It was really two childish fantasies in one. When things got too much, I used to find some place to hide and pretend I wasn't there – or that I'd slipped into some other plane where no-one else could interact with me – but that was just my own personal idiosyncrasies and the real idea is far more universal. To be invisible! People have dreamed of it for hundreds if not thousands of years! Of course, the obvious - or at least the most obvious, to most civilians – applications are a little – voyeuristic, but that's as reasonable a motive as any. Or you could punch people and make them think it was someone else, or at least you'd be able to once I'd managed to stop impacts rendering the field useless. Maybe if you didn't punch them hard?
But anyway, it was after years of working to realise this wonderful childhood dream. I wasn't in the lab, because the floors were off, and I was kind of being invisible in the ladies's bathroom.
Don't get me wrong, it wasn't for those reasons. If it was I'd do it properly with a thrill of being caught, the stealth camouflage making that unlikely. It was just out of curiosity. I wanted to see what they were like after having been excluded from them for all my life. Don't judge me.
So it had makeup mirrors all along the side where the men's room has urinals, right? It didn't smell of makeup, though. There aren't a lot of women on the base – Wolf, and the girl soldier, and I think I saw a lady doctor here once, but I didn't get a good look at her – so it probably didn't see a lot of use.
I used to go in there to, er, well, that - and also to think. Because it was quiet and because I was kind of hoping that – I'm not sure why I was hoping that, come to think of it – it was the obvious but I wouldn't be able to strike up a good conversation and I wouldn't want to peek over the top of the stall and – but – but it doesn't matter because she never came, which was slightly more confusing. I mean, I looked it up and Diazepam does slightly harden stools but not enough to mean Wolf would never need to visit the bathroom. She probably had her own bathroom somewhere with a gun turret pointing out of the window and eight enormous guards to tend to her every whim. I don't even know.
But I do know what happened to the Invisible Man by the end of the book. He went insane and started – killing people. And I realised once, staring through my own face in that mirror, that I was going to end up like that if I carried on doing this. So eventually I stopped sitting myself down on the makeup stools and staring through my own head to think and started doing it elsewhere.
You know, he met her in the women's bathroom, I think. Even though I was following him I couldn't make myself go through the door. Funny how things start easy and then get hard when you start thinking about them.