Eventually the sound of his mom’s laughter brought him out of it. He remembered, as if from a long time ago, that he was supposed to be joining her to watch the movie. Rousing himself, Reuben put the watch away. He yawned, closed the closet door, then leaned against it a moment. He could probably fall asleep right there. He forced himself to shove away from the door and go out into the living room.
His mom sat on the sofa, watching the movie. She had changed into her pajamas. She took one glance at him and said, “You look so tired, Reuben. I don’t know why I didn’t notice before. Did you not sleep well last night?”
“Maybe not,” Reuben mumbled, sinking onto the sofa beside her.
“Here,” she said, passing him the popcorn bowl. “You need to take it easy.” She nodded toward the little television screen. “Evidently, this guy wants to adopt an elephant. No doubt hijinks will ensue.”
Reuben got comfortable in his corner of the sofa. “No doubt.”
Within seconds he was half-asleep. He was aware of his mom groaning at the feebler jokes and chuckling at the better ones for a while, then falling silent, which probably meant she had glanced over and seen his eyes closed. Before long he was completely out. He woke up to the blaring orchestral music that always seemed to play at the end of old movies, and, sure enough, the credits were showing. The bowl of popcorn remained untouched. He looked at his mom and saw that she was blinking away a stunned expression. So she had fallen asleep, too.
She saw Reuben looking at her. “That was really good,” she mumbled. She yawned.
Reuben nodded. “It might be my favorite movie ever.” He yawned, too.
They smiled, hugged each other good night, and went to their rooms.
Reuben closed the door behind him and went straight to his closet. He almost expected to find nothing there. It would make a lot more sense to discover that he had dreamed the whole thing.
But the watch was just where he’d left it, waiting for him.
Reuben woke the next morning to the sounds of his mom getting ready in the bathroom. The groaning of old pipes behind the thin walls, the splash of water in the sink. He opened his eyes. He’d left his lamp on. He had no memory of falling asleep. In fact…
He sat up in alarm. The watch was in his hand. The toy camera lay on the bed nearby. He remembered winding the watch again and starting to take more pictures. After that, though—nothing.
He sat up in alarm. The watch was in his hand.
Reuben pressed the camera’s display button to look at the last few pictures he’d taken. They were all more or less the same: his lamplit pillow, very blurry. He remembered noticing that extra blurriness, as if the camera had begun to feel just as bleary-eyed as he did. But then what? He must have fallen asleep right in the middle of what he was doing. Unbelievable. What if his mom had come in to check on him with the watch in plain sight?
The thought of it propelled him out of bed to put the watch away at once. Yesterday had surely been the longest, most exhausting day of his life, but even so, he should have been more careful. Reuben closed the closet door, shook his head, and was just turning away when the knowledge of what the watch could do—of what he could do—suddenly hit him again full force, as if for the first time.
I can turn invisible! he thought. Invisible!
He laughed and leaped up as high as he could, trying to touch the ceiling. His fingers still came a foot short, but so what?
“So what!” he cried exultantly. He jumped again, just because he felt like it. Then he flung open his door and went to the kitchen—he felt absolutely ravenous—where he flung the cabinet doors open, too. Wow, he could not wait to eat.
“Well, look at you,” his mom said when she emerged from the bathroom. Reuben was spooning great heaps of cereal into his mouth and munching greedily, like a wild beast. “You seem a thousand times better this morning. How do you feel?”
“Great!” Reuben said, and gulped down half his glass of orange juice. (It was his second glass.) He gasped with satisfaction and clapped the glass down on the table. “I guess I just needed some rest. How are you?” He shook more cereal into his bowl.
She was watching him with amusement. “You’d think I was starving you, poor child. I’m fine, thank you. Kind of dreading the long day, but tomorrow’s Saturday, right? We’ll at least have the morning together.”
“Soundzh good,” Reuben said cheerfully, tilting his head back to speak through a huge mouthful of cereal.
Since today was a day that she had to go straight from one job to the other, his mom packed herself some sandwiches and a change of clothes, then went through her usual ritual of naming all the things in the cupboards, fridge, and freezer that Reuben could eat for supper. (“Got it, Mom,” he said repeatedly.) Then, also as usual, she made him promise to be home when she called to check on him at the end of her first shift, encouraged him to talk to other kids at the community center, and so on and so forth until Reuben felt ready to explode. Normally, he didn’t mind the speeches so much. Today all he could think about was getting her out the door.
Finally, with a hug and a kiss and a dash to the elevator, she was off to catch her bus. It was 7:03 AM, and Reuben had the whole day to himself. He shivered with expectation. By 7:04 he was already winding the watch.
If he wanted to try out his invisibility in public—for what good was being invisible alone?—Reuben needed to make sure he understood it properly. And so for the next hour he conducted experiments, taking photos of himself around the apartment, in different degrees of light and shadow, with the camera held at varying distances from the watch. By the time the camera batteries died, he had learned a few important things.
First of all, even with the cheap display on the camera, he could see that the invisibility was not entirely perfect. Wherever his figure should have appeared in the images, there was a slight haziness in the air, like the heat shimmer rising from summer pavement. It was easily overlooked, though, and almost impossible to detect in shadow. Reuben would do his best to keep to the shadows.
He also discovered that the invisibility did not conform to his shape. Instead, it emanated outward from the watch in all directions, encompassing everything within its range, which extended just a few feet. The watch, he reflected, was like a tiny golden planet surrounded by a magical atmosphere, inside of which no object or creature could be seen from the outside. Nor could anything inside the atmosphere see out, which was why Reuben had to hold the camera far away from the watch—beyond its atmosphere—in order to successfully take a picture. When the camera was invisible, it was blind, just like him. That seemed to be the rule: blindness was the price of invisibility.
Reuben’s final realization came when he found himself yawning, sluggish and bleary-eyed, despite having awakened, quite refreshed, only an hour before. How could he already be so tired again? All he’d done since then… He slapped his forehead. The watch. Of course. For whatever reason, turning invisible took its toll on you. Indeed, he was so drowsy he scarcely made the connection before collapsing onto the sofa.
At last, having napped away his fatigue and demolished another bowl of cereal (for he’d grown hungry again, too), Reuben prepared to venture out. He just needed a way to carry the watch in secret. A quick search through his closet produced a hooded sweatshirt with oversized front pockets. He had never liked this sweatshirt—its zipper was permanently snagged at the chest, and its orangey-brown color and big pockets made him look like a kangaroo, he thought. But it suited his purposes now, and Reuben wriggled into it eagerly, as if it were his favorite.
He studied himself in the mirror, making sure he was ready. Tennis shoes: check. Shorts: check. Sweatshirt: check. Secret watch of invisibility…
Reuben thrust his hands into his sweatshirt pockets and grinned.
Check.
Reuben stood by the storage room window, waiting for the cat. He was beginning to feel annoyed, as if they’d agreed to meet here and the cat was late. He had thought it best, this f
irst time, to practice on a creature who couldn’t call the police if something went wrong. But he’d been down here almost an hour and was losing patience.
From his long familiarity with the storage room, Reuben already knew by heart how many steps would carry him to the nearby stack of boxes or to the bureau-sized fuse panel, and what angles he would take to reach them. As he passed the time there now, it occurred to him that to be mobile while invisible—to be able to move freely without bumping into furniture—he should make a habit of memorizing such things anytime he entered any room, anywhere.
That was good thinking, he told himself, then went back to being crushingly bored. He stared out the window, trying by force of will to make the cat appear.
The watch was in his hand, fully wound and open, with the key inserted all the way to its bow. He had only to back it out of its winding position to vanish. If he saw the cat stalking down the alley, he would do just that. And if the cat came into the room and started eating, Reuben would have passed his first test. He wondered if he should reappear while the cat was still there, or if surprising it like that would run it off for good, thus ruining the building manager’s chances of befriending it.
Just as he was wondering this, though, it was Reuben who got taken by surprise. With no warning whatsoever—no approaching footsteps or other sounds of movement—he suddenly heard the doorknob turning. And even that was so quiet he almost didn’t hear it. His eyes shot to the door, which was already slowly swinging open.
Reuben crouched down, tugging at the watch key. The room went black.
Trembling, he listened. For a moment there was only silence. Then, from the doorway, a melancholy sigh. Of course. It was the building manager, come to see if her cat had dropped in. She’d approached stealthily to avoid spooking it. Now she was leaving again, the door closing behind her. A brief fading of hurried footsteps. Silence.
Reuben reappeared, still crouching and still trembling. He stared at the door, then turned to stare at the bowls of cat food and water, the open window, the entire storage room, which the building manager had perceived to be vacant.
He shook his head. She had looked right through him.
He knew this was what invisibility was all about. But something about the encounter was weirdly unsettling. It was as if he wasn’t real, he realized. Present, but not real.
An emptiness.
A ghost.
Reuben’s next stop was the Lower Downs library branch. There were never many people there, which made it a perfect spot to practice. Until he got the hang of the watch, the fewer potential witnesses the better.
The branch was not a brightly lit, modern sort of library, but an old one, musty and dim, with battered card catalogs arranged around the front desk so that the librarian—a brusque, curly-haired man in glasses who never made eye contact—could ensure that they were kept in order. Reuben had always loved it. When he wasn’t checking out books, he would find open spaces on the shelves through which he could peek into adjacent aisles. Pretending to browse, he would shadow library patrons, making note of the books they selected, searching for secret messages in the ones they paged through but returned to the shelves. He liked to imagine that their choice in reading material was a clue in some urgent mystery it was his duty to solve.
Today, though, Reuben made a quick pass through all the library sections, looking for the most deserted. Among the aisles of the history section there wasn’t a soul. With eager anticipation, he squeezed the bow of the winding key in his pocket. Then he cast a final glance around, pulled out on the key, and vanished.
Blind now, Reuben found himself suddenly attuned to all the various library sounds: the buzz of a failing fluorescent light, the distant rattle and thunk of books being shelved from a cart. He moved carefully, slowly, down the aisle. To ensure that his whole body was within the watch’s range, he walked in an exaggerated crouch. (If he’d been visible, he would have looked exactly like a tiptoeing thief in a cartoon.) After a dozen paces, he pushed the key back into the winding position. The bookshelves reappeared on either side of him. He had estimated that a dozen steps would take him to the far end of the aisle, and he’d been pretty close—he was only one giant step short. He’d also done a decent job of keeping to the middle, having veered only slightly to his left.
Reuben felt his confidence surging. He was already good at this.
With more passes up and down the aisle, he developed a better sense of the length of his crouch-stride. He concentrated on keeping his steps consistent, to make them reliable measures of distance. He found that by focusing on his destination, then holding it fixed in his mind, he could walk almost straight to it. The main difficulty was keeping his balance. He was never in danger of falling, but he was surprised to find how disorienting it could be to walk in total blackness (not to mention doing so while stooping down).
Still, he rapidly improved, and before long Reuben moved over to the next aisle for the sake of variety. Up and down he walked in blindness, picking points on the shelves to aim for—that enormous green book, that multivolume set with purple spines—and reappearing next to them. He imagined it was like swimming underwater, surfacing periodically to get his bearings and a breath of air. He’d seen people do such things in movies.
When he had perhaps a minute left on the watch (he’d become adept at gauging the time), Reuben decided to try walking backward. After all, backing up might sometime prove critical. He went very slowly, for it turned out to be much trickier, and stopped after only eight steps, feeling uncertain of their length and his direction. He reached out his left hand, and sure enough, his fingertips touched the spine of a book sooner than they ought to have. He was slightly off track.
He pushed in on the key, and the bookshelves materialized. So, too, did the curly-haired librarian, scanning the shelves at the end of the aisle. He must have just rounded the corner. Reuben quickly straightened up out of his conspicuous crouching stance, and as he did so, the librarian, suddenly aware of movement in his peripheral vision, glanced in Reuben’s direction.
To judge from the man’s reaction, he might have spotted a rhinoceros charging down the aisle. He recoiled violently, flinging his arms out for balance and knocking a book from the shelves. Reuben was so startled by this that he jumped back and almost fell down himself. Their wide eyes met. The man, straightening his glasses, blushed a deep shade of crimson. He turned and hurried from the aisle. A second later he reappeared, snatched up the fallen book, and hurried off again.
Reuben felt an impulse to go after the librarian and apologize for scaring him. But that would make no sense. The man must believe he’d simply failed to notice Reuben coming along the aisle, for although it had seemed as if a boy had appeared out of nowhere, obviously that couldn’t be the case. Anyway, the librarian was clearly humiliated by his overreaction. He wouldn’t care to discuss it.
Reuben, composing himself, found that he was grinning from ear to ear. He thought about the night before, when he’d told his mom that he thought he’d seen someone in his closet, and she had responded with such understanding and familiarity. “Believe me,” she’d said, “I’ve had my mind play tricks like that plenty of times.”
It was occurring to Reuben that people, especially adults, are rather quick to dismiss small mysteries, to assume that they have simply misunderstood or failed to observe something, and to go on about their business. And that for this reason a boy like himself, with a watch like this, could get away with any amount of mischief, if only he was bold enough.
By the time his mom called after her shift at the market, Reuben had successfully performed a number of mischievous acts. His favorite had been at the community center, where he had invisibly stage-whispered the name of a boy he knew from school (Miles Chang, who was pretty nice, actually) from several different locations, suppressing his giggles every time Miles, who was trying to play a game of Ping-Pong with a friend, banged down his paddle and called out, “Who keeps saying my name? Are you doing
that? Well, did you not hear someone say my name? Am I going crazy?”
Later Reuben had eavesdropped invisibly on Officer Warren as he talked on a pay phone (something about a meeting and therefore boring), then eavesdropped invisibly on the complaint line in the lobby of his building (the top-floor residents all had squirrels in their ceilings—that was more interesting). He had also taken three short, drooling naps and consumed half a dozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It was amazing how being invisible took it out of you.
“How’s your day been?” his mom asked on the phone. He heard her take a bite of her dinner sandwich. He knew that as soon as they hung up, she would dash off to catch her bus to Ashton.
“Not bad,” Reuben said. He was turning the watch this way and that under the kitchen light, admiring the way it gleamed. “Just the usual stuff.”
“Did you talk to any kids at the community center?”
Reuben almost laughed. For once he could answer honestly. “Yeah, I talked to Miles Chang.”
“The nice one?” She was speaking with her mouth full. “His dad’s the teacher you like?”
Reuben detected the hopefulness in her tone. Now he felt guilty. “That’s him,” he said, and quickly changed the subject.
As soon as he’d hung up, Reuben left the apartment again. He spent half the evening roaming the building, knocking on doors and listening to residents express their bafflement when they found no one in the hall. It was hilarious and perfectly thrilling. He might have gone on for hours if he hadn’t felt so wrecked with exhaustion. As it was, he barely managed to get the watch put away before falling into bed. He didn’t even brush his teeth.
The next morning, for the first time he could remember, Reuben woke up wishing his mom had to work. He felt rested now and eager to use the watch again. Instead he had to apply himself to a slew of Saturday-morning chores, then sit through an hour of designing dream houses with his mom—an activity that, under the circumstances, required a supreme effort of patience and offered none of the usual satisfactions. His mom did make him a hearty omelet, though, using up the last of the sale eggs. And though he’d had to feign his cheerfulness all morning, he felt so joyous when she left for work in the afternoon, his goodbye hug was genuinely affectionate and enthusiastic. His mom went out with a puzzled smile, and Reuben flew to his closet.