Clay chose this moment to excuse himself, mumbling something about finding a bathroom.
I stood there glaring from Harry to Mallory and back again. Suddenly I felt they were the strangers, and it was I who should be asking who are you?
“What’s going on here? What do you want from me?”
Turning to Mallory, Harry said, “I think Jason would rather hear this from you than from me.”
“Sit down, Jason, please.” I sat down. “I noticed this myself earlier, but I didn’t think it was any of my business. It didn’t even occur to me to mention it.”
“Mention what?”
“That you’re acting as if you don’t exist. You spent the whole day doing it.”
“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
“You’re acting as if you were a piece of clear glass that everyone just looks straight through. You’re acting as if you’re invisible—as if you don’t exist. And this is why Harry’s here tonight. I saw it as soon as he started asking, ‘Who are you?’ ”
“I wish I saw it. When was I acting like this?”
She sent a doubtful look Harry’s way.
“Jason,” he said, taking up the refrain, “the first person to whom you must become visible is you. You can’t guide yourself using Mallory’s eyes or my eyes. You have to see for yourself where you are. It does no good to use another’s vision for this purpose.”
“Riddles,” I said, without conviction.
Clay chose that moment to return, letting the boss know with a nod that he was ready to resume his duties. Harry rose and reached for his topcoat, which had been slung over the back of a sofa.
“You’re leaving?” I’m not sure which feeling was more predominant in me, relief or frustration.
“We’re leaving, yes,” Uncle Harry agreed.
“So nice of you to drop by,” I told him, “though it isn’t for me to say, strictly speaking.”
He replied with a small, troubled shake of the head. Then he turned to Mallory and took her hand gravely for a moment before departing.
I didn’t know what to make of or do about the awkwardness that was now loomingly in place between Mallory and me. I didn’t want to go home in a huff, though it was certainly an option. The light touch seemed a better one, if I could manage it.
“Personally,” I said, pouring us another pair of drinks, “I think we had a better time on the ladder.”
She smiled, valiantly but not wholeheartedly.
I could think of several things I would’ve liked to hear her say, but none of them seemed to occur to her. She was stuck for a solid two minutes.
Then she said, “Let’s not talk.”
I hadn’t thought of that one.
I woke at three in the morning, as I sometimes do, too full of ideas and plans to sleep. Reading for a while usually helps, so I pawed around for the books I’d parked on the night table on returning from Dial’s bookstore. The Stein book was there but not the other two. Thinking they might have been knocked off onto the floor, I slid out of bed and checked. They weren’t on the floor.
“What is it?” Mallory asked, turning over sleepily.
“Two of the books I bought today are gone.”
Sitting up, she asked, “How could they be?”
“I don’t know, but they’re not here.”
“Could you have taken them into the living room?”
“I could have, but I didn’t.”
“Why don’t you check, just to be sure.”
I checked. On returning, I said, “Harry’s adjutant took them. That was what he did when he excused himself to go to the bathroom.”
I could see that she’d already come to the same conclusion.
“Why did he do that?” I asked. “What’s the point?”
“I don’t know,” she muttered, hardly above a whisper.
I stood there frowning down at her, feeling for the first time ever that she was lying to me. Maybe she didn’t literally know, but she had a guess, and she wasn’t sharing it with me.
“Both books can be replaced,” I went on, “so what’s the use of taking them?”
This time she said nothing.
“Give me a hint.”
After thinking a while, she said, “You don’t take hints, Jason. I’ve never known anyone worse at taking hints.”
“Why did he take two and not all three?”
Mallory gazed up at me steadily without answering.
THE NEXT MORNING I was approaching the entrance to the Times Building when I heard my name called. It was Clay, by golly—Uncle Harry’s attaché—standing by the open door of a black limousine.
“Dr. Whitaker would like a word with you,” he said as I approached.
I started to get in, then backed out when I saw that Harry wasn’t inside. “I’ve got an appointment here,” I explained.
“It’s all right,” he told me. “You won’t be late.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” I said, after checking my watch. “Can Dr. Whitaker stop time?”
“Dr. Whitaker can do most anything,” Clay said with the ghost of a smile. Then, as he saw me hesitating, he added, “It’s important.”
He followed me in, and the driver pulled away from the curb.
“Would you mind taking off your jacket?” Clay asked. Since the temperature was in the sixties, I hadn’t bothered with a topcoat.
“Why should I do that?”
“Because I have to give you a shot.” He produced a leather case, which he unzipped to reveal two vials and a hypodermic syringe.
“What the hell is that?”
“What did I just say, Mr. Tull? I have to give you a shot.”
“A shot of what?”
Clay sighed. “Dr. Whitaker said you’d probably ask that. Here’s what he told me to tell you: ‘This will make you visible.’ ”
“Bullshit.”
“Yeah, well, he said you’d probably say that too.”
We inched our way through three or four stoplights.
“The way I understand it,” Clay said at last, “Dr. Whitaker is an old friend of the Tull family.”
“That’s right.”
“But you think he might do you an injury. Is that right?”
“Not exactly.”
Clay laughed. “You know, I didn’t get all that stuff he was saying last night about you not knowing who you are. But I’m beginning to.”
“How wonderful for you.”
“I tell you what.” He reached into a back pocket and pulled out a billfold. After examining the contents, he looked up at me and said, “In this job, I have to carry a lot of cash—or what’s a lot of cash for me.” He counted out four hundreds, eight fifties, and eight twenties, and put them on the seat between us. “I’ll bet you this thousand—which I’ll have to replace out of my own pocket if I lose it—that within five minutes of having this shot, you’ll know who you are.”
“What’s in the syringe, some kind of psychotropic?”
He laughed again. “You really are a scream, Mr. Tull. Next you’ll be asking if I’m going to put you into a trance.”
I got out my own billfold and counted out seven hundreds and six fifties.
“Take off your jacket and roll up a sleeve.”
He carefully swabbed a spot with alcohol from one of the two vials, then filled the syringe from the other. After administering the shot, he taped a bit of cotton over the puncture and helped me don my jacket again.
Then, having repacked the case, he sat back, looked at me with a pleasant smile, and said, “I see you, Mr. Tull.”
I knew he did. By then—after a mere thirty seconds—the revelation was mostly complete, having no connection to whatever drug I’d been injected with. It had all come clear as the steel slid into my vein. It was as though the needle had been the conduit for enlightenment rather than some clear liquid.
As I’d dressed to go out an hour before, Mallory had asked where I was going. When I didn?
??t answer immediately, she said, “Never mind. Forgive me for asking. It slipped my mind that you’re the invisible man.”
Now at last I got it.
I’d thought I could visit Dial’s bookstore and be invisible. I’d thought I could make a very peculiar purchase there and no one would remark on it. I’d thought I could have a portentous conversation with a news editor at a globally influential paper and our words would vanish into the ether. I’d thought I could promise a sensational story and beg for an opportunity to discuss it, and no one would take notice of this or think it worth analyzing as an interesting event in its own right.
I had acted as if Edmund Dial would think of my visit this way: “When I walked into my office, I expected to see Jason Tull, but it wasn’t Jason Tull after all, it was someone else.”
I carried and gave out personal cards all the time. Naturally they said, “Jason Tull, Jr.” What they should have said was, “NOT Jason Tull.” Because I was NOT Jason Tull, it somehow followed that I was invisible. I could go anywhere and do anything without being noticed. People looked through me as if I were a sheet of clear glass.
I knew only who I was not.
This was what Uncle Harry intended to demonstrate by having Clay lift the two books from my bedside table: Behold! You are SEEN. You are NOT invisible. Behold! I’ve come here this evening to purloin two books out of the three that you are KNOWN to have purchased. I even know which two I want to take in order to demonstrate your visibility.
As this went through my head, I didn’t take note of the fact that I was fading out, disappearing into a sort of vast mind-numbing cloud.
The last thing I clearly remember was shoving my thousand dollars across the seat into Clay’s hand.
I WOKE DYING, or at least wishing I was dead, on a cot in a tiny room with a boarded window. My throat was raw, and judging from the taste in my mouth, this was the result of throwing up everything inside of me. My head was pounding in a way that carried pain outward to the very surface of my throbbing skin and eyeballs. I wanted water, but I wanted to relapse into unconsciousness even more.
I turned over, away from the wall, prayerfully imagining that some saintly person might have left a bottle of water within reach, and there, by God, it was—a quart. I fished it up from the floor, opened it, finished off half of it in one swallow, and plunged back into unconsciousness.
I woke again in another four hours or twelve hours. There was enough light seeping through the window to convince me it was day. The blessed bottle was there on the floor at my bedside, and I finished it off in another long gulp. My headache was only a memory, but it was still a potent one. I wasn’t ready for three sets of tennis, but I was ready to get out of that room. At least I wasn’t a prisoner. The door to the room stood open, revealing a hall outside.
Not more than five minutes were needed to explore the entire building, which appeared to have served at one time as a military or scientific installation, permanently manned by two or three people but occasionally visited (I surmised) by another dozen, who used a sort of office or classroom at the front. Of more immediate significance to me was the fact that the building stood in the center of a vast, featureless wasteland that have might have been the moon if it weren’t for the scruffy vegetation that extended on all sides to the horizon. There were the remains of automotive ruts leading to the west (as I judged it to be, since the sun was steadily rising in the other direction), but there were no fresh tire tracks to be seen. Incredibly, it appeared that I’d been airlifted in.
Once it was established that I wasn’t going to leave on foot, I went back inside to consider the setup of the briefing room at the front of the building. At the back of this room was a low platform with a swivel chair positioned on it. The chair, unlike the other furniture in the room, was clean and new—an obvious import. A freshly cleaned chalkboard was mounted on the wall behind the chair, and several objects were arranged to face it: two floodlights, a video camera, and a television set, all connected to massive commercial batteries. Sitting down in the chair, I saw that the camera and the television set were both turned on.
The screen showed a scene that was almost a mirror image of the one I was standing in, with an empty desk and an empty chair behind it. I sat down and fixed my eyes on the screen, waiting for something to happen. Nothing happened.
Obviously something was going to happen. Why else assemble all this equipment here and all that equipment there (wherever “there” was)?
I waited. I watched.
I said to myself, obviously they didn’t expect me to recover consciousness this soon (whoever “they” were).
I still had my watch (along with everything else). It said it was eleven, manifestly in the morning, though I rather doubted I was still in the Eastern time zone.
I went on sitting there, waiting, watching. Nothing went on happening.
At noon, all the water I’d taken in had filtered down to my bladder, and I went outside to get rid of it. While I was there, I took the time to survey again the bleak desert surrounding me. At the end of the rutted road, which disappeared in the haze at the horizon, no cloud of dust was being raised by an approaching vehicle. No helicopters were clattering their way to me.
I went back inside, sat down at the desk, and watched the screen, as empty-headed as a lizard on a rock. I was like someone in a movie theater waiting for the lights to go down and the show to start. The only things going through my mind were equivalent to Where is it? and What’s the holdup?
On the screen in front of me absolutely nothing was happening. There wasn’t even a clock ticking off the seconds on the wall behind the empty chair.
At two o’clock I could no longer ignore the fact that I was ravenously hungry. Surely whoever had deposited me here had left some food to go with the water. I wasn’t intended to perish, after all … surely. There would be a box somewhere, with something edible in it, even if it was only candy bars and crackers. Fruit, maybe, or even something tinned. I could picture it as clearly as if I’d already seen it—a corrugated cardboard box, kraft brown. It would be really terrible, I thought, if they’d forgotten to include a can opener. Such things happen.
But of course there was no box. There was a kitchen of sorts, still furnished with heavy dishes and a few battered pots and pans, but bare of food, except, absurdly, for a box of rice, hard as a brick and with the dust of decades on it. Predictably, nothing came from the tap in the sink.
I went back to my vigil in front of the television screen.
By five o’clock I realized I was beginning to lose control, partly because five o’clock is “quitting time,” when whoever was supposed to be sitting in that chair on the screen would be knocking off work to go home to dinner.
Who did these people think they were dealing with? Some nobody?
I went on watching for another two hours because there was absolutely nothing else to do.
At seven, when I took another bathroom break outside, the sun was still high in the sky, confirming my notion that I was a lot closer to the Pacific coast than to the Atlantic. I eyed the road, wondering what was at the end of it. If, as I’d always been assured, the horizon was twenty miles away, then it would, I estimated, take me five hours of walking to reach the vacancy that was presently visible to me—with no guarantee that anything besides more vacancy would be visible from that vantage point. And even if something besides vacancy was visible, would I be able to cross this desert without a drop of water?
The thought of water sent me back inside to see if the bottle I’d sucked dry in the morning really was completely dry. Except for about three drops I was able to coax from the bottom, it was. But in desperation I got down on my stomach to check under the cot and found a treasure: another quart bottle, half full, that I’d evidently gulped at before I was entirely conscious. The cap was only lightly screwed down, and I gave it another hasty twist, as if the half-quart were going to evaporate before my very eyes.
I’ve heard or read somewhe
re that the thing to do in this situation is to drink down your water reserves straightaway. However logically or physiologically correct this advice may be, whoever formulated it is a damned fool. There was no way in the world I was going to empty that bottle, no matter how much I longed to.
I took a quick sip and screwed the cap down hard.
Then, feeling decidedly heartened (and having nothing better to do), I went back to my watching post. Nothing had changed. The room on the screen remained brightly lit and utterly empty.
In two hours, I said to myself, I’ll have another sip, and set the bottle down firmly in the center of the desk, so that even if some malign force were to tip it over, no harm would come to it.
Night fell, eventually. I considered turning on the battery-powered lights that were trained on me but shrugged the idea off. What was there to see, after all?
In the dark, facing only the lighted television screen, I realized belatedly what point Uncle Harry was making with it (for I had no doubt whatever that he was behind all this). I, seated in a chair behind a desk, was looking at another chair behind another desk. Harry was holding up a mirror for me to look into, and, looking into this mirror, I was seeing myself, seeing what someone would see looking into the room in which I sat: a vacant chair. Or, alternatively, an invisible man.
There was certainly no argument about that. I’d been living for a long, long time as an invisible man. In a sense, my work for the Fenshaws was designed to reduce my invisibility, for certainly they saw me. They didn’t know my father from Adam. They knew me, and me alone.
But who exactly was that?
What would they say if someone asked them who I was?
“Oh … Jason? Terribly nice chap. Earnest, intelligent, conscientious, well-educated. Perfect manners, delightful sense of humor—not pretentious at all, though he’s supposedly very well connected, important family, all that.” Could they conceivably say more than this?
I thought about the people closest to me. My father was Somebody, no doubt about that. My mother was Somebody. Uncle Harry. Both the Fenshaws. Mallory, even in a state of deep psychological shock, was Somebody.