The Invisible Man’s Tricks Are All Variations on the Theme of Levitation

June 3, 2008

It’s not just that the invisible man will never see what he looks like in sunglasses and that he knows everything better than the back of his own hand and that his invisible skin can sting with the indignity of sunburn.

It’s that every room he is in remains empty. It’s that closing his eyes is nothing of the sort and all of his seeing is a kind of peeping. The rules of invisibility are unclear and maddening. Why do his clothes disappear but not the walls he leans against to listen to slow breathing of each apartment’s occupants? Why invisible glasses but not the random car he sits in singing softly along with the radio? What if he wore a suit of armor?

It’s that his origins are as invisible as he is, as is his eventual end. Did he come from nothing and will he return there? Did he have invisible parents? A translucent dog whose barking took the shape of memory?

Once the invisible man excitedly stalked a set of wet footprints on the sidewalk until they disappeared, imagining they belonged to one of his kind, also wandering, but they came to nothing. Then he fell in love with a girl who roller-bladed to the park every day and sat at the table right by the bushes he dozed within, her crazy ringlet curls stuffed partially, awkwardly in her helmet. He read her journal silently over her shoulder and whispered in her ear exactly what she wished to hear until she started shaking her head, saying "no. no. no." and committed herself to a locked ward and regimented medications that even the invisible man couldn’t sneak through.

When the invisible man dances even he can’t be sure that his feet touch the ground. When he runs he is taken for the wind. When he stomps in a puddle everyone around instinctively looks up at the sky. In the water he is a hollow splash.

The invisible man is alone and loneliness, by its nature, walks unseen suffering no light from sun or star.

Tags: AtRandom