Power

My name is Shane Crawford. I am seventeen years old and I am invisible.

Not literally, of course—it’s more like, when I want to, I can make it so no one sees me. The method is kind of hard to describe. My dad showed me, and he always said not everyone can do it, just us.

Basically, you know how ventriloquists throw their voices to operate their dummies? It’s pretty much like that, except I throw attention. The way my dad explains it, when someone is talking to you, they aren’t really focusing on you at all – they’re just focusing on their thoughts about you. So all you have to do is make your thoughts about them match their thoughts about themselves, and then they’re only thinking about themselves and, well, you disappear. It’s like a really intense form of empathy.

This famous psychoanalyst Freud called that kind of thing projection. It’s a kind of defense mechanism; I learned about it in my Psych class. I like the word projection because that’s really how it feels. I don’t know, maybe you have to be doing it, but it’s like you just become this hologram for someone else’s expectations and intentions and they just see what they want to see. You’re helping someone's projection along by holding up this sort of mental mirror. They did a study like that, once. The scientists would go up to strangers and ask for directions and then, partway through the conversation, these guys carrying a huge mirror would just walk straight between the scientist and the stranger, and one of the mirror-carriers would swap places with the scientist, who would be swept away behind the glass. And the strangers just kept on giving the directions, to a completely different person, without noticing the change. Even if, like, they started out talking to a woman in high heels and ended up talking to a construction worker. That should show you how present most people are.

One time I saw an opera singer actually shatter a glass with her voice. I thought it was just because the sound was so loud, but later I found out she just had to sing the right note. My dad says everything has a natural vibration frequency. I think that means that if you have some object, like a glass, really that’s made out of all these molecules and they’re all connected in a certain way. So then when the singer hits the right note, the frequency of the sound – like, the pitch – makes it all resonate the same way and it just undoes itself and falls apart. Anyway, that sort of reminded me of the invisibility thing, too. It’s just about getting on someone’s wavelength. Which is weird because, in a different way, I swear that’s what it was like when I met Jessie last year. We saw each other, and we somehow matched, and we fell apart.

My school has closed breaks, so we don’t get to leave for lunch or anything – the school is like a babysitter – but most days a bunch of us go to this little ravine up on the hill by the gym to smoke and talk shit until fifth period. It’s not technically “on campus,” but whatever. Anyway, this one day fall term, all my friends had to finish this U.S. History assignment about the civil rights movement, and I was too impatient to wait for someone to show up for our usual routine of Alex distracting the school monitor, Drue, so we could head up the hill (we paid Alex in beer that Pat would steal from his older brother, who graduated a few years ago), and I just waited until I thought no one was looking and went up there, except obviously someone was looking because when I came down again Drue was waiting for me, hip cocked out as usual. She said something into her radio while I was out of earshot and stopped me before I could breeze past her.

“Were you off-campus, Shane?”

I took my glasses off and wiped them on my shirt. I don’t know why, but that kind of helps me get in the zone for invisibility. It’s like a costume change or something.

“Because you know, we’ve heard rumors…”

She must be frustrated, I thought. A little bored. And tired – she had this dry, dark look like someone who’s stayed up too late the night before watching TV because the prospect of lying in bed doing nothing is somehow scary. Too close to death, that’s how Freud would probably put it. I’d overheard her the week before, in the faculty lounge where I sometimes go to just eavesdrop – you’d be surprised what people say when they think no one is really listening – talking about her husband and how he wants to start fixing up old cars for fun, which meant they’d have less money to travel to see her family over Christmas, and they’d been fighting over how much time the husband was spending at work, blah blah, stuff like that. Everyone’s problems are mostly the same. They want something they can’t have, and so they feel helpless. So I conjured up frustrated, and bored, and tired, and helpless. I sunk into them like a bath, just like my dad taught me forever ago. It took about five seconds. She didn’t even get to finish her sentence.

“…Ah… rumors that some… students….”

And even though she kept looking at me, her eyes went all calm and glassy like aquariums. This sort of barrier dropped away and it was just her, the way she must be when no one else is around. It’s always unsettling when someone just sees straight through you like that. Like that scene in Casper when Kat’s hand goes straight through the ghost’s. After a few moments Drue looked absently at her radio, smoothed the sleeves of her jacket and walked back to the quad, as if she’d forgotten something important there.

“Nice one.”

The voice came out of nowhere. I didn’t recognize it. It was high, and soft, and on the edge of laughter.

A thin, pale girl stepped out from behind me. Her long brown hair fell in front of her face as she ducked under a tree branch and came around to stand where Drue had just been. She must have been up on the hill with me, but I hadn’t seen her. My first thought was how weird it was that she was wearing just a dress in the middle of fall, no coat or anything. It was black, and it had this deep textured look to it, like someone cut it out of outer space. My second thought was wondering how I'd been going to Los Altos for all this time without having ever noticed her.

“I bet Drue had no idea what hit her,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I was already scoping her out. I didn’t want to talk; I felt caught, somehow, even though I knew this girl couldn't possibly understand what she'd just seen. She seemed haughty and playful, but in a defensive way; she seemed sort of constructed, in the way people tend to when they put a lot of deliberation into what they do and why. Self-aware to the point of affectation. My dad taught me that, too – affected. Trying to be something, instead of just being. Usually it meant pretending to be a different person, but I wondered if you could maybe affect something that was also authentic. I mean, she really was the girl in the outer-space dress, but she seemed like she knew she was that girl, and she wore that knowledge like a second dress, like a skin. I conjured her.

“I… mean…”

Her eyes aquariumed.

But then, just as I started to walk away, she burst into I swear the loudest, craziest laugh I’ve ever heard. She must have laughed for two minutes straight. When she finished she sputtered, between gasps: “I’m sorry! (gasp) I couldn’t help myself. (gasp) You just looked so (gasp) sure it would (gasp) work!”

Why wasn’t it working? I didn’t want to say anything that might give me away. There was no way she could know. No one knew. It was a very closely guarded secret, then.

“Listen, class is starting,” she said. She paused for a second and, right on cue, the bell rang. “Meet me in the parking lot by the senior lawn at 4. Don’t try to pull that shit with me again.” And she walked away. I stood there for years, being undone.

“Oh, and Shane,” she called over her shoulder, without turning around to see if I was still there. “Jessie.” She did a little curtsy mid-stride. “Pleased to meet you.” And disappeared down the hall.

I hadn’t even told her my name.

I spent the whole rest of the day thinking about her. I couldn’t explain what had happened, but I knew it was important. Not only was that the first time my invisibility hadn’t worked, but one had ever just snuck up on me like that. It reminded me of this thing called inattentional blindness, which is exactly what it sounds like. There’s this really cool experiment where participants are asked to watch this video of a bunch of guys in black and white t-shirts throw a ball around, and they have to count how many times each team has the ball or whatever. And while they’re watching and counting, another guy in the video comes out dressed in a gorilla suit and stands right in the goddamn middle of the players and dances around and waves and then walks off. And you know what? Most of the people watching the video don’t even notice the gorilla because they’re so focused on the ball.

That’s just insane to me. The gorilla is invisible, just like me. And just like Jess seemed, too, in a way. Somehow she’d escaped my attention. Not just then, but for the past two years of high school. Which makes me think that maybe seeing isn’t even about the retina and the lens and the optic nerve and the occipital lobe and all that stuff they teach you in Biology. It’s just about awareness. You have sight without vision all the time. I mean, without looking, do you know how many lights or windows are in the room you’re in? Or what the view directly outside the window looks like? You’ve been sitting there a while, maybe you’ve sat there a thousand times before, but I bet you don’t even know. It’s not that you don’t see, though; it’s just you don’t notice. But anyway, Jess didn’t seem invisible for long.

In the morning she’d meet me by the city bus stop down the block from my house. I wasn’t unpopular, but I didn’t particularly enjoy interacting with people, and it used to be that I’d sort of hide in the single seat right behind the driver. But Jessie would drag me to the back of the bus, and everyone – even the nonstudents, the businessmen and old ladies that sometimes took the same route in the morning – would clear out to give us the whole two parallel rows. She didn’t even have to say anything. It was like magic.

We’d meet up again during lunch at the ravine. My friends all fell in love with her instantly, of course, and never resented her no matter how many cigarettes she bummed. It was a running joke to try to catch her off-guard and make her admit she was a transfer student or a child actor or a narc. I’d always thought of us as kind of outcasts, and it was strange at first seeing my friends so affectionate towards her. But validating, too. That’s the second-highest level on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you know: esteem, being accepted and respected. They didn’t even seem to mind when I started vanishing right after class to hang out with her. She was sharp, and witty, and what she lacked in kindness she more than made up for in thoughtfulness – I mean, she was never mean, never anything, by accident. She did everything on purpose. And because of that she had no regrets. And because of that she seemed more herself than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s weird how confidence can do that.

“So people are inherently good, right?”

It was a cold night in February, and she said it without even looking up from her Calculus A textbook, her voice as always on the edge of laughter, disarming me.

“Um.”

“Because if you put them in an ideal environment, they’ll behave well.”

“I guess so.” I looked around my bedroom instinctively, trying to decide if it was an ideal environment or not. “At the very least, people want to be good. No one’s evil from their own perspective, you know? A terrorist is a freedom fighter. A mugger needs to feed his family, or himself. People are good when they have what they need. The problem is they don’t always have what they need. So it’s the world that’s fucked-up and evil, not people.”

“Yeah, but people do shitty things all the time without needing anything. Just because they want to. Just because they can.”

“Like what?”

She leaned back on her elbows for a moment, then shot up from the bed and grabbed my laptop from my desk. “Like you have something I don’t, and I take it from you.” She walked over to the window and opened it. The room flooded with cold air. “Maybe I even destroy it,” she said, “to make us even.”

“It’s all down to reinforcement, though.” I suppressed a shiver. “Like what Skinner says. If you get rewarded for doing good, you’ll be good. If you get rewarded for being bad, you’ll be bad.”

“Psychology, schmycology. All of that is just numbers. What the average subject tends to do.” She leaned out the window a little, laptop in hand. “Tendencies don’t mean anything to the individual.”

“But all the experiments are controlled—“

“Is this controlled?” She leaned more out the window, enough to make me wonder for a split second if by maybe I even destroy it she was alluding to the laptop or herself.

I took a deep breath. “Real people don’t act like that, Jessie.”

“Who says I’m a real person?”

“And besides, I thought you were the one who said people are good in the first place.”

“Who says I’m a person at all?”