Like Me

by Hayley Phelan

  “Gemma,” I said. “Gemma Anton.”

  After I got my next Coke, I told them everything—well, most of it. About Gemma and Benoit and how Gemma had gone missing suddenly, and I was pretty sure Benoit had something to do with it and—no, I only met Gemma once. And—no, I don’t know any of her friends or family or have any “evidence,” but I did know her, I knew her better than anyone, perhaps, I’d been following her for years. The officers nodded vigorously and made quick jabs with their pens on their notepads—only towards the end I started noticing they weren’t taking nearly as many notes, and their nods had taken on an apprehensive quality and they kept sneaking little looks at each other like, Are you getting this?

  “How’d you come up with that bit about the other girl—the doppelgänger?” Saul asked me before the arraignment. “Absolutely brilliant.”

  The judge released me on my own recognizance, pending trial, with the condition that I undergo psychiatric evaluation and treatment at a mental health facility. They sent me to a place up in Westchester, where they pumped me full of lithium and confined me to my room for most of each day. I tried to explain to them about Gemma, but all the nurses would do was smile real nice and say they understood and don’t worry, it’ll get easier. Only one of the other patients ever believed me, an elderly lady who’d been there I don’t know how long and who everyone called Minnie, even though she introduced herself to me as Dolores. I tried to get Minnie to search for Gemma during Internet Free Time, since I wasn’t yet allowed to use any devices, but she couldn’t get past the Safari welcome page. She’d just keep clicking on the Yahoo! logo (“Sounds fun!”) and open up a million new windows, trying to get back to the welcome page.

  My mother came to visit me on the weekends. Dad said he couldn’t stomach being back in a state facility, and really, I didn’t blame him. I knew at least part of the reason he wouldn’t come to visit was that I hadn’t visited him in jail, and I understood that, too, petty as it was. Yes, we were alike, there was no denying it any longer.

  “Sometimes I just wonder why this is happening to me,” my mother lamented one Sunday. “I mean, obviously it has to be somewhat my fault. No, no”—she waved away my protest—“I have to take responsibility for my role here.”

  “You didn’t do anything,” I said. “It has nothing to do with you.”

  Her head bobbled back and forth on her neck. “Everyone knows that a child is just a reflection of the mother. It always goes back to the mother. That’s what everyone says.”

  It just about killed my mother—not so much my arrest, although she was obviously upset about that, too, but the publicity that surrounded it.

  “I’ll just never understand it,” she had said. “I mean, I’d get it a little bit more if it were, I don’t know, one of those creeps who sleeps in alleys—”

  “A homeless person, you mean?”

  “Sure—or whatever. But this guy? I mean, you know, when I was a beauty queen, some of the judges—they took certain liberties. You didn’t like it, but you didn’t bash their head in about it.”

  “You’re right,” I’d said. “You’ll never understand.”

  But I did have some sympathy for her. She’d been fielding calls from reporters almost since the day it happened. I was now the “Fashion Killer,” and my father the “Crooked Daddy Warbucks.” At least I knew she was secretly pleased when the press dug up a photo from her pageant days and dubbed her the “Tragic Beauty Queen Mom.” Still, she could forget about ever going back to Neiman’s again.

  “And after your father, I thought we were finally—” That Sunday she dissolved into tears before she could finish the sentence, taking a shredded Kleenex from the jacket of her tweed blazer (Sandro, but an obvious nod to Chanel, just purchased) and pressing it to her eyes. It came away spotted with black. I’d meant to reach out to her, put a hand on her shoulder, but the lithium made me slow—they always gave me higher doses on visiting day—and by the time I realized I hadn’t done or said anything, she was already getting up to go and it was too late.

  After about a month in there, I decided I’d had enough. Even though the court-appointed psychologist said I was making fantastic progress and we were finally getting to the bottom of some of the trauma I experienced as a child, I couldn’t stand the food, and I hated the pale-blue smocks they made us wear over our own clothes, and I had none of my good underwear there, just a bunch of cotton briefs my mom had bought at the Gap for me.

  “What do I have to do?” I asked Saul during our twice-weekly tactical phone call.

  “They’re not going to release you until they think you’re mentally fit to care for yourself and stand trial.”

  I looked out through the shatterproof glass and made eye contact with the nurse, who was sitting behind a desk, monitoring me. Regular personal calls were made from the pay phone in the hall, but calls with lawyers took place in this small, soundproof room, more of a closet, with an entirely glass wall. I felt like I was in an aquarium. Actually, it reminded me of the room I’d had my fitting in for that doomed JOY shoot. Behind the nurse there was a large photo of the Grand Canyon. It was part of a theme—scattered throughout the facility were framed photos of the Natural Wonders of the World. I wondered if they’d hired an art consultant to come up with that, or if Staples just had a sale one day on nature landscape photos.

  “How do I convince them I’m mentally fit?” I asked, though I was pretty sure I already knew the answer.

  “Quit it with the Jenna stuff.” It was Golden Hour in the photo of the Grand Canyon, the best light, turning the river at the bottom into a silvery snake and the tips of the uppermost rocks amber. This was not the first time Saul had instructed me to stop talking about Gemma. “After some time, tell them you’re beginning to think she was a delusion.”

  A few weeks later, at my exit interview, the psychiatrist asked if I was still concerned for Gemma’s safety.

  “No,” I said, repeating what I had already told the nurses and the psychologist. “Because I no longer believe she was a real person.”

  The psychiatrist nodded and made a mark in her notepad.

  “So you have no intention of trying to look for her?”

  I shook my head. “No. She doesn’t exist. She was probably a composite of a handful of young women I was fixated on.”

  Another nod, another approving mark in the notepad.

  I was released the next day.

  * * *

  —

  I spent the next few months preparing for trial, living with my mother under house arrest at Auntie Joey’s apartment. My father was in Chicago, crashing in an empty house his developer buddy was trying to sell and reconnecting with his old associates. Some of them still wanted nothing to do with him, but others were apparently convinced enough by his verdict of “innocence,” or were able to look past it all for the promise of a quick buck. Maybe some of them felt bad for him, what with his own ordeal having been followed so closely by his daughter’s shameful fall from grace. I didn’t really know. My mother didn’t ask any questions when it came to his business, preferring not to know for legal reasons, but also because I don’t think she really cared, so long as money was coming in. Though neither of them would admit it, I think they’d both realized during my father’s incarceration that they got along a lot better the less time they actually spent together. Saul visited at least once a week, and often stayed for dinner. Other than that, and the occasional brief phone call from my dad, I spoke to and saw no one. It wasn’t intentional at first. I just didn’t remember anyone’s number without my phone. And without my phone—or Instagram—they had no way of contacting me either. Julia, Blake, Joe…I realized I knew very little about them beyond what they liked to drink and the brands they wore. I imagined they were still going out every night, to the same places with the same people. It all felt very far away.

  Looking back, these were pr
obably some of the most peaceful and stable weeks of my life. My mother and I fell into a rhythm. We did Pilates together in the morning and played cards and watched Jeopardy at night. During the day, my mom would go out to run errands or to “do emails” at a Starbucks, since, for whatever reason, she took very seriously the psychologist’s recommendation that I not have access to the Internet or social media right away. I guess she was concerned about how I’d react to everything they were saying about me, since it was all so disturbing for her. She always made a big show about locking her laptop away in the closet whenever she came home. But it was an unnecessary precaution. A strange thing happened during those weeks: I hardly thought about the Internet, or cared if people were thinking of me. It might have been the antidepressants they’d put me on. Or it could have been that I was reading again (I’d started Anna Karenina and couldn’t put it down). Then again, I suspect it was largely because I’d given up. Even if I somehow managed to escape jail time—which looked doubtful—my future was over. I would probably wind up working the cash somewhere shitty that didn’t mind hiring felons for the tax breaks. I’d get fat and probably wouldn’t even bother with what I wore or how I looked. Who cared about going online if you didn’t even have a presence? If no one even Liked anything you did?

  You’d think this realization would have depressed me, but strangely it had a freeing effect. I went on long, solitary walks, circling the five-block radius that did not violate my release order. For the first time since I was very little, I appreciated the fall foliage. When I finished Anna Karenina, I started on War and Peace, working my way through all of Tolstoy. I slept better than ever. One morning in late December, I woke while it was still dark out and padded to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee while my mother continued to sleep. The kitchen opened out into the living room, which had a small balcony off it. Pigeons often congregated on the railing, but that morning, I clocked a much larger bird through my morning blear. It was white and stocky, with black stippling along its feathers. My heart started beating fast. I walked slowly and cautiously into the living room to get a better look. I became aware that two large yellow eyes were looking at me, so suddenly that it was as if the bird had grown them in the back of its head. It was an owl and it was beautiful. We looked at each other for what felt like a long time. Then, without a hint of forethought, it spread its impressive wingspan and took off. I felt as though I’d just been given a key to the universe. I went back to the kitchen and finished making coffee, feeling a profound sense of wellbeing.

  A month before the trial began, the fan mail started arriving. Someone had figured out my address and posted it on Reddit. They were homemade signs and postcards, sympathy cards, and long letters. Apparently, I’d become a cause célèbre, half counterculture hero, half circus-freak oddity. I realized the extent to which the case had been covered in the press. Suddenly, it made a lot more sense why Saul had appeared to be going the extra mile on my case.

  Give the patriarchy the finger! the cards read.

  Mickey, we’re with you!

  Don’t lose hope!

  We stan you forever!

  We believe Mickey

  Believe Mickey

  Often my fans included the hashtag #FreeMickey, as if they’d forgotten you couldn’t click on the page and be redirected to an entire thread. No one talked about me being canceled. I don’t know if it was because they didn’t care, or because they didn’t remember. Karma had deleted her account—she’d gone on to become a painter, quite a talented one, and was notoriously reclusive and press-shy—so it’s possible there was no record of it. But more likely there was a screenshot of it, or many screenshots, saved somewhere on the Internet—but, though the Internet is endless, our memory and attention spans are embarrassingly finite.

  My mother and Saul were thrilled. Apparently the tabloids had been putting me through the wringer, and since neither of them really understood social media, they’d missed the strange birth of a small but ardent fan base. My mother liked to go through the mail with me and set aside her favorite cards. I was far more dispassionate. It all felt so impersonal, even though it was all about me. That’s how fame works—it’s like love without the personal connection. Since fame means having a bunch of people love you without ever knowing you, being known is therefore antithetical to it. You are only adored where you are absent, in a permanent form of disassociation, like what I used to do at casting calls—becoming a body only, becoming a shell. And yet, even still, I didn’t want the cards to stop.

  Often, the cards included a photo, usually from the first shoot I’d done with Benoit: in it, my eyebrows have been bleached and my hair curled, only it’s in black and white and looks like a mugshot from an old-timey newspaper. Meanwhile, in real life, my hair had grown into an awkward bowl cut the color of dishwater. My eyebrows, which I’d neglected to pluck since my arrest, were dark and bushy. I looked nothing like the woman in the pictures.

  “We’re going to have to do something about that,” Saul said one day a few weeks before trial, as he sat at the small dining table in the living room, drinking tea.

  “What do you mean?” I was lying on the couch, pulling one side of my sweatpant drawstring and then the other, creating a kind of pleasant rhythm.

  “We want you to appear consistent, stable,” he said. “What happened that day in question was an aberration, an unfortunate consequence of tremendous mental stress, which led to temporary insanity—”

  “Yes, yes, I know, I went nuts,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “In the public’s mind, this is what you look like,” he continued, ignoring me and holding up a recent card, another close-up from the first Benoit shoot, in which I’m staring wide-eyed at the camera, mouth slightly parted, like a deer in headlights. “We want to stay closely associated with this image. Otherwise you look inconsistent, and that makes you seem erratic and untrustworthy.”

  Saul knew his stuff. He’d met with an image consultant earlier that week to discuss my presentation during trial. He reached into a paper bag I hadn’t noticed him bring in and extracted a Styrofoam head wearing a blond wig, and set it on the table in front of him. I shuddered.

  “Lori”—that was the image consultant—“told me this is top quality, from a wig supplier she’s worked with in the past and had great experiences with. Made from real human hair.”

  My mother walked in carrying a load of laundry at that moment and saw the head, with its soft shoulder-length blond curls, sitting on the table. She nodded—clearly Saul had already discussed this with her—and put the laundry basket down in the hall.

  “Should we try it on, sweetheart?”

  Mom used bobby pins to pin my hair out of my face and then fitted the mesh cap that came with the wig over it. She tented her fingers inside the wig—where my skull would go—so it would keep its shape as she carried it over to me. But she couldn’t get it to sit right on my head.

  I sighed. “Let me try.”

  I went to the bathroom mirror and pulled the wig down, a little bit to the right, and tucked in some stray hairs.

  “There,” I said. I looked good, better than I’d looked in months. I felt something squirm inside, like a worm coming to life again, something repulsive but oddly compelling.

  Saul brought the card over with my face on it, the old face, and put it next to mine in the mirror.

  “Perfect,” he said.

  “Perfect,” my mother echoed.

  That night we plucked and bleached my eyebrows.

  * * *

  —

  Trial began in mid-February. On the first day, I wore a navy cashmere turtleneck and cream wool trousers with brown faux-croc boots. I walked in holding the hands of both my mother and father, who flanked me on each side, another suggestion by Lori. “We want her to look supported,” she’d said. Also, the presence of my mother and father highlighted my youth. I had only just turned twenty.
Outside the courtroom were a dozen or so protestors holding signs, many of which said Free Mickey on pink bristol board. My favorite read Guilty of Fucking the Patriarchy, Innocent of Everything Else. A few people came dressed as me, in curly blond wigs and long white dresses like the one I’d worn when I showed up at Gemma’s apartment that night in the rain. A thrill went through me, and the worm burrowed deeper inside, so that I couldn’t help but smile a little even though the fact that I was happier than I’d been since this whole thing started terrified me.

  In their opening statements, the prosecution argued that though I was narcissistic and disturbed, I was hardly insane—not by a long shot. In fact, throughout my relationship with Benoit, I’d exhibited a level of cunning and manipulation that revealed a well-ordered, if mal-intended, mind. The insanity plea was further evidence of my shrewdness; I’d cobbled together a story about a woman who didn’t exist after I’d been arrested. It wasn’t until the fifth hour of my interrogation that I had even mentioned this so-called Gemma. The prosecution conceded that Benoit and I had had a sexual relationship, but they asserted it had been brief, consensual, and conducted outside of working hours. Benoit was an eccentric, true, but of the sensitive-artist ilk. If he had trouble negotiating workplace boundaries, it was only because he felt things so deeply, was too easily swayed by emotion and what other people wanted from him. He had always been a big supporter of women’s rights—he’d even once shot the portraits for a domestic abuse PSA! For free! Even if what happened between Benoit and me constituted workplace harassment, it certainly did not give me license to viciously maim him, leaving him blind in one eye and unable to walk without a limp for the rest of his life—and that was only because he’d gotten lucky. He could have died. According to the prosecution, I’d tried to kill him that day not because of some imaginary woman but because he wasn’t giving me enough attention. And I was pissed about my haircut.