled your valise to the baggage pickup, then collapsed the carrier and put it into your briefcase. Or in any event you might so try. But even when folded for stowing, the cart was a bundle 2’ x 2’ x 7” and had a mailing weight, anyway, of 11 pounds. However it was transported, such a burden would be meticulously examined by the inspectors of carry-on luggage: a lot of mischief could be concealed in its hollow tubes and amidst its network of articulations. It wasn’t Wagner’s job to make judgments on a product’s merit, but lately the utility of some gadgets had begun to seem questionable.

  The first of the two latest envelopes concerned a hassock in the form of a giant cheeseburger; and the second, a kitchen machine, capable, by means of its multitudinous accessories, of every process from grating ice to making sausages and priced accordingly.

  His skepticism with regard to the folding luggage cart was inhibiting, so he returned the “research” to the In box and instead wrote two sentences for the calendar.

  365 different pearls of spiritual wisdom, one for every day of the year. Perpetual faith calendar, nondenominational.

  This text would appear below a colored illustration of the page for May 17, for which, printed in red type, the day’s slogan was:

  A mighty fortress is our God.

  —Noted Hymn

  Which would seem not to be altogether “nondenominational,” even though Martin Luther was denied his proper credit. However, from the descriptive notes provided by the manufacturer, Geist Printing, it appeared that the inspirational messages for other days were provided by several popes as well as Moses, Mohammed, and even Buddha, not to mention several show-business personalities who were conspicuous believers of one or another persuasion (for example, the standup comic Joey Spang, to whom was attributed the sentiment with respect to shoelessness). “Multidenominational” should rather be the word, but Wagner knew by experience that Jackie would rule it out as having a prefix sufficiently different from the routine as to alienate the average man. So more imprecision was given currency. The vulgarity was expected, though perhaps
this calendar went too far in identifying holidays that had no credentials but those supplied by trade associations: below the quotation from Luther’s hymn the seventeenth of May was called National Scalp Care Day.

  Wagner was capable—as who on the staff was not, excepting Mary Alice Phillips?—of producing such a piece of copy at least once an hour without a hint of strain, but it had taken him no time at all, on first joining the firm, to develop a measured pace, for he had been trained by a laconic man named Ray Olenberg, since retired; indeed, deceased. Olenberg’s most urgently imparted piece of wisdom was that Wagner must not write more than four pieces of copy a day, or else he’d be “goddamn unpopular with the others.”

  The threat was not one which Wagner would disregard. He had a natural sense of professional fraternity even though he was something of a loner. Anyway, he had a moral or perhaps an aesthetic queasiness about distinguishing himself from his fellows as a Stakhanovite, though he dreamed of doing so one day as a literary celebrity. So he did not violate the common quota, good soldier that he was, but of course when Jackie Grinzing was hired and, as her trainer, he passed along the traditional word, she proceeded to ignore it and persistently turn out more copy than any two of the other staffers, and when the former department head had been hired away by another firm, she naturally assumed his post.

  Olenberg was still there at the time. When Wagner brought up the matter, though without reproach, the older man asked, savagely, “But who would want the fucking job?” The truth was that Olenberg was one of those people Wagner’s father, a World War II soldier, had characterized as being by nature “enlisted men,” while fewer were “officer material.” Needless to say, Dad himself was a confirmed member of the former group.

  Wagner agreed with Olenberg that he wouldn’t have wanted Jackie’s position, but neither could he place himself with the common soldiery, except insofar as the work quota went.

  In the remaining hour now he at last wrote the copy for the collapsible luggage carrier, naturally failing to mention any of his reservations.

  Portable Porter: Lightweight but strong aluminum luggage cart supports 70 lbs., then folds to fit in legal-size attache or briefcase. Rubber padded steel spring shock cords, heavy duty wheels. A real boon to the frequent traveler.

  Then, his luck holding for a change, he managed to dispose of everything for the night and to have become invisible only a second or two before Pascal arrived at the cubicle.

  “Damn!” the latter said aloud, even though there was ostensibly no one there to audit him, not even Delphine, who had been heard to leave a moment or two earlier.

  Pascal started away—and the invisible Wagner was not far behind him, his rubber-soled tread not audible above Pascal’s foot-slapping plod—but abruptly spun around and started back. Wagner only just was able to dodge him by stepping into Delphine’s vacant niche.

  Pascal continued back to Wagner’s cubicle, where he stopped and peered in. Since the three-sided cell was only large enough to contain a desk, the accompanying chair, a wastecan, and a hat-tree, no one could be hiding there except if invisible, and for a moment Wagner wondered whether Pascal had any suspicions with respect to his whereabouts.

  But the other man proceeded to demonstrate that he had an interest which would not have been served by Wagner’s presence: he stepped into the cubicle and began to try the desk drawers.

  Wagner had lately become aware that someone was regularly pilfering from his supply of office supplies—pencils still innocent of the sharpener, shiny paper clips in three sizes, creamy new file folders, and not so much of the cheap yellow paper on which the original rough writing was done as the expensive sheets (two sheets of white bond, one pink, one onionskin, with carbons between each pair, all glued together at the top) on which the final version of each piece of copy was typed for submission, minus the onionskin sheet, to Jackie Grinzing, who kept the pink layer and forwarded one of the whites to the client, reserving the other for the printer.

  Nowadays each copywriter had to sign a voucher every time he went to the stockroom for supplies. This was another of the measures put into being by Morton Wilton. Thus the more materials pinched from Wagner, the oftener he had had to apply to the sulky young man who presided over the stockroom. Unfortunately, only the middle drawer could be locked: he kept personal possessions therein, including, for security, his wallet, which he feared might be swiped if he left it in the inside breast pocket of the suit jacket that he hung on the hat-tree while at work.

  He noticed now that after retrieving the billfold he had failed decisively to shut that drawer: it missed closure by no more than an eighth of an inch, but Pascal, with the sharp sight of the stealthy, went straightway to the appropriate knob.

  There was nothing of value to others in the accumulation of the drawer. There was a little gold-framed picture of Babe that had formerly stood on the desktop. There was a letter or two from his sister, for he usually answered the latest at the office, and a couple of postcards sent from foreign places by vacationing colleagues. The odd stick of gum might be found therein, generally hard and brittle, for Wagner’s dentist had discouraged him from exercising this habit, and though he had never smoked since college days, several matchbooks of the kind provided by restaurants and bars. A thorough search might also uncover a petrified example of the peanut-butter cheese-cracker sandwiches which were already stale as they came from the machine.

  It wasn’t much, and as Pascal was fingering through it now, Wagner was humiliated that the man would not encounter anything valuable enough to steal, if that was his purpose, or even some item that might be associated with a secret predilection or condition: a studded condom, a concealable weapon, even a vial of nitroglycerine pills for an unpredictable heart. It took him a moment or two to decide that Pascal, and not himself, was at fault here.

  So as the man was bending to root in the farthermost recesses of the drawer, Wagner gave him a furious kick in the hindquarters. In quest of his lost balance Pascal kicked the wastecan, bumped his head against the fiberglass partition, and jostled the empty hat-tree so violently as to knock it over had it been top-heavy with garments.

  Wagner used the stairs again this evening, though he made himself visible before his feet touched the first tread: it was too precarious to descend on unseen feet. Only the invisible could know such a problem; it was quite another situation than that of the blind, whose remaining senses were compensatorily supersensitive.

  He was spurning the elevator because he wanted to reflect in the absence of other human beings, and perhaps there was no better venue for that exercise than the deserted staircase of a commercial building, with its unyielding metal stairs, undecorated walls, and relatively dim light, a shaft of nullity at the core of the humming beehive. Choosing a place and a time for such deliberation was new for Wagner, whose habitual means of dealing with unpleasantness had been to postpone thinking about it until it either went away—as eventually did the neighbors with the deafening stereo—or by becoming so routine it was seen as normal a part of life as bad weather. Only by viewing certain phenomena in such a light was it possible to endure in the city.

  But lately things had happened that were unacceptable. Merely showing indignation was not an adequate response to the charges made by Jackie Grinzing, and pouring wine into Siv Zirko’s lap had brought only the most transitory of satisfactions, long gone by the time Wagner had accompanied Babe to the cab. Until he saw her in Zirko’s company he had actually been able to suppose that she left him to pursue a career unencumbered by any association with a male that was warmer than her friendship with the homosexual who owned the gallery at which she worked. Wagner had simply refused to entertain even the possibility that Babe was going to bed with anybody. But Zirko was obviously not the type to settle for being just a pal to any woman: if that had been his first dinner date with Babe, he was counting on his pound of flesh; if his second, he had already tasted it at least once.

  Wagner had to try to get habituat
ed to such an ugly way of thinking if he ever hoped to survive. And to win Babe back he would have to discredit Zirko in some more profound fashion than merely bringing about some brief embarrassment or inconvenience. After the incident in the restaurant he realized he had the means to work the ruin of not only Zirko but anybody else he chose to use it on. However, in Babe’s case the greatest delicacy was called for. Knowing her, he would say that, odd as it might seem, she would not be unduly impressed by his ability to become invisible. To Babe that would be a trick, not a talent; an ingenious trick, to be sure, but if he could have learned how to do it, so could others. Whereas talent was unique. Oh, there were lots of people who had talent, but the issue or product of each was one of a kind. No one made the same music or played a role as did any other artist—nor could they even repeat their own performances to the letter. As to the primary arts, nobody painted exactly like another, and obviously each poet, each composer and sculptor had a voice or hand peculiar to himself alone irrespective of quality judgments.

  But there was only one way in which to be invisible; if it were done partially, or badly, leaving anything that could be seen, then it couldn’t be called by the name.