After that, I never looked at anything the same again. I watched light, saw everything through an imaginary frame. Clouds didn’t just mean a storm was coming; they were an ever-changing picture of the sky, a panorama of movement and light that affected everything around them—the landscape, the people in it. I learned to pay attention and realized that once you do, anything you look at is interesting. Everything has its own glow, its own place in the world that’s related to everything else around it. I looked into the connectedness of it all and nothing was the same for me again. I got better at a lot of things. Meeting people. Art. General life skills. Not perfect, but better.
“Have you ever heard of these invisibles?” I ask Ted.
“That’s what the practitioners of voudoun call their deities. Les Invisibles.”
I shake my head. “This kid wasn’t speaking French. It wasn’t like he was talking about that kind of thing at all. He was referring to ordinary people that go invisible because they just aren’t here enough anymore.” I stop and look across the table at Ted. “Christ, what am I saying? None of this is possible.”
Ted nods. “It’s easier to pretend it didn’t happen.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
But I know exactly what he’s talking about. You can either trust your senses and accept that there’s more to the world than what you can see, or you can play ostrich. I don’t know what to do.
“You had anything to eat yet?” Ted asks.
“Not since last night.”
I let him order me breakfast, don’t even complain when it’s the same as his own.
“See, the thing is,” he tells me while we’re waiting for my cereal to arrive, “is that you’re at the epicenter where two worlds are colliding.”
“So now it’s an earthquake.”
He smiles. “But it’s taking place on an interior landscape.”
“I saw that woman last night—other people couldn’t. That kid turned into a heap of litter right in front of my eyes. It happened here, Ted. In what’s supposed to be the real world. Not in my head.”
“I know. The quake hit you here, but the aftershocks are running through your soul.”
I’d argue with him, except that’s exactly how it feels.
“Why do you think that kid talked to me?” I ask.
I don’t expect Ted to know, but it’s part of what’s been bothering me. Why’d he pick me to approach?
“I don’t know,” Ted says. “Next time you see him you should ask him.”
“I don’t think I want there to be a next time.”
“You might not get a choice.”
6
Maybe I could pretend to Ted that I didn’t want any further involvement with invisible people and kids that turn into litter, but I couldn’t lie to myself. I went looking for the boy, for the invisible woman, for things and people out of the ordinary.
There was still a pretense involved. I didn’t wander aimlessly, one more lost soul out on the streets, but took a sketchbook and a small painting box, spent my time working on value drawings and color studies, gathering material for future paintings. It’s hard for me to work en plein. I keep wanting to fuss and fiddle too much, getting lost in detail until the light changes and then I have to come back another day to get the values right.
A lot of those sketching sessions were spent outside the invisible woman’s building, looking for her, expecting the boy to show up. I’d set up my stool, sit there flooding color onto the pages of my sketchbook, work in the detail, too much detail. I don’t see the woman. Wind blows the litter around on the street but it doesn’t rise up in the shape of a boy and talk to me.
I find myself thinking of fairy tales—not as stories, but as guideposts. Ted and I share a love of them, but for different reasons. He sees them as early versions of the tabloids, records kept of strange encounters, some real, some imagined, all of them entertaining. I think of them more metaphorically. All those dark forests and trials and trouble. They’re the same things we go through in life. Maybe if more of us had the good heart of a Donkeyskin or the youngest son of three, the world would be a better place.
I’m thinking of this in front of the invisible woman’s building on a blustery day. I’ve got the pages of my sketchbook clipped down, but the wind keeps flapping them anyway, making the paint puddle and run. Happy accidents, I’ve heard them called. Well, they’re only happy when you can do something with them, when you don’t work tight, every stroke counting. I’m just starting to clean up the latest of these so-called happy accidents when a ponytailed guy carrying a guitar walks right into me, knocking the sketchbook from my lap. I almost lose the paintbox as well.
“Jesus,” he says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see you sitting there.” He picks up my sketchbook and hands it over. “I hope I haven’t totally ruined this.”
“It’s okay,” I tell him. It’s not, but what would be the point of being unpleasant?
“I’m really sorry.”
I look down at the page I was working on. Now there’s dirt smeared into the happy accident. Fixable it’s not. My gaze lifts to meet his.
“Don’t worry about it,” I tell him. “It happens.”
He nods, his relief plain. “I must’ve been dreaming,” he says, “because I just didn’t see you at all.” He hesitates. “If you’re sure it’s okay . . .”
“I’m sure.”
I watch him leave, think about what he said.
I just didn’t see you.
So now what? I’ve become invisible, too? Then I remember the kid, something he said when I asked why I could see the invisible woman and others couldn’t.
Maybe you’re closer to her than you think.
Invisible. It comes to me, then. The world’s full of invisible people and our not seeing them’s got nothing to do with magic. The homeless. Winos. Hookers. Junkies. And not only on the street. The housewife. The businessman’s secretary. Visible only when they’re needed for something. The man with AIDS. Famine victims. People displaced by wars or natural disasters. The list is endless, all these people we don’t see because we don’t want to see them. All these people we don’t see because we’re too busy paying attention to ourselves. I’ve felt it myself, my lack of self-confidence and how it translates into my behavior can have people look right through me. Standing in a store, waiting to be served. Sitting in the corner of a couch at a party and I might as well be a pillow.
The kid’s face comes back to mind. I look down at my sketchbook, exchange the page smeared with happy accidents for a new one, draw the kid’s features as I remember them. Now I know why he looked so familiar.
7
Ted opens his door on the first knock. He’s just got off work and seems surprised to see me. I can smell herb tea steeping, cigarette smoke. Something classical is playing at low volume on the stereo. Piano. Chopin, I think. The preludes.
“Were we doing a movie or something tonight?” Ted asks.
I shake my head. “I was wondering if I could see that old photo album of yours again.”
He studies me for a moment, then steps aside so that I can come in. His apartment’s as cluttered as ever. You can’t turn for fear of knocking over a stack of books, magazines, CDs, cassettes. Right by the door there’s a box of newspapers and tabloids ready to go out for recycling. The one on top has a headline that shouts in bold caps: TEENAGER GIVES BIRTH TO FISH BOY!!
“You don’t have to look at the album,” he tells me. “I’ll ’fess up.”
Something changes in me when he says those words. I thought I knew him, like I thought I knew the world, but now they’ve both become alien territory. I stand in the center of the room, the furniture crouched around me like junkyard dogs. I have a disorienting static in my ears. I feel as though I’m standing on dangerous ground, stepped into the fairy tale, but Stephen King wrote it.
“How did you do it?” I ask.
Ted gives me a sheepish look. “How first? Not even why?”
&nb
sp; I give the sofa a nervous look, but it’s just a sofa. The vertigo is receding. My ears pop, as though I’ve dropped altitude, and I can hear the piano music coming from the speakers on either side of the room. I’m grounded again, but nothing seems the same. I sit down on the sofa, set my stool and sketching equipment on the floor between my feet.
“I don’t know if I can handle why just yet,” I tell him. “I have to know how you did it, how you made a picture of yourself come to life.”
“Magic.”
“Magic,” I repeat. “That’s it?”
“It’s not enough?” He takes a seat in the well-worn armchair across from me, leans forward, hands on his knees. “Remember this morning, when I told you about wanting to be an illusionist?”
I nod.
“I lied. Well, it was partly a lie. I didn’t give up stage magic, I just never got the nerve to go up on a stage and do it.”
“So the kid . . . he was an illusion?”
Ted smiles. “Let’s say you saw what I wanted you to see.”
“Smoke and mirrors.”
“Something like that.”
“But . . .” I shake my head. He was right earlier. There’s no point in asking for details. Right now, how’s not as important as . . . “So why?” I ask.
He leans back in the chair. “The invisibles need a spokesperson—someone to remind the rest of the world that they exist. People like that woman you saw in The Half Kaffe last night. If enough people don’t see her, she’s simply going to fade away. She can’t speak up for herself. If she could, she wouldn’t be an invisible. And she’s at the high end of the scale. There are people living on the streets that—”
“I know,” I say, breaking in. “I was just thinking about them this afternoon. But their invisibility is a matter of perception, of people ignoring them. They’re not literally invisible like the woman last night. There’s nothing magic about them.”
“You’re still missing the point,” Ted says “Magic’s all about perception. Things are the way they are because we’ve agreed that’s the way they are. An act of magic is when we’re convinced we’re experiencing something that doesn’t fit into the conceptual reality we’ve all agreed on.”
“So you’re saying that magic is being tricked into thinking an illusion is real.”
“Or seeing through the illusion, seeing something the way it really is for the first time.”
I shake my head, not quite willing to concede the argument for all that it’s making uncomfortable sense.
“Where does your being a spokesperson fit in?” I ask.
“Not me. You.”
“Oh, come on.”
But I can tell he’s completely serious.
“People have to be reminded about the invisibles,” he says, “or they’ll vanish.”
“Okay,” I say. “For argument’s sake, let’s accept that as a given. I still don’t see where I come into it.”
“Who’s going to listen to me?” Ted asks. “I try to talk about it, but I’m a booking agent. People’d rather just think I’m a little weird.”
“And they’re not going to think the same of me?”
“No,” he says. “And I’ll tell you why. It’s the difference between art and argument. They’re both used to get a point across but the artist sets up a situation and, if he’s good enough, his audience understands his point on their own, through how they assimilate the information he’s given them and the decisions they can then make based on that information. The argument is just someone telling you what you’re supposed to think or feel.”
“Show, don’t tell,” I say, repeating an old axiom appropriate to all the arts.
“Exactly. You’ve got the artistic chops and sensibility to show people, to let them see the invisibles through your art, which will make them see them out there.” He waves a hand towards the window. “On the street. In their lives.”
He’s persuasive, I’ll give him that.
“Last night in The Half Kaffe,” I begin.
“I didn’t see the woman you saw,” Ted says. “I didn’t see her until you stopped her down the street.”
“And after? When she went invisible again?”
“I could still see her. You made me see her.”
“That’s something anybody could do,” I tell him.
“But only if they can see the invisibles in the first place,” he says. “And you can’t be everywhere. Your paintings can. Reproductions of them can.”
I give him a look that manages to be both tired and hold all my skepticism with what he’s saying. “You want me to paint portraits of invisible people so that other people can see them.”
“You’re being deliberately obtuse now, aren’t you? You know what I mean.”
I nod. I do know exactly what he means.
“Why bring this all up now?” I ask him. “We’ve known each other for years.”
“Because until you saw the invisible woman, you never would have believed me.”
“How do I know she’s not another illusion—like the boy made of litter that was wearing your twelve-year-old face?”
“You don’t.”
8
He’s wrong about that. I do know. I know in that part of me that he was talking about this morning over breakfast, the part that had a meaningful dialogue with something bigger than me, the part that’s willing to accept a momentary glimpse behind the curtain of reality as a valid experience. And I know why he sent the illusion of the boy after me, too. It’s the same reason he didn’t admit to any of this sooner, played the innocent when I came to him with my story of invisible people. It was to give me my own words to describe the experience. To make me think about the invisibles, to let me form my own opinions about what can be readily seen and what’s hidden behind a veil of expectations. Showing, not telling. He’s better than he thinks he is.
I stand in my studio, thinking about that. There’s a board on my easel with a stretched full-sized piece of three-hundred-pound Arches hot-pressed paper on it. I squeeze pigments into the butcher’s tray I use as a palette, pick up a brush. There’s a light pencil sketch on the paper. It’s a cityscape, a street scene. In one corner, there’s a man, sleeping in a doorway, blanketed with newspapers. The buildings and street overwhelm him. He’s a small figure, almost lost. But he’s not invisible.
I hope to keep him that way.
I dip my brush into my water jar, build up a puddle in the middle of the tray. Yellow ochre and alizarin crimson. I’m starting with the features that can be seen between the knit woolen cap he’s wearing and the edge of his newspaper blanket, the gnarled hand that grips the papers, holding them in place. I want him to glow before I add in the buildings, the street, the night that shrouds them.
As I work, I think of the tobacco tins that Rebecca, Jerry, and I buried under our porches all those years ago. Maybe magic doesn’t always work. Maybe it’s like life, things don’t always come through for you. But being disappointed in something doesn’t mean you should give up on it. It doesn’t mean you should stop trying.
I think of the last thing Ted said to me before I left his apartment.
“It goes back to stage magicians,” he told me. “What’s so amazing about them isn’t so much that they can make things disappear, as that they can bring them back.”
I touch the first color to the paper and reach for a taste of that amazement.
Seven for a Secret
It’s a mistake to have only one life.
—Dennis Miller Bunker, 1890
1
Later, he can’t remember which came first, the music or the birds in the trees. He seems to become aware of them at the same time. They call up a piece of something he thinks he’s forgotten; they dredge through his past, the tangle of memories growing as thick and riddling as a hedgerow, to remind him of an old story he heard once that began, “What follows is imagined, but it happened just so . . .”
2
The trees are new growth, old before th
eir time. Scrub, leaves more brown than green, half the limbs dead, the other half dying. They struggle for existence in what was once a parking lot, a straggling clot of vegetation fed for years by some runoff, now baking in the sun. Something diverted the water—another building fell down, supports torched by Devil’s Night fires, or perhaps the city bulldozed a field of rubble, two or three blocks over, inadvertently creating a levee. It doesn’t matter. The trees are dying now, the weeds and grass surrounding them already baked dry.
And they’re full of birds. Crows, ravens . . . Jake can’t tell the difference. Heavy-billed, black birds with wedge-shaped tails and shaggy ruffs at their throats. Their calls are hoarse, croaking kraaacks, interspersed with hollow, knocking sounds and a sweeter klu-kluck.
The fiddle plays a counterpoint to the uneven rhythm of their calls, an odd, not quite reasonable music that seems to lie somewhere between a slow dance tune and an air that manages to be at once mournful and jaunty. The fiddle, he sees later, is blue, not painted that color, rather the varnish lends the wood that hue so its grain appears to be viewed as though through water.
Black birds, blue fiddle.
He might consider them portents if he were given to looking for omens, but he lives in a world that is always exactly what it should be, no more and no less, and he has come here to forget, not foretell. He is a man who stands apart, always one step aside from the crowd, an island distanced from the archipelago, spirit individual as much as the flesh. But though we are all islands, separated from one another by indifferent seas that range as wide as we allow them to be, we still congregate. We are still social animals. And Jake is no different. He comes to where the fires burn in the oil drums, where the scent of cedar smudge sticks mingles with cigarette smoke and dust, the same as the rest of us.
The difference is, he watches. He watches, but rarely speaks. He rarely speaks, but he listens well.
“They say,” the woman tells him, “that where ravens gather, a door to the Otherworld stands ajar.”