Being Invisible (11 page)

Babe meanwhile had made a brisk inspection tour. “Nothing’s gone,” she announced. “How could it be? Somebody making a quick grab would have to take the stand and all: Siv’s got everything tightly anchored.”

Guillaume was still in place. “
Hmmm.
” His murmur was rich. He was jowlier than when Wagner had seen him last. Finally he said, “Frankly, I don’t understand this at
all.
” His voice had almost returned to normal. Suddenly he showed a radiant grin. “But then who does?” He did have a boyish charm. He returned to the office.

Apart from the soiled smock, Babe was perfectly groomed as always. Indeed the smock was unprecedented to Wagner. It was also too large: the cuffs were rolled at the wrists. Surely it was a borrowed garment. Since he was invisible, Wagner could inspect her at close range and in a better light than on the sidewalk the evening before, and he moved to do so, but she now went, even more quickly, into the back room, the door to which she closed in his face.

He was reluctant to open it immediately. Curiosity might be provoked by too many consecutive inexplicable events.

Anyway, he had come here really to do something about Zirko, not Babe. On the wall near the door to the street was a plaque under the clear-plastic lamination of which was a dark-gray surface imprinted in white type. Wagner returned to it now.

ALL OF SIV ZIRKO
was the headline, below which appeared the following text.

“Like most people,” Zirko says, “I never before actually ever looked at myself. I mean
really
looked. Or maybe I looked without seeing. And what is art anyway but a way of seeing? And if you think about it, where should an artist begin if not with himself? This is especially true with a sculptor, to which is added the truth that can be learned through tactility. So I have dissected myself. I have let you in on my secrets. Use them well. Touch me, stroke me, fondle me, caress me. Let’s exchange love!”

This statement was followed by encomia from critics whose publications—major papers, newsweeklies, art journals—were eminent.

Zirko has no peer as a plastic rhetorician. His is the language of conclusive conjecture.

“Cruel,” “imperious,” “paranoid” are some of the terms that have been applied to Zirko’s work, and perhaps justifiably so, but it has as appropriately been called “genial,” even “tender,” and so it certainly is as well. What all agree on is that it is unquestionably eloquent.

Zirko is free-swinging, true enough: that much must be admitted, and as such he has been seen as irresponsible. Well, okay, but I maintain that thoughtful examination of any of the pieces in question cannot help but reveal that the irresponsibility is superficial. Significance is there, but it must be sought after. Zirko makes one demand: that the viewer become a criminal accomplice. This is not unprecedented, but for once it is serious.

Wagner chewed on his invisible lower lip. Grammatical barbarism could be expected from Zirko, but for a national magazine to print a solecism like “not help but” was disgusting. The matter of these critical statements was another thing: they read as so much contemptible nonsense, but, as Babe had been wont to remind him, he had no true sympathy with art whose language was nonverbal.

He was, however, as familiar with male anatomy as Zirko, having lived with his own for more than three decades, and what he now recognized, on one of the stands halfway along the western wall of the gallery, just beyond a red fire extinguisher in a glass-enclosed recess, was a set of masculine genitalia: hair-fringed phallus with dependent bag.

Wagner approached this exhibit, but before he got there he encountered a work of another sort than the others, not a standing sculpture but rather a wall-fastened white panel from which five large glass or clear-plastic bubbles protruded. Each container displayed a substance, two of which were colorless. On the near side was posted a card of identification which dealt with the lot:
ARTIST’S SHIT, PISS, SWEAT, SPIT, AND COME.

At no point in his rage did Wagner consider molesting this frieze of filth and thus perhaps effecting the release of some vile material, should any of it be genuine. Instead he moved on to the genitals, which he now noticed had a companion piece of which the principal element loomed so massive he had assumed, from a distance, it was a forearm. These works were labeled, respectively,
ARTIST’S LIMP COCK AND BALLS
and
ARTIST’S HARD-ON
. The detailing of these imitation organs—swollen, tortuous purple veining, etc.—was extraordinarily precise. As to the erection, Zirko had been outlandishly generous to himself: if this were even half true he had made physiological history.

The man was a pestilence. Wagner opened the glass door to the niche and withdrew the fire extinguisher, which was not as large or as heavy as he would have liked, and with it he struck the rampant sculpture as violently as he could... establishing that the material of which it was fashioned was not wax but a remarkably resistant, nonbrittle plastic, but doing little harm to it beyond a slight smudge of red paint, and not only was the counterfeit phallus invulnerable but, as Babe had said, the works were snugly fastened to the stands. The stands were screwed to the floor on all four sides with L-shaped metal straps. Wrestling with force, Wagner got nowhere in a frenzied effort to topple this one.

He did however succeed in making sounds that elicited a distant gibe from Guillaume—“Carla, you’re getting clumsy in your old age,” followed by a watery chuckle—but the gallery owner was not sufficiently interested to emerge from his office when no response was forthcoming.

It was clear that Zirko, even in absentia, was winning this round thus far, the inertia of his plastic prick in exultant contrast to Wagner’s impotent attempts to deflate it. On the other hand, none of this was being seen by anybody, and his humiliation therefore was known only to Wagner himself—even if it could properly be called humiliation in these circumstances. How could one be truly embarrassed in the absence of an audience? Invisibility continued to disclose new advantages. He was in one of Zirko’s strongholds: he could not expect, even when unseen, to glide right in and have his way, first time out. On his next visit he would bring the proper demolition equipment.

... Just a moment, he was not the kind of man who could destroy works of art in cold blood, even when the “art” was such as this. Premeditation would make any such action reprehensible according to the same code by which he despised Zirko’s work: the shit encased in plastic was not art, but shit. And so would be any studied effort to destroy it.

Wagner was morally invigorated by this insight. He left the gallery without making any further invisible overtures to Babe. He understood it was time to put invisibility to better uses than the service of jealousy, spite, and convenience.

It really was a remarkable gift. He who possessed it should be rich, and not loveless. His life long, Wagner had never taken anything that did not belong to him, and now he was thinking of robbing a bank!

But having the ability to vanish does, sooner or later, work a change in a person.

W
AGNER’S MAIDEN EFFORT AS
bank robber took place at lunchtime on the following day. Fortune favored him at the outset: Pascal had a dental appointment late in the morning and therefore would not be in a condition to eat lunch, even if, as he boasted, nothing more was done to his teeth than the semiannual prophylaxis. Naturally he make no reference to the kick Wagner had given him the night before, but apparently it had done its job, for nothing was missing from the desk. Presumably something of this sort could be used to correct unpleasant or even dangerous addictions. If every time a heavy smoker lighted up, he received, from thin air, a boot in the behind, he might well be able to overcome the habit. Whether this would be a powerful enough deterrent to the use of addictive drugs, however, was another matter. And of course to have any significant social effect such measures would have to be enacted by an army of invisible men.

Wagner couldn’t kid himself: invisibility must be used to further his own interests, and as soon as he began to take money that was not his, those were antisocial, which was to say, criminal, in the same area as embezzlement and forgery. He had a choice: he might have walked into a bank with a real or fake gun, stuck up a teller, then escaped by becoming invisible. But for a man with no experience of action, this plan had little allure. Pointing a genuine, loaded firearm at another person would be difficult for him, and even with a toy pistol he would not have adequate confidence to hold it steady. With either, he might well be shot down by bank guards or a fortuitous police officer... He chose the other option.

And another bank than the one at which he maintained a checking account, for though his was a large branch with many tellers, all of whom were incessantly being exchanged for newcomers, and none of whom gave him so much as a glance as he stood before the window, not to mention that while committing the crime he would be invisible from start to finish, Wagner intended to err only on the side of caution. Should the invisibility fail—and it seemed to him it might; it had yet to be tried under conditions of extreme stress—he still would have a chance to escape unrecognized. Most of his colleagues took their paychecks to the same institution used by him, whereas he was certain to be utterly unknown to all mortals found on the premises of a bank say four blocks north and two west. Which was the way of the city: that not in one’s immediate neighborhood was Mars.

However, having found such a bank and entered in the most unobtrusive manner an invisible person could enjoy,
viz.
, occupying the slot of a swinging door being moved by a visible man in the compartment ahead, Wagner got quite a shock, for who were the first people he saw as the door came around but Jackie Grinzing and Morton Wilton! The latter was handing a sheaf of small documents to a teller at the nearest window.

Discouraged, Wagner stayed right in the door and let himself be turned on around to where he had come from. On the sidewalk he was roughly jostled as a remarkably robust man stepped with energy into what seemed an empty space. Encountering the unseen but palpable Wagner, he was confused but even more determined to make headway than at the outset. The result was a short but violent episode in which Wagner got punched in the nose by a flailing arm, perhaps even his own. Witnesses of the event were not quick to believe the other man was even eccentric. One passerby addressed a companion: “Must be a bee or wasp in there.” “Or maybe,” said the other, “just a stink.”

“Damn,” said Wagner, aloud, having finally realized his escape: he felt a wetness on his upper lip. “Do I have a nosebleed?”

“I don’t see any blood,” said one of the latest people on the scene, walking on Wagner’s invisible right foot, addressing her companion. “It’s just your imagination.”

Wagner had to find somewhere out of traffic to plot his next move, else he would continue to sustain damage, for the to-and-fro parade was growing. He stepped to the side of the door just as Jackie and Wilton emerged.

On the sidewalk Wilton grinned at her and asked, “E.F.?”

“No, F.F.,” said Jackie, with an expression that looked at first like pain but was apparently a form of desire.

They went west, undoubtedly en route to a hotel. Invisibility would be a boon to the blackmailer. The technique certainly should be kept out of the hands of a real criminal.

It was unlikely that Wagner would encounter anyone else he recognized, but this bank seemed jinxed for him. There was another at the catercorner. He headed for it, and immediately had another unpleasant experience. Being invisible had, despite the punishment he had only just received in the swinging door, made him feel immaterial, and as he started to cross the street in defiance of the heavy traffic moving on it, he was almost struck by a lurching van.

Leaping back to the curb, he was pretty close to giving up the project for this day. Yes, his nose
was
bleeding. In his current condition he could not see the liquid on his exploratory fingers, but blood it had to be. Perhaps it was dripping on his tie and shirt. He put a handkerchief to his face. When he returned to visibility what a mess he would be! He must clean himself up in one public toilet or another, and to do that he would have to be visible. He was really botching what had seemed simple enough in projection, at least for the preliminary phases. If he had such trouble merely entering a bank, what could he expect when helping himself to money?

But in fact the last-named turned out to be the most easily accomplished achievement of the day. He crossed the street with the light, went into the other bank, lingered near the electrically latched door-gate between the executives’ desks and the tellers’ area until it was opened—which took no time at all, for persons came and went frequently in the incessant transaction between the two—moved along the counter as he had in the post office, and, when one of the tellers (who were all female), took a step to the side, he scooped a handful of hundred-dollar bills from her open cash drawer. As the designers of this bank had shrewdly placed these drawers below the line of vision of anyone not abnormally tall, given the width of the fake-marble counter as it extended towards the customer, plus the plate-glass barrier above it, the eyeglassed, balding man on the other side did not observe the theft—though no doubt if he had so done he would have assumed the fault lay in his own vision. That was the beauty of being invisible: in questionable circumstances people tend
not
to believe their own eyes.

Wagner’s leaving the scene of the crime was as neat as had been his arrival. He now applied himself to the problem of the blood on his clothing. Ironically enough, this proved insuperable to the successful bank robber, the man who could vanish at will. He could not clean himself unless he could see what he was doing. If he materialized before the mirror in a public toilet, he could be seen by others. Now, there was nothing to link someone suffering from a nosebleed with a bank robbery, especially when the thief had been invisible, and the money might not be missed until the tallies at the end of the day, so Wagner had no serious reason for worry. He was nevertheless averse to showing his bloodstains; they could be interpreted as having been received while committing a crime of violence, and under the subsequent interrogation by the police, he might crack. He was after all a bona fide lawbreaker now, for the first time in his life. Stiffing the lunch counter had been in the guise of taking a loan. There could be no alternative characterization of the means by which he had filled the pocket of his jacket with hundred-dollar bills.