Being Invisible Read Free

secret! It might be sufficient cause to get him fired. Who could tolerate an employee with the capacity to become invisible at will?
    For it was pure will. Wagner simply decided to become invisible, and it happened.
    Remarkable, and in fact pretty ugly, was the muscular way in which Jackie was caressing Wilton’s groin, if that was the word for what looked more like punishment. There was no apparent tenderness on the part of either, and odder yet, not a hint of passion. Jackie was in her ash-blond mid-forties. In one way she looked her age. But coming at the matter from another angle, one might say her appearance was better than could rightly be expected. Wilton was shorter than she and may have been younger, but it was hard to tell with his strawlike hair, head and facial. He was leaning back against the wall of the elevator. He had not touched Jackie since putting her hand on him. His expression was inscrutable. Her own, owing to the shape of her closed mouth, looked almost angry.
    It was Wagner, and not either of them, who suffered anxiety at the approach of the floor at which they all were to deboard. Suppose someone was waiting for the elevator directly in front of the door? Wagner was so sensitive to humiliation as to feel it vicariously when he himself was but an observer of an experience in which it was no more than an impending possibility. Thus he was quailing, invisibly, in the far corner when the car stopped and the door slid open.
    In fact a little crowd was waiting just outside. Some of them greeted Wagner’s fellow passengers. Others stepped quickly into the car, barring Wagner’s own exit. None acted as if they had seen Jackie abrading Wilton, for surely she had simply stopped when the elevator had. It took no great sleight of hand. Wagner realized he was a nervous wreck. Penned in now by the new passengers, he was forced to ride back down to the lobby.
    When finally he reached his floor he hastened to the men’s room, locked himself into one of the booths, and returned to visibility. Again the flesh was first to be transformed, and had there been an observer he would have seen a stark-naked man some seconds before the clothes were phased in. However, the entire process was carried out in much less time than had been needed at the post office.
    Someone did see Wagner emerge from the booth and in consequence turned away with flared nostrils, obviously supposing, in distaste, that he had produced a stink. An erroneous impression of this sort was very difficult to correct without being silly, unless of course the man had been a friend, but he was rather some half-recognized person from the art department. For that matter Wagner had no real friends at the office—nor, in truth, out of it with the exception of his old roommate Cal Cavanaugh, with whom he had continued to be close for a while after college, but by now seldom saw, Cavanaugh having since moved to the suburbs and fathered two children in quick succession.
    After his wife left, Wagner had dreaded being seen in the elevators and corridors of the apartment house in which he lived, for there were fellow tenants who were inclined to strike up a conversation when in proximity to another human being of local residence. Wagner had himself been of this taste. He had mildly enjoyed the small-talk about sports with Marvin Benderville, who lived somewhere around the bend of the hall in circumstances of which Wagner was not aware and in fact had no interest in learning, and exchanging complaints with a cadaverous-looking man named Todvik about the absentee management of the building, unreachably remote except when the rent was due, and the all-too-evident though practically useless super, not the sullen, cynical type so often to be found in such employment but rather a young man whose habitual high spirits were encouraging, till one began to suspect, from his failure to accomplish any task he undertook, they were either chemically induced or the symptom of