Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

  I read through a handful, then kept looking.

  Box, after box, after box. I rifled through them carefully but found nothing that belonged to Carey. One plastic container was filled with hard drives, and I set it by the door so that when I found a computer, I could connect them.

  When I was done I set a piece of masking tape on the locker that the hard drives had come from, and carefully locked the rest, wiping my fingerprints away from the steel with a rag. Then I turned to the chest freezer.

  As I expected, it contained body parts, lots of them, shrink-wrapped in plastic inside little aquariums of preservative chemicals. I was nervous to touch them, but they had been placed carefully in clean metal trays that stacked neatly together. The freezer was spotless—no buildup of freezer burn anywhere. All of the packages were labeled by hospital staff, all of them downgraded for one reason or another: too much fatty tissue; not oxygenated enough; a lesion; a growth of unidentified cells. The date of retrieval was on each, some as old as five years, all of them marked with the cause of death.

  In the first few layers, there were two blood-colored kidneys, three purple-brown livers, and one bubblegum-pink stomach. There was a creamy pair of lungs; there was a severed foot; there was the brain. I moved them quickly, worried that they would lose temperature, though I wasn’t sure if it mattered since they wouldn’t be going in another body.

  On the lowest level, all on its own, was a human heart.

  Cause of death: asphyxiation, the label said. NOT VIABLE was stamped in red. The date of retrieval was the day that Carey Logan died.

  * * *

  I felt the meat of it—that hardest, firmest, always laboring muscle—pushing against the flat of my palm. I pressed it with the tips of my fingers, watching the chemicals around it squish up and around like any grocery store package of meat, and was surprised at how dense it still felt, after three years—how resistant.

  White fat ringed the ventricles and lined the seams of muscle in lacy little squiggles. The exterior of the heart was mostly a dark purple-red-blue—the inside of the thickest rare steak you’ve ever eaten—that faded to a brownish peach as it approached the fat. The ventricles themselves, thick, chewy tubes, were a true pink.

  It weighed less than a pound, but more than I expected it to.

  Drops of condensation began to form on the lid of the freezer. When one of them fell, splashing against the clean bottom of it, I panicked. I wiped out the freezer and set the heart back in its place, then stacked the metal shelves atop each other again and loaded the organs back in, wiping each one clean, hoping that I had not damaged them.

  I locked the freezer and stared at it for a long time. It had a puckered white surface, a kind of textured ripple, an aluminum band around the top, and it was where Tyler kept Carey’s heart.

  I heard his voice, asking if I was a fan. The guilt that spilled out of his eyes whenever her name came up. I saw the look on his face when I asked about Carey directly, all that misery, and it shook me right down the spine, the vertebrae clicking like ice cubes, like Carey’s frozen heart.

  That’s when I noticed the coolers: brand-new, vacuum-sealed, five of them, piled up next to the freezer. It didn’t matter, for Tyler, if there were police on the property. He was planning to move everything.

  * * *

  I let myself into Marlin’s studio. She was in progress on something—another series of bodies. The lines were unruly, printed over and over, the registration deliberately off. She didn’t have any locked doors or locked freezers or anything. There were banker’s boxes filled with paperwork, but it was all hers. No film.

  Jack’s studio was nearly completely overtaken by his net—it had almost doubled in size in the past two weeks. There was so much stuff everywhere, detritus, and I couldn’t imagine rooting through it or that he would be the one to keep such a thing. Simply looking at the room made me feel overwhelmed. I told myself that I would come back only if there was nothing anywhere else.

  I locked the door and walked the path to the Theatre, Jes’s studio. My stomach clenched tighter with each step. After trying six different keys I landed on the correct one.

  The double doors opened into the musty foyer with the ticket counter and the Persona poster. The heavy wooden doors on either side were no longer propped open, but they weren’t locked.

  I followed the beam of my flashlight down the aisle, toward the stage, to where the orange extension cords stretched away and to the left. They snaked through the side curtains of the wings, the flashlight illuminating the dirty wooden floors beneath, until plugging into a wall. Next to the outlet, a small spiral staircase led to the upper level.

  Up here a small walkway, the brass railings smooth and shiny from decades of touch, led to a closed door, where I fumbled again with the keys, nearly dropping them, the hard plastic of the flashlight between my teeth, until I found the right one.

  A library waited for me on the other side: racks of plastic film reels in different widths, a dozen different kinds of cameras, rolls and rolls of vintage film stock, and reels labeled with marker and masking tape along the seams.

  The next room was the projectionist’s suite. Two manual projectors were pushed to the side and a digital projector was wired to the aperture, facing the stage, with a metal folding chair placed behind it.

  The third room had a light switch outside the door. I flicked it, and after fumbling for another key, cracked it open. The unmistakable sour chemical smell of fix and developer hit my nostrils. It was a darkroom, recently used, though the plastic basins were empty and the dry lines were clean, their clothespins vacant.

  Two metal canisters sat next to the enlarger, their blank, unlabeled tape cut right down the middle. They were empty.

  I returned to the racks in the library, searching through the canisters until I found the reel labeled WILD HEART(S). I wound it onto the 35mm projector, inserting the end into a slot and carefully winding the center of the reels like a cassette. The celluloid, silky between hard bites of clear plastic tape, loaded easily, and the image appeared, out of focus, on the wall. I followed the reel from splice to splice, stopping with every mark. Carey as Stevie, Little Carey, over and over. Miss America, Little Carey, Carey, Carey, Carey.

  And then I found it. A single set of frames, only six, no—seven. I cranked the reel by hand, and as I adjusted the lens, I knew—I knew what I would see.

  They were murky stills of a woman in a plain white dress, standing at the bottom of a lake, head tilted in a way that suggested she was unconscious. Her arms waved in motion with the current. Her rubber boots were perfectly still. And she was Carey Logan.

  * * *

  I ripped through Jes’s library, opening canister after canister, holding them up to the light at every splice, but it was no use. I couldn’t find another frame anywhere, not after twenty-five canisters. As I sat on the ground, winding up the reels and replacing them on the shelves, I realized that the film could be hidden anywhere; it could be taped behind a rafter in any of the buildings, it could be set beneath floorboards, it could be buried in the ground. It would be impossible to find the rest of the film without knowing its location.

  I cut the seven frames from Wild Heart(s), folded a piece of scrap paper, taped them inside, and slipped them in my back pocket. I returned to Marlin’s studio and looked again at her anatomical prints, this time holding the frames to my eye, and what I saw was that the arms were Carey’s arms; the legs were Carey’s legs. In Jack’s studio I saw that his net, woven in mostly white silk, had a yellow beam down the center that mimicked the light streaming through the water above Carey’s head.

  And in Tyler’s studio lay Carey’s heart, waiting to be bronzed.

  Pine City were all making work about her death. They could not help themselves. And yet they refused to give up the film—a refusal that could result, in a few short days, in a search of the studio where my paintings lay.

  I saw the policemen swarming the studio, touching my paintings, ph
otographing them, making a list, sending it to Charles Eliot’s attorney. I knew exactly what Charles would want in exchange. If he didn’t get it—he would call Jacqueline, she’d feign surprise, Susan Bricklings-Young would confirm that the police photo of Obedience was not the same as the one she had committed to buy—and so would all of Jacqueline’s other buyers. The show would be canceled, my name destroyed, the only one I’d ever had. I wouldn’t be a painter anymore. I’d be the warning sign: the girl from Florida who conned the blue-chip gallery.

  I’d be homeless. I’d be $39,000 in debt. I’d have thirty-five hundred pounds of paintings that nobody wanted except me.

  * * *

  Someone will film Carey’s story. At the end they will put the actress in a waifish white dress, which will pool and billow in highest contrast to the muddy red water of the black lake. The actress’s eyes will be purple and the teeth in her mouth will be so white and big. The texture of her skin will be velvety and the line of her breasts will be pert. Her muscles will be taut from Pilates, but the implication of the camera will be that stress and suicidal thoughts and the artistic temperament have made her so enchantingly thin. She will be Ophelia, clothes spread wide, floating in the brook atop garlands of sweet flowers, and she will look absolutely nothing like Carey Logan.

  The camera will hold steady. Ankles taped with bubble wrap, she plunges her toes into the wet cement pools of her rubber boots. A single air pocket might release under the pressure and belch against her calf. She will stand there for five minutes, maybe ten, in the water, and wait for them to dry. Then she will start walking.

  Maybe they’ll cut to Tyler in his studio: a razor blade pressing down as a glass slide catches a very neat, carpaccio slice of brain. Maybe they’ll show Jack playing with his kids. Maybe they’ll show Jes playing cello and Marlin pulling a print. Maybe they’ll go back to that night on Grand Street and show the five of them sharing a cigarette and laughing, or some other scene, one I haven’t witnessed, the first time they all met. Or maybe they won’t do any of that and it’ll be a long shot: She walks, she shudders at the cold, she hesitates, she walks again. Cut to underwater: flailing and eventual stillness. Above again: water slapping against the beach like nothing was ever there to disturb it.

  It will be a documentary or a Lifetime movie or a multipart series on HBO. It doesn’t matter what they do or how they would do it or who the “they” in question would be; whatever they do would make her body into their commodity, like Tyler was going to do with her heart, and Carey didn’t want that. She wanted to own that commodity on her own terms.

  And she had labored for so long.

  She deserved to have what she wanted.

  So did I.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The next morning, it was very easy to strip the pink from my hair—six or seven washes with baby shampoo took it right out—and the Sally Beauty in the strip mall had everything else. A Savers down the block was an easy place to find a little turban-like hat, a pair of black heels, and cat’s-eye sunglasses, and after a stop at Home Depot, I was done. My hair took the toner right away—and then I was an ashy-gray dirty blonde, just like her.

  She had freckles. They were very easy to replicate with a little brown pencil.

  After an hour in the bathroom with the shower on hot, the white dress and leopard coat from her studio steamed out very nicely. I painted my fingernails bright red—lips too—and zipped up the cream-colored sheath. I slid my arms into the silk lining of the leopard-print coat, set the sunglasses on my nose, pinned the little turban firmly to my hair, slid my feet into the heels, and it was—it was eerie.

  Setting up the cameras took a lot longer. I had no clue what I was doing, and was exhausted from the sleepless night spent at Jes’s computer, hardwired to the internet, googling how to load a 35mm camera and how to connect reels and how to tell one vintage film stock from another.

  Fake concrete was impossible, so I filled a quick-dry concrete bag with silver grout. It wouldn’t harden but would still look realistic going in the boot.

  I wrestled with the tripods in the water but they refused to be stable, so I set them up on the grass, one angled in each direction so that there would be a very wide shot.

  It was ninety-eight degrees that afternoon with 90 percent humidity.

  First I had to bring the manual shutters to where the boots and cement bag were, exactly between the sight lines of the two cameras and right at the edge of the water, and then I had to stand still and hit one with each hand. I moved very stiffly—what I hoped was deliberately—trying not to betray anything so that I didn’t betray the wrong thing.

  I was already sweating when I dumped the grout into the rubber boots, carefully mixing in lake water that I scooped up with a green glass jar from Carey’s studio kitchen. The sunglasses dared to fall down my nose, but I pushed them back up, over and over, with a single finger. Once the grout was the right consistency—I used a wooden paint stirrer—I carefully put one foot, ankles taped with bubble wrap, into one boot, and then the other, the grout sucking between my toes. The volume rose up inches below the tops of the boots, but the cameras couldn’t see how it dried. They were too far away.

  Ten minutes is a long time to stand still and look at a lake. I cycled through a lot of feelings—fear and trepidation, but mostly regret—and wondered how on earth Carey managed to maintain her composure. After three minutes, it was so hot that I slid the leopard coat from my shoulders and let it crumple to the wet sand. My dress was eclipsed by moons of sweat: a sweet crescent on my low back, wide ellipses beneath my arms, dripping down my thighs and into the boots.

  By the time I walked into the water, I was burning up, ready for the cold, and it took a great deal of self-control not to dive—to walk forward, ramrod-straight—until I disappeared under the surface.

  * * *

  I’m still not a strong swimmer. I had to move quite far underwater to get out of the shot, and I had to do it in a dress and rubber boots without disturbing the surface. Every step was fraught with a biological urge to swim to save myself. The grout in the boots weighed me down, but I could have kicked out of it if I wanted to. I kept telling myself that it was a game, over and over, hoping that I could convince myself. My arms trembled, preparing themselves to move, to pump up and down involuntarily, like they’d done on that first day I floated drunk on the lake. Sooner or later, my body was going to take over.

  Had I calculated correctly?

  The sky above me became only a faint pink light. Water crept into my nose, through my sinuses, dripped down the back of my throat, and I began to panic—but then I pushed forward, staying on the bottom of the lake for ten more feet, until I reached the bicycle tube weighted on a neon yellow rope to a seventy-nine-cent brick. The check valve barely opened in my shaking grip; I had to bite my hand to hold it down, but when it opened—when it did, I could breathe. As I sucked in, greedily, the sunglasses tipped off my nose and sank to the bottom.

  I pulled myself along the neon rope, making it to the next bicycle tube, and afterward, finally, to the far side of the water, the end of the neon line, and the anchored silver canoe. Somewhere along the way, the boots kicked off and they receded into the red-black water, the weight of the grout pulling them down.

  When my hands found the boat, I was dying for air, lungs near to exploding.

  My nails clawed at the gunnels, black-red water streamed out of my lipsticked mouth, and I gasped once—and then quietly, little choking ones, like when you are crying but trying to hide it. Though they were fifty feet away, at least, there were still small microphones on the cameras—nothing much—and they would run to the end of the reels, only a few more minutes. Enough time for a person to drown.

  * * *

  Once the reels ran out, I moved. It took a great deal of negotiating to get my body into the boat itself without capsizing it, as the narrow cut of the dress held me back. But once I hiked the skirt up and over my waist, I managed to get atop the stern, ar
ms out flat, my weight almost even.

  I lay in the bottom of the boat for some time, breathing evenly, trying to calm down as the sun descended over the horizon. I took the pins from the turban and dropped them over the side, hearing them disappear into the water with a sound so tiny, such a fragile, narrow plop, that I wanted to record it all on its own.

  When the moon rose in the sky against the coming night—I was ready to move again.

  The canoe shook as I hauled in the neon line and its three bricks. Covered in threads of silt and drowned algae, they coiled in a pile on the bottom of the boat, like the catch of the day. I paddled carefully, unsure of myself, changing sides over and over to guide the boat to where it was supposed to go. At the beach beneath the deck of the Mission, I climbed out, stubbing my toe on a brick as I stepped, then grabbed it by the nose and yanked it up the sand as far as it could go, beaching it. I hurled a sandy, silty armful of bricks and rope around the nearest support pole of the deck, and then, sand between my toes, walked down the beach to unpack the cameras.

  That part was harder. I’m not a filmmaker, and so I was shaking and nervous as I unscrewed them from the tripods and carried them back—over my head and away from the soaking, muddied damp of my dress—to Jes’s studio.

  I closed the darkroom door and turned on the red light like we had done in class. Repeated to myself, over and over, the instructions from her computer. Lift the lever. Wind the reel. Wait for the click or feel the tension. Then—pop it out.

  The reels were sealed, as they’d been before they went in the camera, and in theory, whatever I’d done wrong would have likely already ruined them, but I wrapped them with another strap of light-tight tape anyway, and placed Jes’s cameras back carefully on her shelf. I collapsed the skeletons of her tripods back into their rolls of carbon fiber and wound the power cords from my fingers to my elbows, closing them with tabs of blue tape. I hung the manual shutters back in their place on her pegboard, and then I realized—it was time for dinner.