Being Invisible: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  The man was a pestilence. Wagner opened the glass door to the niche and withdrew the fire extinguisher, which was not as large or as heavy as he would have liked, and with it he struck the rampant sculpture as violently as he could... establishing that the material of which it was fashioned was not wax but a remarkably resistant, nonbrittle plastic, but doing little harm to it beyond a slight smudge of red paint, and not only was the counterfeit phallus invulnerable but, as Babe had said, the works were snugly fastened to the stands. The stands were screwed to the floor on all four sides with L-shaped metal straps. Wrestling with force, Wagner got nowhere in a frenzied effort to topple this one.

  He did however succeed in making sounds that elicited a distant gibe from Guillaume—“Carla, you’re getting clumsy in your old age,” followed by a watery chuckle—but the gallery owner was not sufficiently interested to emerge from his office when no response was forthcoming.

  It was clear that Zirko, even in absentia, was winning this round thus far, the inertia of his plastic prick in exultant contrast to Wagner’s impotent attempts to deflate it. On the other hand, none of this was being seen by anybody, and his humiliation therefore was known only to Wagner himself—even if it could properly be called humiliation in these circumstances. How could one be truly embarrassed in the absence of an audience? Invisibility continued to disclose new advantages. He was in one of Zirko’s strongholds: he could not expect, even when unseen, to glide right in and have his way, first time out. On his next visit he would bring the proper demolition equipment.

  ... Just a moment, he was not the kind of man who could destroy works of art in cold blood, even when the “art” was such as this. Premeditation would make any such action reprehensible according to the same code by which he despised Zirko’s work: the shit encased in plastic was not art, but shit. And so would be any studied effort to destroy it.

  Wagner was morally invigorated by this insight. He left the gallery without making any further invisible overtures to Babe. He understood it was time to put invisibility to better uses than the service of jealousy, spite, and convenience.

  It really was a remarkable gift. He who possessed it should be rich, and not loveless. His life long, Wagner had never taken anything that did not belong to him, and now he was thinking of robbing a bank!

  But having the ability to vanish does, sooner or later, work a change in a person.

  5

  WAGNER’S MAIDEN EFFORT AS bank robber took place at lunchtime on the following day. Fortune favored him at the outset: Pascal had a dental appointment late in the morning and therefore would not be in a condition to eat lunch, even if, as he boasted, nothing more was done to his teeth than the semiannual prophylaxis. Naturally he make no reference to the kick Wagner had given him the night before, but apparently it had done its job, for nothing was missing from the desk. Presumably something of this sort could be used to correct unpleasant or even dangerous addictions. If every time a heavy smoker lighted up, he received, from thin air, a boot in the behind, he might well be able to overcome the habit. Whether this would be a powerful enough deterrent to the use of addictive drugs, however, was another matter. And of course to have any significant social effect such measures would have to be enacted by an army of invisible men.

  Wagner couldn’t kid himself: invisibility must be used to further his own interests, and as soon as he began to take money that was not his, those were antisocial, which was to say, criminal, in the same area as embezzlement and forgery. He had a choice: he might have walked into a bank with a real or fake gun, stuck up a teller, then escaped by becoming invisible. But for a man with no experience of action, this plan had little allure. Pointing a genuine, loaded firearm at another person would be difficult for him, and even with a toy pistol he would not have adequate confidence to hold it steady. With either, he might well be shot down by bank guards or a fortuitous police officer... He chose the other option.

  And another bank than the one at which he maintained a checking account, for though his was a large branch with many tellers, all of whom were incessantly being exchanged for newcomers, and none of whom gave him so much as a glance as he stood before the window, not to mention that while committing the crime he would be invisible from start to finish, Wagner intended to err only on the side of caution. Should the invisibility fail—and it seemed to him it might; it had yet to be tried under conditions of extreme stress—he still would have a chance to escape unrecognized. Most of his colleagues took their paychecks to the same institution used by him, whereas he was certain to be utterly unknown to all mortals found on the premises of a bank say four blocks north and two west. Which was the way of the city: that not in one’s immediate neighborhood was Mars.

  However, having found such a bank and entered in the most unobtrusive manner an invisible person could enjoy, viz., occupying the slot of a swinging door being moved by a visible man in the compartment ahead, Wagner got quite a shock, for who were the first people he saw as the door came around but Jackie Grinzing and Morton Wilton! The latter was handing a sheaf of small documents to a teller at the nearest window.

  Discouraged, Wagner stayed right in the door and let himself be turned on around to where he had come from. On the sidewalk he was roughly jostled as a remarkably robust man stepped with energy into what seemed an empty space. Encountering the unseen but palpable Wagner, he was confused but even more determined to make headway than at the outset. The result was a short but violent episode in which Wagner got punched in the nose by a flailing arm, perhaps even his own. Witnesses of the event were not quick to believe the other man was even eccentric. One passerby addressed a companion: “Must be a bee or wasp in there.” “Or maybe,” said the other, “just a stink.”

  “Damn,” said Wagner, aloud, having finally realized his escape: he felt a wetness on his upper lip. “Do I have a nosebleed?”

  “I don’t see any blood,” said one of the latest people on the scene, walking on Wagner’s invisible right foot, addressing her companion. “It’s just your imagination.”

  Wagner had to find somewhere out of traffic to plot his next move, else he would continue to sustain damage, for the to-and-fro parade was growing. He stepped to the side of the door just as Jackie and Wilton emerged.

  On the sidewalk Wilton grinned at her and asked, “E.F.?”

  “No, F.F.,” said Jackie, with an expression that looked at first like pain but was apparently a form of desire.

  They went west, undoubtedly en route to a hotel. Invisibility would be a boon to the blackmailer. The technique certainly should be kept out of the hands of a real criminal.

  It was unlikely that Wagner would encounter anyone else he recognized, but this bank seemed jinxed for him. There was another at the catercorner. He headed for it, and immediately had another unpleasant experience. Being invisible had, despite the punishment he had only just received in the swinging door, made him feel immaterial, and as he started to cross the street in defiance of the heavy traffic moving on it, he was almost struck by a lurching van.

  Leaping back to the curb, he was pretty close to giving up the project for this day. Yes, his nose was bleeding. In his current condition he could not see the liquid on his exploratory fingers, but blood it had to be. Perhaps it was dripping on his tie and shirt. He put a handkerchief to his face. When he returned to visibility what a mess he would be! He must clean himself up in one public toilet or another, and to do that he would have to be visible. He was really botching what had seemed simple enough in projection, at least for the preliminary phases. If he had such trouble merely entering a bank, what could he expect when helping himself to money?

  But in fact the last-named turned out to be the most easily accomplished achievement of the day. He crossed the street with the light, went into the other bank, lingered near the electrically latched door-gate between the executives’ desks and the tellers’ area until it was opened—which took no time at all, for persons came and went frequently in the incessant transa
ction between the two—moved along the counter as he had in the post office, and, when one of the tellers (who were all female), took a step to the side, he scooped a handful of hundred-dollar bills from her open cash drawer. As the designers of this bank had shrewdly placed these drawers below the line of vision of anyone not abnormally tall, given the width of the fake-marble counter as it extended towards the customer, plus the plate-glass barrier above it, the eyeglassed, balding man on the other side did not observe the theft—though no doubt if he had so done he would have assumed the fault lay in his own vision. That was the beauty of being invisible: in questionable circumstances people tend not to believe their own eyes.

  Wagner’s leaving the scene of the crime was as neat as had been his arrival. He now applied himself to the problem of the blood on his clothing. Ironically enough, this proved insuperable to the successful bank robber, the man who could vanish at will. He could not clean himself unless he could see what he was doing. If he materialized before the mirror in a public toilet, he could be seen by others. Now, there was nothing to link someone suffering from a nosebleed with a bank robbery, especially when the thief had been invisible, and the money might not be missed until the tallies at the end of the day, so Wagner had no serious reason for worry. He was nevertheless averse to showing his bloodstains; they could be interpreted as having been received while committing a crime of violence, and under the subsequent interrogation by the police, he might crack. He was after all a bona fide lawbreaker now, for the first time in his life. Stiffing the lunch counter had been in the guise of taking a loan. There could be no alternative characterization of the means by which he had filled the pocket of his jacket with hundred-dollar bills.

  On the way back to the office he stopped off at a five-and-dime and stole a little pocket mirror. At his building he had to share the elevator with a sudden crowd of lunch-time returnees. His presence was unknown to the others, and with innocent brutality they crushed him into a corner. The man just ahead turned to see what could be the baffling obstruction, and flooded him, at the range of four inches, with foul breath. He was not released until the car climbed to three floors above his own and the throng departed as one.

  Finally arriving at his own offices, he went to the men’s room and into a booth. He became visible there and inspected himself in the pocket mirror. There was some blood on him, but less than he had supposed: a few drops, now dried brown, on his left lapel, none on his tie. He was able to make himself presentable with a saliva-moistened handkerchief.

  He brought the beautiful new bills from his pocket. They were so fresh and crisp as to have cohered as if they were yet in the teller’s drawer. He felt the emanations of their power. He would not have been astonished had the stack emitted an audible hum of generatorlike might. He counted them. He had taken twenty-two bills. That was two thousand, two hundred dollars, a long ton of money to obtain during a lunch hour with very little work.

  Pascal was standing before the mirror when Wagner emerged. Even in his discomfort the former never missed so slight an event as another man’s leaving a toilet stall. He was angled over a washbasin, face all but touching the glass, palpating his upper lip.

  His reflection spoke. “It feels all puffed up.” He pulled his face back. “How’s it look to you? Swollen?”

  “No,” said Wagner. “Why? Were you punched?”

  Pascal winced in reproach. “Didn’t I say I was going to the dentist’s? He gave me not one shot but two. Then drilled for what seemed like an hour, but said it was only a minor cavity.” Now he poked out a cheek-swelling with his tongue, deflated it to add, “Hope never to see a major one.” He moved quickly so as to accompany Wagner out the door.

  But Wagner certainly did not want to be seen leaving the men’s room in such company, in view of the vile charges that had been anonymously placed against him.

  He snapped his fingers. “Damn.” He showed the sick smile with which one sometimes confessed to a weakness and said, knowingly, “Go ahead. I’ve got to finish what I came here for.”

  Pascal would have argued—that’s the kind of guy he was—but Wagner grimaced, put a hand to his belt buckle, and returned quickly to the booth. He heard Pascal reluctantly leave, but would wait awhile anyhow, for the other, keen on sharing the banalities of routine dental work, was capable of lingering in the hallway. Or even, for the door now was reopened, of returning for more facial examination, anything to keep Wagner captive. Goddamn the man.

  Wagner therefore decided, rashly, to become invisible: let Pascal cope with the mystery of where he had gone... But might it not be more likely that in Pascal’s quest to understand he would prove more intrusive than ever?

  While Wagner was pondering on the matter someone went into the booth just next his. That did it; he must leave before the new arrival began to strain.

  Invisibly, he stepped from the stall and went towards the door, but before he got there it opened to admit the sallow-faced clerk whose sullen manner made visits to the stockroom so unpleasant. It was no surprise that this young man moved more quickly now than when filling an order, but what did seize Wagner’s interest, just as he caught the door on its way back to the jamb, was what the stockroom clerk, whose name was Terry something-or-other, now said aloud, for it was identical to what he had heard the day before, from the large, bluff man in the men’s room of the accounting department.

  “Artie?”

  The difference now was that Artie answered, saying, “Yeah,” from the booth next to the one Wagner had vacated.

  Terry proceeded to join Artie.

  Wagner was not tempted to remain and replicate Marcel’s celebrated eavesdropping on the transaction between Charlus and Jupien. By accident he had successfully carried out the assignment that he had rejected when Jackie Grinzing tried to impose it upon him. There was something chagrining in the experience. He had to remind himself that he was also the man who had marched into a bank and taken, with impunity, $2,200: simply plucked it up from a cash drawer, with nobody the wiser. This was the perfect crime, achieved without so much as the threat of violence... though it could hardly be called victimless. No bank would be likely to write off two thousand dollars or believe that the person nearest the source of the loss was without guilt. Of course the teller would be blamed, that pretty and pleasant-mannered young woman. Losing her job would be nothing beside the certainty that she would be prosecuted for grand theft. He had simply destroyed a life, which had proved an easier accomplishment than he could have imagined. The fact was that taking the money at gunpoint would have been preferable, furnishing an obvious villain.

  So much for his initial and, as it now seemed, infantile sense of earning a profit without depleting anyone else’s account. It could not be said that he was making good use of invisibility. Thus far he had collected shameful information on several persons by means of inadvertent surveillance, bilked a greasy spoon of several bucks, stolen a sum of money for which an innocent young woman would be blamed, lost some change in a post office, ruined Babe’s dinner date, and run afoul of a plastic model of Siv Zirko’s penis. There could be no satisfaction in the perusal of a record of that sort.

  He really must make such amends as he could. He visibly returned to his desk, where after a good deal of sober reflection, he determined to deal by anonymous letter with all the correctable matters except the twenty-two hundred-dollar bills. He would have to return the money in person, invisibly. The mails could hardly be trusted, and even if the parcel reached the bank, the teller would get it only after it had passed through a number of other hands, some of which might be unscrupulous. The unfortunate young woman from whose drawer he had taken the bills might never see them again. No, he must revisit the bank before closing time, before she had done her sums for the day. That could be managed; it was only 1:10 at the moment. Think of that. He had made a frustrated attempt on one bank and successfully robbed another, returned to the office and accidentally caught at least two of the people who used the men’s room f
or sexual activities—all in scarcely more than an hour. There was an efficiency in being invisible.

  As to Terry-from-the-stockroom, a note would surely suffice. Wagner was fluent in epistolary composition. It took him no time at all to type, on the same kind of paper used for copy, the following.

  Terry:

  Your restroom activities have become known. What you do is certainly your own affair, but there has been criticism of your doing it at the office. I gather I’m the only one so far who can identify you, and having no wish to do you harm, I thought I’d give you this warning without saying anything to anyone else. But if you don’t heed it, and the executives discover your identity, you might lose your job. You might pass the warning along to “Artie” as well, and to anyone else you know who uses his services.

  That seemed to say it all. There was no need to add a phony name such as “A Friend,” because he wasn’t one.

  The time was now 1:30. Wagner next wrote to Jackie Grinzing.

  You have been observed, quite by accident, in a compromising situation with Morton Wilton. The person who saw you is not a moral policeman and neither approves nor disapproves of your liaison. But it has occurred to this person that if you could be observed by one, you might well be seen by others who would not be so tolerant of human foibles. Both you and Wilton, if his ring can be believed, are currently married. It would be easy for some malicious person to make trouble for you. Discretion is advised.

  His wristwatch now read 2:05. This note had taken him a bit longer to compose than the one to stockroom Terry, for it was slightly elevated in literary style. For example, he would not have used “liaison” when writing to Terry, nor “foibles,” which, though one could hear its occasional use by a certain whimsical, avuncular kind of TV newsman, had Jamesian connotations: someone in “The Liar” calls the eponymous hero a “fetching dog, but has a monstrous foible.” Or approximately: he hadn’t read it since college.