"Don"t come into our house. I"m begging you. What do I need to do to convince you to stay away? Do you need me to start seeing you again professionally? If I have to keep seeing you, here, in my office, I will. But stay away from the house."
"So you do want to spend time with me. That contradicts what you just said, Victoria. Are you sure your thoughts and feelings are the same? Because you never think mine are."
It was no use. There was no way I was going to convince Y____ of anything, and all he was going to do was contradict everything I said in a desperate attempt to keep us talking. In his mind, that was the only way to keep our relationship from ending. As I listened to his regressive arguments, I had a flashback to my freshman year at Davidson: I remembered how impossible it was to break up with my boyfriend from high school, and how he seemed to believe that starting a nightly fight over the telephone was not terribly different than being together as a couple. I realized this had already gone way too far, and the only remedy was to detonate every bridge we"d ever crossed. I chose the nuclear option. I told Y____ that I loved my husband, even though our marriage was not perfect. I told Y____ my interest in his life was solely a product of what he"d done scientifically (and not remotely related to his qualities as a man). I flatly told him, "You"re not a good person." I explained how I was not physically attracted to him, and that it was no coincidence he had to be invisible in order for me to spend time with him in public. I said I sometimes enjoyed talking with him, but not enough to put up with his thoughts and actions. I said that I didn"t want to know who he really was, because that person was probably worse than the person he was pretending to be.
I could not see how these words affected him. I could not see his face. But I knew. I could see him, in my mind.
After I finished my speech, there was a wordless gap that felt louder than the conversation. Eventually, I heard a few sc.r.a.pes from across the room (he must have been sitting on the floor against the wall and was finally standing up). For a moment, I thought he might just walk out without saying a peep. But that, of course, is not his way. He had to say something. He couldn"t stop himself.
"I was too kind to you," he finally said. "You liked me when I insulted you, because you like men who treat you like s.h.i.t. That"s your problem. As soon as I started treating you like a real person, you lost interest. I know I have problems, but your problems are worse."
With that, the door to my office unmagically opened and unmagically closed. "Are you still there?" I asked aloud. I had to make sure he was gone, even though I"d never truly know. But I received no response, and I took that at face value. It was an agonizing brand of relief; I felt sick, but I also felt better. It was over. I really believed that. I don"t know why, but I did. I guess I"ll always be an optimist, even if that makes me a fool.
The Worst-Case Scenario
What happened on the night of September 18 is, for understandable reasons, painful to re-create. Though the event lasted only minutes, it"s become the central fracture of my existence; I now see my life as having two distinct halves. It will probably seem that way forever. I hope I"m wrong about this, but I doubt it.
Whenever I"ve anecdotally described what happened that evening to other people, they inevitably ask the same question: "Did it seem like a movie?" I know exactly what they mean by this, and I understand why it"s something they"d ask. Our exposure to media makes everyone believe they can conceptualize certain popular impossibilities; by now, we"ve all seen so many "invisible man" movies that we a.s.sume we can imagine the unimaginable. But that"s not how it was. It wasn"t like a movie, except at the very end. So my stock answer to the question is this: "Not at all, except when it was." This allows people to laugh at something that isn"t funny.
After my disturbing office conversation with Y____, I counseled two more patients and returned home. I immediately told John what had transpired. He was not surprised. When I told him that things were really over and that I might have (finally) hurt Y____ in an irreconcilable way, he scoffed. "We"re installing a motion detector next week," he said. "The security people are coming Monday morning. I"ve already scheduled an appointment." John knew less about Y____ than I did, but-in many important ways-he understood him better.
The early part of our evening was fine-uncharacteristically idyllic, to be totally honest. I made chicken stir-fry. John and I did the dishes together. I asked John if he had any work to do, but he said, "Not tonight." We took a walk around the neighborhood as the sun went down. After we returned, we watched a doc.u.mentary t.i.tled Visions of Light on IFC. I think we went to bed around eleven p.m. We both read for an hour and fell asleep. As I drifted away, I remember being pleasantly surprised by how little I"d thought about Y____ that entire night. It really seemed finished. My mind was clear. Sleeping was easy.
But something woke me up.
I don"t know what that something was-it could have been a sound, it might have been the sense of being watched, or perhaps both. But something woke me up and I immediately felt sick. I felt like I was about to have a car accident. I sat up in bed. I looked toward our open bedroom door. The doorway was empty, but it didn"t look the way an empty doorway should: Within an utterly dark room, the doorway looked darker. The blackness had a shimmer. I reached for my gla.s.ses and put them on my face. The shimmer disappeared, but the darkness did not. My scalp felt hot. My palms were damp.
"John," I said. "John."
John woke up like a patient after surgery.
"There"s someone here, John."
In an instant, John was vigilant. He grabbed his gla.s.ses and reached for the hammer below the bed. He jumped up from under the covers and said, "Where? Where?"
Now, this is mildly embarra.s.sing, but it needs to be said for transparency: John doesn"t wear clothes when he sleeps. I typically wear sweatpants, but I always sleep topless. When I looked at John, it did seem a bit tragically comedic-there he was, an old, nude man with eyegla.s.ses on his face and a hammer in his hand, crouched at the knees like a high school shortstop. "This is going to end badly," I thought to myself. "We are not ready for this." But we had no choice. This was happening. I got out of bed and pointed at the doorway. "There," I said. "He"s there. Or he"s out there. He"s either there or out there."
John rushed the door and swung his hammer through the open s.p.a.ce. It struck nothing. He swung again, wildly. Again, nothing. He walked through the doorway onto the second-floor landing. He swung in every direction. Nothing. I turned on the reading lamp next to the bed and followed my husband through our bedroom door.
Why did I turn on the reading lamp? No idea. Habit, I suppose. But it made a huge difference. The dim light emanating from our bedroom cast huge shadows across the rest of the house. My five-foot-five body generated a thirty-foot shadow on the living room floor. John"s shadow was just as large. And now we could see a third ma.s.sive shadow, longer than either of ours. I grabbed John by the arm and said, "Look at the walls!" For a moment, I thought I was a genius. I"d cracked the code. But then Y____ simply said, "I"m right here."
The voice was calm and the voice was close. He could not have been more than ten feet away, standing on the same second-floor landing, looking at two naked people who had run out of ideas.
"Call the police," said John. I"d left my cell phone in the kitchen, so down the stairs I ran. Despite everything that was happening, I still felt self-conscious about Y____ seeing me topless. Certain insecurities never disappear. Upstairs, I could hear my husband yelling at Y____, unleashing a concentration of profanity I"d never heard him utter. I could also hear Y____ laughing and asking sarcastic questions about the hammer. I dialed 9-1-1 and pleaded for a.s.sistance. When the operator asked what my emergency was, I only said, "There"s a man in our house. Please get here soon." There was no sense in trying to explain.
Before leaving the kitchen, I should have grabbed a carving knife or a rolling pin. But I didn"t. The thought never even occurred to me. I rushed back into the living room and looked toward the banister on the second level. It was like John had taken LSD: He was naked, standing on the landing, raving like a lunatic, yelling at nothing. "I"m gonna f.u.c.king kill you, you f.u.c.king c.u.n.t," he said. "I"m going to rip off your f.u.c.king head and jam it down your f.a.ggot throat." But Y____"s voice never changed. He never seemed nervous. He didn"t seem menacing. He just seemed like a jerk.
"I"ve grown fond of your wife," said Y____. Even now, he talked like an a.s.shole. "And she"s falling in love with me. Now put down that hammer and get some clothes on. Let"s talk about this like men."
"I"m not gonna f.u.c.king talk to you," yelled John. "Get out of my house!"
"No," said Y____. He sounded bored.
"I"ll kill you," said John.
"You won"t," said Y____. "Don"t try." And with that, John rushed forward, straight toward Y____"s voice, swinging the hammer in a huge diagonal stroke across the front of his body. Once again, he hit nothing. He was thrown off balance, like a boxer who"d overpunched his target. And then it happened: I saw John"s lithe body lift off the floor, float over the banister, and fall twenty-five feet, straight down to the wood below. He tumbled end over end, like a bowling pin knocked into the air. His body rotated 270 degrees as it fell.
It was absolutely the worst thing I"ve ever seen. The fall seemed to last longer than our marriage.
For one terrible instant, it looked like he would hit the hardwood headfirst. That would have killed him instantly. But his body kept rotating, and he landed on his tailbone. He screamed. I screamed. I rushed over to him. He said, "Get away!" I didn"t know what to do. I looked up at the second-floor landing, and (of course) saw nothing. What did I expect to see? Human nature is impossible to overcome.
I could hear Y____ walking down the stairs. He was taking his time. I looked around for the hammer, which John had released as he fell. I was going to kill Y____, or at least I was going to try. That was my final decision. A lot of problems I"d been grappling with suddenly seemed simple.
"We can go now," said Y____.
"Are you out of your G.o.dd.a.m.n mind?" I screamed. "You just killed my husband." This wasn"t exactly true (and probably didn"t give John a lot of confidence about his condition), but my mind wasn"t right. John was still on the floor, moaning.
"Come with me," said Y____. I"ll never get over how calm he sounded. "They won"t be able to find us. I can promise you that. They"ll never find us."
"You"re so sick," I said.
"We"re running out of time," said Y____. "We can"t have one of those conversations where we go back and forth about why I"m right and why you"re nervous. We need to leave now. Everything will be okay." It was as if he did not even hear John"s groans. He was blocking them out entirely. To Y____, John was already a carca.s.s.
"You"re f.u.c.king crazy," I said.
"Don"t do this, Victoria," Y____ said. "We need each other. You know that I"m right."
"Kill yourself," I said. "You"re a liar."
As I knelt beside John, I looked at Y____. He wasn"t there, but I could see him as clearly as I could see the body of my broken husband. I"d never seen him so easily. And Y____ could tell. He knew I could see him now. That"s why he was in my house.
It was at this point that my existence became a movie, if only for five seconds. John"s hammer was laying in the middle of the rug. In a flash, it levitated off the ground. The hammer hung in the air like a cheap special effect from the unpopular eighties, bobbing and weaving, c.o.c.ked and loaded. It was an amazing moment. What can I say? It was an amazing thing to see. But it was also terrible, because I thought it was going to crush me. "This is it," I thought. "This is where Y____ beats me to death." Maybe he"d torture me. Maybe he"d rape me first, or maybe he"d do it after I was dead. I had been wrong about Y____ so many times that nothing seemed off the table. I waited for his attack and wondered if I could fight him off long enough for the cops to arrive; I wondered what the cops would do when they saw a topless woman wrestling with herself on the floor.
But he didn"t attack.
He didn"t even talk.
He dropped the hammer, and the hammer went thud. I heard him casually walk toward the door, and I watched our deadbolt unlock itself. The door swung open and swung itself shut. I started crying uncontrollably. I tried to help John stand, but he couldn"t move. I ran into the kitchen (still crying) to fetch him a gla.s.s of water; when I returned, I could see rolling blue and red lights through our picture windows. I sprinted to the front door, opened it wide, and yelled, "Get an ambulance," at the first cop I saw.
I went back inside, covered John"s midsection with a towel, and tried to figure out how I was going to explain my life to other people.
Epilogue.
It would be wrong to cla.s.sify John as "paralyzed." He still has some feeling in his feet and lower extremities, and he can pivot his right ankle forty-five degrees. If he were truly paralyzed, he"d have no pain around his coccyx, and the pain is definitely there, every minute of every day. But he can"t stand and he can"t walk, and he"ll spend the rest of his days in a wheelchair. We both accepted that certainty very early on, immediately following his surgery. However, he can still read and he can still write, and-if the pain subsides by next fall-he"ll resume teaching full-time. He"s excited about that. John"s become a totally different person. Amazingly, there"s been an upside to this incident, something I could never have imagined. But before I get to that, I need to explain what happened in the wake of Y____"s final, destructive cameo.
Try to put yourself in the position of the first police officer on the scene: You"ve been summoned to investigate a home invasion, but when you arrive no one is there except the two residents. One resident is injured, seemingly from a fall. He"s in no position to explain anything. The other is topless and hysterical. You"re informed that a man was in the house, that this man was familiar with the homeowners, and that he"d escaped (on foot) just minutes ago. But you"re also told that any attempt to search for this man in the immediate area will be completely useless. You ask, "In what direction did he flee?" You are told, "That doesn"t matter." You start to wonder what"s really going on here; you start to wonder if this is some kind of domestic dispute, or maybe that drugs are involved. You start to wonder if you need to take the hysterical woman into custody, so that"s what you do.
After John was rushed to the hospital, I spent six hours in Austin City Jail. They never charged me with anything, probably because they didn"t know what to charge me with. I never got the sense they saw me as a perpetrator, but they were certainly confused. The next morning, I began a series of interviews with Detective Paul LaBour. To his credit, Paul never seemed to doubt any detail of the story (even when he admitted there wasn"t much he could do about it).
Knowing what was at stake, I explained the situation like this: I told Detective LaBour that the intruder had been my patient. This, right away, seemed to remove any suspicion about my motives. I was conscious not to use the word invisible-it dawned on me why Y____ had always been so careful about using that word flippantly. It hijacks every conversation. Instead, I said that this patient had detailed a long history of entering people"s homes, and that he was exceedingly adroit at urban camouflage. I mentioned the "heavy dudes" case in Minneapolis that Y____ had described in June, and the authorities were immediately able to confirm that such a crime had occurred.16 I described the events of the previous evening as accurately as possible, once again avoiding the word invisible (instead, I would use phrases like "we could not really see him"). I also made an off-the-cuff decision that proved invaluable: I told Paul that he could interview John immediately after he recovered from his emergency spinal surgery, even before I had a chance to see him myself. This was an extremely difficult decision, and perhaps a bit cruel. Considering his condition, I"m sure John wanted to see me even more than I wanted to see him. But it was the rational move. Paul needed just five minutes with John to conclude that the details of our stories matched.17 Had we not done this, I wonder if they"d ever have believed a word of what we said. Beyond the broken latch on our back door, there was no evidence of anything. The finger smudges on the hammer were useless-they matched nothing in the FBI database.
The hunt for Y____ continues to this day. But it"s a feeble hunt, devoid of doggedness. In my opinion, the authorities have lost interest.
It is, I suppose, a paradox: Despite listening to Y____ talk about himself for nearly one hundred hours, I"d learned almost nothing useful about him. I knew his name, but it"s a common name and probably fake. I had his previous cell phone number, but the number was registered to a person who"d been dead for years. I didn"t know Y____"s specific address or where he was born. He paid for everything in cash. I turned over all the audiotapes in my possession, and investigators have scoured the transcripts for any clue that might ill.u.s.trate who this person was. Yet every time they find a useful detail, it"s inevitably contradicted by something different Y____ would say later. His deception, it seems, was conscious.
Our strongest lead, certainly, were the dialogue pa.s.sages about his time at Chaminade as a researcher. That period was key to every crime he would later commit. But this presented its own kind of problem: Whatever happened in that Hawaii laboratory has been artlessly stricken from the public record. The school has no information about the program, and the building where such research would have been conducted has been converted into married student housing. On his own, John has tried to ascertain details about the espoused military program through the Freedom of Information Act, but the FOIA doc.u.ments we received were useless: All the names of the researchers have been blackened out, and the explanation for what was being studied is so simultaneously vague and technical that it"s virtually unreadable. We didn"t learn anything, beyond proving that some kind of military program did, in fact, exist in Hawaii.
Did we ever encounter Y____ again? No. For weeks after the attack, I was certain we would. I feared he would show up at the hospital, so I spent almost every night in John"s room. But he never appeared. If he did, I was not aware of it (and as one might expect, I"ve grown hyperconscious of every sound and movement that would indicate the presence of a man who isn"t there). The nights are still the worst. I wake up a lot. I probably wake up five times a night. But that used to happen twice as often, so I suppose that"s progress.
I still think about Y____ all the time. I know I should hate him, but I don"t. Whenever I try to hate him, it doesn"t work. All his worst qualities were totally transparent, but so were the things that made him different than other people. What can I say? I can"t deny that he was interesting, even if he was interesting in a negative way.
Almost six months after John"s fall, Y____ contacted me one final time. He sent me a postcard, addressed to my office. The postmark was from Golden, Colorado, but he claimed to be writing from Canada. Did he think I"d fail to notice the discrepancy? I"ve given up trying to understand his lies. The image on the front of the card was of all four members of the Beatles in lab coats, curiously adorned with decapitated baby dolls and hunks of raw meat. I have no idea if this is supposed to indicate an unhinged state of mind, a sick inside joke, or nothing at all. Y____"s message was handwritten in blue ink; his printing was minuscule and exacting. The message was as follows: Victoria:.
I"m sorry about what happened. I did not enter your home with the intention of hurting your husband. He should not have attacked me with a hammer, but I forgive him. It sounds like he got the worst of it. Obviously, I"m sad about how we left things. It"s hard to be a private person, I suppose. I miss you, and I hope you miss me as well. I am as much to blame for all this as you are, so don"t beat yourself up. I would like to think we"ll meet again, but I know that can"t happen. We were no good together, but try to remember me as best you can. I am doing well here in Montreal. The subway system is very efficient.
Votre ami, Y____.
To the very end, he stayed in his lane.
John was (predictably) angry when I showed him Y____"s postcard. I believe his initial comment was, "So he thinks he"s Hannibal Lecter now?" But-to John"s credit-he eventually conceded that these were not words written by a reasonable person, so there"s really no point in despising him from afar. Maybe John has forgiven him, too. Since his accident, he"s become a different man. Gone is the condescending person devoid of empathy; in his place, I have a husband who needs me, and who admits that he needs me, and who realizes that I am the only person who can help him when he wants help. I am the only person who can pull up his pants or get his books out of the attic or help him go to the toilet in a restaurant lavatory. It was jarring to see him realize these things. He speaks differently. He listens more. We share our lives equally, but I make the real decisions. John"s perspicacity will always be present, but he comprehends his own weakness (and, by extension, the weaknesses of others). I am by no means happy that he cannot walk, and his condition makes our life difficult. But not every tragic situation is tragic in totality.
I must be frank: There are many reasons why I"m writing this book, but the main one is money. John and I both have large life insurance policies, but neither of us ever thought to purchase disability insurance-it didn"t seem applicable to our nonphysical careers. Since his fall, we"ve had to remodel most of our home (including all the bathrooms) and install ramps and chairlifts. Many types of physical therapy are prohibitively expensive. My only option was to sell this story. It"s the only thing I have that"s worth anything. Much of the advance money is already gone, but at least we are comfortable and John is recovering. We needed the money. We did. Y____ wasn"t wrong about everything.
Still, if I"m going to be straight, I need to go all the way: Beyond the money, I"m pleased with the work. I"m happy this record of Y____"s life exists, and I"m proud to be the person who heard it firsthand.
Is the publication of this book precisely what Y____ wanted all along? Probably. It probably is. I can imagine him reading it wherever he"s hiding, scribbling in the margins, consumed by its minor inaccuracies. He will probably send me a letter outlining the revisions he wants to see in the paperback. Y____ could never see the things about himself that were obvious, but that"s not atypical. It might have been the only thing about him that was normal. The only thing I hope is that-wherever he is-he"s reading this book alone. He needs to be alone, and he needs to stay alone. He"s not ready to be the person he is.
1. Calls were received on Sat.u.r.day at 2:55 a.m. and 3:03 a.m.; both messages transcribed on Sat.u.r.day, March 22, at 8:55 a.m.
2. This is more commonly referred to as pathological lying.
3. In quantum mechanics, the Uncertainty Principle suggests that the act of measuring one magnitude of a particle, be it ma.s.s, velocity, or position, causes the other magnitudes to blur. In other words, the very process of examining something changes what that something is.
4. These were two former patients. In both cases, I became overly involved with their problems (the former regarding the death of an infant, the latter involving a rape that occurred during penal incarceration). In both cases, I had to request that our treatment terminate prematurely.
5. Calls were received on Sat.u.r.day, at 3:00 a.m. and 3:03 a.m.; both messages transcribed on Sat.u.r.day, April 5, at 9:58 a.m.
6. National Security Agency.
7. At the time I wrote this sentence, I was having minor problems at home and projecting that frustration onto other aspects of my life. It is not an accurate reflection of my professional self-image and should not be taken as such. I did not think it would ever be read by other people.
8. Daniel Johnston.
9. It has been pointed out to me (by a colleague) that Y____ was incorrect here. The tribe he meant to reference was actually the Tarahumara.
10. Was this an aborted segue to our previous conversation? I thought it might be, but it was not. He didn"t even look at me when he said this.
11. 111 Cesar Chavez Street.
12. It"s my belief that "Zug" was attempting to reference William Ian Miller of the University of Michigan. This is a.s.suming Y____ was telling the truth about what he remembered.
13. Technically speaking, this is the ability to conceive of mental activity in others, particularly how children conceptualize mental activity in other children, how they attribute intentions, and how they predict the behavior of others.
14. "One Percenters" refers to a sect of outlaw motorcycle gangs who regularly engage in criminal activity. The term comes from the (likely apocryphal) belief that the American Motorcycle a.s.sociation once argued that 99 percent of bikers were not criminals; members of the One Percenter society embrace the concept of being the "1 percent" who do live a life of crime.
15. The experience of making deep connections and/or seeing meaningful patterns within random data.
16. Unfortunately, my subsequent deposition regarding this case was deemed inadmissible by the Minnesota court. As of this writing, the defendant remains in custody and is awaiting appeal.
17. Interestingly, John claims he directly referred to Y____ as "invisible" as soon as he met with the police. To the best of his memory, they never really questioned that detail-but John was also under fairly heavy sedation at the time of the conversation. Perhaps they took him for a superstoned drama queen? More likely, they just accepted his story because he had no reason to lie.
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