The Visible Man and Other Stories

by Gardner Dozois

Incongruously, he still had an erection. It slapped awkwardly and painfully against his thighs as he moved. He touched it cautiously: the pallid head. Nausea surged through him.

  Bradley stumbled toward the bathroom, teeth clenched to keep back the vomit that had suddenly geysered up from the pit of his stomach. He couldn’t feel his feet, although he could see his toes stubbing clumsily against pieces of furniture, and knew that it must hurt. He floated—or slid—down the slowly tilting floor toward the bathroom, using his head as a gyroscope. One foot in front of the other, only momentum to keep you from toppling into the abyss.

  The bathroom door irised aside to let him through. He crashed to his knees before the voider, not feeling the jolt. He leaned into the voider and vomited violently, bringing up only an oily, greenish bile. Triggered by his presence, the bathroom began to play soothing Muzak—woodwinds and strings—and to fill the cubicle with subtly perfumed incense: sandalwood. It was all very modern.

  Bradley worked his way through the dry heaves and shuddered into stillness. He retched one final, wrenching time and then knelt quietly, his head resting on the lip of the voider. It chuckled cheerfully and energetically to itself, busy digesting his vomit. His stomach spasmed retroactively; muscles fluttered in sympathy along his bowed back. Sweat had drawn itself primly into precise beads on his upper lip.

  Throwing up had cleared his head, and made him aware of his body again, but otherwise had not helped much. He still felt horrible.

  Don’t think why, don’t get on that at all. Just keep moving, get the blood going a little. Or die, damn you. Die and rot in hell forever.

  Christ.

  He went back out into the hall, cursing feebly at the bathroom door as it dilated open and closed behind him. Retching him out. The apartment was warmer—the thermostat reacting in obedience to his own body temperature, shutting down as his temperature dropped in the stasis induced by the egodrex, revving up again as he returned reluctantly to life. Very clever, these clockwork things. They always functioned, no matter what. Automatically he picked up the clothes he had scattered around when the drug had started to depress the higher-reasoning centers of his brain, translating his undermind directly into experience. He threw the clothes into the hamper that led to the building’s reconstituting systems. They’d be pulped and treated and made usable again. So would his vomit. Now that it was almost too late, the government was very big on ecology. Good to the last drop.

  There was a full-length mirror (convertible to one way so he could peek into the corridor outside) near the hamper. He studied his nakedness with distaste: fish-belly white, flabby, bristly-haired as a dog. His erection had finally gone down, but now it looked like some obscene, wrinkled slug crawling from a nest of dirty, matted hair. He felt a touch of returning nausea. New clothes. Get dressed. The fresh cloth feeling even more stifling against his dirty skin, but never mind. Cover it all up. Before it begins to decompose.

  Dressed, he walked aimlessly into the kitchen, past the sailing-ship wheel. The big electric combination clock blinked relentlessly at him from the wall: hour, day, month, year. Calibrated to a tenth of a second. Never let you forget. Why did anybody need to know the time that closely? Why did anybody need time? Despite himself, he read the clock dials, scanning left to right in reflex. Christ, only five P.M.? Work tomorrow. Back to the office, the tapes, the papers, the meaningless files of numbers, punch cards to be sorted. Routing. And Martino promoted over him, in spite of seniority. The second time. Time. All the hours left in this day, all the days left ahead. Unrequited time hung over him like a rock, threatening to fall.

  This was going to be bad. This was going to be very bad.

  Suddenly, Bradley was having trouble with his breathing. He tried not to think of the seconds turning into minutes into hours into days into weeks into months into years, all ahead of him, all of which he’d have to somehow get through. He thought of them anyway, ticking them off one by one inside his skull. This was going to be too bad to stand. He’d have to. He couldn’t possibly get any more egodrex until Friday. That’d been his regular fix for three years. And he couldn’t afford it anyway—it already took every cent of the small credit margin he was allowed for accessories, illegally transferred, to buy his weekly dose of the egomorphic. But this was bad. He felt another, familiar pressure building up, forcing him toward the other thing. No, not this time. Don’t think about the other thing. Don’t think.

  He took stock of his body, to distract himself. He found, to his disgust, that he was hungry. His body was hungry. He wasn’t actually in need of nutrient, and his mind gagged at the thought of eating, but the food he lived on—like most of the government’s products—was mildly addictive (habit-forming was the official term, not addictive) and his body wanted to eat. Chew and swallow: a pacifier. Resignedly, he punched out a combination on the kitchenette at random, not caring what he got. The kitchenette mumbled, the solar oven buzzed briefly, and a tray slid out of a slot, sealed in tinfoil. He peeled away the tinfoil and ate. The food was divided into tiny geometrical sections on the tray, a glob of that here, a spatter of this there. It all tasted basically the same: like plastic. Bradley ate it without noticing it, trying to involve himself to distract his mind from the other thing, failing.

  It wasn’t enough. Nothing was enough.

  He put down his fork. Hands cupping the eyes, squeezing. Keep it in.

  Maybe you’re finished this time. You’re going to do it again, aren’t you? No. Yes, you will, you know it. (He shook his head, arguing with himself.) Maybe they’ll catch you this time. Maybe they’ll just put you away. Rot in the darkness, no light. Maybe they’ll just put you the hell away. Huh? Degradation. Disgrace. You’ve been lucky all these years, in a way. Nobody’s ever found out about the egomorphic drug—only psychologically addictive, no needle-marks, no lasting metabolic effects: the thinking man’s junk. But someday they’ll catch you. Maybe this time. Today.

  Bradley got up and walked stiff-legged around the apartment, circling around and around his furniture, looking but carefully not touching anything. His furniture. His things. He said. They weren’t really. The apartment and everything in it belonged to the government. The exchange was automatic. He never saw any money, there wasn’t really any such thing as money anyway. The bank computers balanced the credit tally he earned against the credit debit he owed to rent the good things in life a GS 8 was entitled to. Nothing more or less. Food, clothing, antique lanterns—the government allowed him to rent these things from them as reward and compensation for his services. There was no place else you could get any of them. There was only one game in town. If he rose to a higher grade, he would be allowed to rent more good things from the government, of correspondingly finer quality. And when he died, the government would continue to rent the same facilities to someone just up from GS 7, including the same reprocessed food and clothing—although in practice there was an inevitable attrition rate, a little always lost from the system, something else added.

  My things. God save me from my things.

  He looked out the window: Washington faded into Baltimore into New York into Boston.

  There was no place to go. Outside the door, along the corridor, down the elevators and escalators, past the concrete arcades and recycled fountains, past the glass-and-steel hives of the other GS residences, past the drabber cinderblock sections for the rank-and-file, past the cadet nurseries and creches, the tank and algae farms, the oxygen reinforcement systems, the industrial quarter, the rec areas, the outer maintenance rim, then the edge of the megalopolis. And beyond that: only anarchy and death. And the armed patrols, walls, minefields and barbed wire that guarded the City from chaos. No way out that way, not at all.

  And no one else there. In all the four hundred miles of the City, in all the raped lands beyond, no one else there. No one here but him.

  He sobbed, gasping air. Isolation filled his lungs like syrup.

  He would do it now, it was too late to stop. Suicide? He thought b
riefly of suicide, of hurtling himself down from his window and falling forever until the ground caught him. No, he was too scared. Too afraid to be alone. He would do the other thing instead, as he always did.

  Bradley walked to the viewphone. It was handsome, done in polished artificial wood and steel, with a wide screen. Trembling, he sat down.

  The company representative had not even bothered to pretend that his spiel was not a spiel, that he wasn’t speaking it from rote. He explained the merits of the new viewphone network in a rehearsed tone. Bradley listened numbly. They were both bored. It was all a formality anyway. Bradley had received a bonus for seniority—he had to rent something new whose cost would correspond to the bonus. He had to: there could be no such thing as a credit unbalance. The only initiative he could execute was in the selection of the item. He could choose from about five equally priced items. The company rep seemed to be pushing the viewphone network, maybe because they were overstocked—

  Bradley activated the network, waited for the set to warm up. He opened a drawer, took out an address book, looked up a scribbled number. It had taken him three days this time to find the right girl, to follow her home, to find which apartment in the hive was hers so that he could look up the code number. He had been terrified every waking second of those three days, and he had almost been stopped and questioned by a security guard. Every time it got harder, every time he came a little closer to being caught. The viewphone hummed. The dialing pattern appeared on the screen.

  The greatest advantage of the viewphone network, the company representative had told Bradley mechanically, is its intimacy. It can save you a great deal of unnecessary travel. Its every bit as good as being in the same room with the person you want to talk to. It enables you to perform all your social and business functions—

  Bradley punched out the code number. Six short, savage jabs of his finger. He counted each click distinctly to himself. The dialing pattern disappeared; static swirled on the screen. With one hand, he reached down and opened his pants, unsealing the magnetic flap along the front. He had become excited, thinking of what he was about to do—he took his erection in his hand, squeezing, feeling the blood throb under his fingers. His mouth was painfully dry, and he was quivering with tension. Static condensed, became a young woman’s face. Pretty, long dark hair, big golden eyes. “Yes?” she said, not recognizing him. Bradley stood up, letting his pants drop down around his ankles. Her eyes widened. She stared at him in shock—but there was also a quick flicker of fascination behind her eyes, and something else. Recognition? Longing? Love? It is love, he wanted to tell her, it is you and me, it is us. We touch here. But he only thrust his pelvis, a little more forward. She watched in fascination, lips parted, tongue against teeth. After a second, she dutifully—almost reluctantly—opened her mouth to scream. He flicked the set off. Silence echoed. As her scream must be echoing now, in her own apartment, in her own hive. Gradually, he lowered himself back into the chair. He sat there with his pants bunched around his ankles and listened to the clock tick in the kitchen.

  —in the convenience of your own home—

  Then he began to cry.

  The Storm

  THE SKY HAD been ominous all that afternoon—a lurid yellow-green to the south, darkening overhead to blood and rust and soot. East, out over the ocean, there were occasional bright flashes and flares in rapid sequence, all without sound, as though a pitched artillery battle were being fought somewhere miles away and out of earshot. To the north and to the west, the sky was a dull dead black, like an immense wall of obsidian going up to heaven. The boy’s house was silhouetted against that black sky, all slate and angles and old wooden gables, with a single silver light coming from the kitchen window. The house was surrounded by several big old horse-chestnut trees, and, to the boy, the moving silhouettes of their branches in the gathering wind seemed to be spelling out a message to God in some semaphoric sign language that he could recognize but not entirely understand. He wished that he could decipher the movement of the trees, because the same message was being whispered and repeated down through the long soughing fields of summer grass, and retold by the infinitesimal scraping of twig on twig deep in the tangled secret heart of the rhododendron and blackberry thickets, and rehearsed in a different register by the flying black cloud-scuts that now boiled out across the sky, and caught up and reechoed and elaborated upon in the dust-devil dance of paper-scraps and leaves along the blacktop-and-gravel road to town. Spirits were moving. Something big was going to happen, and spirits were scuttling all about him through land and sky and water. Something big and wonderful and deadly was coming, coming up from behind that southern horizon like a muted iron music, still grumbling and rumbling far away, but coming steadily on all the same: coming inexorably up over the horizon and into the boy’s world. The boy wished with all his heart that it would come.

  “You stay close to the house, Paulie,” the boy’s mother called from the kitchen door. “This’s going to break soon.”

  The boy didn’t need to be told that there was a storm coming, nor did he need to go into the screened kitchen porch to know how fast the barometer was dropping. If the testimony of the hostile sky were not enough, then he could feel the storm as an electric prickling all along his skin, he could almost reach out and touch it with his fingertips. He could smell it, he could taste it. It was in the air all around him; it crackled around his feet as he swished them through the grass, and it thrilled him to his soul. If the boy had been magically given wings at that moment, he would have flown unhesitantly south to meet the storm—because it was marvelous and awful and even the rumor of its approach awed the world, because it was the greatest concentration of sheer power that had yet come into his life. The boy had made a brief foray down to the sea wall a few moments before, and even the ocean had seemed to be subdued by the power of the storm. It had been flat and glossy, with only the most sluggish of seas running, more like oil than water, or like some dull heavy metal in liquid form.

  “Paulie!” his mother repeated, more stridently. “I mean it now—don’t you go running off. You hear me, Paulie?”

  “Okay, Ma!” the boy shouted.

  The boy’s mother stared suspiciously at him for a moment, distrustful of his easy capitulation. She started to say something else to him, hesitated, shook her head, and almost wiped her face absent-mindedly with the dirty dust rag she was holding. She caught herself, and grimaced wearily. Her hair was tied back in a tight, unlovely bun, and her face was strained and tired. She pulled her head back into the house. The screen door slammed shut behind her.

  Released, the boy slid off through the trees.

  With the canny instinct of children, he immediately circled the house to get out of sight. A moment later, his mother began calling him again from the kitchen door, but he pretended not to hear. He wouldn’t go very far away, after all. His mother called again, sounding angry now. The boy wasn’t worried. This side of the house was blind except for the windows on the second floor, and his mother would never go all the way up there just to look for him. She was easy to elude. Unconsciously, she seemed to believe in sympathetic magic: she would keep looking out the kitchen door for him, expecting to find him in the backyard because that was the last place she had seen him, and she couldn’t really believe that he was anywhere else. The boy heard the front door open, and his mother called briefly for him from the front stoop. That was her concession to logic. Then the front door closed, and, after a moment, he heard her calling from the kitchen again. The boy had never heard of the Law of Contagion, but he knew instinctively that it was safe to play out front now. His mother would not look for him out in the front yard again. Somewhere inside she had faith in the boy’s eventual reappearance in the backyard, and she would maintain an intermittent vigil at the kitchen door for hours, if need be, rather than walking back through the house to look for him again.

  He sat down on the front lawn to think, well satisfied with himself.

  There wer
e other children in the neighborhood, but none of them were outside today. The boy was smugly pleased that he was the only one who had been able to dodge parental restraint, but after a while he began to feel more lonely than elated. Now that he had his freedom, he began to wonder what to do with it. He was too excited by the approaching storm to stay still for long, and that ruled out many of the intricate little games he’d devised to play when he was by himself, which was much of the time. The Atlantic was only a quarter-mile from his kitchen door, through a meadow and a stand of scrub woods he knew in every twig and branch, and ordinarily he would have gone down there to hunt for periwinkle shells or tide-worn pebbles or to run dizzily along the top of the seawall. But the thought made him uncomfortable—it would be cheating too much to go down there. He’d promised his mother that he would stay close to the house, and he only meant to bend his word a little, not break it. So he set off down the road instead, kicking at weeds and watching the ominously spreading bruise in the sky that marked the distant approach of the storm.

  The neighborhood was more thickly settled down this way. It was about four hundred yards along the road from the boy’s house to Mr. Leidy’s house, the next one down. But just beyond Leidy’s house was Mrs. Spinnato’s house, almost invisible behind a high wall of azalea and ornamental hedge, and beyond that were three or four other houses grouped on either side of a little street that led away from the main road at a right angle. The boy turned off onto the side road. It had a real paved sidewalk, just like in town, and that was irresistible. The road led eventually, he knew, to a landfill in a marsh where the most wonderful junk could occasionally be found, but he didn’t intend to go that far today. He’d be careful to keep his house in sight across the back of Mr. Coggin’s yard, and that way he’d be doing pretty much what his mother had said, even if the house did dwindle to the size of a matchbook in the distance. And he could do without the dump, the boy thought magnanimously. There were sidewalks and driveways and groupings of houses all along this road, and a hundred places to explore—no matter that he’d explored them all yesterday, they could very well all be different today, couldn’t they?