The Visible Man and Other Stories

by Gardner Dozois

  John stands at the side of the road and watches the groceryman drive away. He answered the first honk of the truck horn, and he has followed the groceryman closely during the groceryman’s walk through the house, speaking to him—at first softly, irritated by the man’s rudeness, and then loudly, shouting in panic—and touching him, seizing him by the arm and trying to turn him around, at last grabbing him roughly by, both shoulders and shaking him violently, making his head wobble and rattle like a jack-in-the-box. The man’s flesh is firm under John’s hands, but the groceryman does not notice him, and, save for a slight uneasiness of manner, does not even seem aware that he is being shaken and buffeted. His eyes look through John, not at him. He does not hear John’s voice, even when John screams hoarsely in his ear. Instead, the groceryman shrugs and shakes his head, and goes back outside. John follows him out to the truck, shouting in anger and fear, but the groceryman doesn’t look around—he puts his truck in gear and leaves. John watches the groceryman drive away; John has become oddly calm, and there is a crooked, grim smile on his face.

  It seems that now he too is a ghost.

  The fog closes in again, and John wanders through the house forever. His mind is clear only occasionally, giving him brief, vivid glimpses of the world with no continuity, like a collection of unrelated snapshots: walking down the stairs, sitting in the overstuffed chair in the living room, looking through the glassed-in doors at the veranda. And then the clouds pile up again and bury him, and the world becomes an oozing myopia. He is swept along by hot, drugged currents of feeling, jazzed by goosed, scurrying emotions. He talks to the people. There are many of them here, bright, eclectic, brash, glittering and garish as a neon sign. Their voices are like the hot, sour blare of a trumpet just missing the high note. He talks to the people:

  He says, .

  Their laughter, gaudy, dazzling, brittle. And their eyes.

  , they say.

  He asks, ?

  Their eyes.

  , they say.

  and

  .

  and

  .

  He is sitting on the floor at the bottom of the stairs to the second floor, leaning against the wall. He takes his head in his hands, squeezing the temples. He must think, he must think, but he cannot. And then they are there again, insistent and dazzling, and they say, .

  But he is thinking, he comes to realize that. Somewhere, deep under the surface, sundered from his consciousness, his mind is working logically and well, working continually. And occasionally he is sane enough to be able to listen in on what it is thinking.

  He has a lucid interval. He comes back to his body from a great distance, and finds that he is sitting in the kitchen, and finds that he is thinking, calmly and rationally, that there are two, opposing forces acting upon him. One is the tendency to sink right out of the world, something that has affected him most of his life. But there is another force, opposing it, that has caught him at the narrow place and won’t let him sink all the way out, that is fighting to keep him anchored here. This—that he should stay, not sink—is somewhat similar to what they have been advocating, although it doesn’t translate into words; they definitely belong to the opposing force. Strangely enough, he feels an aversion for the opposing force, the one trying to anchor him to the world, although logically he should feel exactly the opposite. The opposing force is embodied in the house—it wants to keep him. It is also somehow allied with the breath of decay he felt shriveling the forest, although he doesn’t know on what basis he has made the connection. Perhaps it is entropy, he thinks. Ultimate zero, full stop, stasis. You might just as well call it the Devil, it would make little difference. And perhaps his vision is a true one, and the world is destined to die, die in every root and branch, die totally.

  Perhaps the world, life, the continuum, whatever you called it—perhaps it knew that it was going to die. Perhaps every continuum that was about to die sent out seeds, in an effort to perpetuate itself elsewhere. Perhaps that was what he was: a seed. And that was why he’d always kept slipping through the fabric of reality; that was the bias of the continuum acting upon him, a huge, insistent hand trying to push him through, to seed another shore. And it wouldn’t be just him, of course. There would be other seeds everywhere, seeds of everything: people, birds, animals, insects, perhaps even seeds of rocks and trees if the animists were correct. They would be slipping through all the time, vanishing from reality. Who would notice a blade of grass disappearing from a field, who would miss a single tree in a forest, or a bird or a fox, or a bumblebee, or a stone from a mountain? Who would miss him, really? How many people could vanish without anyone even noticing that they’d gone? Thousands, or millions? Or if it was noticed, what could anyone do other than to shrug their shoulders and forget about it? And the seeds would continue to sift through. Perhaps it had been going on for millennia. Perhaps that was how life had come to this world in the beginning, from another dying continuum: a slow seeding over millions of years—unicellular animals, mollusks, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals. And our continuum, knowing its own mortality, immediately beginning to seed in its turn, passing life on. And so it would go, from one level to another, like a stream gradually stairstepping down a many-terraced hill—the level “below” always a little out of phase, a little behind the level “above,” which would explain the virgin spruce forest, if he really had been there for a moment before the anchoring tug of the house had pulled him back. Perhaps when the stream finally got to the bottom of the hill they turned the whole shebang over and started all over again, like an hourglass. Or perhaps it formed a stagnant pool at the bottom and nothing ever moved again—level entropy. Or perhaps there wasn’t any bottom at all. Who knew how it had begun? If it had “begun.” Perhaps it had gone on and would go on forever, world without end. A human mind was not capable of even beginning to grasp the concept of “forever.” Why should a man comprehend the process any more than a dandelion seed whirling through the air, a wheat kernel planted deep in the blind black earth? It was enough to know merely that there was something going on.

  Perhaps there were many people there, perhaps not. Quite possibly it was no better a place than this earth, and problems and situations one was unable to deal with here one would probably still be unable to deal with there. It would not be Eden—it might even be very bad. Even worse than here, in another way. But it would be different. And without the bias of the continuum pushing on him anymore, never letting him stay in one place long enough to put down roots, perhaps some of the foregone conclusions, the inalterable conditions of his own life would also be different.

  Or perhaps not, but there was only one way he’d ever find out.

  He has always fought against the sinking process, peddling desperately to keep his head above the surface, afraid that he was sinking into madness. But what would happen if he let himself go, let go completely, for the first time in his life? Was it possible to sink through madness and out the other side?

  And then he is in the bedroom, lying on the bed, fully dressed. It is night. The cluster of dogwood leaves outside his window has turned into a demon. He can feel the pressure of its soulless, dead-black eyes, he can see the gleam of needle teeth in the dark fox muzzle. He can hear its hungry furnace snuffling as it smells his blood, through the glass. A full moon looms outside the window and forms a leprous alabaster halo for the shockheaded dogwood demon. John struggles to get up on one elbow. His mind is a muddy whirlpool of broken and chaotic thoughts. He knows that there is a strand of thought that he must hold on to, that is the one pertinent thing in an obscurity of distractions. Grimly, he tries to follow the thought through to its conclusion. Suddenly, it is daylight. A robin lands on the windowsill, stares curiously at John, eye to little bright eye, tosses his bill, and flies away. In an eyeblink, it is night again. The moon is in a different, lower quadrant of the window, and the demon looks much bigger—it has flattened its bulk against the pane, and he can hear its sharp diamond tongue probing abrasivel
y against the glass, scritch, scritch, scritch, flickering in the moonlight. John tries to heave himself up to a sitting position, fails, and it is daylight. Harsh gray daylight, showing the thinness of his hands. Rain beats against the window. Dizzied, John squeezes his eyes tightly shut. He keeps them closed for a long time, feeling the shifting play of light and shadow against his eyelids. It is better this way, and easier to think. John laboriously traces the convolutions of the one proper thought, over and over, almost getting it right.

  He opens his eyes. It is night, a moonless night. The stars provide a lactescent, nacred light that sifts down softly through the room, filtering vision through fine cheesecloth. A woman is lying next to him in the big bed, naked, propped lazily on her elbow. She is slender, with short-cropped blond hair, and full breasts that look much bigger than they are against her sleek, long-muscled dancer’s body. The starlight burnishes some of her body to streaked, milky marble—her forehead, her cheek, the line of her arm and hip, the tops of her breasts—and mutes the rest into deep and secret velvet shadow: her legs, her belly, her eyes. She smiles at him, a flash of moist lips sliding back from pearl-wet teeth. The rest of the room is crowded with other shapes, male and female, pressing close against the bed. They are all fascinating, intriguing, tantalizing, mysterious, alluring, intensely interesting. Their glittereyes. They smile invitingly, with beckoning comradery.

  John closes his eyes.

  When he opens them again, after a long, stubborn time, it is still starlit night, but the room is empty. He struggles again to get up, and this time he succeeds. He sits on the side of the bed, feet on the floor, breathing heavily. There is a new tension in the air, a menace, a sense of something building tightly to a climax. The house is alive with sound. John can hear people or things running angrily back and forth downstairs, bumping into furniture, careening against the walls. He hears shouts, screams, wails, angry chittering howls. Something is banging and slobbering harshly against the window behind him. He will not turn his head to look. Let go, he tells himself, let go. Abruptly, all the noises stop, and it is totally silent. Alone in the terrifying silence, John sits and waits. Then, very far away, much lower than the bottom of the stairs could possibly be, John hears a footstep, and then another. Something is ascending the stairs, coming up from Hell. The footsteps are very heavy and ponderous; they shake the house at every step, and there is an unpleasant rasping quality to them, as if the feet are almost too heavy to lift. The footsteps have been coming up for miles, for years, for hundreds of years, and now they are close enough so that John can hear the massive, wheezing, steam-puffing, smithy-bellows breathing that goes with them, and the labored, ugly beating of a monstrous heart. The footsteps stop outside the door. Through the harsh reptile breathing, John can hear the scaly rutch of something infinitely hard pressing in against the door, scraping, digging up the wood like a gouge. Slowly, John gets up and walks toward the door, stopping after every step. He puts his fingers against the door-panel, feeling, behind the thin wood, the sluggish beating of the alien heart. He sees that the doorknob is turning, slowly, hesitantly, as if it is being fumbled at by enormous spatulate fingers. Let go, John tells himself, and he reaches out, briskly, and opens the door.

  Nothing is there.

  Trembling now, after the fact, John begins to walk downstairs. It is like wading through hardening glue, and with every step the glue gets deeper and stiffer. He holds very tightly to the one proper thought, because he knows now what happens to people-seeds who are caught too tightly by the world, unable to sink completely out but unable to stop trying to sink—they go insane. They become psychotic: catatonic, schizophrenic, autistic, God knows what else. Ghosts, maybe. Poltergeists, throwing things around in fits of hapless rage because no one in the world will notice them anymore—those who’ve sunk too far out to be seen by normals, but not far enough to escape. What percentage of seeds did make it through, and how many of those took? How barren was the field the continuum was attempting to seed? Who knows, God knows—the same answer, and the only one there was.

  John reaches the foot of the stairs, and it feels now like he is in glue up to his armpits—on the way across the living room it is over his head completely and he is swimming through murky syrup. By the time he has reached the outside door he has to batter and buffet against the air for every step, as if he is a man trying to bull his way through a high snowdrift, breasting it, breaking it down. One flailing hand catches and holds the doorknob. He turns it and pushes, throwing his weight against the door. It is like slamming into a mountain. He surges against the door twice more, feeling the blood drain from behind his eyes, feeling himself starting to black out. Then, all at once, the door flies open with a despairing crack and groan, and John stumbles outside. He has one glimpse of ghostly white birches, and then the flagstone path is drifting slowly up toward his face. He is puzzled for a moment, as the flagstone inches closer, and then he realizes that he must be falling. His face touches, and is pressed flat against the flagstone, eyes still open, and he continues to fall, into the stone, into the earth, going down.

  Asleep—floating in suspension somewhere, turning over and over, falling endlessly—John dreams of the infinitely complex question that is life, that is the world. And, without the encumbrance of mind or body or ego, he can see the problem clearly and completely for the first time, and he numbers each of the millions of hidden relationships and cross-relationships, totals them, and comes up with the one underlying, unifying relationship: the lowest common denominator. The Answer to It All. And he laughs in his sleep, as he falls. It was so absurdly simple after all.

  John comes awake with a faint bump, as if he is a feather, falling weightlessly for a million miles, that has finally drifted to the ground. He rolls over, scattering leaves and leaf mulch, and sits up. He opens his eyes, and is dazzled by the day. The light, he thinks, dazedly, the quality of the light. He staggers to his feet, falls, lurches up again, filled with a thousand wild terrors, his throat clogged with primordial horror, his mouth strained wide to scream. And then he stops, abruptly, and sinks again to his knees, his mouth slowly closes, and his shoulders unhunch, and the tension goes out of his frame muscle by slow muscle, and something suspiciously like peace begins to seep, grudgingly and gradually, into his haggard face.

  By the sun, he is on the east-facing slope of a mountain, a small wooded, rolling mountain like those he can remember seeing on his original ride in from town—in fact, it seems, as far as he can tell, to be one of the same mountains. But now, a hundred feet below him, breaking in gentle waves against a rocky scrub beach, and rolling back from there to the horizon, breathing and calm and shining, with the rising sun painting a red road through its middle and touching every whitecap with flecks of deep crimson, with seagulls wheeling over it and skimming across it in search of breakfast, with its damp salt stink and the eternal booming hiss of its voice—stretched out below him now, deep and full of life, is the ocean.

  And the rich black dirt under his fingers.

  The earth is fertile. There will be a crop.

  Machines of Loving Grace

  DAWN WAS JUST beginning to color the sky. She huddled inside the small bathroom—door closed, bolt slid and locked—sitting on the toilet lid and hugging her knees. Her head was tilted and hung down, chin almost on breast, and her eyes were nearly closed. She had wrapped her hands around her ankles. Her fingers were turning white. There was no noise in the empty apartment, not even the scurry of a cockroach. She had stopped crying hours ago.

  There was noise beyond the window on her left, beyond plaster and glass, outside the vacuum of bedroom-kitchen-livingroom-guestroom-bath: a frozen automobile horn had been honking steadily for the last hour, occasionally traffic whined on the asphalt below; earlier in the evening there had been radios in nearby buildings, tuned to the confusion of a dozen different stations and fading one by one toward morning. She didn’t pay any attention to these noises. The silence inside her apartment was too loud.


  She opened her hands, flexed her stiff fingers, let her legs uncurl. One of them had gone to sleep, and she stamped it softly, automatically, to restore circulation. The floor was cold under her bare feet. Gooseflesh blossomed along her arms and she ran her hands down over them to smooth it. She had put on a new half-slip for the occasion. She shifted her weight; the toilet lid had been chilly at first, but now it had grown hot and sticky with the heat of her body. She leaned in closer to the hot-water pipe that descended from ceiling to floor—it was still warm to the touch. The dull paint had flaked off it in jigsaw pieces. There was a dingy gray toilet brush leaning against the base of the pipe. The bristles were broken and matted down. All this without thinking at all.

  To be free, she thought.

  Her head came up; eyes snapped open, closed to slits, opened again, wider.

  The muscles in her neck had started to cord.

  Her head jerked to the left. She stared out the window. Dawn was a growing red wash across the horizon, clustered buildings blocky beast-silhouettes, a factory plume of smoke etched black against tones of scarlet. Lights far away and lonely. A television antenna like a cross of stark metal. Her head turned back to center, wobbling: the string cut.

  For a while she did not think. The shaving mirror on the wall over the sink, clutter on the shelves to the right of the basin: empty bottles of mouthwash, witch hazel, deodorant, the cardboard center from a roll of toilet paper, crumpled toothpaste tube, box of vaginal suppositories. The burlap curtains, frayed edges polarizing in the new light. Cracked and chipped plaster around the edges of the windowsill, streaks of white on the walls where paint had run thin. The closed door, the whorls in dark wood: beyond were the cluttered kitchen, the empty bedroom. They pressed in against the door. The door hinges were made in five sections.