He looked at me for a long time. He smiled, but it was the kind of condescending smile that said, You don’t really get this, do you? At least that’s how it felt. Maybe it’s just how I remember it. The one thing I do know is that I believed what he said next, at least at the time.
“What is the purpose of science?” Y____ began. (How did I accept such pompous rhetoric? I’ll never forgive myself.) “What’s the purpose of building a telescope, or going to the moon, or assembling a laser that can slice through a diamond? Is it to make our lives better? Partially. That’s the obvious, unimportant, superficial justification for technology. We study dielectric heating and nonionized radiation in order to create an oven that cooks popcorn in two minutes. We understand internal combustion so that we can travel sixty miles in sixty minutes. We research T-cells so that homosexual heroin addicts don’t die in their late twenties. In general, brilliant people study complex things in order to make life simpler for the average and the less-than-average and the infirm. Talk to an eighth-grade science teacher, and that’s what he’ll try to tell you. Science, for most people, is something we use. But there’s a fallacy in that. There’s a problem. That logic suggests science is improving the world, and that’s not happening. This is what gamblers call a push. Science is always a push.
“Everything science gives us immediately becomes normative. To an eighty-year-old man, a computer is this amazing device that creates instantaneous access to limitless information. He can’t get his head around it. But to a twenty-year-old man, the computer is a limited machine that costs too much and always needs to be faster. Because humans live finite lives, all technological advances immediately feel banal to whatever generation inherits their benefits. Any advance can be appreciated only by the handful of people who happen to exist within the same time period of that specific technology’s introduction. You follow my meaning? Those are the only people who notice the difference. To a seven-year-old, a computer doesn’t even qualify as technology. It’s like a crowbar. Everything magical is temporary. So the idea that science makes our life ‘better’ is kind of an ephemeral illusion. Take vulcanization, for example. That’s a manifestation of science that seems to improve everything about modernity. Right? Of course it is. We couldn’t drive without it, or at least not the way we drive now. But if vulcanization wasn’t possible, would we miss it? No. Of course not. We wouldn’t miss it at all. We’d find a way around it, or we’d effortlessly live without it. We wouldn’t even have the capacity to miss it. Vulcanization seems to make life better only because we already know it exists. We wouldn’t miss rubber tires if they had never been invented, in the same way we don’t miss cows that taste like lobster or shoes made out of glass or sexual time machines or anything else that science can’t create. Over time, the net benefit of technology is always going to be zero. Children born into Amish communities don’t miss TV until they discover such contraptions exist, right? There’s just no real evidence that proves people in the fifteenth century were less happy than people are now, just as there’s no reason to think people in the twenty-fifth century will have happier, better lives than you or me. This is a strange notion to accept, but it’s true. And once I accepted that truth, it forced me to reevaluate everything I did as an intellectual.
“The more I thought about this—and I thought about this a lot, for many, many years—the more it seemed like the only essential purpose of science was to define consciousness. To define reality. I know I overuse that word, but it’s the only word for what I’m interested in: reality. Over time, I realized it was the same instinctive reason I’d dabbled in sociology and journalism and mathematics and music and every other discipline that hopes to make order out of chaos. It consumed me. For a long time, it was the only thing I ever thought about. It just seemed like an impossible conundrum. Everything I did moved me farther away from my intended goal. The process of everything I tried—experiments, surveys, interviews, whatever—inevitably created its own false reality. The process was always the problem. Obviously, I’m not the first person who’s ever come to this conclusion; we talked about this before, very early on, long before you knew who I was or what I can do. By now, it probably sounds like common sense. But when I started at Chaminade, and when I realized what we were doing and what the end results could be, I saw a new potentiality for the very first time. I saw a way to repurpose science. I could use it to get me closer to reality. So that would become both my starting point and my ending point.
“Remember when I told you about that Swanson boy? The boy from my school? The boy who liked Rush? To me, watching him through his window was a rare glimpse of reality. Watching a single person, away from other persons, was the only way. There was no process to interfere with the experience. So that’s what I’ve turned into my life’s work: I’ve built a suit that allows me to see the unseen life, because unseen lives are the only ones that matter. Now, what you seem to be asking is ‘What am I hoping to see?’ My answer is this—I have no expectations. In fact, I can’t have expectations, because the creation of expectation is its own independent process. Let me say that again, for clarity: The creation of expectation is its own independent process. If I expect anything at all, it will change my perception. So if your issue with my observation of Valerie is that nothing ‘interesting’ happened while I was there … well, I have no rebuttal for that. Clearly, you’re not designed to do what I do. You’d be a bad scientist. You will never be able to see reality. You’re just a person.”
As I type these words today, Y____’s reasoning strikes me as dubious. But that’s not what I thought at the time. Every time Y____ insulted my intelligence, I paradoxically trusted him more. Instead of disagreeing with his logic, I accepted it; instead of demanding further explanation, I told him he had a good point and changed the topic. For example, I asked how he could justify drugging Valerie if he did not want any “process” to impact his reality. Wasn’t force-feeding a woman methamphetamine a process?
“Look,” he said. “I’m here in your office. Right? I’m talking to you about what I did. Don’t you think I realize dosing Valerie with cocaine and meth was a mistake? I realize that it was. I do. Obviously, I shouldn’t have done that, or at least not so aggressively. Valerie was not ready for her life to change: She wanted to be unhappy, and you can’t help a woman who refuses to help herself. I’m not saying that incident was entirely her fault, but it was partially her fault. We’re all partially responsible. So what are you trying to figure out here? Are you hoping to understand what I’m trying to learn? If so, you won’t succeed. This isn’t social work. This is complex. There’s no precedent for my behavior. I’m the first and last person who’s ever attempted this. You won’t be able to solve me. Quit trying to be someone you’re not. Are you judging my actions? If so, stop judging them. That’s not why I came here. I came to you so I could manage the guilt I don’t deserve to have. I’m trying to understand why I feel bad about things that—intellectually—I know were good. Why does every conversation we have devolve into a treatise about the things you don’t understand? When do we talk about the things I don’t understand?”
I apologized.
Stupidly, I apologized. I didn’t want to lose him.
I told Y____ he was right. I said that therapists sometimes make mistakes (just like everyone else), and that (of course) he had the right to dictate what we discussed in our sessions. I told him that my inability to comprehend his scientific methodology did not entitle me to question his means. I gave him a few sycophantic compliments and told Y____ he was so unlike all my other patients that I was still learning how to help him. I wanted him to like me as a person and to respect me professionally, which—in retrospect—is probably the most humiliating thing I’ve ever done. I deserve what happened.
1711 Lavaca St.
Suite 2
Austin, TX 78701
[email protected] July 5, 2012
Notes RE: Invisibility (Message to Crosby Bumpus)
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nbsp; Hey, Crosby, me again—I was originally going to mention what follows in my cover letter, and then I considered including it as an appendix. However, John thinks I should just cut-and-paste it here, as its own separate chapter, right in the middle of everything else. But is that a potential mistake? I’m afraid it might hurt “the narrative flow” (as you are wont to say). However, John insists this info is the narrative, because so much hinges on these details. Do you have thoughts on this? We’ve briefly discussed it in passing over the phone, but I need some concrete direction. My gut reaction is that John’s usually right about this sort of thing.
It goes without saying that the most interesting thing about Y____— far beyond anything he saw or did or claimed to have done—was simply his ability to disappear. When serious people study this case, that will be the detail they fixate upon. However, all my attempts to truly understand this phenomenon did not succeed, and for one glaring reason: Y____ almost never spoke about it.
It was, I suppose, the 800-pound gorilla in the room. However, our 800-pound gorilla evidently wore the same suit Y____ had designed for himself. There were only three occasions when Y____ explicitly discussed his capabilities at length, two of which were unrecorded. After our third discussion on the topic, he made it abundantly clear that he wasn’t going to elaborate on that aspect of his being, even though (a) I was incredibly curious about it, and (b) it was the crux of who he was and what he did.
So why didn’t Y____ talk about this? I’ve asked myself that question many, many times. If we are to believe his own explanation, it was mostly because he was paying for these sessions (and therefore reserved the right to dictate what we discussed). He repeatedly told me I wasn’t qualified to understand the science of his cloaking and that he had no desire to waste time “teaching.” The fact that he’d revealed his invisibility to me firsthand on May 9 also played a role—he believed there was nothing left for me to question, and that I should simply accept this supernatural ability and move on. And I suppose that’s what I did. As so often happens in therapist-patient relationships (and to paraphrase the same hokey words Y____ so often used), our dialogue became “its own kind of reality”—we were living inside a vacuum where whatever Y____ said was accepted as infallible. At some point, I stopped thinking about how unusual this was; it just became a weekly part of my life.
Still, I always kept a separate record of any instance where Y____ casually alluded to the sensation and practicality of being an unseen person. These statements often came up as asides, generally when he was trying to change the subject or explain how he found himself in a certain position. All of these statements can be reaccessed within the unedited transcript at the UT psych library. Please note that the following quotes are not thematically connected and were drawn intermittently over the span of our entire relationship—they are not sequential. If you have any ideas about how they can be incorporated, send me an e-mail or give me a call. Thanks—
• On being unable to see one’s own body: “It took a long time to be comfortable with that. I mean, imagine trying to turn on a table lamp in a completely dark bedroom. It’s difficult, and we reflexively assume it’s difficult because we can’t see the lamp. But it’s also difficult because we can’t see our own hand—we can’t gauge the relationship between the object and ourselves. We can feel our hand, and we know where the lamp is. But we reach for the switch and we miss. This happened all the time when I first started playing around with the suit. I had to imagine hands and feet I couldn’t see. Getting up and down stairs was a trial. Even now, I’d never attempt to run down a flight of stairs. That’s a death wish.”
• On the suit itself: “It gets a little disgusting because I loathe to wash it. It operates so much better when there are multiple layers of mist on the surface—those trace remnants of cream harden into something that’s almost like a polish, and nothing refracts light like polish. Every time I clean the suit, I’m basically starting over. But, of course, I sweat like a boar in that thing. I’m essentially wearing a second skin that doesn’t breathe. To cover the smell, I try to spray down the inside of the suit with scentless Lysol. It really eats at my skin. My thighs will never be the same.”
• On the notion of using his ability for the common good, potentially in the vein of a stereotypical superhero: “That’s funny. The thought never occurred to me.”
• On mishaps: “It wasn’t uncommon to have a minor crisis. You can’t control how people live. I had a hilarious, terrible situation near Houston. I was observing a nervous middle-aged man—he couldn’t sit still. He never stayed in place. His movements were hard to anticipate. He had ants in the pants. I was hunched in the corner of his living room, and he started walking directly over to my corner so that he could jiggle the cable plugged into his stereo speaker, because the bass kept cutting in and out. At least that’s what I thought his intentions were. When I saw him coming toward me, I stood up and moved a little to my right to clear the area. But at the last possible moment, he changed his mind and turned ninety degrees to his left. He walked right into me. We collided, head on, skull to skull. It sounded like two coconuts. Bonk! Our heads went bonk. We were both knocked to the floor. He jumped up and started swinging his arms, punching the air, saying all these outrageous things to whoever or whatever he imagined was there. I stayed on the floor, which seemed safer. But then the guy goes into his bedroom and comes back with a fucking gun. This was a huge gun—I think it was a .357 or a .44 Magnum. A Dirty Harry gun, for all intents and purposes. And now ol’ Ants in the Pants is filling the chamber with bullets in the middle of his living room. He’s looking all skittish, breathing through his mouth, sweating under the armpits. There’s nothing like watching a nervous man load a gun. Of course, he doesn’t see anything, and by now I’ve crawled into the kitchen. So now I’m watching ol’ Ants in the Pants from the other room, peeping my head around the doorway. He’s waving the gun around, trying to figure out what the hell just happened. He knows someone was in his living room. He knows his skull hit a skull. He knows it. But he’s also not going to randomly shoot up his own house. His eyes dart from corner to corner to corner. For some reason, he gets the idea that whoever broke into his home must be hiding in the basement. I have no idea why this possibility occurred to him, but I suppose he was grasping at straws. He opens the door to his basement, gun in hand, and slowly creeps down the stairs. I hear them creaking as he walks. When he got to the bottom of the staircase, I just sprinted out the front door. There was no way I was playing around with that motherfucker. Owning a gun doesn’t make the average person safer, but it makes the average person safer from me.”
• On fear: “The one thing that constantly terrifies me is crossing the street. I mean, if anybody ever hit me, I’d just have to lie on the pavement and die. Every other car would drive right over my body. I’d probably have to hope that somebody drove over my head and put me out of my misery. The worst was when I was in west Florida: Crossing the street there is flat-out impossible. No crosswalks, lots of old people driving blind, and no other pedestrians. I was more relaxed in Detroit!”
• On troubleshooting: “I completely miscalculated how cloaking would impact my shadow. We all did. We were all working under the assumption that shadows would be no issue whatsoever, because—in theory—the light I relocate should negate the absence of light we recognize as shadow. But it didn’t work that way. The suit absorbs a tiny percentage of light, so it doesn’t refract the full one hundred percent of what remains. This wasn’t something I realized until I started wearing it on a regular basis: People can’t see me, but the sun can. I still cast a dim, undefined silhouette. It’s almost like projecting a shadow through a funhouse mirror. There are ways around this, though. If I’m traveling outside, I do my walking at night or at noon, or on days that are overcast. When I’m inside a room, I always stay cognizant of any windows that face directly east or directly west, and I try to avoid walking in front of south-facing windows during the afternoon. It’s
really more of a hassle than a problem. And like I said before—you’d be surprised by what people see, yet refuse to notice. I think about that a lot. Like, have you ever heard of a Mexican tribe called the Huicholes?9 The so-called Running People of Mexico? There’s a great book about these freaks. They’re this hermetic society known for two things. The first, as you might expect, is running—the Huicholes are the craziest athletes in North America. Members of this tribe regularly run forty, fifty, a hundred miles at a time, barefoot, over unspeakable terrain, subsisting only on corn beer and mouse meat, purely for pleasure. No one knows how they do it. But—interestingly—the other thing they’re known for is invisibility. They live in caves around the Sierra Madres, and these people can virtually disappear into the rock. The first time a nineteenth-century explorer came across the Huicholes, he walked straight through one of their villages and didn’t see anything. They were right there in front of him, and he didn’t see one person. So if it’s possible for an explorer to overlook an entire tribe he’s actively searching for, imagine how difficult it is for an untrained person to see one stranger they don’t expect to be there.”
• On who could wear the cloaking suit: “Are you asking me if you can wear the suit? Because you can’t. No one can wear it but me. I’m sorry if that disappoints you, but that’s just how it has to be. You can’t wear my suit. You can’t.” (Note to Crosby: At no point did I ever express a desire to wear this garment. I’m still not sure why Y____ inferred that this was something I was angling for.)