The Visible Man (5 page)

Back to me: I was always singular. Most children want to believe they’re different, but I actually was. I say things other people won’t even think. The week I started second grade, they skipped me ahead to third grade. When I was supposed to start eighth grade, they advanced me into high school. I graduated at fifteen. Most of the time, this is the worst thing you can do to a child. It makes them insecure. It makes them fragile. I saw it happen to other kids. But that never hampered me, or at least I never noticed if it did. It was a nonfactor. I didn’t mind skipping grades. It made me feel abnormal, but in a good way. Plus, I was unusually tall. I was almost six feet by the time I was twelve. I’m sure that helped. Tall people are naturally confident. History has proven this—Alexander the Great, Wilt Chamberlain, Gisele. The tallest person in the room always runs the show, and I’m a show-runner. When I was fourteen, I applied for a summer job with a telemarketing company. When I showed up for the interview, the little Willie Loman running the shop asked why he should hire me. I said, “Well, for one thing, you could probably fire some of
the dead weight around here. I don’t see anyone irreplaceable.” I got that job. I crushed it.

But you know what? The thing that really made me different wasn’t my height. It wasn’t my confidence, or the fact that I could read fast or multiply three-digit numbers in my head. What made me different was that I didn’t care about socializing with other kids. I never enjoyed the experience of having friends—they always seemed like a bunch of illiterate teenagers pretending to be other people, trying to impress each other, obsessing over bad music and sexually explicit movies, talking too loudly about where they bought their jeans. Outside of my classes and a few of my teachers, the only thing I enjoyed about high school was the gossip. I really, really loved gossiping about other students. I know that’s a lowbrow confession, but it was always the best part. Gossip was the only thing I found interesting about my peer group. We would speculate on who was dating whom and we would talk about why so-and-so thought she was so awesome and about how so-and-so got an abortion, and it was all conjecture and analysis. There were certain kids we analyzed every single day. To us, they were celebrities. Of course, there were also a lot of jejune bozos we
never
gossiped about, but that demarcation had it’s own little meaning, too—gossipy people define themselves by who they ignore as much as by who they care about. You establish that delineation organically. What can I say, Victoria? I’m a gossip. I don’t deny it. I wanted to be like that, so I was. But what I really wanted was to
know
. I wanted my gossip to be verified or disproven. I mean, how was I supposed to relate to these people if I didn’t even know what they were really like or who they really were? And I didn’t know those things. I didn’t. I knew how they acted, but that’s not the same thing. I started to wonder: How could I learn the truths that weren’t visible? What was I missing? What was
everyone
missing? I became obsessed by these questions, so I started following people. I would follow them home and hide in the bushes. People always make jokes
about freaks hiding in the bushes, but that’s literally what I did. I was the boy in the bushes.

One particular memory stands out. There was a kid I decided to observe—a long-haired boy with glasses. Thick glasses, long bangs. I don’t remember why I picked him. I guess because he seemed easy to follow. He lived eight blocks from my house. At night, I would tell my folks I was going to the library at the community college uptown, but instead I would sneak into this boy’s backyard. His room was on the second floor, so I spent the first few nights observing his parents in the living room. They didn’t do anything except watch TV, but then again, his mother and father were always in the same room. They were never alone, so they couldn’t be themselves. My principal target was the boy, so I eventually took a gamble. There was this massive, sprawling tree behind the house, which I climbed. I climbed this tree, sat on a branch Zacchaeus-style, and looked straight into his bedroom window while the kid played Nintendo. It was incredible! I totally remember that first night—it was the first night I was able to see a person who wasn’t me. He was doing nothing, but he was doing it
for real
. No pretense. No self-awareness. I was seeing him as he really was. And I know this probably sounds like voyeurism, but that’s not accurate. Voyeurism had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t getting cheap pleasure from seeing something I wasn’t supposed to see. I was learning. It was like school.

Now, this boy, this teenager—I don’t even remember his first name, but his last name was Swanson—he mostly just played video games. Driving games, like
Pole Position
. That was his modus operandi, and it was unremarkable. But sometimes he did something else. Every so often, and without any forethought, he would pause the Nintendo, turn up his boom box, and physically act out whatever song he was listening to. He’d perform, but only for himself. And he didn’t play air guitar, the way they always make it seem in movies and in rock videos; it was more
like a Broadway musical. He would pantomime the lyrics of the song, lip-syncing all the words, jumping on the bed and spinning around the room like a woman. It was always the same songs off the same CD, always played at top volume. When his window was ajar, I could sit in my tree and faintly hear the music he would mimic: Rush. He listened to Rush.
2112
. An album that no one at our school cared about. An album I’m certain this boy never mentioned to any of his friends. I mean, I knew this person. I suppose I
was
his friend, from his perspective. I saw him every day, or at least I saw the version of himself he dragged into school. He sat behind me in geometry and across from me in French. We had P.E. together, two years in a row. I knew what he talked about and I knew the things he pretended to like. And I can assure you, the version of the kid I knew from school did not give a shit about Rush. Not at all. Not in any way. And yet … and this seems so obvious now … he clearly did. He
did
care about Rush. He
loved
Rush. It must have been more important to him than all of the things he pretended to adore in public, because that was the music he played when he was himself.
2112
was already uncool and outdated, but it was the one thing he loved, simply for what it was. So I was fascinated by this. I was fascinated by this one minor detail that wasn’t remotely minor—his secret relationship with
2112
. His secret bedroom performances, devoid of anything performative. I always wanted to ask him about it. I wanted to just casually walk up and say, “Hey, Swanson. So, what do you think of Canadian power trios? Any opinion? Do they inspire your very being? Any plans to do an oral book report on
Anthem
?” But, of course, I never did. I couldn’t. Too risky. Instead, I just watched him through his window. Over time, I lost interest and started following someone else. But Swanson was the first. He was the first person I knew.

This, I assume, is exactly the kind of information you want from me. You want me to go back through elementary school and middle school and high school and college, and you want me
to talk about all the things that supposedly made me who I am. And maybe I’ll do that, assuming these sessions go well and we need to keep digging for bones. Maybe I will and maybe I won’t. But—right now—I want to accelerate. I want to talk about why I built the suit and why I developed the cream. You could argue, I suppose, that those things were not necessary. Certainly, there are easier means of surveillance. Wiretapping, for one. Hidden cameras, motion detectors. I had an intense interest in hidden cameras, and I used them on my roommates during college. Very often, hiding under a bed or inside ceiling panels can accomplish the same goals, at least in a limited capacity. But none of those things can truly reflect the sense of being inside a room. If you want to be in a room, you need to be
in the room
, you know? Even though that’s an infinitely more difficult endeavor. Even though the suit and the cream are uncomfortable, and even though the physical toll it takes on my body is ludicrous. I’ll never feel the same. I’ll never be the same. But it had to be done.

[Note to C. Bumpus: In retrospect, I should have stopped Y____ at this juncture and asked him to provide greater details about “the suit and the cream.” He might have complied. However, in my defense, I want to stress that I was still under the impression that “the suit and the cream” were part of Y____’s fantasy life and not tangible artifacts. I was also trying very hard to comply with Y____’s prearranged conditions, which demanded that I not interject during his monologues. At the time, gaining his emotional trust seemed more important than the credulity of his claims. If you’re wondering what I was thinking internally when he started talking about the suit and the cream, my answer is simple: I thought, “This is interesting. I wonder where this is going?” I assumed Y____ was doing something many patients do when they begin to feel relaxed around a therapist—I assumed he was expressing an obvious metaphor about how he viewed himself. The
idea of donning a special “suit” or costume is a common symbol for someone hiding his true self from the world. The concept of “the cream” initially struck me as sexual, which was a subject Y____ had never alluded to previously. I was genuinely excited by these revelations and wanted to hear more. Only later did I discover my silence had been a mistake. I waited one session too long.]

As I believe I already mentioned, research and development for the suit and the cream was financed by the second Bush administration, technically through standard grants but ultimately via the NSA.
⁶
This was when I was in Hawaii. It started as an extension of optical camouflage, which originally came from the University of Tokyo, but—at Chaminade—we were more occupied with metamaterials. Now, to this day, I still don’t know if the original intention for the suit was warfare or reconnaissance. As you might expect, there was a lot of debate about this among the staff at the lab. There was always an issue over whether we could accept funding for this research if the suit and the cream were going to be used in actual combat, since that would essentially make them weapons. None of those eggheads wanted to be working on weaponry. They were overt moralists. It was a little different for me, partially because I was younger but mostly because this was not my first rodeo. I was young, but this experience was arguably my fifth or sixth intellectual undertaking: I had started in chemical engineering as an undergrad, but then I pursued graduate study in sociology and then—immediately following that—psychology. I dabbled in investigative journalism for two years. I was a capable musician. I was a pretty decent playwright. I attended a city planning workshop. I did some organic farming. I invested eighteen months of independent study in mathematics before seriously returning to hard science. I can’t think of any academic subject that doesn’t excite me, except
maybe art history. So even though I was the youngest person in the Chaminade lab, my worldview was much more diverse. I’d already considered different levels of thought. I would never refer to myself as a “renaissance man,” although I suppose that’s precisely what I am. But virtually everyone else at Chaminade had never done anything outside of research, so all their individual concerns were a tad myopic and—frankly—unsophisticated. The big question for them, it always seemed, was the relationship between the unexplained motives of the military and their own personal involvement. Basically, they felt they could chase any technology as long as they pursued it under the guise of doing something good, or at least something neutral. In other words, if they made a weapon
but did not know it was a weapon when they made it
, there was no moral crisis. They refused to consider the possibility of someone misusing whatever we created; that was something they viewed as beyond their control. They were fixated on accepting all directives at face value, even if that information made no sense or seemed like an obvious lie. What they wanted, I suppose, was the proverbial “clear conscience.” But because the government would never directly say why they wanted cloaking paraphernalia, the whole project started to hemorrhage and collapse. Many of my colleagues felt that—because no one would directly tell us
why
we were trying to construct human cloaking elements—they were forced to infer that whatever we ended up making had no use at all. If no one
told them
what the cloaking was for, they looked at everything as an exercise. In their minds, having no espoused explanation meant the suit couldn’t be used for anything. I know that sounds crazy, but there was a certain silly logic to it: If something did not have an outlined purpose, then any use qualified as misuse, and that meant they’d knowingly be working on a project that was destined to be used improperly. Because, I mean—rationally—we all knew these theoretical suits were going to be used for
something
. All the grant contracts made it clear that this was not just a scientific inquiry, and there was so much money being poured into development that there had
to be a definite product when we finished. The NSA wouldn’t throw that much money at an exercise. But nobody could get over the fact that we had no directive. In other words, if the military had told us
anything
about why we were supposed to develop cloaking technology, that would have been enough for most of my co-workers. I’m certain everyone at Chaminade would have been totally comfortable if the NSA had just fabricated some bogus memo about our intended purpose. It could have said anything. Just something on paper that stated, “This is why we want these magic suits.” They could have sent us an e-mail that said, “We want to use these suits to imbed soldiers in dangerous areas so that they can provide emergency relief to displaced citizens without visually notifying enemy personnel.” That would have been more than enough. For all I know, that might have been their actual intention! But because the NSA refused to give us anything quantifiable, people started to slowly abandon the lab on so-called ethical grounds. The first ones who quit did so for valid reasons, but—after a while—most people quit because one of their favorite colleagues quit before them, or because this fake philosophical problem provided an excuse to move back to the mainland, or because they were the kind of sheep who always did what everyone else was already doing. And this, of course, totally worked to my advantage. When the project was eventually eliminated, I was the only person left in the lab, so I just stole everything we had and finished the work in my apartment. I’m not generally a thief, but this was a special circumstance. Once I escaped the distractions, it took only three more years. Nobody noticed. This had never been a secret project, because the project never had a clear-enough purpose to keep secret. I just boxed up everything from the lab and put it in my car. Nobody asked me one question about all the shit I carried out, and all our collective notes and equations were on a shared computer network. And to be honest, even when the lab was at full strength, I’d done most of the work myself, anyway. I was the only one who immediately
understood how important this was. And I’ve never minded working alone. I actually prefer it.