“Come back here you,” shouted the Old Man into the void where the monk had stood not a moment before. “Show yourself! How dare you inveigh against the conjuror’s arts, and then perform the very feat recorded in this scroll? Who invited that man? To what sect, to what teaching does he adhere?”

But no one knew the stranger who had so effortlessly demonstrated mastery of insubstantiation. When had he arrived, this unassuming yet powerful mystic, and from whence? With whom had he been conversing before the Old Man punctuated the easy equanimity of the gathering? None could say. “It’s as if he conjured himself out of smoke and fumes,” opined the Ontologist. “Or out of the cloud of words swirling about the room,” offered one of the Striatorians.

What began as a mild chuckle gradually crescendoed into hearty laughter, and the diffuse vectors of attention scattered across the room came into sharp focus on the indistinct features of the young Andalusian priest. “A cloud of words: of course. Don’t you see?” The priest wiped his eyes on the extravagantly ornamented scarf wrapped about his thick neck. “It is a metaphor. ‘Invisibility is the corollary of visibility’ – this is what the Easterner said, yes?” The priest paused to acknowledge the nods and murmurs of agreement. “And ‘disappearing is as easy as appearing’?” Again the priest laughed; no one else seemed amused. “These are metaphorical words. Tell me: when you pass through the busy square at the heart of a great city – you see many people throngs of people. But: do you see any one person in particular? You do not. And yet if someone in the crowd were to jostle you, causing you to drop the ham you had just purchased from the baker, in your irritation you would become aware of this particular person, would you not? This one person, previously indistinguishable from the rest, has to you become visible.” The Andalusian, smiling broadly, crossed his arms across his chest. “It is the enactment of metaphor we have witnessed, nothing more.”

Now it was the Old Man’s turn to laugh. “The monk was there, and then he was not. And you say this act of dematerialization serves to represent an idea to which it corresponds? That the experience of not being acknowledged by others, of one’s subjective invisibility, is the reality for which physical invisibility is merely a… a shadow play?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes, that’s precisely what I contend,” the Andalusian replied. Mind, Idea – of course these are more real than matter. Looking upon my face and my admittedly excessive bulk you see a solid mass. But the ideas I think and the words with which I speak them – are these not far more solid than my physical substance?”

“In your case, mate, I wouldn’t count on it,” shouted a voice from the other side of the room. Laughter erupted from every corner of the inn.

The Old Man raised his hands. “A moment please.” He glanced first at the Andalusian, who if his facial expression could be read as a metaphor for his state of mind, was as amused as everyone else at the joke told at his expense. Then, lowering himself back into his chair, the Old Man appeared visibly to withdraw into himself. Had his thoughts been visible, written in letters for all to see, the other theologians would have known that he was thinking of the Trappist who, though having employed very different means, had disappeared just as convincingly as had the Easterner, and for a far longer period of time. Many had witnessed his death, only to be told it was an elaborate deception. But then new stories began to circulate: this time he really was dead, drowned in the very coffin that had saved him the first time. As time passed the speculation settled into presumed fact.

“Suppose, through fate or chance,” the Old Man began, “an invisibility cloak were to come into your possession, a real one. Do you truly vanish, or is it simply that no one pays you the slightest mind? In fact it matters little. The cloak hides you from your enemies, from those who would destroy you if they could. It buffers you from interference, allowing you to pursue your private schemes without interference and to hone your skills before putting them to the test. It lets you explore dangerous and forbidden realms without compromising your safety or your reputation. In secret you amass a storehouse of arcane knowledge, master strange spells. You delve into the hidden realms and steal their secrets. You’re ready to face death himself if need be, for even death cannot detect your presence.

“But now, prepared at last to unveil yourself, you discover that your invisibility cloak has wrapped itself around you so tightly that you cannot remove it. No one can detect your presence. What you know, what you can do, who you’ve become – hidden. You demonstrate your powers but no one is watching, or maybe they convince themselves it was an accident, or act as if it had never happened. It’s as though you have become a ghost haunting the world of the living. But even more: you are haunted by it, by the world, by the opaque separateness of the beings who surround you. As if you were already dead.

“Of course you can continue to take advantage of your invisibility, cultivating the kind of uniqueness that only isolation affords, but what does it matter if no one can ever see you? You stop watching, learning, creating, caring. As if you were already dead. Would you even care if you released the most powerful spells upon the world if no one knew who was wielding them? Suppose through your anonymous wanderings you stumbled upon the portal that returns the dead to the land of the living. Would you not far rather find the magical stone that can transport the living across the barrier of invisibility so they can see the ghosts of the lonely dead?”