a wide berth mistaken for invisibility
He had no clue how he really looked. Like many of the itinerant mad of metro Boston, he tended to confuse a wide berth with invisibility.
Context
The narrator's one cold step outside Lenz's skull, and the book's definition of the bottom's blindness: the space people leave around the visibly wrecked, which the wrecked read not as revulsion but as stealth. He believes he is disguised and undetectable precisely because everyone can see exactly what he is and is giving him room.