FaceMate

by Steven M. Greenberg

So she’d gone to FaceMate—The very day she’d heard about it from a girlfriend in an email, she’d gone and checked it out. And, even though the matches weren’t perfect yet, they sure were getting closer—Bottom line: Who could say? Maybe one day, she’d open her inbox and find Tommie’s identical double—his long-lost twin—And Tommie’s double might be looking for a girl just like her—who could say it was impossible?—five-six, long black wavy hair, pretty enough face, trim enough figure: Sandy Garber, that was her. And they’d write to one another, and they’d meet, and….

  It was nice just to imagine that, thought Sandy, as she closed her eyes, crossed her fingers, made her silent wish again—for the hundredth time, probably—took a long, deep prefatory breath, and….

  Click, went the mouse, and up came the standard cover letter from the site: Good; at least they weren’t asking her for that extra twenty bucks she hadn’t had to pay. It was a match, alright; and the intro letter read the same darn way as it had read in the past:

  Here is/are the match/es for the submission you sent in. You may contact the individual of interest at the email address provided with the photo. Those of our participants who have elected to supply contact information have also agreed to receive email responses from their matches, and if an email address accompanies the picture you receive, your email response to the subject will be forwarded automatically from our site.

  OK, well, she hadn’t responded to any of the prior matches thus far—they hadn’t quite been close enough to yank her chain. But who knew? Maybe this one would. She hoped it would, prayed it would, fervently. She crossed her fingers again, took another humongous breath—And when she uncrossed her fingers and clicked again, and the current, latest match appeared….

  Oh my God! Oh, thank heavens! Thank heavens! Sandra Garber was amazed—totally! She was, like, totally blown away!

  “Oh my God—Oh my GOD! It’s HIM!—IT’S HIM!”

  Lucky that Sandy’s neighbors weren’t home from work just then; if they had been, they probably would have called the cops. For Sandy shrieked. She squealed. She screamed. Loud. And she screamed and squealed and shrieked that way because—holy crap!—it really was him, exactly him—Either him or his identical twin—Oh, the hairstyle was a little different, sure: Longer, not the way the guys generally wear their hair today. But, the brow-line was the same. The nose—the same. The chin, with that pretty little dimple—My gawd! A, like, total carbon copy.

  And the eyes! Oh wow! Tommy and this other kid were the only two people in the whole wide world who could have ever had eyes that incredibly blue. If the guy on her screen was in Timbuktu—my gosh!—she’d travel there to see him if he had the slightest interest in meeting with a sweet young gal who was a whiz at ordering parts for General Motors cars. If Tommie wouldn’t have her—and—heck—he’d made that conclusion pretty doggone plain—then maybe this other amazing guy would. Wow! She was enthralled. She was excited. And so, of course, that instant, without a trace of hesitation, she wrote right back:

  She wrote:

  Hi, Ben. I know your name is Ben, because it says so in the email with your picture. You don’t know me. My name is Sandy. I live in Arizona. In the US, in case you don’t live in the US yourself. I got your picture from FaceMate, but it doesn’t have any information about you on it other than your name. What I did was send in a picture of a guy I know from work. That might be kind of cheating a little bit, but I did it anyway. His name is Tom. He’s a mechanic here where I work, but he’s also in college. He’s really smart and really cute like you. Tom is really busy with his work and stuff and not that interested in having a relationship, but I like the way he looks and I would be really glad to get to know someone who looks like him. That would be you. Exactly—Which is amazing, I’m telling you. Really. So if you want to meet a real admirer, I could maybe send a picture and see if you would like to meet me too. I hope you understand this, but since you have an American sounding name I think you will. If you live in Australia or someplace like that I could come there maybe sometime soon. I’ve got a lot of money saved up to pay for a trip or maybe if you’d like to come to Arizona, I could help you pay the fare. So if you want to take a chance and meet somebody kind of cute—a lot of fellows say that anyway—write back. I hope you do. I’ve got my fingers crossed.

  Sincerely yours,

  Sandra Ellen Garber

  from the USA

  The email was sent forthwith and it was instantly processed by the computer in Columbus, then dispatched with barely a millisecond delay to the party who had logged the matching photo in—this party being Alexander Daugherty, the chief proprietor of the FaceMate site himself.

  And when Alexander Daugherty opened it, not quite two minutes after it was sent, he glanced it over, passionlessly, then dispatched it, in turn, to his associate Rajiv Patel.

  And from Rajiv Patel, when he checked his inbox half an hour later, the note got passed on, accordingly, to a Mr. Edward Parker of Red Bank, New Jersey. Who happened to be dining at that moment with a charming lady he had met at the Roxy Bar a week or two before, a lady with a wedding ring on her finger, full lips, big bosoms, and no associated last name.

  Busy as Eddie was at that particular moment, and thereafter for the greater part of the day, it would be another twelve hours before he opened the email which had traveled so far so fast and in such an unlikely correspondence chain. And twenty-four hours more would pass before Mr. Parker mulled it over for the third and final time, and finally decided on the appropriate thing to do.

  But Alex got another email as well—It wasn’t until the following morning that the email came in, a nine-hour time change doing what day-night cycles are prone to do—And it was posted to him, Alex Daugherty, since he, Alex Daugherty, was the one who had logged the initial matching photo in, just as he had logged its accompanying image in at the same time.

  Its less-than-perfect English would have been charming in a way, if Alex had been even the least bit susceptible to charm. But the verbal imperfections added no impediment anyway, since any literate person could decipher it with sufficient clarity to get the gist. The accompanying message, gist included, read as follows:

  My dearest Elizabeth Sommers,

  This day I have found on my computer very lovely picture of you. Perhaps I should not say it is lovely as I am saying, because in saying this I am giving compliment to myself. The compliment is for reason that you and I, we both look very much alike. I have showed the picture of you to several, and they all say that you and I we look very like twins. And when I look at this picture, it is like picture of myself, but with different clothes that I never wear before, otherwise I will think that this is really picture of myself.

  OK, I hope you will write back to me. Maybe we are really twins that grow up in different places, although my mama, she laugh at me when I tell her this. She also say we look very much same, when she see this picture, and my friend here who is from America also tells me this—Maybe you are from America too, this picture does not say.

  So please write to me if you do not mind to do. I wonder how much we are like in different ways or only in way we look. So write and we will figure out. I am ballet dancer and live with my mama in nice Moskva flat. I have 22 years age, how many years have you?

  Good bye for now

  Your twin friend in Moskva,

  Liliana Alexandrovna Glinskaya

  Email Lili2441@vmail.rus

  This email, too, was forwarded by Alex to Rajiv shortly after its reception. But unlike the prior email forwarded the previous day, this posed a major problem as to what the recipient properly ought to do. After all, the girl in the photo was dead these thirty years; consider that.

  For a while, Rajiv was in a devil of a quandary as to how he should proceed. Until in the end, since he couldn’t quite decide, he did what he’d done the prior day, and sent the whole file, text and picture, the whole damn kit and caboodle, in a forward off to Ed.

  20

  “Hey, Cindy.�
�

  She was pulling something from the printer when Eddie lumbered in, and the door behind her was closed. So it was for their ears only, there in the anteroom to Ben’s office, when Eddie asked her:

  “The boss around?”

  “Nope, the missus picked him up to go to lunch—Why? You need him for something?”

  “Actually, I don’t. It was you I really wanted to talk to, if you’ve got a little time.”

  “Nothing but time, Mr. P. You’re as much my boss as Mr. A is. So—what’s up?”

  Eddie stepped over and parked his carcass on the chair in front of Cindy’s desk. A lot of famous backsides had nestled in that chair, billionaires, celebrities, slippery politicians, any number of foreign dignitaries, the cream of the crop of the movers and shakers of the world—all lined up to see Ben Atherton, whether for financing, contributions, or maybe an intro to some bigger fry they had the need to know. Cindy had dealt with them all, and in the process of dealing with them, she’d given sanctuary to Ben behind his paneled walnut door. She’d been his guardian and gatekeeper these past seven years, always protective, always keeping all of the bad stuff out of his life and letting only the good get in. Ben could trust her with anything, simply because she could trust herself with anything that affected Ben. If there was a decision to be made as to Ben’s well-being, the decision could always be left to Cindy. And that’s why Eddie Parker had come

  “OK, here’s the thing:” Eddie leant forward and put his elbows on her desk, as though to keep his words in confidence. Not that anyone could hear them, no—but the implicit secrecy of Eddie’s posturing and mien underlined the privileged nature of the information he was fixing to impart. Cindy perceived this instinctively and moved a little forward herself, a visible symbol of their collusiveness and conjoint trust. And in their collaborative positioning, Eddie quietly went on:

  “I might have done something very smart or very stupid, and I don’t know which it is. I need you to help me decide.”

  “OK, sure, Mr. P, I’m listening.”

  “You know Ben’s history as well as I do by now—his early history, I mean. You know what I’m talking about?”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no—I know a lot of the boss’s past, of course. But you’ve known him a lot longer than I have, so….”

  “Well, you know about the tragedy he lived through—when he was a kid, I mean. The stuff that all of us lived through with him, Carole and Charlotte included—I’m sure you’ve heard about that awful business—right?”

  “Well, naturally I’ve heard. Who do you think keeps the willowy young blondes away from Mr. A? Don’t you remember that, umm—oh, damn it!—what was her name again? The wife of the guy from accounting? You remember that sleazy business, don’t you, Mr. P? That was the biggest problem of my first year here.”

  “Yeah, I do remember that—I don’t remember the couple’s name any better than you do, though. But, God! she was a handful, all right. We finally had to get rid of the husband to keep her away from Ben.”

  “Uh-huh, the girls all kind of like him—Hey, for a fifty-year-old geezer, he’s quite a Cary Grant-ishy kind of guy even now—and he was seven years younger then. But that one!—Whew! She was persistent, wasn’t she? So, I never got the scoop completely—The problem with her was precisely what?—Not just that she was after him, and certainly not that he was after her—but it was the way she looked that was the problem, wasn’t that it?”

  “Exactly it. She didn’t look a lot like Lizzie, but just the hair and the general shape of her, and the way she sort of curled one side of her mouth when she smiled—the resemblance was close enough.”

  “And that’s why Mr. A got sick, is it?”

  “Sick, yeah, I guess you’d call it sick. He gets depressed every once in a while even now, but then—That Barbara did it to him—Yeah, that was her name, Barbara Block. Her husband’s name was Alvin—Alvin Block—I wonder what happened to him afterward. Jesus, he would have been a millionaire by now if not for that moron wife of his. She wasn’t even all that cute—it was just the vague resemblance that did Ben in. It’s the resemblance that gets him. You know, to this day, there isn’t a single picture of Lizzie anywhere around—or there wasn’t anyway, until….”

  “Lizzie? That was his girlfriend’s name?”

  “Yeah, I guess you wouldn’t know it, since no one ever mentions her anywhere around Ben. But—hey, that’s the thing I need to talk to you about anyway. You know Ben almost as well as I do, and you know his reactions to things, and he kind of confides in you, doesn’t he?”

  “I guess so. I think he trusts me as much as anyone in the place.”

  “Which he should, Cindy, which he definitely should. And I’m gonna trust you too. I’m gonna trust you to help me decide what to do with these goddam pictures I’ve got—which I’ll show you once I explain a little more.”

  Whereupon Eddie set a folder containing the alleged pictures on the desk in front of them both. He didn’t open it yet; a bit of prefatory narrative would be required before that. And having cleared his throat and sat back in the chair again, he promptly dove right in—

  Giving her a capsule summary of the loss poor Bennie had sustained. She’d heard some of it before, obviously; but there was a whole lot of Ben’s tragic youthful life that she clearly didn’t know. As Eddie spoke, he could see on Cindy’s face the devotion she bore toward Ben, the shock and sorrow in her eyes as Eddie’s tale of woe progressed, the rueful shaking of her head when the tale about the final, fatal night inevitably got told.

  Then, once he’d finished with the ancient part of Ben’s history, he made it to the new. Cindy knew all about the FaceMate site, so no need to go through that. She had met the leading players in the game, Rajiv and Alex, if briefly, and could relate to Eddie’s introduction of those supporting actors into the play. Which brought him finally to the picture he and Charlotte had found; which brought him sequentially to his sending it to Rajiv, through whom it got to Alex, who took it—both images on it—and entered both those images into….

  “So—I don’t quite get it, Mr. P: Why would anyone try to match the picture of a dead girl with someone living?—It doesn’t make much sense.”

  “Hey, it doesn’t make any sense, Cindy. But this fellow Alex—He doesn’t make a lot of sense either when you have to deal with him, and I’m guessing that with Alex, the normal rules of reason don’t apply.”

  “And he put the picture in of Mr. A when he was—how old?”

  “Twenty-three or so. It was just before that night—so, yeah, he was right around twenty-three at the time.”

  “Which makes no sense either, I would think.”

  “It doesn’t—But actually, it kind of does in a way. You see, they wanted to impress Ben with how well the program worked, and something like eighty-some percent of the pictures they’ve got to match their users with are kids—you know, teens or twenty-somethings. They sent me a few of the older people’s matches they found, but they were so far off, there was no point in even showing them to Ben; and as for the younger matches, some of them were close to Benny when he was young, but I thought they were irrelevant. So they kept on pestering me to come up with a picture of him when he was a kid, and…. Well, that’s how the whole damn thing began.”

  “And then you found that photo, right?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got it here if you’d like to see.”

  Eddie opened the folder and pulled out the enlarged, enhanced copy of the picture he and Charlotte had come across that night. Even now, it was hard for him to look at it for very long, so many memories did it evoke, and so painful were those memories in their impact. Cindy held the photo close up and examined it. There was a glint of recognition in her eyes, for this was Ben she was looking at—maybe not the Ben she was used to seeing, but since the features were the same, and the smile, and the eyes, and the dimple in the chin—no one who knew him could have doubted that the photo was of Ben.

  “He was a beautiful young boy,
wasn’t he?” Cindy asked.

  “Sure. You shoulda seen him back then.”

  “And that girl—Lizzie, you said was her name?”

  “Uh-huh, Lizzie, Elizabeth Sommers. She was amazing, Cindy. Incredible.”

  “I can see. Gosh! How would you even describe her, Mr. P?”

  “You know, Cindy, I’ve been around the block a few dozen times. Nobody can deny I’ve had my fun—But in all my life and all my travels and adventures, I’ve never seen anyone quite as drop-dead beautiful as her—in the flesh at least.” Eddie shook his head and chuckled: “There is this one other picture I’ve gotta show you in a minute, though, but….”

  “What other picture?”

  “I’ll show you in a minute; just hold your horses for a bit. First I’ve gotta show you the kid that Alex matched with Ben—for that Ben, I mean.” Eddie pointed at the photo in her hand. Then he opened up the cover of the folder again and pulled out the print-out he had made of the kid from Arizona, the mechanic who was finishing grad school at Cal-Davis. Cindy took it in her right hand while her left held the photo of Ben and Lizzie when they were kids.

  Cindy looked at one, then at the other, then back and forth several times.

  “It’s amazing!”

  “Isn’t it? That’s what I thought too.”

  “It’s uncanny—the resemblance is uncanny, Mr. P—This young man looks exactly like Mr. A when he was young. And I mean exactly. But is it a fluke though? Are they getting results like this with some of the other photos people send in?”

  “I guess so. They’ve got a lot more subjects in the files to match with lately, so the matches would have to be getting better every day. But to answer the question you asked specifically whether the matches were all getting close: I’ve got another example to show you to illustrate that point. You ready?— Here, take a deep breath and don’t pass out on me, Cindy—Take another gander at the picture of Lizzie in that photo, then have a look at this!”