Since you ask, I will tell you. So gather your blankets around you and stare into the flames, for I do not want you to see my face.
There was a time when I wandered weightless through the world. It is amusing, how easy it is to hide when your skin color is noncommittal and the right hoodie will let you pass for a teenage boy.
If you ever have the courage and presence of mind to erase yourself and become invisible, you will become one with the world behind you and you will, as I did, see the endless river of humanity flow by.
They hurt me when I was visible. Oh, they were glancing blows, sure, but still I worked myself into paroxysms of guilt and sadness and rage over them.
What is wrong with you? they screamed when I kicked the ball in the wrong direction. I scuttled after it, glowing red with shame.
Don’t say anything, said my sister’s grip on the back of my throat. Smile, said her glare. I smiled wide-eyed up at the person we were talking to and my sister’s eyes crinkled with smile lines as she draped an arm over my shoulders.
I learned very early on that the words no and stop fall on deaf ears when you’re a child. Save yourself the pain, dear, and give them what they want. Who knows? You just might like it.
They were right. It made me who I am.
My obsession with blue, for example, might have started with a man I met during one of those forced excursions into reality. His eyes were a laughing shade of cyan blue, his intelligence was frightening, and his body was a coiled spring of energy. He was like a second father to me, and he brought a furious joy into everything he did. One time, we took turns karate kicking each other in the stomach, so that I could learn to tense my abdomen and get a sense of what kicking a real target felt like. His eyes glowed with happiness when I finally internalized all that he’d taught me.
But now I am old, and he is gone, and I will never see those furiously happy blue eyes again.
I slipped back into invisibility, and through the worn patches in the veil I learned things.
I remember walking into a college gym and seeing two men fighting, ripping their clothes off each other in their struggle, one bearing the other down, his muscles rippling in the fluorescent glare. Even behind the veil, I felt their fury and their desire to beat the crap out of one another and my shame at witnessing something so private nearly knocked me out into the light.
I was invisible, when I was eight and sat in an airport and read 1984.
If you want an image of the future, I read, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
When I read that line I needed to shut the book. I knew no curse words at the time, so my emotions were wordless and I let myself start to shiver and didn’t bother remembering to stop. Anyone who walked anywhere near my seemingly empty airport seat felt cold bolts of fear and horror pierce them, and hurried past that empty seat, which had a slight, trembling depression from my weight.
I used to follow politics heavily, and when I watched the 2000 election and the wars that followed, I saw the talking heads and all I heard was: Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution, one makes the revolution in order to establish a dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?
When I grow up, Calvin said, I’m not going to read the newspaper and I’m not going to follow complex issues and I’m not going to vote. That way I can complain that the government doesn’t represent me. Then, when everything goes down the tubes, I can say that the system doesn’t work and justify my further lack of participation.
Calvin and Hobbes was the Bible of my childhood, along with Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings. And the actual Bible—I read it in the back of Sunday school under my desk and I used to pray, because I loved the sound of the words, and I found a perfect non-answer to the God question:
Do you believe in God?
No, but I’m afraid of Him.
So publicly I had a sort of Schrodinger’s belief in God where I believed and didn’t believe in Him at the same time.
In reality, I’m a proponent of the watchmaker theory—that there was a creator, something that set the universe in motion and left it to tick and went off to hang with the other beings on its level and hasn’t bothered to check back since.
I know that it comforts me to think that there’s a creator out there, somewhere. It comforts me to think that I was brought to life for a reason. But I know that my birth is amazingly unlikely, and I know that I’m an accident, and I know whatever knowledge I acquired from behind the veil merely augmented my already pure understanding of my own helplessness.
There’s another question that that raises—fate and free will, how much our actions are pre-determined by our environment and our genetics. Again, my position on the matter is a study in doublethink—I believe that, for all I am bound by the Fates, I am allowed just once to direct my own fate. I will never know when that once will come, so every decision I make is colored by the belief that this is the one free choice I have.
I wonder if my choice to remain behind the veil was fated or free.
There were people who reached through the worn patches in the veil from time to time and burned me, and there were times when I reached through the worn patches to touch them and my hands went straight through them.
In Minnesota, there is a place that I can never talk about. It is in Lake Hackensack, and it is the only place that I have ever truly called home.
It was once in a place called Foston. It was there that I made friends with the feral cats lurking around the basketball courts, and first tried Haribo candy and Toblerone bars and Arianciata. It was there that my cabin and I went to the soccer field at night and looked up at the inky blackness of the night. It was the first time I saw the Milky Way, that light band across the sky that looks like a fault of the eyes but isn’t, that becomes brighter and clearer with staring instead of fading away. It’s spectacular, the sky. It’s there every night, but most people don’t expect it. Look up, darling, and let your eyes take in the night.
When home moved to Lake Hackensack I followed, and I would wake up in the morning and watch the light reflections from the lake ripple on the cabin ceiling.
God, it was gorgeous.
The first person to reach through the veil at Hackensack and burn me was a girl whose name was Paradise. Her eyes changed color with her mood. When she was angry, they were bright green. Once we went to the bathroom together at 3am and her eyes were purple. With me her eyes were hazel, which meant that she was happy. I can still smell her raspberry perfume.
That same year there was a boy named Alex. He was blonde and blue-eyed and wasn’t handsome. If he had been, I’d have been shy. I wouldn’t have known how to talk to him. But he was smart and funny and nice, and my sister told me he was a creep, so I hid from him. He was from Arizona. I’d like to find him, one last time.
When I went back there was a man named Fabiano who smuggled in contraband soda. We went into the cabin with a fireplace that no one goes into and he told me about how his girlfriend had cheated on him. I expressed my sympathy, and we started cracking jokes about the zombie apocalypse. A boy barged in and demanded to know what the hell we were doing. Fabiano said “Nothing!” while he threw his soda can over his shoulder and into the fireplace. The boy, recognizing that he hadn’t walked in on anything untoward, burst out laughing and staggered out the door.
When I hugged Fabiano goodbye he picked me up.
There was a man who I’ll call Sam Smith who used to carry me up the steps to my cabin and lay me down on my bed, honeymoon style. He had a yellow sweatshirt and he gave me a small rubber giraffe-shaped eraser. He’s in Idaho now, I think, and I will probably never see him again. The giraffe is still on my desk.
One night, because my cabin was in between two boy’s cabins, we went over to the boys’ cabin and all of us were in our underwear and one of the boys whipped out his guitar and we all sang along to “Hey there Delilah.” That boy’s eyes glowed in the light from the fluorescent lantern. What a beautiful, bright shade of green they were, in contrast to his general bulk.
When I hugged him goodbye he lifted me up and I wrapped my legs around him.
When I was on the bus to the airport and then the plane back home, I felt what she would later call Nusquaphoria. It is her word, and I will give you her definition of it.
In the space between point of origin and destination, point A and point B, I experience Nusquaphoria.
“Nusquam” is a Latin word meaning “nowhere.” It is the root of “Nusquaphoria.” In transit, we are nowhere. The destination is a fixed point, and the point of origin is a fixed point, but the method of conveyance is not. It is something else, a place with no location. It exists outside of space and time. In transit, we are suspended- not here, but not yet there. We are nowhere. Being nowhere, we do not exist. Nusquaphoria is the joy of temporary nonexistence. It has no connection to death, or even sleep. It is more like being “in the zone” when obsessed with a project- a feeling of being totally disconnected from the outside world.
I will not tell you who she is yet.
Flying at night above a city is absolutely glorious. It is strange and beautiful to see America as spatters of light—America’s constellations on the ground are always there, but people don’t expect them. Look down one day, darling, and you will see their glow and smile.
The last time I went back home to Minnesota no one else I knew had returned and I wept, thinking everything I knew had turned to smoke.
So I hid myself deeper behind the veil, and still the people reached in and burned me.
There was a boy named Carlo who couldn’t feel remorse or anxiety, due to several head injuries. He worried that this made him less human somehow—he couldn’t physically care when he broke someone’s shin when he slide-tackled him during a soccer game. But when a friend of his went missing—his anxiety for her was plainly evident to me. Perhaps he was just a good actor. He told a girl later that he was very good at reading facial expressions—he had to be, because he never knew viscerally when to apologize whenever he hurt people. I tried to put a hand on his shoulder, but my hand went straight through his chest and all he felt was a bolt of cold.
Then there was another, called Stefano, who liked to joke about dissolving me slowly in acid. He was always worried that seeing his grandmother die in front of him had turned off his empathy. A friend used to joke that she’d be very angry if she ever became a forensic scientist and she got one of his victims.
I’ll call her Emerald. She was fifteen but she looked nineteen. She told me never to do crystal meth (on account of what it did to her) and about what to do when you have no money but you really need cocaine. She could throw the nastiest punches I’ve ever seen, and when I asked her where she learned to fight she replied, matter-of-factly, “Guys tried to touch me at parties. I didn’t want to be touched. What was I supposed to do, stop having a good time?”
There was a man named Fabio. He was deeply tanned, with brown hair, thick eyebrows, and a light dusting of a beard. His eyes were a beautiful, haunting shade of blue. I taught him how to say bubble in English and he taught me how to say dragonfly in Italian. Libellula.
When I left that place, they asked me if I would return.
“If I go,” I replied, “I will come back.”
They say that time is a flat circle. It isn’t. Time is a spiral.
All those people who reached through the veil by accident could never have brought me out into the open.
The woman who defined nusquaphoria brought me out into the light, and did so by uttering five simple words: You are not of them. Her eyes were demonic, occasionally orange, occasionally a bright hazel-green, and I smiled.
There is a world of difference between being visible and being seen. She saw me, and I saw her. I could be honest with her and she forced me to be honest with myself. She was a princess, she just was one, in her manner and in her bearing, and her mind was a terrifying thing to behold. She was my soulmate. In her last goodbye to me, she wrote:
Most of these are fare-thee-wells and best-of-lucks and remember-me-fondlys, but this is not going to be one of those because I cannot let you go like that. Sometimes I have needed you and you’ve been there, sometimes you haven’t, sometimes you couldn’t handle me and sometimes I couldn’t handle you. I have loved you and hated you and wanted you and wanted you to die, but I’m over all that, now I just like you, even though I don’t understand you, you are exceptional, you are lovely and brilliant and kind, even though half of what you say is quotes and a third is gibberish. I like the quotes! I like the gibberish! And I love the one-sixth of things you say that are neither quotes nor gibberish but sheer brilliance. You have a great capacity for brilliance. It’s one of the things that I like the most about you, I think.
When she died I knew what she would want, in accordance with her favorite book character:
And it’s a fine wake I’ll be wanting, I heard her whispering, with the best of everything, and beautiful women shedding tears and clothes in their distress, and brave men lamenting and telling fine tales of me in my glory days.
You’re dead, I replied as I set up a stinking drunk wake. You take what you’re given when you’re dead.
I then played the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh and finished the funeral service with AC/DC’s Highway to Hell.
Well, there’s only so much weeping one can do. Do you want me to tell you more about how I wandered behind the veil, darling?
I see you are asleep now. Good. That—that’s good. After all, if I were to tell you all the stories I know we’d be sitting here for seven days and seven nights.
