The Visible Man Part 3

May Ninth (The Revelation)

What can I tell you?

Nothing you will believe.

Nothing I would believe. But this happened. And this is when everything changed (and never changed back).

There was a knock at my door. I knew it was Y____. I had been daydreaming about this meeting all week. I had so many condescending, incisive things to say to him, although I can scarcely remember any of those things now. They all seem irrelevant in light of what transpired when Y____ opened my door and was not there.

"Who is it," I asked, seeing an empty doorway. I said "h.e.l.lo," and then I said "h.e.l.lo" again. I said it a third time. I stood up with the intention of walking across the room, a.s.suming someone (a confused child?) had opened my door by accident and fled upon the cognition of his mistake. I simply wanted to close my door. But the door closed itself, and then the door spoke.

"Come here, Vicky."

It was the signature moment of my life.

I tried to step backward and forward simultaneously, and I fell to the ground, knocking most of the contents of my desk onto the carpet as I tried to catch myself. I got up as quickly as I could and tried to scream, but the only sound that came out of my mouth was garbled, muted nonsense. It was a terrifying ten seconds. You'd think I would have a.s.sumed I was losing my mind, but I instantly knew this moment was real. It was not a dream or a hoax.

"Please don't hurt me," I said. I'm not sure why this was my first thought, but it was.

"I won't hurt you, Vicky," said the void. "Calm down. Sit down, if you need to. I'm not going to hurt you. I am not ... going ... to hurt you. Remain calm."

I did not sit. I tried to balance against my desk like a Christmas party lush. I was staring at my door, trembling. I could vaguely taste vomit on my tongue. Suddenly, Y____ spoke again-but I could tell from his voice that he'd come closer. He was maybe three feet away. My desk was the only barrier.

"There was a reason I didn't want to do this," he said. "This is the reason."

"What the f.u.c.k are you doing to me," I said. "Why are you doing this? I'm sorry I didn't believe you, but don't do this to me. I'm so sorry. You can take whatever you want. I don't care. I'm sorry. Why is this happening?" I had no idea what I was pleading for or what I was pleading against.

"Just think about all the things I've told you," Y____ said, "and accept that those things are true. That's all that I want."

I stood and did nothing. I think a lot of time may have pa.s.sed, but I can't be sure.

"I will give you time to absorb this," said Y____. His voice was recognizable, but the tone was dissimilar to that of the person I'd met the week before. It was lower and leathery. More AM than FM. "Put out your hand. Give me your hand."

I lifted my right arm and extended it outward and upward, almost as if I were trying to pick an apple off the lowest branch of a tree. I could see my hand shaking, but I couldn't make it stop. Suddenly, I felt something: I felt the fingertips of another hand. Reflexively, I pulled my hand back. But then I extended it a second time. I started to relax. I touched Y____'s fingers, and then I touched his palm. I felt a glove, but a glove so sheer I could still detect the texture of the skin underneath. When I pulled my hand back, my fingertips were lightly coated with a silvery, greenish film that reminded me of the glitter a child would use to make a Valentine. I rubbed my fingers together and the film seemed to vaporize, even though I could still sense the grittiness. I collapsed into my desk chair and reflexively put a hand over my mouth. My fingers smelled like antibiotics, so I rubbed them on my pant leg. I wanted to say something, but my head was both empty and full.

"Now ... this is what you wanted," Y____ said. "It is. Remember that. You demanded that I show myself in this way. It was my only recourse. And-to a degree-I respect that request. It's what your job requires, and it's what your personality dictates. Those who believe without seeing are blessed, but they tend to be bad conversationalists."

"Well, Christ-why didn't you just show me the suit?" I asked. "Why didn't you just bring the suit into my office? Why did you walk in here like this, knowing what that would do to me?"

"If I had shown you a suit on a hanger," he asked, "would that have been enough? Or would we still be having the same argument?"

For a long time, I sat and said nothing. Eventually, I spoke like a child: "I'm sorry I did not believe you." I thought he would respond by saying, "I forgive you." Instead, he said, "I'm sitting down now."

I looked at the black chair. Then I looked at the white chair. It seemed like Y____'s voice had come from the white chair, so I moved over to the black one, feeling it with my hand before sitting down. I sat and looked across at the empty white lounger, unsuccessfully pretending that this was not exploding my perception of reality. "This," I said, "is incredible. It's incredible. It's incredible."

"Can you see me?" he asked.

"No! I can't see you! I can't see you!"

"Let your eyes adjust," he said. "Get over the dissonance between what you expect to see and what's actually there. Are you sure you can't see me? Not even a little bit?"

At first, I had no idea what he meant. But as the minutes pa.s.sed, I understood. It was exactly as he had described: The silhouette of his body was vaguely visible (although I would have never recognized this on my own). It was as if the outline of his body was ever so slightly out of focus; it was like someone had completely painted the world over him, but the fuzzy imprint of his being was still faintly present.

It was so amazing.

I am tempted to type that sentence over and over again. It was so amazing. It was so amazing. It was so amazing. But there's no purpose to that, and what would it prove? Either you believe me or you don't. I don't have the command of language to describe what it's like to see something that isn't there. If you can't imagine this experience on your own, I can't help you. Try to look at a white chair and see (almost) nothing. That's what it was like. It was (almost) exactly like that.

I did not audiotape our meeting. Obviously, I should have. But (a) I had knocked my tape recorder off my desk when I fell, and (b) I was not thinking straight. To his credit, I must concede that Y____ was remarkably patient during our encounter. He answered all of my questions, most of which were technical (whenever I get anxious, I worry about technicalities). Here are the key specifics I scribbled from memory after he departed: 1. The cloaking suit was tight and uncomfortable, but Y____ had grown used to it.

2. He didn't know if the "cloaking cream" he sprayed over himself was toxic or benign, but that didn't concern him. "Part of the risk," he said. "A small part. If I get cancer, I get cancer. We're all going to end up with cancer, anyway."

3. Before he encamped in a subject's home, he was able to store four additional cylindrical canisters of aerosol cream in a pouch sewn into the stomach of the suit. By reapplying the cream every thirty-six to forty-eight hours (done when the subject was away), he could stay inside any given residence for up to a week. If a subject proved especially compelling, Y____ might return to the residence for multiple stints.

4. In order to remain alert during these long observation periods, Y____ would consume copious amounts of oral stimulants, most notably low doses of Merck cocaine and methamphetamine in tablet form (this, he noted with some discomfiture, was the reason his teeth were so gnarled). Because stimulants are a diuretic (and since he often could not use the bathroom for long stretches of time), he'd regularly force himself into a state of dehydration. "There were signals I'd use as guideposts," he said. "When my p.i.s.s was the color of Pepsi, I knew it was time to drink some water." He would eat when he was alone during the day, though constant amphetamine use had all but eliminated his appet.i.te. "I can get by on five hundred calories a day," he said. "Usually less. I'll probably live to be two hundred years old. I mean, there's nothing worse for us than food, right? Food is what kills us."

5. When cloaked, Y____ wore tiny mirrored goggles with a soft gray tint. They were similar to swimming goggles. These lenses were the only part of his body uncovered by the cream. Y____ claimed that the easiest way to see through his illusion was to locate his eyes, but I found this totally impossible.

6. Through yoga, he had learned how to control muscle discomfort and to regulate his breathing. This was more imperative than people might antic.i.p.ate. "I'd be the world's most in-your-face yoga instructor," he insisted. "I can lock into any physical position I want for five hours, six hours, eight hours. I've done this dozens of times. I can turn my bones off."

7. Y____ noted that-while he's difficult to see when stationary-he's flat-out impossible to see when in motion. "On the street, and especially in a crowd or in an airport, my individual movements disappear into the chaos of everything that's moving around me. The fuzziness evaporates, because everything surrounding me seems equally unfocused. The human eye isn't fast enough to adjust. It's easy for me to walk straight onto commercial airplanes or into office buildings. The faster I walk, the less people see."

8. When I asked how he sustained himself financially, Y____ said, "My situation is unique. I don't really need money. Outside of my rent and my cell phone, life is free." He said he would sometimes steal high-end items (mostly jewelry) from major retailers and return them for cash the following day. Sometimes he would shoplift from p.a.w.nshops and immediately resell the items at competing p.a.w.nshops on the same block. Sometimes he'd just take two hundred dollars from unattended cash registers. He'd sometimes lift money out of people's homes, but only when absolutely necessary or when he felt the victim was asking for it. "I've stolen from the rich, and from the not so very rich, and from the almost poor. But never from the pure of heart, the chronically depressed, or the very, very, very poor."

9. His omnipresent concerns were rain (which diluted the cloaking cream), dogs, and birds. "Hounds hate me," he said. "Cats don't care if I live or die, but hounds catch my scent and go off the reservation. Birds are even worse. Have you ever had a pigeon fly straight into your face? I'm like a picture window to those G.o.dd.a.m.n s.h.i.+t machines."

By the end of our hour, it seemed like everything about our relations.h.i.+p had reversed itself. During the final ten minutes, we were downright jovial (almost flirtatious). It was like being high for the very first time. Y____ was flattered by my attention. I kept apologizing over and over. He finally said, "I forgive you, Vicky. I forgive you. But you have to make me a promise: From here on out, I decide what we talk about. No more of this 'How did you feel when your father said something dismissive about your haircut when you were eleven?' I already know the answers to those questions. I know how I feel. And no more discussions about how this suit works or how I invented the cream. Okay? No more debates about science. It bores me to talk about things I already understand. I want to talk about what I have seen, and I want to do it my way. So can we agree to this?"

"Yes." I said. "Yes. Anything you want. I will never question you again. I will do anything you ask."

At one point, I felt an urge to photograph this person who wasn't there. I asked if this was okay. Y____ laughed and said, "Why not?" He was in a great mood. I used the camera on my cell phone. This photographic image, as anyone can see (fig. 1), is distorted and grainy and useless. It looks like a chair. But when I see this photo, I can see Y____. I know what I'm supposed to be seeing.

Suddenly, I glanced at my wall clock. It was 11:45 a.m. We both commented on how rapidly our time had disappeared. We said goodbye, and Y____ left. He wasn't there, and then he wasn't there. I had another appointment at noon, but when the patient arrived I told her I was sick. I canceled the rest of my day's appointments and drove home. I spent the rest of the day drinking vodka in bed, completely awake. I did not tell my husband (or anyone else) about this experience for several weeks. I did not know how.

PART 3.

Y____ a.s.sUMES CONTROL.

The game, as they say, had changed.

None of my other patients were interesting, even though I knew they were important; I would sit and nod and listen to their problems, but I was always imagining their problems being described by Y____ (and how much that transference would change the meaning). I surrendered to him completely. I lost interest in my hobbies. I lost interest in television and in whatever new movies I was supposed to see; those things had never been that crucial to me to begin with, but now I couldn't even force myself to follow the plots or remember the names of characters. My college friend Cheryl sent me an e-mail politely expressing concern that she and I were "not connecting" and drifting apart; I didn't respond to the message and found myself alarmed by how little I could remember about the last phone conversation we'd shared. I began investing my free time into practical activities that required no thought (scouring the bathroom, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the hedges) so that my mind could drift without consequence. Nothing was as stimulating as thinking about Y____'s condition. To this day, whenever I slip into boredom, I find myself fantasizing and reimagining the stories he told me. From a therapeutic standpoint, it was an unhealthy situation. I don't deny that. But-in my meek defense-I need to reiterate how unusual this scenario had become (and not just because it involved invisibility). Professionally, it's the kind of problem that can't be solved by reading a book.

Here's what I mean: A few years before meeting Y____, I'd worked with an adult female patient still coping with the abusive relations.h.i.+p she'd had with her father. The father had s.e.xually abused her during her teenager years and she remained paralyzed by recurring dreams of these encounters, inevitably describing her father's appearance in these dreams as vampiric. She saw her father as a sinister, seductive figure who became a monster at night, and she often imagined him draining the life out of her body. She loved and hated him against her will. On more than one occasion, she directly referred to him as "That f.u.c.king vampire." We talked about these memories for many weeks, and in every possible context. However, at no time did I ever suspect the patient's father was literally Dracula. Why would I suspect that? Why would anyone? The central philosophy behind treating the delusional is to understand why that specific delusion has been selected. You never entertain the possibility of the delusion not being a construction. So when that happened with Y____-when I was forced to accept that the impossible situation he had described was not symbolic-I allowed the dynamic of our relations.h.i.+p to invert itself. From this point forward, I rarely questioned anything Y____ said, nor did I stop him from lecturing about whatever topic he desired. In short, I stopped being his therapist; I essentially became a vessel for his thoughts. My peers will criticize me for this, and I deserve the criticism. But I'm the only person who will ever fully understand how this felt, and I know that I did my best.

As the weeks blurred together, my sessions with Y____ became strangely consistent. He would arrive at my office uncloaked, sit in the white chair, and tell me what we were going to talk about. This usually entailed Y____ opening with the words "Today we're going to discuss my time with ____," and a story would advance from there. He'd periodically pace about the office, talking with his hands as much as his mouth. I would listen, take notes, and occasionally pose questions (which he'd sometimes answer but often ignore). Sometimes we'd talk about the same subject for consecutive weeks; sometimes he would spend long stretches dissecting a particular person, abruptly change topics for ten minutes, and then return to the original person he'd started with (without explaining the digression). For simplicity, I have packaged our most remarkable encounters into their own separate rubrics. We were (allegedly) talking about these various people so that Y____ could better understand his guilt over his invasions of privacy-and sometimes we really did touch on that specific issue. But as I reread the transcripts today, I suspect his larger motives were stranger and more egocentric. Y____ felt guilt, but not in the way guilt is supposed to be felt.

As before, I have reconstructed and truncated Y____'s transcripts into traditional prose (with my sporadic interjections in boxed italics). They are in chronological order, except where noted.

I cannot vouch for the veracity of the narrative details, because I was not there.

The Valerie Sessions

[The Valerie Sessions were a three-session dialogue that initiated the week following May 9. Though Y____ never specified where these events occurred, I got the vague impression that "Valerie" resided somewhere in Northern California. The log time of every excerpt is annotated at the conclusion of each pa.s.sage.]

1 This person, this Valerie person, made things easy for me: She left her door unlocked. Not all day, of course, but whenever she went running. I a.s.sume she didn't want to be enc.u.mbered by house keys. Runners despise their house keys. And this was a understandable decision, because she lived where crime wasn't. I have no doubt she could have left her door unlocked twenty-four hours a day without incident. It was an excellent neighborhood. I was wandering outside the apartment complex when I saw a woman in her late twenties exit the building. She was wearing bike shorts, a sports bra, and a headband. This was Valerie. There was no way she had any pockets in that getup, so I made my move. I simply entered the front of the building and started ringing doorbells. If no one answered the bell, I tried the k.n.o.b. It didn't take long. She lived on the second floor, in an efficiency apartment-essentially a studio with a kitchen. Not really decorated, a little messy. A bed, a love seat, a treadmill. Loop carpet. Books, but no bookcase. Way too many shoes. Everything smelled human. Earthy. Musky. I riffled through the mail, checked her medicine cabinet for antidepressants, and then sat in a corner and started to wait.

Val returned about an hour after she'd left, bathed in sweat. She closed the door and took off her sports bra in the same motion. Now, I'm sure-as a woman, and maybe just as a person-you find this description creepy. You think it's sick that I would sit in some unknown female's apartment and watch her get undressed. But this kind of visual experience was never s.e.xual for me. Never. I looked at Valerie the way her gynecologist looks at her. Was she attractive? Maybe. I don't think I'm in a position to say definitively. Seeing naked people is just part of my job. I take no pleasure in it.

So, as I was saying ... Valerie strips off her clothes and takes a shower. I wait for her in the living room. It's darker now-almost eight o'clock. Valerie comes out of her bathroom in a robe and underwear. Her hair is f.u.c.king bizarre. It's wet and vertical-it looks like a koala is crouching on her scalp. She checks her voice mail messages. She looks through her snail mail and separates the bills from everything else. She checks her work e-mail on her phone. And then-and this surprised me-she opens her closet and pulls out the biggest Pyrex bong I've ever seen. It was three feet high. She lights the carb port, takes a ma.s.sive hit, and exhales a thundercloud of smoke. The whole apartment gets blue and thick. She walks through the fog and into the kitchen.

This is where the war was waged.

What I would come to discover about Valerie was that she was at war with herself. It was a ground war-a hundred-year war of attrition. She was at war with the size of her body, her desire to smoke pot, and an obsession with eating all the food in the world. She was compulsive about all three, and all three were connected. Thirty seconds after getting high, she was eating spoonfuls of Jif peanut b.u.t.ter, straight from the jar. Her eyes were crazed as she did this, somewhere between ecstasy and fear. I've never seen a person enjoy peanut b.u.t.ter so much. After ten minutes of chowing, she smoked more pot. Then she ordered a Domino's pizza. For the next twenty-nine minutes, she sat on her love seat, listening to the Beatles with her eyes closed; when the pizza arrived, she ate five of the eight slices like a she-wolf. She threw the last three slices away and emptied the garbage. This alone seemed like a full night's gluttony, but-once again-she returned to the bong. Again, the room turned blue. She listened to a little more of Abbey Road, swaying with herself to "Sun King." It was charming. But then she surprised me again: She ordered a second pizza. A different kind of pizza from a different pizza place. When it arrived, she did the same thing-she ate a little more than half the pie and threw the rest away.

By now, it's almost midnight. Valerie smokes more pot, changes the CD to A Hard Day's Night, and softly sings along with "You Can't Do That." She gorges on more peanut b.u.t.ter, this time swabbing it on Ritz crackers. Again, I a.s.sume the night is over. But suddenly she's lying on the floor, topless. Now she's doing sit-ups! She does one hundred sit-ups, rests for five minutes, then knocks off one hundred more. She attacks the bong a fourth time, refogging the apartment like a machine. Eventually, she crawls into her twin bed and falls asleep. She doesn't even turn off her table lamp. I spend the night watching her sleep in the light. For six hours, we're equally motionless but unequally bored.

Valerie awakes without an alarm. If she's feeling haggard, it doesn't show. Immediately, she's doing sit-ups. She's isolating her abs. She does a few push-ups, but she doesn't do them well. No upper-arm strength. She stretches her hammies and stretches her quads. She puts on her running shoes and pulls on her headband, and-once again-she's jogging out the door. I'm a little surprised, because yesterday she ran at dusk. It's only been twelve hours since her previous run. Her morning jog lasts forty-five minutes. When she returns, she showers and prepares for work. No breakfast required. She puts the bong back in the closet, spends ten minutes looking for her car keys, and finally leaves for wherever she needs to be.

I sleep on her floor for most of the afternoon. When I awake, I look for any innocuous food sc.r.a.ps in the kitchen. This is generally how I feed myself when I'm inside a stranger's home: I eat whatever food seems least likely to be missed. I'm not judgmental. I'll eat anything, and I don't need much. I can last days on uncooked pasta and raw sugar. But Valerie doesn't have either of those items. She doesn't have anything, except for peanut b.u.t.ter, olive oil, ketchup, and a (now empty) box of crackers.

It occurs to me that Valerie is afraid to keep food in the house.

Valerie gets home early-somewhere in the neighborhood of 5:20 or 5:30. I can't get a read on what she does for a living, beyond that it requires her to wear pencil skirts. By 5:45, the headband is back on her brain and she's jogging out the door. Tonight she runs for ninety minutes; when she gets back, I momentarily worry she might collapse. She literally staggers into the apartment, panting like a sheepdog. She needs a moment to compose herself. But Valerie rallies. She takes off her clothes and stands in front of the bathroom mirror, looking at her stomach in profile. When she steps out of the shower, she stares at her stomach again. To me, she looks neither fat nor thin, but I can't imagine what she sees. Judging from the expression on her face, she's either mildly concerned or mildly depressed.

Valerie get dressed and starts cleaning her apartment, although cleaning is not really the right word-she just sort of organizes the disorder into four separate piles. Around eight, her doorbell rings. It's another woman, roughly Valerie's age but significantly heavier. This is Jane. She has a lot of wavy hair, a lot of teeth, and one of those omnipresent, face-dominating perma-grins that makes her look like a lesser Muppet. Diabolically upbeat. She's carrying two buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The two women hug h.e.l.lo, but I can tell they've seen each other recently; the hug is brief and their conversation is neutral and nonexpository. Valerie asks things like, "What's Jim doing tonight?" and Jane responds with, "Oh, you know Jim." They have a brief discussion about when they should start smoking marijuana, and the verdict is "immediately." They're comfortable with each other. They enjoy the process of agreeing. They sit on the floor and light each other's weed. They talk slower, but their personalities don't change. They start eating the chicken. This must be the thing they do together.

At 9:20 they turn on the television. They've digitally recorded that popular program about the good-looking airline pa.s.sengers who accidentally travel through time. Every so often, they pause the action to bicker about the plot: Valerie seems angry at the episode because she doesn't know what's happening. Jane seems pleased by the episode because she doesn't know what's happening.

"Why are they all doing that?" says Valerie. "Why doesn't anyone ask why they're doing the things that they're doing?"

"They're doing it because that one guy told them it was the only way."

"But isn't that guy the same person who wanted to kill them?"

"No, that was the first guy. The guy who can't die."

"But why would they follow the other guy? The smoke."

"I don't think they're following the smoke."

"In this reality, or in all the realities?"

"Yes."

This goes on for a long time. When the show concludes, they keep disagreeing about what did or didn't occur. "I think that already happened." "We don't know that yet." "She's actually his half-sister, right?" "No, that was the woman from the airport bar." "He was killed a long time ago." "He might not be dead anymore." It's the worst conversation I've ever heard two people have about something that wasn't true. They finish the first bucket of chicken and decide to eat the legs and wings from bucket number two for dessert. Valerie hits "play" on her CD player; A Hard Day's Night is still in the carousel. Jane says, "Have you ever heard that song about the Beatles? It's not by the Beatles." Valerie looks at Jane like she's from Atlantis. Valerie says, "What?" Jane says, "Wait," and runs outside to her car. She returns with a ca.s.sette. "I can't play tapes," says Valerie. "I don't have a tape player. I don't play tapes." Jane says, "You should get a tape player." Valerie says, "But I don't have any tapes." Jane says, "But now you have this tape." Their relations.h.i.+p is founded on the repeated deconstruction of meaningless contradictions.

Jane gets ready to go home. She asks if she should leave the remainder of the chicken with Valerie. "Sure," lies Valerie. "I'll have it for lunch tomorrow." Jane walks out the door. Valerie smokes more pot and gets on the treadmill. She runs for three simulated miles, drinks a huge gla.s.s of water, and eats the rest of the chicken. It's the skin she loves most-she tears it off the flesh and drags it through the gravy. Every mouthful is succulent, decadent fat. It electrifies her spirit as it clogs her ventricles. When the chicken is gone, she returns to the peanut b.u.t.ter, finis.h.i.+ng the remainder of the jar. She jams her whole hand into the jar and licks her fingers clean. There's no food remaining in the house. It's been erased by her mouth. Upon this realization, she inhales more weed, does forty abdominal crunches, takes another shower, and falls asleep to John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band.

Valerie was the fittest, hungriest, cleanest person I'd ever encountered. (5.16.08, 10:08 a.m. to 10:33 a.m.) 2 Now, let me ask you a question, Vic-Vick: What's the most transparently interesting thing about this Valerie person? To me, it's that she's a liar. Even to her closest friends, Valerie is lying about how she lives. She doesn't want Jane to know that she could never save half a bucket of chicken until tomorrow. She doesn't want Jane to know that she instantly knew she'd eat it all immediately, and that such an action was beyond her control. Instead, she chooses to exercise with the intensity of a decathlete, simply to sustain the physical appearance of normalcy. It's a hidden cycle: The stress of this fraud makes her want to escape from reality, which prompts her to smoke marijuana, which makes her eat compulsively, which forces her to exercise obsessively and without reward, which makes her original dishonesty so shameful. But I am the only one who knows this. Only I see her secrets. So I find myself thinking: Is this lie the totality of who she is? Is there any part of her personality that isn't dictated by this cycle? Is her secret the only thing that matters about her?

While she was at work, this was what I worried about. (5.16.08, 10:47 a.m. to 10:48 a.m.) 3 On the third day of my occupation, Valerie came home with two boxes of doughnuts, two cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli, and a bunch of bananas. I knew where that s.h.i.+t was going, and I knew it would be gone by midnight. She went out for her evening run and returned to do a few dozen burpies, or whatever they're calling burpies now, in the middle of the living room. Burpies are what convicts do. Burpies are designed for people in prison cells. She takes her second shower of the day and settles in for another night of smoking and gorging and listening to dead hippies sing about the Maharis.h.i.+ ... her life is so calcified. It drives me crazy. How can she not realize how terrible her life is? And yet-she seems happy. I see no explicit depression within her existence. Does she not understand that this is no way to live? I want her to be depressed. I want her to want to be different. But she just doesn't get it.

[I interject to ask Y____ if he sees his own contradiction; I ask if he sees how his espoused intention to "objectively observe" these subjects seems to be false, and that his emotional relations.h.i.+p to Valerie is greater than his interest in her actual life.]

That's not true. That's wrong. Just because I care doesn't mean I can't be objective. That's what's wrong with the world, Vicky: We've given up on the possibility of overcoming our biases. Did I like Valerie? Yes. Sure. Yes I did. But I never surrendered to her. That's the part you can't comprehend.

Going in, I knew that watching people during their private moments was going to be emotionally confusing. I mean, I watched Valerie go to the bathroom many, many times. When she was alone, she never even closed the door. I've watched her defecate, and that's a pretty humiliating experience, even when no one's watching. And seeing someone humiliated is always going to make you like that person a little more. If an author wants to make a fictional character sympathetic, the easiest way to make that happen is to place them in a humiliating scenario. Humiliation preys on our deepest fears of what it means to be alive. So of course I was going to like Valerie. I liked everyone I watched. That was just something I had to mentally fight through. Newspaper reporters do this all the time, or at least they're supposed to. It's not impossible. The larger problem, at least for me, is the inherent inequality within this kind of relations.h.i.+p. Valerie believed she was alone, so-for her-our time together was neutral. There's no emotional charge to being alone. She felt nothing, because she had nothing to feel. Meanwhile, I continually spent my time, one on one, with unguarded strangers who act completely open and completely vulnerable. For me, these episodes became extremely intimate. But it's a one-sided intimacy, and that's something you can't prepare for.

Easy example: Our fourth night together. It rained that day, all afternoon and all night. Valerie couldn't run outside, so she used her treadmill. It was unnerving to watch how hard she ran-she was going nowhere, but she was getting there fast. She sprinted. And she sprinted loud-she took these heavy steps that went boom boom boom boom boom boom boom, like an automatic weapon with the trigger jammed, banging away for almost two hours. Val has an OCD tic about the treadmill: There are three LCDs on the machine, and she won't quit unless they all fall on perfectly round numbers. Like, she would hit her goal of four miles on the "distance" gauge, but she wouldn't stop because the "minutes" gauge might read 36:33. She'd decide to keep running until the minutes gauge was exactly 40:00. But the moment that LCD read 40:00, the "calories" gauge would be at 678, so she'd need to push it to exactly 700. But then the distance LCD would be at 5.58, so she'd need to make it exactly 6.00. This never balanced out, of course. It was hopeless, and it was exhaustive to watch. After she finally gave up and showered, she got high and boiled a ma.s.sive bowl of spaghetti, which she ate with b.u.t.ter and black pepper and string cheese. She ate a bunch of Twix bars, too. But something else happened that night. It was the kind of something that makes me feel bad about myself. And I still don't know why I feel that way, which is why I'm talking to you.

Sometime around ten p.m., woozy and stuffed, Valerie started looking through her closet. At first, I had no idea what prompted this seemingly random, seemingly spontaneous decision. But she got down on all fours and really went at it. This was a dogged, focused search-the kind of search that can only be conducted by the very worried or the deeply stoned. After twenty minutes, she pulls out a clock radio. "Ah ha," she says to no one. I have no idea what her intentions are, because Valerie already has her own internal alarm clock. Besides, this is a ma.s.sive, ugly clock. Unwieldy. Almost like a boom box, but not quite. Very much from the eighties, when plastics were bigger. No one would accept such a monstrosity today. But she plugs it in, and it blinks "12:00." She doesn't fix the time. And-suddenly-I know why she needed to locate this device. It's because it has a ca.s.sette player. She is going to play that ca.s.sette Jane gave her two days ago.

Now, the song on this tape, the song that Jane wanted her to play-I don't know how to describe it, really. It's barely a song. It's just drums and a singer and an accordion, or some instrument that resembles an accordion. The singer sounds broken, but not in the way we typically use that term. He literally sounds like a mentally handicapped child. And this song-well, it's almost like the singer is trying to be sarcastic, because it's just a straightforward explanation of who the Beatles were and what they did. One of the lines in the song is "They really were very good. They deserved all their success." Whenever the guy says the word Beatles, he sings it with a bad c.o.c.kney accent. None of it rhymes. It seems like a song written extemporaneously. Any listener's natural impulse would be to hate it, or to laugh at it. But Valerie kept playing and rewinding this same song. She probably played that song twenty times in a row, and she could not stop smiling. It was the happiest I ever saw her-even happier than when she was eating Jif. And this is because that song is f.u.c.king profound. It's like this quasi-homeless guy had tapped into the most primitive explanation as to why Valerie liked the Beatles, or, I suppose, why anyone likes the Beatles. There's a few lines where the singer mentions how the Beatles' career is like a fairy tale, and that the trajectory of their fame and their impact on the world would seem completely implausible if it were presented in a fictional context. That was the part that made Valerie smile the most-the not-so-obvious idea that the Beatles were not imaginary. It's so not-so-obvious that only an insane person could conceive it.

Now, for Valerie, that night was just about the song itself. There was no subtext. There was only text. She was just a s.p.a.ced-out person, sitting in a love seat and listening to low-quality audio from a c.r.a.ppy clock radio. There was no exchange of feeling, beyond how she felt about the song. Her feelings were her own, and they were shared with no one. But the experience was different for me. I felt extremely close to Valerie that night, even though she had no idea I was in the room. I could hear the rain against the window, intertwined with the fragility of the music. I could see her amorphous affection for the Beatles being demystified-and then amplified-by this one weird song, and to see someone love one thing is to see someone love all things. She was alone, but we were together. The intimacy was overwhelming. Every time she rewound the tape, I felt like we were burrowing deeper and deeper into a hole. Was it the most romantic night of my life? No. That would be an overstatement. But it felt important. And Valerie didn't care at all. She couldn't. It wasn't like unrequited love. It wasn't even like having a crush on a person who doesn't know you exist. It was more like being seduced by an amnesiac. It was like she was forgetting who I was, while I was still there. It was terrible. I mean, I was really seeing this person. I was truly seeing who she was. Someday, Valerie will fall in love. She will get married. But her husband will never see her the way I did. No one will ever be as close to her as I was that night, because no one else can ever be with her when she's alone. Only I can do that.

So what is your real question, Victoria? Did I like Valerie? As I said before: Yes. But I probably didn't care about her. I've barely even thought about her since the last time I saw her. If I wasn't talking about her to you, I probably wouldn't be talking about her at all. Maybe I'm lying to myself, but I doubt it. I eventually found that song she played online, and it's by a local named Dennis Johnson (sic).8 A pretty hopeless case, from what I can tell. That song doesn't even sound good to me anymore. I never want to hear it again. But now I'm left with the memory of having heard it that night. It feels like we shared something. But we didn't. I know the truth. I understand the truth. We didn't share anything. Valerie was in the room, but what happened to me didn't happen to her. And I know that I need to understand this. (5.23.08, 10:32 a.m. to 10:42 a.m.) 4 You're looking at me like I'm lying. You're looking at me like you think I'm saying the opposite of what I really mean. Either that, or you're looking at me like I'm some kind of terrible person. Like I'm some kind of brilliant troll.

[I tell Y____ that I am not looking at him in any particular way.]

Well, good for you. Great. Whatever. You can certainly say that, and maybe you're being honest. I can see how you're looking at me, and I'm never wrong about these things ... but, you know, I understand your reactions. You're wondering why I could be so uncaring toward Valerie, and why I almost seem proud of my emotional detachment. I seem inhuman to you. Your eyes tell me everything. Your eyes are like a search engine.

I get the impression that talking about Valerie has actually made you more confused about what I do and why I do it. You probably think I'm just a sick person who likes to spy on strangers, and that I've created this elaborate, faux-sociological framework to justify my behavior. You can tell me if that's what you think.

[I tell Y____ that I don't know what I think.]

Yes, you do. You're thinking without even trying. You can't stop yourself from thinking. But here's what you ought to be thinking: "What was gained from this observation? What do we now know about human nature that we didn't know before?" That's what you should be thinking. Those are the questions you should be asking yourself.