THE ULTIMATE VOYEUR
BY GLORYBOY
Sunday February 18, 2007
I thought about telling this story in the third person but I think it is better for telling it in the first person since I’ve decided to finally record my adventures, my life, for anyone that cares to hear it and cares, possibly, to believe it. My given name is Carson Lawrence but I have not heard my name spoken, indeed have not spoken to anyone or been spoken to by them, for so long that I would not remember if I did not talk to myself. The irony is that it is my choice to live this way. It started out very innocently too. But I will allow my relevant diary entries to speak for themselves with occasional present day footnotes.
Diary Entry Dated Thursday March 16, 1972
This is just unreal. I can’t believe it. Steve was going to slap me around in the locker room after gym class today just as he always does. I know he was going to. I was so scared. God, how I wished I could teleport or walk through walls or turn invisible or stop time or something, anything so he would not slap me around again or snap me with a wet towel while the other boys just laughed like it was such a big joke, like I was a big joke. I wanted to not be there. I wanted him to just forget about it for one day, just not notice me and forget I was there. It was almost a prayer, “Please don’t notice me. Please don’t notice me.” AND HE DIDN”T!!!! He didn’t just ignore me or not talk to me. He walked right by me without even glancing. He was walking right at me and I figured he was going to run me over. Big joke, right? Knock down the fat kid. But he had a look in his eyes like he didn’t even see me. When I realized he wasn’t going to stop or even slow down, I jumped out of the way. But I didn’t quite make it. We bumped into each other. I got slammed back into the lockers and he stumbled the other way.
“What the fuck?” he said.
He was looking around like he had no idea what just happened. I was so mad I said something out loud I had never dared say to him before.
“Asshole,” I blurted.
He didn’t even look at me. He shrugged and started walking again. I made quite a noise when I slammed the lockers and he didn’t even look my way then. One of his buddies, Bob, said, “Funny, the way you walked into Lawrence and made it look like an accident.”
Steve gave him a puzzled look and said, “What are you talking about?”
As they walked out, Bob was explaining how great it was how Steve had run me over and Steve was looking at Bob like he was crazy.
“Lawrence ain’t even here today,” he was saying.
There’s got to be more to this. It’s just too good to be true.
Diary Entry Dated Friday March 17, 1972
I tested this last night and it works. I tried it on Mom and Dad. I concentrated first on them not noticing me when I walked into the room but it didn’t work. But it felt like I was trying to divide my concentration. So I tried it again, only just on Dad. I stood right in front of him while he was watching television and he didn’t even notice. Mom finally said something to me about blocking his view but Dad asked her what she was talking about. My concentration broke and Dad suddenly said, “I didn’t even notice he was there.” I think he saw me but somehow I was preventing his conscious mind from registering the fact. How he could still see what was happening on the television, I don’t know. I mean, I was blocking his view. Even if he didn’t notice me, how did he still know what was happening on the TV? The human mind has so many untapped abilities.
Diary Entry Dated Friday March 24, 1972
Wow, what a week. I’ve been too busy living life to write about it. My concentration is getting a little better. That first encounter with Steve was sort of a fluke. I had no idea what was happening so I wasn’t nervous about this ability. But once I tried to use it on purpose, any distraction broke my concentration. But I’m getting better. I guess it’s like learning to walk. At first, you think you’ll never be able to do it then you are doing it without even consciously thinking about it. Even though it’s only been a week, it takes a serious distraction to break my concentration. I’ve got to keep practicing. I don’t know what the limits of this ability are but I’m going to find out.
Diary Entry Dated Friday April 7, 1972
I have to start writing more but things don’t change that much in one day and it seems as if all I care about now is this power. Well, why not? This doesn’t happen every day. It’s getting easy to make one person at a time not notice me. I’m getting so I can make it work on two people at the same time. A couple of people started getting suspicious. For instance, I was concentrating on Steve not noticing me. My friend Neil walked up and started talking to me. To Steve’s point of view, Neil was talking to himself.
I’ve tried to figure out what has happened to me. It’s pretty obvious though. There have always been rare people with superhuman abilities. Nobody really knows why. As the population increases, there are more such beings. Still, it’s never been more than one person out of a couple of million. Most of the time, the abilities are fairly subtle even at that. There’s that guy who can make flowers grow faster for instance. People like the guy who can bench forty tons and shrug off shells from a rocket launcher and that woman with the fire powers are the rarest of the rare. I think what I can do fits into the ‘subtle’ category but subtle doesn’t always mean weak.
Diary Entry Dated Friday May 26, 1972
It was the last day of school. It’s the end of my freshman year of high school. I was expecting three more years of hell but maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe it won’t be at all. It’s getting to the point where I can affect a lot of people. For a while, I had to look at them one at a time and think, “You don’t see me. You don’t hear me. You don’t have any awareness of my presence here.” The cool thing is that it wasn’t just that I turned invisible. It was more than that. It was like they had no awareness that I had ever been there to begin with. I don’t mean they didn’t remember me at all. They just didn’t remember me being there right at that time. In the last month, I’ve gotten better at it. I was able to shorten my thoughts to, “You have no awareness of my presence”. That covered everything. Then, as I kept practicing, it got to the point that I didn’t even have to do that. I could just look at someone and concentrate for a moment. Then I could look at the next person and then the next one. The effect lasts long enough that I was able to make Steve, Bob and George, the three bullies that always hang together and seem to use me as their whipping boy, all forget I was there.
I used to hate school. Now I almost hate that school is ending for the summer. This is a small town. Why can’t we go to school into June like a big city school? Well, no matter. I’m going to keep practicing all summer.
Diary Entry Dated Tuesday September 5, 1972
This was the first day back in school and my first chance to put my practice to the test with a large group of people. I kept practicing all summer. I think I’ll tell you about that first and then talk about what happened today in school. Okay, I suppose that someone reading this some day (who is ever going to read this besides me I don’t know) might like a little background. Here we are in a small town in Northern Michigan. I am talking about way up in Northern Michigan, the Upper Peninsula. Technically, it’s not even in a small town because we live out in the country. The school is in the town, of course. Anyway, during the summer, I went up the road to the neighbor’s house. One of the boys there is my age and in the same grade as me. Another boy is a year older than me. There is also a girl, three years younger. Mike, the boy my age, was out in the yard shooting hoops. He saw me coming and I just concentrated, “You have no awareness of my presence.” I know he
saw me. He had started to say something. But then he just turned and kept shooting hoops. I walked by him and into the open garage. There was a side door from the garage into the house. I took a deep breath. This was really putting things to the test. I know Frank, the older boy, saw me. He probably assumed Mike had told me to come in. I got a little nervous and flubbed it at first. He started to say something to me. But I buckled down and focused.
“You- have- no- awareness- of- my- presence”, I said out loud and saw he was looking through me before I had even finished saying it.
The mother and father were sitting in the living room. He was reading the newspaper and she was reading a book. I looked at the father and got him before he even knew I was there to begin with. He just went on reading. The mother looked up and smiled. She said, “Oh, hi Carson. Would you like—“ then she just looked down and continued reading as if I had never been there. Frank turned and said, “Who are you talking to Mom?”
But she gave him a puzzled look and said she didn’t remember saying anything. The girl, Jane, was apparently up in her room listening to music and she never did come down. I walked around the house for a few minutes, even sat and watched television with them while they had no awareness that I was there. But I didn’t have all that much confidence in my abilities so I only stayed about five to ten minutes and then quietly left.
Yes, I know, not very exciting. But today in school was a trip. I got to my first period class before anybody else, that way I could see each person as they came through the door. By the time class started, I was sitting in a room of about two dozen people that had no awareness that I was there. Attendance was called and I was marked absent. I have never in my life had such a feeling of freedom, of being able to go anywhere and do anything unbothered. Towards the end of the hour, I started feeling like I needed to look at everyone and reinforce my ‘suggestion’ that they didn’t notice me, like maybe it was starting to wear off. But that was no great effort. I just glanced at each person and it was done.
I decided to put myself to a greater test the next time. I went to my second hour class and did nothing to hide my presence. I wanted to make sure that the effect had worn off of everyone. When it did, that amazed me too. When they became aware of me, they reacted as if I had been there all along. So I decided that third hour would be the big test. This time, I made sure I was the last one in, late even. As the teacher started to admonish me for my tardiness, he became the first target, stopping in mid-sentence. Then I swept my gaze across the room, making sure to specifically look at each person. But it was just a matter of sweeping my gaze down each row of desks. It took only a few seconds and two dozen people had no awareness of me. I could walk up and down the aisles, stomp my feet and stand behind the teacher giving him bunny ears. I even wrote stuff on the blackboard and nobody saw me doing it or saw the chalk moving. A minute or so later, people started noticing the stuff written on the board and wondering how it got there but they did not notice me. And then, out in the hallway after class, I noticed Shauna Roberts and my most daring and risky idea came to me.
Present Day Footnote: Wednesday February 21, 2007
I didn’t know it then but that idea, formed as a teenager, was to become the pattern of my existence with all the fun it implies and with all the isolation and loneliness that resulted as well.
Continuing Diary Entry Dated Tuesday September 5, 1972
Shauna Roberts is the hottest girl in school. She’s a senior now, two years older than me. It makes me feel giddy just being near her. Every guy thinks she has the most fantastic body and is the most beautiful girl in the world. Until today, I was an infatuated with her as anyone else. Now I’m more infatuated with her. Now I know she is even more beautiful, has an even more perfect body, than I ever imagined. The sad part is that making her not notice me wasn’t hard. It’s not as if she ever did to begin with. Oh, but enough whining. I played it smart. I lingered near the door to the girl’s locker room. That way, I could do my “You have no awareness of my existence” speech in my mind for each girl. Granted I didn’t really need to think it out in so many words anymore but I was taking no chances.
I should explain that there were two entrances to the locker rooms. One was in a side hallway and the other was from the gym. After making sure I had ‘gotten’ most of the girls, I went around and walked into their gym class in progress. The girls mostly went through the side door, changed and went into gym class. This meant that there were only a few I had to ‘get’ after walking into their class. A few questions of “What do you want?” ended as they forgot I was there.
I wasn’t really there to spy on their gym class. I was just there to keep reinforcing the suggestion that they didn’t perceive me. What I was really there for was what happened when class was over.
Present Day Footnote Dated Thursday February 22, 2007
I’m taking the liberty of preempting what I originally said in my diary and substituting my current view. What I said then was what you’d expect from a teenaged boy. Hell, what I’m going to say now might be what you’d expect from a teenaged boy. But if I could somehow go back in time and see what I saw then, I’m sure I would not react as I did then. Shauna seemed the hottest woman in the world to me back then. If I could go back as I am now and see her in that locker room, I’d probably think she was just a kid, nice enough and all but just a kid, though she was eighteen. But at that time, I had never seen a woman naked before and she really was the best looking of any girl in school. My reaction back then was, shall we say, enthusiastic. Now, at the risk of embarrassing myself, I’ll let the readers see what I wrote back then.
Continuing Diary Entry Dated Tuesday September 5, 1972
Oh God, this power is unbelievable. I can stand here in the doorway to the shower completely unnoticed. No power in the world could be as good as or better than this. I feel giddy. My knees are shaking. Oh god in heaven, I had no idea how gorgeous she is, how perfect. When she started massaging her breasts with that soap, I thought I would lose it right then and there. I mean lose it in the dirty sense and lose control of the power. I had to take deep breaths and relax a little as the heat washed over me. I was sweating and not just because the steam from the shower made it hot in there. I was so tempted to walk into the shower and get a closer look, to walk right up to her. But my clothes would get drenched. It would be worth it, true, but I was also hesitant about how far I could push it without being noticed. What if she bumped into me? What if her naked, wet, glistening body slammed into mine? Would she know I was there? What if I wanted more than just seeing her? What if I was tempted to touch her? The same question arises. Would she be aware of it? Let’s say she didn’t notice. How much and in what ways could I touch her without her noticing? That’s when the guilt hit me because I started thinking about what I was doing. I’m spying on these girls, invading their privacy. I’m a Peeping Tom. Of course, the guilt didn’t stop me from looking. After all, I wasn’t hurting anyone. They had no awareness that I was even there. There would be no shame or embarrassment for them. I was really more nervous about getting caught. Good old underconfidence. Maybe that’s why I got a power like this to begin with.
So anyway, they came out of the shower and I stood in the locker room feeling quite sweaty, watching every detail as they dressed. Well, truthfully, I didn’t notice most of them dressing, mostly Shauna. And then I did something on an inspiration. No, I didn’t touch her. I wasn’t quite that brave. I followed her. I mean, I followed her for the rest of the day. I mentioned she was a senior so she had different classes than me. I blew off all my classes and just followed her into every class she had. When she went to the lunch room, I held back until most of the students got their meals and sat down as to avoid getting bumped. I’m sure a few people saw me in the lunch room before I swept everyone with my gaze. Then, unnoticed, I was able to stand right next to her table, listen to the things she said in conversation with other girls, be a silent and invisible ghost observing her life and feeling slightly a part of it in a way I knew was not going to happen in any other way.
I don’t know what to make of myself. Am I a stalker? I don’t think so. A stalker would make his presence known; try to have something with her. No, I’m just a Peeping Tom, a voyeur. No, I’m not just a voyeur. I’m the Ultimate Voyeur. If I ever became a super hero, maybe that should be my name. Yeah right, like a world famous hero being the ultimate voyeur isn’t a contradiction in terms.