All Those Invisible

Rachel's older sister, Cicely, has a boyfriend who thinks an invisible man is trying to have sex with her. Pete is 22; Cicely is 31. They have lived together for the past seven months in a second-floor apartment that smells of their un-neutered male cat in the city of Binghamton, New York. Rachel lives only 15 minutes away from them but she never visits them. She has only met Pete once, when Cicely first started dating him. There was something about the way her sister fawned over Pete during this meeting, which took place at a local bar over drinks, that unsettled Rachel, though she didn't say anything to Cicely about it. Four years earlier, when Cicely's ex-husband had their two sons for the weekend, a fire in his kitchen that he may have accidentally set spread through the rest of his rental home, killing him and the boys. Since the fire, Rachel doesn't say anything sharp or pointed to her sister out of fear that it will split her open.

Cicely tells Rachel about the invisible man during a phone call, which is the only way the sisters communicate lately. "I was sitting on the couch, and my legs weren't crossed. So Pete told me to close them because an invisible man was trying to get between them."

Rachel is in her tiny kitchen, unpacking a bag of groceries with one hand while the other presses her cell phone to her ear. "If he's invisible, how does Pete know what he's trying to do?" she asks, while trying to imagine the scenario her sister has described to her. She's the logical one in the family, an English literature graduate student, so it's up to her to dig for the buried treasure of hidden meanings in words. Cicely, on the other hand, has always been the pretty one, who their father smiled at and complimented whenever she dressed up to go out with friends. Strange men do the same thing to her even now when she fills their parts orders at the AutoZone where she works five days a week.

"I didn't ask him that. I think he can sort of see him. Like his aura or something."

"If he has an aura, then he's not really invisible." Rachel tosses out a bag of soggy lettuce cowering in the back of her fridge and thinks about the fact that this is the equivalent of throwing away six dollars. Such a waste. A few weeks earlier, she had fed her sister's cat when Cicely and Pete visited his grandparents in Virginia for a long weekend. They had left a partially open bag of garbage inside their foyer, and when Rachel picked up their mail under the slot, three white maggots wriggled out. She pictures the white writhing worm-like forms and shudders.

"I guess. Pete's the only one who sees him."

"Does the invisible man see Pete?" Rachel remembers what Pete looks like based on the Facebook photos her sister has posted. He is as narrow as a pine sapling, with dark eyes that remind Rachel of a beetle's carapace. Cicely has been dating him for almost a year but hasn't introduced him to anyone other than Rachel, and certainly not their parents, Denny and Eileen.

"Yeah, because Pete scared him off the other day. He was trying to peek into the bedroom when I was getting dressed."

"Sounds like Pete's experiencing an omniscient invisible power, like Foucault's panopticon. Foucault would say it's really the watchful eye of the state you were being observed by. Pete's just transferred that to an invisible man," Rachel says. She is in the second year of her master's study at Binghamton University and is trying on varying styles of literary criticism like bathing suits, to see which one flatters her most.

"What?" Cicely asks.

"Never mind," Rachel says, because she can't expect Cicely, who earned her GED after getting pregnant during her senior year of high school, to understand. The other truth...