TT 18 Invisible Flashcards
a little Helter Skelter lead-in in the background there.
By the time he’d reached the corner, that first morning of this New Dispensation, he was feeling real fear. Of what? he asked himself. Of nothing.
Where was the traffic? The pedestrians? The muffled sound of a radio in one of the buildings,
or people talking?
The muffled sound of a radio in one of the buildings,
or people talking?
He looks back now and he can’t believe he didn’t know right then what had happened. But the thing is, you don’t catch on to the obvious
when what it is that’s obvious is also impossible.
you don’t catch on to the obvious when what it is that’s obvious is also impossible.
It might have been different if he’d been raised a Baptist, if his heart and mind and understanding of things to come had been formed around movies like A Thief In The Night, songs like I Wish We’d All Been Ready. Or maybe, the way it all turned out, that would have just confused things even more.
that would have just confused things even more.
But the fact is, he’d grown up with The Beatles instead of Jesus Rock, shows like Around The World Under The Sea and Ride The Wild Surf instead of movies about the Second Coming. So he was quite unprepared for what actually came to pass.
So he was quite unprepared for what actually came to pass.
He remembered when he was little, heading for school one morning and imagining, what if he had suddenly turned invisible when he left his house,
and nobody could see him? And the more he imagined that, the more they couldn’t.
And the more he imagined that, the more they couldn’t.
Nobody said hi to him that particular morning, or made room for him at the corner waiting for the school patrol to let them cross, and nobody came over to play with him on the school ground.
nobody came over to play with him on the school ground.
And when the bell rang he waited to be at the end of the line to go in and the playground monitor didn’t even look at him, and the illusion was perfect until his teacher Mrs. Peters called his name when she took attendance, and he had to answer, and she heard him and everything, and that was that.
and she heard him and everything, and that was that.
Remembering that, he also thought of another game from his childhood, where he pretended everybody else had disappeared and he was the last person alive on the earth. It would be on a day when everybody else was inside, on a rainy day or after the other kids’ bedtimes or maybe there was some big event that everybody was inside watching on TV, like a moon landing or somebody’s assassination or Batman or something.
like a moon landing or somebody’s assassination or Batman or something.
But as a kid he’d pretend they were all gone forever,
destroyed by some nuclear war or Triffids or whatever, and he was left all alone on the planet Earth to try and survive by his wits. And then the game would go on for a bit too long, the game would start seeming a bit too real. And he’d start thinking maybe there really had been a nuclear war in Russia or somewhere and that’s what everybody was in watching on TV.
and that’s what everybody was in watching on TV.
And pretty soon the radiation would get to Calgary,
and everybody’d be dead. And he would catch himself not breathing, because that wasn’t impossible enough, even a kid knew that, it was something that could actually be, something that was too likely and too frightening to make into a game like the Invisible Boy Goes To School game.
