The Visible Man

by Chuck Klosterman

  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 assumed 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 shit? 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 appetite 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 coke, 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 cocktail. 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 coke 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 modicum 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 porn 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 assumes 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 assumption, 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 meatballs, 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 scrapes 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 nobody does. She locks the front door and pulls down the window blinds—totally cliché behavio
r. 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 massive quantity of speed smoke, coughs manically, chokes down four aspirin for (what I assume) 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-shirt, 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 Belushi 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 9–1–1. 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 fuck is there? What’s going on? Oh my God oh my God oh my God!” 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 shit 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 assume 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 hassle. On balance, I suppose my plan failed. Even now, I’d classify 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 aud
iotapes 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 relationship. 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.