Being Invisible: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  “Maywee,” Phillips said sternly, “this isn’t easy for me to ask, but I must: are you still intacta?”

  “Is that any of your business?”

  “Then you’re not, pure and simple. And I know you. Such a venture could never be your own enterprise.”

  As always when an unannounced kibitzer on the private moments of others, Wagner felt some shame now—until he remembered that both father and daughter assumed he was listening from a place of concealment, and then he began to develop an indignation against them both. Mary Alice could easily cancel this emergency by simply answering the question in the affirmative. Why must she continue to compound the trouble that she indeed had begun the day before?

  “Dad, you’ll just have to accept the fact that I can’t stay a little girl till I’m old and gray. Now put down the thirty-aught-six and go home.”

  “Not before I put a round or two into him,” Phillips said in a dispassionate voice.

  “How come you didn’t bring the nine millimeter?” asked his daughter.

  “Why, you ought to be able to figure that out. The permit’s premises-only. It would be a violation.”

  “But, Dad, my God, isn’t it also against the law to shoot somebody?”

  Both of these people seemed to know the specialized jargon of firearms enthusiasts. Listening to them, Wagner felt even more out of his element than when in the company of Sandra. Any prolonged connection with Mary Alice was out of the question. No doubt her father would be overjoyed to hear such sentiments, but how to get the message to him without being shot first?

  Alwyn Phillips answered his daughter now with a contemptuous laugh that sounded like the bark of a miniature dog. “No danger at the moment, it seems,” said he. “Your admirer has fled the premises. Went out a window and down the fire escape, I suppose. It seems he is a poltroon.” He lowered the weapon, banging the butt on the bare wood of the hallway floor. Babe had taken away the little rug, handwoven by peasants in the mountains somewhere. Wagner would rather have had that back than get the TV set: when one was barefoot it had been a welcome island in the straits between bedroom and bath.

  “Oh, maybe you had to take the step eventually,” Phillips was saying, “but why with this dog-eared example of the opposite sex? Why not with a fine lad of your own age, Maywee, and not this poor specimen of manhood?”

  Making every allowance for Phillips’ emotional state, Wagner was annoyed by the slurs, especially when made by such a runt.

  Mary Alice spoke. “Don’t judge by exterior impressions. Fred cares nothing about his appearance. So his posture is awful, he’s skinny, his clothes are rumpled, his shoes scuffed, et cetera, et cetera. He’ll even wear socks of different colors. So? But he has quite a mind.”

  “Oh, yeah?” her father asked defiantly. “And what has he invented for the betterment of humanity?”

  Though of course he was flattered by her tribute to his other gifts, Wagner had not realized that Mary Alice so despised his person. He was tempted to point out, from thin air, that it was not his mind that she had been overusing during the last twenty hours.

  Phillips added, “That’s my definition of brilliance: does it contribute to the welfare of humankind. I can scarcely find anything to admire in some cheap cleverness that has no purpose but to delude the naïve into buying that which they do not really want.”

  “My gosh, Dad, you can’t expect everybody to be another Archimedes. Fred’s not the only person never to have discovered a principle as far-reaching in its consequences as the lever.”

  Mary Alice continued to reveal new facets of herself, but none thus far that Wagner found especially fetching. Of course, one is always otherwise with members of one’s own family than with even the closest of friends: indeed, just thinking about his sister could make Wagner feel like a ninny.

  “The important point,” said Mary Alice, “is that when it comes to words, he hasn’t met his master.” This was too outlandish an overstatement to be at all pleasing, unless of course it was confined to the preposterously literal: no, he had never sailed with Capt. Joe Conrad or gambled with Dusty at Roulettenburg or met Chuck Baudelaire at Mallarmé’s mardis.

  “If that were the case,” said her father, his weedy mustache quivering in derision, “then how can it be we are not reading his byline on dispatches from the tinderkegs and flashpoints across the globe, or seeing his Burberry outside some chancellery on the cathode-ray tube? Answer: he’s nobody, Maywee. He’s simply used his seniority at the office to win your favor.”

  “You’re wrong, Dad. He’s publishing a book with Burbage.”

  The statement had an uncomfortably familiar resonance, but Wagner had no memory of ever making it to Mary Alice. Apparently he could not be trusted when it came to the matter of his unwritten novel.

  Phillips looked as if he were impressed by what embarrassed Wagner to hear. “Can it be true?”

  “Sure it is,” said Mary Alice. “Same publisher as your favorite, Theodore Wulsin.”

  Phillips peeped at the ceiling, hand at chin. “You certainly know how to fetch me up short,” said he, under the finger that was across his lips. “Mightn’t you have imparted this information at the outset?” He lowered one eyelid. “But look here, he’s married, isn’t he?”

  “That’s a technicality,” said Mary Alice.

  Her father plunged a finger into his collar. “Well, you know you can count on me to apologize if I’m wrong,” said he. “I won’t be deterred by a narrow concern for amour propre.” He glanced up and down the hall with an air of drama. “But if he’s a man of probity, where is he? He disappeared without an argument.”

  “He’s shy,” said Mary Alice. “Not to mention you came in muzzle first.”

  “Indeed a slippery customer,” her father said, not unkindly. He and Mary Alice drifted along the hall to the living room, where Alwyn found his golf bag and returned the firearm to it. Now, thought Wagner, would be the moment to jump him, but it was too base an impulse to survive. Caring about the fate of one’s offspring was not a contemptible emotion: this was a lot more than Wagner’s own father would have done, and though it might not have been his mother’s fault as such, she had died when he was yet a boy. Suddenly he felt an unprecedented access of affection for his sister. After all, she was kin. But in the next moment he remembered that in his latest conversation with her he had made the outlandish claim that apparently he repeated later on during some sexual transport with Mary Alice, and he found himself resenting both women for believing him.

  However, if he could only get rid of Mary Alice and then somehow elude Sandra except for carefully scheduled meetings, there was now no procedural reason why he could not sit down and write that novel. He had no job to deter him. And why did he need Gordon’s permission to use the poet’s name to make contact with someone in power at the Burbage Press? Things often seem impossible only because one has not tried them. Invisibility was a case in point.

  ... It was ridiculous that he continued to be on the retreat long since perfecting the process of becoming invisible. In the latest exercise of his power, when Phillips pointed the gun at him, he had disappeared in a millisecond. His potential was unlimited: by invisibly manipulating orders at headquarters, he could exert his will on an army. He could saunter unseen into the White House and, monitoring the President at close hand, learn all the secrets of state. From the Bureau of Engraving and Printing he could in one visit take away enough high-denomination bills to make him immediately rich, then go again at any time for replenishment.

  But his moral principles had not changed. He had no intention of being a spy or a traitor, and as to stealing money that was not yet current, if he did that those responsible for it would be placed in jeopardy. Surely the sheets of newly printed greenbacks were tallied at every phase of their production. He could not prosper by the ruination of the innocent.

  Thus despite his extraordinary gift, Wagner was still as much at the mercy of events as he ever was. Perhaps he lacke
d the basic stuff to be a legendary invisible personage, one of the pioneering titans of the tradition, on whose shoulders all future unseen practitioners would stand. Perhaps he was a poetaster, not a poet, of invisibility, his experiences a mere doggerel of the ability to elude the eye.

  He found himself standing between father and daughter now, near his own front door.

  “I am big enough to reconsider, Maywee,” Alwyn Phillips was saying. “But I really would like the opportunity to converse with the gentleman.”

  “Undoubtedly you shall have it anon, moan pear,” Mary Alice replied, continuing to manifest her father’s stylistic influence though perhaps with an edge of parody.

  Wagner stepped aside so that they would not collide with him when they embraced, but in fact they shook hands, not even with much apparent warmth. Reflecting on Mary Alice’s newly awakened appetite for fleshly contact, Wagner once again felt an uneasy sense of responsibility.

  Phillips and golf bag made their exit. Mary Alice stood before the closed door for a moment, then lifted her shoulders and sighed.

  She lifted her chin, and shouted, “Where are you, Fred?”

  Wagner went quickly to the sofa, lay down, and materialized. “Hi.”

  “You were there all the while,” Mary Alice stated. “You were counting on Dad’s being distracted.” She gave him a look of brief vulnerability.

  “It’s just that I didn’t want to be wounded,” said Wagner. “I suppose you’ll tell me now his shotgun didn’t have any bullets in it.”

  This time she sighed in another fashion. “Finally found something I know and you don’t. All wrong. It’s a rifle, and it was loaded with cartridges. Dad had blood in his eye.”

  “Then you saved my life,” said Wagner, but without a genuine feeling of gratitude.

  Mary Alice screwed up the corner of her mouth. “Does that surprise you? Seems little enough.” She began to leer at him.

  Wagner put out a finger. “Now, Mary Alice, I absolutely must go down to the office and get my check.”

  Her underlip rose to cover the upper. Then she opened both to say, “You don’t care for me.”

  Though he found this display exasperating, Wagner did acknowledge that he owed her an explanation. “But you see, Mary Alice”—he had to restrain himself from using “Maywee”—“I need money to buy paper to complete that book of mine you told your dad about.”

  Her eyes displayed incredulity. “You mean you’ve really got such a book? I assumed you said that last night merely to get into my pants.” She grinned brilliantly. “And it worked!”

  At this point the telephone rang. Wagner stepped into the kitchen and answered at the wall-hung instrument.

  “Mr. Wagner, this is Miss Brink at Dr. Leprak’s office. Could you come to the office at your earliest opportunity?”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “How about this afternoon at one P.M. sharp?”

  Wagner looked at his watch. “It’s already eleven-forty. I’ve got some errands to run.”

  “Put them off,” said Miss Brink. “Get over here.”

  “If it’s that important.”

  “Please.”

  “I’m not supposed to be dying or anything, am I?”

  “It’s hardly my place to say,” said Miss Brink.

  Wagner felt no sense of doom as such; it seemed simply as if he were in another state of being as he hung up.

  When he emerged from the kitchen Mary Alice was watching TV again. Now he might have welcomed a sexual advance from her as being an affirmation of his healthy life force, but she had changed in just that short a time.

  She looked away from the screen to say, “Tell them I’m doing all right.”

  It took Wagner a moment to understand. Had he not taken her virginity he might never have been aware of how much resentment Mary Alice felt towards their former colleagues. But whatever the milieu, at any given time someone must always be the most newly arrived.

  11

  “I’M FREDERICK WAGNER.”

  Miss Brink consulted her appointment book. “I just don’t see your—”

  “You called me.”

  “I’m sure I did if you say so.” She gave him a look of disapproval through the tops of her eyeglasses, chin remaining down.

  “If you don’t remember, then there’s hardly the emergency you implied on the telephone,” said Wagner. “I’ve got to do some important errands. I’ll drop back later.”

  “My, oh my,” blurted Miss Brink. “Now I recall. Doctor must see you immediately.”

  Waiting in a physician’s office is not an occasion for joy in the best of times, but one could always take comfort in the assumption that if it was anything really bad, you would hardly be sitting there, leafing through outdated magazines: you’d already be in Intensive Care if not the grave. Only now did it occur to him that there could be a banal beginning to a fatal disease. Indeed, no doubt that was more characteristic than one for which the houselights were dimmed, the curtain opened, and the orchestra struck up. Now that he forced himself to remember, his own mother had eventually died from what had started as mild indigestion.

  But in his current case he was not aware of manifesting any symptoms of disorder. His being underweight was due simply to missing so many dinners since Babe’s departure. Under the right conditions, e.g., at A Guy from Calabria before the appearance of Babe and Siv Zirko or in Sandra’s bathtub, it was proved he could eat a proper meal with relish. And his organs of generation had certainly been proved to be in superb condition. One thing to be said for Dr. Leprak’s summons was that it served to get him away from Mary Alice for the moment. Wagner wondered whether he would have the nerve to return and quote the doctor as having urged him to have no traffic with women until the condition cleared up.

  He had no time for further deliberation. Leprak came in from outside. Wagner had never before seen him in street clothing: it seemed he actually dressed like a physician in a play, i.e., in homburg and velvet-collared chesterfield. Seeing him on a sidewalk, Wagner would have thought: he looks too much like the legend to be living it.

  Miss Brink told the doctor to call his wife. He vanished into his inner office, from which he soon buzzed for Wagner.

  “Hi, Fred,” said he belatedly, no doubt because he had had to consult Wagner’s folder to get the name. “I don’t want to call my wife, because I’m sure it would be only to hear that my boy has caused some kind of trouble at school. He’s a scallywag.”

  The quaint term was noted by Wagner, who had previously heard it only in movies, but uneasy as he was it did not elevate his spirits.

  “I’ve run out of ideas,” said the doctor. “He’s not quite old enough to send to sea in a square-rigger.” He lowered his head to study the papers before him. “We have a mystery here, Fred.” He rose and walked to the long panel of backlighted milk glass on which were hung several X rays. “According to these you have no internal organs. Look for yourself.”

  But the best of X rays would have been untranslatable to Wagner. He confessed as much to Dr. Leprak after only a glance at the murky pictures.

  “Take my word for it then,” the doctor said. “And I’ve checked the machine, which works perfectly in every other case. Take off your clothing above the waist. Let’s look through the fluoroscope.”

  Wagner was soon enclosed in this device, Leprak squinting at the screen in front of his thorax.

  “By George, there you have it,” said the doctor.

  “My entrails?”

  “A figure of speech,” said Leprak. “In fact your internal organs are still missing and now your rib cage has joined them. Lean over and look down and you’ll see what I mean.”

  Wagner did as directed. The screen was blank above his belt buckle.

  Leprak stuck his own left hand between Wagner’s thorax and the screen, and switched on the brief flash of power. The fingers were seen in skeleton form.

  Wagner had never given thought to how he might eventually reveal his
unusual ability to become invisible. He had assumed that such a revelation might bring more trouble than it would be worth. There were people extant for whom another’s ability to become invisible would simply be a pretext for resentment.

  Dr. Leprak took Wagner from the machine and placed him on a treatment table, where he kneaded his midsection. “Yet they seem to be there,” said he. “Anyhow, you’d hardly be going about your business without those vital parts.” He slapped Wagner’s stomach. “Well, old fellow,” he cried, though Wagner was obviously much younger than he, “I’m going to book you into General for a more thorough examination than I am equipped to do here.”

  “Why?” Wagner asked. “I feel all right, and I gather you haven’t found anything out of order in those other tests you made.”

  The doctor frowned into his face. “Come now, Fred. You are a man of reason. It simply doesn’t make sense that your viscera are invisible to the X rays. You know we can’t let that go and escape the charge of obscurantism.” He chuckled in apparent self-approval. “By George, we’ll find the cause and pin it to the cork. We’re scientists!”

  “All right then,” said Wagner. “I saw no need of mentioning this earlier, because it might be confusing to hear, but lately I have been able to turn altogether invisible as an exercise of the will. Undoubtedly that state of affairs has something to do with this situation, wouldn’t you say?”

  Leprak was studying his own knuckles. “It wouldn’t really explain it though, would it, Fred? Wouldn’t it simply expand the existing mystery?”

  Wagner had certainly not anticipated this kind of response. He had assumed he would be confronted with disbelief, no doubt derisive.

  “I’m no scientist, I grant you,” said he. “I’m just telling you what happens.”

  “Forgive me if I say you aren’t doing a good job of it,” Dr. Leprak said. “Come here and sit down and start over.” He led Wagner to the chair before the desk, and went himself to the one behind it.

  “I don’t know what else to say,” said Wagner, “than to repeat that I can turn invisible at will.”