Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (37 page)

“You got it!”

“It made a sound! You hear that? It made a sound!”

I stumbled back, stunned by the pain.

“Get it!”

The boy with the branch was advancing again. I stepped back, my good arm extended to ward off the next blow. The branch swung hard into my side and, stumbling with the force of the blow, I slipped and went sprawling onto the ground.

“It’s down! It’s down!”

“Get it!”

They were instantly crowding around me, and I was being pelted with stones. I saw the branch raised high over me, as I rolled over and scrambled frantically along the ground on all fours, trying to get to my feet. The branch came crashing down on my right leg. I was up on my feet and running for my life.

“There it goes! It’s getting away!”

The whole pack of them were right after me, shouting.

“Look at its tracks! Get it!”

It was true. I was leaving tracks as I ran, huge gouges in the wet dirt, and, thinking that must be helping them, I turned onto a paved footpath. Ahead of me on the footpath a group of four people had stopped apprehensively, bewildered by the confusion. One of them was a woman in a long flared red raincoat with a matching rain hat. There was a large patterned umbrella; someone had bright yellow foul-weather gear. They were looking not at me but at the black kids beyond, who were running toward them.

One of the boys called out, “Stop that thing! It stole my bicycle!”

The people in the designer rainwear seemed to be looking at me now, uncomprehending.

“Stop it! Knock it down!”

I veered off the path and ran south. Suddenly I was standing at the edge of the Seventy-ninth Street transverse looking straight down at the sunken road cutting across the park fifteen feet below. They were coming up behind me. I half jumped, half slid over the edge and down the face of the wall onto the sidewalk that ran along the road, landing hard and tumbling forward across the pavement.

“It went over the edge!”

“There it is on the walk! Get it.”

One of them was already clambering down the wall. As he reached the pavement a little to the west of me, I struggled to my feet and ran desperately east, toward the center of the park. I saw another of them sliding down the wall and others running along the edge above me. Up ahead I could see I was coming to the underpass where the road runs under the park drive.

“It’s going into the underpass! It’s in the underpass! Cut it off!”

Pulling up in the shelter of the underpass, I watched the rain drain off me, leaving only random beads of water, as if I were made of glass, and I shook myself free of them like a dog. Two of the boys had already entered the underpass behind me, and were peering around intently. Another boy had clambered down the wall somewhere beyond the underpass and was approaching from the other direction, carrying the tree branch. I was invisible again, but I was trapped.

“You see it?”

“Nothing came out this side.”

“It’s in here. I
feel
it.”

The usual massive, deep puddle had formed over a clogged drain and flooded most of the road surface in the underpass. I could not walk through it without giving myself away, so I stood there trembling in the middle of the sidewalk.

The boy with the stick was scanning the ceiling of the underpass.

“Stay there by the edge and watch nothing comes out.”

I was perfectly still. The boy waded into the puddle, kicking at it as he went.

“Fucking weird.”

“It’s just used up,” one of them said. “Like a little tornado. Just all used up.”

“I hit it with the stick. It’s alive.” The boy had crossed over to the other side of the road and was studying the wall.

“Might of gone down the drain,” said someone else.

“Nothing going down that drain, not even water,” said the boy who had hit me.

“Well, nothing in here but us now,” said another boy uneasily.

I stood very still.

“Fucking weird,” said the boy in the road. “Maybe it lives in the water,” he speculated, eyeing the puddle. He started to smash at the puddle with the stick, taking big, savage swings.

“Watch for it to start up again,” he said. He was laying about wildly with the stick, banging at the water and the wall of the underpass. I had very little room to maneuver on the sidewalk, and sooner or later he was going to catch me with one of his blows. Or force me out into the rain again.

A Mercedes, its windshield wipers clacking at full speed, loomed up out of the torrent and slowed to a crawl as it entered the puddle. The boy with the stick retreated back up onto the sidewalk to let it pass. I edged over until I was standing next to him on the curb, and as the rear end of the car moved alongside us, I stepped over onto the bumper with my left foot and threw myself up onto the back of the car so that I was sprawled over the top of the trunk and rear window, gripping the rims of the window frames with my fingers. The car heaved under my weight, and there was a metallic thump as I landed on the trunk. The driver looked back to see what was happening and saw a boy frantically slamming a large stick against the rear end of his car.

“The car! It’s on the car!”

Another boy was running at him, waving.

“Stop! Stop! Stop the car!”

The driver abruptly accelerated, and the car, with me clinging desperately to the window edges, lurched off, leaving the boys behind.

When the car stopped for a red light at Central Park West, I dropped off the back and stumbled down into the subway. My neck and cheek seemed to be bleeding, and my body hurt everywhere from the clubbing. Feeling like a rat half beaten to death by small boys, I sat on a bench at the end of the platform and tried to collect myself. Eventually I climbed onto a train and rode down to Fifty-second Street and Sixth Avenue, where I stood trembling miserably at the foot of the stairs for another half hour until the rain stopped and I could limp back to the Academy Club.

It was after five when I got back, and the Club was full of people. Not safe to go into a guest room. I slunk into a storeroom on the fifth floor, where I sat on bundles of freshly laundered towels and ran my fingers over my body, trying to determine how badly I had been injured. I decided nothing was broken, although I could not be sure about my shoulder or my ribs. It was hard to tell whether my neck was still bleeding, but I blotted it carefully and wrapped a towel around it. I curled up and fell asleep immediately.

It was morning when I awoke, which meant I had slept through my chance to eat. Two full days without food. I ached everywhere, and it hurt to breathe. When I tried to stand up, I found that my right knee was badly swollen, and I was barely able to get myself down to the kitchen that night. I was sore for weeks, and my ribs continued to hurt for months.

A
lthough I continued to force myself to go outside regularly, after that I could no longer leave the Club without a feeling of dread. It was so much safer inside, in those large, quiet, reassuring rooms. No crowds, no running or shoving or shouting. As the weeks passed, I became quite accustomed to my existence there and began to take it for granted, losing sight of how thoroughly odd it was. I was provided with all the necessities of life, and many of the luxuries as well. It was true that I was eating only one meal a day, but I had grown almost used to that, and I had an extraordinarily varied menu to choose from and a wine cellar better than any I could ever have provided for myself. There were books and newspapers, the cool pleasant water of the swimming pool, the acres of leather-upholstered chairs and couches.

The Club had been built with a maze of little corridors and back stairs to allow a vast — and now unaffordable — staff to move discreetly through the building, and soon I knew every inch of it. I knew each employee and where he would be at any time — when the library would be vacuumed, when the dressing room attendants would slip up to the roof to smoke marijuana, and when the kitchen staff would leave each night. I knew which member would fall asleep under a newspaper in the lounge after lunch and which would stay late in the evening. And I moved through the building at will, with complete confidence.

As for Colonel Jenkins, I no longer gave him much thought. I think I assumed that he had given up by now – or if not, that his investigations would lead to nothing. For all they knew, I was dead. In any case, there would be no particular reason for them to suppose that I was in the Academy Club. But even if they did somehow find out where I was, it seemed to me that there was very little they could do about it. It did sometimes bother me that there were only two exits from the building: they might be able to keep me in. But they would never actually catch me inside that warren of little passages and rooms and stairways. Not unless they were willing to send in scores of men who knew exactly what they were looking for.

And it was inconceivable that they would send a raiding party into the Academy Club. The members would not stand for it: they really do have the idea that the place is a sort of sanctuary, and many of them are used to having their way. And anyway, half of them are lawyers. You could probably not send a lone uniformed policeman through the front door without a lifetime of litigation and letters to the editor. They would have people like Anne writing articles on the abuse of police power or the lack of accountability of the intelligence services, and I could not see what sort of explanation Jenkins or anyone else could plausibly give that would come anywhere near satisfying them. Anyway, Jenkins would not do anything that would draw attention to himself or give away my existence: half my value to him lay in the fact that no one knew about me. All in all, I felt quite pleased with my own cleverness in choosing the Club as a refuge, and I think I believed then that I would spend the rest of my life there.

And there was the proximity of friends and acquaintances. There was comfort — at first, anyway — in seeing familiar faces. But then, when you go for weeks without speaking to anyone — only scurrying around the back way, avoiding everyone — your mind begins to go, and you lose any sense of being with other people. No matter how many laps you swim, or how many walks you take. The faces begin to seem like meaningless masks, the conversation a murmur in the background. Just forms drifting past. And you don’t really notice it happening to you. You think you are the same person you always were.

I remember one day stepping into the entrance hall and finding myself suddenly face to face with Peter Wenting. He was someone I had always known. Not a close friend ever, but we had gone to the same school, lived in the same house at college. In fact, I went out with his wife Jennifer once, long before he did. But I would normally have walked on past without a thought, except that on this occasion, just as I found myself staring straight into his eyes, he was saying to the other man, whom I knew but could not quite place (you start forgetting the names), “Nick Halloway? No, he wouldn’t be interested. Anyway, he’s apparently dropped out and joined some sort of religious sect. The Moonies or something.”

“Nick Halloway?
I never really knew him, but—”

“It just goes to show that you can never be sure of anything in this world.” There was a pause as Peter reflected on something. “I always liked him, more or less. I know there are plenty of people who didn’t.”

“The Moonies!”

“Or the Hare Krishnas — one of those sects… Anyway,” said Peter, evidently returning to some previous topic of conversation, “it could have gone either way.”

“It’s like everything else.”

“We should get together. Have Marion give Jennifer a call.”

“I’ll do that, Peter. Take care.”

There is always something mildly compelling in an overheard conversation about yourself, even when the people mean nothing much to you and nothing much is said. The trouble was that tears were running down my face, and I could not control the feeling welling up in me that the exchange I had just heard had been extraordinarily moving. It was odd: I would feel perfectly calm and balanced going about my daily routine, but then I would suddenly notice that I was consumed by inexplicable rage or the most maudlin nostalgia, and I began to fear that I was losing control of my reason. It came from scurrying about furtively all day. But it began to bother me that my friends were talking in the next room, and increasingly I would think that I had heard my name. But when I would steal up to them, they would always be talking about something else. And it still bothered me the way Bill would look straight through me as I came through the door. He had, I noticed, acquired a new assistant, who stood next to him, learning the members’ names. He would never learn my name. It was living like this, among all these people but cut off from them.

It was also the agonizing worry every waking moment. Can they hear the water running into the basin? Will they notice the food missing, the books out of place, the way the bed is made? You begin to grow paranoid. And when you decide they
have
begun to notice you, you no longer know how much confidence to have in your own judgment. The night watchman had begun to vary his routine so that he would come up to the fifth floor while I was trying to wash up in the evening. The maids had begun to come in to check guest rooms that had not been booked, as if they knew someone was using them. And one night I heard the doorman ask the night watchman, “Is he up there?”

It might have meant anything. You have to try to keep your perspective. But there were times when you could hear the slightest movement in the almost empty building, and perhaps they
were
aware of me. I became more cautious in my daily routine. I always wore all my clothes and carried all my possessions with me, and when I went to bed at night, I wrapped everything up in a single tight bundle that I could pick up and carry off in one hand if anything threatening should happen. I wanted to be ready at every moment to walk out of the room, or out of the building.

As the weeks went by and June approached, there were fewer and fewer people in the Club, especially during the weekends. The maintenance men began to paint and repair the interior of the building — which was disconcerting, because I would come down in the morning to find some part of the Club full of painters and completely closed off for days. The dining room was not open on weekends now, which was also unpleasant, since that meant two full days without fresh food. Then for several days the front entrance was closed off entirely with big sheets of plywood while they performed repairs of some sort on the door. This left only the service entrance, which opened onto an alleyway along the back of the building, and that made me particularly uneasy, because to get through it you first have to pass through a vestibule consisting of a short corridor with a locked door at either end. Running along one side of the corridor is a counter, behind which there is a little storage area for deliveries. A porter sits on a stool behind the counter, and once you are in that vestibule you cannot get out until the porter reaches under the counter and presses a buzzer unlocking one of the doors. Rather than risk being trapped in that space between two locked doors, I stayed inside for three days, feeling more like a prisoner each day.