Invisible Men. Eric Freeze

slamming the window in my haste.

      He was in his room again. It was twelve-fifteen. He hadn’t gone to work. He wore his khaki Dickies and burgundy penny loafers and a blue pinstripe button up. He was ready for lunch but couldn’t get himself to stop looking at himself in the mirror. He wasn’t a narcissist, no, that wasn’t it. It was something about normalcy. Did his face look right? Was it his face? In lieu of work he’d gone to a line-up today, a request by the investigation. There were five other men who stood in a line and turned to the left, turned to the right, put their left foot in, shook it all about. There was something gravely impersonal about the process. He didn’t talk to any of the other men. They were all Caucasian like him with small frames and varying degrees of male pattern balding. He couldn’t imagine why they would have him stand with these men. There was no victim who could identify him, no one who would be convicted or not convicted based on whatever forensic evidence they found. In the mirror Garvey put his arms out as though he were a kid pretending to fly. Then he reached with his one arm, touched his nose. Reached with the other, did the same. He spread his legs, Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man circumscribed by a perfect circle. He said, “I am Garvey Pacini, professor of music. I am a Doctor of Musical Arts. I have perfect pitch. I like Bach and Buxtehude and Dupré. I play the organ at the Episcopal Church. I have 33D shoes. I am recently divorced. I own a dog.” He put his arms back down at his sides. And sighed. It was 12:30. He wouldn’t make it to lunch now and he didn’t want to seem like a flake by showing up twenty minutes late. No, he would stay here, make something in his kitchen. Eggs perhaps. Breakfast food to trick him out of this funk. But first he was going to open the window for some air.

      The next day, they began construction on the Super Walmart. Mom’s protests had had some effect; Walmart agreed to foot the bill for widening South State Street to make access easier for adjacent businesses. Part of the Mom’s group’s platform included an argument about aesthetic appeal. Athens and nearby Nelsonville were brick-making towns. Uptown had roads with bricks stamped “Athens.” Half the buildings of campus were made of the same bricks. A Super Walmart in Athens was like putting vinyl double-hung windows in the Sistine Chapel. It was an “ugly anachronism” a “boxy testament to consumerism” and a number of other things Mom called it that sounded haughty and noble and right. So to make the lobbyists happy, Walmart agreed to build their box in brick.

      I decided to ask Chelsea about it.

      “Your mom should spend less time worrying about Walmart and more time worrying about you,” she said.

      I said, “I broke into our renter’s apartment yesterday.”

      Chelsea said, “This family is so dysfunctional.”

      We were watching TV downstairs, one of those shows where people receive a makeover before they’re reunited with their family. A big woman had her hair trimmed so it was boy-short, with sort of pointy sideburns. She got new black slacks to try and slim down her squarish buttocks, to streamline her body. She looked about the same as when she was in jeans and a t-shirt, but when her husband saw her he spread his arms wide and embraced her on the mouth.

      Chelsea lit a cigarette.

      “You’re not supposed to smoke in the house,” I said.

      “Tell that to your mother if she ever comes home.”

      I shrunk into my seat as I watched the smoke curling out from Chelsea’s mouth. She was right, I knew. Once, a couple days ago, we saw my mother on the local news with a group of activists in the rain. She wasn’t the one talking, but we had a good enough view of her holding part of a picket sign. I said, “Mom is on TV!” and I felt proud for a moment. Mom held the sign and the newswoman talked of their vigil and the rain kept pouring so that Mom’s face was slick with it. Then I realized that Mom hadn’t been home all day, that I had seen her on TV before I had seen her here, at home.

      A footprint. That’s what his foot stuck to when he opened the window. Why hadn’t he noticed it before? Had he not opened his bedroom window since he got back from his sabbatical? He knelt down and touched the fresh tar with his fingers. The tread was small, a child’s, he had no idea what size. The kid could be anywhere from three to ten years old for all he knew about children. To have this child’s footprint in his bedroom was enormously disconcerting. He hadn’t lived in the apartment long, a little over a year now, but he was sure he would’ve noticed it earlier. And the tar was fresh, still sticky, not hard and caked on. In any other frame of mind, at any other time in his life, this footprint, this child’s footprint wouldn’t matter so much. He would write it off as an anomaly or something he may have overlooked when he first rented the place. He brought his hand to his face and rubbed where his cheeks met his lips. He wanted to chew on his fingernails, a habit he had until he was a teenager. Stick his fingers in his mouth and suck. Maynard jumped down from the bed and shook, the tags from his collar clinking as his ears thwacked his neck. And stretched. Yes, Garvey would take him out. He needed to get away from here, from this spot. When Garvey described himself to the police he said, “I don’t even like kids.” It was unsolicited information, not the kind of thing you mention when you state your name and address. He’d only been thinking ahead. He knew he looked suspicious and so he wanted some declaration to exonerate him. “We didn’t say that you did, Mr. Garvey,” the officer said and from then on Garvey felt like they were on the alert. Now a child’s tar footprint was in his bedroom, like a signature, a stamp. And he did like children, really. Even though Darla cited his reluctance to have a family as one of the primary reasons for their divorce. It was more that he was afraid of them. They had a kind of perspicacity that made him uncomfortable. A child could look through you, past the degrees and office talk and inanities and know what you were thinking no matter how you tried to cover it up. Like you were a bedtime story and all they had to do was open the book and turn the page.

      The day Garvey came back I told Mom I wanted to move back to Canada.

      “But you love it here,” she said. “You have so many friends.”

      “You’re never home. I’m still missing Dad and now I feel like I’m missing you too.”

      Mom was getting ready for her once-a-week night class and I knew that this would stop her. She put down her backpack with all the straps and sat down beside me at the breakfast table. “That isn’t really fair, honey,” she said. She touched the side my face and tucked my hair behind my ear. “We’ve talked about this. It’s the middle of the semester.”

      I shrugged. Mom watched me for a second to see if there was more. I was trying to cry but couldn’t manage it somehow. Then she put the rest of her books in her backpack and picked up her cell phone and checked its charge and told me that Chelsea would be here in a half an hour and that I should phone her if there was a problem and that we would talk about all this tonight, just the two of us, girls night out, and the screen door slammed and she was gone.

      It was then that Garvey showed up. I was watching after-school cartoons and I heard the front door open, the one we never used, and steps going up the stairs. I was curious of course. I had constructed a mental image of the man from what I knew about him: his mail, his furniture, his job. I knew he taught at the university so I thought he must be elbow-patchy, wiry, the kind of man who wore bow ties and Hush Puppies. I crept into the hallway and I heard him fiddle with his keys on the landing. The front door was wide open so I went to close it but he was gone inside his apartment by the time I got there. When Chelsea arrived, I told her what happened.

      “Did you see him?” she asked.

      “Not really.”

      “So how do you know?”

      I thought Chelsea was trying to make me look stupid; of course it was him. He had a key. He walked through the door as though he were entitled to it. It was the middle of the day.

      “I mean, it could be a contractor or a friend of your mother’s. Or even a friend of his. Did you think of that?”

      But I could hear new sounds now, the shuffle of feet to the bathroom, a knock as he dropped something to the floor. I could only imagine who he was, what he was doing, separated as we were by this veneer of wood, sheetrock, and