I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of
your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might
even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the
bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard,
distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their
imagination -- indeed, everything and
anything except me.
Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a bio-chemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to
which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter
of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. I
am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most
often rather wearing on the nerves. Then too, you're constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or
again, you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's
minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. It's when you feel like
this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the
time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the
sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And,
alas, it's seldom successful.
One night I accidentally bumped into a man, and perhaps because of the near darkness he saw me and
called me an insulting name. I sprang at him, seized his coat lapels and demanded that he apologize. He was a tall
blond man, and as my face came close to his he looked insolently out of his blue eyes and cursed me, his breath
hot in my face as he struggled. I pulled his chin down sharp upon the crown of my head, butting him as I had seen
the West Indians do, and I felt his flesh tear and the blood gush out, and I yelled, "Apologize! Apologize!" But he
continued to curse and struggle, and I butted him again and again until he went down heavily, on his knees,
profusely bleeding. I kicked him repeatedly, in a frenzy because he stilluttered insults though his lips were frothy
with blood. Oh yes, I kicked him! And in my outrage I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat, right there
beneath the lamplight in the deserted street, holding him by the collar with one hand, and opening the knife with
my teeth -- when it occurred to me that the man had not seen me, actually; that he, as far as he knew, was in the
midst of a walking nightmare! And I stopped the blade, slicing the air as I pushed him away, letting him fall back
to the street. I stared at him hard as the lights of a car stabbed through the darkness. He lay there, moaning on the
asphalt; a man almost killed by a phantom. It unnerved me. I was both disgusted and ashamed. I was like a
drunken man myself, wavering about on weakened legs. Then I was amused. Something in this
man's thick head had sprung out and beaten him within an inch of his life. I began to laugh at this crazy discovery.
Would he have awakened at the point of death? Would Death himself have freed him for wakeful living? But I
didn't linger. I ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself. The next day I saw his
picture in the Daily News, beneath a caption stating that he had been "mugged." Poor fool, poor blind fool, I
thought with sincere compassion, mugged by an invisible man!
Most of the time (although I do not choose as I once did to deny the violence of my days by ignoring it) I
am not so overtly violent. I remember that I am invisible and walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones.
Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers. I learned
in time though that it is possible to carry on a fight against them without their realizing it. For instance, I have
been carrying on a fight with Monopolated Light & Power for some time now. I use their service and pay them
nothing at all, and they don't know it. Oh, they suspect that power is being drained off, but they don't know where.
All they know is that according to the master meter back there in their power station a hell of a lot of free current
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is disappearing somewhere into the jungle of Harlem. The joke, of course, is that I don't live in Harlem but in a
border area. Several years ago (before I discovered the advantage of being invisible) I went through the routine
process of buying service and paying their outrageous rate
