Invisible Men. Eric Freeze

his mail. He has three separate piles: one for bills, one for correspondence, the other for garbage. He finds out that his cousin is getting married, the mousy one with the too-plucked eyebrows. He gets reimbursement checks from the college, letters requesting him to review the enclosed book please. He tears all the credit card applications in half. A whole semester’s worth of mail takes twenty minutes, like fast-forwarding through his life. He runs his hands through his thin hair. He sits on the edge of his bed, kicks his feet up. How tired he is from traveling. I sat in my room just below his, idly doing homework while Chelsea watched sitcoms and raided our fridge.

      I didn’t need to see this man. I was there with him.

      From the exasperated sound of the officer’s voice on the line, Garvey could tell he had called at a bad time. “I can call back,” he said.

      “What do you want, Mr. Garvey?”

      “I’m sorry. I just wanted to see if you’ve made any headway on the case.”

      No, the officer explained, still the same situation. We’ll let you know. Garvey made the call from his office. He hadn’t wanted to but it was during the day and he was having a hard time concentrating on work. His office was mostly spare and neat, the way he liked it. He had one picture, a man sitting at his desk and looking out the window. Often he’d sit and wonder what exactly he could see, maybe another man looking out another window, an eternal line of men preoccupied by something else. It was a helpful self-reflexive exercise for Garvey, like meditation. And sometimes his mind would fill up with such wonderful notes, images in sound, that he could sit and compose and arrange them on the screen and not notice the time passing. But today, blank. He was sure it was the investigation that was doing it, clogging him up. He needed to get out, go check his cubby, stretch his legs. Forget about the investigation. He had acted poorly, he knew, but now it was time to be on his best behavior. He left his office and entered the hall, a big commons area that had tables and an elevator with the department office at the other end. One of the doors to the stairs was partway open. A girl in a spring gingham dress stood by the door frame so that only half her body was visible. The girl looked familiar but as he passed she shut the door and he could hear the slap of her sandals as she bounded down the stairs two at a time.

      Sometimes I would follow Garvey almost the whole loop down the bike path and around the public library. Near the library was a copse of trees so if I didn’t feel like walking I could find shelter under their branches. He and his dog were such an odd pairing. Garvey was short with small hands and a face that was almost babyish with very round features. He shuffled when he walked, like he was a teenager trying to push his toes into shoes that were too big for him. The dog ran back and forth with a sway that reminded me of a rocking horse. His tongue was always out, his body all sinew and muscle while Garvey shuffled along. I wanted to know more about who he was. I had only lived in the same house with one other man—my father—and even though we were separated by walls and plaster and contracts I felt like we had the makings of a kind of nuclear family. Here was the mother and daughter, the babysitter, the man, the family dog. I wanted our lives to intersect in more ways, not to be just an imaginary man with his imaginary dog walking into an imaginary apartment filled with imaginary things. No longer the renter of my mind. One day before dinner I came home and met him on our walkway as he was on his way out. I stood stick still and he said “hello” in a kind of strained way but I kept my mouth shut. During dinner I said, “Mr. Garvey seems like a nice man.” Mom was in a rush again, opening and closing cupboards without ever once looking at me. “We should invite him over.”

      “That would be weird,” Mom said. She shoved silverware into a side pocket, broke juice boxes from their shrink wrap.

      “Why?”

      “Oh honey,” she said. She came over to me and pulled my head to her torso. She ran a finger down the part of my hair. “He’s not anybody. Aren’t things fine the way they are?”

      She was wrong in so many ways.

      She looked like her. The girl. He couldn’t be sure if his memory was accurate but some features were unmistakable: her oatmeal-colored hair, the dimpled nose. And here she was, a kind of back-from-the-dead siren blocking him on the sidewalk. He didn’t know how to circumvent her and get up to the safety of his apartment without talking to her. How did this girl go from being in front of him to the body floating in the Ohio? He knew most acts of abuse were by people known to the victim. Forget the parked car and tinted windows. It was a trusted priest, a relative, a best friend’s parent. He was none of these to this girl but he lived in the same house, used the same electricity, breathed the same air-conditioned air. Her proximity was unnerving and so Garvey said “hi” in curt, rushed tones, the voice of someone who had people to see. He thought about the murder, how easy it would be for him to take this girl and rape her. Her mother was never home. Often it was just the two of them keeping each other company during the day. He could come downstairs to borrow a cup of sugar, matches for his stove. She would want to see his apartment, to see if the floor plan differed at all from the apartment downstairs. This is where I keep my books. This is my roll top desk. This is my poster bed. See how the memory foam conforms to the shape of your body? He would talk to her like an equal, an adult, and take her for long walks along the river where he would complement her on her fine mind, her artistic sensibilities. The act would happen at any one of these moments. She would tell him about her father and how she had to look at photographs to remind herself what he looked like. She kept one of his work ties in her closet and sometimes imagined talking to it. These confessions would be precious to him, candid and true, like childhood promises. He would hold her hand in a paternal way, have her sit on his lap as he talked about Bach. “Take off your shoes. I want to see if you have the feet to play the organ.” Always a reason. She wouldn’t struggle until he came out of his bathroom and lay beside her and then it would be her cries, her childish “I’ll tells” that would lead to the accident, the silencing of her voice, the breaking of her body. It would happen so quickly, each act the cause of the next. There was something so wrongheaded about it. And familiar. This girl, her twin face.

      The second time a police car came to our house I half-expected some sort of confrontation, an old western guns-blazing kind of meeting. My mother hadn’t done anything wrong. Besides being gone less frequently, she’d kept out of the limelight, even turned over her responsibilities to a younger graduate student, one without kids, who could devote more time to the aesthetic concerns of urban renewal, keeping all the mom and pop stores in business. Chelsea met the officer out on the walk I think to shield me from whatever embarrassment his visit may entail so I was surprised when both came up to the front door and entered it. It wasn’t until I heard his footsteps receding up the stairs that I realized he wasn’t here for my mother at all. He was after Mr. Garvey.

      “I think you’d better call your mother,” Chelsea said.

      That night, we made plans. When Mom came home, she hugged me and put her hands on both side of my face and looked into my eyes. No one wanted to fill me in on the details. I knew our renter was gone, evicted by the law in as sudden a fashion as I could imagine. There were headlines on the news. Chelsea told me that I shouldn’t suppress what had happened to me and that Garvey should have his dick cut off. The conviction wasn’t certain yet but enough evidence had accumulated that the qualifiers “alleged” and “suspected” rang hollow. I would have to tell his story my own way.

      “We can go back to Canada if you want,” Mom said.

      “You have exams coming up.”

      Her cell rang and she clicked the headset open and she walked into the other room. She sniffled and rubbed her eyes and then did it again and again. I unzipped my backpack and got out my schoolbooks and turned to my math homework. Word problems. #1. There were 20 pigs. 2 had one eye, 5 had no teeth, and 3 had no tail. How many pigs had no defects? #2. If there are 789 people in one area, how many are in 5 areas? #3. Holly got a 48% a 53% and 100% on her tests. What was her average score?

      I knew what the questions wanted me to answer. 20-2-5-3=10. 789 x 5=3,945. (48+53+100) / 3=67. But I thought, what if? What if some of the pigs had more than one defect? Or what if there were different numbers of people in the other areas? And who aces a test and then