The Visible Man Part 2

Q: Did you use this suit to enter people's homes?

A: Yes. To observe them. This was a scientific endeavor. I've stated this countless times. I wasn't robbing them, if that's what you're suggesting. I'm not a thief. I wasn't peeping for thrills. I'm no peeper. Is that what you're suggesting? That I'm some kind of thieving peeper?

Q: I'm not suggesting that. But I do need to ask one more question. Can I a.s.sume, or would it be safe to say, that the reason you have contacted me is to talk about how the process of using this invisibility suit to spy on strangers has negatively impacted your day-to-day life?

A: Yes. Yes. Yes! Have I been talking to myself for the past two months? Why are you asking me to explain the only things I've already explained at length?

[At this point I made a request for Y____to come in to my office in person. I tell him that I can no longer help him over the telephone.]

What? Why? Where is this coming from? What will that accomplish? I thought we agreed on this. There were certain terms I outlined as imperative. Relatively speaking, this seemed like a minor one. You've expressed no problem having these conversations in this style. It's never been an issue. I'm more comfortable on the telephone. It allows me to think more clearly. And ... it's more convenient. I'm a busy person. Don't you realize I'm a busy f.u.c.king person? Why do I need to come to your office and sit there like some housewife with postpartum depression? I'm not going to do it.

[In response, I give Y____ a host of valid reasons why face-to-face meetings would be to our advantage: they're more intimate, nonverbal language has significance, trust cannot be galvanized over the phone, etc. These are all fake reasons, but I express them out of courtesy.]

That's horses.h.i.+t. That's fiction. You would have mentioned those things immediately if they were true. You have an ulterior motive here. Your lies are transparent. What are you trying to get for yourself? Is it that you want to see the suit with your own horsey eyes? Or is it that you want to not see this "Invisible Man" you can't stop yourself from mentioning? Are you falling in love with me? Are you falling in love with some childish notion of an invisible man? The Invisible Man is not real, Vicky. It was a book. There is no such creature. You need to come to grips with that. I'm just a person. You've seen men like me before. Don't you have a husband? Try loving your husband.

[I ask him to remain calm. I tell him this is a professional decision, not a personal one.]

But a professional decision would be based on reason. It would be built on specifics, and those specifics would be clear to both of us. You're communicating through abstractions. Your arguments are horses.h.i.+t-you're just throwing around buzzwords to sound like you're not making an arbitrary, personal choice. Which, I would argue, is exactly what you're doing. If you can't tell me the real reason you want to meet with me in person, I don't see how my doing so could be helpful.

[On this point, I concede that Y____ is correct. I apologize. I proceed to tell him my actual reasoning for wanting a face-to-face meeting: It's because I do not believe the things he is telling me, and I suspect he needs a different kind of help. I tell him that he is not a bad person and that I can sense his intellect, but that his intellect is the reason he came to me in the first place-he knows that he has significant mental health issues. As such, he also knows it's not too late to become the man he used to be. I tell him that I am probably not the person who can provide that help, but that I can connect him to someone who can. Again, I reinforce the likelihood that he already knows I'm right about this. Y____ listens without interrupting, and then he says this:]

This is interesting, Vic-Vick. I'm surprised to hear you state your feelings so directly. I'm not surprised you thought these things, but I am very surprised you said them. I'm actually impressed. I've kind of been waiting for this.

I've told you who I am and I've told you why I called you. And you don't believe me. You think, "This is some kind of new insanity." Or maybe you think it's just the old insanity, repackaged as bad television. This is what your mind is telling you to believe. You view yourself as a therapist, which-in a broad sense, from your perspective-makes you a certain type of scientist. A rationalist. You view yourself a rational being who a.s.sists other people in driving their flawed relations.h.i.+ps toward rationality. That's essentially your job, isn't it? Your job is to talk to people who see their lives irrationally, and you try to coax them toward a rational balance. You can't tell them how to feel or how to think, even if that's what they want. You can only ask them leading questions that force them to talk to themselves. "If they could just hear what they themselves are saying," you think to yourself, "they'd see how their view of the world is skewed." That the view they hold is unrealistic, or maybe unnaturally personal. In order to do what you do, this is how you need to think. So when I call you up on the telephone, and I tell you I've done these unbelievable things, and I explain how I am unlike every other person you've ever met, you can't accept what I say. Your whole self-ident.i.ty tells you that my unbelievable stories are literally unbelievable, and that I'm just a normal person with a delusion. So you ask me to come to your office. You want to prove to yourself that I have a different problem than the one I've outlined over the past two months. Now, honestly, I think you know that everything I've told you is true. I don't think I've said one thing that you don't believe. But there's no way you can admit that. It would make your own relations.h.i.+p with rationality unmanageable. So maybe you want to avoid the collision. Maybe you think if you demand my physical presence, I will refuse to comply, thereby ending our relations.h.i.+p on your terms. Or maybe you think I will show up at your office door and admit that this has been an elaborate hoax, perpetrated by one of your colleagues, and you will be a little embarra.s.sed and a little relieved. You're in a peculiar position right now: You can't believe what you believe. And you want to void that feeling, so you're changing the rules. This is by no means irrational. I understand completely. I do it all the time.

Let me tell you a story. I don't know if it will help you understand where we're at, but I'm going to try nonetheless. It happened in Cleveland. This was a few years ago. Three years ago, if I recall correctly. I spent four months in Cleveland, following a variety of random Clevelanders. This was difficult, because absolutely everyone in Cleveland drives. It's like L.A. It was hard to find a decent mark, because I'd have to find an unlocked car in the afternoon, wait in the vehicle for several hours, and then stow away in the backseat while they drove home. Then I'd have to figure out a way inside their house, and-very often-the homes would be in suburban areas, like Lakewood or Mayfield or Cleveland Heights. The upside to this was that it's much easier to sneak into a freestanding home than into an apartment, because modern houses have a lot of vulnerable openings. The mechanics are pretty simple. But the downside to watching someone in a suburb is that you're often trapped in the middle of nowhere. If things went wrong, it would take forever to get back to the center of the city, which is where I was temporarily living. Sometimes I'd have to walk the whole way back, because there's really no public transportation in Cleveland and I didn't like the risk involved with stealing cars. But these details don't matter right now. What I want to talk about is a particular guy I watched for almost a week. His name was Bruce.

I first noticed Bruce at a bar. Bars are good places to begin following someone. If the person you start following is already a little drunk, you can take more risks. For example, it's easy to sneak into a really intoxicated person's vehicle: All you have to do is trip them while they're opening the driver's side door. You just step on their outside foot and push them down with your shoulder, all in one motion. It doesn't matter if they feel something pus.h.i.+ng them-they inevitably a.s.sume it's their own fault. Drunks always blame themselves. If a drunk person can't see who knocked him down, he immediately a.s.sumes he's just more wasted than he thought. Sometimes they lie on the ground and laugh at themselves, because drunkards love being drunkards. It feels great to be drunk, right? That's when you slip into the pa.s.senger seat. Granted, you then have to ride home with a person who's too drunk to realize he was just a.s.saulted. It's sketchy. But people are good at driving drunk, especially in Cleveland. That's another thing I learned-drunk-driving laws are way too stringent in this country. Or at least they are in Ohio.

I didn't even have to knock Bruce down, though. He required no work at all. I found him in an Irish pub, late in the afternoon. It was autumn. The sun was low. He was having drinks with a few people he worked with-it was easy to figure out what was happening, because they all got to the bar at the same time and they were all dressed identically. There were five of them, all men, all in their late twenties. I watched them through a window and tried to figure out which one I wanted to trail. Two of them had wedding rings, so they were immediately out. Remember: I watch people when they're alone. That's my thing. Of the three who remained, I thought two looked like viable candidates; the third guy was too handsome and gregarious, so I a.s.sumed he was either in a preexisting relations.h.i.+p or sleeping with a whole bunch of random hookups. I wasn't interested in those scenarios. I wanted people who looked like they had no important friends. Bruce fit the equation. Bruce had that sad, distant stare of a man who missed college too much. So did the guy sitting next to him. Neither one talked much as the group drank three or four beers. None of the five got drunk. They all left together, at the same time. My initial plan focused on the other loner-the quiet guy who wasn't Bruce. He just seemed swarthier and weirder-he had a strange haircut and thicker eyegla.s.ses. He looked like someone who might have played in a ska band when he was sixteen. Bruce's princ.i.p.al upside was that he had less character. Bruce was just an American guy. Nothing about him was obvious.

Now, because my original target was not authentically intoxicated, and because it was still dusk, my best option was to distract him when he opened his driver's side door. I was going to wait until he started to climb into the driver's seat, and then I was going to kick the back fender of his Nissan as hard as I could. My hope was that he'd get out of the car to check on the mysterious thud, and then I'd scoot around and jump in the vehicle while the door remained ajar. My life is filled with these kinds of momentary misdirections. They only work twenty-five percent of the time, but how else can I do it? It's all trial and error. This time, however, I got absurdly lucky: Before I even had a chance to put my plan into action, Bruce opened the door of his own car and just absentmindedly walked away from it. Left it wide open for at least fifteen or twenty seconds. He opened his car door, walked over to one of his drinking partners, and said, "So, are we going to make this trade or not?" The other guy said something along the lines of, "I don't know, man. Anquan Boldin always gets hurt. Let me look at the schedule and think it over." It was too easy. By the time Bruce turned his ignition key, I was already in the backseat. Bruce was oblivious. Oblivious Bruce. I would say it was like taking candy from a baby, but babies scream. This was easier.

We finally arrive at his house, which is way the f.u.c.k out in somewhere I'd never even heard of. Most single twenty-five-year-old men don't own four-bedroom houses that are seventy-five minutes from the office, but Bruce did. He was an odd one. Bruce parks in the garage and waddles inside. I follow about five minutes later. The screen door isn't locked. He's already at the computer, masturbating. That might seem perverse, but you'd be amazed how common this is: Men get home, change clothes, and m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e. There's nothing remotely s.e.xual about it. They just need to get it out of the way. It's like taking out the trash. I've probably watched three hundred different guys m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e, and not one of them seemed to enjoy it. I'm sure they did, but you wouldn't know by looking at them. I don't even think that p.o.r.nography plays a particularly important role. It simply saves them a little time. Men are so lazy. They're too lazy to imagine naked women.

Anyway ... so now I'm inside his house. This is always the most thrilling moment, because it means everything worked. I always spend so much mental energy trying to get into this position that I never know what to do with myself once I'm actually inside. I always want to celebrate, to congratulate myself for being so G.o.dd.a.m.n clever. But I can't. I just have to find a comfortable spot in a corner and sit down. I have to control my breathing. I have to keep it shallow. I also need to prepare myself for the inevitability of utter boredom: Very often, single people don't do s.h.i.+t. They do nothing, all night long. They sit in a recliner and watch TV. I've probably watched more television than anyone you've ever met, and I don't even own one. Terrible shows, good shows. Golf tournaments in Cancun. C-SPAN. Hours of Oprah. Law and Order. Lonely people love Law and Order, for whatever reason. They prefer the straight narratives. They'll also rent the entire run of a TV series on Netflix, and they tend to rent whatever Netflix promotes as popular. I'm pretty sure I've seen every episode of The Wire, but never in the proper sequence. I have no f.u.c.king clue what's supposed to be going on there.

Bruce is a different kind of guy, though. Bruce doesn't watch TV-he owns an awesome one, but he never turns it on. Bruce is one of these people who lives on the Internet. He has a house full of leather furniture, but he spends the whole evening in his desk chair. He plays RISK over the Internet for hours-he'll have sixty or seventy games happening simultaneously, all against strangers he'll never meet in person. He steals music constantly-he'd rip a live Paul Simon alb.u.m, listen to the first track for thirty seconds, and then never play it again. He follows a bunch of political blogs and seems to comment on every post, usually with bitter sarcasm but sometimes with an LOL. He looks at YouTube clips and types terse, lowercase critiques of any videos that underwhelm him. His updates his Facebook page about ten times a night and elects to "like" some photo of a dead porcupine lying next to an empty champagne bottle. He never reads books, but he put a lot of effort into a website called goodreads.com: He looks at other people's reviews on Amazon and writes his own reviews from whatever he gleans. Bruce has, relative to a lot of the other people I observed, a relatively rich life. He isn't dark or depressed, or at least he wasn't while I was there. Never sighed, never cried. But I noticed one omnipresent aspect about his online activity: It was constantly interrupted by Bruce's ongoing attempt to write an e-mail. One e-mail, to one person. He would open his e-mail account, type a few sentences, delete a few sentences, and then close it back down and do something else. At first, I thought he was writing a bunch of different e-mails to a bunch of different recipients, but it turned out that he was only working on one. It was a single e-mail to one woman, maybe a hundred words long. The woman's name was Sarah. He would work on this e-mail like it was a sculpture. He'd type, "Long time no talk," and then he'd delete that and write, "Been a long time since we talked." Then he'd delete that and type, "It's been awhile, no?" Completely innocuous stuff, but he'd type different variations of these words and pace around his living room, saying these phrases aloud, testing them out. He kept trying to craft a joke about how his job was more boring than her job, but he was obviously paralyzed by the prospect of offending her. During the first night I was there, he probably built and rebuilt that e-mail five hundred times-yet he never worked on it for more than five consecutive minutes. He'd add something or delete something, and then he'd go back to the Internet to waste another quarter of an hour. He'd always return to the e-mail, fixate over its contents for another five minutes, and repeat the process all over. He finally sent the message at about two a.m., and when he did, it was the most bland, nonmeaningful letter you can imagine. I read it over his shoulder. Nothing romantic, nothing humorous, nothing clever. Zero insight. I watch him punch the "send" b.u.t.ton. Bruce sits motionless and breathes through his mouth. It's like he's watching a person die in a hospital bed: He wants to do something, but there's nothing to do. So he ends up doing the only thing anyone can do once they've sent a message they can't stop thinking about: He goes back and rereads his own sent e-mail for another forty-five minutes, parsing and reparsing every line like it's the book of Revelation. It was excruciating. I felt terrible for him. It was eating him alive. He was eating himself alive. I was so relieved when he went to bed.

The next morning he wakes up early. He drinks a 7:05 Dr. Pepper for breakfast and checks his e-mail. He has dozens of messages, but nothing he cares about. Most are left unread. He leaves for work. I stay behind. I immediately turn on his computer, a.s.suming a man who lives alone will not have his e-mail account protected by a pa.s.sword. But Bruce is the kind of man who does. I suppose the kind of guy who buys a four-bedroom home in order to spend his nights in a desk chair is the same kind of guy who protects his e-mail from roommates who don't exist. I look through his desk drawers and find nothing personal. He has a photo alb.u.m in his bedroom, but almost all the photos look like they were taken during the same fraternity party. I look for anything that might indicate who Sarah is, but there's nothing. No trace. Outside of his hard drive, there's nothing in this house to indicate that Bruce is alive.

The day drags. Bruce arrives home at roughly the same time as yesterday. He walks in the door and checks his e-mail. He goes upstairs to change clothes, strolls back down, and rapidly m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.es. Today is yesterday. He boils a few hot dogs and eats them at his desk, wrapping them in white bread and smearing the meat with chili sauce. He starts playing RISK. He leaves some comments on the political blogs. The only difference is that, tonight, he's no longer composing a hundred-word e-mail a hundred different ways; tonight, all he does is check his in-box. He checks it constantly. It's robotic, mechanical. Bruce knows a lot of keyboard shortcuts-he can check and close his e-mail in less than two seconds, and he does so incessantly. He gets messages every hour, but not the one he wants. He downloads Billy Squier's Don't Say No, listens to half of "In the Dark," and then he checks his in-box. He attacks Alaska from Kamchatka, and then he checks his in-box. He reads a blog post about China's environmental policy, follows a Wikipedia link to a list of prominent Chinese entertainers, puts a doc.u.mentary about Yao Ming into his Netflix queue, and then he checks his in-box.

He shows no emotion while compulsively rereading the message he wrote the night before. I sit on the floor right next to him, unseen; we both reread his letter to Sarah. Neither of us sees anything worth rethinking. Around two thirty a.m., he gives up and goes to bed. When he checks his e-mail the next morning, there's still no reply. He drinks his morning Dr. Pepper and leaves for work. I was in that house for five days, and Sarah never responded. It was probably the only thing he thought about, despite the fact that he was technically thinking about twenty-five other problems.

Now, what do you think this means, Vic-Vick? Why do you think I told you this story?

I told you this story because I'm curious about what element you view as meaningful. What part of Bruce's life do you consider to be most important? In my view, Bruce was living three lives. He had his exterior life, which was composed of day-to-day work and shallow friends.h.i.+ps: This was his job, the people he had beers with, all the normal daily filler. This exterior life was boring and unsatisfying-I suppose I can't prove that he didn't like his day job, but that's the impression I got. Now, he also had a second life, on the Internet-a life that was simultaneously unreal and fulfilling. It was a life he controlled completely, and it was the means for his escape from the boredom of being a normal person with normal responsibilities. But he also had a third life-this hyperinterior life, within his own mind, where he incessantly imagined an intimate, online relations.h.i.+p with Sarah. A life where his first life and his second life were intertwined. Every time he wrote and rewrote that e-mail, he was activating that relations.h.i.+p inside his imagination and fighting the natural, irrational urge to become fixated on a person he didn't really know. I mean, Bruce was a sane man: He knew his connection to Sarah was not real unless she responded to his e-mail, and he knew he'd be living like a crazy person if he just sat at a desk with his arms crossed, staring at his static in-box. So Bruce used the Internet to normalize his abnormal existence. As long as Bruce was engaged with his computer, it was not unusual to check and recheck his in-box, or to write and rewrite a single e-mail. That's what people do when they're sitting at a computer: They mult.i.task and they daydream and they think about everything at once. One can easily fold obsessive self-absorption into the process of online communicating. In other words, the Internet was doing two things for Bruce-it allowed him to separate from the exterior life he hated, but also allowed him to stay engaged with an interior life he wanted. It was, ultimately, the single most important aspect of who he was: It removed his present-tense unhappiness while facilitating the possibility for future joy. It made the dark part of his mind smaller, but it made the optimistic part limitless. It added what he needed to affix and subtracted what he hoped to destroy. And maybe this was bad for Bruce's humanity, but I think it was probably good. I think it took a mostly sad man and made him mostly happy. The degree of authenticity doesn't matter.

Right?

Here's the bottom line, Vicky: You are an Internet. What the Internet did for Bruce, you do for me. You are the bridge through which I mind the gap between my exterior and interior life. Now, judging from what you've told me, you don't believe my exterior life is real. You think my exterior life is my interior life, and that I'm making up a delusion to compensate for some other problem. Personally, I don't care that this is what you believe. You don't need to believe what I tell you. My self-esteem doesn't hinge on whether you think I'm a reliable patient. I don't care what you think of me and I never have. I never will. But right now, I need this experience. I need to have you in my life, because you act as the control. I want to upload these images into someone who isn't me. And if the only way to make this happen is to meet with you in person, face-to-face ... well, then I will do it. I will come to your office, because I want to keep talking and I don't want to start over with someone else.

Give me your address.

END OF PHONE SESSION 3.

NOTES: On balance, I'm cla.s.sifying today's conversation with Y____ as a success (albeit a strange one). He is coming into my office next week, or at least that's what he claims. That was my goal, and my goal was achieved. But this does not feel like a win. My confidence is shaken. I should not admit this (even to myself), but it's the truth. I feel uneasy with Y____'s casual aggression. Was Y____ describing himself when he told the story of Bruce? That's my gut feeling, but such a diagnosis seems imperfect. Did he make the whole thing up? His details oscillate between unnaturally specific and uselessly general. Was I wrong to accuse him of lying? It seemed like the honest move, but perhaps I've lost his trust. In general, I'm losing my grip on this process. Y____ is either fabricating his story out of whole cloth or completely believes these falsehoods to be true-I must keep both of those possibilities at the front of my mind at all times, and I need to keep them intellectually equal. He's articulate, but I can't let his articulation bully me. Perhaps I need to accept that I'm scared of this patient. I still look forward to talking with Y____ every week, but part of me is frightened. I don't think I'm very good at my job. Does Y____ know this? I fear that he does. I should have made different choices with my life. This is not something I'm good at.7

PART 2.

THE SECOND INTRODUCTION.

I was physically introduced to Y____ in the most standard of ways: There was a knock at my office door, and I told the knocker to enter. The entrance swung open and a man stepped into the room. I knew who he was before he told me. There were no surprises.

He was a man. A strange-looking man, but nothing more.

He was tall and he was thin. Cadaverous. Perhaps six feet five or six feet six, but no more than 175 pounds. His head was a skull on a stick; it was shaved to the skin, but I could see a subtle shadow where his hair would sprout. The hairline was receding. He wore an oversized black T-s.h.i.+rt, khaki pants, and garish white tennis shoes. His arms were wiry and unnaturally long. His nose was large, as were his Adam's apple and his ears. His teeth were jagged and yellow. "Ichabod Crane," I thought to myself. "He looks like an actor auditioning for the role of Ichabod Crane." It was a sweltering day in May, but he was barely sweating. I can recall this because I asked him where he had parked his car (at the time, I was in the midst of a minor parking dispute with a neighboring office building and lived in constant fear that my patients might get towed). He mentioned that he had arrived on foot. I could not imagine how a man in a black T-s.h.i.+rt could walk any distance in the 90-degree Texas heat without perspiring, but Y____ was immune. When he shook my hand, it was cool and dry, like a brick from the cellar.

I turned on the tape recorder.

When I treat patients in my office, I never sit behind my desk. The desk creates a barrier, and barriers are the enemy. Instead, I sit in a white Eames chair. My patients have the option of sitting in an identical black Eames chair or on the couch. No one ever takes the couch, particularly during their first session (too overt). Y____ looked at both options and requested that he sit in my chair. I said, "No, that's not how things work here." I don't know why I used those specific words. Y____ asked, "Does it matter where I sit? Can't I sit in the white chair?"

"If it doesn't matter," I responded, "then why not sit in the black chair, like everyone else who comes here?"

"Because I have a preference," said Y____. "I prefer white objects. If I express a preference for white objects, why not allow me to sit in the white chair?"

"Perhaps I have my own preference," I said.

"Do you have a preference?"

"Yes. I prefer the white chair. The white chair is my preference."

"Then by all means, take the white chair," said Y____. "I would never interfere with your preference."

We both sat. I smiled. He smiled back, but only for a moment.

"So here I am," he said. "You wanted to see me, and now you have. This is your office, and I am here. I'm in your office."

"You are," I said. "Thank you for coming in. It's really nice to see you."

"Yes, yes. Of course. Of course it's nice. Let's talk about how nice it is. This is a wonderful office-you have plants, carpeting, a relatively quiet air conditioner. It's contemporary in a cla.s.sic way, or perhaps vice versa. Can we get to work now? Or do we still need to have a pretend conversation about how much your rent is?"

"We can absolutely get to work," I said. "That's a good att.i.tude. I've really been enjoying our work thus far. The progress has been, you know-progressive. But let me ask you something, before we get going: You mentioned that you liked white objects. That's an interesting thing to like."

"No it isn't."

"Well, what if I think it's interesting?"

"What if I think it's not? There's no meaning here, Vicky. My affinity for the color white doesn't say anything about me. Look, we're not going to do this. You need to accept that. I already understand the process. We both understand the process. I don't need to slowly grow comfortable with the conceit, and you don't need to understand why I like white objects. Let's get to the provocation. Let's start with what matters: You think I'm telling a fictional story. Your stomach tells you that I'm telling the truth, but your mind insists your stomach is crazy. I've been thinking about this all week. When we last spoke on the phone, I realized I misspoke. I said that I didn't care if you believed me. That's not accurate. That was my mistake. What I meant to say is that I don't care if you think I'm an honest person. I don't care if you think I'm a good person or a bad person. But I do need you to believe the specific things I've told you. If you don't believe I've done the things I've done, it will derail our conversation. You will hear everything I say as an extension of a delusion, and the content will get ignored. I will say things like, 'I once saw Event A happen to Subject Zed,' and you will wonder, 'What is his inner motive for telling that particular story about this particular fabrication? What does this story represent?' But that won't be what's happening. Anything I elect to tell you won't be theoretical or metaphorical. It will be something real that happened in my life. So I need you to believe that what I've said-and what I will continue to say-is not untrue."

Y____ stood up from the chair, jarringly, throwing himself upward by pus.h.i.+ng down on the armrests. It was like watching a giraffe awaken from a tranquilizer. "May I walk about," he asked. He began to pace around the room, erratically, looking down at the floor while gesturing with his hands. This behavior is what I'd come to cla.s.sify as "the Y____ Character." Whenever Y____ became "the Y____ Character," his dialogue would feel rehea.r.s.ed. It was like watching a one-man show. Though I'd already experienced several of these moments over the phone, this was the first time I witnessed it with my eyes. Over time, I've come to accept that the Y____ Character was (probably) the real Y____. It was everything else that was (probably) the show.

"So how can we do this?" Y____ continued. He loved semirhetorical questions. "How can I make you believe me? What could I do, short of being cloaked in front of you, to make you accept my words at face value?"

"That's an intriguing question," I said. "Maybe it's an impossible thing for me to accept. So if I never accept this, how will it make you feel?"

"Vicky, we're not doing this," he said. "We're not doing some kind of exercise where I make a declarative statement and you ask me how I feel about that declaration. We're not going to talk about my development or my primal memories. Maybe we will eventually, but not today. Right now, today, I need you to tell me how I can make you believe I'm not like other people. That I can do things other people cannot."

He stopped pacing and looked at me, frozen, waiting, saying nothing. The moment I began to respond, he commenced his pace.

"If there were some witnesses to this partial invisibility," I said, "and those witnesses came in here and verified what you had said, honestly and scientifically, I might believe you."

"There are no witnesses to my life," Y____ said. "That's one of the keys to being unseen: If there are witnesses, something went wrong. So what else?" His pacing continued.

"Video evidence," I said. "A videotape of you doing something that only an invisible person could do."

"That would prove nothing," said Y____. This was a game to him. "I could fake that with any computer. And even if my video was perfect-even if it was so seamless and unimpeachable that it couldn't be faked by a moviemaker-you'd still a.s.sume it was somehow unreal. You would merely think it was the best fake you've ever seen. You'd believe I was David Fincher before you'd accept who I actually am. Try again."

"Any reported evidence that this could be done. A Wall Street Journal article that describes your research. A textbook about the process."

"There is no such article or textbook," said Y____. "I would be the only person who could write it."

"Maybe you should do that."

"Not my thing. Not anymore. I hate writing."

Y____ returned to the black chair. He was smirking. I asked if he wanted coffee. He said he didn't want coffee or need coffee. He seemed calm, smug. Not very adult. More like a high school senior in the final days of May.

"Well, what about this," he finally said. "What if you just considered everything I've told you and weighed that information against the degree to which I seem credible?"

"That's what I've been doing," I told him. "From the first day you called me on the telephone, I've been calculating that very equation. I've taken what you've said at face value, and I've considered the source. I've tried to be as open-minded and nonjudgmental as possible. I've taken all your statements seriously and professionally, and I've come to a conclusion. Do you want to know what that conclusion is?"

"Yes."

"Are you sure? Do you promise to be as open-minded and fair with me as I have been with you? Because that's essential."

"Yes, yes. Yes."

"Then my diagnosis is this," I said, as evenly as possible. "You are an educated, affluent, highly functioning person who has experienced a break from the life you used to live. You have become obsessed with an imaginary life, and you use your natural intellect as a crutch to make that imaginary life real. This allows you to ignore the pain that still exists from whatever caused that break to happen."

I waited for a reaction, but he said nothing. His expression did not change.

"Now, that probably sounds very bad to you, and perhaps even insulting," I continued. "I can't tell if you already know I'm right, or if you're about to walk out my door and never speak to me again. Obviously, I have no control over what you do or how you react. But this is a solvable problem. Your very presence in my office proves you understand that. You want to get better, and you know that a better life is possible. So here is what I want to do: I want both of us to get in my car and drive to Seton Medical Center. They don't have to admit you and you won't need to stay overnight. However, they will conduct a short interview and a few tests in order to decide what the next step should be. From that point on, it's totally your decision. There are people there who are better suited to deal with this situation than me. If you want to continue using me as your primary therapist, that would be fantastic. I enjoy working with you, and I care about what happens to you. But you need to talk to a medical doctor, and I am not a medical doctor."

Y____ waited until I finished. He wordlessly thought about what I had said (and seemed to treat my words seriously). But then he stood up and resumed pacing, instantly rematerializing as the Y____ Character. It was as if I had said nothing at all.

"What about this," he began. "What if I told you something I couldn't possibly know? What if I knew something that could only be known by someone who was able to make themselves unseen?"

"I'm not sure what that would be, and I'm not sure what that would prove."

"You read a Malcolm Gladwell book last year," Y____ said.

"What?"

"You read a Malcolm Gladwell book. Last winter. Try and tell me that you didn't read a Malcolm Gladwell book last winter."

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"That happened. Right? It happened. So how do I know this?"

"What Malcolm Gladwell book did I read?"

"I can't remember. One of them. The first one, or maybe the other one. The third one? All the covers look the same to me."

"So, the fact that I read a book by one of the most popular writers in America, an author who sells several million books every year-this proves you have the ability to be invisible?"

"Well, I would have liked to use a more specific example. But you don't seem to read many books."

"So, what ... are you implying that you've been watching me? Is that what you're claiming? Because that's a crime. Be careful what you say right now, Y____. Don't make up a story that will create a new problem for us."

"Well, that's why I only mentioned the Gladwell book," Y____ said. "I don't want to scare you. If I told you something too specific-if I told you the color of your living room carpet, for example-you'd probably freak out. I'm not going to freak you out."

"What is the color of my living room carpet, Y____?"

He said nothing. Maybe he smiled, but I can't be certain.

"There's a reason you're not telling me the color of my living room carpet," I explained. "And the reason is not that you don't want to scare me. The reason is that you don't know what the color of my carpet is. Now, maybe you think you know, or maybe you know you don't know. I can't tell. Right now, that's our problem. And this is why we need to go to Seton Medical. This-this scenario, right here. This thing we are dealing with, right now. This incongruity. This is the problem. Not your guilt over spying on people, not the stress from being an 'almost invisible' man. Nothing that involves the outside world. Our problem is the chasm between who you are and who you want to be. Everyone deals with this problem, Y____. Everyone. You are not alone. Half the work I do with my other patients is about the difference between who someone is and who they wish they were. The only difference here is the degree. You have a fixable problem. Your condition just happens to be a little more severe than what I typically encounter. But I am on your side here. Do you see that? I want to help you."

For the next thirty seconds, I thought I'd broken through. Y____ stopped walking and stood at the center of my office. He looked sad. He looked defeated. There was a moment when I antic.i.p.ated (hoped?) that Y____ was going to cry. But then he changed entirely. His concern melted into stoicism, and then evaporated into low-level joy. He smiled and ran a hand across his bald skull; it was like a different person had jumped inside his bones.

"Okay, Vic-Vick: You win," he said. I thought this meant we were going to Seton Medical Center. It did not. "Next week. I will see you next week. Things will be different a week from now. But just try and remember what we talked about, okay? Remember what I said today. Really think about the things I said. Digest my words. They will make sense later. How about this: If you still feel this way seven days from now, I will go to the hospital. That is my promise. But only if you've really considered the things I've told you. Okay?"

I did not believe him, but I shook my head up and down. What else could I do?

"Goodbye, Vicky. Your skepticism is adorable. Don't ever lose that, no matter what happens."

And with that, Y____ walked out of my office. For the rest of the day, I seethed at my desk. He had dodged me again, and he talked to me like a child. He was so uniquely troubled. I should have known what was coming, but of course I did not.