There he is, right there, though he’s not. Not really. He takes up space but lightly, without footprints, evidence, permanence. He drags his feet, indents the sand, but combed over are his tiny legacies, indifference enveloping each of his steps in turn. He questions his visibility daily, passively, a series of shrugs and a galaxy of blank expressions. There is consolation in these manufactured mechanisms, but if he twitches knowingly he’s not letting on – his are but instinctive shrugs.
She is there obviously, there in every way he is not. She is diminutive but noticeable and highly so, irrepressibly so: a presence stamped into the memories of even casual observers, a tattoo that fades only minutely, the grooves of an etching carved in stone, an accidental ideal too charmed to notice, too unburdened to try. That she is beautiful there is no doubt, not even by the most discerning standards; that she could conceive of being anything but is laughable – preposterous even, a broken branch through the spokes of her tricycle-tire mind.
She is in a fragile state, now, the youthful temerity of her emotions insistent, prodding at her superficial thoughts, hijacking them with superficial pain. He is eating an apple, also now, careful to keep his gaze hollow… still, his eyes on occasion flit to the melted portrait sitting on his left, a masterwork engulfed in the flames of rejection: smoking, distorted, curling around the edges. It’s all at once pathetic, this open display of maudlin adolescence. All the same, his sympathy reaches out to provide token comfort, but in finding nothing substantial to cling to it evaporates into a mist of irrelevance. Or, it’s his sympathy that’s irrelevant; he is invisible, and he had forgotten.
Her tears aren’t, truly; more drooling water unencumbered by sincerity, perhaps, her eyes leaky faucets through which she steals glances, desperate to insinuate her angst into the lives of passersby. He watches her, safe in his invisibility, as she edges closer; watches her smile her sad smile, her practiced vulnerability; watches her slide closer still, her eyes begging for acknowledgement, pleading for him to take notice, and take notice he does. He is keenly aware of her, of his half-eaten apple, of his possibly-wavering invisibility, and he continues to be keenly aware of these things equally, even as she speaks.
'Hi,' she says, a spritely dimple punctuating her mouth, her words. 'I don’t think I’ve seen you around before,' she says, pushing away her fraudulent tears with a backhand of fake nails.
I’m sure you haven’t, he thinks. I am invisible.
'You look like a nice guy,' she says, her overwhelming eyelashes fluttering in a knee-buckling display of femininity.
Impossible, he thinks. I don’t look like anything. I am, in the very least, translucent.
He was parsing out his soundless objections to a backbeat of silence, watching her safe in his translucence: she unfurls from her coiled wretchedness, breathes deep in his contagious rumination, glinting then shining dimly through his relentlessly foggy aura. He has torn all of the meat off of his apple before she speaks again.
'Why are guys such assholes?'
It escapes from her lips with purpose, naïve and rhetorical, as though it weren’t a cliché of such astonishing banality as to render the question itself completely unanswerable. He, focusing on his apple-core, realizes that she was fixing to have an entire conversation with herself, he only an ostensible consideration, and this realization gives him a perverse sense of satisfaction, his invisible worldview likely intact. Holding his hourglass-shaped detritus at arm’s length, he finally, firmly, dramatically swivels his head in her direction.
This least of movements, this barest of head-turns, is the catalyst for her apparently-suppressed verbosity to erupt: a torrent of barely-cogent whining spews from her face, coating him in the trivial spittle of an entitled princess unjustly maligned, and despite the miniscule attempts he makes to shield himself from her plaintive slobber, he remains at least figuratively unmoved.
His arm’s length becomes an elbow’s length, finally sagging to a wrist’s length, and he sees in the apple-core a representation of his diminishing attention-span: skeletal, decaying, a shell of what it had been before an intruder stripped it of its succulence. He eyes it suspiciously, as though merely holding the dilapidated foodstuff aloft was prolonging both her diatribe and his subsequent malaise.
The apple-core has to go, he thinks, and go but quick.
As if sensing his waning (if not utterly fractured) attention, her hand shuffles from its resting place in her lap, briefly gesticulates on some inconsequential point, and settles timidly on his forearm. Appalling is the first word that comes to his mind as he struggles against looking at her hand; this is followed by appealing, then pleasant, but before his mind meanders down that track it fishes disingenuous from its depths and holds the word like a billboard before his frontal-lobe, bathed in spotlights, the image amplified until it at last reaches the threshold of his understanding: invisibility was his own prop, and he, at this moment, was hers.
He can’t, or won’t, hear her. A pregnant pause gives birth to an infantile query altogether muted by his dispassion, a newborn baby that doesn’t scream, cradled in the ether just outside his capacity to listen. In the ether alongside his invisibility, his translucence, his inevitable visibility… or is it?
Is it inevitable?
He can’t, or won’t, speak; verbalization would be ruinous. Her question lingers, lilts, grows heavy in the air above them, unwieldy, darkening like the ebbing luminescence in her eyes. The hand on his arm spasms, caught between the muddy banks of infatuation and the undertow of receding enthusiasm. The apple-core jumps from his fingertips, released with a quarter-turn into a parabola of maximum torque, spinning and spinning and spinning until it explodes against the pavement, leaving an unrecognizable mishmash of red and off-white guck to ferment amongst those edibles already littering the walkway, those foodstuffs unlucky enough to be discarded without a proper sendoff.
Nicely done, that, he thinks. Now for the rest of it.
He shrugs. Once, only, but hard, unequivocal, impossible to miss or misunderstand, an all-encompassing shrug for the ages. The effect is gradual, glacial, an unhinged grin left to droop over chattering teeth, a hand snapped back with such force that its momentum carries its owner away like a cheetah leashed to a missile…
There he is, right there, though he’s not. Not, at least, as he was before. He no longer questions his visibility for he is neither visible nor invisible but transcendent of both, an ironic signpost to the contradictory absolutes of perception, in all ways transvisible.
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