The Visible Man Read online

  • On side effects and addiction: “Because there was no way to test this stuff, I have no idea if continually covering myself with an aerosol mist is basically going to guarantee I’ll eventually get sick. I’m sure it’s a bad idea to live like this, but I don’t know to what degree. At first it burned my nostrils, but that stopped after a while. Of course, I was also taking a lot of stimulants at the time … the idea of becoming addicted has never been an issue. I understand my body. I got used to the stimulants gradually. Now they’re just a tool, no different than a pen or a camera. The only people who talk about the dangers of drugs are the people who can’t handle them. How does that old Richard Pryor line go? ‘I know guys who’ve used cocaine every single day for ten years and never got addicted.’”

  • On the nature of this ability: “What I do is not metaphysical. It does not transcend science in any way. It only feels metaphysical because no one else can do it. I’m sure the first person to build a fire with a flint seemed to be dabbling in the metaphysical, too. What I do is much closer to illusion. I relate to people like David Blaine: We both do something visually confounding that demands physical endurance. The only difference is that I’m doing something essential. Magicians only want to get laid.”

  • On what he wanted: “You call me invisible because you can’t comprehend this any other way. I suppose that’s fine. It’s the wrong application of that term, but I understand why you keep using it. For you, any person who can’t be seen is invisible. But there are invisible people in plain sight, Victoria. Most of the world is invisible. I wanted to see the visible man. That’s what’s happening here. That’s really all it is.”

  The Unclear Story of the Half-Mexican Ladies Man

  [This content emerged from a rambling one-hour session on June 13. I’m including portions of the conversation not because it seems revelatory to me, but because it seemed so important to Y____. There was an element of nostalgic desperation to his storytelling. I’ve elected not to log the specific times these statements were made, although I have kept the passages in chronological order. Conscientious readers may have already noticed how Y____ oscillates between past and present tense; this may have been accidental, but I suspect it was not. As such, I’ve kept it faithful to the original audio. I got the sense this encounter had happened in the very recent past—perhaps as recently as the previous week. But when I asked when it happened, he said nothing, nor would he explain why he declined to answer.]

  1 Elderly people present unique problems. It’s harder to get inside their homes, because they’re more cautious. They don’t leave doors or windows unlocked. They don’t trust people. The world gets scarier. Now, granted, once you’re inside, old people are incredibly easy to observe. They don’t hear footfalls and they’re less aware of their surroundings. But the real problem is that they never fucking leave. They’ll stay inside the house for two, three, four days straight. It’s like working a double shift with no overtime.

  2 I once had an old woman die while I was watching her. Died on Thanksgiving morning. She just never got out of bed. I decided to stick around until someone found the body, because I wanted to see the reaction of whoever discovered the corpse. I wondered how quickly the visitor would recognize that they were in an apartment with a dead body—would they sense this instantly? Would they check for a pulse? Would they cry? I was especially curious to see if the person who found the body would talk to the corpse, which we’ve all been conditioned to do by TV. On television, people are always talking to the dead. “Live, dammit. Come on, live!” “No, grandma, please don’t leave us!” That sort of thing. But after two days, I started to suspect no one was going to show up, and the bedroom started to feel awkward and stale. We would all have a less romantic view of death if we regularly had to smell it. It seemed wrong to be there, and kind of gross. I left on Saturday. I left the front door wide open. Seemed like the right thing to do.

  3 There was one old man I really liked, though. He lives right here in town. Liked him. Liked him a ton. A half-Mexican. I genuinely liked him. He lives not far from here, out beyond the Mount Calvary Cemetery. A barrel-chested half-Mexican. I broke into his house in the morning, when he was out watering the lawn. I remember watching him drink from the hose after I slipped through his sliding door. He must have been at least eighty years old, although that’s a hard thing to tell with half-Mexicans. He wore flip-flops and suspenders and he walked with a slouch. He had a gray mustache. These details don’t matter, but I remember them. He was in great shape for someone who probably shouldn’t have been alive.

  4 It was a nice house. It fit the universally accepted definition of “nice.” There were pictures on all the walls of people who must be his kids. He must have had multiple wives, because there were at least three different women in the various photos and some of the kids look totally unlike the others. Some of the kids looked like borderline albinos! He had several framed pictures of himself, but they were all in the bathroom. No idea if this was irony or vanity. The picture over his toilet must have been taken when he was nineteen or twenty. As a younger man, he was handsome. I remember thinking, “I bet this guy used to run the show.” He was standing in front of a Chevy with a cigarette and a Lone Star, posing in the way people from that era always pose in photographs: No smile, hand on hip, one eyebrow raised. Now, obviously, all old people seem cool whenever we see black-and-white images of their younger selves. It’s human nature to inject every old picture with positive abstractions. We can’t help ourselves. We all do it. We want those things to be true, because we all hope future generations will have the same thoughts when they come across forgotten photographs of us. But this codger had genuine charisma. I’m sure of it. His cigarette looked delicious.

  5 I never deduced this man’s name. I’m sure I could have if I’d tried, but I never tried. Didn’t seem important. When he came in from the lawn, he took off his damp flannel shirt and sat at the kitchen table in a wifebeater, reading the newspaper. He read every word of every story. It’s been my experience that solitary people are generally more engaged with the mass media. They have no alternative.

  6 As I tell this story, I sense that you are waiting for something to happen. You’re wondering why I’m even talking about it. Quit asking yourself that question. It’s not your job to wonder.

  7 I watch him prepare lunch. He’s wearing an apron and looking confident. He sears chicken in a pan with orange and yellow peppers. It smells fantastic. I thought he was making fajitas, but he just ate everything straight from the pan, standing over the sink. No need for tortillas. “This guy has really got it figured out,” I thought.

  8 The afternoon is long and hot, just like today. Grueling. But he doesn’t use the air conditioner and he doesn’t open any windows. He just sweats. He slouches toward the TV and manually turns on a baseball game, but the sound is muted and he barely follows the action. The half-Mexican plays a solitary game I’d seen only in second-rate cowboy movies: He places an upside-down Stetson on his living room floor and tosses a deck of cards into the opening, one by one. It’s like he’s a monk, but his particular religion venerates an extremely tedious god. I sit across the room and watch him toss cards. Around three o’clock, he looks up—not at me, but toward the ceiling.

  “I know you’re there,” he says.

  It was like a punch in the kidney. I’m dumbstruck. Nothing like this had ever happened before.

  He tosses two more cards into the hat.

  “I know you’re there,” he says again, this time without looking up. “You can’t take all the credit for what happened to me.”

  This was a new problem.

  9 For the next hour, I remain even more motionless than usual. I’m trying to figure out how this half-Mexican had deduced my presence—I had not been careless. Sometimes I make mistakes, but never due to carelessness. I always care. I wait for him to confront me again, or to call the police. I’m sure I can escape if I have to, but I’m hoping that won’t be necessary. I wan
t to see what happens. I want to know. Around six o’clock, he begins to make his supper. It’s the exact same meal as lunch—chicken and peppers, cooked and consumed in the original pan. No plate required. The only difference was that he had a banana for dessert. As he peeled the banana, he spoke again.

  “That wasn’t funny,” he says. “That’s a bunch of lies. That’s not the way it is in real life. We don’t have dictators in this country.”

  It was not what I expected to hear.

  I mean, I didn’t expect to hear anything, but certainly not this.

  “No lie,” said the half-Mexican to no one.

  The phone rings. It’s like a woman’s scream—the ringer was on the highest possible volume and the phone was right next to my head. He walks over to the phone and picks up the receiver. I become an air statue. It’s crazy. He’s standing less than three feet from where I’m sitting on the floor. If he knew I was in the room this afternoon, how could he not know I was right there? There’s a mental disconnect.

  “Quit following me,” he immediately says into the phone. And then he hangs it up.

  Ten seconds later, the phone screams again. He answers mid-ring.

  “Listen,” he says calmly. “If you don’t quit following me, I will kill every man you’ve got. I’ll burn down your house and rearrange your furniture. I will not pray for you and not for your children and not for your children’s children. I’ll get inside your dreams. I will contact Roberto Duran. We’re very close friends. Did you know that? Do you understand me? Good.”

  Again, he hangs up the receiver. He seemed completely unfazed. This was a man with one omnidirectional emotion. A steadfast state of being we have no English word for: It’s some kind of triangulation of boredom, regret, and dignity. Maybe the Germans have a word for it.

  The half-Mexican walks up the stairs. I follow. I’m no longer worried about anything.

  10 I follow him into this bedroom, which opens up to a balcony veranda. Again, I’m struck by how beautiful this home is—everything is expensive, everything is painted blue or gold. And it’s old, or at least it looks that way. Disorganized, but classy. I don’t know who decorated this place, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the half-Mexican. A woman must have lived here, once. Maybe recently. There are decorative pillows everywhere.

  The half-Mexican sits on his balcony. There are two plastic chairs out there, so I take the other one. We sit and we look. It’s pleasant. The insufferable afternoon has broken into a comfortable dusk. His home overlooks a mostly empty, generally dilapidated park. This dilapidated park is built around a dilapidated basketball court—no nets on the rims, weathered wooden backboards, cracked pavement. There are two men playing on the court, and they’re the only two men in the park. They’re playing one-on-one, full court. The game is ragged and sloppy, but the men are playing hard. One man is black, one man is white. They’re sort of reverse stereotypes: The white guy is slick and athletic, but he shoots bricks and seems out of control. The black guy really hustles and knows the fundamentals, but he’s slow and predictable and tethered to the earth. Neither man is talented. They’re two guys on the cusp of being too old to play basketball against other people, so they play each other instead. For every basket they make, they miss five. They’re huffing and puffing too much to talk.

  The half-Mexican and I watch the men play. Actually, that’s not true—he watches the basketball game and I watch him. His eyes are intense. His mind is alive. I have no idea why this game is so interesting to him. I want to jump into his mind. I want to jump inside his skull and crouch behind his eyes. What is he seeing? I’ll never know. It dawns on me that I’ll never know, no matter how long I watch him. I start second-guessing my entire project. Here I am, sitting with a person who’s alone, sitting right next to him, watching him think … and yet, nothing. I learn nothing.

  “That’s not how you do it,” he suddenly says.

  “He is talking at the basketball players,” I think. My dreams have been answered, sort of.

  “Don’t do it like that,” he says. “They tried that once before, in the seventies, with Carter and Echeverría. Nobody cared.”

  So maybe he’s not talking to the basketball players.

  Maybe he’s not talking to anyone.

  “I agree,” he says. “I agree, you double-crazy donkey thief. You goddamn double hypocrite.”

  So now I’m in an awkward position. If the half-Mexican is an insane person—and it seems pretty obvious that he is—there’s nothing to be learned from watching him warble. As a society, we expend way too much effort trying to understand the thought processes of crazy people. We’re always trying to analyze suicide notes and to interview serial killers. It’s a fool’s game. Crazy people say things that don’t make any rational sense, which is why they’re classified as crazy. So why would rational attempts at semantic scrutiny teach us anything of value? It’s like trying to use math to figure out history. It’s like hypnotism or dream analysis. I certainly had no desire to watch a crazy person speak nonsense for another twenty-four hours. But there was something else at play here, and it was something that seemed worth investigating: Here was a man hearing voices from people who were not there. They were people he couldn’t see, because they did not exist. But what if he heard voices from a person he couldn’t see who was there? Would he be able to differentiate? I mean, this is a guy living in a false reality, right? He’s communicating with someone he’s constructed. But was the construction itself central to the conversation? Because if it was, that would mean—on some level—he’d be aware that there is a difference between having a voice inside your head and hearing a voice whose presence can’t be explained.

  I was just curious, I suppose.

  I got up from my chair and walked behind where the half-Mexican was sitting. I didn’t want the sound of my voice to originate from my chair, for whatever reason … it seemed better if I stood directly behind and slightly above him. It seemed fairer, somehow.

  I had concerns. I was nervous. What if he jumped off the balcony? I remember thinking that. But he didn’t seem the type to panic. There was still a coolness about him, regardless of his age. The man from the bathroom photograph was still the man in the chair. I was confident he’d keep it together.

  I swallowed hard, and I spoke. I said: “Who will win this basketball game?”

  No response. I said it again: “Who will win this basketball game?”

  “The black doesn’t have a chance,” the half-Mexican said. Beyond that sentence, he offered no reaction whatsoever. It dawned on me that I’d spent too much time thinking about whether I should talk to him and not enough time considering what I’d actually say. I had no material.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “What are you doing in my house?” he said in response.

  I tried to seem casual.

  “I mean you no harm,” I said. I’m not sure why I started talking like a biblical character.

  Twenty seconds of silence.

  “The black has no chance,” he reiterated. “Too fat. Too soft a life for him. Must have a good cook for a wife. The güero is a cow, but he can run.”

  “Güero,” I say. “You say güero. Are you from Mexico?”

  “No,” he replied. “I’m not Mexican. Only half. My mother was Mexican. My father, he was Irish. Not a drunk, but a fighter.”

  “You have a nice house,” I say. “How did you get such a nice house?”

  “I made oil,” he said. “Way back when.”

  “You made oil? You made it?”

  No response to this.

  I knew what he had meant when he spoke. It was stupid of me to correct him.

  We watched the basketball game for another five minutes. We didn’t talk. We just listened to the faraway basketball sounds—the dribble drives and the missed fallaways. Tock tock … tock TOCK TOCK clang. It started to get dark. The two sweaty amateurs finally stopped playing and bent at the waist, smiling and panting like cartoon bloo
dhounds. It was impossible to tell who’d won. I don’t think they were even keeping score.

  “You can’t stay here,” said the half-Mexican. “I don’t want you sleeping here. Not in my house. I have problems of my own.”

  “No worries,” I said. “I will leave. I want to leave.” I did not want to leave.

  “Exit through the back door,” he said. “And don’t call anymore.”

  “I never called you,” I said. “That wasn’t me.”

  “Yes you did,” he said. “You called me, and you watched me eat. Twice. You watched me eat twice. You’re a pervert.”

  “Can I use the bathroom before I leave?”

  “No,” he said. “You can’t. Why would I let a pervert in my lavatory? Why do you think you can do whatever you want?”

  He made a good point, so I left. And I haven’t gone back there, even though I want to. Who knows? Maybe I will tomorrow. There was just something about that guy. I know he’s nuts, but there are a lot of people in America who are way, way nuttier. They’re just more socialized. North America has more crazy people than every other industrialized continent combined, except for maybe Australia. I’d say 25 percent of our populace has craziness in the blood. It’s genetic. It’s historical. I mean, what kind of person immigrated to the New World? Not counting slaves, there were only four types, really: people who didn’t think Europe was religious enough, people who thought they could make a lot of money, antisocial failures with no other option, and fruitcakes who thought risking their lives on an alien shore might make for an interesting adventure. Those are the four components of the American gene pool, and those are the four explanations behind everything good and everything bad that’s ever happened here. Everything. I can’t think of a single exception. So this guy, this aging half-Mexican—this guy isn’t that outrageous. On balance, he’s almost normal. He’s probably more like me than you are.