The Visible Man Read online

  “My players are all five and six years old,” he continued. “It’s a ‘coach-pitch’ league. What this means is that—as their coach—I pitch to my own players. The opposing coach pitches to his own players when they’re up to bat. We used to have the little guys hit off a tee, but the league decided that this format was better for their development. Basically, the idea is that—as their coach—I know which kids are good and which kids are bad, and I can challenge or assist them accordingly. We want every kid to know how it feels to get a hit, but we also want them to learn how competition works. That’s the concept. It’s a good concept, maybe.

  “So, we’re playing a game this last Wednesday afternoon. It’s tight. Our games are five innings long, and we’re behind nine to seven in the bottom of the fifth. Two outs, top of the order. This kid named Tommy is our lead-off batter. Tommy is a wonderful kid—quiet, polite. Plays second base. Looks like Justin Bieber, so all the older kids give him shit. I lob him a fat one, and he whacks a single. Nice. Great. I’m happy for Tommy. The next batter is his friend Matt. Matt’s a snot, but funny as hell. Reads Batman during practice, or whoever the new Batman is supposed to be now. Talks a lot. Talks all the time. Talks about things no one cares about, like some book his grandfather gave him about Vietnam. I love Mattie. Matt already thinks he’s interesting. I basically give him the same fat pitch, and bang. Another single. So now Tommy’s on second and Mattie’s on first. It’s getting exciting, you know? This is about as tense as a baseball game between kindergarteners can be. The third batter is Cory. Now, the only thing I really know about Cory’s life is that his mom is way too attractive to be forty. But Cory’s a good player, at least for his age, so I challenge him some. I throw the ball with a little velocity, because I know he can handle it. He pops it straight up, so it looks like the game’s over. But the third baseman—remember, these are six-year-olds—totally misplays the ball. It hits him on the top of the head. So now Tommy’s at third, Matt’s on second, and Cory’s on first. Bases loaded. The sacks are juiced. It’s a real game. All the parents are suddenly interested. I can tell, because they’ve stopped checking their cell phones.

  “Now, our clean-up hitter is Toby. Toby is almost seven, but he looks like he’s ten. He’s far and away the best player on our team. We probably should have moved him up to a higher division. I have no doubt he’ll be some kind of star by the time he’s sixteen. You can already tell he’s a jock by the way he walks. But, you know, right now, he’s still six. He acts like a six-year-old, even though he’s tall and thick and coordinated. And here he is, with the chance to be a six-year-old hero. Here’s Toby, in prime position to win the game and be the king of the postgame McDonald’s trip. And I want this to happen. In my mind, I want Toby to hit a goddamn grand slam, because he’d remember that forever, or at least until junior high. I’m his coach. My responsibility is his development. But something always stops me from feeling this way, even if my mind tells me otherwise. I remembered when I was in high school, when I pitched in the state playoffs. Everyone expected me to close games down, because I was the closer. I was the Mariano Rivera of the Class B San Antonio Catholic League. That’s who I was, and that’s still how I feel. I know I’m not the same person I was in high school, but sometimes I am. And at that moment—just like always—I quit caring about the economic growth of my insurance dealership or my wonderful wife or my own goddamn kids. I just want to be me. So when I saw Toby digging his stupid little size-five cleats into the dirt, it pissed me off. Fuck that kid. Fuck him. There was no way Toby was going to do this. There’s just no way. Time to close the door.

  “I lace the first pitch on the inside corner of the plate. Good cheese. I can still bring it. Strike one. Our sixty-pound catcher almost fell backward when it hit his glove. I can tell it kind of scares Toby, which must have been my goal? Next, I throw a breaking ball that runs outside, but he chases it for strike two. I mean, what does Toby know about breaking pitches? I’m sure he can’t even spell the word breaking. I waste my third pitch high and away, but then I blow off his doors with a split-finger fastball, right down the gullet. The bat never even gets off his shoulder. Strike three. Game over. I get the save against a child on my own team. I’m a monster.

  “Later, I tell Toby that he shouldn’t have chased strike two, that he needs to be more patient at the plate, but that—next time—I’m sure he’ll come through and be the big hero. I let him have extra McNuggets—everyone else got six, but I let Toby have ten. To be honest, he seemed totally okay with what happened. Unchanged. But I felt awful. I felt the way I always do, whenever this happens.”

  As the Nabisco man finishes his story, I see other people around the table nodding. They all relate to this, somehow. A long-haired man starts yammering; he tells a story about how his wife recently composed a song on the piano, and he goes on and on about how the song was so beautiful. Much better than anything he’d ever written for his own band. Far more sophisticated and nuanced than anything he’d ever created himself. He’s clearly proud of his wife. But his wife will never know how proud he was, because he refused to tell her. Instead, he told his wife it is “kind of okay” and that it seemed like something off a late Wings album that Linda McCartney might have co-written. Again, everyone around the table nodded away. The teenage girl spoke third. She said she recently got a 97 on a trigonometry test, but that two other girls in the class got a 100 because they showed their work and she did not. This made her hate the other two students. She could not believe they were being rewarded for doing things on paper that she could do in her head. As a result, she logged onto Facebook under a fake identity and claimed these two girls were lesbians and that she saw them kissing after a National Honor Society meeting. She wanted to ruin their lives and stop them from getting into Rice. She said she felt guilty about this, but not really.

  It turns out I had stumbled into a support group for people with “competition disorder,” a disorder I had never previously considered. Every person’s anecdote expressed an overwhelming sense of helpless entrapment—they all wanted to know how it felt not to obsess over winning. They talked about how they couldn’t stop watering and mowing their lawns. They talked about their need to drive faster than the flow of traffic and how they always ruin Christmas by overreacting to minor rules infractions during games of Apples to Apples. The woman I spotted in the TGI Friday’s spoke last. She worked for a commodities broker and made $400,000 a year. Her salary meant nothing to her. “I don’t like spending money,” she said. “I only like watching it accrue.” She had no husband and no children. Her social life revolved around her co-workers, all of whom she despised.

  “They’re so unmotivated,” she said. “They smile at me, so I smile back. They ask me to lunch and sometimes I go. I need food like anyone else. They talk about how much things cost and about how their dogs act like cats and about which of our co-workers they suspect are sexist or racist or sympathetic to Elisabeth Hasselbeck, and they all try to convince me to visit their nondenominational churches. It’s funny that somebody else mentioned Facebook … two years ago, they all told me I needed to join Facebook. They said it was ridiculous that I’d never joined, particularly since my divorce. ‘This is just how it is now,’ they said. I told them I was too old for that shit. But they kept insisting how great it was, how it was no longer just for college kids, how it was this underrated crowd-sourcing resource, how it wasn’t what I imagined, how it was this wonderful diversion and this important business tool. So I surrendered. I joined Facebook. And you know what? It turns out the only reason they wanted me to join was so they could show me pictures of their children without having to ask if I was interested in seeing them. This is why Facebook caught on with adults: It’s designed for people who want to publicize their children without our consent.

  “I suppose I don’t mind chatting at the office. It’s painless. I just repeat whatever they’ve already said with different words, and that’s usually enough to satisfy their curiosity. They count
that as conversation. They’re naturally satisfied. I listen to their stories and look for weaknesses. I plot against them. They probably know I’m plotting, but they don’t mind. They don’t even have the tenacity to think I’m a bitch. They don’t care if they lose. Honestly, they don’t. They just go home and upload more baby pictures. It’s crazy. It’s so crazy. This is the life I’m supposed to envy? No way. No fucking way. I want to tell them this. I want to say it to their face. Which, I realize, is unnecessary. It’s not their fault, I suppose. They can’t help being satisfied with who they are. And it’s not like my life is anything to brag about. You know what I do most nights? I watch There Will Be Blood in my bedroom. Not the whole movie. Just the middle part. The part where the oilman is talking to his fake brother by the fire and says, ‘I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed.’ I watch that scene over and over and over again. It’s track five on the DVD. It feels so good to watch. I like watching it so much that it scares me. I know this is pathetic, but I wish that oilman was my coworker. I wish he was in my life. I want to live in a world where that guy is normal. I want to sleep with that guy. That’s who I envy. And that’s why I’m such a mess. That’s why I’m here. I know it’s wrong to feel like this, even though this is how I want to feel.”

  The meeting ended after an hour. The group left en masse. I stayed behind, unseen, sort of dumbfounded by what I’d heard. Our world is really backward, Victoria. It’s backward. Look what society does. It takes the handful of people who know how to succeed and makes them feel terrible for being different. Everyone is supposed to be mediocre, I guess. Everyone is supposed to be dragged into the middle—either down from their success, or up from their self-imposed malfunction. These people didn’t need a support group. These people needed someone to tell them they were okay. They needed to be told that the morality they’ve been forced to accept is manufactured and fake, and that their guilt is just the penalty for not being a failure. Do you know who was the smartest president of the twentieth century, Victoria? Do you know who was the greatest intellectual? Nixon. The bipartisan historians all agree it was Richard Nixon. Bill Clinton is probably second. He was a Rhodes scholar. So this means the two smartest presidents of the twentieth century were the only one we forced to resign and the only one we impeached. That’s how it goes. That teenage girl? The one who started the lezbo rumor? She could be president. She’s presidential material. She’s got brains and she’s got guts. But that will never happen. The world will convince her that it’s better to lose half the time, because losers are lovable. That’s the phrase, right? Lovable loser.

  I tell you what, Vicky: Sometimes it’s terrifying to see how things really are. It makes me want to run away. I mean, I know I’ll never get proper credit for the things I’ve done and the truths I’ve learned. We both know I won’t. People want Santa Claus, and I’m not Santa Claus. I’m more like the guy who invented his magic fucking sleigh. I’m the guy who does the impossible things that need to be done, so that all the normal people can go back to sleep.

  [A Personal Aside]

  Though I am reticent to discuss my own life (even when it unavoidably intersects with my time with Y____), I need to outline a few pertinent details about what was happening to me during this specific period, purely for the sake of transparency.

  I will be brief.

  As stated earlier, I had not told anyone—including my husband—about what was happening with Y____. I lied to my own longtime therapist (the aforementioned Dr. Dolanagra) and claimed that Y____ had ended treatment without explanation in May. This required an even denser web of lies: I now had to come up with an ongoing weekly serial for Dr. Dolanagra about what was supposedly happening in my day-to-day life. I initially tried expressing boilerplate complaints about my marriage, but that made me more depressed than I already was. I tried talking about my own childhood, but I couldn’t locate any conflict (relative to most, my adolescence was devoid of adversity). I finally made up a crisis about a fictional high school girl I was supposedly mentoring who was considering an abortion (I built a composite “troubled teen” from various ex-patients and tossed in a few plot elements I remembered from If These Walls Could Talk—I named the girl “Joan” and focused on the political implications). To my amazement, Dolanagra was totally bamboozled—to this day, she still asks how Joan is coping. I could probably teach an improv class.

  My husband, however, was harder to fool. He sensed something strange and hidden; our interactions were now punctuated by long stretches of unnatural silence. Ever since May 9, I’d become a different person—I spent more time alone and went to bed two hours after John was already sleeping. I’d been in a book club, but I quit; I stopped following the news and avoided phone calls. Everything outside of my imagination seemed gray; the world inside my head was more electrifying than the world I had to live in. I started spending days by myself, walking along the lake to the Congress Avenue bridge in order to watch the bats. Every night, thousands of Mexican bats take flight from beneath this bridge, blanketing the sky like an undulating cape. Three thousand bats becoming one massive superbat, a mosquito-eating sky-creature. I did this dusk after dusk after dusk. It was an excuse to be alone and an opportunity to think about Y____. He had become the center of my professional life (and, by extension, my life as a whole).

  In the weeks that followed our meeting outside the Caribou Coffee, I started to question my own feelings toward Y____; I started to wonder if I was becoming too entertained by his stories (and if that was damaging my ability to work with other patients and communicate with other people). When we met on June 20, I waited to see if he’d formally revisit the “misplaced” issues we’d casually discussed. I placed the responsibility on Y____ to bring it up. When he ignored me entirely, I decided it was time to tell John what was happening. Hiding this information seemed worse than anything I’d technically done. Moreover, I needed to know if this was really happening. Was I losing my mind? If I was, I knew John would tell me directly. He never has any compunctions about calling me crazy.

  When I told John that I needed to talk to him and that he would need to sit down, his initial response was cold and predictable: “Are you having an affair?” he asked without emotion. I said I was not. “Are you sick?” he asked next. “Do you have a disease?” Again, I told him no. “You are not going to be able to guess what I’m going to say,” I assured him. “Quit trying. And no matter how you feel, this information must remain only between us.”

  I told him almost everything.

  I told him how my relationship with Y____ had started and what I originally suspected his problem was. I told him about our initial inperson interactions. Obviously, most of what I told him involved the experience of May 9, which felt liberating to say aloud. It was like removing a megalith from the roof. I recounted every detail I could remember about that morning. By the end, I was almost shaking.

  I expected John to disbelieve my story, in the same way I never believed Y____ until he proved otherwise. Amazingly, John did not seem skeptical (perhaps he was, but he didn’t show it). I also expected him to have a million questions, but he had only a few.

  “So, he’s not transparent. Am I right? He can be invisible, or mostly invisible. But he’s not transparent. True? When he eats, you can’t see the food going down his invisible throat and lodging in his invisible stomach. You can’t see through his invisible skin. Am I right?”

  I told him that this was accurate. I reiterated how annoyed Y____ always became anytime I referred to him as an invisible man. Oddly (or maybe predictably), John empathized with that sentiment.

  “Is there any chance that this is some kind of hoax?” was his next question. I told him that I couldn’t prove that it wasn’t a hoax, but that I was 99.9 percent certain Y____ was the person he claimed to be. I had not seen him with my own eyes.

  It was John’s third question that threw me off balance.

  “So who is this person?”

  I told John I didn’
t understand the query.

  “You can’t just become an invisible man these days,” he said. “I don’t know if you ever could, but you certainly can’t now. We live in a bureaucratic nightmare. I mean, does he have a permanent residence? People can’t disappear anymore. Does he have a Social Security card? How does he pay taxes? Did he fake his own death? What happens when you plug his name into Google? At the very least, would it be possible to verify his academic records, or his employment in Hawaii? That information must be online. Am I right? I’m right. Who is this person? Who is this person, really?”

  I told John I did not know the answer to these questions. I told him that our relationship was not focused on those kinds of specifics, and that he hadn’t even filled out his insurance form. I told him I wasn’t a police officer, and that Y____ came to me for help. I told him that all of those technical details were—on balance—insignificant, particularly when compared with the experience of being inside a room with a person you can’t see. Mostly, I was annoyed by John’s unsupportive posture. I was annoyed by John himself. Why weren’t my personal anxieties worth his concern? I’ll never understand why his first reaction is to immediately ask more questions. It’s like he can’t think about problems in any other way.

  “You need to wonder about these things,” John said. “If what you’re saying is all true—and I have no reason to doubt you, because you’re not the kind of person who tells stories—then you need to recognize the import of the situation you’re in. True? This is major. This is a totally new landscape. You are the emotional confidante of a phenomenon. This needs to be investigated. You have a civic responsibility to investigate this. Am I right? I’m right.”