Invisible Men. Eric Freeze

was dead. My mother still paced in the living room. Her voice warbled. She closed the phone, snapped it shut and smoothed her eyes with her fingers.

      “Why don’t we go for a walk?” she said.

      Garvey had always wanted to compose Jazz but he never could imagine the notes. Composition for him was a hobby, something he did in his spare time: rearrange, play with scales. He was like a boy with a new set of Legos trying to follow the pictures to make a turreted castle. But he was always drawn to the looser form of Jazz, like a bass who had always wanted to sing tenor. There was just so much more you could do.

      Garvey was grateful to the sheriff that he didn’t make him wear handcuffs to the car. Looking at him, the sheriff must have known that Garvey wasn’t the kind of man who would bolt. Or who knew Jujitsu or carried weapons. Maybe he’d been to one of his recitals, a Bach aficionado in plainclothes. Did cops listen to music in their cars?

      “I’m sure this is a mistake,” Garvey said.

      “You don’t have to say anything Mr. Garvey. Probably shouldn’t.”

      Sitting in the patrol car, Garvey felt like he was in a taxi. Same sequestered space, same puke-resistant slick vinyl seats. This wasn’t where he was supposed to end up.

      The sheriff’s radio squawked and Garvey tried to make out the voices through the static. They were talking about him. Suspect. Custody. Station. Enough to piece together the coming sequence of events. But there was part of him that wanted verbal confirmation from the source.

      “Excuse me,” Garvey said from the back seat. “Excuse me. Would you mind if I make a phone call?”

      The sheriff put the headset back in the squawk box and rummaged through his pockets for Garvey’s cell phone. He held it up between his thumb and forefinger and turned around.

      “It’s going to take that little girl all her life to sort this thing out,” The sheriff said. “Go ahead. Make your phone call.”

      Garvey scrolled through his contacts until he got to his divorce lawyer, a man who knew him better than just about anyone. There was a time when Garvey didn’t have a lawyer. If he’d been arrested then, before everything happened, he would have to ask for the Yellow Pages or look up a friend who knew somebody before he’d be able to make the call. He only hoped his lawyer could come up with the words to tell his story carefully, put it all together in a deliberate and thoughtful way. This once Garvey was sure. There was no room to improvise.

      This is Garvey the way he wanted to be: a man wrongfully accused, victim of circumstance. I’ve killed the young version of myself, the body who dies as you read her, limp and lifeless in the first paragraph. It’s only near the end that my stories merge, the man captured for the crime I’ve tried to suppress. Don’t feel slighted. It’s me. I live with the story’s absences: the trips to counsellors and psychiatrists, our gradual migration back to Canada. I won’t apologize for what’s there, no matter how unreliable it may be. But there is one absence that I want on the page.

      Let me tell you about my father.

      He was a man who worked in an office building that looked like a mirrored Rubik’s cube. He wore khaki slacks and button-down shirts with a different tie for every day of the week. I didn’t know what he did, just that it had something to do with computers and communication and that he never talked about it when he came through the door of our townhouse because when he did it! Was! Time! To! Play! He taught me to do puzzles by finding all the corners and the straight-edged pieces first and for my birthday he bought me a size 1 soccer ball with the red logo of some European team on it. He read books to me when I was sleepy and I’d perk up, that last burst of energy to hear him do the voices of each character, nasal, or in falsetto, or a low growl for wolves or dinosaurs, before falling asleep in the soft space between his shoulder and his chest. He sipped his coffee in the morning and when he took off his glasses there were marks on either side of his nose where the silicone nose pads dimpled the skin. Sometimes we listened to music, mostly old CDs from his high-school days, and we danced and I reached up my hands so he would swing me around in an arc until I was dizzy. When I rode on his shoulders I grabbed tufts of his hair and when he took me on bike rides he always asked, where do you want to go? We did activities with construction paper and glue sticks with glitter and multi-colored puff balls and pipe cleaners. We baked cookies and made waffles and popped popcorn and slathered our vegetables with butter. And at night, just before bed, he puckered and I gave him a peck, a quick touching of lips, and I put my arms around his neck and patted his back and told him good night, papa, have a good sleep, and he said yes, you too, bye now, and then I lay in bed with my hands tucked under my pillow, closed my eyes, and dreamed my childhood dreams.

      The Invisible Invisible Man

      Fred had flux on his fingers. It was lead-free, self-cleaning, from a red-and-white tin the size of a can of shoe polish. He’d tried the brush that came with the kit but the clumps had refused to spread out the way he wanted them to. It was cold. Pipe-freezing cold. He needed his fingers to warm the metal, so the flux would go on smooth.

      Fred pushed a coupling into place and eased open the gas torch. He lit the flame with a lighter. Bits of solder stuck in the nozzle like tiny silver fillings. The blue flame was lopsided and he hoped it burned hot enough. He angled the torch down at the mess of copper he’d constructed on the basement ground, propped up on old pipes with their inch-long gashes where the metal had flowered open from the ice. The blue flame split at the ¾-inch tee joint and wrapped around either side like a tiny pair of ethereal tongs. Then he waited.

      The flux went soft and melted and kind of bubbled at the edges but when Fred touched the unwound solder to the joint it stuck and beaded like a little ball of mercury. It wouldn’t suck into the joint. The bright copper turned an agate color and the sticker with the bar code flamed and became a dark smudge. He pushed the solder into the joint again and again but the blobs nicked off the copper and fell like ball-bearings to the dirt floor. Maybe he hadn’t got all the water off. Maybe it was just too damn cold. The soldering had worked for the ½-inch but it had dripped into the torch nozzle and the bigger, ¾ joint wasn’t budging. Fred touched his fingers to the end of the pipe to melt off the excess flux and get his fingers warm again.

      Two hours earlier he had been in his office faxing an offer on a brick Greek revival for one of his clients. It was a cherry place with a yuppie stainless kitchen, Viking stove and original moldings from the turn of the century. It had been on the market for two years, dropping a couple thousand with every downtick of the S&P, and the offer was a fraction of what the place was worth on paper. Didn’t seem right somehow. And now here he was saddled with his own property, a Christmas foreclosure, a rental he’d snatched up for a little more than what you’d pay for a car. He’d forgone the inspection because there was a bidding war and the place had been recently renovated. No contingencies. Now here he was. Fluxed hands. Cold. And money hemorrhaging out of him like blood from a new wound.

      Fuck it, he said.

      At the hardware store, he stood with a clerk in front of a shelf of new torches. This one, the clerk said, 30% faster, automatic ignition. That’s what you need, a hotter torch. Fred took it and went to the till and swiped his card and signed on the electronic line and within half an hour was back in the dark basement sixty bucks poorer.

      But the clerk was right.

      The flame was a brilliant blue, about an inch wide. It feathered out at the edges and when he put it to the joint it covered the copper in a wash of translucent blue. He waited ten seconds to be sure before moving in with the solder. It sucked in immediately and the excess dripped and splattered on the floor. Smoke poured from the open ends of the pipe, and for a moment, Fred was happy.

      He fluxed the burnished ends of the old pipes and fit the welded piece into place. The coupling was just outside the slatted wood covering an old crawl space, and the February air blew hard through the gaps. Maybe that’s what did it. He’d have to get some spray foam insulation or they’d burst again for sure. Maybe wire-wrap, even. Always something that cost more money. But, for now, the