The Interloper (10 page)
My aunt was an extreme hypochondriac, and my uncle was a family physician. Their dynamic had been the same for the forty years they’d been together. She complained, he dismissed her complaints, she complained some more, in part about his dismissing her complaints, and he would then go through an involved process to demonstrate to her that her complaints had been groundless. He was proven wrong as often as she, yet the dynamic stayed the same. I tended to side with her, out of shared temperament, or fear—my mother had died of cancer, after all. My aunt’s dire predictions seemed such a more accurate picture of life than my uncle’s reassurances and dismissals of warning signs, real and imagined.
Eileen was the only one in the household who completely bought into her father’s assurances. She coveted them, got hooked on them, solicited them from him. Every time she went out into the world, she saw that things were not going to be okay, and she ran home to her father, so he could contradict a world of evidence and reassure her as he had always done. These roles had been well established by the time I showed up. While I adapted to life with a new family fairly well for a child who had lost his mother and barely saw his father, I never felt as though I could squeeze myself into their little metaphysical universe. The sympathy I had for my aunt’s complaints and worries was not strong enough to drag me into her camp, and my uncle’s confidence in reason and his unremitting optimism never sat well with me, either, my life having provided plenty of evidence to the contrary. So I drifted between the poles of my aunt and uncle, and I fell in love with my cousin, in a way that made me want to be like my uncle. I wanted her to come to me for reassurance.
I read Raven’s next letter standing in the Mailboxes Store. I remember it vividly because I felt the need to conceal my emotions (the fox, the horns, the chase!) from the other patrons in the store.
Miss Hazelton,
I wish I could say I lived with you in the “third place” you talk about. I look forward to your letters but life on the inside is ruled by routine. They don’t want us to make our own place.
When you wrote about “a sliver of shimmering ocean” I thought it sounded nice.
My ex did not have a way with words like that. You don’t want to hear about her but as I said before I am
nothing if not honest. I can sense kindness in your letters. She used to harp on me all the time as if there was anything I could do about it.
Send a longer letter next time. I’ve got nothing else to do.
Kind Regards
Henry Joe Raven
The Mailboxes Store buzzed with activity. Just as I was coming to the end of the letter, I heard the mechanical bell of the front door and looked up to see who was coming in.
A young man stood in the doorway, wearing what appeared to be a brand-new shirt and tie. I smiled at this clean-shaven college grad, happy to have in my hand a letter from Raven, happy to share my good cheer. It was one of those miniature social interactions, and it would have been nothing more, I would have moved on, if the kid hadn’t mistaken me for a Mailboxes Store employee.
“Excuse me,” he said. He had papers in his hand.
“I don’t work here,” I said. He apologized and made his way toward the line at the counter. That was the end of our interaction. He left me wondering why he would mistake me for an employee of the Mailboxes Store. I had therefore become more alert to his presence. Otherwise I might have missed the following: when he got to the front of the line, he seemed equal parts nervous and baffled. The wife/sister behind the counter tried to look helpful but probably scared him all the more.
“Is this 3131 Extra Road?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“I’m looking for suite 1391.”
The wife/sister nodded patiently. “That would be a PO box. Do you need to drop something off?”
“No,” said the young man, “I was looking for a real person. Like in suite 1391. This is 3131 Extra Road?”
“That’s what it says on the door. 1391 is a PO box. Sorry, kid.”
He left, bewildered and disappointed. I must confess I felt a thrill at the boy’s confusion, some schadenfreude, although only a moment before I had wanted to spread to him my good cheer. For I had already turned him into Raven in my mind, and was sampling the early fruit of what would one day be an enormous crop: when Lily, love of his life, would be revealed to him as a sham, a nonexistent suite-heart.
Dear Henry,
I’m sorry you had a bad week. I am sending a happy-looking picture in hopes of cheering you up. Why was your week bad? I know you might find it hard to write about sometimes, but I hope you will feel comfortable sharing that with me. And nobody can really live in the “third place,” Henry—I meant that it’s nice to have an outlet, someone to put a new perspective on things.
Things at the school have been exciting recently! The teacher I’ve been working with, Greta, recently underwent a surgical procedure, and as a result I’ve been
teaching the class all by myself. As you can imagine, it has been exhausting. But I don’t feel tired until the day is over. During the day, I move forward without a break, and I get so much energy from the kids. I feel like I want to fill their lives with good things, all the time.
The kids are in fourth grade, boys and girls, and they’re at the age when they’re just beginning to act like little men and women, thinking on their own, but still so dependent on the rest of us. I read to them, and we have extended discussions about what we’re reading, lately about whether characters have treated each other unfairly. They’re really into fairness, this group.
There is one boy, new to the school, who’s having some difficulty joining the rest of the group. Whenever the end-of-recess bell rings, I find him at the edge of the playground, watching the clouds cross the horizon. He’s sweet, but he tends to wander off on his own a lot, and I can’t figure out if it’s because he’s more advanced or more behind than the rest of them. I suppose he’s a bit of both.
I had put this letter down and am picking it back up now. I just put together a delicious-looking meatloaf (it is in the oven now). Breadcrumbs, ketchup, onions, peppers, ground beef (of course), cheddar, and a few other things, with bacon on top—an old Hazelton family secret. It is cooking up right now and filling the apartment with the most exquisite smells. Do they let us send you food? I would happily send you some. Or something else, if meatloaf is not to your taste.
You mentioned your ex. I don’t mind you writing about her. As a matter of fact, I would like to know more about her, especially about why things did not work out between you two. (Your honesty, it goes without saying, is much appreciated.) As for me, I have not been with someone for a while. I was in a relationship that ended badly too. I won’t talk your ear off (I mean write your ear off) about it, but let’s just say that after him, I stopped dating. I needed time to decide what I wanted. Now I’m looking for someone upstanding, honest, decent, and of course handsome. Plus with a good sense of humor. And someone who knows how to treat a lady.
You said that I have a way with words. I think you do too. Does your facility have a good library? I could send you some books, if that’s allowed.
Yours truly,
Lily
Enclosed with the letter was a picture of Lily smiling a broad smile, sitting at a teacher’s desk, surrounded by children’s drawings. Her hair was up in a ponytail and she looked both capable and youthful.
You have figured out by now where I got the new picture of Lily. As I mentioned before, trying to replicate her without cutting and pasting from Lily_1 had proven difficult and would only become more difficult with each successive request for a photo. I remembered how much Lily_1 had resembled my cousin
Eileen. Only a few hours from my home was a cache of images, a grouping of faces, looks, smiles, and frowns all belonging to one person who, with a few clicks of the mouse, could be made to look like Lily, and who could never be tracked down by looks alone, unless one were willing to follow her into the afterlife, and an afterlife existed, and one’s looks were there preserved, and the veil of deceit was not permanently lifted at the moment of our dying.
I did not copy these images unmodified and send them off—I was not that crass. I couldn’t make Eileen equal Lily, even if I wanted to. No, but I took Eileen’s face and hair, and I put them on other women’s bodies, digitally, and I colored her hair and accentuated her features in a regular way, so that I could replicate what I had done when the time came to make more images. I referred back to Lily_1, that happy accident of Photoshop collage, to make sure I was being faithful to my first image. I am no computer genius, and no visual artist. My first attempt involved a great deal of measuring. I felt like the phrenologists of yesteryear, measuring ratios of skull width to eye placement and distances between nose and chin as a function of the width of the nostrils. The more variables I discovered, the more ratios arose from those variables, and I found myself having to chart the whole thing out on a spreadsheet, so that the calculations wouldn’t be too burdensome—and so they would remain trackable for future iterations.
I do not have the spreadsheet in my possession, obviously, though I could reproduce it here if it were required, and accurately so. By way of illustration: The distance, on the master image, between Lily_1’s right earlobe and the left corner of her
mouth was 51 mm. The top of her forehead was 85 mm from the center of her chin. Her eyes were 27 mm apart. I plotted twelve different points on Lily_1’s face to digitize her features. When looked at alone, without an image superimposed on them, the plotted positions looked like a connect-the-dots drawing of a jet fighter, with earlobes for wing tips and chin as afterburner. It was hard to believe they actually marked the spots that made Lily_1 uniquely herself, but when Lily_1’s image was brought to bear on the diagram again, the points matched up perfectly.
I have since discovered that people do this for a living, and do it better than I do. These so-called biometrics experts have broken up the human face into eighty “nodal points.” My mere twelve points yielded sixty-six discrete distance measurements—imagine their spreadsheets.
I brought all this math to bear on an image of Eileen. The result was Lily_2. For the moment I convinced myself that she was a success, that Lily_1 and Lily_2 looked like two images of the same person. But the experience was like watching a film with the latest special effects, where everything looks “realistic” but not real, and even as you watch and believe, you know that ten years from now the images will look dated and computer-generated and corny, and you will wonder how you could have ever found them realistic. I was at a disadvantage here, because I had suspension of disbelief and Raven did not. If I were in his shoes, I would assume that Lily was sending only her “best” pictures, and so I would scrutinize them for some sense of what she “actually” looked like, in day-to-day life. I put Lily_2 away overnight, convinced but cautious.
When she emerged from the shadows of a well-disguised folder tree the next morning (
…/typing_master/tutorial/images/key_strokes/Lily_2.jpg
), she looked like the victim of botched plastic surgery and—what’s worse—did not in the least resemble Eileen or Lily_1. The numbers had failed. Or, I should say, my application of the numbers, my choice of the numbers, had failed, because if one were to throw pure numbers at the problem, she might have looked perfect.
My second approach was to clear my mind as much as possible and look again at Lily_1. Only after I’d assembled her had I connected her looks to Eileen’s. I made a short list of subjective statements encapsulating how she both resembled and differed from the image of Eileen I held in my mind. Here is a sample (from memory, all from memory):
1. Lily’s brow ridge looks like Eileen’s, but her cheekbones are not as high or prominent.
2. Lily’s nose bridge is like Eileen’s, except a bit higher, and she has no cute cluster of freckles.
3. Lily’s chin is pointy, unlike Eileen’s.
4. Lily has brown eyes. Eileen’s eyes are green.
Creating this list, I was overcome with a sense of uncanny familiarity—I had done this before. I had done this with Patty when I had started dating her. I remembered a particularly superficial moment (post–ski–trip) at which I picked apart her features for those that reminded me of my cousin, whom I still regarded as a paragon of beauty, and tried to find in Patty’s face
some shadow of my first love. I wanted to understand how Patty had so swiftly and completely rearranged my heart’s loyalties. I was never able to get to the root of that mechanism. It remains a mystery.
I closed Lily_1 and opened an image of Eileen. I worked down my list, making changes one by one, and worked by instinct rather than by number, always keeping part of my focus on maintaining a natural look. I waited overnight again and examined Lily_2.2 in the morning.
She looked like a real woman, like Eileen but not like Eileen, both familiar and foreign. Promising. I crossed my fingers and loaded up Lily_1. Yes. It was her. Then I opened the first Lily_2, the one I had done by the numbers, dragged her out of the trash bin out of curiosity, to see how far I’d come, to give myself a pat on the back for succeeding the second time around. She was dull, out of proportion, lifeless. I wanted to condemn the numbers but I couldn’t. Some part of me had decided what to measure and how to define it.
The remarkable thing was, her features weren’t too far off. Now that I could examine her free from anxiety, I saw not a badly reconstructed face, nor a decade old special effect, but something else altogether: a tell-tale dullness. Opaque as a candle. In contrast, the skin of Lily_2.2 maintained the brightness of Eileen’s skin from the original photograph—I had restored it, from Lily_2 to Lily_2.2, from opacity to translucency, from dull reflection to bright glow, from death to life.
I heard Patty in the living room. She’d been home from work for a little while. Those simple routines—what I would give to have them back. The morning, her arrival, her “dinner,” my breakfast, the peaceful day ahead, a trip to the office, the Mailboxes Store. I found her crumpled on the sofa, embracing a carton of wheat thins, watching a video of CJ and his friends.