Eric Anderson

Karl Rove

Through the snow the man in bandages walked, arriving at our tavern in the middle of the night.  Over his gauzy wrappings he wore a black hat and a black scarf and black gloves.  While my wife prepared his room, I brought him a tankard of ale and what leftovers I could find in the kitchen.  He drank and ate (from behind the bar, I watched the red flames flicker in his black glasses), then without a word, he retired to his room.

            That poor man must be hideously scarred, my wife said.  We were thinking of burn victims, acid spills, leprosy.  We traded our morbid thoughts back and forth like kisses, barely whispering to each other, for the walls of our tavern were very thin. 

            That was why when we heard that laughter—high-pitched, insane, like a mouse only wounded by the trap—we believed it was the bandaged man in his room, the sound unpeeling out of a nightmare from which he could not awake.  And if it seemed to us like the sound came from somewhere inside our room, we only huddled closer, believing it was the nature of the night and the strange arrival which troubled us.

            It wasn’t until the next evening when the man removed his bandages that I remembered the strange light I saw on our covers, the cold spot between the fireplace and the bed, the caress I thought I had only imagined brushing my cheek while I slept.

            You see I’m invisible, the man said, unwrapping his dirty wrappings.  You see? 

            What an amusing trick, my wife said, trying as always to be kind.

            Wait, the man said, and began to unwind his invisibility, dropping it at his feet.

            My wife screamed first, when she saw what he really was, and I closed my eyes so tight they never saw anything again.

            In this way, the invisible man succeeds in making the world invisible, too.