by Ray Bradbury
Lois, Lois Palancheck—where was Lois now? Charlie had closed his eyes; he was walking back along the beach in the twilight, hand in hand with Lois, when he heard a loud “My God!” from the doctor and a scream from the nurse, followed by the sound of a door slamming. When he opened his eyes —and for a moment, this time, he had a little difficulty doing so—he was alone in the room with the doctor, and the doctor was white with astonishment. “It’s true, damn it, it’s true!” the doctor was saying.
“They want me to go to the Cooley Clinic in Baltimore,” Charlie said to his wife when he got home that evening, not without a slight tinge of pride. “You know, the place where all those big shots go for their checkups. They want me to have a checkup, too.”
“Baltimore?” Marcia commented. She was reading a detective story at the time. “Isn’t that where you knew that girl you told me about once?”
“Oh, no. That was Buffalo,” said Charlie, and then he glanced at his wife apprehensively. Had he spoken too quickly? But she, apparently, had not noticed.
“Well, wherever she was, don’t go thinking of her too much” was all she said. “Think of yourself more. Think of me.” And she added, a trifle maliciously, “If you don’t, you may vanish entirely.”
And yet, he wondered later, was that malice, really, or a touch of that prescience that women, traditionally, were supposed to have? For the truth was, there was a problem about Lois. Unconsidered before, now memories of her were growing in his mind constantly, and the fact seemed to be both a presage and an involvement. Meantime, for the most part, his stay at the Clinic turned out to be a disappointment.
He got the full treatment there, to be sure—seven days at the hospital, during which he underwent just about all the tests, samplings, and explorations that modern medical research is capable of, from X-rays and ionoscopy to basal metabolism and the Keynes reaction. These disclosed a number of things that were “wrong” with him, in the sense that they differed from the ideal—low blood pressure and a fairly low blood count, a certain “waxiness” of the skin, due to a deficiency in pigmentation, a slight nitrogen imbalance, and so on—not to mention an odd correlation between his neuro-and vascular responses (Charlie’s nervous reactions seemed to vary as he breathed, and vice versa), which was the one really unusual thing about him.
But all these, on the whole, were hardly more than might be discovered in the average, ordinary person, and though some of them, particularly the last, offered vague “leads” to the doctors (they pondered long over his nerve charts, for instance, in conjunction with the lack of pigmentation), there was none that offered any real clue to his condition, let alone suggesting a cure. Charlie left, in the end, with the doctors as bewildered about him as he was himself.
It has been truly said, though, that a man can learn to live with any affliction, from the loss of a leg to total blindness, and Charlie had already developed a number of devices for getting along with his. On the ground that he was thereby saved from needless interruption, he had a spring catch installed on the door of his office; controlled by a button release on his desk, it gave him a moment or two to “collect himself,” as he put it, before any intrusion. In restaurants, he always sought out a table at the rear, and if possible in a corner, and kept his mind firmly on himself, and the food before him, while eating; on the street, after some buffeting, he had learned to keep a similarly rigorous single-mindedness— or, conversely, if he did let his mind wander, to make sure no one was coming his way.
The trouble was, however, that as time went on, he came less and less to regard it as an affliction—or, rather it seemed to him that the affliction was not the tendency to vanish, itself, but the sternness of concentration that was constantly necessary to avoid it. This, of course, might have been ascribed to the “learning to live with it” process already mentioned, but it really went far beyond that; the fact was that the act of vanishing was becoming increasingly attractive. He had learned by now to recognize certain symptoms that characterized its onset, so that he was no longer taken unawares, so to speak, by the condition. There was a sort of “tingling,” as he had described it to the researchers at the Clinic, followed by a feeling of “falling, only through time instead of space”— while the disappearance itself, when he could accomplish it without embarrassment, was at once a refuge and an adventure.
He could walk side by side with another person, unseen and of course unsuspected, and it seemed to him that at such times he penetrated far more deeply than he would otherwise have been capable of into the other’s thoughts or emotions, not hearing or feeling them, exactly, but simply absorbing them, with interest and understanding. He could sit or stand unregarded, watching the flow of life around him with a mixture of sympathy and detachment that had formerly been impossible. What it meant, in the common phrase, was that it permitted him “to get outside himself”—and this, for a man at his stage and condition of life, was a feat that had its definite, though possibly dangerous, attractions.
“You live too much in the past,” one of the psychiatrists at the Clinic had remarked to him (it was he who first offered the self-hypnosis theory), and though Charlie, at forty-seven, had just about concluded that the past was the best place to live in, he had to confess there was a certain shrewdness in the man’s diagnosis. He would have been less ready to admit —openly, at least, for Charlie had his loyalties—the truth of another of the same man’s observations. This was a statement, which Charlie, of course, did not see, that the doctor made on his clinical report. “The whole case,” he wrote, enlarging on his idea of autohypnosis, “is obviously a manifestation of a severe defense psychosis. Though the subject will not admit it, he wants to escape from everything—his wife, his job, his life, everything. He is an escapist, almost per se.” He added, dryly, “I must admit, though, I have never seen this or any similar psychosis manifest itself with such thoroughgoing efficiency.”
All this, however, was the scientific side. All that Charlie knew was that when he “let go” now, he could relive times and places—that one wonderful month abroad, among the gray hills and olive groves of Provence; the long summer with Lois (and why was that now, to him, so memorable?); walks and outings in his college days; and so on—with a vividness that was as remarkable as it was delightful.
Charlie had his own mild sense of humor, and, as he put it to his wife one day—and regretted it: “Maybe you can joke about this. I can’t,” she told him acidly—it was the strain of “keeping up appearances” that was getting him down; and though he knew instinctively that there was a certain vague peril connected with the practice, he was tempted more and more to experiment with his strange capacity. Even in his moments of “falling,” he had a sense, an intuition, almost, that there was a point beyond which he must not go, or he’d risk falling into regions that were truly unpredictable, and for a long time he restrained himself. It was not until one day in May—a bright, sunny day, too, clear and golden—that he yielded finally to the impulse and truly let himself go.
He was walking down his own street at the time, heading for his office, and except for a couple of men just turning in to it at the next corner the block was deserted. And there had been a particularly bitter outburst from Marcia the evening before. They had been sitting at dinner then, face to face and, as usual, rather silent, and somehow or other his mind had wandered. ... He had awakened, if that was the word for it, to find her staring at him, glaring at him. “Stop dimming, Charles! Damn it! Stop dimming!” she was shouting at him.
And yet it wasn’t that, either, exactly. Charlie had his loyalties, and as he often told himself, he had married Marcia with his eyes open. Even now, throughout all his other difficulties, he retained a keen understanding of the problems she must face, being married to a man who was always on the verge of disappearing. More than that, it was the sense of being in the midst of a tangle: Marcia and her complaints behind him, and ahead of him the tediousness of his work at the office, and not only at the office, either, but
everywhere. Life was dull, dull, dull; that was the truth of it, and before he knew what he was doing, really, he turned his thoughts strongly away—toward Lois, though it seemed that was only at random—and, truly, let himself go.
There was the tingling at first, then the fall, and the fall got faster; and then, suddenly, he plunged into oblivion, but an oblivion so dark it was almost blinding. But before fear could take hold of him (through it all, oddly, he never felt fear), he was through the black darkness and on the other side; and the other side, not too surprisingly, was the same street he had been walking on—only now, somehow, everything had a thinner look, as if it had been painted on glass, and the two men he had noticed before were closer to him, much closer, and coming directly toward him. Again, intuitively, Charlie knew what to do.
He walked steadily on, and this time, as he’d somehow known, there was no feeling of contact, no disturbance. The men simply walked through him and past him, never stopping their conversation, and Charlie, too—this time, really, he thought, on “the other side”—went on down the street in his own direction. He had gone only a pace or two, though, before he felt a body bump against his and then heard a slight scurrying; and while this did not really startle him—it seemed to him, again intuitively, that there would surely be others who were invisible—it still made him, in a vague sort of way, apprehensive. He might learn to “see” better later, he thought, in this new world that he was in, or at least he hoped so, and meantime he slowed his pace, even on the familiar street, to a cautious shuffle, sliding one foot before him and then advancing, more or less as a blind man might, or a man in darkness. Progressing that way, he had almost come to the corner before he felt someone reach out (and it seemed the touch was familiar; was it from that day on the beach, long ago?) and take his hand.
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