Reflections

Stanley Chumway knew he was never the kind of person who attracted a lot of notice. He was thin, with nondescript hair and, quite honestly, a nondescript face, of which the glasses he’d worn since the third grade had always been the most prominent feature. Though he would have been an ideal target, not even the schoolyard bullies noticed him. They picked on others who were more noticeable. Now, in his thirties, his hairline was receding, and he would still only wear a hat when it was truly needed for warmth and not style. He was, of course, still single, escaping the recognition of women as well.

He worked in a large, open plan office where he was a reliable cog in a giant paperwork machine. His desk was lost in a sea of other desks that, like all the others, were awash with file folders, forms, and organizers that consistently failed to organize. The mail clerk would come around and drop work into his in-basket. He would promptly and competently process it, placing it in his out-basket where the same mail clerk would pick it up on his afternoon run, barely slowing on his circuit around the office floor.

Stanley was surprisingly comfortable living his life like this. He flew beneath the radar of all the office politics and petty scandals. He was aware of them. Unnoticeable people often get to hear interesting things if they listen carefully. But he always managed to avoid any involvement. His annual evaluations were always satisfactory, mainly because his supervisor had difficulty remembering exactly which one of the many clerks he was.

He did not lack imagination. Stanley sometimes fantasized about what it would be like to be actually invisible. H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man has been on his bookshelf since his first year in high school. (His book report got an “A”, the only piece of his writing to be so highly rewarded.) Now, he was beginning to feel more and more invisible. It often seemed like people on the street were seeing right through him. Once in a while, people’s eyes used to meet his, or at least land in his vicinity. That hadn’t happened for a while now as far as he could remember. The new mail clerk at work never acknowledged him in any way when he dropped off or picked up at Stanley’s desk. The previous clerk, a perky but far from comely young woman, would usually come up with some sort of greeting. The new guy, of the same age group, trudged through his route like it was the mindless chore it actually was. Rumor had it that he was the offspring of one of the higher-ups, a grown-up problem child who couldn’t seem to last at any job where he wasn’t an offspring of one of the higher-ups.

It was cold in Stanley’s studio apartment that morning. After his shower, the bathroom mirror was particularly steamed up and in a rather strange way. As Stanley looked at his reflection, even after a few swipes with his bath towel, his image remained foggy, even when other parts of the room seemed clearer. Besides that, the reflection was refracting in a strange way where it looked like he could still vaguely make out the bath curtain behind him while he was standing there. He didn’t pay much attention. His morning routine was down pat and would get him to work precisely on time while granting him the optimum amount of sleep. There was no time to pause or ponder.

He would get to the subway station five minutes before his train was due, sometimes adding a little padding when the weather was foul. For some reason, the second car from the rear was always the least crowded, so that’s where he waited. He lived far enough away from the business district to almost always get a seat.

One morning on the way to work and there was a fairly attractive young woman seated opposite him, across the aisle. He noticed when she looked up from her phone and stared in his direction. She began primping her hair in a way that could almost be considered flirtatious. She smiled a couple of times, once cocking her head slightly in a very lovely, coy kind of way. Stanley was on the verge of smiling back at her when the expression on her face returned to cooly neutral and she looked down again at her phone. It puzzled him, but he looked past her and saw his vague reflection in the window beside her. As the brightly lit trail travelled through the dark subway tunnels, the windows became effective mirrors.

Each morning, even when it wasn’t obscured by condensation, his reflection in the bathroom mirror became a little dimmer, the shower curtains behind him more distinct. On one level, he knew he should find this disturbing, but he didn’t. Without understanding why, he was starting to feel better about himself and life in general. It wasn’t like he was tempted to be more gregarious. It was like he had been hiding by laying on a cot and covering himself with a thin blanket. Now it was becoming like he was in a nice bed with a soft duvet drawn over him. It helped him feel more comfortable and relaxed as he went through the day.

Without fully realizing it, he had also begun eating less and less. It wasn’t like he was shunning food or depressed. After his usual banana and coffee in the morning, he still felt satisfactorily full at lunchtime and at dinner, when he only ate a salad or side dish, mostly out of habit. Though his reflection was becoming more transparent, it didn’t show any gauntness and his energy level, never particularly great, was unchanged. So, this was all fine with him. He’d always found cooking to be an undesirable chore. Going to restaurants or having food delivered meant interactions he’d prefer to avoid. On the other hand, he had mastered the preparation of frozen pizzas (just add a little olive oil on top) and fried eggs (carefully watch the edges to know when it’s cooked).

That year, the transition from the mild, welcome spring to the long, hot summer was abrupt. When Stanley heard the weather forecast that night, he steeled himself for sweaty suits on his commute and wet pillows at night. His apartment gave him the choice between city noise flooding in through open windows or sleeping in a steam bath. The weekend passed and it was late Monday before he remembered the prediction. He was about to head home and felt grateful that his favorite TV meteorologist blew yet another forecast.

Heading to the train, he noticed an abundance of loosened ties, suit jackets thrown over shoulders, sweaty shirts, and sweatier, sleep deprived faces. It struck him as odd. Stanley realized that he’d even forgotten to unbutton his collar as he usually did when he left the office for the day. Odd, he thought.

There was a large park not far from Stanley’s apartment. It had the requisite tennis courts and playground equipment, but much of it was left to look reasonably natural with trees and shrubbery and even a small duck pond that, for a few weeks in spring and fall, was visited by a flock or two of passing ducks. A long path wound through it, bordered by the occasional green park bench and faded wood picnic tables here and there. The path went deep enough so that, at points, the city noises were muted and if one listened carefully, one could sometimes hear a birdsong and not just the pigeons flapping, scraping, and cooing. It was his habit on weekends, if the weather was clement, to walk to the park and then treck around the long path.

Stanley was taking one of these walks on an early summer Saturday afternoon when a small group of people sitting around one of the picnic tables attracted his notice. They were a mixed group, chatting idly together. He could tell almost immediately that something was a bit odd about their appearance. Most people he saw had begun to look rather dull and grayish, like slightly blurred people in the background of a photograph. These folks had a certain vibrance about them that radiated like a faint glow. It was very subtle, maybe a trick of the early afternoon sun, but it caught his eye.

Surprisingly, Stanley appeared to catch their attention. A couple of them turned towards him, nodded and smiled a hello. He returned their greeting with equal subtlety and a bit cautiously. They were possibly saying hello to someone behind him.

They could easily be described as “an average group of people,” conservatively dressed in a nondescript kind of way, neither particularly attractive nor in any way repulsive, with some around his age, one or two younger, and a silver haired couple who were considerably older.

The older gentleman spoke up, “Wonderful afternoon, isn’t it?”

Stanley slowed his walk, smiled, and nodded is assent.

“Would you care to join us for a while?” the silver-haired woman at his side asked, sliding closer to the gentleman to make room for him at the end of the bench.

This caught Stanley completely off guard. He stopped in front of them and just stammered for a few moments. He shocked himself when he found himself saying, “Okay. Thank you,” and sitting down in the offered space.

“We often meet like this here on weekends. We’ve sometimes seen you walking by and thought we’d enjoy your company.” This struck Stanley as a bit odd but he accepted it.

The woman introduced herself and the others in group and said a little about each one, nothing exciting or particularly notable. But they all appeared quite friendly, even the woman who was about Stanely’s age. Stanley shyly introduced himself in the same way.

“When did you start noticing your transition?” the gentleman asked.

“Transition?”

“To our world? To the place where others see you less, if at all, and where others, like us, seem to stand out?”

“I’ve never seemed to attract anyone’s attention, but lately, things have been looking a little different to me.” Stanley went on to talk about the bathroom mirror, the girl on the subway and some similar occurrences that left puzzled.

“Oh, you’re going through the most difficult part,” the younger woman said sympathetically. “It made me terribly anxious for a while until I ran across these nice folks who’d already gone through it. They were kind enough to reassure me that it was all perfectly natural, and things were going to be okay.”

“But what is it that’s happening?”

“It’s the natural progression for people like us,” the gentleman began. A lot of people go through times when they feel they don’t fit in. Others spend their whole lives like that. Some bad ones fight back in unfortunate ways; some sad ones give up and take an even less fortunate route. But, as you can see, there are a few of us manage to make a more graceful exit from the world where we don’t exactly fit. Yet we don’t quite leave it, either. And we learn how to see each other and discover that there are people who will understand and welcome us.

“We still keep to ourselves much of time. We’re all happy that way. But some of us do manage to pair off in a rather pleasant way. Gloria and I have been together thirty-one years now.”

“Thirty-two, dear.”

“Quite right. Thirty-two.” There were chuckles around the table.

A new kind of warmth started flowing through Stanley, like he could finally feel his heart beating and blood coursing through him, affirming that he was, indeed, a living creature.

And so, bolstered by these Saturday afternoon meetups at the local park, Stanley proceeded with his fade-out from the world where he didn’t quite fit to a place where he found himself quite comfortable with the virtual invisibility that he had yearned for and friends who were kind, understanding, and welcoming. Nobody in the world he left ever missed him and, quite frankly, he didn’t miss any of them.

In a very natural sort of way, he and Sheila, the sympathetic woman at that first gathering did “pair off” as they say. As the years passed, they became the older couple who were the cornerstone of the little group, welcoming newcomers and setting them at ease and letting them know they fit right in with them. No one outside their small group noticed, but the two of them were living a very  happy life.