The Visible Man Part 4

[I say, "I would love to know the answer to those questions."]

Don't pressure me. I'll answer your questions, but only when I'm ready. You won't really understand, anyway. The information will be useless to you.

[I say, "It seems like you want me to ask you questions, just so you can decline to answer them."]

That's not true. You lack self-confidence. We're almost out of time, anyway. The session is basically over. Wait a week. Next week. I'll talk about this next week. And I don't appreciate your tone, Victoria. It makes me think you're against me. (5.23.08, 10:44 a.m. to 10:46 a.m.) 5 I started to feel responsible for Valerie. She might have been comfortable with her life, but I wasn't. I didn't like where her life was going. She didn't realize how enslaved she was. Here was a single woman with no obligations, but with a life devoid of freedom. She didn't even understand what freedom meant. There are convicted murderers with more freedom than Valerie. I truly believe that.

Did she like exercise? No. She exercised only so that she could smoke pot and gorge herself on pizza. Did she like being high? Probably when she started, but not anymore. Now it was just a ritual that accelerated her hunger. Did she enjoy food? No. If she loved food, she would not be shoveling canned ravioli down her throat. Did she enjoy the process of eating-the chewing, the swallowing, the filling of the stomach? No way. All that did was remind her that she needed to exercise again. I'm not even sure if she really liked the Beatles. I think she thought she did, but how would she know? She clearly sucked at knowing things about herself. I think it's more likely that she believed the Beatles were simply what a person like her was supposed to listen to. Valerie had no agency. I don't care if she didn't realize that. I realized it for her.

This, my Vic-Vick, is the type of realization that can happen only through surveillance: If anyone else had been in the room, Valerie would have "become" happy. She wouldn't have been happy, but she would have acted happy and a.s.sumed that her actions were somehow related to feelings. Jane came by again-the following Tuesday, just as before-and they watched their little TV show that didn't make any sense and argued about a sequence of numbers and laughed and got excited and chewed on fried chicken skin. I'm sure they thought they were fulfilled, but they were wrong. That was not fulfillment. It was just another way to avoid the cognition of their imprisonment, and their ba.n.a.l interaction made that easier. They could feed off each other's fabricated joy. But when Valerie was alone, I saw the desperation she could not comprehend. She was running herself into the grave, just so that she could s.p.a.ce out and pig out and not care about things that mattered. It was pathetic. She deserved better. I saw potential in Valerie that she refused to see in herself, but she was too busy being Valerie to see anything that wasn't already there.

So-now-I had to make a decision. I had to decide if watching Valerie was more important than helping Valerie. Did I have a responsibility to this person? Jesus would say, "Yes." Nietzsche would say, "Don't ask a question when you already know the answer." But let's not get political. I had to decide for myself. And what I elected to do would be-at least in theory-beneficial to both involved parties. I decided that I would help Valerie in order to observe Valerie. That was my plan. I thought that moving this person from a bad life to a good life would make her core qualities more clear, because those would be the only qualities that'd remain unchanged. I still see the logic in this. I do.

The way to help Valerie seemed obvious. What I needed to do was alter the sequence of her unhappiness cycle: I had to stop her from exercising, stop her from smoking pot, or stop her from eating. If I stopped one, the other two would cease to exist. In order to stop her from exercising, I a.s.sumed I would need to physically injure her. That struck me as wrong, even if my motives were good. What if I accidentally paralyzed her? What if her health insurance was s.h.i.+t? The risk was too high. Stopping her from smoking marijuana was flat-out impossible-her whole life revolved around that experience. If I threw away her marijuana, she'd just call Jane or buy more. But there was a way to stop her from eating, and that's what I pursued.

As I mentioned before, I always carry stimulants whenever I'm on an observation. This is done out of necessity: I need to stay mentally alert, and I need to stay awake for long periods of time. I can't sleep at my own discretion. As a consequence, I'm never hungry. I can barely remember what being hungry feels like. What I needed to do was make Valerie feel the same way I did. So when Valerie went to work, I turned her weed into an appet.i.te suppressant.

It seemed like the best solution.

Val kept her pot in a music box, inside the freezer. And she had a ton of it-she was clearly the kind of nervous addict who always bought four or five months' worth whenever she saw her dealer. It looked like a soft, green brick. Now, like I said before, I had a whole buffet of stimulants at my disposal: Adderall, oral meth tablets, Ritalin, Dexedrine, medical c.o.ke, modafinil. I'm my own pharmacy. I always keep a little of everything on my person, because I don't like to use the same stimulant for too many days in a row. I can't risk addiction. So here's what I did: When Valerie left for work, I made a speed c.o.c.ktail. I combined everything I had in a plastic bag, and I found a rolling pin under her sink-I'm not sure why a person with no food would possess a rolling pin, but Valerie had a nice one. It was perfect. I crushed all this c.o.ke and speed and meth into a powder. It was a sandwich bag of zombie dust. There ended up being a lot in there, way more than I expected-there was enough granular stimulation to make a Clydesdale climb a Christmas tree. And I poured all of it into her dope. I used my fingers and a fork to really drive it inside the buds. I had to make sure every future hit housed a modic.u.m of speed. Obviously, this process caused the brick to disintegrate. It no longer looked like a brick. I started to worry that she'd notice how different it looked, because stoners tend to be meticulous about their weed. It's usually the only thing they really pay attention to. But then I had a moment of divine inspiration: I remembered that one of the only household items Valerie happened to own was olive oil! It was like organic gorilla glue-one tablespoon was more than enough to rebuild the brick. To this day, I'm kind of shocked how lucky I got with Valerie. When I needed a rolling pin, she inexplicably had a rolling pin; when I needed olive oil, it was pretty much the only item she had in the kitchen. It was almost like she unknowingly wanted me to save her life.

I put the dope back in the music box and I put the music box back in the freezer. Val gets home at her usual hour; she strips off her clothes, looks at her profile in the bathroom mirror, and prepares for her second run of the day. She's a robot. As she stretches, I can faintly hear her joints cracking, but her face expresses nothing. Mary Decker never had this level of resolve. She runs like a deer. She returns like a carrier pigeon. She showers like a p.o.r.n star, and then she smokes like a tire fire. But this new smoke smells different; that's obvious to both of us. It doesn't smell like weed. It smells like a Nerf ball melting in the microwave. But Valerie a.s.sumes it's just the sediments in the bong water. She sniffs the chamber of her bong and makes a face. I can't get inside her mind, but I know what she's thinking: I'm just really high right now. That's the only rational conclusion she can draw. I'm so high, this pot smells like poison. It's an illogical a.s.sumption, but more logical than the truth.

I'm not sure if you know this or not, but smoking cocaine and marijuana simultaneously makes a person idiotically high. The feeling is unique. You get up as rapidly as you go down, and there's this unique third twist behind your eyes-it's kind of like how people describe the movement of earthquakes. I can tell Valerie notices this immediately. Her reaction is transparent. She knows something is different-her pupils are pinned and kinetic, and her pulse is running downhill. Plus, she thinks she should be hungry. I can tell just by looking at her. It's obvious. She knows this is the point where food always becomes a nonnegotiable desire. But the feeling is just not there. She looks at all the groceries she grabbed on the way home-some turkey meatb.a.l.l.s, bread, cheese, ice cream-but none of it appeals to her and she doesn't know why. She sticks it in the fridge and starts to organize her apartment. She smokes more speed weed and cleans the bathroom. She smokes again and aligns her CDs in alphabetical order. She collects her dirty clothes and starts to do laundry, separating everything by color and fabric. Pretty soon it's ten o'clock and she still hasn't eaten. The shackles of hunger are broken. She's free. She can do whatever she wants. She opens her unopened mail and writes checks for all the individual bills. She balances her checkbook, smiling to herself as she does so. She smokes again and goes back into the bathroom-she's already cleaned it once, but now she really cleans it. She sc.r.a.pes the toilet. She waxes the floor. She scrubs the walls of the shower with Ajax. She looks at herself in the mirror and poses like a model. She practices her casually-trying-not-to-care expression for future photo ops. She looks at puppies and kittens on the Internet. She's like three people at once. "I've done such a great service," I think to myself.

Valerie finally goes to bed without supper at 4:30 a.m. She wakes up at nine, looking awful, immediately late for work. When she gets home that night, things seem unchanged: She takes her normal run-maybe a little shorter than usual, but not by much-and then she showers and resumes her regimen of destruction. This time the smoke smells really bad, but the strangeness bothers her less. I can see her spirits lift. She brought home another grocery bag of food, undoubtedly presuming that last night had been an anomaly and that she'd be extra-hungry tonight. But she's not. She looks at her bacon and her white bread and she thinks, "I don't need this." I'm helping her. I know I'm helping her.

But I guess I did one thing wrong.

I guess I put too many drugs into her drugs.

I must have. It didn't seem like too much, but maybe I used my own tolerance as a yardstick, or maybe I should have added every-thing except the meth. Maybe she just had a weak system. I don't know what happened. I know it was an amateur mistake, but I'd never tried anything like this before. Pharmaceuticals are tricky. Doctors make mistakes all the time. That's why they need all that insurance. Plus, this was partially her own fault. She smoked like mad that night. Like, way more than the other nights. I started to wonder if perhaps she'd traditionally used the sensation of hunger as a barometer for when to stop. Because now she was smoking compulsively, every ten or fifteen minutes. Instant basehead. And suddenly she's acting all crazy: pacing around, arguing with herself, calling people on the telephone and hanging up when they answer, running to the bathroom every half hour with explosive diarrhea. She listens to "Revolution 9," which n.o.body does. She locks the front door and pulls down the window blinds-totally cliche behavior. I suppose I was concerned, but not over concerned-I mean, lots of people act paranoid when they take stimulants. Everyone knows this. Uppers are always worse than downers. But Valerie was off the reservation. I don't know if she liked how it felt, or if this combination of narcotics somehow confused her, or if she was just the type of person who didn't realize how much she enjoyed drugs. But she was definitely smoking too much, and there was no way I could stop her. At this point, I was merely an observer. I was just sitting in the corner, silent and unseen, waiting for her to crash and sleep. I was waiting for her to recognize that her life was different now ... better ... less suffocating. But she didn't seem to get that. She just got higher.

Around nine thirty, she takes another gargantuan hit and changes into her regular workout clothes, then changes into a similar but different outfit, and then combines the two outfits into a third. She jumps on the treadmill. That was the first red flag. Now I'm getting worried. She starts running, sweating, grunting. And tonight she is really obsessed with the LCD monitors, crazily obsessed, in a manner that totally dwarfs her previous behavior. Instead of wanting all the gauges to line up perfectly, she needs that to happen; she needs them all to share the same numbers, and she keeps adjusting her pace and the incline to make it so. It never works. It's like watching a person accidentally attaching themselves to an electric chair. I'm mesmerized. This is real science. I'm finally seeing the fundamental qualities of an isolated human in trouble. Pretty soon, I realize she's been sprinting for over two hours. She gets off the treadmill, inhales a ma.s.sive quant.i.ty of speed smoke, coughs manically, chokes down four aspirin for (what I a.s.sume) was her pounding headache, and returns to the treadmill. Now, as you probably know, stimulants dramatically thin the blood. Aspirin is just about the worst thing to combine with cocaine. But Valerie doesn't even know there's cocaine in her system. Her nose starts to bleed, and maybe her ears. It takes her too long to notice, but she eventually does. She steps off the treadmill, tries to wipe her nostrils on the shoulder of her T-s.h.i.+rt, and immediately falls to the carpet. I see her hold two fingers on her neck, just below her cheek; she's checking her own pulse, and I can tell that she's worried. She hasn't looked right for the past ninety minutes, but now she looks like an animal at the pound. Her left leg starts to spasm, so she grabs her calf with her hands. It doesn't stop trembling. She starts crying, but she can't force out any tears-she's too dehydrated. She starts panting, and I think she says, "Help." I guess I'm not sure she said "help," but I thought that's what it sounded like. It was a one-syllable word that starts with an H.

So now I had to make a decision.

I am not a bad person. I'm not going to let any person-and certainly not someone I like, such as Valerie-die in front of me. No way. That's obscene. And I will concede that-in many important ways-I was responsible for this turn of events. If Val were to die, and if someone were to say I was responsible for her death ... I'd have a hard time arguing against that. But I didn't think Valerie was dying. I really, really did not. I thought she was having a terrible reaction to a bunch of drugs she probably should not have been metabolizing, but I was 98 percent sure she'd live. Yeah, I know what happened to John Belus.h.i.+ and Len Bias and Ike Turner. I know, I know. I read all the same books as everybody else. It can happen. But people don't die the second time they try cocaine. It can happen, but it never does. Part of me thought I should just stay cool and ride the situation out. But this was a major blunder, and I knew it. My confidence was totally shot. I would have never forgiven myself if Valerie died. It would have contradicted the purposes of my research. I made the decision to intervene.

This, certainly, creates its own kind of special problem: How does one intervene in an emergency situation if one isn't really there? I mean, I was in the room, but I wasn't in the room. You know what I mean? So I knew this intervention would be shocking to Valerie, and her mental state was already fragile. My biggest fear was that I might give her a heart attack that might not have happened on its own. But life is a gamble. I finally just stood up, walked over to her cell phone, and called 911. I told the dispatcher the address, I gave him a rough idea of what was happening, and I left the building. I don't know what ultimately transpired, but I do know that Valerie is fine today. She lived. I was right.

[At this point, Y____ just stopped talking, as if the story was over. I waited for him to continue, but he quit pacing and sat down in the white chair. He just sat there, silently. Finally, I asked the obvious question: "How did Valerie react to what you did?"]

Oh, not well. I'm sure she thought she was hallucinating, or maybe dying. When I started dialing the phone, she initially said something like, "What's happening?" I said, "Remain calm." She screamed a few times. She said stuff like, "Who the f.u.c.k is there? What's going on? Oh my G.o.d oh my G.o.d oh my G.o.d!" Again, I said, "Remain calm. Everything will be okay." She started shaking. It was a little like the first time you saw me when I was cloaked, except way worse. She lost her s.h.i.+t completely. But this would be a lot for any person to handle, particularly if that person was super-high and possibly dying and had just finished a cardio workout.

As I talked to the 9-1-1 operator, Val just sort of lay there and writhed around on the carpet. "What's happening? What's happening?" That was her refrain. When I was finished with the call, I walked over to where she was lying. I was sort of looming over her body, but I tried to be as casual as possible. It's funny-even when I know a person can't see me, I worry about semiotics. "Things will be okay," I told her. "The paramedics are coming. You've inhaled a lot of stimulants. When they arrive, give them what's left of your marijuana and tell them it was laced with other drugs."

"What are you saying," she said. "Who are you? What's happening to me? I want this to stop. Stop! Stop! I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. I want this to stop."

"Remain calm," I told her. "You don't have the ability to understand what's happening to you right now, so don't even try. Let it go. Breathe deep. Stay on the floor and wait for the paramedics."

"I'm dying," she said.

"You're not dying," I told her. "You're a decent person. I was trying to help you, but I made a mistake."

"Who are you? Where are you? Who is talking to me? Who is talking to me? Who is talking to me?"

"No one is talking to you," I said. "This isn't happening. Just make sure you give the paramedics the drugs in your fridge. I know you won't want to do that, but you must. They need to know what's inside you. It's not what you think."

And, with that, I left. And-like I said before-I don't even know if Valerie was ever in real danger. She lived. I do know that. A few weeks after that last night together, I went back and made sure she'd recovered. I didn't reenter her apartment, because I was kind of scared to go back in there. It seemed like the wrong thing to do. But I did follow her on a jog. She seemed fine. I'm sure she spent at least one night in the psych ward, and I a.s.sume she was placed into an outpatient rehab program for an amphetamine addiction she never actually had. I regret that. It's one of my regrets. She didn't deserve that ha.s.sle. On balance, I suppose my plan failed. Even now, I'd cla.s.sify my time with Valerie as "bittersweet." But that's the consequence of getting involved with other people. If my job was easy, I wouldn't need to see you. I did the best I could. (5.30.08, 10:11 a.m. to 10:50 a.m.)

An Attempt at Reason

When Y____ finally concluded the Valerie Sessions in late May, I was relieved. This is not because I found his stories uninteresting-quite the contrary. I was still in awe of almost everything Y____ said; I still preferred to see him as superhuman. The cognition of his invisibility usurped my critical distance. He would arrive at my office and lecture me like a child, and I accepted those lectures unconditionally. But after he'd leave and I'd start to think about what he'd told me-when I relistened to the audiotapes and forced myself to seriously consider the information he was presenting-I grew troubled.

"This is not a moral judgment," I told him at the beginning of our June 6 session, "and I'm not trying to dictate what you discuss here. Certainly, I have problems with how you treated Valerie. But that can be addressed later. The one thing I do need from you, however, is a better sense of what you were hoping to learn from this observation. Because I must be honest with you: What you're describing doesn't seem like science to me."

I was nervous as I said this. I was tentative. My intellectual infatuation with Y____ was interfering with my judgment; I felt privy to the interior thoughts of an authentic genius and I didn't want to jeopardize our relations.h.i.+p. I'm certain Y____ suspected this. His response was hypersensitive, almost as if my question had wounded him. "What do you want to know?" he asked. "How can I help you understand this?"

What I told him was what anyone would have told him: I said that he didn't seem to be learning anything important about the people he was watching. It seemed like unadulterated voyeurism and a misuse of power. I noted that secretly drugging a person was immoral (not to mention criminal). But regardless of how things ended, I wanted him to explain why he ever thought the best use of invisibility was to watch a randomly selected woman smoke marijuana inside her apartment. I wasn't even that concerned with his involvement in Valerie's life; I was more occupied with his original intentions. My suspicion was that he didn't really have "intentions" at all. So I told him this.

He looked at me for a long time. He smiled, but it was the kind of condescending smile that said, You don't really get this, do you? At least that's how it felt. Maybe it's just how I remember it. The one thing I do know is that I believed what he said next, at least at the time.

"What is the purpose of science?" Y____ began. (How did I accept such pompous rhetoric? I'll never forgive myself.) "What's the purpose of building a telescope, or going to the moon, or a.s.sembling a laser that can slice through a diamond? Is it to make our lives better? Partially. That's the obvious, unimportant, superficial justification for technology. We study dielectric heating and nonionized radiation in order to create an oven that cooks popcorn in two minutes. We understand internal combustion so that we can travel sixty miles in sixty minutes. We research T-cells so that h.o.m.os.e.xual heroin addicts don't die in their late twenties. In general, brilliant people study complex things in order to make life simpler for the average and the less-than-average and the infirm. Talk to an eighth-grade science teacher, and that's what he'll try to tell you. Science, for most people, is something we use. But there's a fallacy in that. There's a problem. That logic suggests science is improving the world, and that's not happening. This is what gamblers call a push. Science is always a push.

"Everything science gives us immediately becomes normative. To an eighty-year-old man, a computer is this amazing device that creates instantaneous access to limitless information. He can't get his head around it. But to a twenty-year-old man, the computer is a limited machine that costs too much and always needs to be faster. Because humans live finite lives, all technological advances immediately feel ba.n.a.l to whatever generation inherits their benefits. Any advance can be appreciated only by the handful of people who happen to exist within the same time period of that specific technology's introduction. You follow my meaning? Those are the only people who notice the difference. To a seven-year-old, a computer doesn't even qualify as technology. It's like a crowbar. Everything magical is temporary. So the idea that science makes our life 'better' is kind of an ephemeral illusion. Take vulcanization, for example. That's a manifestation of science that seems to improve everything about modernity. Right? Of course it is. We couldn't drive without it, or at least not the way we drive now. But if vulcanization wasn't possible, would we miss it? No. Of course not. We wouldn't miss it at all. We'd find a way around it, or we'd effortlessly live without it. We wouldn't even have the capacity to miss it. Vulcanization seems to make life better only because we already know it exists. We wouldn't miss rubber tires if they had never been invented, in the same way we don't miss cows that taste like lobster or shoes made out of gla.s.s or s.e.xual time machines or anything else that science can't create. Over time, the net benefit of technology is always going to be zero. Children born into Amish communities don't miss TV until they discover such contraptions exist, right? There's just no real evidence that proves people in the fifteenth century were less happy than people are now, just as there's no reason to think people in the twenty-fifth century will have happier, better lives than you or me. This is a strange notion to accept, but it's true. And once I accepted that truth, it forced me to reevaluate everything I did as an intellectual.

"The more I thought about this-and I thought about this a lot, for many, many years-the more it seemed like the only essential purpose of science was to define consciousness. To define reality. I know I overuse that word, but it's the only word for what I'm interested in: reality. Over time, I realized it was the same instinctive reason I'd dabbled in sociology and journalism and mathematics and music and every other discipline that hopes to make order out of chaos. It consumed me. For a long time, it was the only thing I ever thought about. It just seemed like an impossible conundrum. Everything I did moved me farther away from my intended goal. The process of everything I tried-experiments, surveys, interviews, whatever-inevitably created its own false reality. The process was always the problem. Obviously, I'm not the first person who's ever come to this conclusion; we talked about this before, very early on, long before you knew who I was or what I can do. By now, it probably sounds like common sense. But when I started at Chaminade, and when I realized what we were doing and what the end results could be, I saw a new potentiality for the very first time. I saw a way to repurpose science. I could use it to get me closer to reality. So that would become both my starting point and my ending point.

"Remember when I told you about that Swanson boy? The boy from my school? The boy who liked Rush? To me, watching him through his window was a rare glimpse of reality. Watching a single person, away from other persons, was the only way. There was no process to interfere with the experience. So that's what I've turned into my life's work: I've built a suit that allows me to see the unseen life, because unseen lives are the only ones that matter. Now, what you seem to be asking is 'What am I hoping to see?' My answer is this-I have no expectations. In fact, I can't have expectations, because the creation of expectation is its own independent process. Let me say that again, for clarity: The creation of expectation is its own independent process. If I expect anything at all, it will change my perception. So if your issue with my observation of Valerie is that nothing 'interesting' happened while I was there ... well, I have no reb.u.t.tal for that. Clearly, you're not designed to do what I do. You'd be a bad scientist. You will never be able to see reality. You're just a person."

As I type these words today, Y____'s reasoning strikes me as dubious. But that's not what I thought at the time. Every time Y____ insulted my intelligence, I paradoxically trusted him more. Instead of disagreeing with his logic, I accepted it; instead of demanding further explanation, I told him he had a good point and changed the topic. For example, I asked how he could justify drugging Valerie if he did not want any "process" to impact his reality. Wasn't force-feeding a woman methamphetamine a process?

"Look," he said. "I'm here in your office. Right? I'm talking to you about what I did. Don't you think I realize dosing Valerie with cocaine and meth was a mistake? I realize that it was. I do. Obviously, I shouldn't have done that, or at least not so aggressively. Valerie was not ready for her life to change: She wanted to be unhappy, and you can't help a woman who refuses to help herself. I'm not saying that incident was entirely her fault, but it was partially her fault. We're all partially responsible. So what are you trying to figure out here? Are you hoping to understand what I'm trying to learn? If so, you won't succeed. This isn't social work. This is complex. There's no precedent for my behavior. I'm the first and last person who's ever attempted this. You won't be able to solve me. Quit trying to be someone you're not. Are you judging my actions? If so, stop judging them. That's not why I came here. I came to you so I could manage the guilt I don't deserve to have. I'm trying to understand why I feel bad about things that-intellectually-I know were good. Why does every conversation we have devolve into a treatise about the things you don't understand? When do we talk about the things I don't understand?"

I apologized.

Stupidly, I apologized. I didn't want to lose him.

I told Y____ he was right. I said that therapists sometimes make mistakes (just like everyone else), and that (of course) he had the right to dictate what we discussed in our sessions. I told him that my inability to comprehend his scientific methodology did not ent.i.tle me to question his means. I gave him a few sycophantic compliments and told Y____ he was so unlike all my other patients that I was still learning how to help him. I wanted him to like me as a person and to respect me professionally, which-in retrospect-is probably the most humiliating thing I've ever done. I deserve what happened.

1711 Lavaca St.

Suite 2 Austin, TX 78701 July 5, 2012 Notes RE: Invisibility (Message to Crosby b.u.mpus) Hey, Crosby, me again-I was originally going to mention what follows in my cover letter, and then I considered including it as an appendix. However, John thinks I should just cut-and-paste it here, as its own separate chapter, right in the middle of everything else. But is that a potential mistake? I'm afraid it might hurt "the narrative flow" (as you are wont to say). However, John insists this info is the narrative, because so much hinges on these details. Do you have thoughts on this? We've briefly discussed it in pa.s.sing over the phone, but I need some concrete direction. My gut reaction is that John's usually right about this sort of thing.

It goes without saying that the most interesting thing about Y____- far beyond anything he saw or did or claimed to have done-was simply his ability to disappear. When serious people study this case, that will be the detail they fixate upon. However, all my attempts to truly understand this phenomenon did not succeed, and for one glaring reason: Y____ almost never spoke about it.

It was, I suppose, the 800-pound gorilla in the room. However, our 800-pound gorilla evidently wore the same suit Y____ had designed for himself. There were only three occasions when Y____ explicitly discussed his capabilities at length, two of which were unrecorded. After our third discussion on the topic, he made it abundantly clear that he wasn't going to elaborate on that aspect of his being, even though (a) I was incredibly curious about it, and (b) it was the crux of who he was and what he did.

So why didn't Y____ talk about this? I've asked myself that question many, many times. If we are to believe his own explanation, it was mostly because he was paying for these sessions (and therefore reserved the right to dictate what we discussed). He repeatedly told me I wasn't qualified to understand the science of his cloaking and that he had no desire to waste time "teaching." The fact that he'd revealed his invisibility to me firsthand on May 9 also played a role-he believed there was nothing left for me to question, and that I should simply accept this supernatural ability and move on. And I suppose that's what I did. As so often happens in therapist-patient relations.h.i.+ps (and to paraphrase the same hokey words Y____ so often used), our dialogue became "its own kind of reality"-we were living inside a vacuum where whatever Y____ said was accepted as infallible. At some point, I stopped thinking about how unusual this was; it just became a weekly part of my life.

Still, I always kept a separate record of any instance where Y____ casually alluded to the sensation and practicality of being an unseen person. These statements often came up as asides, generally when he was trying to change the subject or explain how he found himself in a certain position. All of these statements can be reaccessed within the unedited transcript at the UT psych library. Please note that the following quotes are not thematically connected and were drawn intermittently over the span of our entire relations.h.i.+p-they are not sequential. If you have any ideas about how they can be incorporated, send me an e-mail or give me a call. Thanks- * On being unable to see one's own body: "It took a long time to be comfortable with that. I mean, imagine trying to turn on a table lamp in a completely dark bedroom. It's difficult, and we reflexively a.s.sume it's difficult because we can't see the lamp. But it's also difficult because we can't see our own hand-we can't gauge the relations.h.i.+p between the object and ourselves. We can feel our hand, and we know where the lamp is. But we reach for the switch and we miss. This happened all the time when I first started playing around with the suit. I had to imagine hands and feet I couldn't see. Getting up and down stairs was a trial. Even now, I'd never attempt to run down a flight of stairs. That's a death wish."

* On the suit itself: "It gets a little disgusting because I loathe to wash it. It operates so much better when there are multiple layers of mist on the surface-those trace remnants of cream harden into something that's almost like a polish, and nothing refracts light like polish. Every time I clean the suit, I'm basically starting over. But, of course, I sweat like a boar in that thing. I'm essentially wearing a second skin that doesn't breathe. To cover the smell, I try to spray down the inside of the suit with scentless Lysol. It really eats at my skin. My thighs will never be the same."

* On the notion of using his ability for the common good, potentially in the vein of a stereotypical superhero: "That's funny. The thought never occurred to me."

* On mishaps: "It wasn't uncommon to have a minor crisis. You can't control how people live. I had a hilarious, terrible situation near Houston. I was observing a nervous middle-aged man-he couldn't sit still. He never stayed in place. His movements were hard to antic.i.p.ate. He had ants in the pants. I was hunched in the corner of his living room, and he started walking directly over to my corner so that he could jiggle the cable plugged into his stereo speaker, because the ba.s.s kept cutting in and out. At least that's what I thought his intentions were. When I saw him coming toward me, I stood up and moved a little to my right to clear the area. But at the last possible moment, he changed his mind and turned ninety degrees to his left. He walked right into me. We collided, head on, skull to skull. It sounded like two coconuts. Bonk! Our heads went bonk. We were both knocked to the floor. He jumped up and started swinging his arms, punching the air, saying all these outrageous things to whoever or whatever he imagined was there. I stayed on the floor, which seemed safer. But then the guy goes into his bedroom and comes back with a f.u.c.king gun. This was a huge gun-I think it was a .357 or a .44 Magnum. A Dirty Harry gun, for all intents and purposes. And now ol' Ants in the Pants is filling the chamber with bullets in the middle of his living room. He's looking all skittish, breathing through his mouth, sweating under the armpits. There's nothing like watching a nervous man load a gun. Of course, he doesn't see anything, and by now I've crawled into the kitchen. So now I'm watching ol' Ants in the Pants from the other room, peeping my head around the doorway. He's waving the gun around, trying to figure out what the h.e.l.l just happened. He knows someone was in his living room. He knows his skull hit a skull. He knows it. But he's also not going to randomly shoot up his own house. His eyes dart from corner to corner to corner. For some reason, he gets the idea that whoever broke into his home must be hiding in the bas.e.m.e.nt. I have no idea why this possibility occurred to him, but I suppose he was grasping at straws. He opens the door to his bas.e.m.e.nt, gun in hand, and slowly creeps down the stairs. I hear them creaking as he walks. When he got to the bottom of the staircase, I just sprinted out the front door. There was no way I was playing around with that motherf.u.c.ker. Owning a gun doesn't make the average person safer, but it makes the average person safer from me."

* On fear: "The one thing that constantly terrifies me is crossing the street. I mean, if anybody ever hit me, I'd just have to lie on the pavement and die. Every other car would drive right over my body. I'd probably have to hope that somebody drove over my head and put me out of my misery. The worst was when I was in west Florida: Crossing the street there is flat-out impossible. No crosswalks, lots of old people driving blind, and no other pedestrians. I was more relaxed in Detroit!"

* On troubleshooting: "I completely miscalculated how cloaking would impact my shadow. We all did. We were all working under the a.s.sumption that shadows would be no issue whatsoever, because-in theory-the light I relocate should negate the absence of light we recognize as shadow. But it didn't work that way. The suit absorbs a tiny percentage of light, so it doesn't refract the full one hundred percent of what remains. This wasn't something I realized until I started wearing it on a regular basis: People can't see me, but the sun can. I still cast a dim, undefined silhouette. It's almost like projecting a shadow through a funhouse mirror. There are ways around this, though. If I'm traveling outside, I do my walking at night or at noon, or on days that are overcast. When I'm inside a room, I always stay cognizant of any windows that face directly east or directly west, and I try to avoid walking in front of south-facing windows during the afternoon. It's really more of a ha.s.sle than a problem. And like I said before-you'd be surprised by what people see, yet refuse to notice. I think about that a lot. Like, have you ever heard of a Mexican tribe called the Huicholes?9 The so-called Running People of Mexico? There's a great book about these freaks. They're this hermetic society known for two things. The first, as you might expect, is running-the Huicholes are the craziest athletes in North America. Members of this tribe regularly run forty, fifty, a hundred miles at a time, barefoot, over unspeakable terrain, subsisting only on corn beer and mouse meat, purely for pleasure. No one knows how they do it. But-interestingly-the other thing they're known for is invisibility. They live in caves around the Sierra Madres, and these people can virtually disappear into the rock. The first time a nineteenth-century explorer came across the Huicholes, he walked straight through one of their villages and didn't see anything. They were right there in front of him, and he didn't see one person. So if it's possible for an explorer to overlook an entire tribe he's actively searching for, imagine how difficult it is for an untrained person to see one stranger they don't expect to be there."

* On who could wear the cloaking suit: "Are you asking me if you can wear the suit? Because you can't. No one can wear it but me. I'm sorry if that disappoints you, but that's just how it has to be. You can't wear my suit. You can't." (Note to Crosby: At no point did I ever express a desire to wear this garment. I'm still not sure why Y____ inferred that this was something I was angling for.) * 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 pa.s.sages 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 f.u.c.king leave. They'll stay inside the house for two, three, four days straight. It's like working a double s.h.i.+ft 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 Sat.u.r.day. 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 ma.s.s 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 ap.r.o.n 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 G.o.d. 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 want 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 cla.s.sy. 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 Echeverria. n.o.body cared."