The Visible Man Part 5

So maybe he's not talking to the basketball players.

Maybe he's not talking to anyone.

"I agree," he says. "I agree, you double-crazy donkey thief. You G.o.dd.a.m.n double hypocrite."

So now I'm in an awkward position. If the half-Mexican is an insane person-and it seems pretty obvious that he is-there's nothing to be learned from watching him warble. As a society, we expend way too much effort trying to understand the thought processes of crazy people. We're always trying to a.n.a.lyze suicide notes and to interview serial killers. It's a fool's game. Crazy people say things that don't make any rational sense, which is why they're cla.s.sified as crazy. So why would rational attempts at semantic scrutiny teach us anything of value? It's like trying to use math to figure out history. It's like hypnotism or dream a.n.a.lysis. I certainly had no desire to watch a crazy person speak nonsense for another twenty-four hours. But there was something else at play here, and it was something that seemed worth investigating: Here was a man hearing voices from people who were not there. They were people he couldn't see, because they did not exist. But what if he heard voices from a person he couldn't see who was there? Would he be able to differentiate? I mean, this is a guy living in a false reality, right? He's communicating with someone he's constructed. But was the construction itself central to the conversation? Because if it was, that would mean-on some level-he'd be aware that there is a difference between having a voice inside your head and hearing a voice whose presence can't be explained.

I was just curious, I suppose.

I got up from my chair and walked behind where the half-Mexican was sitting. I didn't want the sound of my voice to originate from my chair, for whatever reason ... it seemed better if I stood directly behind and slightly above him. It seemed fairer, somehow.

I had concerns. I was nervous. What if he jumped off the balcony? I remember thinking that. But he didn't seem the type to panic. There was still a coolness about him, regardless of his age. The man from the bathroom photograph was still the man in the chair. I was confident he'd keep it together.

I swallowed hard, and I spoke. I said: "Who will win this basketball game?"

No response. I said it again: "Who will win this basketball game?"

"The black doesn't have a chance," the half-Mexican said. Beyond that sentence, he offered no reaction whatsoever. It dawned on me that I'd spent too much time thinking about whether I should talk to him and not enough time considering what I'd actually say. I had no material.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"What are you doing in my house?" he said in response.

I tried to seem casual.

"I mean you no harm," I said. I'm not sure why I started talking like a biblical character.

Twenty seconds of silence.

"The black has no chance," he reiterated. "Too fat. Too soft a life for him. Must have a good cook for a wife. The guero is a cow, but he can run."

"Guero," I say. "You say guero. Are you from Mexico?"

"No," he replied. "I'm not Mexican. Only half. My mother was Mexican. My father, he was Irish. Not a drunk, but a fighter."

"You have a nice house," I say. "How did you get such a nice house?"

"I made oil," he said. "Way back when."

"You made oil? You made it?"

No response to this.

I knew what he had meant when he spoke. It was stupid of me to correct him.

We watched the basketball game for another five minutes. We didn't talk. We just listened to the faraway basketball sounds-the dribble drives and the missed fallaways. Tock tock ... tock TOCK TOCK clang. It started to get dark. The two sweaty amateurs finally stopped playing and bent at the waist, smiling and panting like cartoon bloodhounds. It was impossible to tell who'd won. I don't think they were even keeping score.

"You can't stay here," said the half-Mexican. "I don't want you sleeping here. Not in my house. I have problems of my own."

"No worries," I said. "I will leave. I want to leave." I did not want to leave.

"Exit through the back door," he said. "And don't call anymore."

"I never called you," I said. "That wasn't me."

"Yes you did," he said. "You called me, and you watched me eat. Twice. You watched me eat twice. You're a pervert."

"Can I use the bathroom before I leave?"

"No," he said. "You can't. Why would I let a pervert in my lavatory? Why do you think you can do whatever you want?"

He made a good point, so I left. And I haven't gone back there, even though I want to. Who knows? Maybe I will tomorrow. There was just something about that guy. I know he's nuts, but there are a lot of people in America who are way, way nuttier. They're just more socialized. North America has more crazy people than every other industrialized continent combined, except for maybe Australia. I'd say 25 percent of our populace has craziness in the blood. It's genetic. It's historical. I mean, what kind of person immigrated to the New World? Not counting slaves, there were only four types, really: people who didn't think Europe was religious enough, people who thought they could make a lot of money, antisocial failures with no other option, and fruitcakes who thought risking their lives on an alien sh.o.r.e might make for an interesting adventure. Those are the four components of the American gene pool, and those are the four explanations behind everything good and everything bad that's ever happened here. Everything. I can't think of a single exception. So this guy, this aging half-Mexican-this guy isn't that outrageous. On balance, he's almost normal. He's probably more like me than you are.

Another Lapse in Judgment

When Y____ finished his story about the elderly biracial gentleman, I asked him a battery of straightforward questions about what he believed the story meant and why it felt significant to him. He didn't respond to either topic. "That should be self-evident" was the closest he came to an explanation. He left my office around eleven a.m. I immediately studied my notes from the session and tried to connect the dots; by this point, I'd followed Y____ to the bottom of the rabbit hole. I still worked under the a.s.sumption that every word he said and every thought he expressed had value. Around 11:20, I walked a few blocks to a (now closed) Caribou Coffee, intending to buy a caramel macchiato and return to my work. My next patient wasn't due until one o'clock. When I exited the coffeehouse, I was surprised to see Y____ sitting outside the establishment on a bench, drinking Coca-Cola from a gla.s.s bottle. We nodded h.e.l.lo and I began to walk away; like virtually all therapists, I don't fraternize with patients outside the office environment. But because nothing about my experience with Y____ had been normal, I suspended my own rules: I stopped, turned around, and engaged him in casual conversation. I a.s.sumed we would talk for ninety seconds.

I'm ashamed to admit that we spoke for almost ninety minutes.

The time evaporated. I could have sat there all afternoon.

Obviously, I didn't record this encounter, as it happened by chance. I do not remember most of what we discussed-the conversation was lively, but much of it revolved around mundane subjects like regional housing prices, what neighborhoods in Austin were improving or declining, and various construction problems with local highways and thoroughfares. We talked about the coffeehouse itself, and about coffee in general, and about why Y____ never drank coffee despite his love for how it smelled.

However, three parts of our conversation remain vivid in my mind.

The first stemmed from a question I asked Y____ directly. What I asked him-in an admittedly understated way-was if he honestly believed he needed a therapist to help him. "You essentially talk to yourself for an hour, and you don't seem particularly interested in anything I say in response," I said. I told him that the goal of therapy is to take what we discuss in our session and apply it to the outside world, and that this didn't seem to be happening at all. I conceded that, all things considered, I wasn't completely qualified to work with someone engaged with the life he was living, and that no therapist on earth was trained to help a criminal scientist with the power of invisibility. I told him I loved working with him, but that I wondered if perhaps his state of mind would be better served by writing about his experiences firsthand (if for no other reason than to create a public record of what he was learning through his surveillance).

"If I wrote a book, people would hate it," he replied (author's note: I'm paraphrasing these sentiments, but my memory is strong). "There's something wrong with the way I write. It always makes people hate me. And you know, there will be a record of all this, eventually. A book will exist, or something akin to a book. But that won't happen for years. Decades, in all likelihood. I can't take notes during my observation periods, so there's no data to report. It's a problem. I mean, imagine if Jane Goodall had no access to pen and paper when she was in Tanzania. Imagine if she had no camera and no colleagues. That's how it is for me. All I can do is remember everything that I see, contextualize those images inside my head, and then recompose my theories several days later, when I return to my apartment. And most of the things I write in my journal aren't specific. Specificity is overrated. It distracts from the theme. The only details I try to record are incidents that suggest something larger and more meaningful than what they'd seem to suggest on the surface. Besides, I wouldn't want to write a book until I've finished with the entire project, and that will take forever. It will take my whole adult life. There can't be a book until there's nothing left for me to see. So until then, I just need someone to remind me that what I'm doing is essential. That's what I pay you for." He laughed at his own joke like a guest on a late-night talk show.

I informed him that was not my job. He said, "Well, of course it isn't. But we can all see the same things differently, can't we? I mean, that's a big part of it."

The second item we discussed was something I'd been thinking about nonstop since May 9: I wanted to know how it felt to be invisible (or at least what I considered "invisible"-I'm sure I used the word cloaked when I spoke with Y____ as to not create another argument). I remember thinking how strange it was that we were speaking about this in public; people were walking all around, completely oblivious to the doolally conversation we were having. It was like both of us were invisible already.

"It doesn't feel like anything," he said. "I mean, people can't see me, but I can see myself, even if my eyes tell me otherwise. I know where my arm is. When I wear the suit and I look at my arm, there it is. It looks like a fuzzy, subtle outline of a limb-like a photograph of an arm tacked to the wall of someone's kitchen, but then painted over with four coats of white latex. A visitor would never notice, but the woman who owns the house would always see it immediately. The only time it's strange is if I look at a mirror. If I look directly at myself in a mirror, I see something maddening, because my image just reflects back-and-forth-and-back-and-forth without any concrete substance to recognize. I see a human silhouette of light, and I just have to accept that the light is me. I generally try to avoid mirrors."

That's bizarre, I responded, but it wasn't what I wanted to know. That really wasn't the question I'd asked. I wanted to know how being invisible felt. I wanted to know if being invisible was something he liked, or just something he did.

"You're obsessed with feelings," he said. "Which is natural, considering your occupation. You traffic in feelings. And I'm not one of those retrograde automatons who insist they're immune to emotion until they end up having a stroke. I don't have contempt for emotion. But you misread things. People think about themselves constantly, but not in the way you imagine. The only time people are conscious of how they feel is when something hurts them. Most of the time, we train ourselves to ignore the entire sensation. I certainly don't believe it's possible to be successful at anything complicated if you let feelings dictate how you live. It always seems like you're trying to direct me toward some sort of grand realization. I always get the impression that you want me to say something incisive, like, It makes me feel powerful or It makes me feel alone or It makes me feel special. And all of those descriptions are true, some of the time. But none are true all of the time. Everything eventually becomes normal. The first time I realized I could enter someone's home, there was this predictable rush of power. There was an immediate recognition that I could do anything I wanted. I could kill a man and never be captured. I could rape a woman and she'd a.s.sume it was just a horrific nightmare. You think about things like this when you're different from the rest of society. You think about them all the time. But the fact of the matter is that I'm not a rapist, and the fact that I suddenly had the means to become a world-cla.s.s rapist wasn't going to change that. We always end up being ourselves, somehow. I was who I was long before I consciously became the person I am. Being unseen makes me feel different than other people, but I've always felt different than other people. Invisibility isn't the issue. The difference is that I've always possessed the single-minded dedication to make an impossible scenario plausible. I have the power to invent my own life. Even if I'd spent the past twenty years sitting on a beach and drinking myself stupid, I would still feel powerful and alone and special. Those are simply the intermittent qualities of who I always am, regardless of how I feel about it."

I was electrified by Y____'s rehea.r.s.ed bragging; it reminded me of the first time I ever became legitimate friends with one of my college professors outside of cla.s.s. I wanted him to keep talking, even though the conversation was one-sided and pedantic. I know that must sound m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic, but there's no influence like the force of personality: It overwhelms everything, even when it defies common sense. Y____ had an effortless, extemporaneous way of explaining complex, personal things. He contradicted me so often (and so deftly) that I started to feel good anytime he agreed with me; I awarded his rare compliments much more weight than they deserved. That imbalance made every conversation charged, which might explain what happened next. This was the third part of our conversation I remember, and it's the part I remember most.

"There's actually something I wanted to talk to you about," Y____ said. "It might seem inappropriate, but I feel like it's necessary."

"Go ahead," I said. "Nothing is inappropriate."

"You say that now," he said. "But here's the thing: I know it's common for therapy patients to misdirect their feelings. I know that therapy patients often develop s.e.xual feelings toward their therapists, simply because they're usually confused people who've never had an experience where they felt open and vulnerable around another person. This is true, no?"

"Yes," I said. "That sometimes happens. Sometimes the misdirection is paternal or maternal, and sometimes it's intimate or romantic."

"Exactly," he said. "Now, the fact that I'm bringing this up probably makes what I'm about to say abundantly obvious."

"Yes," I said. "I think I know what you're getting it."

"What am I getting at?"

"I think you're trying to tell me that you are experiencing misplaced romantic feelings directed toward me."

"Yes," he said. "Obviously. We're all aware of this cliche. But here is my real question-are these misplaced feelings going to create a problem within the context of our work? Are you going to be able to handle my misplaced attraction? Because I'm sure it's misplaced. It has to be."

This confused me. It confused me in two different ways, but I only talked about one.

"Well, you're the one experiencing the attraction," I said. "You feel the attraction, and you seem to understand what it means. I don't get the sense that you're confused by what's happening, nor is this the first time I've ever had it happen with a male patient. So I don't see any problem from my end. It's nothing I haven't seen before. The only problem would be if this makes you uncomfortable."

"No, you're not getting it," said Y____. "It's never going to be a problem from my side, because feelings don't dictate my behavior. I'm not like that. What I'm worried about is the possibility of my misdirected feelings becoming uncomfortable for you, and if that discomfort will impact how freely we talk. If it will impact the things I can say to you."

"Like what? I don't follow." Now, certainly, I did know what Y____ meant when he said these words. I did follow. I followed completely. But I pretended not to. I suppose I wanted to hear what he was going to say. Sometimes I pretend I don't know certain things about myself in order to force other people to directly voice the compliments I secretly need to hear.

"Okay, here's a hypothetical: Let's say I started thinking about you. Let's say I started to have dreams about you. s.e.xual dreams. Should this be something I express? Keep in mind I'm not a s.e.xual person."

"Of course," I said.

"You say that now. But what if I told you that I liked to think about you when I m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed? What if I said that you were what I fantasized about, and that I could o.r.g.a.s.m only by thinking about you?"

"We've never talked about your fantasy life," I said. I was a little staggered by the degree to which this dialogue was escalating, mostly because I hadn't expected Y____'s language to be so specific. "I suppose I'd be interested in your willingness to talk about things like that, since, until now, those subjects have always been out of play." I found myself wis.h.i.+ng we were having this conversation in my office. Amazingly, I suddenly wondered if Y____ had somehow orchestrated this encounter so that it would happen in public. I felt a sensation of spontaneous paranoia.

"So none of this will be an issue," he asked. "This is all standard?"

"Yes," I said. "I want you to feel safe."

"Even if my thoughts are grotesque? Even if they're dark and detail-oriented? Even if I said something like, 'Well, see you next week, Victoria. I'm just going to go home and m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e right now. I'm just going to imagine putting my hand up your skirt while I m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e. I'm going to imagine you're not wearing underwear, and that I can faintly feel your pubic hair with my fingertips. See you next week.' Are you saying that these are things you'd want me to tell you?"

"Not necessarily," I said as impa.s.sively as possible. "I don't want you to tell me that. Unless you think those details are meaningful, or if you feel a need to say them aloud in order to own them. If those thoughts are important to you, they're important to me. But what I want has nothing to do with this. That's not our relations.h.i.+p."

The skin on my face felt warm. Was I blus.h.i.+ng? I prayed I was not. This had gone too far.

"That's good to hear, Vicky," said Y____. "Rea.s.suring. Very rea.s.suring. You are a pro. And-like I said-sorry if that seemed inappropriate. Like I said, I'm not a s.e.xual person. I'm not one of those s.e.xual people you read about in magazines. I was just curious, and it seemed relevant."

About five minutes after this exchange, I excused myself and returned to my office to wait for my next patient. Y____ walked in the other direction, leaving his empty c.o.ke bottle on the ground. He waved goodbye with two fingers. I felt good and bad. I knew I'd made another mistake.

June 20: A memory or a clue?

[This is simply a straightforward excerpt from our June 20 session. I kept waiting for Y____to revisit the strangeness of our most recent conversation outside the coffeehouse, but he never did. At least not directly.]

Sometimes I'd follow people in hotels. Hotels are much less complicated than residences, because of the access: You just walk around the halls during the afternoon, you locate a maid cleaning the room of a late checkout, and you stroll in while she finishes the bathroom. They always clean the bathroom last. Easy as pie. It was also easier to find decent food, because people leave the remains of their room service outside the door. Sometimes I'd also take snacks from the minibar. Hotels make you lazy.

The problem, of course, is that people aren't natural when they stay in hotels. It's not a realistic depiction of life. The ability to just drop towels on the floor changes the way people view themselves. It causes everyone to act like they're rich. Plus, most people staying in hotels are only in town for business, so they just sit around and look at the Internet all night. They lie on top of the covers and watch HBO. You can usually tell what social cla.s.s a hotel guest comes from by how long they stay in the shower and how much they appreciate the mattress. If they're staying in a hotel alone, men inevitably m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e,10 but women only do so half the time. That might sound reductionist and overstated, but my data is irrefutable.

The other downside to working hotels, of course, is the inescapable likelihood of ending up in a room with two people instead of one. That's when you really see people who aren't acting like themselves. When it's a couple on vacation, you can tell a lot about their relations.h.i.+p within the first ten minutes of arrival: If they almost have s.e.x as soon as they enter the room, there's a 95 percent chance they'll have s.e.x later that night; if they just unload their luggage and leave for dinner, they probably won't have s.e.x all weekend. To be honest, I didn't learn much from studying hotel patrons. It was kind of like trying to study the natural behavior of African elephants by visiting a zoo in Portland.

However, I do recall one episode that happened at a Radisson, right here in town. It wasn't an intentional discovery and it didn't fulfill my original goal, but it was a good day. I don't know if you've even been inside the Radisson on Cesar,11 Vicky, because ... well, why would you go to a hotel in the city where you already live? But there's a TGI Friday's on the ground floor. I saw this serious forty-something woman eating there, all by herself on a Friday afternoon. She didn't look like she was thanking G.o.d for anything. My a.s.sumption, of course, was she was staying at the Radisson. And there was something brittle about her I appreciated: It looked like she was unpleasant on purpose. She wore an earth-tone pantsuit and never looked away from the newspaper, even while smearing her chicken fingers with honey mustard. All business, all the time. I decided she'd be my subject for the night; I was drawn to her severity. She seemed like she wouldn't have the patience to become a different person, even when she wasn't at home. I waited for her to pay the bill, and I noticed she didn't charge the food to her room. In fact, she paid cash, which meant she wasn't even on an expense account. That was my first clue that something was afoot.

She leaves the TGI Friday's and walks up to the next level. The mezzanine. The mezzanine? The mezzanine. She enters a conference room. The door is propped open, so I follow. There are maybe ten other people in the room. At first I think, "G.o.ddammit. I've walked into a f.u.c.king business conference." But everybody there seems too unalike, and one of these people is clearly a teenager. They all nod h.e.l.lo, but n.o.body says anyone else's name and n.o.body shakes hands. About five minutes after five o'clock, they close the door and start talking. For a split second, I'm certain I'm at an AA meeting, which is only slightly better than a business meeting. But n.o.body talks about being drunk or wanting a drink or regretting things they've lost through drunkenness. These stories are more oblique.

"As you all know, I've been a Little League coach for the past three summers," one man began. He looked like a person from a Nabisco commercial: a good-to-great-looking guy. No facial hair. Nice s.h.i.+rt, no tie. Monotone voice. I don't want to stereotype, but I remember thinking he looked like somebody who used to go to Jimmy Buffett concerts, but only during college. He looked like the kind of guy who traded his SUV for a Saab the same day gas prices went above two dollars a gallon. He looked like the type who hated Obama for completely nonracist reasons.

"My players are all five and six years old," he continued. "It's a 'coach-pitch' league. What this means is that-as their coach-I pitch to my own players. The opposing coach pitches to his own players when they're up to bat. We used to have the little guys. .h.i.t off a tee, but the league decided that this format was better for their development. Basically, the idea is that-as their coach-I know which kids are good and which kids are bad, and I can challenge or a.s.sist them accordingly. We want every kid to know how it feels to get a hit, but we also want them to learn how compet.i.tion works. That's the concept. It's a good concept, maybe.

"So, we're playing a game this last Wednesday afternoon. It's tight. Our games are five innings long, and we're behind nine to seven in the bottom of the fifth. Two outs, top of the order. This kid named Tommy is our lead-off batter. Tommy is a wonderful kid-quiet, polite. Plays second base. Looks like Justin Bieber, so all the older kids give him s.h.i.+t. I lob him a fat one, and he whacks a single. Nice. Great. I'm happy for Tommy. The next batter is his friend Matt. Matt's a snot, but funny as h.e.l.l. Reads Batman during practice, or whoever the new Batman is supposed to be now. Talks a lot. Talks all the time. Talks about things no one cares about, like some book his grandfather gave him about Vietnam. I love Mattie. Matt already thinks he's interesting. I basically give him the same fat pitch, and bang. Another single. So now Tommy's on second and Mattie's on first. It's getting exciting, you know? This is about as tense as a baseball game between kindergarteners can be. The third batter is Cory. Now, the only thing I really know about Cory's life is that his mom is way too attractive to be forty. But Cory's a good player, at least for his age, so I challenge him some. I throw the ball with a little velocity, because I know he can handle it. He pops it straight up, so it looks like the game's over. But the third baseman-remember, these are six-year-olds-totally misplays the ball. It hits him on the top of the head. So now Tommy's at third, Matt's on second, and Cory's on first. Bases loaded. The sacks are juiced. It's a real game. All the parents are suddenly interested. I can tell, because they've stopped checking their cell phones.

"Now, our clean-up hitter is Toby. Toby is almost seven, but he looks like he's ten. He's far and away the best player on our team. We probably should have moved him up to a higher division. I have no doubt he'll be some kind of star by the time he's sixteen. You can already tell he's a jock by the way he walks. But, you know, right now, he's still six. He acts like a six-year-old, even though he's tall and thick and coordinated. And here he is, with the chance to be a six-year-old hero. Here's Toby, in prime position to win the game and be the king of the postgame McDonald's trip. And I want this to happen. In my mind, I want Toby to hit a G.o.dd.a.m.n grand slam, because he'd remember that forever, or at least until junior high. I'm his coach. My responsibility is his development. But something always stops me from feeling this way, even if my mind tells me otherwise. I remembered when I was in high school, when I pitched in the state playoffs. Everyone expected me to close games down, because I was the closer. I was the Mariano Rivera of the Cla.s.s B San Antonio Catholic League. That's who I was, and that's still how I feel. I know I'm not the same person I was in high school, but sometimes I am. And at that moment-just like always-I quit caring about the economic growth of my insurance dealers.h.i.+p or my wonderful wife or my own G.o.dd.a.m.n kids. I just want to be me. So when I saw Toby digging his stupid little size-five cleats into the dirt, it p.i.s.sed me off. f.u.c.k that kid. f.u.c.k him. There was no way Toby was going to do this. There's just no way. Time to close the door.

"I lace the first pitch on the inside corner of the plate. Good cheese. I can still bring it. Strike one. Our sixty-pound catcher almost fell backward when it hit his glove. I can tell it kind of scares Toby, which must have been my goal? Next, I throw a breaking ball that runs outside, but he chases it for strike two. I mean, what does Toby know about breaking pitches? I'm sure he can't even spell the word breaking. I waste my third pitch high and away, but then I blow off his doors with a split-finger fastball, right down the gullet. The bat never even gets off his shoulder. Strike three. Game over. I get the save against a child on my own team. I'm a monster.

"Later, I tell Toby that he shouldn't have chased strike two, that he needs to be more patient at the plate, but that-next time-I'm sure he'll come through and be the big hero. I let him have extra McNuggets-everyone else got six, but I let Toby have ten. To be honest, he seemed totally okay with what happened. Unchanged. But I felt awful. I felt the way I always do, whenever this happens."

As the Nabisco man finishes his story, I see other people around the table nodding. They all relate to this, somehow. A long-haired man starts yammering; he tells a story about how his wife recently composed a song on the piano, and he goes on and on about how the song was so beautiful. Much better than anything he'd ever written for his own band. Far more sophisticated and nuanced than anything he'd ever created himself. He's clearly proud of his wife. But his wife will never know how proud he was, because he refused to tell her. Instead, he told his wife it is "kind of okay" and that it seemed like something off a late Wings alb.u.m that Linda McCartney might have co-written. Again, everyone around the table nodded away. The teenage girl spoke third. She said she recently got a 97 on a trigonometry test, but that two other girls in the cla.s.s got a 100 because they showed their work and she did not. This made her hate the other two students. She could not believe they were being rewarded for doing things on paper that she could do in her head. As a result, she logged onto Facebook under a fake ident.i.ty and claimed these two girls were lesbians and that she saw them kissing after a National Honor Society meeting. She wanted to ruin their lives and stop them from getting into Rice. She said she felt guilty about this, but not really.

It turns out I had stumbled into a support group for people with "compet.i.tion disorder," a disorder I had never previously considered. Every person's anecdote expressed an overwhelming sense of helpless entrapment-they all wanted to know how it felt not to obsess over winning. They talked about how they couldn't stop watering and mowing their lawns. They talked about their need to drive faster than the flow of traffic and how they always ruin Christmas by overreacting to minor rules infractions during games of Apples to Apples. The woman I spotted in the TGI Friday's spoke last. She worked for a commodities broker and made $400,000 a year. Her salary meant nothing to her. "I don't like spending money," she said. "I only like watching it accrue." She had no husband and no children. Her social life revolved around her co-workers, all of whom she despised.

"They're so unmotivated," she said. "They smile at me, so I smile back. They ask me to lunch and sometimes I go. I need food like anyone else. They talk about how much things cost and about how their dogs act like cats and about which of our co-workers they suspect are s.e.xist or racist or sympathetic to Elisabeth Ha.s.selbeck, and they all try to convince me to visit their nondenominational churches. It's funny that somebody else mentioned Facebook ... two years ago, they all told me I needed to join Facebook. They said it was ridiculous that I'd never joined, particularly since my divorce. 'This is just how it is now,' they said. I told them I was too old for that s.h.i.+t. But they kept insisting how great it was, how it was no longer just for college kids, how it was this underrated crowd-sourcing resource, how it wasn't what I imagined, how it was this wonderful diversion and this important business tool. So I surrendered. I joined Facebook. And you know what? It turns out the only reason they wanted me to join was so they could show me pictures of their children without having to ask if I was interested in seeing them. This is why Facebook caught on with adults: It's designed for people who want to publicize their children without our consent.

"I suppose I don't mind chatting at the office. It's painless. I just repeat whatever they've already said with different words, and that's usually enough to satisfy their curiosity. They count that as conversation. They're naturally satisfied. I listen to their stories and look for weaknesses. I plot against them. They probably know I'm plotting, but they don't mind. They don't even have the tenacity to think I'm a b.i.t.c.h. They don't care if they lose. Honestly, they don't. They just go home and upload more baby pictures. It's crazy. It's so crazy. This is the life I'm supposed to envy? No way. No f.u.c.king way. I want to tell them this. I want to say it to their face. Which, I realize, is unnecessary. It's not their fault, I suppose. They can't help being satisfied with who they are. And it's not like my life is anything to brag about. You know what I do most nights? I watch There Will Be Blood in my bedroom. Not the whole movie. Just the middle part. The part where the oilman is talking to his fake brother by the fire and says, 'I have a compet.i.tion in me. I want no one else to succeed.' I watch that scene over and over and over again. It's track five on the DVD. It feels so good to watch. I like watching it so much that it scares me. I know this is pathetic, but I wish that oilman was my coworker. I wish he was in my life. I want to live in a world where that guy is normal. I want to sleep with that guy. That's who I envy. And that's why I'm such a mess. That's why I'm here. I know it's wrong to feel like this, even though this is how I want to feel."

The meeting ended after an hour. The group left en ma.s.se. I stayed behind, unseen, sort of dumbfounded by what I'd heard. Our world is really backward, Victoria. It's backward. Look what society does. It takes the handful of people who know how to succeed and makes them feel terrible for being different. Everyone is supposed to be mediocre, I guess. Everyone is supposed to be dragged into the middle-either down from their success, or up from their self-imposed malfunction. These people didn't need a support group. These people needed someone to tell them they were okay. They needed to be told that the morality they've been forced to accept is manufactured and fake, and that their guilt is just the penalty for not being a failure. Do you know who was the smartest president of the twentieth century, Victoria? Do you know who was the greatest intellectual? Nixon. The bipartisan historians all agree it was Richard Nixon. Bill Clinton is probably second. He was a Rhodes scholar. So this means the two smartest presidents of the twentieth century were the only one we forced to resign and the only one we impeached. That's how it goes. That teenage girl? The one who started the lezbo rumor? She could be president. She's presidential material. She's got brains and she's got guts. But that will never happen. The world will convince her that it's better to lose half the time, because losers are lovable. That's the phrase, right? Lovable loser.

I tell you what, Vicky: Sometimes it's terrifying to see how things really are. It makes me want to run away. I mean, I know I'll never get proper credit for the things I've done and the truths I've learned. We both know I won't. People want Santa Claus, and I'm not Santa Claus. I'm more like the guy who invented his magic f.u.c.king sleigh. I'm the guy who does the impossible things that need to be done, so that all the normal people can go back to sleep.

[A Personal Aside]