The Visible Man (25 page)

All of these vignettes, told in their conversational totality, can be accessed in the U of T archives. Some of them are funnier than others, and I’m tempted to detail the best stories here. But that would be a ruse. That would be nothing more than a way to avoid writing about what was really happening between Y____ and myself, which is probably what I’ve been trying to avoid since I started this project.

We were not in love.

I did not fall in love with Y____. People will accuse me of this, just as John has, and sometimes I wonder if I protest too much. But what happened between us certainly did not feel like love. It was a different type of problem, accompanied by a different type of buzz. I want to be clear about this. I don’t want people saying I fell in love with this patient, because I did not. I don’t know why that’s so important to me, but it is. My new therapist has asked me questions like, “What did you possibly appreciate about this evil person? Was it pure apophenia
¹⁵
?” But those seem like such unreal, unfair questions. I mean, honestly: How many rational people end up in irrational relationships? How many marital affairs are the manifestation of deep consideration? Think about your own circle of friends—how many of them have been intertwined in romantic liaisons that contradict logic? The mistake I made was not seeing goodness where it didn’t exist, because that’s what all romantic people do. My mistake was allowing something professional to become something personal, solely because my client refused to differentiate between those two idioms.

He spoke to me differently than other people did. That was the crux of it. Y____ talked the same way John does, but with a deeper kind of authority; it was spongier. More elastic. John is the kind of person who can instantly recall every single passage from every book he’s ever read, and that instantaneous recall is the foundation of who he is. He’s a perpetual remembering machine. But Y____ wasn’t like that. He was the kind of person who would say, “I’m
familiar with that book, and it’s a good book, and you can certainly read that book if you want—
but here’s the truth
.” He didn’t need to know something in order to be confident. Now, obviously, that’s a dangerous way to live. That brand of thinking is what starts world wars. But it was this autodidactic self-assurance that made conversation such a blast. Whenever John tells me that something I say is
interesting
, it’s almost like he’s saying, “That’s something I could have thought of myself.” When Y____ told me I was
interesting
, he was authentically engaged. He treated my words like a new thought. Sometimes he was cruel, but that’s because he respected me. And I know that sentence reads like the words of a battered wife, but it wasn’t like that. Y____ wasn’t an arrogant intellectual, even though he was both arrogant and intellectual. I’d be lying if I said that made me enjoy him less.

He gave me such specific compliments.

They were all so excruciatingly detailed. “I like when you wear two-inch chunk heels,” Y____ might say. “They make you look more relaxed than when you wear pumps. When you wear pumps, I always feel like you’re too conscious of your own feet. They make you anxious when you stand up to shake my hand.” Now, I’m not even sure if this was true. But who cares if it wasn’t? It was a delightful thing to hear. If you asked John a hundred questions about my shoes, he wouldn’t be able to answer one of them. He might know when clogs were first popularized in America, but he’d have no idea if I actually owned a pair.

But still: Let’s not pretend that this is an objective reading of what went down. I’m culpable. I only believed what Y____ said when his words humanized him, or when I could make them human through my own devices. This was most evident during our conversation about the “heavy dudes,” but it was happening all the time. In those early days following May 9, I didn’t know how to feel about Y____. It was impossible for me to know what he was capable of. He seemed capable of anything. But something changed as we exposed ourselves, just as it does in any relationship built on words instead of deeds. His sociopathic parables became neutral.
It was almost like he wanted me to think he was dangerous in order to compensate for the fact that he wasn’t. That was how I chose to view him. I processed every story as metaphorical autobiography. He could never admit he was wrong. He couldn’t admit that he was pretending to observe strangers for all these high-minded, altruistic reasons, even though he wasn’t learning anything of value. His project, or at least the project he claimed to be pursuing, was a total failure. None of his alleged discoveries improved my understanding of the human condition. As far as I was concerned, he was telling me other people’s stories so that I’d understand secrets about him. I elected not to believe the things about Y____ that were troubling; I saw those details as part of his fantasy life and (sadly) as a pathetic way to impress me. For a time, I even toyed with the notion that Y____ had never entered
any
of these residences and was just projecting what he imagined his power of invisibility might allow him to do. Why did I think this? I don’t know. Why do people get mad at the TV?

When I reread the conversations I’ve typed into this manuscript, I see Y____ the way others will see him. I suspect every third-party reader will see him more transparently than I did. But he wasn’t a one-dimensional fiend. He wasn’t. Sometimes I’d see glimpses of a vulnerable person, and that would make me rethink all my previous thoughts. I remember him once saying, half-jokingly, as he got up to leave my office: “You know, I’ve been everywhere in the world. I’ve been all over America, all over Europe. I spent a few weeks in Australia. I traveled through Asia in high school, I traveled through Africa in college. I’ve been everywhere there is to go. But you know what? I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone I wanted to see again.”

Even the invisible are insecure. It’s the most universal problem we have. It’s so universal, it might not even count as a problem.

During our last session in August, I asked Y____ something I had been wondering since spring: Why me?

“You weren’t the first therapist I called,” he said. “You were the fifth. But the first four were unsatisfactory. Actually, that’s giving them too much credit—they were wretched. We never finished the
initial phone call. They were inflexible. Control freaks. They were dictatorial. Therapists forget that they have issues, too.”

So how was I different, I asked. Certainly, I had no fewer issues than anyone else. In fact, I might have had more.

“You didn’t immediately assume things. You asked questions, but you didn’t pretend like you already knew the answers,” he said. “Nobody else was comfortable with the information I refused to provide. They always assumed my unwillingness to tell them information was an unconscious attempt to tell them something deeper.”

“Give me an example,” I said.

“Oh, you know what I mean,” Y____ replied. “Look: You have a black husband. Right? And I’m sure the fact that you married a black man made certain people in your life skeptical of your motives. I’m sure close-minded people assumed that his blackness was part of the reason you were attracted to him, or that this had something to do with your father or your upbringing or your education or your liberal guilt, or that this relationship was somehow
political
. But would any of those assumptions be remotely true? Should you be required to deny those accusations, lest they become the conventional wisdom? I can’t accept someone who
forces
me to explain how I feel, simply to contradict a preexisting opinion they incorrectly applied in the first place.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “I know that feeling. But when did I ever talk to you about my husband?”

“When we were sitting on the bench that day,” Y____ said. “Outside the coffee shop. You talked about your husband. He’s an academic, right? A historian? A big nineteenth-century guy, no?”

I didn’t remember that part of our conversation, but maybe it happened. It probably did. My memory is good, but Y____’s was always better. It probably happened. I’m going to believe it happened.

Sometimes he was just a weirdo.

“You never talk about your romantic relationships,” I said one morning. “Most of my patients talk about those things constantly. But you never do. Have you ever had a serious relationship?”

“Oh, not really,” he said. “There was a woman I dated in college—Alejandra Llewellyn. She was half Argentinean and half British. She had beautiful, condescending eyes. She listened to techno and cooked a lot of steaks. We were only together for seventy-four days. It was like having sex with the Falkland Island war.”

“Come on,” I said. “Be real with me.”

“Men who talk about the details of their sex life are not real people,” he said. “I’m not a rapper. I’m not a Jewish novelist.”

It seems obvious to me now—and, in fact, it
felt
obvious to me, even then—that Y____ has never had a girlfriend and is probably a virgin. That he had been skipped two grades during his adolescence surely contributed to this; it’s not unusual for academically accelerated males to enter college with the stigma of asexuality. Very often, they embrace that discomfort as a personality trope. Y____’s unconventional physical appearance and his inability to understand human behavior (much less the needs of an adversarial gender) compounded that problem exponentially. I felt for him. It was ironic: It seemed so many of my insecure patients reveled in their over-the-top sexual histories; somehow, finding partners for empty intercourse was the one thing they could always succeed at. Over time, these oversexed patients would inevitably come to accept that unfeeling physicality complicated their mind and eroded their self-worth. It was an impulse they needed to overcome. Yet here sat the most self-assured, knottiest patient I’d ever encountered … and in his world, the act of physical intimacy was so terrifying he refused to engage with the concept on any level. He couldn’t even talk about it. Instead, he pretended not to care. He made jokes about it and tried to position me as prurient and intrusive. It was a hard thing to watch. I wanted to help him. It made me think his problems were profound, but still solvable. Maybe he was only missing that one chip?

When our final August session ended, Y____ started to collect his things and leave (sometimes he brought a tote bag with him, usually filled with notebooks and half-empty water bottles). We were both smiling; our conversation had been lively. Our meetings were no longer work, and I felt guilty for charging him. I wasn’t
thinking like a therapist anymore. I wanted Y____ to think I was spontaneous and laid-back. I wanted him to enjoy talking to me, so I asked a stupid question.

“When won’t I see you again?” I asked.

“What?”

“When won’t I see you again?” I asked again. I thought this was so droll.

“You’ll see me next week,” said Y____. “I look forward to it.” He wasn’t getting it. He didn’t get me.

“Of course,” I said. “But I want to know when I
won’t
see you again. Will I ever get to see you cloaked? That first time I saw you, it was too intense. I couldn’t keep it together. I couldn’t appreciate it. But I think I could, now. I’d love to not see you again. Or is it too much hassle? I can understand why you wouldn’t want to come here in the suit. I was just curious.”

(I have no idea what I thought I was doing here. Any criticism of my decision-making is justified. I was lost in my own head.)

Y____ looked at me for a long time. The smile left his lips, but he was still smiling with his eyes. He was a supermodel.

“What are you doing tomorrow afternoon?” he eventually asked.

“Tomorrow? What am I doing tomorrow? Nothing.”

“Meet me at noon,” he said.

“Where? Here?”

“No, not here,” he said. “Somewhere else.”

“Like where?”

“I’m not sure. How about the Capitol Building? Meet me outside the Capitol Building, where the tourists take pictures,” Y____ said.

“Why the Capitol Building?”

“Because it’s a place,” he said. “Just be there, unless this is some sort of mean joke. I’ll find you. Try to stand apart from other people. Don’t stand in a crowd. And come by yourself, obviously.”

“Obviously,” I repeated.

“Are you sure about this?” Y____ asked. His smile returned. “If I show up and you’re not there, I’ll be devastated. It will ruin my weekend.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not the kind of person who doesn’t show up.”

Today, as I type the words from that exchange and consider the choices I was making, I want to vomit. It’s like remembering I’d forgotten a baby in the backseat of a car. But on that summer Friday, I was excited. I was as excited as I get about anything. It was all I thought about for the next twenty-four hours. It was what I wanted, and I almost knew why I wanted it.

It was twenty minutes to 12:00 when I arrived on the grounds of the Capitol. John didn’t ask where I was going when I left the house. He always assumes there’s a predictable reason for everything I do. Y____ had said I should avoid crowds. This was not a problem; almost no one else was there. I sat on a metal bench and looked at the white dome in the distance. I remember thinking, “Why do so many capitol buildings look exactly the same? Who made that decision?” I also remember thinking, “This is such a picturesque place. It’s so lush. Why have I never visited before?” I also remember thinking, “The sky looks a little gray. Maybe it will rain. Will today not happen if it rains?” And then, suddenly, I was no longer alone with my thoughts.