The Memoirs Of An Invisible Man by Patrick Sean Lee (nice books to read TXT) 📖

woman was hurrying in as I was leaving, and froze in astonishment when she saw the dozen or two lemons whisking by her three feet off the worn linoleum floor.

“Evening, miss,” I said.

I don’t recall her replying, but I do recall the look on her face. A look lying somewhere between Armageddon has finally arrived, aliens have landed with wheelbarrows loaded with gold, a shotgun blast has caught me right in the face. She froze. I stepped forward (I was suddenly feeling better about myself, although I was more famished than ever), and I kissed her cheek—something I’d always wanted to do to a pretty stranger. That wrenched her out of her mesmerized state, at which instant she screamed loudly.

Me and my lemons turned again and walked away grinning. Me anyway. I can do anything I like!

Not entirely true. I knew instinctively that I must begin wearing clothes again at the earliest convenient moment. I was freezing my butt off. Still, there is a wild, almost erotic feeling when it comes to prancing around the neighborhood naked.

I gorged myself with six lemons outside in the parking lot as the manager, a group of mystified shoppers, and the sheet-white woman watched in horror as my fruit bounced up and down twenty feet away. It occurred to me that among all those people bearing cell phones, one at least would soon enough be punching in 911. The cops would arrive, equally mystified, but I would lose the lemons when one of them pulled up the courage to approach me and retrieve the stolen merchandise floating in the air. Worse, one of L.A.’s finest might actually take a shot at whatever it was levitating the lemons, and the lead would probably care less whether I was invisible or not. So, I ran, inadvertently dropping a piece of deliciously tart fruit every so often, like a trail marker.

“He went this-a-way!”

Ten minutes and fifteen detours later I’d nearly made it back to the gallery. Hill Street was deserted. The air was frigid, surprisingly so for mid-December, and ahead of me at the end of the block I could make out a portion of the gallery’s entry canopy, the automatic lights on and glowing around it. Across the street another glow of light rose and fell in quick, metronomic pulsations. The same green light hue that had somehow caused the change in me. I’d never paid much attention to those industrial/commercial structures; not really. They were just there. They were soot-stained brick, sat behind dilapidated fences, leftovers from seventy-five years ago, whose owners most likely lived in mansions in Beverly Hills and had forgotten the properties even belonged to them.

I laid the remaining lemons on the sidewalk and peered up the avenue at the pulsar regularity. In the split seconds of its brightness, Los Gatos Tres’ lights disappeared in the intensity of green, then reappeared, then disappeared, again and again and again.

Without warning, a further split second before I stooped to retrieve my dinner and breakfast off the cracked concrete, the green light seemed to grow nova-like. I closed my eyes at the sudden, intense brightness, witnessed a nuclear brightening inside my eyelids, and then heard and felt the tremendous explosion that followed in its wake. The force of the blast catapulted me backward into a chain link fence and sucked the breath out of my lungs as it roared westward on its way to the ocean a few blocks away.

There is, in the brief instant following a mighty blast, the feeling of numbness and absolute confusion. Incomprehension. Mental sterilization.

What…happened?

You shake your head, peer out at devastation, feel to find what parts of you are missing. Very quickly your brain miraculously forces its way back to the immediate present. The real aftermath is what finally materializes. What I saw not only shocked me by virtue of its violence, but strangely gave me pause to think about what I might wear, should I choose to don clothing this evening or tomorrow. The fate of my lemons. I find it interesting, in a way; how the mind works during chaos.

Both the building from which the light emerged, and the adjacent buildings on either side of it were gone, as was Los Gatos Tres across the street. I had no home any longer, but then again, neither would there be any evidence of what inconceivable change had taken place inside it. Pulling myself up to my feet, I wondered how many, and what kind of people had perished in the explosion, and whether I would be numbered among the atomized victims?

I’d truly been ripped from the face of the earth. Maybe Jasper would throw a week-long, nearly X-rated memorial bash/service for me, and then my existence would be defined only in an epitaph written at his hand; “The worst artist on the face of the earth. Long may he stay dead, and may he be soon forgotten.”

I gathered up the fruit scattered about, and then gravitated up the street to stand as close to the inferno as I could for warmth before the damn firefighters arrived to extinguished it.

*

In the days following my exodus from this earth I solved the problem of homelessness, taking up residence at Jasper’s mansion in Beverly Hills. I’d stolen a very nice Rolls Royce—a Silver Cloud—and driven it from the valet parking lot behind the chic restaurant up to Jasper’s. He was having a party, of course, but my only objectives were, A) warmth, and B), gorging myself on the lemons I’d managed to save. I found an empty bedroom on the third floor, and that became my new home. During this time many thoughts ran through my head. Chief among them was, Is this disease, this scourge, permanent? Is there anyone I can go to that might know of a remedy? NASA or JPL? No.

General Electric? They make light bulbs. Maybe someone there will understand my predicament in practical terms…and then begin experimenting on me, poking and prodding…No.

Industrial Light and Magic? Lucas would have a field day with me, but in the end I’d be no better off than I am now.

Television. A diversion from the long, boring hours there in my room. I watched dull and vacuous women’s talk shows in the mornings; re-runs of NCIS in the afternoons. By week’s end, not only was I beginning to lose weight, my hearing was going south as well. I was forced to turn the volume up in order to drown out the ringing in my ears.

Simply because the room was unoccupied didn’t mean one of Jasper’s maids wouldn’t visit it, and each time she did, the woman picked up the remote and clicked the TV off. She did this absently at first, but soon enough it became a game to me. I’d click it back on before she left the bedroom. She would turn, then come back to the nightstand and turn it off again. I would wait, then click it back on. Again and again we did this. Finally I said, “Boo!” which sounded demonic and fractured coming out of my mouth.

Consuela—that was her name—left screaming, and didn’t return. Jasper arrived a bit of time later to investigate, though. I performed the same routine with him, sans the “Boo!”, and his solution was simply to remove the remote. Hours later the locksmith arrived to bolt the bedroom door shut from the outside. The ghost was secured. So they might have thought.

I used the window for egress, going along the portico walkway outside to the next bedroom window. In, across the room, and out into the palatial hallway. Inconvenient, but then I had nothing else to do until I could figure out how to regain my wasting body.

I hated lemons. I loved lemons. I loathed them, and craved beef or bread, or milk and cookies. But after suffering immediate indigestion on a stellar scale the few times I stole such desirable staples from the refrigerator on the main floor and ate them, I settled into eating the only thing that I could keep down. My hunger was a constant malady. The ringing in my ears grew to cathedral bell proportions. I was skin and bones and going mad.

I hated the maid for no good reason and haunted her for the fun of it. I hated Jasper for no good reason, and began to visit him as well, interrupting his sexual forays with young women by jumping into bed with them. The household, if I was to suffer, would suffer right along with me.

The parties ended abruptly. Priests and psychics—every manner of witchdoctor arrived soon afterward to chase me away. They all thought, and communicated as much to Jasper, that I was either a demon, or else the ghost of dead and gone Olivia DeHaviland. I laughed at the fools.

The mansion went onto the market, but I wondered who in their right mind would buy a haunted house at any price? Would the real estate broker have to disclose the fact?

I didn’t care. I left along with freaked out Jasper, and went unseen with him to Andrea’s home on the canal, a destination that shouldn’t have surprised me, although it did.

During those weeks and months that I’d been under contract with my old buddy designing sets, I still lived in my home on Hill Street. I struggled with my art, taxing my brain to discover new directions for my paintings. I devoted an inordinate amount of time in trying to discover another way to paint the color black I should say. Fruitless. Little did I know that Jasper had developed a romantic connection to beautiful Andrea during that period, and mysteriously, she to him. Perhaps it had all begun long before I met either of them, despite the fact that he was sleeping with someone else night after night? Did she know this? Inconsequential at any rate. Cupid’s arrow had somehow hit its mark.

Jasper told Andrea the entire story of the ghost in Beverly Hills, sitting there in her living room in front of a warm fire, me standing in front of it gazing across the room at them. It rankled me when she responded that despite the fact he was probably crazy, he was welcome to stay with her for as long as he liked. And then that coy wink she offered him.

Later, after they’d shared a bottle of wine and disgusting words of foreplay, they went upstairs to her bedroom hand in hand. Naturally my first impulse was to follow them. Bang jewelry about on the nightstand; open and close the window overlooking the sleeping ducks and the canal outside, but I couldn’t bring myself to enter behind them and watch. I was furious, and struck down in agony at the very thought of that slob making love to my Andrea. I stopped dead at the doorway.

The thought occurred to me to return to the living room, snatch a burning log from the untended fireplace, and burn Andrea’s cursed home clear to the ground, both her and that sonofabitch trapped upstairs. When the fire trucks arrived to douse the inferno, I’d slash their hoses, tip over their ladders… I’d, I’d…I couldn’t bring myself to do that, either. I loved Andrea, hated Jasper, and my mind was suddenly a wheel spinning, a kaleidoscope out of control, insane and rational images whirling in contradiction at light speed. Around and around and around.

Instead, in a fit of despair, I went back down the stairs, grabbed Jasper’s trench coat from the arm of the sofa, threw it over me, and stumbled out into the frigid night.

*

Two weeks have passed. I have taken up lodging next door to Andrea’s house, consumed hundreds of pounds of the fruit I hate. I have the driving impulse to invade UCLA Medical