What a blessing it would be to disappear during the most embarrassing moments of your life. And not just backing out of the room to a quiet side exit kind of disappearing act but vanishing into nothing then somehow coming back into the physical world. Say something wrong on a first date and just be gone. Forget your wallet while at the store and poof. What a gift. What a power to have.
But to James, an 8th grader at Allentown Middle School in Allentown, Michigan it wasn’t a gift and it never made him feel powerful.
Besides the ability to become invisible there was nothing remarkable about James. He wasn’t tall or short. He didn’t have perfect blonde hair or straight white teeth. Of course he wasn’t popular at school and didn’t have many friends.
Even when NASA scientists studied him they seemed to think of him as not entirely there but instead already out of sight when really he was right there. The NASA dudes, as James liked to call them, chatted about their wives, taxes, and sports cars as if they were assembly line workers instead of Ph.D. recipients. They’d stare at monitors-which filled half-lit rooms and made their faces glow. James often wondered why people who mostly put things into outer space wanted to know so much about being invisible, so maybe they were CIA dudes.
When James was two years old he suddenly vanished while playing in the sprinklers. His father looked down for a second, listening to the giggling delight of the toddler and then just didn’t hear the giggles any more. Perhaps you remember this as it took quite a bit of airtime on the 24-hour news channels. His parents went three days without seeing James. You remember this happening about 10 years ago, his parents crying yet embracing on the front lawn where James did his first of many disappearing acts. The television cameras from all the major networks, plus all the crummy ones, were capturing the stirring moment when James’ mother appeals to non-existent abductors to return “little Jimmy” unharmed. She didn’t get too far into her speech when cries became audible from the trunk of the family car. His parents thought a miracle had just occurred. The rest of America wasn’t convinced. Charges where never filed against his parents. CIA dudes had other plans.
In sixth grade he managed to disappear right in the middle of a math lesson. James delighted in that. But in the seventh grade when he tried to play hockey and was the team’s goalie he didn’t fair well when suddenly he became veiled from sight as the puck approached. Most frustrating to James was trying to explain where he was all this time when he went away. Going away into nothingness was never an activity you could update on your homepage status. Instead it was more like waking up from a seizure and having no idea what happened until the befuddled looks of an entire room of people make it clear that he’d done it again. The same people who moments before weren’t even concerned you where there but once you left their sight and then suddenly came back you where the only thing in the room.
Often people asked James why he didn’t spend his time robbing banks or stealing really cool things from the store. James would always start by explaining, “it’s not like that…” And in fact it wasn’t like that. He had no control over this power. He didn’t clutch his teeth and close his eyes and just wish himself away. He wasn’t a stealthy assassin, he didn’t walk around like a ghost or invisible freak. It was something that just overwhelmed him like flood gates before a massive hurricane and quicker than anything he would be gone. Many people would wish they had the powers that James had but knowing what he knew about his condition James never wished his powers on anyone.
“Mom, what if I never come back?” He asked once when he was just 6 years old.
“You always come back and I’ll always be here waiting for you.” His mother dutifully stated. Many more times James would ask this question and each time she would finish her answer by saying she would always be waiting for him. It was a comforting thing to say to a young child and James believed it.
Truth is his mother didn’t really believe this answer herself. She knew more than anyone that James wasn’t going to die of old age, cancer, auto accident, or anything normal. She knew that he would be gone one day and that would be that.
Several months after his visits to NASA/CIA dudes James had a visitor. This visitor didn’t arrive at the front door and didn’t phone ahead to announce his visit. Instead this visitor seemed to appear right in front him.
“Hello James.” The visitor said. James was startled but somehow recognized the way the visitor seemed to enter the room from nowhere.
“Where did you…” James started but wasn’t allowed to finish. He didn’t really need an answer anyway.
“I’m not from around here you see. Just come to give you something that helped change things for me when I was about your age.” The visitor said as he flashed a small box about the size of cell phone. “You’ll need time to practice before you can become of use to us. Just keep it with you wherever you go.” The visitor said as he placed the newer looking box on the table in front of James. The new box looked just like the box that the visitor had.
“Once you’ve practiced enough, I’ll be back.” And just like that he was gone. The visitor had left but the box was still there.
There wasn’t any instructions, nor was there any buttons or screen to read. But the box was small enough to fit in a pocket so that’s where James kept it.
A week went by since the visitor left him the box. It seemed to have no use. But James kept it in his pocket anyway just like the visitor had said. He nearly forgot about the box since it carried no weight and never made a sound and never needed to be plugged in.
That’s when James noticed for the first time that the world around him had stopped. Not stopped in the way the world might do when sad news reaches the eye of the public. Birds frozen in mid air. Cars that should be speeding by were stuck in the road as if the last drop of gas had been burned. People speaking in mid sentence where stopped like an all-powerful being had decided to pause a television program. James spent nearly an hour watching a girl he had a crush on school. He even pretended they were having a conversation. That was easy anyway since James pretended to have conversations with her before. Before the world froze he would glance at her a second a few times a day but even that seemed to be too much. When she was frozen she seemed more like a statue at an art museum so James felt like he was admiring her the way you would fine art.
After that he thought about visiting a few banks and perhaps an electronics store. But that’s when he noticed the visitor. He had been watching him the entire time.
“Look this isn’t a game. You have to be able to use what you have for something other than staring at a pretty girl or thinking about getting things you think you want but don’t need.” The visitor started to explain.
“What’s happening? What’s going on? How did I do this? When does this stop…” James would have asked questions for a day but the visitor had heard all these questions before and even asked a few of them himself.
“Listen kid I’m not here to answer your questions. I’m here to make sure you make the most of what you have. I’ve been assigned to watch you and so far you don’t have much of what it takes. You’re not much use to us. And that box I gave you might not be right for you.”
James listened to the visitor talk about setting things right, learning to read people’s faces, influencing world events, and something about creating a narrative. Most of it made no sense to him. Perhaps he wasn’t right for what the visitor did. Most of all the visitor said that even though he would be working for the good guys the world would never know James or the visitor for that matter. No history books to note what great things they had done for all mankind. There would never be any breaking news when James had left the world, as his mother predicted, by vanishing forever.
“You mean like spies?” James asked.
“I told you I wasn’t here to answer your questions only to tell you that I am watching you. Just remember the box.” And with that James was standing back with the world again. The visitor wasn’t around and James was left to ponder the visitor’s offer.
After a few days James thought about what the visitor had said. He wasn’t interested in politics or world events. When he watched sports he didn’t even know what team to cheer for. For as long as he could remember he never did well in school and never won any big shot awards and never thought he was anything special.
So he stopped carrying the box around. Just left it in a desk drawer like a drawing from his imagination. There the box was forgotten and unused. James didn’t think much about what the visitor had told him all he thought about was his mother’s promise to always be there when he came back. And that was enough for him.