Invisible Man: Chapters 7-11

His way of talking to Mr. Norton had been a foreshadowing of my misfortune — just as I had sensed that it would be.

The car roared and swayed, pressing me hard against her, but when I took a furtive glance around no one was paying me the slightest attention.

I was miserable and I dared not talk to anyone about my problems; not even the officials at Men's House, for since they had learned that I was to be assigned to an important job, they treated me with a certain deference; therefore I was careful to hide my growing doubts.

Please don't misunderstand me; I don't say all this to impress you. Or to give myself some kind of sadistic catharsis.

The bearer of this letter is a former student of ours (I say former because he shall never, under any circumstances, be enrolled as a student here again) who has been expelled for a most serious defection from our strictest rules of deportment.

Thus, while the bearer is no longer a member of our scholastic family, it is highly important that his severance with the college be executed as painlessly as possible.

There was a note of insinuation in his voice, and I looked up from tying my shoe, breathing with conscious evenness.

Somewhere an engine ground in furious futility, grating loudly until a pain shot around the curve of my head and bounced me off into blackness for a distance, only to strike another pain that lobbed me back.

Holding on grimly, I could hear the sound of someone wading, sloshing, nearby, and an old man's garrulous voice saying, "I tole 'em these here young Nineteen-Hundred boys ain't no good for the job. They ain't got the nerves. Naw, sir, they just ain't got the nerves."

I tried to speak, to answer, but something heavy moved again, and I was understanding something fully and trying again to answer but seemed to sink to the center of a lake of heavy water and pause, transfixed and numb with the sense that I had lost irrevocably an important victory.

Green hedges, dazzling with red wild roses appeared behind my eyes, stretching with a gentle curving to an infinity empty of objects, a limpid blue space.

"The machine will produce the results of a prefrontal lobotomy without the negative effects of the knife," the voice said.

Faces hovered above me like inscrutable fish peering myopically through a glass aquarium wall.

And remember, you'll be adequately compensated for your experience.

"We require an affidavit releasing the company of responsibility," he said.