“Alright already, I’ll leave, you got your way!” I shouted, trying to wrench my wrists from the doorman’s clutches. After a brief hesitation—a searching look towards the father and child—the doorman eased up his grip and finally let go. I rubbed my wrists dramatically, breathing hard like an animal. I’d no intention of leaving. I wanted to get to the bottom of this. I rounded on the doorman, just as the man with the child spoke up:
“I called the police.” His voice was almost apologetic. He was clearly embarrassed to be party to the whole business. So he was a liar and a blackguard like the rest of them, but at least there was some part of him with a conscience. I knew because when I looked him in the eyes, his gaze was one of compassion and concern (with only a tinge of fear). He said, his voice incredibly soft and gentle but at the same time firm—a real father! The father I never had! The father I always wanted!—he said: “I hope you get some help.”
I nodded. Looked at the two of them, his large hand pressed against her scrawny little chest as if protecting her heart, as she backed herself into him so that her body was practically wedged between his legs, knowing herself to be totally protected and safe, trusting that everything would be fine, because Daddy was here.
“Your daughter’s lucky,” I said. “I hope she grows up ugly. But if she doesn’t, she could be a model one day. She could be just like me!”
I took off at a run. I was not afraid of the police. The police would sort it out, they would see my side of it. But that would take time, and I did not want to invest any more of it in this farce. No, it wasn’t the police, but the prospect of paperwork and labyrinthine bureaucracy that sent shivers down my spine. The father’s words had given me courage. Get help. Yes. Without delay. I must get help. Gemma was missing. There was something seriously wrong with this picture. Gemma was gone. The image returned to me out of nothing: Gemma, standing on the pier, a red sky behind her, an uncertain expression on her face that gives way to terror. I thought I heard her scream. I began to run faster. The strap on my sandal broke. I tore off the whole contraption and flung it into a garbage can. It was starting to get dark. Gemma was drowning in black waters, the waves of which reflected the red sky at their apex before turning black again. I kept running, one bare foot slapping against the pavement. Gemma was surrounded by red streaks in the water, her mouth was open and calling out—she was calling out to me as she drowned. What had I done? Why hadn’t I helped? Where were Benson and Stabler?
I was having a million thoughts, one after the other, clear bolts of lucid comprehension, divine inspiration, where everything seemed perfectly straightforward, but they were coming in quick flashes, and somehow they were not connecting in my head. It was as if a firework were spreading across the night sky, but just as I was beginning to make out its shape it disappeared, swallowed up seamlessly by the dark. The night before I’d gone viral, I’d followed Gemma to the record store. I had wandered in the streets, followed her all the way to the pier, on which I’d watched…I’d watched…I’d only watched. A rushing sound swept across the street and the rain intensified. I felt a shudder of guilt. Big wet drops splashed along my collarbone and down my back. It was then that I felt the weight of the locket against my chest. Her locket was against my chest. This fact stunned me. Why was her locket against my chest? Who took it from her? Its discovery in Benoit’s bedside table now seemed distinctly ominous. I saw Benoit snatch it from her neck. I saw the thin line of blood it left on the tender skin of her nape just before he strangled her and threw her into the river, just like on that episode of SVU where Olivia only put it together because she identified the bloated corpse’s ankle tattoo…No, it didn’t make sense. None of it made sense. Gemma was okay. She had to be okay. It could not be otherwise. All I needed to do was to find her.
I passed under a scaffolding. There was another person there, swaddled in layers, a hood up over their head, and they were leaning against one of the metal supports and moaning softly. It was now dark. I waited on the other side of the scaffolding, and the person’s moans were drowned out by the sound of the rain. Cars made noises like waves as they drove through the water on the street, disturbing puddles and creating lurid streaks of red and yellow along the wet pavement. There was a ticking inside of me, growing louder and louder until I thought I would burst. My hands trembled, and I realized they were clenched around my phone. I ran my fingers over its smooth surface as if it were a talisman. Where else did I have to turn, I ask? Where else was I to go? I opened up Instagram. Of course that was what I was going to do. It was all I knew how to do. A circle appeared at the bottom of my screen, and I pressed my thumb to it. I began filming.
“Hey guys,” I began. A car passed, briefly illuminating my face, and I was momentarily dazed by the magnetism of my own reflection. Even though I felt like shit, I couldn’t help noticing I looked good: my skin was wet with rainwater, making it shine in the light. My eyes were large and penetrating, like those of a film star about to get murdered. I already felt calmer, looking at myself in the glassy mirror. Then the stranger, still slumped against the metal support, made a small, animal noise behind me, and I cleared my throat and went on: “So I know this is a little weird, but honestly, I’m not sure what else to do.” I took a deep breath, heart hammering in my chest. “I’ve started to become very worried about someone. Someone who has wound up being very important to me. I won’t say her name, because—well, for a lot of reasons. Her privacy, for one. And also because I’m not sure it would be safe just now…” I glanced at the person slumped at the scaffolding but couldn’t make out their face, if they were watching me…“Anyway,” I continued, turning back to the camera distractedly, forcing a smile. “You guys are smart, so I’m sure you know who I’m talking about.” I gave the camera a knowing look. “She looks a lot like me. She’s a model. Dated a certain photographer about town…” I could feel the faceless person staring at me, the heat of their attention. I turned to glare at them—but they turned their head away too quickly, and somehow managed to get into exactly the same position they were in before. This frightened me because it suggested a kind of skill I hadn’t suspected. I hurried away, and the circle completed itself and appeared anew on my screen. I kept filming. I was walking fast, my face glowing orange when I passed under streetlights. Rain fell lightly on my head. Rain fell onto my eyelashes and filled up my eyes with water until I blinked. I didn’t even realize I was crying until I heard myself speak. “What I want to know,” I said, my voice cracking, “is why everyone is lying. Why is everyone lying? What is everyone trying to hide? I don’t understand. Can someone tell me? You know who you are. What are you trying to hide? What is it!” I was screaming at the end there, and it felt good; I felt a release. A new video began. I was walking. I was walking in the rain, hair matted to my head. I was walking in the rain, walking fast, and I was dripping wet, and I should have been freezing, but I wasn’t. I was starting to feel calm, and that’s when the anger began to set in. Oh yes, I’d show them. I’d get right to the bottom of this. I was unstoppable. I continued, in a lower pitch: “Something very disturbing happened to me just now, which is that twice today I was in a position where a guy, who was sort of in a position of power, was trying to tell me that I was wrong. He didn’t believe me. I knew what I was saying was true and right but he didn’t believe. He denied it. He denied my reality, and, to be honest, it just really fucked with my head. But you know what I realize now?” I began screaming again. I wanted him to hear it all the way back in his house of lies. “Fuck him,” I shouted. “Fuck him!”
A message popped up on my phone alerting me to perilously low batteries.
“I’m going to die soon,” I said, picking up my pace to a run. “But it doesn’t really matter. What matters is—well, what does matter?” I’d pretended not to notice that I’d lost my train of thought. The rain was covering my face, it was getting in my mouth. I suddenly wanted to laugh out loud. “Yes, exactly, that’s the thing, isn’t
it? What matters is the truth, and I want to know it, is what I’m saying. That’s what matters.” I was starting to lose steam. I was panting. The circle completed itself, and I lifted my thumb off it. The video was uploaded. Message sent. I looked at my feet. My bare foot shimmered in the light. It looked like a fish. It looked exactly like a fish, with silvery scales that shimmered in the light. For the first time, I felt the cold against my skin. I didn’t remember why I had been running, and when I looked at my phone I saw that it was dead. Without my phone, there was no time. Where time should have been, there was just an empty container. And within that void, I began to feel a tickle of freedom. I began to feel giddy, even. Yes, giddy. It was a glorious night, and I knew exactly what I was doing. I kept walking for I don’t know how long, but eventually I did get home.
* * *
—
The next morning, before I even woke, dread was upon me. Between dreams, I’d remembered parts of what I’d done. How I acted. Details, memories, returned to me, surfacing like sharks in the water, black, amorphous shapes that grew larger and then emerged only when it was too late. I tried to block them out. I turned over on my side, but like a relentless alarm clock, my anxiety kept pinging me with new details. Ping! My eyes, clearly unfocused. Ping! Had I cried? I had cried. I had cried in front of my entire Follower list. Ping! I’d lost my fucking sandal! I’d run through the streets half-barefoot like a maniac. I could recall my thinking at the time, but could not connect it to any sort of reality I had experienced. When I remembered that I had begun to suspect something violent or criminal about Gemma’s so-called disappearance, it was like peeking into the mind of another person whom I didn’t know or understand at all. I couldn’t believe how melodramatic I’d gotten! It was all the hours I’d spent watching SVU, surely. I’d let the show seep into my subconscious. I was sure the image that had plagued me—the one of Gemma out on the pier, Gemma drowning in the waters—was in fact the climactic scene from one of the most recent episodes I’d watched. A thought—one I couldn’t even bring myself to articulate at the time—kept occurring to me, no matter how many times I tried to ignore it: Benoit might have seen the videos, I wasn’t sure if he even watched my Stories, but if he did, he would see them, and that made me want to die. Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I picked up my phone. It was six a.m., I was covered in sweat, my heart was racing, and my skin was still flecked with mud—I was filthy. I steeled myself and then opened up Instagram.
It turned out I needn’t have worried at all.
Everybody had loved it. They thought it was brilliant. Someone actually wrote that: This is brilliant! Relief flooded over me so powerfully, I was actually dazed. Everyone thought I was saying something profound, though some people thought I was calling out rapists and victim-blamers and other people thought I was making a statement about the facades we all put up, the roles we play, especially on social media.
So brave. You tell that fucker! #believewomen, someone wrote.
This happened to me once in college, and I can’t tell you how much it means to me to see it on someone else’s feed. Makes me feel less alone. Thank you, wrote another.
People had DMed with personal confessions, the things they’d been hiding. Most of it was mundane shit, like they were embarrassed about their thighs, or that they told a lie once, or kissed their best friend’s crush, or that they were broke and hid it from their friends—though one girl confessed she’d had sex one night with her first cousin and was in love with him.
I’d gotten so many responses and messages, it took me a moment before I noticed his name among all the strangers. Benoit.
Tee hee, he wrote. You’re WILD ;)
I recoiled, briefly, at the use of tee hee from a middle-aged man, but I was too delighted to care. In fact, I was so delighted that soon my relief matured into complacency, then bloomed into full-blown self-assurance and cockiness. I began to feel that it had all unfolded as I had planned; that I’d intended exactly what everyone thought I’d intended. Of course, I’d had to subvert that intention subconsciously, in order to pull it off in the moment. Truly, the foresight of my genius astonished me.
As for Gemma, I decided it would be better if I didn’t think of her any longer. For whatever reason, she seemed to provoke in me a juvenile thirst for melodrama. I had imagined all sorts of impossible, insane things, when in fact there could be nothing more mundane than a girl deleting her Instagram account and going on vacation. That is what I told myself at the time. That is what I tried to believe.
In my camera roll, I found the photos that Benoit had AirDropped to me of the two of us standing next to each other at the Strand bookstore. They were the only reminders I still had of her. Taking a deep breath, I deleted them all.
* * *
—
The next morning, I walked outside, and watched myself walk outside in a two-by-six-inch liquid crystal display. I walked outside and I smiled and breathed in the world as if I were happy, and it began to feel, as the sun fell across my tilted face and reflected in the mirrored lenses of my sunglasses, that truly, I was happy. My thumb lifted from the screen, and immediately my posture transformed itself from convex to concave. I stooped forward, bending my neck almost perpendicular to my body. I flicked my sunglasses to the top of my head and clutched my phone with both hands and squinted at the screen, but all I saw was a malformed reflection of some black, bulbous face, backlit by the sun. I found a sliver of shade in the shadow of a building and watched myself perform my life of fifteen seconds ago. I watched as I walked out of the building, smiling, as the sun fell across my tilted face and reflected in the mirrored lenses of my sunglasses. I watched as I smiled and breathed in and looked happy and was happy. I watched myself. Feeling strong and healthy and lucky, I wrote. Then I hit the delicate white arrow at the bottom corner of the screen, and the me of seventeen seconds ago was dispatched to the ether. I resumed my walk. I was going to meet my mother. Like a good daughter. Like a perfectly normal human.
You’ll be experiencing stronger motivation to pursue your goals, dear Aquarius, but you might also need to let go or back off a little today. It was seventy-nine degrees. Chance of rain: 0 percent. Humidity: 15 percent. Air quality, moderate. Julia was having a bath, pink bubbles foaming up to the neck. More victims had come forward to accuse Jeffrey Epstein of rape. “He was a sociopath,” one said. He had a familiar look to him, in his zipped Harvard hoodie, like Andrew or Joe but older. Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton were also possibly implicated in the case. Two women stood in a field holding hands, wearing blazers and long dresses and imploring me to check out Zara’s summer sale. Flat Leather Bow Sandals, $35.99. Tuxedo Trousers with Side Taping, $39.99. Tuxedo Collar Blazer, $49.99. Embroidered Voluminous Top, $19.99. Global climate temperatures were set to rise two degrees by 2050. Blake “ate” a donut with blue frosting. A hurricane was en route to New Orleans. Kylie Jackson’s “Revenge Body”: How the Star Toned Up after Breakup to Wow in Pole-Dancing Video. No one talked about the Eric Garner case anymore. I wore All Access Rush Stretch Biker Shorts in Black, Jacquemus La Chemise Bahia Shirt in White, By Far Sage Croc Mini Bag, and Balenciaga Mirrored Rimless Sunglasses.
My mother was waiting for me outside the restaurant. I saw her from a distance, her head bent over her phone. She was wearing skinny jeans and old Tod’s loafers with an oversized blazer I recognized from J.Crew, which made me want to cringe, that my mother shopped at J.Crew now. From far away she looked so small and insignificant, I felt a pang of protectiveness.
“Hey,” I called out. My mother’s head shot up. She broke into a wide smile and, seemingly unable to wait the ten seconds until I got to her, half jogged over to me with arms outstretched. We hugged.
“My Mick,” she said, and kept her arm over my shoulder even as we walked into the restaurant, a place called Wishbone that specialized in bone broth.
“Oh, it’s counter serve,” my mother said, taking in the restaurant�
��s low-key setup with obvious disappointment.
“It’s supposedly got the best bone broth,” I said defensively. I’d spent a not-insignificant amount of time looking up Yelp reviews.
“Oh no, this is fine, really! It’s cute. We don’t need anything fancy, do we? Any old place will do.”
“Well, you said you wanted something keto, and so I looked it up, and this was ranked number one.”
“I’m sure it was,” she said. “It’s very cute in here. Different.”
I should have known this was not her idea of a restaurant. It was bright and deliberately unfussy, with a counter cut from untreated plywood, white tiled floors and small round tables and stools scattered throughout. It was 10:30 a.m.—there was plenty of time before the lunch rush—and there were only a few people seated at the tables, all of them hermetically sealed in the attention orbit of their phones.
“Well, let’s look at a menu, we can go somewhere else if you want,” I said, shrugging her arm from my shoulder and picking up a menu from the counter. I could feel my mother’s eyes on my back, raking over my body.
“Have you lost weight?”
I scoffed, shaking my head, though I had in fact winnowed myself down to the smallest I’d ever been.
“You look like you’ve lost weight.”
“Supposedly the Original Badass Bone Broth with Chicken is the thing to get,” I said, ignoring her and studying the menu.
“Don’t lose any more weight, okay?”
I rolled my eyes. “Fine, Mom.”
“I get it—because you’re young, you want to look good, everyone else around you is so skinny, it’s easy to start comparing, but you just have to do what’s best for your body.”
Like Me Page 18
