The Visible Man Part 6

Though I am reticent to discuss my own life (even when it unavoidably intersects with my time with Y____), I need to outline a few pertinent details about what was happening to me during this specific period, purely for the sake of transparency.

I will be brief.

As stated earlier, I had not told anyone-including my husband-about what was happening with Y____. I lied to my own longtime therapist (the aforementioned Dr. Dolanagra) and claimed that Y____ had ended treatment without explanation in May. This required an even denser web of lies: I now had to come up with an ongoing weekly serial for Dr. Dolanagra about what was supposedly happening in my day-to-day life. I initially tried expressing boilerplate complaints about my marriage, but that made me more depressed than I already was. I tried talking about my own childhood, but I couldn't locate any conflict (relative to most, my adolescence was devoid of adversity). I finally made up a crisis about a fictional high school girl I was supposedly mentoring who was considering an abortion (I built a composite "troubled teen" from various ex-patients and tossed in a few plot elements I remembered from If These Walls Could Talk-I named the girl "Joan" and focused on the political implications). To my amazement, Dolanagra was totally bamboozled-to this day, she still asks how Joan is coping. I could probably teach an improv cla.s.s.

My husband, however, was harder to fool. He sensed something strange and hidden; our interactions were now punctuated by long stretches of unnatural silence. Ever since May 9, I'd become a different person-I spent more time alone and went to bed two hours after John was already sleeping. I'd been in a book club, but I quit; I stopped following the news and avoided phone calls. Everything outside of my imagination seemed gray; the world inside my head was more electrifying than the world I had to live in. I started spending days by myself, walking along the lake to the Congress Avenue bridge in order to watch the bats. Every night, thousands of Mexican bats take flight from beneath this bridge, blanketing the sky like an undulating cape. Three thousand bats becoming one ma.s.sive superbat, a mosquito-eating sky-creature. I did this dusk after dusk after dusk. It was an excuse to be alone and an opportunity to think about Y____. He had become the center of my professional life (and, by extension, my life as a whole).

In the weeks that followed our meeting outside the Caribou Coffee, I started to question my own feelings toward Y____; I started to wonder if I was becoming too entertained by his stories (and if that was damaging my ability to work with other patients and communicate with other people). When we met on June 20, I waited to see if he'd formally revisit the "misplaced" issues we'd casually discussed. I placed the responsibility on Y____ to bring it up. When he ignored me entirely, I decided it was time to tell John what was happening. Hiding this information seemed worse than anything I'd technically done. Moreover, I needed to know if this was really happening. Was I losing my mind? If I was, I knew John would tell me directly. He never has any compunctions about calling me crazy.

When I told John that I needed to talk to him and that he would need to sit down, his initial response was cold and predictable: "Are you having an affair?" he asked without emotion. I said I was not. "Are you sick?" he asked next. "Do you have a disease?" Again, I told him no. "You are not going to be able to guess what I'm going to say," I a.s.sured him. "Quit trying. And no matter how you feel, this information must remain only between us."

I told him almost everything.

I told him how my relations.h.i.+p with Y____ had started and what I originally suspected his problem was. I told him about our initial inperson interactions. Obviously, most of what I told him involved the experience of May 9, which felt liberating to say aloud. It was like removing a megalith from the roof. I recounted every detail I could remember about that morning. By the end, I was almost shaking.

I expected John to disbelieve my story, in the same way I never believed Y____ until he proved otherwise. Amazingly, John did not seem skeptical (perhaps he was, but he didn't show it). I also expected him to have a million questions, but he had only a few.

"So, he's not transparent. Am I right? He can be invisible, or mostly invisible. But he's not transparent. True? When he eats, you can't see the food going down his invisible throat and lodging in his invisible stomach. You can't see through his invisible skin. Am I right?"

I told him that this was accurate. I reiterated how annoyed Y____ always became anytime I referred to him as an invisible man. Oddly (or maybe predictably), John empathized with that sentiment.

"Is there any chance that this is some kind of hoax?" was his next question. I told him that I couldn't prove that it wasn't a hoax, but that I was 99.9 percent certain Y____ was the person he claimed to be. I had not seen him with my own eyes.

It was John's third question that threw me off balance.

"So who is this person?"

I told John I didn't understand the query.

"You can't just become an invisible man these days," he said. "I don't know if you ever could, but you certainly can't now. We live in a bureaucratic nightmare. I mean, does he have a permanent residence? People can't disappear anymore. Does he have a Social Security card? How does he pay taxes? Did he fake his own death? What happens when you plug his name into Google? At the very least, would it be possible to verify his academic records, or his employment in Hawaii? That information must be online. Am I right? I'm right. Who is this person? Who is this person, really?"

I told John I did not know the answer to these questions. I told him that our relations.h.i.+p was not focused on those kinds of specifics, and that he hadn't even filled out his insurance form. I told him I wasn't a police officer, and that Y____ came to me for help. I told him that all of those technical details were-on balance-insignificant, particularly when compared with the experience of being inside a room with a person you can't see. Mostly, I was annoyed by John's unsupportive posture. I was annoyed by John himself. Why weren't my personal anxieties worth his concern? I'll never understand why his first reaction is to immediately ask more questions. It's like he can't think about problems in any other way.

"You need to wonder about these things," John said. "If what you're saying is all true-and I have no reason to doubt you, because you're not the kind of person who tells stories-then you need to recognize the import of the situation you're in. True? This is major. This is a totally new landscape. You are the emotional confidante of a phenomenon. This needs to be investigated. You have a civic responsibility to investigate this. Am I right? I'm right."

I disagreed with John, at least at first. I told him that my foremost responsibility was to the patient, and that I did not treat interesting clients any differently than uninteresting clients (this was a lie, but it's what I said). John seemed completely oblivious as to why I was telling him about Y____. He never tries to see things from my perspective. He doesn't have that ability.

"That's the wrong way to think," he said. "You're a smart person, but you're not being smart right now. Don't take that the wrong way, but it's true. You're overlooking the obvious. This is not a normal scenario. This is a unique case. Traditional rules don't apply. I would strongly advocate investigating who this person is and what they're really doing. I mean, look: This man does not seem to be seeing you for conventional reasons. True? It doesn't even seem like he's coming to you for the reasons he himself purports. Right? True? Right? You're not handling this case correctly."

I was stunned by this accusation. It was consistent with John's personality, but he'd never before questioned my professional abilities with such directness. It escalated our debate into a far larger argument, much of which gridlocked around issues completely unrelated to Y____: John's unwillingness to take my career seriously, our unresolved decision to remain childless, the way our age difference and racial experience creates an imbalance in our marriage (John is thirteen years my senior and African-American), John's overall condescending tone toward almost everyone we know (particularly my closest friends), and a bunch of complaints and accusations I can't even remember. We fought all night, and-though we both apologized the next morning-it placed a strain on our relations.h.i.+p that had not been there before. It was definitely the most problematic stretch of our problematic marriage.

When John and I got engaged, I knew we were very different people. I told that to everyone at our wedding, and they all made the proper "opposites attract" jokes during their toasts. But it turns out that we were remarkably similar, at least about things that didn't matter. I'd been wrong about all the minor differences I a.s.sumed would cause friction: We had different politics, but our fundamental perceptions about fairness were the same; we loved different books and movies, but we had similar ideas about what made a book or movie good; we came from different places, yet we had identical views about how our upbringings shaped us. On a day-to-day level, our marriage has been easier than I would have ever expected. But what I didn't realize on my wedding day-and what John continues to deny, even now, after everything that's happened-is that we're profoundly different in one metronomic respect: There's nothing I care about more than how other people feel, which is the one thing John doesn't care about at all. Or, to put it more on the nose: There's nothing I care about more than how other people (and particularly John) feel about their lives, and there's nothing that interests John less than how anyone (myself included) feels about any issue that doesn't involve him directly. It has nothing to do with my love or his love or loving or levels of love. It's just the way I am and the way he is. All my friends saw this when John and I were dating, but I never did and they never told me.

It took me a while to accept this. Maybe I'm still trying.

I expose these things not to embarra.s.s John or myself, and not because I feel any need to live a public life. I expose them because it had an impact on things that happened later.

Pseudo-Historiography

[What follows is an excerpt from June 27. The session initially dragged, as Y____ seemed less talkative than usual. During a lull in the conversation, I asked Y____ something I'd been wondering: What, exactly, did he feel he was learning from these observations, since he was always so adamant about the pedagogic component of his invisibility. In other words, outside of any espoused scientific revelations, what was he personally learning about himself? He immediately perked up at this query and became the Y____ Character, lecturing in his bombastic, self-aggrandizing style. When I read this transcript now, it strikes me as highly rehea.r.s.ed. He also didn't answer my question at all. But if this exchange was scripted (and had no relations.h.i.+p to my query), why did he save it until I specifically asked my question?]

Roommate situations were strange. This became a problem whenever I tried to observe someone in their twenties-I'd select a target and I'd follow him into his life, only to realize he wasn't living alone. So then I'd have this claustrophobic situation where two or three or four people were interacting in a small, enclosed area. It was formal and completely fake. Plus, my likelihood of being discovered increased dramatically. If a person is alone, you can get away with a lot. You can get away with more than you should. You can sneeze, and the person will hear you sneeze, and you will see them hearing you sneeze. It will be abundantly clear that they heard an unexplainable noise. They will perk up and look around. They'll give the whole room the once-over. But that's as far as it goes: They notice something, and then they go back to whatever they were doing before. They a.s.sume they're hearing things. They return to a state of nonnoticing. But once you have two people in the room, every noise is unforgiving. If you sneeze, the couple will look at each other and wordlessly ask, "Did you hear that?" And then they start wondering. People trust their friends more than they trust themselves. That was something I established straight away. And you'd think that would make them feel more secure, but it doesn't. It has the opposite effect: Unconditional trust destroys relations.h.i.+ps. Two people meet as open-minded strangers. They like each other, so they grow closer. It feels good. They become unguarded. Eventually, the two strangers become two friends. But once that boundary of distrust is removed from the equation, they start to learn who the other person really is, and then each starts to resent the other. They end up feeling more distant as friends than they were as strangers. I've seen this happen a million times.

Still, I must be honest: I sometimes enjoyed observing roommates, even when it contradicted my premise. I spent so much time watching lonely people do nothing that group dynamics were a nice change of pace. That said, it's a little shocking how rarely most roommates speak to each other. Especially guys-guys will spend five hours in the same enclosed s.p.a.ce and say nothing. Men tend to have zero interest in the lives of others. Women talk about what's on TV, and about boyfriends or potential boyfriends, and about various concerns they have over haircuts. It's disturbing how accurate gender cliches tend to be. They're self-perpetuating. We all direct so much effort toward undermining gender cliches and punching holes through stereotypes, but all that does is remind people how tenacious those sentiments are. Arguing that they're false actually makes people more aware that they're true. I mean, just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something insignificant; listen to what they say and watch how their residual emotions manifest when the fight is over. It's so formulaic and unsurprising that you wouldn't dare re-create it in a movie. All the critics would mock it. They'd all say the screenwriter was a hack who didn't even try. This is why movies have less value than we like to pretend-movies can't show reality, because honest depictions of reality offend intelligent people.

The reality I got to see was not "movie reality." The reality I saw was just reality, without quotes. You want to know what I really learned? I learned that people don't consider time alone as part of their life. Being alone is just a stretch of isolation they want to escape from. I saw a lot of wine-drinking, a lot of compulsive drug use, a lot of sleeping with the television on. It was less festive than I antic.i.p.ated. My view had always been that I was my most alive when I was totally alone, because that was the only time I could live without fear of how my actions were being scrutinized and interpreted. What I came to realize is that people need their actions to be scrutinized and interpreted in order to feel like what they're doing matters. Singular, solitary moments are like television pilots that never get aired. They don't count. This, I think, explains the fundamental urge to get married and have kids, or even just the need to feel popular and respected. We're self-conditioned to require an audience, even if we're not doing anything valuable or interesting. I'm sure this started in the 1970s. I know it did. I think Americans started raising offspring with this implicit notion that they had to tell their children, "You're amazing, you can do anything you want, you're a special person." They thought they'd be bad parents if they didn't. They felt a responsibility to give unlimited emotional support. But-when you really think about it-that emotional support only applies to the experience of living in public. We don't have ways to quantify ideas like "amazing" or "successful" or "lovable" without the feedback of an audience. n.o.body sits by himself in an empty room and thinks, "I'm amazing." It's impossible to imagine how that would work. But being "amazing" is supposed to be what life is about. As a result, the windows of time people spend by themselves become these meaningless experiences that don't really count. It's filler. They're deleted scenes.

Every once in a while, I'd come across someone who was really happy when they were alone. That was always a little beautiful, but also a little confusing. You know who seemed happiest alone? Consumers. It wasn't the people who read the best books or had the most hobbies. It was the people who bought the most bulls.h.i.+t. I know there's this image in our collective unconscious about the depressed millionaire living alone in an ivory tower, drinking himself drunk on four-thousand-dollar bottles of wine, sadly trying to purchase his childhood sleigh in order to feel something real. But that's a lie. As it turns out, that lonely millionaire is way happier than the lonely pauper. It's not even close, and the explanation is obvious: The rich man can buy things, and those things distract him from loneliness. The rich can take vacations, which isn't nearly as essential to day-to-day happiness as the process of looking forward to all the vacations you'll experience later. They have more comfortable furniture and better TVs, and those objects are the single man's sanctuary. They don't need to cook, so cooking becomes this gratuitous, exotic activity. Poor people hate cooking. It's just another ch.o.r.e they need to complete when they get home from the job they hate. But ent.i.tled people love to cook. It makes them feel competent and earthy. Of course, rich people don't love cleaning, so they hire maids to do that. That's another thing that really sets the happy apart from the unhappy-how clean the house is, and how much effort it takes to keep the house clean. I've seen a lot of rich people come home to a clean house that they had nothing to do with-the maid service did everything while they were away. You can see the happiness on their face when they open the door and smell the Lemon Pledge. That smell reminds them they're rich. Here again, this all comes back to parenting. That's my theory. The central mistake parents make is telling their kids that making money is not as important as being happy, as if those two things are somehow opposed or disconnected. Movies and TV perpetuate that sentiment, because it makes for counterintuitive plots and happier endings. What parents should be telling their kids is that these things are connected. They should tell them the single easiest way to be happy is to make a s.h.i.+tload of money. Money doesn't guarantee happiness, but poverty doesn't even come close. I mean, sure, a lot of rich people are unhappy, but sometimes they don't even notice how unhappy they are. They're too busy online shopping. They're too occupied trying to figure out a better recipe for jambalaya. You can buy love-not completely, but partially. You can, and never believe otherwise.

Heavy Dudes

[This was the turning point. From the moment Y____ entered the room, our July 11 session was irregular (we had not met on July 4 because of the holiday). Nothing was easy. Y____ sat down, stood up, sat down, stood up, paced around, and told a few nonpersonal anecdotes that seemed irrelevant and disjointed. He was agitated. He kept starting and ending stories, often criticizing himself for wasting my time. This was unusual; he rarely cared about my time. Had Y____ ingested some sort of stimulant that morning? His behavior suggested as much. About twelve minutes into the session, he sat back down, sighed, and dramatically s.h.i.+fted gears. He started telling me a different kind of story-his tone was muted, but the details were rich. It took almost two hours, but I didn't restrict him.

The way Y____ told this story was not remotely chronological; he began in the middle and filled in contextual details intermittently, often repeating the same information multiple times, trampling his own speech patterns. For the purpose of clarity, I have reorganized the story into a straight narrative and removed the gaps and repet.i.tions. The specific time of each statement is in parenthesis, along with its sequence within the original telling.]

1 This is something I've wanted to discuss with you for a while. Of the things that bother me, this is what bothers me most. I mean, I know what happened wasn't my fault, even less so than what happened with Valerie, but it eats at me. Unlike the Val situation, this experience was absolutely a net negative. If I could reverse what happened, I might. In fact, I would. (12:40 [29]) 2 Flying had become too risky. I had a close call. I'd sneezed on an American Airlines flight to Boston-twice-and everything went pear-shaped. There was a moment when I actually thought there might be a physical altercation on the plane, because a stewardess knew something unusual was happening. I could tell what she was thinking: She was thinking, "There is a terrorist hiding in this fuselage." I could read it on her face. It's exactly what she was trained to think. My only option was to crawl underneath the last row of seats and sweat it out. That was a terrible two hours. After that, I started driving myself everywhere, but that started to have an impact on the process. My agency was unconsciously dictating whom I was observing. I was poisoning the sample by driving to places I'd already been. I decided a better strategy would be to stow away with random people when they pa.s.sed through Austin. It felt more egalitarian. That was my thinking at the time. (11:14 [1]) 3 Do you care about music? Do you remotely care about music? Do you at least read the A & E section of the newspaper? Do you pick up the Chronicle? Even if you don't, I'm sure you know about the music festival that happens here every March. It's impossible to live here and not know about it. You can't avoid it, so I'm just going to a.s.sume you know what I'm talking about. As a resident, I'm sure it annoys you. It used to annoy me. But it's a great weekend for my objectives, because it makes stowing away supereasy. That weekend, every single year, there are literally hundreds of vans and U-Hauls parked downtown, all filled with equipment-guitars, drum kits, amplifiers, everything. And because these bands tend to play three or four shows over the course of the weekend, the vans get loaded and unloaded constantly. I just amble around Sixth Street on Sunday night and crawl into the back of somebody's s.h.i.+tty van. If the van was a jalopy, I knew the band had no money-and if the band had no money, I knew they'd be leaving that same night, because every hotel in Austin jacks up the price of its rooms during the festival. By Monday, I'd always be somewhere different. (11:23 [4]) 4 There's a club on Red River Street called Red Eyed Fly. Kind of where Red River intersects with Eighth Street? Terrible name for a bar, I don't get the reference, but whatever. There were four bands playing there on Sunday. One was called Suicide by Antelope. One was the Something-Somebody-Somewhere Blues Band, or words to that effect. I can't remember what the third group was called-I didn't watch any of these bands, obviously. I'm just trying to remember what was on the marquee. Besides, the only one that really mattered was the fourth band, because they loaded out their equipment last. They were called Jooky MaGoo. That, I can remember, because they had red-and-white JOOKY stickers all over their guitars. (11:20 [3]) 5 The members of Jooky MaGoo, for whatever reason, did not ride in their own van. The band was three thin bozos and one hot girl, and they traveled separately in an aqua sedan. The Jooky van was driven by two roadies, one guy about twenty and one who might have been forty. That's who I got in with. We drove nonstop, north on I-35, for something like nineteen hours. It was a soul-deadening ride-I don't think the two guys exchanged more than fifteen words on the entire trip, and the van had no radio. That's probably why the band drove separately. I almost skipped out a few times when they were getting gas, but I wanted to stick with my plan. It seemed like such a good plan. We ended up in suburban Minneapolis, late Monday night. After sitting on a speaker for nineteen hours, it felt good to be anywhere. But I wasn't ready for the f.u.c.king weather. I did not antic.i.p.ate being able to see my breath in March, and I wasn't dressed properly. Walking would have been a problem-the suit doesn't break the wind. I elected to stay with the van. The younger roadie dropped the older roadie off at some suburban house and said, "Thanks for the help, man." That was the extent of their relations.h.i.+p-I have no idea how they ended up working together. They didn't seem to know each other at all. The older roadie walked into his house and the young roadie drove the rest of the stuff-and me-to his apartment uptown. By now, it must have been almost midnight. I remember we drove down a road called Hennepin, and maybe past a little frozen lake? It was too dark to tell. No moon. We ended up on Pleasant Avenue, which is an easy avenue to remember. When the kid finally got home, he had to drag all the musical equipment up two flights of stairs, all by himself. I just followed him inside, right through the front door, easy as pie. He was storing all that s.h.i.+t in his living room, which was not an inconvenience, because he really didn't have much furniture. He lived in one of those inexpensive, oversized studio apartments that seem to exist only in self-consciously hip neighborhoods. There was a mattress on the floor and a stereo in the corner. Lots of upright Bose speakers. Nothing on the walls-not even paint. Vinyl records on the floor, in crates. Lots of vinyl. A thick gla.s.s coffee table, but no proper chairs and no sofa. He had a c.r.a.ppy set of golf clubs, weirdly. It smelled like an attic and a bas.e.m.e.nt at the same time. He finished hauling the equipment, he took off his s.h.i.+rt and his eyegla.s.ses, and he collapsed on the mattress. Didn't wake up until three in the afternoon. I slept for maybe an hour or two. My mind was fried. (11:33 [7]) 6 Now, this kid: Let me talk about this kid. His name was Dave. He smiled as he slept. That was, and that will always be, the thing I remember most about him. (11:18 [2]) 7 I was pretty sure I was going to hate this kid. He looked like someone I would hate. He looked like someone who put a lot of effort into slacking. The fact that he didn't talk once during a nineteen-hour van ride made me think he was snooty or boring or stoned, or maybe all three. But the second he woke up on Monday, things were different. He seemed so gentle. He carefully folded his dirty T-s.h.i.+rt and placed it inside the cardboard box he was using as a drawer. He put on a different s.h.i.+rt that made him look like a cowboy. He briefly exited the studio and crossed the hallway to knock on his neighbor's door, and the youngish woman who opened it immediately handed him a fat orange cat. She must have been the cat-sitter. He brought the cat back into his apartment and had a little conversation with its furry face. He must have stroked that cat's head for twenty minutes. He played with its ears, asked it if it had had a nice weekend, gave it a bowl of water. He held the cat's face up to the window so it could see outside. They had a real relations.h.i.+p. (11:32 [6]) 8 Around 5:30, Dave calls his girlfriend on a cell phone. It's clear that this is his girlfriend, because he calls her "Baby" as often as he calls her "Julie" and immediately tells her how much he misses her, and he reiterates that sentiment every time the conversation loses momentum. Obviously, I can hear only one side of this conversation. But most of their dialogue is rote and easy to piece together. [Y____ holds a hand to his ear with his thumb and pinky extended, mimicking a phone conversation.] "Don't believe the haters. Austin's still happening." "They played one good show and three bad ones." "It was nice. A lot of people were wearing khaki shorts." "The best deal is Iron Works." "He was supposed to meet us at the Sword show, but he was too drunk." "Tina took care of Murray for me. Tina. From across the hall. The redhead." Just totally normal stuff, the kind of stuff anyone might say to a girlfriend who lives in a different city. They talked for an hour, and she did most of the talking. But there was one thing Dave said near the end of the call that was more opaque. [Again, Y____ puts his hand to his ear like a phone.] "They're real heavy dudes. They're the heaviest dudes I know." He elaborated on this, but only slightly. He was extremely enthusiastic. "They're actually coming over here tonight ... Yeah ... Julie, I know! But ... but-exactly. I mean, they're just so heavy. I've never hung with dudes like this. They're heavier than everything. They're the heaviest dudes I've ever met." He kept repeating that same phrase: heavy dudes. Was some kind of ponderous metal band going to perform in this modest apartment? I was involved with this. I was mentally involved. (11:35 [8]) 9 Now, I know what you're thinking, Vicky-my whole reason for pursuing this project was to observe people when they were alone. I've stated that thesis time and time again. But-remember-all the rules I've outlined are my own rules, created by me, for my own motives. I can break them whenever I want. Any self-imposed rule can be suspended without explanation. People forget that they have that ability. You forget that, too, Victoria. (11:27 [5]) 10 Dave cleans his apartment, or at least he cleans everything that might get touched. The bathroom is too gross to salvage, but he makes the kitchenette livable and files half of the loose records. He listens to piano jazz as he cleans-that Charlie Brown music that makes everyone happy. He leaves for twenty minutes and brings back a case of Guinness and a case of Ba.s.s. He washes his biggest, coolest beer gla.s.ses and dries them with a towel. He talks to his cat. "Don't let these heavy dudes scare you, Murray. They're just heavy." The cat stares at him for a long time. He's like a cat from a cat food commercial. He's an actor cat. I think to myself, "This cat should be on TV." (11:37 [10]) 11 Around nine o'clock, men start arriving at the apartment, sometimes solo and sometimes in pairs. And these are men. Like, they're all six feet four or six feet five. Most of them weigh in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds. Everyone has a beard. A few have ponytails. Three of them are wearing bib overalls and work boots. Dave's empty apartment is instantly devoid of emptiness: It's now a room of ten ma.s.sive mountain men, sitting comfortably on unplugged Marshall amplifiers, drinking twenty-four-ounce black-and-tan schooners of beer that Dave mixed over the kitchen sink. It was two tons of flesh and bone and hair. So this is all that Dave meant, I thought. They're literally heavyset people. But then they start playing the stereo, and I notice they like only certain types of music. One type, really. They play Black Sabbath's Master of Reality. They play Neil Young's Live Rust. They listen to a bunch of bands no civilian would ever enjoy-bands with monosyllabic names like Sleep and Tool and Karp. They listen to the Beatles' "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" twice in a row. They listen to Electric Wizard, and they define all other bands influenced by Blue Cheer as "compromised." So now I'm thinking, "This is what he meant. This is why they're heavy." But that's only part of it. Around 9:45, these acid-rock gorillas start eating mushrooms. Like, whole handfuls of dried, s.h.i.+t-colored, hallucinogenic mushrooms. They offer some to Dave, but he says, "I'll stick with beer." It was crazy. But what made it even crazier is that these mushrooms didn't seem to affect them at all. They didn't trip, or at least they didn't act trippy. Maybe the mushrooms didn't work. That seems to happen more often than not. But regardless, their personalities remained static-if I hadn't watched them eat the mushrooms, I'd have never known it happened at all. The only thing that changed was what they started talking about. That's when I finally deduced what Dave had meant. (11:42 [11]) 12 I don't know if this was an organization or a club or just an ad hoc collective of friends. That was ambiguous. That was never defined. They clearly knew one another, although they must not have been overly familiar, because they all shook hands when they arrived and again when they left. But whatever excuse brought these guys together was exactly that-an excuse. These dudes wanted only one thing: They wanted to sit around and get heavy. It was the heaviest possible conversation, conducted by the heaviest possible humans, held under the heaviest of circ.u.mstances. All they did was argue about morose, heavy s.h.i.+t: The possibility of a world without morality. Ethical justifications for revenge. The concept of genocide as a necessary extension of Darwinism. Someone would ask a question, somebody else would answer it with a different question, and that would turn into a third question. It was like taking a philosophy cla.s.s with a herd of minotaurs. They debated politely, rarely cutting anyone off and always conceding minor points. But they'd also insult each other, flatly and without tact. "That's naive," they'd tell each other. "Your words are entertaining, but you think like a child." (11:40 [9]) 13 Part of me wants to call these heavy dudes "brilliant," but I don't know if that's true. They'd all read a lot, certainly, and they all had a lot of opinions. But that's not really the same as being smart, you know? It's related, but it's not the same. Like, they were all p.r.o.ne to conspiracy theories. Every time someone really started to impress me, the conversation would unravel into something stupid. Like, a certain song came on the stereo, and they started talking about the way music was recorded during the 1950s. This one dude starts talking about Pro Tools and studio technology, and he's fixated on how music producers can now do most of their editing by watching sound waves on a computer. He wasn't for this or against this-he just thought it was meaningful and super-duper deep. "We now measure the quality of sound through visual means," he said. "This means a product designed for one specific sense is built through criteria that are measured by a totally unrelated sense. This means something for our ears is created by someone's eyes. That's a huge leap. This would be like if it suddenly turned out that the most accurate way to judge the quality of wine was by how it felt when you rubbed it between your fingers, so all the world's sommeliers started using their hands instead of their mouths and noses. Judging wine would become a tactile occupation, just as judging sound has become an optical occupation." When he first described this, I was impressed; it was, I suppose, a new way to think about sound. But he just kept going, and his logic went congo-bongo. He kept talking and talking and talking, until he ended up insisting that there's some ma.s.sive underground vault in rural New Mexico that's owned by the Church of Scientology, and that this vault houses a solar-powered turntable with pictogram ill.u.s.trations explaining how it operates. They devised pictograms, apparently, in case written language disappears over time. This dude insists that the vault was built in preparation for a nuclear holocaust, because no one really knows what will happen to the U.S. power grid if a bunch of nuclear weapons are detonated at sea level. The best a.s.sumption, or at least his best a.s.sumption, is that all our hard drives will be spontaneously fried and the Internet will collapse and every digital file in existence will either be deleted or spontaneously corrupted. So when human society eventually tries to rebuild itself in some distant future, this underground bomb shelter will be the only source for recorded sound. Scientologists will own the only working record player on earth. Hence, Scientologists will control all the music in the world. He was pretty concerned about this. (11:48 [12]) 14 The question I had while watching all this, of course-and probably the question you have right now-is, "Why were these people in Dave's apartment?" Dave was thin, didn't seem like a philosopher, didn't talk much, didn't act or posture or trip, and seemed to be into Vince Guaraldi. But it was obvious he wanted these guys in his apartment, and he listened to their conversation with a real intensity. He was a listener. He did a lot of affirmative nodding. And he obviously had some kind of preexisting outside relations.h.i.+p with Zug. That was obvious from the get-go. Zug was the difference maker. (12:44 [30]) 15 Zug was kind of their leader. I say "kind of" because I suspect he might not have said that about himself, and I know none of the other heavy dudes would have said that about him. But-in reality-he was. Zug spoke the most and was more willing to abruptly change the trajectory of the conversation. He'd read more than the others, or at least he was the most willing to casually cite the books he'd read. He was the largest person from a physical standpoint, and he had the most body hair. He ingested the most mushrooms. He laughed the least and was the most nihilistic. Zug was the heaviest of the heavy dudes. (11:50 [14]) 16 I didn't like the way Zug spoke to Dave. He would kick back his head and snort whenever Dave tried to enter the conversation. Sometimes he'd kind of loom over him and glare. They must have liked each other on some level, but Zug was dismissive. He was cruel, and for no apparent reason. Have you ever seen Goodfellas? Do you remember the scene where Joe Pesci shoots the teenager in the foot? It was too much like that. (12:46 [31]) 17 There was a dispute. What can I say? It was a minor dispute, but it seemed not-so-minor at the time. It certainly doesn't seem minor now, in light of what happened. (12:20 [22]) 18 It was late. It was well past one in the morning. They were talking about "honor cultures"-societies where everything is based around status and there's just a collective, accepted notion that any kind of threat or negative action will be met with immediate violence. This is how it is in prison, for example, and-apparently-how it was in Iceland during the tenth century. I don't know where they were getting their information, but they all seemed to know a s.h.i.+tload about tenth-century Iceland. The larger point, according to Zug, is that honor cultures have more n.o.bility than nonhonor cultures, because they're more egalitarian and more functional and ultimately more polite. If everyone has the potential to become a vigilante, everyone becomes equal. I could tell Dave was getting annoyed by this, just by the way he kept wrinkling his nose and shaking his head. After five minutes of this c.r.a.p, he finally interrupted Zug's lecture. He said the concept sounded childish and anti-intellectual, and that it seemed like Zug was glamorizing a primitive world he'd never want to honestly experience, and that the whole theory was basically just a complicated way of saying, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." Now, if anybody else had made this argument, I think Zug would have been civil. But because it came from Dave, Zug started raising his voice. "Don't you realize that the phrase 'an eye for an eye' is actually an argument for restraint?" Dave said he didn't want to waste time on semantics. He seemed nervous, or maybe even scared. So then Zug says, "Well, you've certainly read William Henry Miller's [sic]12 books on this subject, right?" Fully aware that Dave had no reason to be familiar with some random academic n.o.body's ever heard of. So, of course, Dave told him he didn't know who that person was, which immediately made Zug roll his eyes. To which Dave quietly replied, "Now you're just showing off." And that's when Zug started yelling. He totally lost whatever cool he might have had. "You're an idiot, go f.u.c.k yourself, let the grown-ups talk," on and on like that. Loud. Embarra.s.singly loud. Embarra.s.sing in general. (12:23 [24]) 19 Dave just sat there and took it. It went on forever. (12:24 [25]) 20 There was a knock on the door, right after the yelling. It was the red-haired woman from across the hall. Dave answered the door. Everybody in the room got quiet-that unnatural variety of quiet that happens when the cops try to break up a party. She was obviously asking about the yelling, although we couldn't really hear what was being said. Dave finally came back inside and said, "You guys should probably leave. It's later than I thought." n.o.body argued. The heavy dudes got off the amps and started filing out, shaking hands with Dave as they said goodbye, mentioning how they'd had a great time. They all left at the same time. But Zug didn't leave. Zug stayed. He went to the fridge, opened a Guinness and a Ba.s.s, and poured himself another black-and-tan. n.o.body seemed to think this was unusual. I suppose I did, but I was the only one. (12:27 [23]) 21 Dave started cleaning up the apartment, placing empty schooners in the sink. Zug was leaning against the kitchen counter with beer foam in his mustache. He says, "I'm sorry I yelled at you, D." Dave says something along the lines of, "I just don't understand why you do that." Again, Zug says he's sorry. But then he just starts lecturing Dave all over again. "You need to have more sophisticated ideas," he insists. He tells Dave that he doesn't read enough, and that the books he does read are facile, and that he's sometimes embarra.s.sed by the things Dave says. He's not yelling when he says this, but he's talking like a bad father. He says, "All your opinions are received wisdom." He says, "If you don't have an original idea, it's better to just listen to the people who do." This was real perverse, real condescending s.h.i.+t. It was appalling. I was appalled. Dave just sort of shrugged it off and didn't say anything. He acted like he was concentrating on half-a.s.s organizing his totally unclean apartment. Finally, Zug stops talking. He downs half his beer in one gulp. Then something peculiar happened: Dave turned to him and casually said, "Are you staying over here tonight?" Zug took another drink of beer and said, "We'll see." (12:31 [26]) 22 What was going on there? I don't know. I have an idea, obviously, but I don't think it matters. (12:30 [27]) 23 I was upset. I don't like to admit when I get upset, but I was. He was an awful person. I regret what happened, but only the last part. I don't regret the first part very much. I suppose I regret it a little, but just barely. I can see the absurdity in what transpired. I can recognize the irony. It's probably not the worst thing I've ever done. (11:53 [13]) 24 Zug is walking around the apartment, looking at the guitars and finis.h.i.+ng his drink. And I'm looking at this huge, hairy, heavy dude, and I just hate him. I'm a pretty good judge of character. Everybody thinks that about themselves, but I'm right. I'm different. Zug was a bully. It wasn't like he was doing anything for the world, or producing anything the world needed. He was just an educated cretin who took advantage of people like Dave, probably in lots of bizarre psychological ways. I was thinking about how Zug had talked all that bulls.h.i.+t about the n.o.bility of honor cultures, and how transparent that was. Sometimes it's wrong to let people get away with their behavior. (11:56 [16]) 25 I was only going to freak him out. That was the totality of my intention. I thought I would just scare him, f.u.c.k with his mind, f.u.c.k with his reality, put him in a subordinate position. Was it out of character for me to do this? Yes. But I did it for Dave. Dave deserved my help. (11:55 [15]) 26 I didn't overthink it. It was just an honest reaction to what was happening at the time. Dave goes into the bathroom and closes the door. I see the light come on under the crack of the door, and I hear the fan running. By now, I have a strategy: I'm going to walk up to Zug, poke him in the chest, and tell him he's a coward. I'm going to tell him that he's fake and that everyone knows he's fake, and that everything he believes about the world is wrong. If nothing else, I want him to think he's having an extremely bad trip. Then I'll just run out the door and spend the night in the hallway. He'll flip. That was my thinking. (12:50 [32]) 27 Okay, I get it. I get it. You're still not getting it. Let me try to simplify the situation: Dave's still in the bathroom. I can hear him working in there. It's gross. Zug is standing in the middle of the living room, looking back toward the kitchen. The positioning seems perfect. I walk straight toward Zug's face. I can tell he can't see me at all-and, even if he could, this is a person who'd probably had ten or twelve beers and a bushel of psychedelics. I have all these brilliant things in my head that I want to say, but I don't say them. I choke. I just say, "f.u.c.k you, man," real fast, almost like it's one three-syllable word. And I poke him in the chest with my finger. Hard. I poke him hard in the chest. But, you know, it was only a poke, and this was a huge man. Normally, I don't think I could have knocked him down if I'd punched him in the face. But this poke really surprised him. Really, totally surprised the s.h.i.+t out of him. He got this hilarious look on his face, like he'd just remembered something awful. His arms shot out. His eyes were like bicycle tires. He tried to back up, and he fell. And he fell straight back, real fast. And his f.u.c.king head went right through the f.u.c.king table. His skull went through that gla.s.s coffee table like a cannonball. It shattered into a million f.u.c.king pieces. My first thought was "This is bad." But then I saw the blood. It was pouring out of the back of his head. It seemed like it was being forced out by a pneumatic pump. Blood was pooling up under his neck, crawling across the floor in every direction, seeping into his beard. His hair was like a wet red sponge. So my second thought was "This is as bad as it gets." (12:39 [28]) 28 His head struck one of the metal legs of the table, and it punctured the bone. Put a hole in his head the diameter of a golf ball. That's exactly how it was explained in the Pioneer Press-the reporter was weirdly graphic about the trauma, almost like he was getting off on describing it. You can read it for yourself. The details are all online, if you're curious. Their archives are free. It turns out Zug's real name was Marion. Just like John Wayne! (11:59 [17]) 29 These are vivid memories. Vivid, vivid, vivid. I close my eyes and everything happens again. The toilet flushes and Dave flies out of the bathroom, his belt still unbuckled. He doesn't scream. He just says, "Jesus." He tries to help Zug, but what can he do? He gets blood on his hands, blood on his s.h.i.+rt, blood on his pants. It's now a room of blood and amplifiers. It looks like a photo shoot for Vice magazine. Dave starts frantically searching for his cell phone. He calls 9-1-1, explaining the situation as best he can. He explains everything too calmly, actually. His voice was perfectly composed. This would come back to haunt him. I know they played that 9-1-1 call for the grand jury in an attempt to portray him as unfeeling. (12:10 [19]) 30 Waiting for the cops to show up was a strange fifteen minutes. Dave just stood over Zug's corpse, kind of hugging his own body with both arms. The dude was so clearly dead. He turned white when he bled out. The cat started licking some of the blood, so Dave picked it up and patted its little orange head, real gentle. The cat didn't care about Zug. He understood. Animals are like that. (12:12 [20]) 31 As soon as the police arrived, I left. A room full of police is not a good place to hide, even if you're the best hider on the planet. People were constantly coming in and out of the door, so it wasn't hard to exit. I read that they interviewed redheaded Tina the very next morning, and she told them about the loud argument. All the other heavy dudes gave depositions, too. The newspaper wouldn't directly say what the relations.h.i.+p between Zug and Dave was, but several of the heavy dudes implied it was complicated. That was the word they all used: complicated. It was too frigid for me to go out into the night, so I spent the rest of it on the second-floor landing. They took Dave to the station around 3:30 a.m. He wasn't in handcuffs, but they charged him with murder when he got downtown. I saw him walk out with two cops. He looked guilty. He did. Just before they went down the stairs, he asked one of the cops if he could run back and give his cat to the woman across the hall, but they said they'd take care of it for him. He said, "Thank you. I'd appreciate that." (12:15 [21]) 32 I can tell you have questions, Victoria. I can see them on your face. But just let me finish. I don't care if our session goes long. You can charge me extra. We'll address your concerns next week. Next week, you can ask me anything you want. But I just need to power through. (12:04 [18]) 33 As you might expect, I've been following this case pretty closely over the Internet. The daily papers don't write about it much, but some of the weeklies report almost everything. Personally, I don't think he'll go to prison. Maybe he'll take a hit for manslaughter, but certainly not for second-degree homicide. That's what the prosecution wants, but I see a lot of holes in their case. Why would you murder a man by pus.h.i.+ng him through a coffee table? Is that even something you can do on purpose? Plus, Zug's blood alcohol level was jacked through the roof, and he still had some uneaten mushrooms in his pocket. The fact that they had an argument hurts, of course. Tina's testimony was a problem. And-of course-Dave's lawyer won't allow Dave to testify on his own behalf, which makes it seem less like an accident and more like an incident, especially with all this "complicated relations.h.i.+p" c.r.a.p that the heavy dudes keep repeating. You know, if I didn't know better, I'd be a little suspicious myself. I saw an AP photo of Dave in the courtroom, wearing an ill-fitting suit, looking like he hadn't slept in weeks. His hand was over his mouth. He looked worse than Zug's corpse. I hope this hasn't ruined his life. I mean, I'm sure it hasn't made his life better, but I like to imagine he's got some grit. (12:58 [34]) 34 Part of me wanted to get inside Tina's apartment to check on the cat, just because I feel like I owe it to Dave. I owe him that much. But now there's too much risk, and I'm never going to Minneapolis again. Too many nutcases in that town. Too many weirdos. I'll stay here. (12:51 [33])

Heavy Dudes Part II (The Interrogation)

[I've generally avoided using two-sided transcripts in this ma.n.u.script, partially to keep the focus on Y____ 's words but primarily because I'm uncomfortable with my own elocution. However, I'm suspending that rule temporarily in order to ill.u.s.trate why certain things were said in our July 18 session. My queries have been streamlined for clarity. This is not the full conversation; I am including only the opening thirteen minutes. I'm mildly embarra.s.sed by some of the things I said in this exchange, but it was a confusing time.]

VV:.

Last week, you said you'd be open to questions about what happened in Minneapolis. Are you still open to that?

Y____:.

I am. Did you read about the case online? I'm curious as to whether you were curious.

VV:.

I did not. Is that important to you? Is this something you want me to be interested in? Is it something you need me to know about?

Y____:.

I don't need you to know anything. I was just curious. I'm curious about what interests you.

VV:.

A great deal of what you said was interesting. And ...

Y____:.

And?

VV:.

Troubling.

Y____:.

I accept that. What troubles you? I'm open to all of this. I want you to understand this, Victoria. I don't need you to, but I want you to. And I must admit-I'm a little surprised you didn't look this up on the Internet. Why didn't you do that? I'm just curious. I would have done that immediately, had I been in your pumps.

VV:.

I wanted to talk about this first, before I did anything. I wanted to talk about if this really happened.

(Long pause.) Y____:.

I don't follow you.

VV:.

Did this really happen?

Y____:.

What do you mean? Is that a nonliteral question? Or is this some Rene Descartes horses.h.i.+t?

VV:.

My question is self-explanatory.

Y____:.

I just told you to check the Internet in order to read about it. Wouldn't that be a pretty stupid thing for me to say if I'd made the whole thing up? I don't understand where this is going.

VV:.

Oh, I'm confident that the event you described happened. I do not doubt-if I rummaged around the Internet-that I'd find a story very similar to what you described. But I want to know if you were actually there. I want to know if you actually played a role in what happened, or if you merely saw it happen, or if maybe you just read about it and decided it would make a good story. I'm not trying to catch you in some sort of a lie. I just want to establish the real reason you told me that story.

Y____:.

So ... even though you've seen me cloaked, and even though you believe that I can become what you cla.s.sify as "invisible," and even though I stood in front of you and you could not see me-you're still skeptical of what I tell you. You're skeptical of my story.

VV:.

Don't misinterpret what I'm saying. I'm not making accusations. I've seen you when you can't be seen. I know that's real. I know you have the ability to be unseen. But that doesn't mean everything you tell me is real. Sometimes people tell stories about themselves that aren't impossible, but still untrue. Do you know what I mean? I'm not saying I think you're a liar, or that there's no way this could have happened. I'm just asking if everything you told me is how it really was. All you have to do is answer yes, and I'll move on.

(Pause.) Y____:.

I see what you're doing, Victoria. (Another pause.) This is actually a little sophisticated. I can't deny that you've thought about this. I appreciate that. It's sort of like television, I suppose. Right? From your perspective, my stories are like reality television: You start with the idea that what you're seeing is real, even though everyone watching at home knows it's constructed entertainment. But then there's another level, where an actual reality emerges from the simulated reality. All the fake relations.h.i.+ps become real relations.h.i.+ps. And then there's a third level after that, the level of received realness, where all that universal fakeness ends up being closer to formal reality than the show's original intention. That's impressive, Victoria. You should get a job at MTV.

VV:.

Does this mean you're not answering my question?

Y____:.

You already know the answer to your question. You're taping these conversations, right? Go back and tell me what parts you think are unreal. I would be fascinated to hear which parts you think are fabricated. It would be truly fascinating.

VV:.

Please don't be offended. That's not why I'm asking you these questions. You said you would be open to whatever I wanted to ask about ... You know, I'm curious about something else: Have you ever heard of something called the Theory of Mind?

Y____:.

Of course I have.

VV:.

Of course you have.

Y____:.

And? So?

VV:.

Tell me what it means.