The Visible Man and Other Stories

by Gardner Dozois

  She was zeroing in on him: this was the theory his mind immediately formed, instantly and gratefully accepted. He had thought of her from the beginning as an angel—now he conceived of her as a lost angel wandering alone through Night for ages, suddenly touched by his presence, drawn like an iron filing to a magnet, pulled from exile into the realms of light and life.

  He soothed her. He would wait for her, he would be a beacon—he would not leave her alone in the dark, he would love her and pull her to the light. She quieted, and they moved together, through each other, became one.

  He sank deeper into Night.

  He floated in himself: a Moebius band.

  In the morning, he woke in the chair. A test pattern hummed on the television. The inside of his pants was sticky with semen.

  Habit drives him to work. Automatically he gets up, takes a shower, puts on fresh clothes. He eats no breakfast; he isn’t hungry—he wonders, idly, if he will ever be hungry again. He lets his feet take him to the bus stop, and waits without fretting about whether or not he’d remembered to lock the door. He waits without thinking about anything. The sun is out; birds are humming in the concrete eaves of the housing project. Mason hums too, quite unconsciously. He boards the bus for work, lets the driver punch his trip ticket, and docilely allows the incoming crowd to push and jostle him to an uncomfortable seat in the back, over the wheel. There, sitting with his knees doubled up in the tiny seat and peering around with an unusual curiosity, the other passengers give him the first bad feeling of the day. They sit in orderly rows, not talking, not moving, not even looking out the window. They look like department store dummies, on their way to a new display. They are not there at all.

  Mason decided to call her Lilith—provisionally at least, until the day, soon now, when he could learn her real name from her own lips. The name drifted up from his subconscious, from the residue of long, forgotten years of Sunday school—not so much because of the associations of primeval love carried by the name (although those rang on a deeper level), but because as a restless child suffering through afternoons of watered-down theology he’d always imagined Lilith to be rather pretty and sympathetic, the kind who might wink conspiratorially at him behind the back of the pious, pompous instructor: a girl with a hint of illicit humor and style, unlike the dumpy, clay-faced ladies in the Bible illustrations. So she became Lilith. He wondered if he would be able to explain the name to her when they met, make her laugh with it.

  He fussed with these and other details throughout the day, turning it over in his mind—he wasn’t crazy, the dream was real, Lilith was real, she was his—the same thoughts cycling constantly. He was happy in his preoccupation, self-sufficient, only partly aware of the external reality through which he moved. He contributed only monosyllabic grunts to the usual locker-room conversations about sports and Indochina and pussy, he answered questions with careless shrugs or nods, he completely ignored the daily gauntlet of hellos, goodbyes, how’re they hangings and other ritual sounds. During lunch he ate very little and let Russo finish his sandwich without any of the traditional exclamations of amazement about the wop’s insatiable appetite—which made Russo so uneasy that he was unable to finish it after all. Kaplan came in and told Russo and Mason in hushed, delighted tones that old Hamilton had finally caught the clap from that hooker he’d been running around with down at Saluzzio’s. Russo exploded into the expected laughter, said no shit? in a shrill voice, pounded the table, grinned in jovial disgust at the thought of that old bastard Hamilton with VD. Mason grunted.

  Kaplan and Russo exchanged a look over his head—their eyes were filled with the beginnings of a reasonless, instinctive fear: the kind of unease that pistons in a car’s engine might feel when one of the cylinders begins to misfire. Mason ignored them; they did not exist; they never had. He sat at the stone table and chain-smoked with detached ferocity, smoking barely half of each cigarette before using it to light another and dumping the butt into his untouched coffee to sizzle and drown. The dixie cup was filled with floating, jostling cigarette butts, growing fat and mud-colored as they sucked up coffee: a nicotine logjam. Kaplan and Russo mumbled excuses and moved away to find another table; today Mason made them feel uneasy and insignificant.

  Mason did not notice that they had gone. He sat and smoked until the whistle blew, and then got up and walked calmly in to work. He worked mechanically, raising the hammer and bringing it down, his hands knowing their job and doing it without any need of volition, the big muscles in his arms and shoulders straining, his legs braced wide apart, sweat gleaming—an automaton, a clockwork golem. His face was puckered and preoccupied, as if he were constipated. He did not see the blood; his brain danced with thoughts of Lilith.

  Twice that day he thought he felt her brush at his mind, the faintest of gossamer touches, but there were too many distractions—he couldn’t concentrate enough. As he washed up after work, he felt the touch again: a hesitant, delicate, exploratory touch, as if someone were groping through his mind with feather fingers.

  Mason trembled, and his eyes glazed. He stood, head tilted, unaware of the stream of hot water against his back and hips, the wet stone underfoot, the beaded metal walls; the soap drying on his arms and chest, the smell of heat and wet flesh, the sharp hiss of the shower jets and the gargle of water down the drain; the slap of thongs and rasp of towels, the jumbled crisscross of wet footprints left by men moving from the showers to the lockers, the stuffiness of steam and sweat disturbed by an eddy of colder air as someone opened the outer door; the rows of metal lockers beyond the showers with Playboy gatefolds and Tijuana pornography and family snapshots pinned to the doors, the discolored wooden benches and the boxes of foot powder, the green and white walls of the dressing room covered with company bulletins and joke-shop signs . . . Everything that went into the making of that moment, of his reality, of his life. It all faded, became a ghost, the shadow of a shadow, disappeared completely, did not exist. There was only here, and Lilith here. And their touch, infinitely closer than joined fingers. Then the world dragged him away.

  He opened his eyes. Reality came back: in a babble, in a rush, mildly nauseating. He ignored it, dazed and incandescent with the promise of the night ahead. The world steadied. He stepped back into the shower stream to wash the soap from his body. He had an enormous erection. Clumsily, he tried to hide it with a towel.

  Mason takes a taxi home from work. The first time.

  That night he is transformed, ripped out of himself, turned inside out. It is pleasure so intense that, like pain, it cannot be remembered clearly afterward—only recollected as a severe shock: sensation translated into a burst of fierce white light. It is pleasure completely beyond his conception—his most extreme fantasy not only fulfilled but intensified. And yet for all the intensity of feeling, it is a gentle thing, a knowing, a complete sharing of emotion, a transcendental empathy. And afterward there is only peace: a silence deeper than death, but not alone. I love you, he tells her, really believing it for the first time with anyone, realizing that words have no meaning, but knowing that she will understand, I love you.

  When he woke up in the morning, he knew that this would be the day.

  Today she would come. The certainty pulsed through him, he breathed it like air, it beat in his blood. The knowledge of it oozed in through every pore, only to meet the same knowledge seeping out. It was something felt on a cellular level, a biological assurance. Today they would be together.

  He looked at the ceiling. It was pocked with water stains; a deep crack zigzagged across flaking plaster. It was beautiful. He watched it for a half hour without moving, without being aware of the passage of time; without being aware that what he was watching was a “ceiling.” Then, sluggishly, something came together in his head, and he recognized it. Today he didn’t begrudge it, as he had Wednesday morning. It was a transient condition. It was of no more intrinsic importance than the wall of a butterfly’s cocoon after metamorphosis.

  Mason rolled to his f
eet. Fatigue and age had vanished. He was filled with bristly, crackling vitality, every organ, every cell, seeming to work at maximum efficiency: so healthy that “healthy” became an inadequate word. This was a newer, higher state.

  Mason accepted it calmly, without question. His movements were leisurely and deliberate, almost slow motion, as if he were swimming through syrup. He knew where he was going, that they would find each other today—that was predestined. He was in no hurry. The same inevitability colored his thoughts. There was no need to do much thinking now, it was all arranged. His mind was nearly blank, only deep currents running. Her nearness dazzled him. Walking, he dreamed of her, of time past, of time to come.

  He drifted to the window, lazily admiring the prism sprays sunlight made around the edges of the glass. The streets outside were empty, hushed as a cathedral. Not even birds to break the holy silence. Papers dervished down the center of the road. The sun was just floating clear of the brick horizon: a bloated red ball, still hazed with nearness to the earth.

  He stared at the sun.

  Mason became aware of his surroundings again while he was dressing. Dimly, he realized that he was buckling his belt, slipping his feet into shoes, tying knots in the shoelaces. His attention was caught by a crisscross pattern of light and shadow on the kitchen wall.

  He was standing in front of the slaughterhouse. Mason blinked at the building’s filigreed iron gates. Somewhere in there, he must have caught the bus and ridden it to work. He couldn’t remember. He didn’t care.

  Walking down a corridor. A machine booms far away.

  He was in an elevator. People. Going down.

  Time clock.

  A door. The dressing room, deep in the plant. Mason hesitated. Should he go to work today? With Lilith so close? It didn’t matter—when she came, Lilith would find him no matter where he was. It was easier meanwhile not to fight his body’s trained responses; much easier to just go along with them, let them carry him where they would, do what they wanted him to do.

  Buttoning his work uniform. He didn’t remember opening the door, or the locker. He told himself that he’d have to watch that.

  A montage of surprised faces, bobbing like balloons, very far away. Mason brushed by without looking at them. Their lips moved as he passed, but he could not hear their words.

  Don’t look back. They can turn you to salt, all the hollow men.

  The hammer was solid and heavy in his hand. Its familiar weight helped to clear his head, to anchor him to the world. Mason moved forward more quickly. A surviving fragment of his former personality was eager to get to work, to demonstrate his regained strength and vigor for the other men. He felt the emotion through an ocean of glass, like ghost pain in an amputated limb. He tolerated it, humored it; after today, it wouldn’t matter.

  Mason walked to the far end of the long white room. Lilith seemed very close now—her nearness made his head buzz intolerably. He stumbled ahead, walking jerkily, as if he were forcing his way against waves of pressure. She would arrive any second. He could not imagine how she would come, or from where. He could not imagine what would happen to him, to them. He tried to visualize her arrival, but his mind, having only Disney, sci-fi and religion to work with, could only picture an ethereally beautiful woman made of stained glass descending from the sky in a column of golden light while organ music roared: the light shining all around her and from her, spraying into unknown colors as it passed through her clear body. He wasn’t sure if she would have wings.

  Raw daylight through the open end of the room. The nervous lowing of cattle. Smell of dung and sweat, undertang of old, lingering blood. The other men, looking curiously at him. They had masks for faces, viper eyes. Viper eyes followed him through the room. Hooves scuffed gravel outside.

  Heavy-lidded, trembling, he took his place.

  They herded in the first cow of the day, straight up to Mason. He lifted the hammer.

  The cow approached calmly. Tranquilly she walked before the prods, her head high. She stared intently at Mason. Her eyes were wide and deep—serene, beautiful, and trusting.

  Lilith, he named her, and then the hammer crashed home between her eyes.

  The Man Who Waved Hello

  THE WORLD SOLIDIFIED.

  He was Harry Bradley, Caucasian, thirty-seven years of age, of certifiably good character. A junior executive—grade GS 8, $10,000 a year, Readjusted Scale—who had been a junior executive since he was thirty and would be a junior executive until he died in harness or was forcibly retired to a Senior Citizen’s Haven (you can get in but you can’t get out). His apartment measured thirty feet by thirty feet by twelve feet, and was decorated in the pseudocolonial that was popular that year, everything made out of plastic and scaled down. He had plush red artificial fabric drapes across a picture window that looked out at nothing except acres of other picture windows looking back. The window measured exactly sixteen inches by twenty-four inches, no more or no less than any other picture window owned by any other executive of his grade and seniority. That was only fair; that was democracy. He had a solar-powered kitchenette that could cook him almost anything in five minutes, but he was very seldom hungry. He had paneled walls made out of artificial wood. He had a fireplace with a simulated fire that was actually a (safe; economical) electric coil; you could turn it on and off with a switch and plug it into the wall socket. He had a “colonial” chandelier (scaled-down) that was made of a plastic that you almostcouldn’ttellfromrealglass, and that would sway and tinkle convincingly if you turned the air conditioner up high. He had (although he didn’t know it this precisely) the 152,673rd copy of a Cezanne print to be run off the presses that year, and the 98,435th copy of a Van Gogh—both pictures were hung magnetically so that the uniform creme luster of the walls would not have to be marred by a nail. He wasn’t allowed to mar the walls anyway, and if he did he would have to explain it in writing, in triplicate, in exasperating detail. There was also a large Rembrandt (copy number into the high millions) that he didn’t like but which was government issue and had come with the apartment, and which his contract didn’t allow him to get rid of. He had a silent electric clock with a built-in optional tick. He had a combination viewphone/color hologram (but he didn’t want to think about that now: later) that enabled him to either talk to people (other executives) or watch commercial (government) programming. He had a table shaped like an old sailing-ship wheel that you could put cocktails on and spin around. He had a simulated antique colonial lantern for a conversation piece. He had an automatic stereo with a selection of twenty-three classical symphonies and six uninterrupted hours of interpreted popular music that he never listened to. If he wanted, he could use his viewphone to talk to people on the moon via the communications satellite linkups. There was nobody on the moon he wanted to talk to. Nobody on the moon wanted to talk to him either.

  He was Harry Bradley. There was no way to avoid it.

  He lay perfectly still in the middle of the floor.

  He was naked.

  Sweat dried on his body, and his breath came in rasps.

  Bradley struggled weakly, flopped over onto his stomach. The tile was unbelievably cold against his wet skin, and hard as rock; his flesh crawled in revulsion at the contact. He managed to raise himself up on one elbow before his head began to swim. He paused, head bowed, panting, involuntarily studying the dirt in the cracks between the tiles. For a moment there he had been two people, living two different existences in two separate environments, and that’d been rough. He was still having trouble separating realities—conflicting memories chittered at him, emotions surged in opposition, lingering afterimages merged nauseously with vision: one universe still superimposed over another like a double-exposed negative. But one universe was fading. The universe he preferred, the universe where he wasn’t doomed to be Harry Bradley, junior executive, grade GS 8, $10,000 a year. Even as he struggled to hold onto it, to something, it slipped away irrevocably. His dream universe melted and flowed back into the well
behind his eyes, to be replaced by the gray, familiar scenes of reality that boiled up like landscapes in bubbles.

  The rococo opulence of the other place was gone: supplanted by a plastic sterility that was worse than poverty.

  He shook his head ponderously, wincing at the rasp of pain. Even memory had gone now. All he could recall of the other place was a vague impression of abstract beauty and richness, and that there he had been important, an integral part of totality. That it was a better place than here.

  The electric clock in the kitchen ticked noisily, each tick a nail pinning him more tightly to the world.

  A furnace started with a roar on a lower level.

  His throat was clogged with sandpaper.

  He had taken the egomorphic drug two hours ago: ten thousand years of subjective existence.

  He began to shake, trembling uncontrollably. The cold of the apartment was getting through now, piercing like knives. His teeth chattered painfully together. His lips were turning blue.

  With an effort, he sat up. The floor tilted queasily, first one way and then the other, like a seesaw. He put his head between his knees for awhile. The room steadied. He heard the elevator swarm by outside his walls: a snide ratcheting sound.

  Don’t think. Just don’t think at all.

  Slowly, he got to his knees, and then crawled to his feet. It was easier than he’d thought it would be, if he stopped at every stage to rest. It only took him about five minutes.

  He was finally able to stand. The shift in perspective was amazing, and frightening. Suddenly, he felt like he was balancing on a tightrope above an abyss, like he was a taffy-man that’d been stretched out to miles in length and was now in danger of toppling over because he was too thin for his height. His knees kept giving way, and he kept trying to lock them. The taffy-man swayed precariously, as if in a high wind.