Chapter
One
Invisibility
copyright 2017, David Benning
I grew up in a variety of houses. The one common thread
among each was my love for hiding. From my earliest memories, I was
hiding under the bed, behind the sofa, then exploring nooks and
crannies in various rooms. One house we lived in had an attic that
was relatively easy to enter. I believe I was about nine years old
when I followed my dad up those old, narrow steps and found the dark
and dusty space above our ceiling. I was enthralled! I immediately
began planning how to turn a corner of this magical space into my own
private kingdom where I could pursue the other love of my young life:
reading.
We stayed in that house about four years; during that
time I nurtured my imagination by reading all sorts of comic books
then SciFi adventure stories and finally some of the books that my
dad had in his collection. That bookshelf was a very pretty
bookshelf. Dad commented on the beauty of the oak grain and the
precision of the workmanship. Mom agreed which is why she let him
keep it in the living room as nearly the first thing seen when
walking in the front door.
I don't think that Dad had read those books in a very
long time. When I actually became curious and pulled out a copy of
H. G. Wells' The Invisible Man, I was surprised at how much
dust had collected on the top of the book and on the shelf behind it.
I quickly blew off the layers that time had deposited then retreated
with the book up to my well-furnished reading alcove, high above the
ceiling and far out of sight from anyone else.
A couple of days later Dad asked me about the missing
book and I told him I had almost finished it. He surprised me by
asking key questions about the plot and the characters, proving that
he really had read the book at some point in his life. I often was
surprised by what information he kept in his mind.
Unfortunately we moved soon after that—moved several
times, actually—but those early events provided a counter theme to
the reality that pressed itself in on nearly every waking moment of
the modern, civilized human. Watchers. Our society had grown
to desire safety and protection so much that those in control
fostered the belief that the only way to have complete, or nearly
complete, safety would be to have surveillance at nearly ever point
in the public space. Thus we had video cameras recording activity;
but because that became labor-intensive to have a human watch all of
it, they figured out how to have a computer scan the feed of hundreds
of video inputs: scanning for certain behaviors, scanning for faces
then logging where everyone was and what direction they were going
and with whom they traveled and what packages were with the person.
The next step in monitoring the populace was to install radio chip
detectors to sense what RFIDs were going by. People weren't
“tagged,” per se, but most everybody had a driver's
license or a bank card to access their funds or an identification
card for their school or place of employment. It was very easy to
quietly add this monitoring capability to the suite of our benevolent
government's Watcher programs.
Of course, the government had special sounding names to
point out the good side to their intrusive watching: names like
“Crime Prevention Algorithms” or “Early Warning Heuristics”
or even “Neighborhood Protection Plan.” It was the folks on the
street that called them “The Watchers” but never too
loudly. I heard an old man at the corner market—the type of man
who liked to throw around big words to impress and to bolster his
opinion. He muttered something about the “stupid Watchers”
then added loudly, “They're ubiquitous, I tell ya'! They're
spying on my coffee now!”
I went home and looked that word up.
I also remember that I never saw that man again. It was
just another reminder to play the government's game the way they
wanted you to play. Don't rock the boat, just blend in or hide.
I chose hiding.
Not that I could really hide, but by laying low and not
attracting attention to myself, I tried to stay off the radar and
just live my life my own way. It was far easier than truly being
invisible.
Of course, fantasies about developing an invisibility
cloak still colored my imagination. I replayed the H. G. Wells story
a thousand times in my head and thought how the main character,
Griffin, might have pulled off his plan if he had merely made a suit
to wear that was invisible instead of turning himself into a one-man
freak show.
In my last year of high school we had to read another
story about an invisible man: Ralph Ellison's “Invisible Man.”
But this book was social commentary on the plight of the
minority. Not that he was really invisible, but people chose not to
see him, rendering him practically invisible. Exactly the opposite
problem that we had in our society. I brought that point up in the
class discussion and the teacher looked a little alarmed at my
connection. She quickly gave the assignment and suddenly we weren't
discussing that book anymore. I wondered if I was going to be made
“invisible” like that old man in the corner market some
years before. I watched my back as well as my “Ps and Qs” but
it seemed that nothing came of it.
There was, however, one image from that book that I
liked. At the end, the narrator talked about decorating his room
with hundreds of lights; I thought, “How cool would that be!”
The closest that I was able to get to that was a number of years
later when I had a small room of my own and I decorated it with
almost fifteen hundred miniature holiday lights—about half white,
with other colors that I could control to have my very own form of
mood lighting.
Anyway, I went off to college in a neighboring state so
I didn't come back home except for the big holidays. During my time
at college, there came a subtle shift in my parent's attitude toward
each other. No, Dad didn't desert or anything, but there was what
I've heard described as the trauma of empty-nesters. In the midst of
their trying to come to grips with how to relate to each other
without their only child, Dad died in a traffic accident. I didn't
find out till over a day later since I was in the midst of finals and
had turned my phone off, forgot to check it and then it ran out of
battery.
I mention my parent's problem only to partly explain why
Mom became more bitter and much harder to please. I was now torn
between the filial duty to help Mom and the strong desire to leave
and do my own thing without her bitterness haunting everything I did.
Little Janie Raincloud would have been a good moniker for her
if I had thought about it and didn't mind stirring up trouble. But I
stirred up enough trouble by moving out entirely. She gave me the
withering glare of disapproval and the silent treatment of guilt
peppered with random slights of annoyance here and there. All it did
was make me ever the more happy to be out from under her glare.
Yet the Watchers continued their surveillance,
monitoring my coming and going, charting my progress in becoming a
functional and productive adult. I spoke to Mom on occasions and
sent her a greeting on her birthday, yet I never told her how things
were going with me. At least nothing deep or personal. But she
seemed to know. I wondered how much of it was because she was
connected to the Watchers programs or people who had an inside
track into that data set. I didn't want to give any thought to the
reality of a mother's insight into her child. No, for me, at that
point in my life, it was far easier to believe that the Watchers
somehow fed her direct information on what I was doing—even though
she never had specifics, just generalities which were far too close
to the truth for my comfort.
No comments:
Post a Comment