Things Not Seen

“‘Let’s…let’s call Dr. Weston—or someone else, a…a specialist.’ So I’m thinking, Oh, great. Yeah, let’s call one of those Invisible Teenager Specialists. I’ll get the Yellow Pages.”

At first, Bobby’s mom panics over her son’s invisibility, so Bobby retreats into sarcasm. It’s a way of putting a distance between himself and what he resents, including his parents. It also shows a boy who’s able to regard his predicament with a certain sense of humor.

“I stand there in the kitchen, naked and shivering, and I look at Mom and Dad, still sitting at the table. They’re stumped. I’ve never seen them this way. And that might be the scariest thing of all. With parents like mine, you get used to having them tell you what to do next. But I can see they don’t have a clue. Not about this. And suddenly I think, Why did I ever believe they had all the answers for me, anyway?”

Part of Bobby’s crisis is that he has always relied on his parents to protect him. Now, however, they seem helpless to do so. For the first time, all three of them are on the same level, and Bobby feels slightly overwhelmed as he is forced to step up in maturity. Suddenly his outcomes depend much more on his own decisions; grousing about his parents won’t do him any good.

“‘So why can’t we see this hand?’ Now he’s got hold of my hand at the wrist, and he’s shaking it up and down under the light. ‘Because the eye isn’t getting an image?’ ‘Bingo! Because what does it need to make an image?’ Dad’s too excited now, so he answers his own questions. It’s one of the things that stinks about living with a genius.”

Aside from the terror of being invisible, Bobby must deal with the mixed blessing of a genius father who turns his son’s plight into a science demonstration. Bobby thinks his dad simply loves to show off his smarts, but he can’t see that his father also loves to think about and teach science. His dad’s methodical approach to the problem also helps. Bobby is smart enough to listen, since any scientific clues might help him deal with his condition. But Bobby does not want this to become an adventure he can share with his dad; at this point, he has no interest in deepening his bond with his parents.

“I’m out in public, but I am completely alone. There’s action all around me. People are doing things and saying things, but it’s like they’re in a different dimension, like they’re on a stage or a screen. And me? I’m just watching, an audience of one, watching secretly.”

Bobby walks, naked and invisible, among college students at the University of Chicago's main library. It’s an experiment to learn what it’s like, and what he can do, when he’s completely unseen. He undergoes a change in his perception, and he feels free to study others much more extensively than he would if they could notice him doing it. He’s beginning to understand people differently, in ways that subtly shift his attitudes toward them.

“All the time, her eyes are searching the air for me. Her eyes get watery again and she says, ‘I can’t get used to this. I hate not seeing your face.’ I haven’t seen Mom all soft and weepy like this since my first trumpet recital back in Texas. She loves music. We both do. Dad listens and enjoys the sound waves, but Mom really hears the music.”

There’s nothing quite like a life-threatening emergency to put people’s priorities in order. As he stands at the bedside of his stricken mother, it’s clear that Bobby cares about her and she cares about him. Without her officiousness or his resentful grouchiness, what’s left is what matters—their love for each other.

“I’m running up the front stairs, flipping on lights as I go, and I get to my room and turn on the lights, and I shut the door, and I lock the door, and I sit on my bed, and I grab my pillow, and I hug it against my stomach. Because of the fear. It’s cranked up. It’s up past terror, past panic. I’m thinking this must be dread. Except I’m not thinking. There’s no room for thinking, just feeling, feeling like the dread is oozing up through the cracks between the boards on my floor. Bubbling up through the heater grates. […] The dread is filling my locked room and my mouth and my nose and my ears and my eyes and my lungs, and I’m drowning in it.”

It’s Bobby’s first time alone in his house at night, and fear floods him. It doesn’t matter that the building’s alarm system is fully armed, and that almost certainly no one will suddenly invade the house: He’s alone, without the safety of his parents, the dark all around, and that’s terrifying. It’s a moment of having to face the night by himself, a growing-up moment that sits atop his already stressful day of invisibility.

“And why didn’t I call her, which I did, but she was too messed up to remember to turn the phone on. And have I remembered to water the plants? Because the ivy in the front hall needs a half cup of water every other day or it droops. And did I do my homework? What do I mean, I couldn’t get the assignments? So if no one is online, then you just call them on the telephone. Have kids today forgotten how to use the telephone? What do I mean that I didn’t want to talk to anyone last night? Am I feeling all right? Am I eating nutritious foods? I’m not just eating junk, am I? Because that’s the worst thing for my complexion. Fifteen minutes of that, and I’m ready to scream and yank the phone out of the wall.”

Bobby’s mother, recuperating in the hospital, frets because her son is at home alone. Unable to care for him personally, she goes overboard and nags Bobby incessantly, which Bobby immediately finds overbearing and annoying. It’s not enough that Bobby is invisible; he must still deal with his parents, who manage, despite their love for him, to greatly irritate him.

“This isn’t a movie where you watch it for two hours and then it ends, and then you climb into a car and you talk about how the movie was while you go to get pizza with some friends. This isn’t like that. This is my life. And what’s happening means that suddenly my life is completely off track. It’s like a train wreck, and I’m pinned down, trapped. And it’s starting to feel like this is permanent. What if I never change back to the way I was? What then?”

Hiding out at home alone, Bobby has plenty of time to worry about his future as an invisible person. He can’t have a normal life this way—no school, no job, no buying things, no wife or kids—and he can’t imagine spending the rest of his life hiding in his parents’ house. Something’s got to give, and he has no idea what that is. It’s the worst combination of fear, frustration, and helplessness.

“Talking with her, it’s like walking along on ice, and I think it’s safe, and then I take one more step, and everything starts to crack and buckle. And under the ice there’s this dark river.”

As he gets to know Alicia, Bobby learns the things she’s touchy about, and he recognizes in her some of the same deep issues that trouble him. Alicia’s parents, too, are fussy with her, and her sudden sarcasm echoes his own with his parents. They have a lot in common.

“[…] I was suddenly the little blind girl. It was like I became invisible. I couldn’t see myself, I couldn’t see me going to dances or college or grad school, couldn’t see myself becoming an archaeologist. I was never going to get to see the pyramids or the Valley of the Kings. And I couldn’t even see getting married or having kids, or anything I used to wish about. Everything just disappeared.”

Alicia describes her struggle with blindness. Her thoughts about it are largely the same as the thoughts Bobby has been having about his own invisibility. Telling her story to Bobby is an act of trust and intimacy, and Bobby can’t help but empathize with her.

“I had to trust her. Sometimes you have to tell someone else what it’s like. Because if you don’t, you’ll go nuts.”

Telling Alicia about his invisibility breaks his vow of secrecy. If news of Bobby’s condition got out, his family might be torn apart by ravenous media and government investigators. Bobby, though, feels completely alone in his plight, and finding someone who understands him is something he desperately needs. Trusting Alicia is risky, but he senses her integrity and takes the chance. Besides, as she reminds him, no one would believe her even if she tried to tell them about him.

“Dad’s different. Or maybe I am. Or maybe it’s both of us, because there’s a lot less yelling. He talks, I listen. I talk, he listens. He still says plenty of stupid stuff, and he still says ‘bingo’ way too much. But he’s definitely not the same person. So one thing I learn is that maybe everyone should have a near-death experience now and then. Sure did the trick for Dad.”

Bobby jokes that his father is nicer now that he nearly died in a car crash, but he also senses that there’s a lot more to the sudden change at home. His invisibility forces his parents to stop taking him for granted, and it does much the same to his own attitude. That each could lose the other reminds them that family members are precious. From this point, they take conscious steps toward being a closer-knit family.

“‘You’ve really thought about all this, haven’t you?’ ‘In case you haven’t noticed, Bobby, I really think about everything. Just because I’m blind doesn’t mean I’m stupid.’”

Alicia has read and thought about Bobby’s situation, and his comment puts her on the spot about how much she likes him. She responds defensively; her answer says as much about how blindness makes her feel vulnerable as it does about how he makes her feel. They’re still learning how to communicate, given their unique situation, but they persist because of how much they already understand about each other and how important they’ve become to one another.

“[…] I bet that having moms be pals is almost as tough on kids as having moms who can’t stand each other.”

Emily Phillips and Julia Van Dorn discover that they went to the same university and majored in English literature. This brings them together, and Bobby imagines them planning his and Alicia’s future, monitoring the two teens’ behavior, and generally never leaving them in peace. It would only be worse if they were enemies who tried to keep the two teens from seeing each other. Bobby’s quick insight reveals how his bright mind is beginning to see deeply into relationships and future outcomes. Dealing with all this awareness is a common teenage experience—and, in some ways, as challenging and frustrating as invisibility is for Bobby and blindness is for Alicia.

“When I can listen to a movie I’ve seen, that’s the best. Like Titanic. I can see the whole thing. But for new stories, now I like books better. Then I get to make up the movie in my head.”

Alicia remembers well her favorite films, especially The King and I, which she’s seen 20 times. She can recall all the details. Her blindness shifts her relationship to the arts: Those that encourage her imagination now serve her the best.

“I don’t believe what she said—that ‘everything is going to work out all right.’ That’s just something parents say. It’s something they say at bedtime so you won’t lie awake worrying all night like they do. They hope things will work out okay, and they might even believe things will be all right in the end, but are they sure, really sure?”

Bobby is beginning to understand how adults think, and he struggles to wrap his head around the idea that life is tougher for them than he imagined. His invisibility proves that things don’t always work out the way we want, and this understanding is part of his own entry into adulthood. Moving forward, he’ll have to depend more on his own resources than that of his parents. Grown-ups can’t simply run home for comfort; they are the comfort. It’s a big responsibility.

“I can look at everything—the whole overpopulated, overtraveled, overtrucked, overpaved, overbillboarded, full-color, three-dimensional world zipping by at seventy miles an hour—and I can get bored. And Alicia’s got nothing but her own thoughts and whatever she sees inside her head, and she’s not bored at all. She’s soaking up the trip. Completely alert. I watch, and she has a slight response to every little hum and thump of the tires, the jangling radio music, the flutter and rush of air in the window, the static and garbled bursts from the driver’s two-way […] her nostrils flare like a wild pony sniffing the wind, and I know Alicia’s also processing the smells—the exhaust and kerosene, the accumulated scent of a thousand cab passengers, that half-eaten tin of salad on the seat by the driver—an ocean of airborne information to sift and sort. And watching her, I’m not bored.”

Without trying, Alicia teaches Bobby an important lesson about conscious attention. There’s a tremendous amount of information impinging on everyone, much of it not visual. Alicia’s blindness changes her attention, and she listens and smells and feels the world in a vivid way that people with sight often ignore. Her attention bespeaks someone who’s vividly alive, and Bobby loves that—and her.

“The cab that arrives has no divider between the front and back seat, so I can’t talk to Alicia. […] I’m three feet away from two other people, and I can’t talk to either of them. I’ve never felt this alone. And the worst part is that Alicia seems perfectly content not to talk. She seems glad that she doesn’t even have to try.”

In trying to obtain information about others who might also be invisible, Bobby and Alicia visit the company that makes Bobby’s electric blanket. Alicia pretends to be interested in a job while Bobby pilfers company computers for critical data. Alicia’s subterfuge is so successful that she’s practically getting offers then and there. Bobby realizes that she’s just made herself visible to important people who can help her. It’s a huge confidence-builder for her. Suddenly, she’s a step beyond him in getting noticed by the world. He worries that she won’t need his emotional support much longer.

“‘It made me feel alone.’ ‘Oh.’ She opens up her heart to me, and what do I say? I say ‘Oh.’ And I’m so mad at myself. Because I could have said, ‘But you’re not alone, Alicia. I’m here. I’ll always be here.’ And then the lights would dim, and the violins would start playing, and I take her face between my hands…oh, jeez. I am in big trouble.”

Bobby begins to realize how much Alicia means to him. She has a great encounter with potential employers, and he thinks she doesn’t want him anymore. When it turns out she was feeling lonely about the sudden opportunity, the similarities between them once again surprise him, and he’s tongue-tied. Bobby does not yet understand that he, too, is worth noticing. 

“It all gets down to the little things. Like two blankets, two cities, two dates, and two people. After I talk to Sheila, I don’t see how the facts can add up to anything. But it’s never just about the facts. Sherlock Holmes proves that, case after case. It’s all about what you do with the facts, how you look at them.”

Three things in the story are invisible: Bobby; the world, to Alicia; and the answer to the electric blanket puzzle. Bobby admires both his father, a determined scientist who teases information out of raw data, and Sherlock Holmes, who does the same with clues. Bobby believes that the answer to the puzzle will be hidden in plain sight among the data he’s generating.

“I’ve never heard of billions of things. Truth is, I know practically nothing. Except how to take almost anything that happens and make myself feel stupid because of it.”

Bobby, frustrated that his parents won’t consult him about his own life, wakes from an impromptu nap still feeling somewhat miserable. His usual approach to life is to perceive evidence of his inferiority everywhere. Though his parents must make decisions about him—he is, after all, their child—their unwillingness to bring him into the decision-making process makes him feel even weaker and less important. He’s been unwilling to respect himself until he can get his parents to respect him first. As the story progresses and he takes initiative, involving himself in the solution to his predicament, he finally steps out of the trap of self-deprecation.

“[…] a week ago, back when there was no hope of a comeback, I didn’t have any responsibilities. None. I was a floater. A week ago it was all about living, just living, minute by minute. […] And now that I know how it’s done, would I do it again someday, on purpose? So I could take a vacation from life?”

Sheila tells Bobby she likes her new life and doesn’t want to go back to being visible. Bobby can tell that there are advantages to such a life; it’s not all bad to be that way. Still, he wants to be visible to others. It’s important for him to have a presence in that way with them. He no longer wants to be ignorable.

“basement room

i think its raining from my basement room.

but basements make for faraway ears,

and rain dries up so quickly.

i still think it was rain.

i think a wind is blowing up above.

but wind is such a meaningless thing,

invisible and always gone.

i still think it was wind.

i think im up there in the wind and rain.

but dreaming is always done in bed,

and so many winds and rains are dreams.

i still think it was me.”

Alicia’s poem expresses both her dreams and her doubts. As a person with blindness, she imagines herself to be invisible; this makes even her thoughts seem meaningless, or at least unmoored from reality. The fundamental contradiction in her soul is that she can sense the world, but if she can’t see it, maybe her senses are illusions. Maybe, she thinks, she doesn't exist at all. If she’s illusory, then perhaps so is Bobby’s love for her, and certainly so is her love for herself.