Fiction
Running late for work one morning, the young man decided to take a cab. He stepped to the edge of the sidewalk, raised his hand and — nothing. Cab after empty cab drove by, their number lights glowing, but none of them stopped. The cab drivers didn’t pull over to ask where he was going, they didn’t even seem to look in his direction. He tried everything: stepping further into the street, waving both hands, even whistling.
Maybe it’s some kind of protest, he thought, as he headed down into the subway.
He was delayed there too. The train was on time, the problem was getting on board. The passengers standing in the doorway wouldn’t step aside to let him on. One man glanced over his shoulder, looked directly at him, then went right back to reading his book. After asking politely, the young man tried barging his way through, but by then the doors were closing. The train pulled away, and the young man was left standing on the empty platform.
When he finally made it to the office, nobody said anything to him about coming in late. In fact, they said nothing to him at all, not that morning, not the rest of the day. Nobody greeted him in the hallways, or came by his cubicle to make small talk. His comments in meetings went unacknowledged, the conversation carrying on as if he had said nothing at all. He received no phone calls and his inbox was improbably empty.
At lunchtime he went to the deli downstairs. But when he got to the front of the sandwich line, the sandwich maker shouted, “next!” and a woman behind him stepped up and started giving her order. The young man protested, but the sandwich maker and the woman carried on as if they couldn’t hear him.
Was it all some elaborate prank? the young man wondered, returning to his desk with a bag of chips from the vending machine. Yes, this seemed like the kind of stunt his coworkers would pull. They’d even gotten the building’s security guards and the deli workers in on it. But when he came in the next day, he got the same treatment, and the day after that, and the day after that.
No, it could not have been a prank, for it happened wherever he went. It didn’t matter who it was — his neighbor, his doorman, the barista at his favorite coffee shop, a nanny pushing a stroller, a police officer standing outside a bank, a stranger passing on the sidewalk. He could tap them on the shoulder, or shout in their faces, but nothing he did would get their attention. He could bump into them, trip them even, and they’d just brush themselves off and keep walking. For days nobody spoke to him, or looked at him, or acknowledged him in any way. It was like he was invisible, like he wasn’t there at all.
I must be dreaming, he often thought. Yet each morning he awoke and went out into a city that was oblivious to his existence. If it was a dream, it was one from which he could not awake.
The young man did not go to work the following Monday, or ever again. He wanted to read the paper, but the Times hadn’t been delivered in more than a week, none of his mail had. His phone line was dead, the TV was all static, and though he still had water and gas, he wondered for how long.
He left his apartment and went down to the coffee shop. There he slipped unnoticed behind the counter and prepared his coffee himself. He spent the rest of the morning undisturbed at a corner table, reading a paper he had taken from a newsstand. He even got to the crossword, which he never had time for. But he had nowhere to be and nothing he needed to do.
Gradually the young man came to accept his new condition. He walked everywhere, avoiding the subway and other crowded spaces. He shoplifted food and other necessities, knowing he wouldn’t be caught. The thought of robbing a bank or a jewelry store did occur to him. But then he realized that money was all but worthless to him now, for he had no way to spend it, and no real need to.
To pass the time, he went to the movies and the latest Broadway shows, avoiding the hassle of getting tickets and waiting in line. He went to day games at Yankee Stadium, taking in the action from the empty seats behind home plate. He visited museums, arriving just before closing time, as the guards cleared out the last visitors, leaving him free to wander the empty galleries alone.
He walked and walked, all over the city, until he had seen every neighborhood, and visited every landmark, even those usually closed to the general public. He read books in Gramercy Park, and smoked a cigar in the Metropolitan Club. He toured the gold vaults in the basement of the Federal Reserve, and stood on the floor of the General Assembly Hall in the UN.
In all this time, nobody came to check up on him, not his coworkers, not his neighbors, not his friends. He went to the police station to see if his name was in the missing persons records. It was not. As far as he knew, nobody ever attempted to find out what had happened to him, not even his parents. He had gone so long without human interaction that he began to forget what it felt like to be part of a conversation, or have somebody look him in the eye, or take his hand in theirs.
While out walking one evening, the young man spotted an old friend. She appeared to be looking for someone, and when she turned in his direction, her face lit up, and it seemed, for a moment, that she had recognized him, that she had seen him.
But then another man elbowed past him, the man she was really looking at. She went up and hugged this other man, and together they started walking away. The young man followed.
He followed them to a small, candlelit restaurant, followed them to their table, to which he pulled up a chair. Her date was handsome and confident, and said all the right things. His jokes made the young man laugh. When they ordered a bottle of wine, the young man took a glass from another table and poured one for himself.
The date went well. From the restaurant they went to a bar for another drink, then to an ice cream parlor for dessert. The young man went with them. He watched them kiss on the stairs outside her apartment building, her arms wrapped around his shoulders. Then she led him upstairs. The young man did not follow them. He stood on the stoop for a very long time.
He wandered through the city. The night was cool and clear, the city’s glare drowning out all but one or two stars. He found a bar in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Seizing a bottle from an unsuspecting bartender, he slipped into a booth in the back and poured himself glass, after glass, after glass, after glass, until he forgot all about his friend, forgot about everything.
In the morning he awoke on the pavement outside the bar. He lurched back to his apartment. The door was open and several large men were carrying away his sofa and other belongings. Inside, his landlord was showing an eager-looking couple around. The young man went into his bedroom and packed a suitcase.
He took a room at a nearby hotel. Every few days the hotel would book the room, but he would just go down the hall and find another. He kept this up for the rest of the summer and into the fall. Winter was fast approaching and he was not looking forward to walking everywhere.
By then he was tired of going to sporting events. He had been to most of the shows on Broadway, and seen the entire permanent collections of MoMA and the Met. He took up reading. He preferred long, elaborate novels with complex characters. But soon even books couldn’t hold his attention.
He became a regular at several bars, where he would sit with the other regulars, and listen to them complain, about rent, gentrifiers, tourists, their spouses, the Knicks. In the park he would join picnics, sharing their food, listening to their music and their laughter. Sometimes he would pick somebody out of a crowd and follow him, to his office, to his lunch break, to the store, to his home, where his wife, and his children, and his dog or cat were waiting. He would watch the stranger eat dinner, and wash the dishes, and do homework with his kids, and read them bedtime stories, and tuck them in, and say, I love you. He saw men and women talking about their days, and planning vacations, and stressing out over bills, and getting into arguments, and making love, and having affairs, and getting divorced, and remarried. He witnessed anniversaries and graduations, births and funerals, life and death.
The leaves in Central Park turned and fell to the ground, winter came. The snow buried the leaves and melted, and piled up, and melted again. One day the young man packed his suitcase and got on an empty E train. He rode it all the way out to Queens, then took the shuttle to the airport. After passing through security unscreened, he stood in front of the departures board deciding where to go. He settled on a city in Europe that he had seen and read about in films and books but never actually been to, and several hours later, he was there.
By spring the young man had seen everything there was to see in that European city and the other cities in that country. He spent the next year visiting the rest of Europe, before moving on to the Middle East, then Central Asia, then the Sub-Continent, and so on. He circled the globe, once, twice, maybe more, he lost track. He spent time in dense, energetic cities and in villages so remote only the people living there knew of their existence. He climbed mountains and explored caves and slept under trees and swam in rivers. He visited ruins of ancient civilizations, and tried foods he couldn’t identify, and witnessed strange customs, which eventually became familiar, and learned languages, and forgot them. He forgot many things — his old address, the color of his first car, the names of his friends, and then their faces, and then his own face. But each lost memory was replaced by a new one.
And so the man — for he was no longer young — saw everything, though he himself was never seen again.
