Mysogyny

Older people experience the onset of invisibility, they get used to it as everything else. It commences when someone is no longer seen as a hunter or a target in the courtship rituals. This will happen sometime in middle age, earlier if the milieu is one of youth. Some try to resist, becoming more flamboyant and always more foolish, others embrace the chance of disappearance, to come and go and make their mischief unrecognised and unremembered. This fellow was one of these, though I watched and wondered if he knew, as I do, that you are not invisible to those are themselves of the disappeared.

He was always when I saw him perfectly polite, always sunny faced, a half smile well prepared and practiced. He said little but then we all did. In those bars at that time it was not done to talk of where you got your money or to ask another's history and if those matters are excluded then men have very little to talk about once the good day pleasantries are done for. In this I thought he was as the rest of us, secret, sad, probably nursing a last set of idiotic ambitions. What made me notice more was how he flinched at the presence of women. I too was of an age of invisibility, I could watch and listen with impunity. Whereas I stayed still, he shrunk up,slipping wraith and silent away so that no trace of his presence could be felt by them.

I asked if the fear was greater than the loathing.

"In equal measure, though this milk of hatred slops as tube tilts so sometimes all fear and other times all is loathing or any measure in between. When all is fear I shrink, when all is loathing I am scared of other danger"

I did not see so much of him for a while, his, perhaps unguarded words, had made him aware that the disappeared can, should they mind too, see each other though they are not seen by others. There were no murders of women at that time, not here, though I read reports of such things in Seattle and Ipswich, Montreal and Delhi. There was a murder of a man but it was said this was arranged by his wife though investigations were never conclusive. I knew her too.

Then he was back, one after midnight when I still with adrenalin from a professional chore, sitting across the bar eyes ablaze, more prominent, more content. He had a coke beside him, the lemon stacked in it suggested there was rum as well. It occur ed to me, in one of those irritating unbidden thoughts that come to one that he had the air of someone who had dined very well whereas his normal air was of being rather hungry. There were several pretty creatures there still, it was the hour when the courtships fail or not but he ignored them as he always had, comfortably invisible. I shifted back, into the dark, turned lighting a cigarette as an excuse, so that my own obvious invisible self did not intrude upon his and light him up. He sipped out the rum, the bar was mostly drunks now, slipped away, walkng lightly. I shamble.

Months past, we had not forgotten out glances, but as we want in this place nothing happened. Visiotrs come and go, they are the source of most business here, stay a few days, leave, knowing everything about the place. Most of those who stay use the visitors to provide our anonimity so we try not to know them individually. I had not forgotten him, but rather not paid him any mind. I went down to the supermarket to buy shampoo, then, seeing it was twilight, I went down for a beer before the red wine got opened back home. I don't have much sense of smell but there was a feel of breath on my neck, white hairs rising. I turned, his hungry look was back.

"Hi, long time" I said

He looked straight forward, he spoke,

I have watched you" He breathed a rasp and turned a bit to me, "You sit here invisibly, you avoid the presence of women but you have the hungry eyes of a killer. Nothing has happened but if it ever did I would know where they should first look".

As if the mirror reflection has spoken.