The Visible Man

  Valerie get dressed and starts cleaning her apartment, although cleaning is not really the right word—she just sort of organizes the disorder into four separate piles. Around eight, her doorbell rings. It’s another woman, roughly Valerie’s age but significantly heavier. This is Jane. She has a lot of wavy hair, a lot of teeth, and one of those omnipresent, face-dominating perma-grins that makes her look like a lesser Muppet. Diabolically upbeat. She’s carrying two buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The two women hug hello, but I can tell they’ve seen each other recently; the hug is brief and their conversation is neutral and nonexpository. Valerie asks things like, “What’s Jim doing tonight?” and Jane responds with, “Oh, you know Jim.” They have a brief discussion about when they should start smoking marijuana, and the verdict is “immediately.” They’re comfortable with each other. They enjoy the process of agreeing. They sit on the floor and light each other’s weed. They talk slower, but their personalities don’t change. They start eating the chicken. This must be the thing they do together.

  At 9:20 they turn on the television. They’ve digitally recorded that popular program about the good-looking airline passengers who accidentally travel through time. Every so often, they pause the action to bicker about the plot: Valerie seems angry at the episode because she doesn’t know what’s happening. Jane seems pleased by the episode because she doesn’t know what’s happening.

  “Why are they all doing that?” says Valerie. “Why doesn’t anyone ask why they’re doing the things that they’re doing?”

  “They’re doing it because that one guy told them it was the only way.”

  “But isn’t that guy the same person who wanted to kill them?”

  “No, that was the first guy. The guy who can’t die.”

  “But why would they follow the other guy? The smoke.”

  “I don’t think they’re following the smoke.”

  “In this reality, or in all the realities?”

  “Yes.”

  This goes on for a long time. When the show concludes, they keep disagreeing about what did or didn’t occur. “I think that already happened.” “We don’t know that yet.” “She’s actually his half-sister, right?” “No, that was the woman from the airport bar.” “He was killed a long time ago.” “He might not be dead anymore.” It’s the worst conversation I’ve ever heard two people have about something that wasn’t true. They finish the first bucket of chicken and decide to eat the legs and wings from bucket number two for dessert. Valerie hits “play” on her CD player; A Hard Day’s Night is still in the carousel. Jane says, “Have you ever heard that song about the Beatles? It’s not by the Beatles.” Valerie looks at Jane like she’s from Atlantis. Valerie says, “What?” Jane says, “Wait,” and runs outside to her car. She returns with a cassette. “I can’t play tapes,” says Valerie. “I don’t have a tape player. I don’t play tapes.” Jane says, “You should get a tape player.” Valerie says, “But I don’t have any tapes.” Jane says, “But now you have this tape.” Their relationship is founded on the repeated deconstruction of meaningless contradictions.

  Jane gets ready to go home. She asks if she should leave the remainder of the chicken with Valerie. “Sure,” lies Valerie. “I’ll have it for lunch tomorrow.” Jane walks out the door. Valerie smokes more pot and gets on the treadmill. She runs for three simulated miles, drinks a huge glass of water, and eats the rest of the chicken. It’s the skin she loves most—she tears it off the flesh and drags it through the gravy. Every mouthful is succulent, decadent fat. It electrifies her spirit as it clogs her ventricles. When the chicken is gone, she returns to the peanut butter, finishing the remainder of the jar. She jams her whole hand into the jar and licks her fingers clean. There’s no food remaining in the house. It’s been erased by her mouth. Upon this realization, she inhales more weed, does forty abdominal crunches, takes another shower, and falls asleep to John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band.

  Valerie was the fittest, hungriest, cleanest person I’d ever encountered. (5.16.08, 10:08 a.m. to 10:33 a.m.)

  2 Now, let me ask you a question, Vic-Vick: What’s the most transparently interesting thing about this Valerie person? To me, it’s that she’s a liar. Even to her closest friends, Valerie is lying about how she lives. She doesn’t want Jane to know that she could never save half a bucket of chicken until tomorrow. She doesn’t want Jane to know that she instantly knew she’d eat it all immediately, and that such an action was beyond her control. Instead, she chooses to exercise with the intensity of a decathlete, simply to sustain the physical appearance of normalcy. It’s a hidden cycle: The stress of this fraud makes her want to escape from reality, which prompts her to smoke marijuana, which makes her eat compulsively, which forces her to exercise obsessively and without reward, which makes her original dishonesty so shameful. But I am the only one who knows this. Only I see her secrets. So I find myself thinking: Is this lie the totality of who she is? Is there any part of her personality that isn’t dictated by this cycle? Is her secret the only thing that matters about her?

  While she was at work, this was what I worried about. (5.16.08, 10:47 a.m. to 10:48 a.m.)

  3 On the third day of my occupation, Valerie came home with two boxes of doughnuts, two cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli, and a bunch of bananas. I knew where that shit was going, and I knew it would be gone by midnight. She went out for her evening run and returned to do a few dozen burpies, or whatever they’re calling burpies now, in the middle of the living room. Burpies are what convicts do. Burpies are designed for people in prison cells. She takes her second shower of the day and settles in for another night of smoking and gorging and listening to dead hippies sing about the Maharishi … her life is so calcified. It drives me crazy. How can she not realize how terrible her life is? And yet—she seems happy. I see no explicit depression within her existence. Does she not understand that this is no way to live? I want her to be depressed. I want her to want to be different. But she just doesn’t get it.

  [I interject to ask Y____ if he sees his own contradiction; I ask if he sees how his espoused intention to “objectively observe” these subjects seems to be false, and that his emotional relationship to Valerie is greater than his interest in her actual life.]

  That’s not true. That’s wrong. Just because I care doesn’t mean I can’t be objective. That’s what’s wrong with the world, Vicky: We’ve given up on the possibility of overcoming our biases. Did I like Valerie? Yes. Sure. Yes I did. But I never surrendered to her. That’s the part you can’t comprehend.

  Going in, I knew that watching people during their private moments was going to be emotionally confusing. I mean, I watched Valerie go to the bathroom many, many times. When she was alone, she never even closed the door. I’ve watched her defecate, and that’s a pretty humiliating experience, even when no one’s watching. And seeing someone humiliated is always going to make you like that person a little more. If an author wants to make a fictional character sympathetic, the easiest way to make that happen is to place them in a humiliating scenario. Humiliation preys on our deepest fears of what it means to be alive. So of course I was going to like Valerie. I liked everyone I watched. That was just something I had to mentally fight through. Newspaper reporters do this all the time, or at least they’re supposed to. It’s not impossible. The larger problem, at least for me, is the inherent inequality within this kind of relationship. Valerie believed she was alone, so—for her—our time together was neutral. There’s no emotional charge to being alone. She felt nothing, because she had nothing to feel. Meanwhile, I continually spent my time, one on one, with unguarded strangers who act completely open and completely vulnerable. For me, these episodes became extremely intimate. But it’s a one-sided intimacy, and that’s something you can’t prepare for.

  Easy example: Our fourth night together. It rained that day, all afternoon and all night. Valerie couldn’t run outside, so she used her treadmill. It was unnerving to watch how hard she ran—she was going nowhere, b
ut she was getting there fast. She sprinted. And she sprinted loud—she took these heavy steps that went boom boom boom boom boom boom boom, like an automatic weapon with the trigger jammed, banging away for almost two hours. Val has an OCD tic about the treadmill: There are three LCDs on the machine, and she won’t quit unless they all fall on perfectly round numbers. Like, she would hit her goal of four miles on the “distance” gauge, but she wouldn’t stop because the “minutes” gauge might read 36:33. She’d decide to keep running until the minutes gauge was exactly 40:00. But the moment that LCD read 40:00, the “calories” gauge would be at 678, so she’d need to push it to exactly 700. But then the distance LCD would be at 5.58, so she’d need to make it exactly 6.00. This never balanced out, of course. It was hopeless, and it was exhaustive to watch. After she finally gave up and showered, she got high and boiled a massive bowl of spaghetti, which she ate with butter and black pepper and string cheese. She ate a bunch of Twix bars, too. But something else happened that night. It was the kind of something that makes me feel bad about myself. And I still don’t know why I feel that way, which is why I’m talking to you.

  Sometime around ten p.m., woozy and stuffed, Valerie started looking through her closet. At first, I had no idea what prompted this seemingly random, seemingly spontaneous decision. But she got down on all fours and really went at it. This was a dogged, focused search—the kind of search that can only be conducted by the very worried or the deeply stoned. After twenty minutes, she pulls out a clock radio. “Ah ha,” she says to no one. I have no idea what her intentions are, because Valerie already has her own internal alarm clock. Besides, this is a massive, ugly clock. Unwieldy. Almost like a boom box, but not quite. Very much from the eighties, when plastics were bigger. No one would accept such a monstrosity today. But she plugs it in, and it blinks “12:00.” She doesn’t fix the time. And—suddenly—I know why she needed to locate this device. It’s because it has a cassette player. She is going to play that cassette Jane gave her two days ago.

  Now, the song on this tape, the song that Jane wanted her to play—I don’t know how to describe it, really. It’s barely a song. It’s just drums and a singer and an accordion, or some instrument that resembles an accordion. The singer sounds broken, but not in the way we typically use that term. He literally sounds like a mentally handicapped child. And this song—well, it’s almost like the singer is trying to be sarcastic, because it’s just a straightforward explanation of who the Beatles were and what they did. One of the lines in the song is “They really were very good. They deserved all their success.” Whenever the guy says the word Beatles, he sings it with a bad Cockney accent. None of it rhymes. It seems like a song written extemporaneously. Any listener’s natural impulse would be to hate it, or to laugh at it. But Valerie kept playing and rewinding this same song. She probably played that song twenty times in a row, and she could not stop smiling. It was the happiest I ever saw her—even happier than when she was eating Jif. And this is because that song is fucking profound. It’s like this quasi-homeless guy had tapped into the most primitive explanation as to why Valerie liked the Beatles, or, I suppose, why anyone likes the Beatles. There’s a few lines where the singer mentions how the Beatles’ career is like a fairy tale, and that the trajectory of their fame and their impact on the world would seem completely implausible if it were presented in a fictional context. That was the part that made Valerie smile the most—the not-so-obvious idea that the Beatles were not imaginary. It’s so not-so-obvious that only an insane person could conceive it.

  Now, for Valerie, that night was just about the song itself. There was no subtext. There was only text. She was just a spaced-out person, sitting in a love seat and listening to low-quality audio from a crappy clock radio. There was no exchange of feeling, beyond how she felt about the song. Her feelings were her own, and they were shared with no one. But the experience was different for me. I felt extremely close to Valerie that night, even though she had no idea I was in the room. I could hear the rain against the window, intertwined with the fragility of the music. I could see her amorphous affection for the Beatles being demystified—and then amplified—by this one weird song, and to see someone love one thing is to see someone love all things. She was alone, but we were together. The intimacy was overwhelming. Every time she rewound the tape, I felt like we were burrowing deeper and deeper into a hole. Was it the most romantic night of my life? No. That would be an overstatement. But it felt important. And Valerie didn’t care at all. She couldn’t. It wasn’t like unrequited love. It wasn’t even like having a crush on a person who doesn’t know you exist. It was more like being seduced by an amnesiac. It was like she was forgetting who I was, while I was still there. It was terrible. I mean, I was really seeing this person. I was truly seeing who she was. Someday, Valerie will fall in love. She will get married. But her husband will never see her the way I did. No one will ever be as close to her as I was that night, because no one else can ever be with her when she’s alone. Only I can do that.

  So what is your real question, Victoria? Did I like Valerie? As I said before: Yes. But I probably didn’t care about her. I’ve barely even thought about her since the last time I saw her. If I wasn’t talking about her to you, I probably wouldn’t be talking about her at all. Maybe I’m lying to myself, but I doubt it. I eventually found that song she played online, and it’s by a local named Dennis Johnson (sic).8 A pretty hopeless case, from what I can tell. That song doesn’t even sound good to me anymore. I never want to hear it again. But now I’m left with the memory of having heard it that night. It feels like we shared something. But we didn’t. I know the truth. I understand the truth. We didn’t share anything. Valerie was in the room, but what happened to me didn’t happen to her. And I know that I need to understand this. (5.23.08, 10:32 a.m. to 10:42 a.m.)

  4 You’re looking at me like I’m lying. You’re looking at me like you think I’m saying the opposite of what I really mean. Either that, or you’re looking at me like I’m some kind of terrible person. Like I’m some kind of brilliant troll.

  [I tell Y____ that I am not looking at him in any particular way.]

  Well, good for you. Great. Whatever. You can certainly say that, and maybe you’re being honest. I can see how you’re looking at me, and I’m never wrong about these things … but, you know, I understand your reactions. You’re wondering why I could be so uncaring toward Valerie, and why I almost seem proud of my emotional detachment. I seem inhuman to you. Your eyes tell me everything. Your eyes are like a search engine.

  I get the impression that talking about Valerie has actually made you more confused about what I do and why I do it. You probably think I’m just a sick person who likes to spy on strangers, and that I’ve created this elaborate, faux-sociological framework to justify my behavior. You can tell me if that’s what you think.

  [I tell Y____ that I don’t know what I think.]

  Yes, you do. You’re thinking without even trying. You can’t stop yourself from thinking. But here’s what you ought to be thinking: “What was gained from this observation? What do we now know about human nature that we didn’t know before?” That’s what you should be thinking. Those are the questions you should be asking yourself.

  [I say, “I would love to know the answer to those questions.”]

  Don’t pressure me. I’ll answer your questions, but only when I’m ready. You won’t really understand, anyway. The information will be useless to you.

  [I say, “It seems like you want me to ask you questions, just so you can decline to answer them.”]

  That’s not true. You lack self-confidence. We’re almost out of time, anyway. The session is basically over. Wait a week. Next week. I’ll talk about this next week. And I don’t appreciate your tone, Victoria. It makes me think you’re against me. (5.23.08, 10:44 a.m. to 10:46 a.m.)

  5 I started to feel responsible for Valerie. She might have been comfortable with her life, but I wasn’t. I didn’t like where her life was goi
ng. She didn’t realize how enslaved she was. Here was a single woman with no obligations, but with a life devoid of freedom. She didn’t even understand what freedom meant. There are convicted murderers with more freedom than Valerie. I truly believe that.

  Did she like exercise? No. She exercised only so that she could smoke pot and gorge herself on pizza. Did she like being high? Probably when she started, but not anymore. Now it was just a ritual that accelerated her hunger. Did she enjoy food? No. If she loved food, she would not be shoveling canned ravioli down her throat. Did she enjoy the process of eating—the chewing, the swallowing, the filling of the stomach? No way. All that did was remind her that she needed to exercise again. I’m not even sure if she really liked the Beatles. I think she thought she did, but how would she know? She clearly sucked at knowing things about herself. I think it’s more likely that she believed the Beatles were simply what a person like her was supposed to listen to. Valerie had no agency. I don’t care if she didn’t realize that. I realized it for her.

  This, my Vic-Vick, is the type of realization that can happen only through surveillance: If anyone else had been in the room, Valerie would have “become” happy. She wouldn’t have been happy, but she would have acted happy and assumed that her actions were somehow related to feelings. Jane came by again—the following Tuesday, just as before—and they watched their little TV show that didn’t make any sense and argued about a sequence of numbers and laughed and got excited and chewed on fried chicken skin. I’m sure they thought they were fulfilled, but they were wrong. That was not fulfillment. It was just another way to avoid the cognition of their imprisonment, and their banal interaction made that easier. They could feed off each other’s fabricated joy. But when Valerie was alone, I saw the desperation she could not comprehend. She was running herself into the grave, just so that she could space out and pig out and not care about things that mattered. It was pathetic. She deserved better. I saw potential in Valerie that she refused to see in herself, but she was too busy being Valerie to see anything that wasn’t already there.