Invisible (2 page)

Right?

“Hey, Dougie!”

I look at my alarm clock: 1:17.

“Dougie, you up?”

I roll out of bed and crawl to the window.

“I'm up now,” I say, resting my chin on the windowsill.

“How's it going?” Andy is sitting in his window, his long legs dangling over the spirea bushes.

“I was dreaming.”

“What were you dreaming?”

“I don't remember. Hey, was tonight your play?”

“Yeah! It went great. I didn't miss a line. But—you're gonna like this—Melissa's skirt came off.”

“Melissa Haverman?”

“Yeah! See, I'm Stanley Kowalski, and Melissa is playing Stella, my wife? And in this one scene she's really mad and she spins around fast and the bottom of her skirt gets caught on a nail sticking out of this table leg and it comes right off.” He laughs. “She was wearing blue panties.”

I have a very vivid imagination. I can see it in my head just like a movie.

Andy says, “But she was really cool. She grabbed the skirt and pulled it back on and just kept going with the scene. The audience didn't laugh or anything. You should've been there.”

“I don't really like plays,” I say. “A bunch of people talking about nothing.”

“Well, you would've liked this one. You should've heard Melissa after the play. She was so mad at the guy in charge of props, I thought she'd rip his face off. So what did you do today?”

“Still working on my bridge.” I am connecting East Madham to West Madham with an eleven-foot-long suspension bridge. I've been working on it for months. It's really quite amazing.

“How's it going?”

“I've finally got the towers built.” The entire bridge is scratch-built from matchsticks, string, and glue. Andy always teases me about that.

“Aren't you afraid it's gonna catch on fire?”

We laugh. Andy and I had some bad luck with fires when we were kids. We're more careful now. I always scrape the phosphorous tips off all the matchsticks before using them. I have scraped the heads off 112 boxes of stick matches. There are 200 matches in a box. In case you are slow at math, that's 22,400 matches in all.

“I figure the bridge will be ready for its inaugural crossing in about three weeks. Everybody in Madham will be there. You want to come?”

“Sure!”

Of course, the bit about “everybody in Madham” is kind of a joke, because the people who live in Madham are made out of plastic and they are less than one inch tall. Madham is the name of the HO scale railroad town I built in my basement. It covers three Ping-Pong tables and nearly fills the biggest room in the basement.

Madham has 109 buildings, all scratch-built. There are two lakes, a football stadium, a cement plant, a hospital, two tunnels, a forest, and sixty feet of track. It has a population of 289 plastic people, seventeen dogs, six cows, and eleven horses. Madham is the perfect town. In fact, one of my goals is to live in Madham. Once I figure out how to make a few million dollars, I'll build a full-scale version of the town with real trains and real trees and real people. I think it would be a nice place to live.

I've been working on Madham for two years and eleven months now. I guess you could say that I'm not only disturbed, I'm obsessed.

M
y ability to focus on one thing at a time is the secret to my success. Other people do not have this talent. Let me tell you: I once peeled an entire bag of tangerines—seventeen of them—using only my fingernails, without losing one drop of juice. I lined up the peeled tangerines on the kitchen counter and they were as beautiful as any work of art. Mrs. Felko, my art teacher, would not agree with that. She and I have very different tastes. But I thought they were quite beautiful.

The special things I do are not always appreciated by my mother. She was upset about the tangerines. But
I still remember them: beautiful, naked, and soft orange, on green Formica.

I am like that with school assignments, too. That is, if the assignment interests me. I once was assigned to build a model windmill for science class. I made it out of Popsicle sticks, thread, wax paper, and copper wire. It actually worked. Math is also easy for me. It is all about focus and concentration. It is about doing exactly one thing at a time.

Andy understands the importance of focus. He knows how to focus when he is about to hit a golf ball, or when he is on stage in a play, or on the football field. Andy is a ferocious focuser. But he is not as good at it as I am. I can sit and watch a blade of grass grow. Andy, he can't do that for more than five minutes before he gets all itchy and has to get up and
do
something. Andy is a doer. Doing things is what he does.

One day—this was four years ago—Andy and I decided to build a treehouse in Peanut Woods. We call it Peanut Woods because it's right behind the Skippy peanut butter factory, and it always smells like peanut butter.

Peanut Woods is not a very good woods. It's big enough—about sixteen acres in size—but the ground is squishy and swampy, and except for a few cottonwoods, there aren't a lot of big trees, and in the summer the mosquitoes can be ferocious. Andy and I used to go there when we were kids and build campfires. Andy was very good at fires. He never needed more than one match. Starting with a few scraps of paper, leaves, and slender twigs, he would slowly feed it larger twigs, then broken
branches, then logs. The smoke kept the mosquitoes away. We would sit for hours, talking and watching the flames.

One big old cottonwood near the center of the woods was a perfect treehouse tree—the trunk went straight up for twenty-five feet, then three huge branches spread out from a single bulbous crotch. We found a pile of old crates and pallets behind the Skippy factory. Andy borrowed a saw, a hammer, a couple of boxes of nails, and some nylon rope from his dad's workshop, and we went to work.

We started out by cutting steps from the pallets and nailing them to the trunk, three long nails per step. Once we made it up to the crotch, we set up a pulley system to haul the boards up the tree. Andy stayed up there sawing and nailing while I stayed below and fed him fresh lumber. Most of the time, however, I worked on carving our initials in the trunk:

A.M.
D.M.H.

It took me hours to carve those initials, but I did a remarkable job. I stripped off a rectangular section of bark, carefully outlined each letter with the tip of my pocketknife, then began to carve. I did not have a very good knife back then, just an old two-blade jackknife my father had given me, but I worked on those letters until each one was neat and straight and perfect. And all the while Andy was up there sawing and pounding and every now and then shouting, “Look out below!” when he was about to drop something.

It took us two days to build the treehouse. It was three-sided, like a wedge of cheese, with a door in one wall, a window in each of the others, and a ceiling just high enough so we could stand up. We covered the floor with carpet samples. We found some wooden chairs and a table someone had thrown out. By the time we were done, it was just like a little triangle-shaped apartment.

The treehouse was a great place to hang out. Nobody knew about it but us.

A few months ago Andy and I visited the old cottonwood. The treehouse is just a few charred, broken, rotting boards stuck way up in the branches. But you can still read our initials on the trunk, just as clear and precise as the day I carved them. Andy thinks that's funny—he worked a whole day building the treehouse while I just carved our initials, but only the initials survived.

That is all you need to know about focus. If you take your time and do a job right, it can last forever.

M
y father owns seven identical gray suits, fifteen identical white dress shirts, three pairs of brown shoes, and twenty silk ties. Every tie is red and blue striped, but they are all different stripe patterns. Every year for his birthday I try to find a new variety of red-and-blue-striped silk tie. It can be quite challenging. One year I made a mistake and bought him a tie exactly like one he already owned, but he was very happy to get it because the old one had a coffee stain.

My father loves his suits. He even wears them on weekends. He wears a suit and tie to mow the lawn—although if it is really hot out, he will take off the jacket
and roll up his shirtsleeves. Our neighbors find this strange, but many of their behaviors are also quite interesting. Mr. Ness, for example, likes to get drunk and play his electric guitar in his garage and sing old Rolling Stones songs. I find that very strange indeed.

Like me, my father is extremely intelligent. He is a professor at the university. He has written fourteen books about economics. You can actually go into a bookstore and see several of his books on the shelf. And by the way, he has a very good reason for always wearing a suit. He says that he has so many decisions to make in his work that he has no time to make decisions every day about trivial matters such as what he wears. He wears the same thing every day so he never has to think about it. It makes perfect sense when you think about it logically.

My father leaves the house at 7:08 every morning. He walks seven blocks to the bus stop, where he boards the number 14 bus, which delivers him almost to the door of Keyes Hall at the university. He does not drive his car to work. He says cars are wasteful and unnecessary. You might disagree with that, but I would advise you not to argue the point with my father.

One day I went to work with him and watched what he did all day. I listened to him lecture about economics. It was highly enlightening. One thing that surprised me was how energetic and happy he seemed while he was lecturing. He even made some funny jokes, which he never does at home.

My father is normally very quiet and polite—as long as you don't argue with him. If you argue with him, he
becomes very loud. He has been known to shout. Every now and then he will have a disagreement with my mother. He makes his case in a highly logical and mostly indisputable fashion. For instance, a couple of months ago they disagreed about buying a new sofa. My father was against it. He presented his argument, his voice increasing in volume with each point.

“We do not
need
a new sofa, Andrea. First, our
existing
sofa is perfectly adequate. It is both comfortable and attractive. Second, a new sofa would
cost several hundred dollars
—OR MORE! Our financial resources are finite. Third, by DISCARDING the EXISTING sofa, we would be contributing to the EVER-INCREASING MASS OF HUMAN WASTE PRODUCTS THAT IS TAKING OVER THE SURFACE OF OUR PLANET! Furthermore,
I SEE NO REASON WHY WE SHOULD HAVE TO GO TO THE TIME AND TROUBLE TO GET USED TO A NEW PIECE OF FURNITURE THAT WE DO NOT NEED!”

By the time he delivered that last line, he was red-faced and pounding his left palm with his right fist.

My mother is used to my father's hyperlogical rages. She simply smiled and said, “I understand, dear.”

The next afternoon, while my father was at work, a truck from Wickes Furniture arrived at our house. Two men carried a new sofa into our living room. They removed the old sofa and added it to the ever-increasing mass of human waste products that is taking over the surface of our planet.

That night when my father arrived home, he walked
right past the new sofa without seeming to notice anything different. In fact, he hasn't said a word about the sofa since. Maybe he is choosing to ignore it, or maybe he is simply oblivious. Either way, I'm sure he has a very logical reason for his position.

B
est friends have secrets. Andy and I are no exception. Of course, I can't really discuss all of our secrets, because if I did they would not be secrets anymore. But I can tell about this one thing, because we got caught and so it is a secret no more. It is an
ex
-secret.

The secret I'm talking about, the secret that isn't a secret anymore, has to do with the Tuttle place on Redbud Road. Mrs. Tuttle, who was ninety-six years old at the time, died a few years ago. Andy and I were thirteen. After she died, her son Jack cleaned out her house and put up a
FOR SALE
sign. Every now and then somebody would look at the house, but it had so many
problems that no one wanted to buy it. The roof was rotten, the foundation was collapsing, the plumbing was rusted and leaky, and there were bats in the attic. Also, it was way down at the end of Redbud Road, with no other houses in sight.

The Tuttle place had been for sale for almost a year the day Andy and I broke in.

It was a chilly, breezy early spring afternoon. Andy and I were out walking and talking the way we always did. I was wearing a light windbreaker, and I was cold. We were walking by the Tuttle place when Andy noticed a window that hadn't been closed all the way.

“Let's go in and check it out,” he said. Or maybe it was me who said it. Actually, I'm pretty sure it was me.

We climbed in through the window. It was warmer inside. The sun was slanting in hard through the windows. The rooms were bright and clean and empty. Jack Tuttle had gotten rid of almost all the furniture, refinished the wood floors to a pale golden yellow, and painted all the walls bright white. I guess he thought maybe people would overlook the roof and the plumbing if the paint was fresh.

Andy and I wandered through the echoey spaces, a forbidden kingdom, clean and white and separate from the world. After we explored the whole house, we sat down in the middle of the biggest room in the house and talked for hours. While we talked, I carved a design in the maple floor next to the big stone fireplace. When Andy and I find a place that is important to us, we like to leave our mark. Maple is very hard wood, and difficult to carve, but I am very focused, and I always finish what I start.

The design I carved that afternoon is gone now, but I still remember its lines and curves as if I carved it yesterday. I had been working on it in my head for a long time. It became our sign, our secret mark, our sigil: