NOW GET THIS. I was on the can this afternoon, taking my time, thinking nothing, when I looked down, and my hands were gone. My shirt sleeves were there, but nothing came out of the cuffs. I dropped my hands, or what felt like my hands, from my lap and stared straight ahead at the bathroom door. My first thought was that I might have died without knowing it. But then I reasoned that it might be a momentary optical trick like a dizzy spell or spots before my eyes. I decided to find out if my sense of touch was normal. I closed my eyes to avoid the original shock again, I closed my eyes but I continued seeing everything, the door, the sink, the ceiling. Now with my eyelids drawn down but my vision unblocked, it took all my will power to keep from panic. I didn’t know what to do. I just kept my head pushed forward and upward, and my hands hanging down, so I wouldn’t see exposed portions of my body again. Then I realized that in the periphery of my vision there was no sign of eyebrows, eyelashes or nose. It was as if my eyeballs were propped out on sticks. Carefully I leaned forward so I could reach my feet with my hands. I squeezed my shoes, patted my ankles, and slowly worked up. Everything seemed to be there. Finally I gathered enough courage to look at my hands again, I raised them in front of my face. Empty cuffs! I peered into the cuffs. The cloth was drawn tight at the elbows. I pressed my hands against my face. They were warm and damp, but they didn’t shut off my vision. I was scared. I pushed my pants from my thighs and looked down through the hollow legs at the dark insides of my shoes. I couldn’t see even an outline of flesh. I ripped the buttons off my shirt and yanked up the undershirt. It bunched on my chest over nothing that I could see. Then I panicked. No one must see me like this, so I hauled up shorts and pants, tucked in my undershirt, and turned around to look in the mirror. Like a shot I sat down again. In the mirror it seemed as if my head was cut off. Now there were two possibilities, both as far as what had happened to me and what to do about it. Either this was an illusion, in which case I was sick; or else it was a fact, in which case other people couldn’t see me either. Which it was would be easy enough to find out. All I had to do was walk into the hall with my clothes on and wait for someone to come along. If that someone was dumfounded at the headless figure, then it was an objective fact. The alternative test would be to take off all my clothes before going out. Then, if it was an illusion, I’d be taken to a hospital for exposing myself. There didn’t seem to be any question about which test to choose. I’d go out naked, and if it wasn’t all my imagination, at least I’d have a chance to decide for myself how to operate. Otherwise I’d end up in some scientific laboratory, and the fact that I was a human being and a citizen wouldn’t count for a thing. I could see it. With clothes on, I’d manage to get out of the building, but once on the streets crowds would gather and surge around me. At first no one would touch the headless figure, they’d be too frightened. But finally the police would come because of the commotion and take me into custody. I would have committed no crime, but I would be a prisoner. Newspapers would unpack their war-size headlines to announce the incredible phenomenon. Reporters would demand to see me, they’d want pictures for their doubting readers. The authorities would have to give in. A press conference would be arranged, to which not only newsmen but representatives of all the communication media of all the countries in the world would show up. And at this point I’d make a magnificent speech. Science be damned, I’d say. I’m a human being and a citizen of the United States and I’m being held against my will without due process of law. I’d work into an eloquent passage about the meaning of individual rights, the pursuit of happiness and all that. The papers would eat it up. The whole world would read about me, first in wonderment and then in sympathy. Editorials would be written, demands made by freedom-loving citizens’ groups, for my release. But the scientists would fight to hold me. The case would be argued in every quarter of the land, and finally in the Supreme Court itself, where a history-making decision would be delivered re-establishing the prerogatives of the common man. New meaning would have been given to the Constitution, and after the dust settled I would retire into private life on a government grant, so that I could not become a victim of commercial exploitation. Then and only then might I possibly co-operate with the scientists. But a cold thought broke into my reverie. It was much more probable that I was sick and that this was the beginning of many years inside a mental institution, where I would undergo shock treatments and suffer untold interior self-made agonies. Now I became certain that it was a trick of the mind, and rejected the idea of undressing and going out into the hall. Somehow I would get down to my car in front of the house, close the top and drive to my mother’s place. She would call the doctor, and maybe I could be treated privately instead of in an institution. I couldn’t make up my mind. I looked at my hands again to see if they would answer the problem for me. I moved them about, rubbed one on the other, looking for an outline or hint of flesh. None. I began to study the insides of the cuffs. If this was all an illusion, it certainly was perfect. Not only couldn’t I see my hands, but my mind was inventing the parts of the cuffs that should have been hidden by my wrists. I could see how every fiber was woven into every other, I could even see the tiny imperfections in the cloth. Then I suddenly became aware of almost imperceptible fragments of dirt under my fingernails. The difficulty in seeing them before, I understood, lay not so much in that they were slight but in that the eye had no guide to help focus on them. I tore off a piece of toilet tissue, put it on my knee and my hand on top of the tissue to provide a white background. Now I could see the fingernail dirt plainly and just barely make out the form of a hand from the bits of foreign matter that adhered to the skin. It was only the tenderest ghost, but it was infinitely better than nothing. I bent over and rubbed the pad of my index finger on the tile floor. I held the finger up. A semi-opaque spot. When I turned the finger sideways, the spot became a delicate cup hanging in air. Then I drew my whole palm along the floor. A floating handprint. If I looked closely I could even see the grain of skin. It reminded me of a trick of my childhood, putting a coin under a piece of paper and rubbing a pencil on top of it to get a picture of the coin. The handprint gave me courage. I decided to go out into the hall naked. So what do you think, man? That’s the beginning of my novel. I’ve been sitting around here day after day wasting my patrimony, or should I say matrimony, and I decided to take the plunge. Am I not onto something? Let me ask you. When you started reading, did you think I had flipped my lid? Did you know it was an entertainment? You see, what I’m going to do is send the poor slob out into the hall naked to wait for his first encounter, let’s say a girl walking slowly up the stairs. Will she scream, or just walk by unseeing? She walks by, he’s overjoyed. It means that he isn’t sick, that he’s really invisible, and out of sheer exuberance he slips her a mighty goose. But once on the street he has difficulties. For one thing, in the sun his eyes burn because he can’t shade them. And the dirt of the sidewalk sticks to his feet. He has a hell of a time getting food and has to hide when he eats because it takes about half an hour for him to digest. Contrariwise he pees in the gutter and watches the pee slowly materialize before his eyes as it ceases to be a part of him. Now, the book will concern the contrast between his actual situation, which is desperate because he’s afraid of being captured by the scientists, and his ambition to take full advantage of his condition, rule the world by influencing national leaders, discover the secrets of history by being privy to the conversations of powerful people, lay the world’s most beautiful women by moving in on them in the darkness of the night. I have to figure out a gimmick to account for his invisibility—which word, by the way, I’m not going to mention in the book—and since the thing happens to him on the can I’m considering using what I call the floggis, a semi-substantial organ common to all living things, which this poor bugger shakes loose from its moorings and defecates. At the end of the book he’ll find it somewhere, swallow it and become opaque again. You like?