The Visible Man

by Chuck Klosterman

  Another Lapse in Judgment

  When Y____ finished his story about the elderly biracial gentleman, I asked him a battery of straightforward questions about what he believed the story meant and why it felt significant to him. He didn’t respond to either topic. “That should be self-evident” was the closest he came to an explanation. He left my office around eleven a.m. I immediately studied my notes from the session and tried to connect the dots; by this point, I’d followed Y____ to the bottom of the rabbit hole. I still worked under the assumption that every word he said and every thought he expressed had value. Around 11:20, I walked a few blocks to a (now closed) Caribou Coffee, intending to buy a caramel macchiato and return to my work. My next patient wasn’t due until one o’clock. When I exited the coffeehouse, I was surprised to see Y____ sitting outside the establishment on a bench, drinking Coca-Cola from a glass bottle. We nodded hello and I began to walk away; like virtually all therapists, I don’t fraternize with patients outside the office environment. But because nothing about my experience with Y____ had been normal, I suspended my own rules: I stopped, turned around, and engaged him in casual conversation. I assumed we would talk for ninety seconds.

  I’m ashamed to admit that we spoke for almost ninety minutes.

  The time evaporated. I could have sat there all afternoon.

  Obviously, I didn’t record this encounter, as it happened by chance. I do not remember most of what we discussed—the conversation was lively, but much of it revolved around mundane subjects like regional housing prices, what neighborhoods in Austin were improving or declining, and various construction problems with local highways and thoroughfares. We talked about the coffeehouse itself, and about coffee in general, and about why Y____ never drank coffee despite his love for how it smelled.

  However, three parts of our conversation remain vivid in my mind.

  The first stemmed from a question I asked Y____ directly. What I asked him—in an admittedly understated way—was if he honestly believed he needed a therapist to help him. “You essentially talk to yourself for an hour, and you don’t seem particularly interested in anything I say in response,” I said. I told him that the goal of therapy is to take what we discuss in our session and apply it to the outside world, and that this didn’t seem to be happening at all. I conceded that, all things considered, I wasn’t completely qualified to work with someone engaged with the life he was living, and that no therapist on earth was trained to help a criminal scientist with the power of invisibility. I told him I loved working with him, but that I wondered if perhaps his state of mind would be better served by writing about his experiences firsthand (if for no other reason than to create a public record of what he was learning through his surveillance).

  “If I wrote a book, people would hate it,” he replied (author’s note: I’m paraphrasing these sentiments, but my memory is strong). “There’s something wrong with the way I write. It always makes people hate me. And you know, there will be a record of all this, eventually. A book will exist, or something akin to a book. But that won’t happen for years. Decades, in all likelihood. I can’t take notes during my observation periods, so there’s no data to report. It’s a problem. I mean, imagine if Jane Goodall had no access to pen and paper when she was in Tanzania. Imagine if she had no camera and no colleagues. That’s how it is for me. All I can do is remember everything that I see, contextualize those images inside my head, and then recompose my theories several days later, when I return to my apartment. And most of the things I write in my journal aren’t specific. Specificity is overrated. It distracts from the theme. The only details I try to record are incidents that suggest something larger and more meaningful than what they’d seem to suggest on the surface. Besides, I wouldn’t want to write a book until I’ve finished with the entire project, and that will take forever. It will take my whole adult life. There can’t be a book until there’s nothing left for me to see. So until then, I just need someone to remind me that what I’m doing is essential. That’s what I pay you for.” He laughed at his own joke like a guest on a late-night talk show.

  I informed him that was not my job. He said, “Well, of course it isn’t. But we can all see the same things differently, can’t we? I mean, that’s a big part of it.”

  The second item we discussed was something I’d been thinking about nonstop since May 9: I wanted to know how it felt to be invisible (or at least what I considered “invisible”—I’m sure I used the word cloaked when I spoke with Y____ as to not create another argument). I remember thinking how strange it was that we were speaking about this in public; people were walking all around, completely oblivious to the doolally conversation we were having. It was like both of us were invisible already.

  “It doesn’t feel like anything,” he said. “I mean, people can’t see me, but I can see myself, even if my eyes tell me otherwise. I know where my arm is. When I wear the suit and I look at my arm, there it is. It looks like a fuzzy, subtle outline of a limb—like a photograph of an arm tacked to the wall of someone’s kitchen, but then painted over with four coats of white latex. A visitor would never notice, but the woman who owns the house would always see it immediately. The only time it’s strange is if I look at a mirror. If I look directly at myself in a mirror, I see something maddening, because my image just reflects back-and-forth-and-back-and-forth without any concrete substance to recognize. I see a human silhouette of light, and I just have to accept that the light is me. I generally try to avoid mirrors.”

  That’s bizarre, I responded, but it wasn’t what I wanted to know. That really wasn’t the question I’d asked. I wanted to know how being invisible felt. I wanted to know if being invisible was something he liked, or just something he did.

  “You’re obsessed with feelings,” he said. “Which is natural, considering your occupation. You traffic in feelings. And I’m not one of those retrograde automatons who insist they’re immune to emotion until they end up having a stroke. I don’t have contempt for emotion. But you misread things. People think about themselves constantly, but not in the way you imagine. The only time people are conscious of how they feel is when something hurts them. Most of the time, we train ourselves to ignore the entire sensation. I certainly don’t believe it’s possible to be successful at anything complicated if you let feelings dictate how you live. It always seems like you’re trying to direct me toward some sort of grand realization. I always get the impression that you want me to say something incisive, like, It makes me feel powerful or It makes me feel alone or It makes me feel special. And all of those descriptions are true, some of the time. But none are true all of the time. Everything eventually becomes normal. The first time I realized I could enter someone’s home, there was this predictable rush of power. There was an immediate recognition that I could do anything I wanted. I could kill a man and never be captured. I could rape a woman and she’d assume it was just a horrific nightmare. You think about things like this when you’re different from the rest of society. You think about them all the time. But the fact of the matter is that I’m not a rapist, and the fact that I suddenly had the means to become a world-class rapist wasn’t going to change that. We always end up being ourselves, somehow. I was who I was long before I consciously became the person I am. Being unseen makes me feel different than other people, but I’ve always felt different than other people. Invisibility isn’t the issue. The difference is that I’ve always possessed the single-minded dedication to make an impossible scenario plausible. I have the power to invent my own life. Even if I’d spent the past twenty years sitting on a beach and drinking myself stupid, I would still feel powerful and alone and special. Those are simply the intermittent qualities of who I always am, regardless of how I feel about it.”

  I was electrified by Y____’s rehearsed bragging; it reminded me of the first time I ever became legitimate friends with one of my college professors outside of class. I wanted him to keep talking, even though the conversation was one-sided and pedantic. I
know that must sound masochistic, but there’s no influence like the force of personality: It overwhelms everything, even when it defies common sense. Y____ had an effortless, extemporaneous way of explaining complex, personal things. He contradicted me so often (and so deftly) that I started to feel good anytime he agreed with me; I awarded his rare compliments much more weight than they deserved. That imbalance made every conversation charged, which might explain what happened next. This was the third part of our conversation I remember, and it’s the part I remember most.

  “There’s actually something I wanted to talk to you about,” Y____ said. “It might seem inappropriate, but I feel like it’s necessary.”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Nothing is inappropriate.”

  “You say that now,” he said. “But here’s the thing: I know it’s common for therapy patients to misdirect their feelings. I know that therapy patients often develop sexual feelings toward their therapists, simply because they’re usually confused people who’ve never had an experience where they felt open and vulnerable around another person. This is true, no?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That sometimes happens. Sometimes the misdirection is paternal or maternal, and sometimes it’s intimate or romantic.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “Now, the fact that I’m bringing this up probably makes what I’m about to say abundantly obvious.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think I know what you’re getting it.”

  “What am I getting at?”

  “I think you’re trying to tell me that you are experiencing misplaced romantic feelings directed toward me.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Obviously. We’re all aware of this cliché. But here is my real question—are these misplaced feelings going to create a problem within the context of our work? Are you going to be able to handle my misplaced attraction? Because I’m sure it’s misplaced. It has to be.”

  This confused me. It confused me in two different ways, but I only talked about one.

  “Well, you’re the one experiencing the attraction,” I said. “You feel the attraction, and you seem to understand what it means. I don’t get the sense that you’re confused by what’s happening, nor is this the first time I’ve ever had it happen with a male patient. So I don’t see any problem from my end. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before. The only problem would be if this makes you uncomfortable.”

  “No, you’re not getting it,” said Y____. “It’s never going to be a problem from my side, because feelings don’t dictate my behavior. I’m not like that. What I’m worried about is the possibility of my misdirected feelings becoming uncomfortable for you, and if that discomfort will impact how freely we talk. If it will impact the things I can say to you.”

  “Like what? I don’t follow.” Now, certainly, I did know what Y____ meant when he said these words. I did follow. I followed completely. But I pretended not to. I suppose I wanted to hear what he was going to say. Sometimes I pretend I don’t know certain things about myself in order to force other people to directly voice the compliments I secretly need to hear.

  “Okay, here’s a hypothetical: Let’s say I started thinking about you. Let’s say I started to have dreams about you. Sexual dreams. Should this be something I express? Keep in mind I’m not a sexual person.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “You say that now. But what if I told you that I liked to think about you when I masturbated? What if I said that you were what I fantasized about, and that I could orgasm only by thinking about you?”

  “We’ve never talked about your fantasy life,” I said. I was a little staggered by the degree to which this dialogue was escalating, mostly because I hadn’t expected Y____’s language to be so specific. “I suppose I’d be interested in your willingness to talk about things like that, since, until now, those subjects have always been out of play.” I found myself wishing we were having this conversation in my office. Amazingly, I suddenly wondered if Y____ had somehow orchestrated this encounter so that it would happen in public. I felt a sensation of spontaneous paranoia.

  “So none of this will be an issue,” he asked. “This is all standard?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I want you to feel safe.”

  “Even if my thoughts are grotesque? Even if they’re dark and detail-oriented? Even if I said something like, ‘Well, see you next week, Victoria. I’m just going to go home and masturbate right now. I’m just going to imagine putting my hand up your skirt while I masturbate. I’m going to imagine you’re not wearing underwear, and that I can faintly feel your pubic hair with my fingertips. See you next week.’ Are you saying that these are things you’d want me to tell you?”

  “Not necessarily,” I said as impassively as possible. “I don’t want you to tell me that. Unless you think those details are meaningful, or if you feel a need to say them aloud in order to own them. If those thoughts are important to you, they’re important to me. But what I want has nothing to do with this. That’s not our relationship.”

  The skin on my face felt warm. Was I blushing? I prayed I was not. This had gone too far.

  “That’s good to hear, Vicky,” said Y____. “Reassuring. Very reassuring. You are a pro. And—like I said—sorry if that seemed inappropriate. Like I said, I’m not a sexual person. I’m not one of those sexual people you read about in magazines. I was just curious, and it seemed relevant.”

  About five minutes after this exchange, I excused myself and returned to my office to wait for my next patient. Y____ walked in the other direction, leaving his empty Coke bottle on the ground. He waved goodbye with two fingers. I felt good and bad. I knew I’d made another mistake.

  June 20: A memory or a clue?

  [This is simply a straightforward excerpt from our June 20 session. I kept waiting for Y____to revisit the strangeness of our most recent conversation outside the coffeehouse, but he never did. At least not directly.]

  Sometimes I’d follow people in hotels. Hotels are much less complicated than residences, because of the access: You just walk around the halls during the afternoon, you locate a maid cleaning the room of a late checkout, and you stroll in while she finishes the bathroom. They always clean the bathroom last. Easy as pie. It was also easier to find decent food, because people leave the remains of their room service outside the door. Sometimes I’d also take snacks from the minibar. Hotels make you lazy.

  The problem, of course, is that people aren’t natural when they stay in hotels. It’s not a realistic depiction of life. The ability to just drop towels on the floor changes the way people view themselves. It causes everyone to act like they’re rich. Plus, most people staying in hotels are only in town for business, so they just sit around and look at the Internet all night. They lie on top of the covers and watch HBO. You can usually tell what social class a hotel guest comes from by how long they stay in the shower and how much they appreciate the mattress. If they’re staying in a hotel alone, men inevitably masturbate,10 but women only do so half the time. That might sound reductionist and overstated, but my data is irrefutable.

  The other downside to working hotels, of course, is the inescapable likelihood of ending up in a room with two people instead of one. That’s when you really see people who aren’t acting like themselves. When it’s a couple on vacation, you can tell a lot about their relationship within the first ten minutes of arrival: If they almost have sex as soon as they enter the room, there’s a 95 percent chance they’ll have sex later that night; if they just unload their luggage and leave for dinner, they probably won’t have sex all weekend. To be honest, I didn’t learn much from studying hotel patrons. It was kind of like trying to study the natural behavior of African elephants by visiting a zoo in Portland.

  However, I do recall one episode that happened at a Radisson, right here in town. It wasn’t an intentional discovery and it didn’t fulfill my original goal, but it was a good day. I don’t know if you’ve even been inside the Radisson on Cesar,11 Vicky, because … well, why would you go to a hotel
in the city where you already live? But there’s a TGI Friday’s on the ground floor. I saw this serious forty-something woman eating there, all by herself on a Friday afternoon. She didn’t look like she was thanking God for anything. My assumption, of course, was she was staying at the Radisson. And there was something brittle about her I appreciated: It looked like she was unpleasant on purpose. She wore an earth-tone pantsuit and never looked away from the newspaper, even while smearing her chicken fingers with honey mustard. All business, all the time. I decided she’d be my subject for the night; I was drawn to her severity. She seemed like she wouldn’t have the patience to become a different person, even when she wasn’t at home. I waited for her to pay the bill, and I noticed she didn’t charge the food to her room. In fact, she paid cash, which meant she wasn’t even on an expense account. That was my first clue that something was afoot.

  She leaves the TGI Friday’s and walks up to the next level. The mezzanine. The mezzanine? The mezzanine. She enters a conference room. The door is propped open, so I follow. There are maybe ten other people in the room. At first I think, “Goddammit. I’ve walked into a fucking business conference.” But everybody there seems too unalike, and one of these people is clearly a teenager. They all nod hello, but nobody says anyone else’s name and nobody shakes hands. About five minutes after five o’clock, they close the door and start talking. For a split second, I’m certain I’m at an AA meeting, which is only slightly better than a business meeting. But nobody talks about being drunk or wanting a drink or regretting things they’ve lost through drunkenness. These stories are more oblique.

  “As you all know, I’ve been a Little League coach for the past three summers,” one man began. He looked like a person from a Nabisco commercial: a good-to-great-looking guy. No facial hair. Nice shirt, no tie. Monotone voice. I don’t want to stereotype, but I remember thinking he looked like somebody who used to go to Jimmy Buffett concerts, but only during college. He looked like the kind of guy who traded his SUV for a Saab the same day gas prices went above two dollars a gallon. He looked like the type who hated Obama for completely nonracist reasons.