The girls are fine, he tells Elaine, fine, and as soon as he gets off the phone, he’s going home to tuck them into bed. Then he’ll drive out to the hospital to see her and the baby again. Where is he right now? At a pay phone. On the way home from work, he lies. He didn’t call her from work, he explains, because … well, because he didn’t realize how late it was until he got halfway home. So he pulled off the road at the first pay phone he saw and called her to tell her he’d be a little later getting over to the hospital than he’d said this morning. It’s been a real busy day, he explains. Yes, he, too, is grateful to Ellen and Ronnie Skeeter. They couldn’t have done this without them. Yes, he promises that he’ll do something nice for them. Maybe bring home some kind of fancy expensive liqueur from the store, she suggests. Galliano, maybe, or Kahlúa. Okay, sure, why not? He can buy it with his discount, she points out, and that way it won’t cost any more than a regular bottle of whiskey would. Right, right, he says, cringing as he talks, drawing his body into itself, shrinking it away from the rapidly expanding world of lies he’s created. He feels himself being squeezed small and pressed against an invisible wall, until he has begun to imagine his body moving through that wall and becoming invisible itself, leaving behind nothing but lies, leaving behind the life of another man, the one who calls home to check on his kids, while this other Bob, off on his crazy mission to Auburndale with the gun and then to Eddie’s in Oleander Park, forgets all about his kids, forgets that he is the father of three children, two of whom are at home in the care of kindly neighbors; he’s left in the visible world the life of a man who has a job in his brother’s liquor store, when the man who’s just become invisible has no job at all, has in fact quit his job without a second’s hesitation or fear and has no regrets or second thoughts; he’s left out there in the real world an invented, unreal man who’s dutiful, prudent, custodial, faithful and even-tempered, while here in the invisible world, where Bob now lives, he’s feckless, reckless, irresponsible, faithless and irrational — so that the invented man, the one everyone but Bob believes exists, is the father of the real man, who is the man no one but Bob knows exists, the man who is a boy.
He pulls off Route 17, and before he’s halfway down the lane to the trailer, he sees the van that’s parked in front of it, a large, metallic-green Chevy van with mag wheels and one-way mirror glass on the side and rear windows, and his first assumption is that it belongs to a friend of the Skeeters. But when he draws abreast of the van and sees the lettering on the driver’s door,
This information should astonish Bob, since he hasn’t heard from Avery in almost a year, and then only by means of a Christmas card mailed to him in New Hampshire. Bob never answered the card, not, however, because he was still angry with Avery for what happened between him and Elaine (that, after all, was a long time ago, and both parties felt properly ashamed of themselves immediately afterwards, and who knows, maybe in some unconscious way Bob wanted it to happen, especially that first summer after Ave and Bob finished rebuilding the trawler, and Bob, as if to repay himself for all the work he did on Ave’s boat, treated the boat pretty much as if it were his own and went out on it almost every weekend, frequently alone). But the sight of Avery’s van parked on the grass outside his trailer doesn’t surprise Bob in the least. That is, the sudden appearance of Avery Boone doesn’t surprise the invisible man, Bob Dubois, though it would indeed astonish and unsettle the visible one, the invented man. The invisible version of Bob Dubois, the one who is feckless, reckless, irresponsible, and so forth, that man finds it perfectly natural that Avery should show up at this moment in his life, both natural and desirable, because, with Avery as with no one else, Bob can tell the truth and in that way can make the visible and the invisible man one.
