The Invisibles

The Invisibles

16 the invisibles— The end of my fifth summer singled it out forever in the stream of my childhood. Many days my mother and I cooked canned soup on a toy stovetop in our basement, pretending bombs had ruined the upstairs world. And one afternoon at the zoo, surrounded by wild animals in cages and tamer ones in trees, my mother confiscated my snow cone and yanked me behind a hedge. She crouched down and directed my attention to a small, gray-haired woman standing in front of the lions. Her face was wrinkling, rendered sexless by neglect. Families passed without the faintest interest in her. “Cynthia, see her. She’s more or less invisible, except to the lion, who sees lunch. She’s not really invisible, but she might as well be. Wipe away that smile, little girl. We’re exactly like her.” My fascinated mother drank from the snow cone until her lips were stained purple. She scowled and jerked her head toward the woman—the invisible, a person who is unnoticeable, hence unmemorable. Mother knew all about invisibles and kept her eyes open in public. She brought home reports: a woman licking stamps at the post office, an anguished old man in line at the bank, a girl crying by a painting in the museum. The library crawling with them. “Remember, Cynthia, you’re an invisible, too,” she said. “Just like me. We’re in it together. Forever.” That summer I collected her sayings and built a personality with them. I mastered my bicycle and braved the creeks and abandoned barns that lay within an hour’s journey of home, never doubting the invisibles — 17 that if a bad guy appeared, he wouldn’t see me and, if he happened to be an invisible, that I moved in the aura of my all-knowing mother. Then, one August day when the corn crop was blowing, giving glimpses of sweet ears ripe for the picking, she disappeared from our house. Over a decade after she vanished, a strange van appeared in the old parking lot at the Great Skate Arena. At once I knew an invisible drove the thing. Around the corner, in the main lot, honking cars inched forward. The grouchy cop waved his ticket book at drivers seeking a place to release excited children. No one had noticed this van, faded maroon with a custom heart-shaped bubble window on the passenger side near the back. Scabs of rust clung to the lower body, over new tires. It wasn’t the sort of car you liked to see outside a skating rink or anyplace where the typical patron was twelve years old. “First of all it should go without saying that a guy drives that thing. But mainly I wonder how he it got into the lot.” Randall was our tall, brainy boy. He lived for logical problems like this one; the old parking lot where we smoked was separated from the new parking lot by a row of massive iron blocks with thick cable handles that only a crane could have lifted. The back of the old parking lot was closed in by a tangle of vines and meager trees. Beyond this dark thicket, from below, came the sounds of the highway. “He must have come from down there.” Brianna squinted at the wall of vegetation. I’d put the purplish paint around her eyes. “There must be a bare patch we can’t see.” “I would bet that a pervert drives that baby,” Randall observed of the van. “Vans are too obvious for pervs these days.” Brianna took a stance in her vintage black and white stockings. She was little, hot, 18 — the invisibles and adept at finding killer vintage clothes in thrift stores. “He’s probably some poor escapee from the psycho ward.” They turned to me to decide, these two kids who didn’t know what invisibles were, even though they were in the club. They bore the symptoms of invisibles in denial, dying their hair black, punching steel through their lips and nostrils, wearing shirts that pictured corpses. They hung out with me. We hung out at a skating rink with junior high schoolers. No one ever caught us smoking . The list went on. Rather than try to explain our metaphysical plight—I’d never been comfortable talking about my mother—I shrugged, faked a smile, and ignored the...