The Visible Man Read online

  “Can you see me?” he asked.

  “No! I can’t see you! I can’t see you!”

  “Let your eyes adjust,” he said. “Get over the dissonance between what you expect to see and what’s actually there. Are you sure you can’t see me? Not even a little bit?”

  At first, I had no idea what he meant. But as the minutes passed, I understood. It was exactly as he had described: The silhouette of his body was vaguely visible (although I would have never recognized this on my own). It was as if the outline of his body was ever so slightly out of focus; it was like someone had completely painted the world over him, but the fuzzy imprint of his being was still faintly present.

  It was so amazing.

  I am tempted to type that sentence over and over again. It was so amazing. It was so amazing. It was so amazing. But there’s no purpose to that, and what would it prove? Either you believe me or you don’t. I don’t have the command of language to describe what it’s like to see something that isn’t there. If you can’t imagine this experience on your own, I can’t help you. Try to look at a white chair and see (almost) nothing. That’s what it was like. It was (almost) exactly like that.

  I did not audiotape our meeting. Obviously, I should have. But (a) I had knocked my tape recorder off my desk when I fell, and (b) I was not thinking straight. To his credit, I must concede that Y____ was remarkably patient during our encounter. He answered all of my questions, most of which were technical (whenever I get anxious, I worry about technicalities). Here are the key specifics I scribbled from memory after he departed:

  1. The cloaking suit was tight and uncomfortable, but Y____ had grown used to it.

  2. He didn’t know if the “cloaking cream” he sprayed over himself was toxic or benign, but that didn’t concern him. “Part of the risk,” he said. “A small part. If I get cancer, I get cancer. We’re all going to end up with cancer, anyway.”

  3. Before he encamped in a subject’s home, he was able to store four additional cylindrical canisters of aerosol cream in a pouch sewn into the stomach of the suit. By reapplying the cream every thirty-six to forty-eight hours (done when the subject was away), he could stay inside any given residence for up to a week. If a subject proved especially compelling, Y____ might return to the residence for multiple stints.

  4. In order to remain alert during these long observation periods, Y____ would consume copious amounts of oral stimulants, most notably low doses of Merck cocaine and methamphetamine in tablet form (this, he noted with some discomfiture, was the reason his teeth were so gnarled). Because stimulants are a diuretic (and since he often could not use the bathroom for long stretches of time), he’d regularly force himself into a state of dehydration. “There were signals I’d use as guideposts,” he said. “When my piss was the color of Pepsi, I knew it was time to drink some water.” He would eat when he was alone during the day, though constant amphetamine use had all but eliminated his appetite. “I can get by on five hundred calories a day,” he said. “Usually less. I’ll probably live to be two hundred years old. I mean, there’s nothing worse for us than food, right? Food is what kills us.”

  5. When cloaked, Y____ wore tiny mirrored goggles with a soft gray tint. They were similar to swimming goggles. These lenses were the only part of his body uncovered by the cream. Y____ claimed that the easiest way to see through his illusion was to locate his eyes, but I found this totally impossible.

  6. Through yoga, he had learned how to control muscle discomfort and to regulate his breathing. This was more imperative than people might anticipate. “I’d be the world’s most in-your-face yoga instructor,” he insisted. “I can lock into any physical position I want for five hours, six hours, eight hours. I’ve done this dozens of times. I can turn my bones off.”

  7. Y____ noted that—while he’s difficult to see when stationary—he’s flat-out impossible to see when in motion. “On the street, and especially in a crowd or in an airport, my individual movements disappear into the chaos of everything that’s moving around me. The fuzziness evaporates, because everything surrounding me seems equally unfocused. The human eye isn’t fast enough to adjust. It’s easy for me to walk straight onto commercial airplanes or into office buildings. The faster I walk, the less people see.”

  8. When I asked how he sustained himself financially, Y____ said, “My situation is unique. I don’t really need money. Outside of my rent and my cell phone, life is free.” He said he would sometimes steal high-end items (mostly jewelry) from major retailers and return them for cash the following day. Sometimes he would shoplift from pawnshops and immediately resell the items at competing pawnshops on the same block. Sometimes he’d just take two hundred dollars from unattended cash registers. He’d sometimes lift money out of people’s homes, but only when absolutely necessary or when he felt the victim was asking for it. “I’ve stolen from the rich, and from the not so very rich, and from the almost poor. But never from the pure of heart, the chronically depressed, or the very, very, very poor.”

  9. His omnipresent concerns were rain (which diluted the cloaking cream), dogs, and birds. “Hounds hate me,” he said. “Cats don’t care if I live or die, but hounds catch my scent and go off the reservation. Birds are even worse. Have you ever had a pigeon fly straight into your face? I’m like a picture window to those goddamn shit machines.”

  By the end of our hour, it seemed like everything about our relationship had reversed itself. During the final ten minutes, we were downright jovial (almost flirtatious). It was like being high for the very first time. Y____ was flattered by my attention. I kept apologizing over and over. He finally said, “I forgive you, Vicky. I forgive you. But you have to make me a promise: From here on out, I decide what we talk about. No more of this ‘How did you feel when your father said something dismissive about your haircut when you were eleven?’ I already know the answers to those questions. I know how I feel. And no more discussions about how this suit works or how I invented the cream. Okay? No more debates about science. It bores me to talk about things I already understand. I want to talk about what I have seen, and I want to do it my way. So can we agree to this?”

  “Yes.” I said. “Yes. Anything you want. I will never question you again. I will do anything you ask.”

  At one point, I felt an urge to photograph this person who wasn’t there. I asked if this was okay. Y____ laughed and said, “Why not?” He was in a great mood. I used the camera on my cell phone. This photographic image, as anyone can see (fig. 1), is distorted and grainy and useless. It looks like a chair. But when I see this photo, I can see Y____. I know what I’m supposed to be seeing.

  Suddenly, I glanced at my wall clock. It was 11:45 a.m. We both commented on how rapidly our time had disappeared. We said goodbye, and Y____ left. He wasn’t there, and then he wasn’t there. I had another appointment at noon, but when the patient arrived I told her I was sick. I canceled the rest of my day’s appointments and drove home. I spent the rest of the day drinking vodka in bed, completely awake. I did not tell my husband (or anyone else) about this experience for several weeks. I did not know how.

  PART 3

  Y____ ASSUMES CONTROL

  The game, as they say, had changed.

  None of my other patients were interesting, even though I knew they were important; I would sit and nod and listen to their problems, but I was always imagining their problems being described by Y____ (and how much that transference would change the meaning). I surrendered to him completely. I lost interest in my hobbies. I lost interest in television and in whatever new movies I was supposed to see; those things had never been that crucial to me to begin with, but now I couldn’t even force myself to follow the plots or remember the names of characters. My college friend Cheryl sent me an e-mail politely expressing concern that she and I were “not connecting” and drifting apart; I didn’t respond to the message and found myself alarmed by how little I could remember about the last phone conversation we’d shared. I began investing my free
time into practical activities that required no thought (scouring the bathroom, trimming the hedges) so that my mind could drift without consequence. Nothing was as stimulating as thinking about Y____’s condition. To this day, whenever I slip into boredom, I find myself fantasizing and reimagining the stories he told me. From a therapeutic standpoint, it was an unhealthy situation. I don’t deny that. But—in my meek defense—I need to reiterate how unusual this scenario had become (and not just because it involved invisibility). Professionally, it’s the kind of problem that can’t be solved by reading a book.

  Here’s what I mean: A few years before meeting Y____, I’d worked with an adult female patient still coping with the abusive relationship she’d had with her father. The father had sexually abused her during her teenager years and she remained paralyzed by recurring dreams of these encounters, inevitably describing her father’s appearance in these dreams as vampiric. She saw her father as a sinister, seductive figure who became a monster at night, and she often imagined him draining the life out of her body. She loved and hated him against her will. On more than one occasion, she directly referred to him as “That fucking vampire.” We talked about these memories for many weeks, and in every possible context. However, at no time did I ever suspect the patient’s father was literally Dracula. Why would I suspect that? Why would anyone? The central philosophy behind treating the delusional is to understand why that specific delusion has been selected. You never entertain the possibility of the delusion not being a construction. So when that happened with Y____—when I was forced to accept that the impossible situation he had described was not symbolic—I allowed the dynamic of our relationship to invert itself. From this point forward, I rarely questioned anything Y____ said, nor did I stop him from lecturing about whatever topic he desired. In short, I stopped being his therapist; I essentially became a vessel for his thoughts. My peers will criticize me for this, and I deserve the criticism. But I’m the only person who will ever fully understand how this felt, and I know that I did my best.

  As the weeks blurred together, my sessions with Y____ became strangely consistent. He would arrive at my office uncloaked, sit in the white chair, and tell me what we were going to talk about. This usually entailed Y____ opening with the words “Today we’re going to discuss my time with ____,” and a story would advance from there. He’d periodically pace about the office, talking with his hands as much as his mouth. I would listen, take notes, and occasionally pose questions (which he’d sometimes answer but often ignore). Sometimes we’d talk about the same subject for consecutive weeks; sometimes he would spend long stretches dissecting a particular person, abruptly change topics for ten minutes, and then return to the original person he’d started with (without explaining the digression). For simplicity, I have packaged our most remarkable encounters into their own separate rubrics. We were (allegedly) talking about these various people so that Y____ could better understand his guilt over his invasions of privacy—and sometimes we really did touch on that specific issue. But as I reread the transcripts today, I suspect his larger motives were stranger and more egocentric. Y____ felt guilt, but not in the way guilt is supposed to be felt.

  As before, I have reconstructed and truncated Y____’s transcripts into traditional prose (with my sporadic interjections in boxed italics). They are in chronological order, except where noted.

  I cannot vouch for the veracity of the narrative details, because I was not there.

  The Valerie Sessions

  [The Valerie Sessions were a three-session dialogue that initiated the week following May 9. Though Y____ never specified where these events occurred, I got the vague impression that “Valerie” resided somewhere in Northern California. The log time of every excerpt is annotated at the conclusion of each passage.]

  1 This person, this Valerie person, made things easy for me: She left her door unlocked. Not all day, of course, but whenever she went running. I assume she didn’t want to be encumbered by house keys. Runners despise their house keys. And this was a understandable decision, because she lived where crime wasn’t. I have no doubt she could have left her door unlocked twenty-four hours a day without incident. It was an excellent neighborhood. I was wandering outside the apartment complex when I saw a woman in her late twenties exit the building. She was wearing bike shorts, a sports bra, and a headband. This was Valerie. There was no way she had any pockets in that getup, so I made my move. I simply entered the front of the building and started ringing doorbells. If no one answered the bell, I tried the knob. It didn’t take long. She lived on the second floor, in an efficiency apartment—essentially a studio with a kitchen. Not really decorated, a little messy. A bed, a love seat, a treadmill. Loop carpet. Books, but no bookcase. Way too many shoes. Everything smelled human. Earthy. Musky. I riffled through the mail, checked her medicine cabinet for antidepressants, and then sat in a corner and started to wait.

  Val returned about an hour after she’d left, bathed in sweat. She closed the door and took off her sports bra in the same motion. Now, I’m sure—as a woman, and maybe just as a person—you find this description creepy. You think it’s sick that I would sit in some unknown female’s apartment and watch her get undressed. But this kind of visual experience was never sexual for me. Never. I looked at Valerie the way her gynecologist looks at her. Was she attractive? Maybe. I don’t think I’m in a position to say definitively. Seeing naked people is just part of my job. I take no pleasure in it.

  So, as I was saying … Valerie strips off her clothes and takes a shower. I wait for her in the living room. It’s darker now—almost eight o’clock. Valerie comes out of her bathroom in a robe and underwear. Her hair is fucking bizarre. It’s wet and vertical—it looks like a koala is crouching on her scalp. She checks her voice mail messages. She looks through her snail mail and separates the bills from everything else. She checks her work e-mail on her phone. And then—and this surprised me—she opens her closet and pulls out the biggest Pyrex bong I’ve ever seen. It was three feet high. She lights the carb port, takes a massive hit, and exhales a thundercloud of smoke. The whole apartment gets blue and thick. She walks through the fog and into the kitchen.

  This is where the war was waged.

  What I would come to discover about Valerie was that she was at war with herself. It was a ground war—a hundred-year war of attrition. She was at war with the size of her body, her desire to smoke pot, and an obsession with eating all the food in the world. She was compulsive about all three, and all three were connected. Thirty seconds after getting high, she was eating spoonfuls of Jif peanut butter, straight from the jar. Her eyes were crazed as she did this, somewhere between ecstasy and fear. I’ve never seen a person enjoy peanut butter so much. After ten minutes of chowing, she smoked more pot. Then she ordered a Domino’s pizza. For the next twenty-nine minutes, she sat on her love seat, listening to the Beatles with her eyes closed; when the pizza arrived, she ate five of the eight slices like a she-wolf. She threw the last three slices away and emptied the garbage. This alone seemed like a full night’s gluttony, but—once again—she returned to the bong. Again, the room turned blue. She listened to a little more of Abbey Road, swaying with herself to “Sun King.” It was charming. But then she surprised me again: She ordered a second pizza. A different kind of pizza from a different pizza place. When it arrived, she did the same thing—she ate a little more than half the pie and threw the rest away.

  By now, it’s almost midnight. Valerie smokes more pot, changes the CD to A Hard Day’s Night, and softly sings along with “You Can’t Do That.” She gorges on more peanut butter, this time swabbing it on Ritz crackers. Again, I assume the night is over. But suddenly she’s lying on the floor, topless. Now she’s doing sit-ups! She does one hundred sit-ups, rests for five minutes, then knocks off one hundred more. She attacks the bong a fourth time, refogging the apartment like a machine. Eventually, she crawls into her twin bed and falls asleep. She doesn’t even turn off her table lamp. I spend the night watc
hing her sleep in the light. For six hours, we’re equally motionless but unequally bored.

  Valerie awakes without an alarm. If she’s feeling haggard, it doesn’t show. Immediately, she’s doing sit-ups. She’s isolating her abs. She does a few push-ups, but she doesn’t do them well. No upper-arm strength. She stretches her hammies and stretches her quads. She puts on her running shoes and pulls on her headband, and—once again—she’s jogging out the door. I’m a little surprised, because yesterday she ran at dusk. It’s only been twelve hours since her previous run. Her morning jog lasts forty-five minutes. When she returns, she showers and prepares for work. No breakfast required. She puts the bong back in the closet, spends ten minutes looking for her car keys, and finally leaves for wherever she needs to be.

  I sleep on her floor for most of the afternoon. When I awake, I look for any innocuous food scraps in the kitchen. This is generally how I feed myself when I’m inside a stranger’s home: I eat whatever food seems least likely to be missed. I’m not judgmental. I’ll eat anything, and I don’t need much. I can last days on uncooked pasta and raw sugar. But Valerie doesn’t have either of those items. She doesn’t have anything, except for peanut butter, olive oil, ketchup, and a (now empty) box of crackers.

  It occurs to me that Valerie is afraid to keep food in the house.

  Valerie gets home early—somewhere in the neighborhood of 5:20 or 5:30. I can’t get a read on what she does for a living, beyond that it requires her to wear pencil skirts. By 5:45, the headband is back on her brain and she’s jogging out the door. Tonight she runs for ninety minutes; when she gets back, I momentarily worry she might collapse. She literally staggers into the apartment, panting like a sheepdog. She needs a moment to compose herself. But Valerie rallies. She takes off her clothes and stands in front of the bathroom mirror, looking at her stomach in profile. When she steps out of the shower, she stares at her stomach again. To me, she looks neither fat nor thin, but I can’t imagine what she sees. Judging from the expression on her face, she’s either mildly concerned or mildly depressed.