The Visible Man Read online

  I first noticed Bruce at a bar. Bars are good places to begin following someone. If the person you start following is already a little drunk, you can take more risks. For example, it’s easy to sneak into a really intoxicated person’s vehicle: All you have to do is trip them while they’re opening the driver’s side door. You just step on their outside foot and push them down with your shoulder, all in one motion. It doesn’t matter if they feel something pushing them—they inevitably assume it’s their own fault. Drunks always blame themselves. If a drunk person can’t see who knocked him down, he immediately assumes he’s just more wasted than he thought. Sometimes they lie on the ground and laugh at themselves, because drunkards love being drunkards. It feels great to be drunk, right? That’s when you slip into the passenger seat. Granted, you then have to ride home with a person who’s too drunk to realize he was just assaulted. It’s sketchy. But people are good at driving drunk, especially in Cleveland. That’s another thing I learned—drunk-driving laws are way too stringent in this country. Or at least they are in Ohio.

  I didn’t even have to knock Bruce down, though. He required no work at all. I found him in an Irish pub, late in the afternoon. It was autumn. The sun was low. He was having drinks with a few people he worked with—it was easy to figure out what was happening, because they all got to the bar at the same time and they were all dressed identically. There were five of them, all men, all in their late twenties. I watched them through a window and tried to figure out which one I wanted to trail. Two of them had wedding rings, so they were immediately out. Remember: I watch people when they’re alone. That’s my thing. Of the three who remained, I thought two looked like viable candidates; the third guy was too handsome and gregarious, so I assumed he was either in a preexisting relationship or sleeping with a whole bunch of random hookups. I wasn’t interested in those scenarios. I wanted people who looked like they had no important friends. Bruce fit the equation. Bruce had that sad, distant stare of a man who missed college too much. So did the guy sitting next to him. Neither one talked much as the group drank three or four beers. None of the five got drunk. They all left together, at the same time. My initial plan focused on the other loner—the quiet guy who wasn’t Bruce. He just seemed swarthier and weirder—he had a strange haircut and thicker eyeglasses. He looked like someone who might have played in a ska band when he was sixteen. Bruce’s principal upside was that he had less character. Bruce was just an American guy. Nothing about him was obvious.

  Now, because my original target was not authentically intoxicated, and because it was still dusk, my best option was to distract him when he opened his driver’s side door. I was going to wait until he started to climb into the driver’s seat, and then I was going to kick the back fender of his Nissan as hard as I could. My hope was that he’d get out of the car to check on the mysterious thud, and then I’d scoot around and jump in the vehicle while the door remained ajar. My life is filled with these kinds of momentary misdirections. They only work twenty-five percent of the time, but how else can I do it? It’s all trial and error. This time, however, I got absurdly lucky: Before I even had a chance to put my plan into action, Bruce opened the door of his own car and just absentmindedly walked away from it. Left it wide open for at least fifteen or twenty seconds. He opened his car door, walked over to one of his drinking partners, and said, “So, are we going to make this trade or not?” The other guy said something along the lines of, “I don’t know, man. Anquan Boldin always gets hurt. Let me look at the schedule and think it over.” It was too easy. By the time Bruce turned his ignition key, I was already in the backseat. Bruce was oblivious. Oblivious Bruce. I would say it was like taking candy from a baby, but babies scream. This was easier.

  We finally arrive at his house, which is way the fuck out in somewhere I’d never even heard of. Most single twenty-five-year-old men don’t own four-bedroom houses that are seventy-five minutes from the office, but Bruce did. He was an odd one. Bruce parks in the garage and waddles inside. I follow about five minutes later. The screen door isn’t locked. He’s already at the computer, masturbating. That might seem perverse, but you’d be amazed how common this is: Men get home, change clothes, and masturbate. There’s nothing remotely sexual about it. They just need to get it out of the way. It’s like taking out the trash. I’ve probably watched three hundred different guys masturbate, and not one of them seemed to enjoy it. I’m sure they did, but you wouldn’t know by looking at them. I don’t even think that pornography plays a particularly important role. It simply saves them a little time. Men are so lazy. They’re too lazy to imagine naked women.

  Anyway … so now I’m inside his house. This is always the most thrilling moment, because it means everything worked. I always spend so much mental energy trying to get into this position that I never know what to do with myself once I’m actually inside. I always want to celebrate, to congratulate myself for being so goddamn clever. But I can’t. I just have to find a comfortable spot in a corner and sit down. I have to control my breathing. I have to keep it shallow. I also need to prepare myself for the inevitability of utter boredom: Very often, single people don’t do shit. They do nothing, all night long. They sit in a recliner and watch TV. I’ve probably watched more television than anyone you’ve ever met, and I don’t even own one. Terrible shows, good shows. Golf tournaments in Cancun. C-SPAN. Hours of Oprah. Law and Order. Lonely people love Law and Order, for whatever reason. They prefer the straight narratives. They’ll also rent the entire run of a TV series on Netflix, and they tend to rent whatever Netflix promotes as popular. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen every episode of The Wire, but never in the proper sequence. I have no fucking clue what’s supposed to be going on there.

  Bruce is a different kind of guy, though. Bruce doesn’t watch TV—he owns an awesome one, but he never turns it on. Bruce is one of these people who lives on the Internet. He has a house full of leather furniture, but he spends the whole evening in his desk chair. He plays RISK over the Internet for hours—he’ll have sixty or seventy games happening simultaneously, all against strangers he’ll never meet in person. He steals music constantly—he’d rip a live Paul Simon album, listen to the first track for thirty seconds, and then never play it again. He follows a bunch of political blogs and seems to comment on every post, usually with bitter sarcasm but sometimes with an LOL. He looks at YouTube clips and types terse, lowercase critiques of any videos that underwhelm him. His updates his Facebook page about ten times a night and elects to “like” some photo of a dead porcupine lying next to an empty champagne bottle. He never reads books, but he put a lot of effort into a website called goodreads.com: He looks at other people’s reviews on Amazon and writes his own reviews from whatever he gleans. Bruce has, relative to a lot of the other people I observed, a relatively rich life. He isn’t dark or depressed, or at least he wasn’t while I was there. Never sighed, never cried. But I noticed one omnipresent aspect about his online activity: It was constantly interrupted by Bruce’s ongoing attempt to write an e-mail. One e-mail, to one person. He would open his e-mail account, type a few sentences, delete a few sentences, and then close it back down and do something else. At first, I thought he was writing a bunch of different e-mails to a bunch of different recipients, but it turned out that he was only working on one. It was a single e-mail to one woman, maybe a hundred words long. The woman’s name was Sarah. He would work on this e-mail like it was a sculpture. He’d type, “Long time no talk,” and then he’d delete that and write, “Been a long time since we talked.” Then he’d delete that and type, “It’s been awhile, no?” Completely innocuous stuff, but he’d type different variations of these words and pace around his living room, saying these phrases aloud, testing them out. He kept trying to craft a joke about how his job was more boring than her job, but he was obviously paralyzed by the prospect of offending her. During the first night I was there, he probably built and rebuilt that e-mail five hundred times—yet he never worked on it for more than five
consecutive minutes. He’d add something or delete something, and then he’d go back to the Internet to waste another quarter of an hour. He’d always return to the e-mail, fixate over its contents for another five minutes, and repeat the process all over. He finally sent the message at about two a.m., and when he did, it was the most bland, nonmeaningful letter you can imagine. I read it over his shoulder. Nothing romantic, nothing humorous, nothing clever. Zero insight. I watch him punch the “send” button. Bruce sits motionless and breathes through his mouth. It’s like he’s watching a person die in a hospital bed: He wants to do something, but there’s nothing to do. So he ends up doing the only thing anyone can do once they’ve sent a message they can’t stop thinking about: He goes back and rereads his own sent e-mail for another forty-five minutes, parsing and reparsing every line like it’s the book of Revelation. It was excruciating. I felt terrible for him. It was eating him alive. He was eating himself alive. I was so relieved when he went to bed.

  The next morning he wakes up early. He drinks a 7:05 Dr. Pepper for breakfast and checks his e-mail. He has dozens of messages, but nothing he cares about. Most are left unread. He leaves for work. I stay behind. I immediately turn on his computer, assuming a man who lives alone will not have his e-mail account protected by a password. But Bruce is the kind of man who does. I suppose the kind of guy who buys a four-bedroom home in order to spend his nights in a desk chair is the same kind of guy who protects his e-mail from roommates who don’t exist. I look through his desk drawers and find nothing personal. He has a photo album in his bedroom, but almost all the photos look like they were taken during the same fraternity party. I look for anything that might indicate who Sarah is, but there’s nothing. No trace. Outside of his hard drive, there’s nothing in this house to indicate that Bruce is alive.

  The day drags. Bruce arrives home at roughly the same time as yesterday. He walks in the door and checks his e-mail. He goes upstairs to change clothes, strolls back down, and rapidly masturbates. Today is yesterday. He boils a few hot dogs and eats them at his desk, wrapping them in white bread and smearing the meat with chili sauce. He starts playing RISK. He leaves some comments on the political blogs. The only difference is that, tonight, he’s no longer composing a hundred-word e-mail a hundred different ways; tonight, all he does is check his in-box. He checks it constantly. It’s robotic, mechanical. Bruce knows a lot of keyboard shortcuts—he can check and close his e-mail in less than two seconds, and he does so incessantly. He gets messages every hour, but not the one he wants. He downloads Billy Squier’s Don’t Say No, listens to half of “In the Dark,” and then he checks his in-box. He attacks Alaska from Kamchatka, and then he checks his in-box. He reads a blog post about China’s environmental policy, follows a Wikipedia link to a list of prominent Chinese entertainers, puts a documentary about Yao Ming into his Netflix queue, and then he checks his in-box.

  He shows no emotion while compulsively rereading the message he wrote the night before. I sit on the floor right next to him, unseen; we both reread his letter to Sarah. Neither of us sees anything worth rethinking. Around two thirty a.m., he gives up and goes to bed. When he checks his e-mail the next morning, there’s still no reply. He drinks his morning Dr. Pepper and leaves for work. I was in that house for five days, and Sarah never responded. It was probably the only thing he thought about, despite the fact that he was technically thinking about twenty-five other problems.

  Now, what do you think this means, Vic-Vick? Why do you think I told you this story?

  I told you this story because I’m curious about what element you view as meaningful. What part of Bruce’s life do you consider to be most important? In my view, Bruce was living three lives. He had his exterior life, which was composed of day-to-day work and shallow friendships: This was his job, the people he had beers with, all the normal daily filler. This exterior life was boring and unsatisfying—I suppose I can’t prove that he didn’t like his day job, but that’s the impression I got. Now, he also had a second life, on the Internet—a life that was simultaneously unreal and fulfilling. It was a life he controlled completely, and it was the means for his escape from the boredom of being a normal person with normal responsibilities. But he also had a third life—this hyperinterior life, within his own mind, where he incessantly imagined an intimate, online relationship with Sarah. A life where his first life and his second life were intertwined. Every time he wrote and rewrote that e-mail, he was activating that relationship inside his imagination and fighting the natural, irrational urge to become fixated on a person he didn’t really know. I mean, Bruce was a sane man: He knew his connection to Sarah was not real unless she responded to his e-mail, and he knew he’d be living like a crazy person if he just sat at a desk with his arms crossed, staring at his static in-box. So Bruce used the Internet to normalize his abnormal existence. As long as Bruce was engaged with his computer, it was not unusual to check and recheck his in-box, or to write and rewrite a single e-mail. That’s what people do when they’re sitting at a computer: They multitask and they daydream and they think about everything at once. One can easily fold obsessive self-absorption into the process of online communicating. In other words, the Internet was doing two things for Bruce—it allowed him to separate from the exterior life he hated, but also allowed him to stay engaged with an interior life he wanted. It was, ultimately, the single most important aspect of who he was: It removed his present-tense unhappiness while facilitating the possibility for future joy. It made the dark part of his mind smaller, but it made the optimistic part limitless. It added what he needed to affix and subtracted what he hoped to destroy. And maybe this was bad for Bruce’s humanity, but I think it was probably good. I think it took a mostly sad man and made him mostly happy. The degree of authenticity doesn’t matter.

  Right?

  Here’s the bottom line, Vicky: You are an Internet. What the Internet did for Bruce, you do for me. You are the bridge through which I mind the gap between my exterior and interior life. Now, judging from what you’ve told me, you don’t believe my exterior life is real. You think my exterior life is my interior life, and that I’m making up a delusion to compensate for some other problem. Personally, I don’t care that this is what you believe. You don’t need to believe what I tell you. My self-esteem doesn’t hinge on whether you think I’m a reliable patient. I don’t care what you think of me and I never have. I never will. But right now, I need this experience. I need to have you in my life, because you act as the control. I want to upload these images into someone who isn’t me. And if the only way to make this happen is to meet with you in person, face-to-face … well, then I will do it. I will come to your office, because I want to keep talking and I don’t want to start over with someone else.

  Give me your address.

  END OF PHONE SESSION 3

  NOTES: On balance, I’m classifying today’s conversation with Y____ as a success (albeit a strange one). He is coming into my office next week, or at least that’s what he claims. That was my goal, and my goal was achieved. But this does not feel like a win. My confidence is shaken. I should not admit this (even to myself), but it’s the truth. I feel uneasy with Y____’s casual aggression. Was Y____ describing himself when he told the story of Bruce? That’s my gut feeling, but such a diagnosis seems imperfect. Did he make the whole thing up? His details oscillate between unnaturally specific and uselessly general. Was I wrong to accuse him of lying? It seemed like the honest move, but perhaps I’ve lost his trust. In general, I’m losing my grip on this process. Y____ is either fabricating his story out of whole cloth or completely believes these falsehoods to be true—I must keep both of those possibilities at the front of my mind at all times, and I need to keep them intellectually equal. He’s articulate, but I can’t let his articulation bully me. Perhaps I need to accept that I’m scared of this patient. I still look forward to talking with Y____ every week, but part of me is frightened. I don’t think I’m very good at my job. Does Y____ know this? I fear that
he does. I should have made different choices with my life. This is not something I’m good at.7

  PART 2

  THE SECOND INTRODUCTION

  I was physically introduced to Y____ in the most standard of ways: There was a knock at my office door, and I told the knocker to enter. The entrance swung open and a man stepped into the room. I knew who he was before he told me. There were no surprises.

  He was a man. A strange-looking man, but nothing more.

  He was tall and he was thin. Cadaverous. Perhaps six feet five or six feet six, but no more than 175 pounds. His head was a skull on a stick; it was shaved to the skin, but I could see a subtle shadow where his hair would sprout. The hairline was receding. He wore an oversized black T-shirt, khaki pants, and garish white tennis shoes. His arms were wiry and unnaturally long. His nose was large, as were his Adam’s apple and his ears. His teeth were jagged and yellow. “Ichabod Crane,” I thought to myself. “He looks like an actor auditioning for the role of Ichabod Crane.” It was a sweltering day in May, but he was barely sweating. I can recall this because I asked him where he had parked his car (at the time, I was in the midst of a minor parking dispute with a neighboring office building and lived in constant fear that my patients might get towed). He mentioned that he had arrived on foot. I could not imagine how a man in a black T-shirt could walk any distance in the 90-degree Texas heat without perspiring, but Y____ was immune. When he shook my hand, it was cool and dry, like a brick from the cellar.

  I turned on the tape recorder.

  When I treat patients in my office, I never sit behind my desk. The desk creates a barrier, and barriers are the enemy. Instead, I sit in a white Eames chair. My patients have the option of sitting in an identical black Eames chair or on the couch. No one ever takes the couch, particularly during their first session (too overt). Y____ looked at both options and requested that he sit in my chair. I said, “No, that’s not how things work here.” I don’t know why I used those specific words. Y____ asked, “Does it matter where I sit? Can’t I sit in the white chair?”