Looking at Animals

Abstract

RAYMOND knew all about invisibility. It was what had made him so successful during his thirty years at National Geographic; in jungles and deserts, beside rivers, in grasslands he could get closer to the animals than anybody else. He'd photographed Siberian tigers from just a few feet away, blending into the tundra and chanting to himself, I am nothing. I am nothing. I am nothing. Four months ago Raymond retired to Morrisville, North Carolina, a stone-still town with one video-rental store, a diner, some bars, and a concrete park with a patch of too-green grass. He chose Morrisville because his sense of the place was that people let one another be. It was small enough that everyone knew his name, but they didn't feel the need to use it too much. The business with Greg Phillips started like this: sitting on his front porch one night, Raymond spotted a big kid of about sixteen crouched under Bob Hendersons bedroom window. Something about the kid how comfortable he looked, how calm told him that Greg was neither a burglar nor a pervert. His curiosity was benign; he was, like Raymond, a watcher. After that first night it was a simple matter of doing what Raymond had trained himself to do. If he looked thoroughly enough, he was sure to find Greg leaping over one of those idiot wooden fences that didn't keep anything out that wanted to get in, or perched under a window, or listening at a closed door. Greg wasn't particularly careful, didn't slink or crawl, and Raymond could tell he believed himself invisible. Which was funny, because he sure as hell wasn't. The kid made all sorts of mistakes, wouldn't last a minute in the Serengeti without the animals sensing him, but then again he wasn't all that bad either. It wasn't right, probably, to hold Greg to Raymond's own standards. After all, there was such an art to imperceptible observation.