by Peter Straub
Living Visibles like Harold McNair do not expect merely to be seen. Though they be discreetly attired, quietly spoken, and well-mannered, within they starve, they slaver for attention and exact it however they must. In Mr. McNair’s case, this took the form of divisiveness, capriciousness, sanctimoniousness and, for lack of a better word, tyranny. He would favor one counter clerk, then another, thereby creating enmity and rivalry and an ardent wish in two hearts to comprehend his own heart. He would select an obscure minion for weeks of special treatment, jokes, confidences, consultations, then without explanation drop the chosen one back into obscurity, to be pecked to death by his peers. He drew certain employees aside and whispered subtle criticisms of their dearest friends. Throughout, he searched for his true, secret favorites, those whose contempt for themselves, masked behind a smooth retailer’s manner, matched his own for them, masked behind the same. In time I began to think of Harold McNair as a vast architectural structure something like his great store, a building charmingly appointed with fine though not ostentatious things, where a smiling but observant guide leads you ever deeper in, deciding room by room if you have earned the right to behold the next, by stages conducting you into chambers growing successively smaller, uglier, eventually even odorous, then through foul, reeking sties, and at last opens the final door to the central, the inmost room, the room at the heart of the structure, the most terrible of all, and admits you to—the real Mr. Harold McNair.
He knew I was his the first time he saw me behind the Better Shirts counter on the second floor. He may have known it on the day he hired me, long years before. In fact, he might even have regarded the alcoholic welder laboring in his basement and seen that this man’s son, if he had one, would be his as if by Natural Law. His in the sense of easily flattered, thus easily dominated. Ready to be picked up by a kind word and downcast by a harsh one. Capable of attentive silences during the Great Man’s monologues. Liable to be supine before power, abject before insult. A thorough and spineless subordinate. A kind of slave. Or, a slave. Long before my final promotion, I had been shown into the final room and met the true Harold McNair. I knew what he was and what I was. In many ways, I had fallen under the sway of a smoother, more corrupt Boy Teuteburg, a Boy who thought himself a noble being and wore the mask of a dignified, successful man of business.
I accepted this. But I had determined to be paid well for the role.
My thefts began with an impulsive act of revenge. I had just departed Mr. McNair’s office after a session in which the whip lashed out more forcefully than was customary from within the velvet bag, both before and after my employer had expressed his apocalyptic disgust for womankind, those sly scented obscenities, those temples of lust, et cetera, et cetera. Making my way granite-faced through Better Gowns, I observed an elderly temple of lust depositing her alligator bag upon the counter as she turned to scrutinize a bottle-green Better Gown with Regency sleeves. A wallet protruded slightly from the unclasped bag. Customer and saleslady conferred in re the wisdom of Regency sleeves. My legs took me past the counter, my hand closed on the wallet, the wallet flew into my pocket, and I was gone.
Heart athud, I betook myself to a stall in the male employees’ washroom, opened the wallet, and discovered there sixty-eight dollars, now mine. I had been rash, I knew, but to what an electric, unharnessed surge of life force! All I regretted was that the money had been the temple’s, not Mr. McNair’s. I left the stall and by reflex stepped up to the sinks and mirrors. Washing my spotless hands, I caught my face in the mirror and froze—a vibrant roguish Visible a decade younger than I looked back with blazing eyes, my own.
Anyone in a business that receives and disburses large amounts of cash will eventually devise a method for deflecting a portion of the moolah from its normal course. Some few will test their method, and most of those will be found out. A primitive snatch and grab like mine, unobserved, is as good as any. During my tenure in the store, many employees located the imperfections in their schemes only as the handcuffs closed around their wrists. (Mr. McNair never showed mercy or granted a second chance, ever.) From the moment I met my living eyes in the washroom mirror, I was withdrawing from the cash available an amount appropriate to my degredation, or stealing my real salary. All that remained was to work out a method that would pass undetected.
Many such methods exist, and I will not burden you with the details of mine, save to reveal that it involved a secret set of books. It proved successful for better than two decades and yielded a sum nearly compensatory to my endless humiliation. Mr. McNair knew that significant quantities of money were escaping his miserly grasp but, despite feverish plotting and the construction of elaborate rattraps, could not discover how or where. The traps snapped down upon the necks of minor-league peculators, till tappers, short-change artists, bill padders, invoice forgers, but never upon his greatest enemy’s.
On the night I placed my hundred thousandth unofficial dollar in my secret account, I celebrated with a lobster dinner and a superior bottle of champagne in our finest seafood restaurant (alone, this being prior to the Nameless Friend era) and, when filled with alcohol and rich food, remembered that the moon was full, remembered also my night of misery so long ago, and resolved to return to the Oliphant Hotel. Then, I had been a corpse within a grave within a prison; now, I was achieved, a walking secret on the inside of life, an invisible Visible. I would stand before Ethel Carroway and be witnessed—what had been written on her face now lay within me.
I walked (in those pre-Bentley days) to Erie Street and posted myself against a wall to await the appearance of the shade. By showing herself again to me, she would acknowledge that the intensity of my needs had raised me, as she was raised, above the common run. Mine was the confidence of a lover who, knowing this the night his beloved shall yield, savors each blissful, anticipated pleasure. Each moment she did not appear was made delicious by its being the moment before the moment when she would. When my neck began to ache, I lowered my chin to regard through enormous glass portals the Oliphant’s lobby, once a place of unattainable luxury. Now I could take a fourth-floor suite, if I liked, and present myself to Ethel Carroway on home ground. Yet it was right to stand where I had before, the better to mark the distance I had come. An hour I waited, then another, growing cold and thirsty. My head throbbed with the champagne I had taken, and my feet complained. My faith wavered—another trial in a test more demanding with every passing minute. Determined not to fail, I turned up the collar of my coat, thrust my hands in my pockets, and kept my eyes upon the dark window.
At times I heard movement around me but saw nothing when I looked toward the sound. Mysterious footfalls came teasingly out of the darkness of Erie Street, as if Ethel Carroway had descended to present herself before me, but these footfalls were many and varied, and no pale figure in black appeared to meet my consummating gaze.
I had not understood—I knew nothing of Visibles and those not, and what I took for confidence was but its misshapen nephew, arrogance. The cynosure and focus of myriad pairs of unseen eyes, I surrendered at last after 3:00 A.M. and wandered sore-footed home through an invisible crowd that understood exactly what had happened there and why. In the morn, I rose from the rumpled bed to steal again.
Understanding, ephemeral as a transcendent insight granted in a dream, ephemeral as dew, came only with exposure, which is to say with loss of fortune and handsome residence, loss of Nameless Companion, of super-duper Bentley, of elegant sobersides garb, of gay Caribbean holidays on the American Plan, loss of reputation, occupation (both occupations, retailer and thief), privacy, freedom, many constitutionally guaranteed civil rights, and, ultimately, of life. As with all of you, I would have chosen these forfeited possessions, persons, states, and conditions over any mere act of understanding, yet I cannot deny the sudden startling consciousness of a certain piquant, indeterminate pleasure-state, unforeseen in the grunting violence of my last act as a free man, which surfaced hand in hand with my brief illumination. This s
ense of a deep but mysterious pleasure linked to my odd flash of comprehension often occupied my thoughts during the long months of trial and incarceration.
I had long since ceased to fear exposure, and the incarnadine (see Shakespeare) excess of exposure’s aftermath would have seemed a nightmarish impossibility to the managerial Mr. Wardwell, stoutly serious and seriously stout, of 1960. Weekly, a gratifying sum wafted from Mr. McNair’s gnarled, liver-spotted grip into my welcoming hands, and upon retirement some ten stony years hence I expected at last to float free in possession of approximately one and a quarter million dollars, maybe a million and a half. My employer’s rattraps continued to snap down on employees of the anathema stripe, of late less frequently due to widespread awareness of the Byzantinely complex modes of surveillance which universally “kicked in” at the stage beneath the introduction of my invented figures, on account of their having been set in place by the very anathema they were designed to entrap. Had not the odious McNair decided upon a storewide renovation to mark the new decade, I should after twenty, with luck twenty-five, years of pampered existence in some tropic clime and sustained experience of every luxury from the highestly refined to basestly, piggishestly sensual, have attained upon death from corrupt old age an entire understanding of my frustrated vigil before the Oliphant, of the walkers and shufflers I had heard but were not there, also of Ethel Carroway and her refusal to recognize one who wrongly supposed himself her spiritual equal. But McNair proceeded upon his dubious inspiration, and I induced a premature understanding by smashing the fellow’s brains into porridge—“nasty, nasty porridge”—with a workman’s conveniently disposed ballpeen hammer.
The actual circumstances of my undoing were banal. Perhaps they always are. A groom neglects to shoe a horse, and a king is killed. A stranger hears a whisper in an alehouse, and—a king is killed. That sort of thing. In my case, coincidence of an otherwise harmless sort played a crucial role. The dread renovation had reached the rear of the second floor, lapping day by day nearer the accounts room, the art department, and the offices, one mine, one Mr. McNair’s. The tide of workers, ladders, drop cloths, yardsticks, plumb lines, sawhorses, and so forth inevitably reached our doors and then swept in. As my employer lived above the store in a velvet lair only he and his courtiers had seen, he had directed that the repaneling and recarpeting, the virtual regilding, of his office be done during normal working hours, he then enduring only the minor inconvenience of descending one flight to be about his normal business of oozing from customer to customer, sniffing, adjusting, prying, flattering. As I owned no such convenient bower and could not be permitted access to his, not even to one corner for business purposes, my own office received its less dramatic facelift during the hour between the closing of the store, 6:00 P.M., and the beginning of overtime, 7:00 P.M. A task that should have taken two days thus filled ten, at the close of every one of which, concurrent with my official duties, I had to manage the unofficial duties centered on the fictive set of books and the disposition of the day’s harvest of cash. All this under the indifferent eyes of laborers setting up their instruments of torture.
Callous, adamantine men shifted my desk from port to starboard, from bow to stern, and on the night of my downfall informed me I had to jump ship posthaste that they might finish, our boss having lost patience with this stage of affairs. I jumped ship and bade farewells to departing employees from a position near the front doors. At 6:55 P.M. I made my way through the familiar aisles to my office door, through which I observed Harold McNair, on a busybody’s journey from the sultan’s quarters above, standing alone before my exposed desk and contemplating the evidence of my various anathematic peculations.
The artisans should have been packing up but had finished early and departed unseen by the rear doors; McNair should have been consulting his genius for depravity in the velvet lair but had slithered down to ensure their obedience. We were alone in the building. As Mr. McNair whirled to confront me, a combination of joy and rage distorted his unpleasant features into a demonic mask. I could not save myself—he knew exactly what he had seen. He advanced toward me, spitting incoherent obscenities.
Mr. McNair arrived at a point a foot from my person and continued to berate me, jabbing a knobby forefinger at my chest as he did so. Unevenly, his face turned a dangerous shade of pink, hot pink I believe it is called. The forefinger hooked my lapel, and he tugged me deskward. His color heightened as he ranted on. Finally he hurled at my bowed head a series of questions, perhaps one question repeated many times, I don’t know, I could not distinguish the words. My being quailed before the onslaught; I was transported back to Dockweder’s. Here again were a marked bill, an irate merchant, a shamed Frank Wardwell—the wretched boy blazed forth within the ample, settled, secretive man.
And it came to the wretched boy that the ranter before him resembled two old tormentors, Missus Barksdale and Boy Teuteburg, especially the latter, not the sleek rodent in a pearl gray hat but the red-eyed bane of childhood who came hurtling out of doorways to pummel head and body with sharp, accurate, knifelike fists. I experienced a moment of pure psychic sensation so foreign I could not at first affix a name to it. I knew only that an explosion had taken place. Then I recognized that what I felt was pain, everlasting, eternal pain long self-concealed. It was as though I had stepped outside my body. Or into it.
Before me on my oaken chair lay a ballpeen hammer forgotten by its owner. The instant I beheld this utilitarian object, humiliation blossomed into gleeful revenge. My hand found the hammer, the hammer found Mr. McNair’s head. Startled, amazed even, but not yet terrified, Mr. McNair jumped back, clamoring. I moved in. He reached for the weapon, and I captured his wizened arm in my hand. The head of the hammer tapped his tough little skull, twice. A wondrous, bright red feeling bloomed in me, and the name of that wondrous feeling was Great Anger. Mr. McNair wobbled to his knees. I rapped his forehead and set him on his back. He squirmed and shouted, and I tattooed his bonce another half-dozen times. Blood began to drizzle from his ears, also from the abrasions to his knotty head. I struck him well and truly above the right eye. At that, his frame twitched and jittered, and I leaned into my work and now delivered blow after blow while the head became a shapeless, bloody, brain-spattered . . . mess. As the blows landed, it seemed that each released a new explosion of blessed pain and anger within Frank Wardwell; it seemed, too, that these blessings took place in a realm, once known but long forgotten, in which emotion stood forth as a separate entity, neither without nor within, observable, breathtaking, utterly alive, like Frank Wardwell, this entranced former servant swinging a dripping hammer at the corpse of his detested and worshiped enemy. And there arose in an unsuspected chamber of my mind the remembered face of Ethel Carroway gazing down at but in fact not seeing the disgraced boy—me on Erie Street, and, like a reward, there arrived my brief, exalted moment of comprehension, with it that uprising of inexplicable, almost intellectual pleasure on which I chewed so often in the months ahead. Ethel Carroway, I thought, had known this—this shock—this gasp—
Into the office in search of a forgotten hammer came a burly tough in a donkey jacket and a flat cap, accompanied by an even burlier same, and whatever I had comprehended blew away in the brief cyclone that followed. Fourteen months later, approximately dogging Ethel Carroway’s footsteps, I moved like a wondering cloud out of a sizzling, still-jerking body strapped into our state’s electric chair.
The first thing I noticed, apart from a sudden cessation of pain and a generalized sensation of lightness that seemed more the product of a new relationship to gravity than actual weight loss, was the presence in the viewing room of many more people than I remembered in attendance at the great event. Surely there had been no more than a dozen witnesses, surely all of them male and journalists by profession, save two? During the interesting period between the assumption of the greasy hood and the emergence of the wondering cloud, thirty or forty onlookers, many of them female, had somehow crowded into the sobe
r little room. Despite the miraculous nature of my exit from my corporeal self, these new arrivals paid me no mind at all. Unlike the original twelve, they did not face the large, oblong window looking in upon the even smaller, infinitely grimmer chamber where all the action was going on.
I mean, although the obvious focus of the original twelve, one nervously caressing a shabby Bible, one locking his hands over a ponderous gabardine-swathed gut, the rest scratching “observations” into their notebooks with chewed-looking pencils, was the hooded, enthroned corpse of the fiend Francis T. Wardwell, from which rose numerous curls and twists of white smoke as well as the mingled odors of urine and burned meat, these new people were staring at them—the Bible-stroker and the warden and the scribbling reporters, really staring at them, I mean, lapping up these unremarkable people with their eyes, devouring them.
The second thing I noticed was that except for the thirty or forty male and female shades who, it had just come to me, shared my new state, everything in the two sober chambers, including the green paint unevenly applied to the walls, including the calibrated dials and the giant switch, including the blackened leather straps and the vanishing twists of smoke, including even the bitten pencils of the scribes, but most of all including those twelve mortal beings who had gathered to witness the execution of the fiend Francis T. Wardwell, mortal beings of deep, that is to say, radiant ordinariness, expansive overflowing heartbreaking throat-catching light-shedding meaning-steeped—
