The Visible Man

  I disagreed with John, at least at first. I told him that my foremost responsibility was to the patient, and that I did not treat interesting clients any differently than uninteresting clients (this was a lie, but it’s what I said). John seemed completely oblivious as to why I was telling him about Y____. He never tries to see things from my perspective. He doesn’t have that ability.

  “That’s the wrong way to think,” he said. “You’re a smart person, but you’re not being smart right now. Don’t take that the wrong way, but it’s true. You’re overlooking the obvious. This is not a normal scenario. This is a unique case. Traditional rules don’t apply. I would strongly advocate investigating who this person is and what they’re really doing. I mean, look: This man does not seem to be seeing you for conventional reasons. True? It doesn’t even seem like he’s coming to you for the reasons he himself purports. Right? True? Right? You’re not handling this case correctly.”

  I was stunned by this accusation. It was consistent with John’s personality, but he’d never before questioned my professional abilities with such directness. It escalated our debate into a far larger argument, much of which gridlocked around issues completely unrelated to Y____: John’s unwillingness to take my career seriously, our unresolved decision to remain childless, the way our age difference and racial experience creates an imbalance in our marriage (John is thirteen years my senior and African-American), John’s overall condescending tone toward almost everyone we know (particularly my closest friends), and a bunch of complaints and accusations I can’t even remember. We fought all night, and—though we both apologized the next morning—it placed a strain on our relationship that had not been there before. It was definitely the most problematic stretch of our problematic marriage.

  When John and I got engaged, I knew we were very different people. I told that to everyone at our wedding, and they all made the proper “opposites attract” jokes during their toasts. But it turns out that we were remarkably similar, at least about things that didn’t matter. I’d been wrong about all the minor differences I assumed would cause friction: We had different politics, but our fundamental perceptions about fairness were the same; we loved different books and movies, but we had similar ideas about what made a book or movie good; we came from different places, yet we had identical views about how our upbringings shaped us. On a day-to-day level, our marriage has been easier than I would have ever expected. But what I didn’t realize on my wedding day—and what John continues to deny, even now, after everything that’s happened—is that we’re profoundly different in one metronomic respect: There’s nothing I care about more than how other people feel, which is the one thing John doesn’t care about at all. Or, to put it more on the nose: There’s nothing I care about more than how other people (and particularly John) feel about their lives, and there’s nothing that interests John less than how anyone (myself included) feels about any issue that doesn’t involve him directly. It has nothing to do with my love or his love or loving or levels of love. It’s just the way I am and the way he is. All my friends saw this when John and I were dating, but I never did and they never told me.

  It took me a while to accept this. Maybe I’m still trying.

  I expose these things not to embarrass John or myself, and not because I feel any need to live a public life. I expose them because it had an impact on things that happened later.

  Pseudo-Historiography

  [What follows is an excerpt from June 27. The session initially dragged, as Y____ seemed less talkative than usual. During a lull in the conversation, I asked Y____ something I’d been wondering: What, exactly, did he feel he was learning from these observations, since he was always so adamant about the pedagogic component of his invisibility. In other words, outside of any espoused scientific revelations, what was he personally learning about himself? He immediately perked up at this query and became the Y____ Character, lecturing in his bombastic, self-aggrandizing style. When I read this transcript now, it strikes me as highly rehearsed. He also didn’t answer my question at all. But if this exchange was scripted (and had no relationship to my query), why did he save it until I specifically asked my question?]

  Roommate situations were strange. This became a problem whenever I tried to observe someone in their twenties—I’d select a target and I’d follow him into his life, only to realize he wasn’t living alone. So then I’d have this claustrophobic situation where two or three or four people were interacting in a small, enclosed area. It was formal and completely fake. Plus, my likelihood of being discovered increased dramatically. If a person is alone, you can get away with a lot. You can get away with more than you should. You can sneeze, and the person will hear you sneeze, and you will see them hearing you sneeze. It will be abundantly clear that they heard an unexplainable noise. They will perk up and look around. They’ll give the whole room the once-over. But that’s as far as it goes: They notice something, and then they go back to whatever they were doing before. They assume they’re hearing things. They return to a state of nonnoticing. But once you have two people in the room, every noise is unforgiving. If you sneeze, the couple will look at each other and wordlessly ask, “Did you hear that?” And then they start wondering. People trust their friends more than they trust themselves. That was something I established straight away. And you’d think that would make them feel more secure, but it doesn’t. It has the opposite effect: Unconditional trust destroys relationships. Two people meet as open-minded strangers. They like each other, so they grow closer. It feels good. They become unguarded. Eventually, the two strangers become two friends. But once that boundary of distrust is removed from the equation, they start to learn who the other person really is, and then each starts to resent the other. They end up feeling more distant as friends than they were as strangers. I’ve seen this happen a million times.

  Still, I must be honest: I sometimes enjoyed observing roommates, even when it contradicted my premise. I spent so much time watching lonely people do nothing that group dynamics were a nice change of pace. That said, it’s a little shocking how rarely most roommates speak to each other. Especially guys—guys will spend five hours in the same enclosed space and say nothing. Men tend to have zero interest in the lives of others. Women talk about what’s on TV, and about boyfriends or potential boyfriends, and about various concerns they have over haircuts. It’s disturbing how accurate gender clichés tend to be. They’re self-perpetuating. We all direct so much effort toward undermining gender clichés and punching holes through stereotypes, but all that does is remind people how tenacious those sentiments are. Arguing that they’re false actually makes people more aware that they’re true. I mean, just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something insignificant; listen to what they say and watch how their residual emotions manifest when the fight is over. It’s so formulaic and unsurprising that you wouldn’t dare re-create it in a movie. All the critics would mock it. They’d all say the screenwriter was a hack who didn’t even try. This is why movies have less value than we like to pretend—movies can’t show reality, because honest depictions of reality offend intelligent people.

  The reality I got to see was not “movie reality.” The reality I saw was just reality, without quotes. You want to know what I really learned? I learned that people don’t consider time alone as part of their life. Being alone is just a stretch of isolation they want to escape from. I saw a lot of wine-drinking, a lot of compulsive drug use, a lot of sleeping with the television on. It was less festive than I anticipated. My view had always been that I was my most alive when I was totally alone, because that was the only time I could live without fear of how my actions were being scrutinized and interpreted. What I came to realize is that people need their actions to be scrutinized and interpreted in order to feel like what they’re doing matters. Singular, solitary moments are like television pilots that never get aired. They don’t count. This, I think, explains the fundamental urge to get married and have kids, or even just the ne
ed to feel popular and respected. We’re self-conditioned to require an audience, even if we’re not doing anything valuable or interesting. I’m sure this started in the 1970s. I know it did. I think Americans started raising offspring with this implicit notion that they had to tell their children, “You’re amazing, you can do anything you want, you’re a special person.” They thought they’d be bad parents if they didn’t. They felt a responsibility to give unlimited emotional support. But—when you really think about it—that emotional support only applies to the experience of living in public. We don’t have ways to quantify ideas like “amazing” or “successful” or “lovable” without the feedback of an audience. Nobody sits by himself in an empty room and thinks, “I’m amazing.” It’s impossible to imagine how that would work. But being “amazing” is supposed to be what life is about. As a result, the windows of time people spend by themselves become these meaningless experiences that don’t really count. It’s filler. They’re deleted scenes.

  Every once in a while, I’d come across someone who was really happy when they were alone. That was always a little beautiful, but also a little confusing. You know who seemed happiest alone? Consumers. It wasn’t the people who read the best books or had the most hobbies. It was the people who bought the most bullshit. I know there’s this image in our collective unconscious about the depressed millionaire living alone in an ivory tower, drinking himself drunk on four-thousand-dollar bottles of wine, sadly trying to purchase his childhood sleigh in order to feel something real. But that’s a lie. As it turns out, that lonely millionaire is way happier than the lonely pauper. It’s not even close, and the explanation is obvious: The rich man can buy things, and those things distract him from loneliness. The rich can take vacations, which isn’t nearly as essential to day-to-day happiness as the process of looking forward to all the vacations you’ll experience later. They have more comfortable furniture and better TVs, and those objects are the single man’s sanctuary. They don’t need to cook, so cooking becomes this gratuitous, exotic activity. Poor people hate cooking. It’s just another chore they need to complete when they get home from the job they hate. But entitled people love to cook. It makes them feel competent and earthy. Of course, rich people don’t love cleaning, so they hire maids to do that. That’s another thing that really sets the happy apart from the unhappy—how clean the house is, and how much effort it takes to keep the house clean. I’ve seen a lot of rich people come home to a clean house that they had nothing to do with—the maid service did everything while they were away. You can see the happiness on their face when they open the door and smell the Lemon Pledge. That smell reminds them they’re rich. Here again, this all comes back to parenting. That’s my theory. The central mistake parents make is telling their kids that making money is not as important as being happy, as if those two things are somehow opposed or disconnected. Movies and TV perpetuate that sentiment, because it makes for counterintuitive plots and happier endings. What parents should be telling their kids is that these things are connected. They should tell them the single easiest way to be happy is to make a shitload of money. Money doesn’t guarantee happiness, but poverty doesn’t even come close. I mean, sure, a lot of rich people are unhappy, but sometimes they don’t even notice how unhappy they are. They’re too busy online shopping. They’re too occupied trying to figure out a better recipe for jambalaya. You can buy love—not completely, but partially. You can, and never believe otherwise.

  Heavy Dudes

  [This was the turning point. From the moment Y____ entered the room, our July 11 session was irregular (we had not met on July 4 because of the holiday). Nothing was easy. Y____ sat down, stood up, sat down, stood up, paced around, and told a few nonpersonal anecdotes that seemed irrelevant and disjointed. He was agitated. He kept starting and ending stories, often criticizing himself for wasting my time. This was unusual; he rarely cared about my time. Had Y____ ingested some sort of stimulant that morning? His behavior suggested as much. About twelve minutes into the session, he sat back down, sighed, and dramatically shifted gears. He started telling me a different kind of story—his tone was muted, but the details were rich. It took almost two hours, but I didn’t restrict him.

  The way Y____ told this story was not remotely chronological; he began in the middle and filled in contextual details intermittently, often repeating the same information multiple times, trampling his own speech patterns. For the purpose of clarity, I have reorganized the story into a straight narrative and removed the gaps and repetitions. The specific time of each statement is in parenthesis, along with its sequence within the original telling.]

  1 This is something I’ve wanted to discuss with you for a while. Of the things that bother me, this is what bothers me most. I mean, I know what happened wasn’t my fault, even less so than what happened with Valerie, but it eats at me. Unlike the Val situation, this experience was absolutely a net negative. If I could reverse what happened, I might. In fact, I would. (12:40 [29])

  2 Flying had become too risky. I had a close call. I’d sneezed on an American Airlines flight to Boston—twice—and everything went pear-shaped. There was a moment when I actually thought there might be a physical altercation on the plane, because a stewardess knew something unusual was happening. I could tell what she was thinking: She was thinking, “There is a terrorist hiding in this fuselage.” I could read it on her face. It’s exactly what she was trained to think. My only option was to crawl underneath the last row of seats and sweat it out. That was a terrible two hours. After that, I started driving myself everywhere, but that started to have an impact on the process. My agency was unconsciously dictating whom I was observing. I was poisoning the sample by driving to places I’d already been. I decided a better strategy would be to stow away with random people when they passed through Austin. It felt more egalitarian. That was my thinking at the time. (11:14 [1])

  3 Do you care about music? Do you remotely care about music? Do you at least read the A & E section of the newspaper? Do you pick up the Chronicle? Even if you don’t, I’m sure you know about the music festival that happens here every March. It’s impossible to live here and not know about it. You can’t avoid it, so I’m just going to assume you know what I’m talking about. As a resident, I’m sure it annoys you. It used to annoy me. But it’s a great weekend for my objectives, because it makes stowing away supereasy. That weekend, every single year, there are literally hundreds of vans and U-Hauls parked downtown, all filled with equipment—guitars, drum kits, amplifiers, everything. And because these bands tend to play three or four shows over the course of the weekend, the vans get loaded and unloaded constantly. I just amble around Sixth Street on Sunday night and crawl into the back of somebody’s shitty van. If the van was a jalopy, I knew the band had no money—and if the band had no money, I knew they’d be leaving that same night, because every hotel in Austin jacks up the price of its rooms during the festival. By Monday, I’d always be somewhere different. (11:23 [4])

  4 There’s a club on Red River Street called Red Eyed Fly. Kind of where Red River intersects with Eighth Street? Terrible name for a bar, I don’t get the reference, but whatever. There were four bands playing there on Sunday. One was called Suicide by Antelope. One was the Something-Somebody-Somewhere Blues Band, or words to that effect. I can’t remember what the third group was called—I didn’t watch any of these bands, obviously. I’m just trying to remember what was on the marquee. Besides, the only one that really mattered was the fourth band, because they loaded out their equipment last. They were called Jooky MaGoo. That, I can remember, because they had red-and-white JOOKY stickers all over their guitars. (11:20 [3])

  5 The members of Jooky MaGoo, for whatever reason, did not ride in their own van. The band was three thin bozos and one hot girl, and they traveled separately in an aqua sedan. The Jooky van was driven by two roadies, one guy about twenty and one who might have been forty. That’s who I got in with. We drove nonstop, north on I-35, for something like ninete
en hours. It was a soul-deadening ride—I don’t think the two guys exchanged more than fifteen words on the entire trip, and the van had no radio. That’s probably why the band drove separately. I almost skipped out a few times when they were getting gas, but I wanted to stick with my plan. It seemed like such a good plan. We ended up in suburban Minneapolis, late Monday night. After sitting on a speaker for nineteen hours, it felt good to be anywhere. But I wasn’t ready for the fucking weather. I did not anticipate being able to see my breath in March, and I wasn’t dressed properly. Walking would have been a problem—the suit doesn’t break the wind. I elected to stay with the van. The younger roadie dropped the older roadie off at some suburban house and said, “Thanks for the help, man.” That was the extent of their relationship—I have no idea how they ended up working together. They didn’t seem to know each other at all. The older roadie walked into his house and the young roadie drove the rest of the stuff—and me—to his apartment uptown. By now, it must have been almost midnight. I remember we drove down a road called Hennepin, and maybe past a little frozen lake? It was too dark to tell. No moon. We ended up on Pleasant Avenue, which is an easy avenue to remember. When the kid finally got home, he had to drag all the musical equipment up two flights of stairs, all by himself. I just followed him inside, right through the front door, easy as pie. He was storing all that shit in his living room, which was not an inconvenience, because he really didn’t have much furniture. He lived in one of those inexpensive, oversized studio apartments that seem to exist only in self-consciously hip neighborhoods. There was a mattress on the floor and a stereo in the corner. Lots of upright Bose speakers. Nothing on the walls—not even paint. Vinyl records on the floor, in crates. Lots of vinyl. A thick glass coffee table, but no proper chairs and no sofa. He had a crappy set of golf clubs, weirdly. It smelled like an attic and a basement at the same time. He finished hauling the equipment, he took off his shirt and his eyeglasses, and he collapsed on the mattress. Didn’t wake up until three in the afternoon. I slept for maybe an hour or two. My mind was fried. (11:33 [7])