Being Invisible by Thomas Berger Read Free Book Online Page B

we’d go to a restaurant and eat a big meal and when it was time to pay Petey would pull out a bratwurst he brought along for the purpose, and he’d slide down under the table, and I’d hold it between my legs and he would suck on it.”
    Babe was now listening intently.
    “So they’d see that, and we’d get thrown out as degenerates, see, and never had to pay.”
    Babe asked, “Are you serious?”
    “So after we done that a few times, my friend Petey says, ‘Hey, how about letting me hold the sausage for a change while you suck it?’” Zirko grinned extravagantly: he seemed to have more teeth than a normal man. “So I asked him, ‘What sausage?’”
    After an instant, Babe squealed with laughter, and when she could breathe again, said, “Oh, Siv. I took you seriously. How can I ever tell?”
    Zirko was the kind who would not laugh at his own jokes. He shrugged, then squinted at his ham and fruit and began to eat.
    Siv ?, His name was Siv? As if “Zirko” wasn’t enough. Irrespective of his name, he was a hyena. Couldn’t Babe see that?
    The waiter showed up with a bottle of wine, displayed it, label up, to Zirko. “Hit me,” Zirko said. Tommy extracted the cork, handed it over, and Zirko elaborately smelled the discolored end, then scratched it with a thumbnail. “Vino,” he said to Babe and rolled his eyes. “If I was ever starving again I’d take wine before food.”
    When Tommy poured a sample, it was no surprise to Wagner that Zirko sucked and slurped and sniffed and closed his eyes and worked his tongue behind his closed lips and finally, eyelids lowered again, made a majestic nod.
    Wagner could endure no more of this. Why should he? He was invisible.
    He waited till Tommy had filled Babe’s glass and brought the bottle to Zirko’s; then, stepping to the waiter’s side, using two hands he forced Tommy to pour wine into the lap of the pretentious little thug.
    For a few moments nothing else happened. A stream of red fluid was falling into Zirko’s lap. Tommy was struggling but not too vigorously, for he knew not what he was struggling against. As to Babe, she was serenely tasting the contents of her own glass.
    Then Zirko began to shout obscenities. But still he made no move to elude the falling stream. Wagner now used both hands to maintain the bottle in the offending position and while he might not have been stronger than Tommy in a fair match, he was for the first time experiencing a noteworthy concomitant of invisibility: greater physical strength, or perhaps merely the illusion thereof. At any rate the waiter was unable to alter the situation, or the attitude, of the bottle.
    Babe had now begun to observe all of this—well, scarcely “all,” for she couldn’t see the man who pulled the strings!—but thus far had remained noncommittal. Not that much could be done except by Zirko himself, who could simply have moved away from the table. No one was stopping him. But some kind of vanity kept him in place: he intended to triumph over this inexplicable adversary. So, though shouting vile language, he stayed. Moreover, he stared into his wine-soaked lap and not even at Tommy.
    The waiter was sniveling piteously. “I don’t know—I can’t seem—oh God, I’m sawry. Oh Christ. Oh shit.”
    Wagner released him only after the last drop had fallen. Tommy’s response to freedom was to drop the empty bottle and sprint through the kitchen doors.
    Still Zirko stayed in place. At last he raised his eyes from his lap to say, through his teeth, “I’m going to carry this off, you’ll see. I don’t want anybody to think they got ahead of Zirko. I know I do crazy things, but they’re always my idea. If I’m a clown, then I’m my own kinda clown. Not some fuckin’ waiter’s.”
    Wagner had not had time to note the reaction of the many other diners to Zirko’s cries. He was interested only in Babe.
    Who said, “I can’t think he did it on purpose, Siv. It must have been a nervous fit of