My Life and Death in a Parallax World by Ogelsby Young ©200-2007 David Boyne

I remember that I awoke with a snort.

I was in the library of the University Club, and it was crowded with people.

A skinny man standing nearby was staring at me, peering over a pair of ridiculous red-frame glasses.

He asked a woman standing near him, "Did you hear something?"

"Like what?" she said.

"Like snoring."

This was too much: he was staring straight in my direction; why embarrass me further? I grumbled at him, "Jerk."

"That!"

The woman looked around. "What?"

"I heard—I thought—" He pushed his glasses to the bridge of his sharp nose. "Oh, never mind."

I'm seventy-one, alert and competent, if not as vigorous as before my personal descent to hell began, three years ago. Although, I must admit this was not the first time I had awakened from an unintended nap in the library of the University Club. But this time, after falling asleep while reading an edition of Robinson Crusoe published before my own birth, I had slept right into the cocktail hour.

The deeply quiet library I had fallen asleep in, was now filled with dozens of noisy men and women. Profit-eager airlines and hotels would have delighted in so many representatives of the “business class.” To me, they seemed more like buffalo, than adult humans. They milled about, drinks in hand, bumping themselves into small huddles, or shouldering into the big herd along the portable bar, grunting, stamping, and bellowing just as naturally as shaggy buffalo at a water hole.

I was grateful that everyone, other than the jerk who had pretended not to see me while sarcastically commenting on my snoring, was politely ignoring me. Not wanting to embarrass myself more than I already had, I sat up straight. My intention was to stand up, make my way across the crowded room, go downstairs, exit the Club, and get a taxi home.

I set my hands on my knees to begin what in the past few years has become a rather stiff process of standing. That was when I discovered that something was wrong with me. Something was very wrong.

I could feel my hands on my knees, but when I looked down, I saw only the black leather chair, the faded orange and rose colored Persian carpet, and lying on the carpet, more under the chair than in front of it, where it had no doubt landed after falling from my hands when I nodded off, was the old edition of Robinson Crusoe. But what was wrong, was what I was not seeing. I was not seeing tan buckskin shoes, grey wool slacks, blue wool blazer—or the long spindly legs of my 6-foot 3-inch frame. I was not seeing the small round potbelly that had taken me 35 years to develop, a full half of my sedentary, and up until recently, satisfying life, spent quietly and contentedly in the work of a tenured professor of history and a minor although authoritative historian of the Scottish Industrial Revolution.

What I did not see—was me.

I was invisible.

Scene One

I sat very still, but the boisterous noise of the business class buffalo filling the library, and my post-nap grogginess, combined to make me feel an overwhelming dizziness, the same weightless dizziness I have experienced when flying: the jet taking off, sharply banking, tumbling the ground into the sky.

As I would do when flying, I closed my eyes. I felt a little better. Strangely, closing my eyes also seemed to dampen the noise of the alcohol-slurping buffalo all around me. With my eyes closed, I then made myself take several slow, deep breaths.

I warned myself: Ogelsby, calm down. This may be it. This may be the heart attack. This may be the end.

Just three months earlier, my new doctor, a black-haired man with a year-round tan, and, despite being 20 years my junior, with an annoyingly paternal manner, had said, “Ogelsby, Nature has sent you a wake up call.”

“I hardly think a heart attack is a wake up call, Doctor,” I had said. I never could seem to remember the man’s name, first or last. I had picked his name from a list provided by my insurance company because his offices were not far from my home, he was male, and he was a board certified cardiologist.

In his office, seated in arm chairs facing one another, he had leaned forward, placing his palms on his knees. “It wasn’t a heart attack, per se, my friend.”

I stared at the man, irked by the false intimacy of “my friend,” but managing to cloak my disdain with a bland expression while biting my tongue. “Oh. Really?”

He held my gaze and said,  “No, not quite a heart attack, Ogelsby. But a serious event. A warning. You might call it a near miss.”

He had actually used that phrase, “near miss.” As if I were a jet pilot guilty of not taking my work seriously and nearly crashing my plane.

“So. Doctor. Tell me. If not a heart attack, what was Nature up to by giving me an intense, transfixing pain in my chest, causing me to collapse on the floor of my own bathroom, making me gasp for one single decent breath of air while crawling to the phone in my living room to dial 911, and invite a hyperactive gang of undergraduate-aged Emergency Medical Technicians to cover my face with an oxygen mask and take me for a joy ride to the hospital emergency room?”

To the man’s credit, he smiled, and said nothing.

“If that was not a heart attack,” I said, unable to keep from adding a rankly sarcastic, “My friend.”  I took a breath, recovered my civility, and ended with, “What the hell was it?”

“Grief.”

He held my stare easily, not looking away, and not saying anything more.

I was the first to speak. “Well then, you, and the insurance company you protect, have nothing to worry about. No one dies of grief.”

“If only that were true.”

I thought I had heard an odd, almost sighing, note in his voice. And then I realized, he was actually being, not merely acting, sincere.

“Let go of it, Ogelsby Young,” he said, in that new voice. “If you don’t, it will kill you.”

Sometimes I wonder, when I’m driving and I see someone shaking a fist out their window, their face distorted and red with rage, screaming at some other driver they don’t know from Adam. Sometimes I wonder, when I watch the televised news of murder, slaughter, and massive, indifferent, almost casual violence. I wonder, must there be some vast primordial pool of anger in our genetic makeup? Where does all the anger come from? Why is it always there, always present, even in acts of kindness, if only for the pressure of its temporary absence? I wondered why I wanted nothing more than to stand up and punch this doctor in his face.

Scene Two

Like a switch being turned from on, to off, the memory, extraordinarily vivid, was over. I felt a jolt as I again realized where I was and what my condition was. As I sat in my chair in the noisy Club library, recovering from feeling as if I had just relived the memory of my conversation with the doctor, I firmly decided my invisibility, like the vivid memory, had to be a delusion. A delusion of some sort brought on by what had to be a heart attack, although a mild one, as I felt no pain, not even discomfort, in my chest. My breathing was not labored. My mind seemed alert enough, given the situation. The odd thing was, despite the shock of this sudden delusion, I felt relaxed, almost calm. I simply accepted this delusion of invisibility as only another trick of aging, a new flaw in what had become, from the moment I learned what had happened to Christine, a rapid deterioration of my body and spirit.

I addressed myself as if whispering to a young child, "Now, listen to me, O. Open your eyes slowly, and try to pay attention." I thought that was the least I could do, to pay attention, as these might be the final moments of my life.

I looked ahead. There were more people coming in through the large double doors, joining the few dozen already milling about the main floor of the library. They were not unfriendly, these buffalo, the way they stood head to head in pairs, or huddled in groups. While some were talking, their jaws moving as if chewing cud, the others turned their heads, shifted their feet, snorted a laugh now and then.

Again, slowly, I looked down at my feet. Still, only the chair and carpet were visible: not me. Yet, I could feel my hands move from my wool slacks to the smooth leather arms of the chair. I could feel my short white hair brushing against the inside of my shirt collar. Staring down where my legs and feet should have been, I wondered, "Am I dead? Is that why I can't see my body? Is that why I feel no pain? Is that why everyone is oblivious to me, because I no longer exist in their world?"

But if I were dead, how had that sarcastic jerk in the red glasses heard me snore? No, I wasn't dead. My invisibility had to be a delusion affecting only me.

I had to do something, yet I was too embarrassed to ask for help. What would I say? Excuse me, but I seem to have gone invisible. What would I ask for? What could anyone, if inclined to help, give me to remedy the situation?

Exasperated, I stood up fast—and immediately felt completely disoriented, as if about to faint from the sudden rush of blood to my head. I fell back into the chair, and the padded leather squeaked loudly.

In mid-sentence, the jerk broke away from the woman and stepped towards me. Standing just a few feet from me, he pulled those ridiculous red glasses forward and peered over them, at me. I glared back at him—but instantly felt uncertain if he was in fact looking at me, or at the seat of my chair. Finally, muttering something about "drinking on an empty stomach," he stepped backward to rejoin the woman, who archly inquired, “How many hours of sleep has the good doctor had this week?”

I had the overwhelming urge to bolt from the room. I thought if I could get a taxi to my home, then maybe, in the private safety of my house, I could down aspirin and scotch and sleep off this—this impairment.

I stood up again, slowly, bracing myself against the flood of disorientation. Once standing, I shut my eyes and took three deep breaths. When I opened my eyes again, I made myself stare straight ahead, and walk. It worked. I was able to move, navigating through the dispersed heard of business-class buffalo.

I had discovered the First Law of Invisibility: Don't look down.

Although slightly stooped from my seven decades of resisting gravity, I've lost no more than an inch or so of my 6’ 3” height. As I passed among the milling herd my field of vision was awash in middle-aged male faces, creased foreheads and receding hairlines. Below eyelevel passed a variety of female hair, straight, curled, teased, tinted, sprayed, and dyed. In a moment of clumsiness, I accidentally brushed against the backside of a woman in a white blouse and navy skirt, my hands reflexively bracing myself, but unfortunately, one hand landing ever so briefly on each side of her rear end. She gasped and spun around as I passed. I hurried the last steps to a clearing near the door, and from there, saw her spreading a death-ray look of suspicion over all the men near her.

I went from the library doors to the top of the main stairway, and paused, resting my right hand on the polished wood banister. I made the mistake of lowering my gaze, and looking down the wide, red-carpeted stairs that now seemed impossibly steep and menacing. My fatalistic calm flickered: at my age, a broken hip is more fearful than an earthquake, or a stock market crash. I realized that I was perspiring. In reflex, I removed my handkerchief from my inside jacket pocket and patted my brow—all before noting that my handkerchief remained invisible during the act. I filed that observation for examination once home, sometime between the first and second tumbler of Scotch.

I looked down at the stairs, swallowed hard, and took a step. I stumbled. My knee hit hard against the wall. If I had not stopped my fall by strangling the banister with both my hands, I would have rolled and bounced all the way down into the lobby.

I scrambled up, shaking, and examined the acrophobia inducing stairs. I exhaled as slowly as possible and urgently whispered the First Law: "Don't look down!"

With one hand resting on the banister for guidance, I closed my eyes, and stepped forward.
Astonishingly, I came down the stairs, in my self-imposed blindness, without a misstep.

In the lobby, I opened my eyes. I immediately aimed myself at the door man. He was happily spinning people through the narrow revolving door, out onto the sidewalk. I kept my gaze on the level, and walked. I was fairly convinced that I was plainly visible to everyone but myself, yet people seemed to behave like over-heated molecules, and randomly zip right in front of or right in back of me. Several times, when it seemed some rushing person was about to crash into me, I could not keep from making sudden changes of direction or nervously sidestepping. Then I began to suspect my own unpredictable movements were creating these near collisions. I heard the doctor’s voice in my mind saying, “Consider it a near miss.”

Perhaps it was barely three seconds later that I managed to scoot over to a corner near the front desk and stand partly behind a potted tree near the glass counter displaying cigars for sale. I tried to appear aloof, casually distracted, but I with a sudden wave of compulsive fidgeting, I probably looked like a man suffering from advanced Parkinson’s.

Quickly, I gathered my thoughts. Beyond getting to a taxi, I had no idea what I might do. Yet, below my surface behavior of uncontrolled fidgeting, I still felt reasonably calm. Nothing seemed as sensible, as real a restorative, as to get home and pour that first big tumbler of scotch to wash down the aspirins. Perhaps some sleeping tablets, of which, in the past two years, I had become an experienced connoisseur. In a quick accounting, I listed my assets: I was able to move, to think, to make a plan, as humble as it was. I was coping with my inexplicable condition in a way that seemed natural, a matter of instinct. It struck me that, not without a flicker of pride, that I, like Robinson Crusoe, was managing to make the best of a very bad situation.

With this rise in confidence, I stepped out from behind the potted tree, kept my eyes on the level, and restrained my urge to jump aside when people briskly passed around me. I set a course straight for the doorman, the same fellow I passed by almost daily when arriving for, or leaving from, my reading sessions in the library. He was a large bald man stuffed into the Club’s blue blazer that had to be two sizes too small. His grey wool slacks were so tight they wrinkled and pinched at the seams. He had a very large face, and watery blue eyes that actually somehow twinkled at each and every person he greeted, over and over and over. How anyone could take delight in being a doorman for longer than 15 minutes was beyond me, but apparently, this man had found his life’s work. I realized that even I, in the silent distraction of my grief and depression, had looked for this bulky man, like a benign sort of Quasimodo, his wide face and twinkling eyes welcoming me, each time I had entered the Club, confirming for me that I had reached, for a few hours at least, sanctuary. As I approached the steadily revolving door, I thought to call a greeting to him, but realized I had never learned his name. With one big hand, he kept the door spinning at just the perfect slow speed for a woman who was exiting the Club to step into its motion without changing her stride. I flowed toward the spinning door, mumbled a terse, “Good evening,” and slipped into the section of the door behind the woman. A moment later, I had been smoothly spun outside, onto the wide steps of the Club, overlooking one of the busier cross streets of downtown.

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