Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (60 page)

Then, abruptly, she furrowed her brow.

“Why do you have a gun?”

“Oh… that’s not anything. It just happened to be there when… I just happen to have it.”

“Nick, is it true what you said this morning, that you have to die again?”

“As far as I know,” I said uncomfortably.

“What
do
you know exactly? Are you in touch with other ghosts?”

“I am definitely not in touch with other ghosts.”

“Well, is ‘ghost’ the right word for what you are? I mean, what are you exactly?”

I felt again the temptation to confide in her, to tell her everything. Too dangerous. I saw now that it had been wrong to come back at all. Tomorrow I would really have to leave for good. I could not afford to take these risks.

“Does it matter what I am? I could be anything. The Spirit of Christmas Past, a visitor from Venus, the devil—”

“I have to admit to a twinge of disappointment that you weren’t the devil. That would have been the most wickedly romantic, although I suppose the terror and the despair would be awfully wearing in the long run.”

“Or I might be like anyone else — a bookkeeper who happened to fall asleep under a defective sun lamp or who stumbled into the wrong vat on a tour of a chemical plant.”

“Well, that wouldn’t be very romantic at all. I think I definitely prefer you as a ghost. You said you had lived in the material world before in a normal human body. Isn’t that—”

“Yes, probably it’s best to think of me as a ghost.”

“Well, what can you tell me? I mean, about what happens when we die. Or what there is beyond the material world.”

“I can’t tell you anything. I don’t
know
anything.”

“Oh!” she gasped. “That’s such an extraordinary sensation — to feel a hand suddenly inside my clothing. Oh God.”

Buttons began to unbutton themselves.

“I know exactly what you are, you know.”

“You do?”

“You’re an incubus.”

“I am not an incubus.”

“It’s perfectly obvious that you’re an incubus. An incubus is a spirit that—”

“I know exactly what an incubus is — or would be, if there were such a thing — and incubatory functions regrettably constitute only a very small part of my activities.”

“Oh yes? Well, you seem pretty vague on the rest of your activities. In fact, incubusing seems to be the only thing you know anything at all about. Ohh! You see? That’s
just
the sort of thing an incubus does.”

I am the boy

Who can enjoy

Invisibility.

I
had absolutely resolved to leave for good in the morning, but somehow I found myself staying with Alice again that night, and the next night as well, until eventually, without there ever having been any decision taken or even any discussion of the matter, we both took for granted that I was living there. I told myself constantly that I should not be staying in one place and that I should above all not be putting myself at the mercy of another person. On the other hand, I also told myself that really I was safer now than before. I no longer had to worry each day about where I would sleep that night or whether I was walking into some trap prepared for me by Gomez. At least for the time being, I would be much harder to find. So long as Alice didn’t say anything to give me away. But although I remember that the question gnawed at me continually, it seems perfectly obvious, looking back at it now, that I could not possibly have done anything other than go on living with Alice.

She worked in the East Thirties as a commercial artist, and when the weather was good — and I remember it as a particularly clear, brilliant autumn — we would go out together in the morning, walking from her building on York Avenue down through the East Side to her studio. She would bump into me or lean against me as we walked, to confirm my presence, and she would frequently break into a smile.

“It’s so amazing. I mean walking down the street with you like this without anyone knowing.”

“Alice, you can’t talk to me in public like this.”

“It’s such an incredible secret. No one would ever believe it.”

“Just be sure you don’t give anyone the chance.”

I would usually spend those days in law offices or investment banks or corporate headquarters, performing my securities research, if it is fair to call it that. We kept a key hidden under the edge of the hall carpet so that I could always get back into the apartment, and when it rained I would stay home reading and listening to music — without ever having to worry about being heard by the neighbors.

Alice would pick up groceries on the way home from work. This was the first time since I had been driven from my own apartment that I had been free from constant hunger: suddenly I could eat and drink whatever I liked and as much as I liked rather than what I happened to find and could digest quickly. With Alice’s help I began to learn how to cook, and together we prepared elaborate dinners each night. I had Alice buy the most powerful sun lamp she could find, and I installed it in the bathroom so that I could go in and burn myself clear again whenever I needed to.

Those evenings we spent together in her apartment were the most pleasant I had known in my new life — or in my old life, come to think of it — and it seemed to me that I had everything I could ever have wished for. It is impossible for me to explain how wonderful it was just to be able to talk to another human being again. I would spend hours drawing Alice out about her childhood, her parents, her friends, her work, her opinions on popular music or Baroque painting or whatever I could find that she had an opinion about. And although for my part I was more interested in the intimacy than in the information itself, looking back on it now, I can see that it must have all seemed quite strange to Alice, as if she were the subject of some mysterious inquisition.

And the fact that I would not tell her anything about myself must have made it seem stranger still. It was bad enough that Alice knew about me at all and that I seemed, against my own better judgment, to be staying with her. But I could at least be careful not to give away any more about myself than I had to, and whenever she would ask me about my former life, I would immediately deflect the topic of conversation back to her. Even so, I could see that I must have been more careless than I thought, because she had somehow gathered that I had grown up and worked in New York and even that I had been in my present state for less than a year. No matter how fond you find yourself becoming of someone, I told myself, there is no reason to take them recklessly into your confidence and to put your fate in their hands. Especially not in the hands of someone who believes in ghosts.

That was in a way the thing that made me most uncomfortable — all the embarrassing nonsense about my being a ghost. And the more so since it seemed to constitute a major part of my appeal to Alice. Understandably, I suppose, she had many questions to put to me about other spiritual realms. The trouble was that I had no answers, and I felt foolish and more than a little guilty at the thought of inventing them, so that I found myself being more evasive than dishonest. Which, of course, did nothing to lessen Alice’s curiosity.

It was not long before Alice was bringing home books with titles like
Realms of Psychic Being
and
Astral Selves and Others.
For several days I managed to ignore it, but in the end I could not stop myself from commenting.

“Alice, I dread even asking this question, but why are you suddenly possessed to read about ghosts and voices from Beyond the Great Divide?”

“No reason. It just seemed like an interesting topic. I can’t think why I suddenly got the idea of reading about it.”

“Well, I notice that there weren’t any books like this in your library before I arrived, and I hate to think that I might be the cause of anyone reading this sort of thing.”

“Well, you know how it is. You go out with a plywood salesman and you want to read up on plywood. You start going out with a ghost and you find yourself getting all interested in ghosts.”

“Well, I can tell you that these books are a very poor source of information on this or any other subject.
Bridges to the Beyond.
This is nothing but the crudest superstition.”

“Nick, have you ever considered that by not believing in ghosts, you put yourself in a kind of awkward position?”

“Alice, have you ever heard of Occam’s razor?”

“Yes, I have. And in my opinion it cuts a little too close for someone in your situation.”

“And what about this?
The Hermeneutics of Ghosts and Apparitions: A Psychocultural Approach.
This doesn’t even rise to the level of superstition. It genuinely distresses me to see you reading these books.”

“Well, I might not have to rely on them, if I had some other source of information. Perhaps you’d like to recommend some more authoritative source. Or you might even consider telling me something about yourself.”

“There is, unfortunately, nothing to tell. What you see is what you get.”

A
t first we stayed home every evening, there being no reason I could think of ever to go anywhere else. But the telephone would often ring, and I would hear Alice saying, “No. No, I’m really sorry, but I can’t… No, I’m seeing someone — sort of… No, it’s not that. It is serious… I’d love to have you meet him, but we just can’t on the seventeenth… Why don’t we give you a call… Sure. Bye.”

“You know, Alice,” I said, “maybe you shouldn’t be turning down all these invitations. You ought to get out more and see your less ethereal friends.”

“You think you’d like to have dinner with Myra and Bob?”

“I’m not having dinner with anyone except you. But I’m beginning to worry that you’ll go stir-crazy sitting home every evening. It’s an entirely selfish concern. I’m afraid it will make you cranky and difficult to live with.”

She said nothing but walked over to her drawing table and, frowning, made some impatient strokes with her pencil. It seemed to me that she might be annoyed or unhappy, although I find that there is no way of knowing such things with any certainty.

But I decided that I had to do whatever I could to make our curious life together as normal as possible, and so at the end of October I had Alice accept an invitation to a Halloween costume ball. She chose to dress herself as a witch, with a black robe and cape, which only set off the wholesome radiance of her features, and a black conical hat, from under which masses of strawberry blond hair spilled out incongruously. But her smile, when it revealed those savagely pointed canines, really did seem to have a magical quality. Bewitching.

Whereas I, showing a lack of judgment which still takes my breath away whenever I think of it, had Alice wrap yard upon yard of white gauze bandaging around my head, leaving only two little slits for the eyes. In some thrift shop she found an old suit that fit passably, and she made a trip to Brooks Brothers for gloves, socks, shoes, and a shirt and tie. When I got everything on I looked just like Claude Rains doing H. G. Wells. I might as well have worn a sign saying “Invisible Man.”

Alice found the whole thing in poor taste. “Why do you always want to make yourself less interesting than you really arc? You could be anything. Why pretend you’re a bad chemical experiment? And besides, I’m the only one who can get the joke.”

It was actually quite an uncomfortable arrangement. It was difficult to breathe, and I finally decided to puncture the bandaging at each of my nostrils. Speaking was even more awkward, but there was nothing at all I could do about that. My voice was muffled and probably sounded a bit sinister, and the bandaging over my mouth became almost immediately wet, so that by the end of the evening my lips were rubbed raw. But worst of all were the eyes. If I stood where a light shone toward the slits, you could see straight into what seemed to be an empty cavity where my head should be. A sickening sight. But Alice bought me a pair of mirror sunglasses, and I bent the metal frame back so that no one could see in from the sides.

I think there must have been something compelling about my appearance, because as Alice and I walked across the East Side through streets filled with Halloween costumes of every sort, I got many admiring looks and several compliments. And although I was already discomforted by the wetness of the bandaging over my mouth and nose, and I had trouble seeing through my dark glasses in the lamplight, I was exhilarated by the experience of being seen once again by other people and once again occupying a full human place in the world. I found myself striking up pointless conversations with other passers-by in fancy dress and giving away all of Alice’s change to trick-or-treating children.

At the ball itself I attracted less attention, since it was a benefit for something called the New York Institute of the Arts, and many of the several hundred guests had created fabulous costumes for themselves. Alice seemed to know an extraordinary number of people there, and as she led me gradually across the room, introducing me to her friends, I could feel her quivering with delight at my side — delight, presumably, at the magnitude and audacity of our secret.

“This is my fiancé, Nick Cheshire.”

“Nice to meet you, Nick. Congratulations. Wonderful girl, Alice.”

“I was beginning to wonder why we never see her anymore…”

“Good to meet you, Nick. That’s great about you and Alice. We’ll have to get the two of you over for dinner. Can you—”

“Nick’s living in San Francisco, so we hardly ever—”

“Tell me, Alice,” said a girl dressed, I think, as some sort of nymph or fairy queen — it was difficult to tell exactly, as she was virtually naked — “what sort of pig have you got in that poke? Is he good-looking?” Titania, or whoever she was, winked at me and reached up for my glasses, pressing into my side a bare breast onto which several small golden spangles had been pasted at random.

“‘Good looking’ isn’t the word for it,” said Alice as we spun out of Titania’s reach and off across the dance floor through crowds of pirates, angels, vampires, and gangsters.