Being Invisible

by Thomas Berger

  “But now you must give even more,” Babe said with a piety that of course could have been bogus. “Isn’t that what we expect of the artist?”

  Zirko sat up. “What bullshit you talk, lady. Why don’t you do something really meaningful? Come over here and sit on my face.”

  Babe spoke as if he had been silent. “And, if we must be practical, much as you’ve made from this show, given taxes, et cetera, et cetera, the money goes, and you like money, Siv. I want to show as much of you as I can while you’re so hot.”

  Wagner’s regard for her was returning after this nonsentimental speech. If making a profit was the point, then her obsequiousness towards this little rodent was probably permissible. But whatever Zirko spent money on, it obviously was neither his studio-home nor that of his wardrobe thus far seen by Wagner.

  “That’s right, I am hot,” Zirko said petulantly. “I want to get laid.”

  “Of course,” said Babe, “it is true that having too frequent shows can cause a critical backlash. You know for all the impression he gives of irresponsibility, Cleve is actually a master of timing. I’ve learned an awful lot from him. Underneath it all, he’s a natural businessman. That’s not apparent on the surface, but you should see him handle the museum people—and sometimes the private collectors are even tougher. You have to agree that he’s really done a fantastic job with you, Siv.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Zirko said, depressing both his heavy eyebrows and the corners of his mouth, “I always do well, whatever dealer I got. Now what Guillaume’s got going for him is the faggot connection: that’s who buy the pieces like ‘Artist’s Cock’ and my plastic ass: rich buttfuckers.” He made a seated bump-and-grind. “Hey, open us a bottle of champagne. Chilled glasses in icebox.” He pulled up his legs and stretched out full-length on the sofa, left wrist over his eyes.

  Babe went to the refrigerator. When the door was open Wagner could see that, aside from several wide-mouth glasses on the uppermost shelf, there was nothing in the fridge but foil-necked bottles of champagne. Yes, to maintain that supply Zirko must obviously continue to have frequent shows.

  Babe removed one of the bottles and struggled with the little wire cage that enclosed the bulbous head of the cork. On the rare occasions when she and Wagner had had a bottle of bubbly, it had been his job to open and pour, and Babe had paid no attention to the process. At the moment she was on the verge of breaking a nail on the wire.

  Wagner was at her side. Without thinking, he said, “Take hold of the little loop and twist counterclockwise.”

  “Oh,” said she and followed his instructions. She apparently took his voice for that of Zirko, though to his ear there was little resemblance. When the wire was off she worked at the cork. Suddenly, with a smart report, it popped out and struck Wagner in the forehead, for just at that moment he had been standing in a situation from which he might offer more help if needed. The metal cap had remained on the cork top, and the blow was medium-painful. Wagner rubbed vigorously at it as Babe poured a glassful of champagne and took it to the now apparently somnolent Zirko.

  “Siv,” said she, speaking down, “are you asleep already?” She waited for a moment, but the artist displayed no sign of life. “I’ll put it right here on the floor,” said Babe, bending to do that. As she was on her way back up, Zirko’s forearm left his side, where it had been paralleled, and in a trice it was up under her skirt to the elbow.

  She shrieked in surprise and kicked the champagne over; it foamed on the floorboards. Yet she did not appear to be outraged.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” she chided. She retrieved the glass, which had not broken, and returned to the sink, where the bottle had been left.

  Wagner was aching to do something violent to Zirko, but because his concern for Babe must always be preeminent, he restrained himself. Obviously she believed every indulgence must be offered to an artist so essential to the livelihood of a gallery owner. To recognize that truth was to embrace the kind of realistic morality for which Wagner had hitherto frankly lacked the stomach. But it seemed to be the fundamental way the world worked, and not even being invisible had any effect on it.

  Babe brought Zirko a fresh glass, and this time he sat up and accepted it. She then poured one for herself and sat down in the canvas chair. In response to the sculptor’s salute with raised glass, she took the slightest sip of the champagne. Babe had never been much of a drinker.

  “C’mon!” cried Zirko. “Get some of that drink in you. It’ll warm up your twat.”

  Wagner stepped to the couch and slapped the artist’s face as hard as he could swing. Zirko’s head snapped to the side, and immediately a handprint in subcutaneous blood began to form on his left cheek. Yet he did not lose a drop from the glass he held. He drank the champagne down now in one draught, then shook his head as if to clear it.

  “Damn,” he said, “I might be coming down with something. Maybe I’ll have a stroke and die without ever getting into your pants, but it won’t make you sad, right? My work’ll just go up in value. You parasite dealers are all the same.” He gestured at her with the empty glass. “Life is short, and art is my dong. Bring the bottle and leave it, and open the next one. I’m going to get you dead drunk, lady, and then I’m gonna give you the stuffing of your life.”

  Babe gave him more champagne but took none for herself. As commanded, she left the bottle on the floor near him. He reached for her again as she put it down, but she evaded his fingers and went back to her chair, where she sorted through the interior of the soft briefcase she had long carried in lieu of a purse. “Aha, here it is.” She glanced at the sheet of paper. “Amsterdam. They’re enthusiastic.” She looked at Zirko. “The retrospective. So that makes Munich and Stockholm and—”

  “I can’t seem to get it through your fuckin’ head,” said Zirko. “My career’s over. It’s the late Siv Zirko. The artist is deceased... only his royal red American pecker is alive.” While speaking he had been opening his fly.

  With gentle reproach, Babe said, “Siv, please! Be serious.”

  Wagner went invisibly to the sofa and, though he was not an exceptionally strong man, seized Zirko by the collar and lifted him to a standing position, at which point he clutched the seat of the sculptor’s jeans with his remaining hand. At a running frog-march he took Zirko down the entire length of the loft to the wall of windows, and when they arrived before the one that was open, he hurled his captive through it.

  At last he had committed a criminal act that could not be undone. He was now a murderer, but having been invisible at the time of the crime, only he could have identified himself as the perpetrator.

  12

  WAGNER BECAME VISIBLE AND GREETED babe.

  “Fred,” said she, frozen in the canvas chair, “something terrible has happened. Siv just jumped out the window. He didn’t give any warning at all.” She was so distracted by Zirko’s defenestration as not to notice anything remarkable in Wagner’s sudden materializing in a place in which he had never before been seen.

  “Oh,” he said cruelly, “I’m sure there’s a never-ending supply of his kind in the world.”

  In her current state she was not quick to take offense. “No,” said she, “all the critics agree that Siv Zirko is one of a kind, one of the talents that come once in an era, and he had only just arrived at the threshold of what could have been his major period. Oh, my God.” She put her face into her hands.

  Wagner did not want to appear insensitive and therefore he sought to give Zirko a justification for committing suicide. “I heard he believed he had lost his gift: that of course could make a man desperate.”

  Babe’s blanched face came into view. “He said that after every show. It was meaningless.”

  Wagner was cruel again. “Well, not quite, Babe. He really did go out the window.” He might have felt guilty had he acted from Philistine motives, but his negative feelings towards Zirko were personal; considerations pertaining to art did not really apply. Suddenly he remembere
d his humanitarian obligation. “Where’s the phone? I better call an ambulance.” But as he asked he saw a telephone on the wall, up front by a fire extinguisher, and he walked towards it at a measured pace.

  Before he got there, Zirko lurched through the intervening doorway. He looked only slightly shaken, not visibly bruised or battered. His fly was still open.

  He glanced at Wagner, whom he had never seen before, without surprise or indeed anything but the usual self-obsession. “That did it,” he said. “I’m productive again.”

  Wagner could not have defined his own reaction except as a complex mixture of both relief and regret. Therefore nothing seemed appropriate but an introduction.

  “I’m Fred Wagner,” said he. “Carla’s—”

  Zirko brushed him aside and lurched towards Babe, shouting, “I’m back on track!”

  Babe rose. “My God, Siv! It was all a joke?”

  “Far from it,” said Zirko. “It wouldn’t have worked if I hadn’t been dead serious. I threw myself out that window with every intention of being spattered on the street below. I tell you, stimulating my faculties demands more extreme measures as the years go by.”

  Babe asked with awe, “But how did you survive the fall?”

  Zirko grinned. “An open truckful of discarded mattresses was at the curb below at just that moment! Now can you doubt that I am a man for whom Fate has something special in mind?”

  Wagner certainly could not, else he would have been sorely tempted to try another defenestration. As it was, he realized that he was up against something opposed to which his own powers were nil.

  “The real point of this episode, however, is,” Zirko was telling Babe, “I now know where to go from here. I get a suit of coveralls, you see, with helmet and face mask, and I cover myself with pigments, and I leap through the window and plunge down into a canvas mounted horizontally in the bed of a truck—no, wait a moment, onto a canvas lying on top of one of those safety nets used by firemen to catch people jumping from burning buildings.”

  “You’re developing a new style,” Babe said with low volume but great intensity.

  “Babe,” said Wagner, “would you mind introducing me?”

  “Siv, this is Fred Wagner,” said she. “He’s a... writer.”

  Despite the hesitation, Wagner was grateful to her for using the honorific term.

  Zirko winked at him. “This is going to make your career, a scoop like this: Zirko has never worked with color.” He lay down on the couch and said, “Please try not to misquote me, and include the salty language, or it can’t be authentic Zirko. If I say ‘cunt,’ don’t write ‘lady,’ or there ain’t gonna be nobody who will buy it.”

  Wagner tried something new, at least in this context. “You prick,” said he, “anyone can defecate in a jar and call it art, but can you become invisible?”

  “The unseen,” said Zirko, “is always a part of any work of art. What’s visible is only the tip of the iceberg.”

  “For a change the subject is not you, you bastard, but me! I can disappear right before your eyes. Babe! I want you to see this.” But his wife was speaking with energy into the telephone. He became invisible anyway, and shouted at Zirko, “Look here! Can you see me?”

  “As a painter,” Zirko said, “I must forgo the tactile. I will be denied an entire dimension. But I’m counting on the sheer drama of the act, that is, the vault through the window, the plunge to the truck, the trampoline effect, et cetera, et cetera, to supply what would otherwise be missing. What I seek is no less than a synthesis of ritual, dream, and gymnastics.”

  Invisible, Wagner said, “I preferred you in the foul-mouthed phase. Go back to making obscene overtures to my wife. You’ll get no more resistance from me.” He went to Babe. “I’m leaving now,” he shouted. “I won’t bother you again. But you were wrong, Babe, to ignore me. This is really a unique power, and furthermore I can control it. I could use it to accomplish something remarkable, if only someone would believe in me.”

  But Babe continued to speak into the phone, oblivious to him. Wagner could have tried something obvious, like tapping her on the shoulder, but he deplored vulgar effects—and after all they had not succeeded with Dr. Leprak.

  Therefore, having no means by which he could do more to make his point, he returned to the hospital, where the same nurse who had previously told him he would be served no food dropped by to taunt him with a repetition of that announcement.

  Again he disappointed her by a display of indifference.

  “Man does not live by bread alone,” said he. “Bring on the barium.”

  But now Miss Hogan, identified by the nameplate high on her gaunt left chest, delivered a telling thrust. “They’ve changed their minds: they’ve got to dig a bit deeper.”

  “Do you mean surgery?”

  “Not exactly,” said Miss Hogan, who had a mouth that fell naturally into negation.

  “You’re lying, aren’t you? They intend to do exploratory surgery.”

  “Well, there you are. You didn’t say the magic word first time.”

  “‘Exploratory’?”

  “Why sure: they’re not going to take anything out.”

  “If they’d only pay attention when I became invisible,” Wagner said bitterly. “They’re not going to learn anything by cutting me open.”

  Miss Hogan put her hands on her straight white hips. “Look who knows more than the people who spend their lives in medical practice. I’d think you’d be grateful.”

  “I would if I were sick. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me. I just have a remarkable gift.”

  “Which is—?”

  “The ability to become invisible.” He extended a petulant chin. “For a while I did my best to conceal it, and I don’t know why. I guess I was afraid it would bother people. The fact is, now when I reveal it no one seems to care. Which makes this hospital business hard to understand. Doctor Leprak refused to take me seriously when I made myself completely invisible in his office. Yet he wants to cut me open because my internal organs don’t show up on the X rays.”

  “That’s easy to explain,” said Nurse Hogan. “One thing is just private. Whereas the other’s medical.”

  “Would you do me a big favor?” Wagner asked. “Just watch me become invisible and then tell me what you think.”

  “Now, Mr. Wagner,” said Miss Hogan, rapidly leaving the room, “you should realize I don’t have time for that. I’ve got patients here who might die at any minute.”

  Of course she was right. But the whole truth was even more devastating: it wasn’t only people concerned with mortal illness who lacked the time to do justice to him. In all the world there was no one who would willingly and with more than a polite interest serve as his audience.

  He simply had to take the courage to accept the truth that the old life had arrived at its logical end, that to persist in trying to make a go of it would be as fruitless as his attempts to get some serious acknowledgment of his ability to become invisible.

  He slept well and he rose early, before they came to take him to surgery, and wrote a farewell note with writing materials to which he invisibly helped himself at the nurses’ station.

  TO WHOM IT MIGHT CONCERN:

  I intend to drown myself as soon as I can reach the river after concluding this message, the purpose of which is not to posture but rather to allay all possible doubt as to the nature of my death: it will definitely be self-inflicted and not a crime for which anyone else can be accused. I accept all responsibility, and not only for this act but for all else I have done or failed to do, and for those who believe I owe them an apology, please take one from this text, which is as compromising as I shall ever again find it possible to be.

  FREDERICK V. WAGNER

  With a water tumbler he anchored the note to the bedside table, dressed in his street clothes, and left the hospital invisibly. Arriving at the promenade along the river, he saw with approval that he was not alone, despite the earliness
of the hour. Still some distance away, what appeared to be the figure of a young woman, probably out for her morning constitutional, was striding vigorously in his direction. It was essential to his scheme to have at least one witness, in full view of whom he could remove his outer clothing and plunge into the water. She would never see him surface. His identity would be established by the wallet to be found in the discarded jacket. Wagner was proficient enough at underwater swimming to travel downstream to a point at which he could emerge from the river invisibly with nobody the wiser. There could be no real impediment to his being declared legally dead, and what a lot of matters would thereby be resolved, to, so far as he could see, universal satisfaction, for surely both Sandra and Mary Alice would be no less capable of dealing with the loss than they had been in fitting his presence into their arbitrary fantasies. Babe’s way would now be without obstacle, and his sister might eventually realize that she was better served by a dead brother whose success had been imminent than by one who had actually achieved renown.

  What could not be as confidently projected was his own future, but that was the very excitement of it. He would emerge from the river fully grown but otherwise in much the same situation as at his first birth: wet, (very nearly) naked, and with no possessions and no means for independent support. To maintain his new life he could never use any part of the old identification. He must go to an altogether different part of the country, and not one which any of his old associates would have a reason to visit: which would eliminate from consideration anyplace with a shoreline, a colorful history, sporting facilities, or dramatic vistas. He could probably expect foul weather, the fumes of industry, and neighbors of low culture, perhaps even benighted bigots who would naturally resent a man of mind like himself... but was he such, after all?

  In any event it was high time to step off the path and materialize behind one of the stouter treetrunks in the bordering park, for at her smart heel-and-toe pace the young woman was drawing near—and now to her witness could be added that of the large man who had emerged from a thicket in the grove into which Wagner was just withdrawing and who moved rapidly to intercept her.