Free The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman

into a website called goodreads.com: He looks at other people’s reviews on Amazon and writes his own reviews from whatever he gleans. Bruce has, relative to a lot of the other people I observed, a relatively rich life. He isn’t dark or depressed, or at least he wasn’t while I was there. Never sighed, never cried. But I noticed one omnipresent aspect about his online activity: Itwas constantly interrupted by Bruce’s ongoing attempt to write an e-mail. One e-mail, to one person. He would open his e-mail account, type a few sentences, delete a few sentences, and then close it back down and do something else. At first, I thought he was writing a bunch of different e-mails to a bunch of different recipients, but it turned out that he was only working on one. It was a single e-mail to one woman, maybe a hundred words long. The woman’s name was Sarah. He would work on this e-mail like it was a sculpture. He’d type, “Long time no talk,” and then he’d delete that and write, “Been a long time since we talked.” Then he’d delete that and type, “It’s been awhile, no?” Completely innocuous stuff, but he’d type different variations of these words and pace around his living room, saying these phrases aloud, testing them out. He kept trying to craft a joke about how his job was more boring than her job, but he was obviously paralyzed by the prospect of offending her. During the first night I was there, he probably built and rebuilt that e-mail five hundred times—yet he never worked on it for more than five consecutive minutes. He’d add something or delete something, and then he’d go back to the Internet to waste another quarter of an hour. He’d always return to the e-mail, fixate over its contents for another five minutes, and repeat the process all over. He finally sent the message at about two a.m., and when he did, it was the most bland, nonmeaningful letter you can imagine. I read it over his shoulder. Nothing romantic, nothing humorous, nothing clever. Zero insight. I watch him punch the “send” button. Bruce sits motionless and breathes through his mouth. It’s like he’s watching a person die in a hospital bed: He wants to do something, but there’s nothing to do. So he ends up doing the only thing anyone can do once they’ve sent a message they can’t stop thinking about: He goes back and rereads his own sent e-mail for another forty-five minutes, parsing and reparsing every line like it’s the book of Revelation. It was excruciating. I felt terrible for him. It was eating him alive. He was eating himself alive. I was so relieved when he went to bed.
    The next morning he wakes up early. He drinks a 7:05 Dr. Pepper for breakfast and checks his e-mail. He has dozens of messages, but nothing he cares about. Most are left unread. He leaves for work. I stay behind. I immediately turn on his computer, assuming a man who lives alone will not have his e-mail account protected by a password. But Bruce is the kind of man who does. I suppose the kind of guy who buys a four-bedroom home in order to spend his nights in a desk chair is the same kind of guy who protects his e-mail from roommates who don’t exist. I look through his desk drawers and find nothing personal. He has a photo album in his bedroom, but almost all the photos look like they were taken during the same fraternity party. I look for anything that might indicate who Sarah is, but there’s nothing. No trace. Outside of his hard drive, there’s nothing in this house to indicate that Bruce is alive.
    The day drags. Bruce arrives home at roughly the same time as yesterday. He walks in the door and checks his e-mail. He goes upstairs to change clothes, strolls back down, and rapidly masturbates. Today is yesterday. He boils a few hot dogs and eats them at his desk, wrapping them in white bread and smearing the meat with chili sauce. He starts playing RISK. He leaves some comments on the political blogs. The only difference is that,