“Spring clean-up and tidying,” Jilly had said by way of explanation.
“Hello? It’s September.”
“So I’m late.”
The coffee had been waiting for Mona when she arrived, as had been a willing ear as she related her curious encounter after leaving the pub. Jilly, of course, was enchanted with the story. Mona didn’t know why she was surprised.
“Let’s say I don’t disbelieve you,” Jilly said.
“I don’t know if I believe me. It’s easier to put it down to those two pitchers of beer we had.”
Jilly touched a hand to her head. “Don’t remind me.”
“Besides,” Mona went on, “why doesn’t he show himself now?” She looked around Jilly’s disconcertingly tidy studio. “Well?” she said, aiming her question at the room in general. “What’s the big secret, Mr. Nacky Wilde?”
“Well, it stands to reason,” Jilly said. “He knows that I could just give him something as well, and then he’d be indebted to me, too.”
“I don’t want him indebted to me.”
“It’s kind of late for that.”
“That’s what he said.”
“He’d probably know.”
“Okay. I’ll just get him to do my dishes for me or something.”
Jilly shook her head. “I doubt it works that way. It probably has to be something that no one else can do for you except him.”
“This is ridiculous. All I did was give him a couple of dollars. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Money doesn’t mean anything to you?”
“Jilly. It was only two dollars.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s still money, and no matter how much we’d like things to be different, the world revolves around our being able to pay the rent and buy art supplies and the like, so money’s important in our lives. You freely gave him something that means something to you, and now he has to return that in kind.”
“But anybody could have given him the money.”
Jilly nodded. “Anybody could have, but they didn’t. You did.”
“How do I get myself into these things?”
“More to the point, how do you get yourself out?”
“You’re the expert. You tell me.”
“Let me think about it.”
Nacky Wilde didn’t show himself again until Mona got back to her own apartment the next morning. She had just enough time to realize that Pete had been back to collect his things — there were gaps in the bookshelves, and the stack of CDs on top of the stereo was only half the size it had been the previous night — when the little man reappeared. He was slouched on her sofa, even more disreputable-looking in the daylight, his glower softened by what could only be the pleasure he took from her gasp at his sudden appearance.
She sat down on the stuffed chair across the table from him. There used to be two, but Pete had obviously taken one.
“So,” she said. “I’m sober and you’re here, so I guess you must be real.”
“Does it always take you this long to accept the obvious?”
“Grubby little men who can appear out of thin air and then disappear back into it again aren’t exactly a part of my everyday life.”
“Ever been to Japan?” he asked.
“No. What’s that got to—”
“But you believe it exists, don’t you?”
“Oh, please. It’s not at all the same thing. Next thing you’ll be wanting me to believe in alien abductions and little green men from Mars.”
He gave her a wicked grin. “They’re not green and they don’t come from—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” she told him, blocking her ears. When she saw he wasn’t going to continue, she went on, “So was Jilly right? I’m stuck with you?”
“It doesn’t make me any happier than it does you.”
“Okay. Then we have to have some ground rules.”
“You’re taking this rather well,” he said.
“I’m a practical person. Now listen up. No bothering me when I’m working. No sneaking around being invisible when I’m in the bathroom or having a shower. No watching me sleep—or getting into bed with me.”
He looked disgusted at the idea. Yeah, me too, Mona thought.
“And you clean up after yourself,” she finished. “Come to think of it, you could clean up yourself, too.”
He glared at her. “Fine. Now for my rules. First—”
Mona shook her head. “Uh-uh. This is my place. The only rules that get made here are by me.”
“That hardly seems fair.”
“None of this is fair,” she shot back. “Remember, nobody asked you to tag along after me.”
“Nobody asked you to give me that money,” he said, and promptly disappeared.
“I hate it when you do that.”
“Good,” a disembodied voice replied.
Mona stared thoughtfully at the now-empty sofa cushions and found herself wondering what it would be like to be invisible, which got her thinking about all the ways one could be nonintrusive and still observe the world. After a while she got up and took down one of her old sketchbooks, flipping through it until she came to the notes she’d made when she’d first started planning her semi-autobiographical strip for The Girl Zone.
Notes for chapter one:
(Mona and Hazel are sitting at the kitchen table in Mona’s apartment having tea and muffins. Mona is watching Jamaica, asleep on the windowsill, only the tip of her tail twitching.)
MONA: Being invisible would be the coolest, but the next best thing would be, like, if you could be a bird or a cat — something that no one pays any attention to.
HAZEL: What kind of bird?
MONA: I don’t know. A crow, all blue-black wings and shadowy. Or, no. Maybe something even less noticeable, like a pigeon or a sparrow.
(She gets a happy look on her face.)
MONA: Because you can tell. They pay attention to everything, but no one pays attention to them.
HAZEL: And the cat would be black, too, I suppose?
MONA: Mmm. Lean and slinky like Jamaica. Very Egyptian. But a bird would be better — more mobility — though I guess it wouldn’t matter, really. The important thing is how you’d just be there, another piece of the landscape, but you’d be watching everything. You wouldn’t miss a thing.
HAZEL: Bit of a voyeur, are we?
MONA: No, nothing like that. I’m not even interested in high drama, just the things that go on every day in our lives — the stuff most people don’t pay attention to. That’s the real magic.
HAZEL: Sounds boring.
MONA: No, it would be very Zen. Almost like meditating.
HAZEL: You’ve been drawing that comic of yours for too long.
The phone rang that evening while Mona was inking a new page for “Jupiter Jewel.” The sudden sound startled her and a blob of ink fell from the end of her nib pen, right beside Cecil’s head. At least it hadn’t landed on his face.
I’ll make that a shadow, she decided as she answered the phone.
“So do you still have an invisible friend?” Jilly asked.
Mona looked down the hall from the kitchen table where she was working. What she could see of the apartment appeared empty, but she didn’t trust her eyesight when it came to her uninvited houseguest.
“I can’t see him,” she said, “but I have to assume he hasn’t left.”
“Well, I don’t have any useful news. I’ve checked with all the usual sources and no one quite knows what to make of him.”