I realized something the other day.
I've completed my list of things to do to earn my ring, and I have Charlie's vote, but there is one thing he ashed me to do that I haven't gotten around to doing--learn how to see him when he's invisible and make myself so invisible that I can sneak up on him. I'd put that rather daunting project off for later and then I'd forgotten about it. And apparently Charlie is fine with me finishing without getting that part done, but I've realized I'm not.
And now is really a better time to do it, since Charlie is invisible far more often at this time of year.
I should point out that Charlie is never literally invisible. He doesn't even get hard to see the way Allen does. Rather, he occupies places where they eye simply does not look. He takes advantage of other people's obliviousness in order to find his privacy. That's why he's "invisible" more at this time of year--he's not available to students, and while he continues living on campus, he tries not to attract the notice of the students who spend the winter here, too.
I already know how to perform the trick myself. I seldom do it deliberately, but I often notice other people when I'm outside being quite and watching things, and they seldom notice me. I've learned to know when I'm hard to see and when I'm not, so that even when invisibility is not my goal (more like a side-effect) I can feel it come over me and know I'll have to de-cloak if I want to be seen--and de-cloak carefully so that I don't startle or frighten anybody.
But I doubt that my version of invisibility will work on Charlie, yet, since the whole point is to take advantage of other people's obliviousness and he doesn't have any, none I've never noticed, anyway.
He says that an advantage of becoming a hunter is that one learns how to think like prey, and prey cannot afford to ever be oblivious.
So I've put that part of it off for a while, and I'm focusing on how to see Charlie, not on how not to be seen by him--and strangely enough, I've done it twice this past week.
I'd asked him, back when he gave me the assignment, how I was supposed to be able to tell the difference between not seeing him because I haven't defeated his invisibility and not seeing him because he's simply not there. He said that if I learn how to tell if he is there, I will also learn how to tell if he's not. Wise words, I've decided.
So I've adopted a practice of, every few minutes, checking to see if Charlie is around. I look for an absence of Charlie, and I do this even in places where he could not possibly be, like in my bedroom or the shower. I'm just getting used to looking for him regularly, noticing whether he is there or not, rather than waiting passively for him to impinge upon my consciousness.
And twice, while I was checking for an absence of Charlie, I spotted his presence instead.
Once, I'm fairly sure he wasn't trying to be invisible at all, he was just walking down the road on campus and I happened to come out of the Meditation Hall and look left and there he was. But the second time he may indeed have been hiding, though not especially from me. He was crouched down behind a shrub at the back of the Mansion, looking at the ground and not moving. That he was wearing his brown school uniform--as he usually does--helped, since the ground was covered by mostly brown fallen leaves, but the main thing is he was where nobody would expect him to be.
I stopped to look at him and he, probably hearing my footsteps on the gravel and hearing my footprints stop, he looked up. We made I contact and I glanced at the ground he'd been watching and then looked at him, curiously. But he held up his finger for silence so I nodded and walked away.
Maybe when I see him next he'll tell me what he was looking at.
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