bills and then insulated and weather-stripped the thing so it cost them hardly anything to heat. It was a bungalow. He loved that word: bungalow. It seemed to capture all the middle-class optimism of a first home. And now he had bungled it. Bungled the bungalow. When the buzzer went off he snaked the intertwined laundry from the top-loading washer to the front-loading dryer. With the dryer door open, there was just enough light to change into a pair of flannel pajama pants and a t-shirt.
Upstairs, the kitchen was dominated by the fridge. Donna’s request. The 29-cubic-feet monstrosity dwarfed the plain oak cupboards. Because of the ice dispenser plumbing in the back and its four-inch-thick door, the fridge stuck out like a giant stainless steel monolith in a too-tight doorway. He thought of getting drunk. He’d been saving a six-pack of Coronas and he reached through the long necks for the yellow handle and pulled them all out. They’d get warm, sure, but he didn’t want to have to go back to the fridge. He had a date with the couch. And the Sci-Fi channel, maybe Stargate or Battlestar. Something to take him out of this world.
The next buzzer sounded hollow. He meandered downstairs to the dryer, where he pulled out the clothes and carried them to his room. He dropped them on the floor in wadded clumps and sifted through for the overalls. His new find. With the new-to-him house. Free. Along with the stress of busted pipes and repainting and removing years of hard water and soap scum from the shower. Hanging from his hands the overalls made him think of those dustbowl photos, depression-era Joads. They were a grayish-blue denim, faded around the knees. He looked for some sort of tag or initials or symbol in the rivets. But there was nothing. Just oil stains that darkened the denim in cloudy spots the size of plums. What the hell, he thought. He put them on. One leg, then another. The overalls didn’t look to be that long, but he couldn’t see his feet through the other end. He stood up and instantly felt the beers, all six at once it seemed like. His head was a pressure cooker about to go, the world shook, the edges of his vision were blurred and indistinct. It was like going cross-eyed, two fields of vision separating, and his eyes straining to merge them again. Was that his hand? That white shape between him and the mirror at arm’s length? Whatever it was, it was fading, along with his lumpy torso. He sat on the bed and his shoulders tingled like he’d slept on an artery and the blood was just now starting to circulate again. And his head. He held his hand to his forehead, like he was checking himself for a fever. His vision was still getting worse. All he could see were the mocha walls of his apartment, and, before his body fell back against the bed, the crisscross of denim from the back of his overalls.
He woke in the morning with lines of light striping the room through his mini-blinds. At some point he had pulled his feet up and rolled onto his side facing the window. The light was hitting him right across the eyes and he pulled his pillow over his head and shifted to his other side. He would get up now, headache or no headache. Even if there wasn’t much to get up for. Besides the yuppies, he didn’t really have any clients. A couple of perpetual window shoppers and one investor looking for foreclosures like the one he just bought. And the MLS was dead, no new listings in the city, not much even in the region. That left the house. The house and his botched plumbing job. The house he had almost burned down last night. If only he had burned it down and could find a way to blame it on someone else. It was worth twice as much in insurance as it had cost him.
He sat on the edge of the bed, his dry eyes open in slits, and looked in the mirror.
Nothing.
He opened his eyes fully and the room came into focus. There were the triangular wall sconces, the beveled mirror, his dresser top with a broken watch, a bowl of coins, wadded gum wrappers and a stray sock. But nothing there, here, where a person should be, a self. Just a pair of rumpled overalls, the straps looped loosely over nothing. He stood up. The overalls stood up. He twisted his torso from side to side. The overalls corkscrewed, bunching around the middle. He bent over. The overalls bent at the waist, an open maw of emptiness. Son of a bitch. He slapped his face, jumped up and down. Nothing. Huh. He went to eat some breakfast.
In the kitchen, between bites of Grape-Nuts, he experimented with the overalls. He tried one leg in, one leg out, and his body faded down the middle like it had been airbrushed away into nothing. He drank his orange juice and had to use two hands to steady the cup that seemed to will itself through the air to his lips. It was like his body was one large phantom limb. In the shower, overalls off, his skin reappeared and the water went slick over his arms. The threads shot from the nozzle and his arm hair flattened where they hit and flagellated with the current. He held up his hands. They were wrinkled around the whorls of his fingertips, whitish. But when he dried and changed back into the overalls it was like a light had gone out. A relief, somehow, to be without himself.
In his Taurus he expected to turn heads. For once be the guy that everyone was looking at. Or through. Maybe even cause a panic. But on the street and even at stoplights, people kept their eyes straight ahead. They yakked on cell phones, tapped fingers on steering wheels. He was the invisible invisible man. The office was empty when he arrived, most of the realtors out with clients, the way it should be on a Saturday. He ambled to his office, plopped down in his ergonomic chair. He logged on to his computer under the pretense of doing work. He checked the MLS and a couple realtor blogs to try to keep his focus. But in a few clicks his browser was open to tinychat.com and his webcam window showed his swivel chair and his empty overalls. He created a new profile as “Invisiman” and scrolled through the other lonely souls looking for someone to talk to. The first month after Donna left all he had felt was sorrow. He still fantasized about getting her back: the house and its jackpot-potential leading to his own kind of coronation with Donna at his side. Meeting people online was like a warmup run, or dating for dummies. It let him make the mistakes so he wouldn’t make them again when he tried to woo her back. There were only a few chat sites that the firewall at work didn’t block. Of them, Tinychat was the only one that allowed you to search by location; you could narrow it down to the few people logged on in Indianapolis and chat with them while they sat in their living rooms or hotels or internet cafes or at work. He’d found Donna on there a few weeks ago. She had a list of friends, the screen name “Indyhottie277” and a description of pastimes and interests that were almost inimical to his own. He remembered looking at her picture, knowing that with one click he could be face to face with the woman who left him. Seeing her there, her name and personality and photo reduced to a thumbnail icon, he experienced a kind of jealousy. Like he’d walked in on her and a lover but the lover was in the bathroom. Or he was the lover, the potential lover, looming in the doorway. A few keystrokes and he found her profile again.
She wasn’t on.
He sat back in his seat. He tried to think what had set Donna off. Couldn’t have been the job. She always said those things weren’t important to her. Had they simply gotten too used to each other? Diverged in ways he didn’t comprehend? There were warning signs. Like the teeth, his clicking teeth. He’d been eating his cereal, the way he had for years, a nest of wheat puffs and 2% milk. But when he brought the spoon to his mouth: a silence, then a kind of gasp. Donna had been sipping her coffee, two handed, her butt against the counter, watching him.
“Stop it,” she said.
Fred spooned more puffs into his mouth and crunched away. “What.”
“Never mind.”
So he did. He didn’t mind. He ate his cereal one spoonful at a time, his spooning and chewing and swallowing filling the space. She held herself rigid the whole time. It was only later when he heard her on her cell that he found out. He’d turned on the water for a shower then cracked open the door to their bedroom to watch and listen. It was perplexing, Donna and her hang-ups. She was always on, like a contestant in some reality TV show, always conscious of the camera. She strode around their bed, her cell against her ear. Her head bobbed up and down and when she flung her hair back, she flicked the curl of her bangs so you could see her eyes pooling.
“He clicks his teeth,” she said into the phone.
