Ensenada? That doesn’t sound like it’s close.
‘It’s in Mexico,’ she says.
Mexico.
‘You can’t be serious?’ I laugh and begin to lose my cool. ‘Even if I weren’t wanted by the police, I couldn’t get across the border without a passport. I don’t even have my damn wallet anymore. It was taken from me when you flipped the fuck out last night. Remember?’
Epiphany sighs. She says, ‘Watch your language, Jerry.’
Watch my language?
‘Last night you lied to me, I reacted. It’s in the past,’ she says, like I’m the ex-boyfriend who can’t move on. ‘We need passports now and you can get them.’ I’m about to tell her I don’t know who she thinks I am, that I wouldn’t know the first thing about getting passports, when she says, ‘Your friend can get them for us.’
Now I know she’s insane.
‘I don’t have any friends.’
This is where she steps closer and I see that little warning flash in her eye – the one she gets right before she stabs you with something. I’m not playing this well.
‘I do have one … friend,’ I say. ‘Maybe he can help us. But I would need things first – so I can contact him.’
‘What do you need?’
‘A lot,’ I shake my head. ‘I need to get on the internet. I need a computer.’
I expect Epiphany to say ‘nice try’, but instead she just walks towards the door.
‘Where are you going?’ I say.
‘I told you we don’t have a lot of time. I’m going to get your computer.’
I wait ten minutes in case Epiphany comes back, in case this is a trap. I mean she can’t really be going to my place to get my computer. She can’t be that stupid; the cops will catch her right away.
But after fifteen minutes I’m pretty sure she’s actually left. I go to the bedroom and find the incision in the mattress, the one next to the big brown piss stain. And using both hands, I stretch it open until it’s wide enough to fit my arm in. Then I plunge my hand inside. I blindly reach around the mattress springs and the stringy mattress filler until I’m elbow deep. I feel a tickle against my finger, but it goes away. I keep groping around the tightly coiled spring. And that’s when the tickle, it comes back. And this time it doesn’t go away.
The tickle begins to crawl along my forearm. Then it makes its way to my elbow, right by the mouth of the incision. It peeks its black, boney little head out. Its red rat eyes glowing rabidly. I cry out and the rat sprints up my arm and onto my neck. And me, I hurl backwards, shrieking like a little girl. The rat grips firm to my shirt collar, its claws pricking my skin, and squeals in unison with me as I grab its ropelike tail and fling it hard against the wall. It lands with a thump on the floor on the opposite side of the mattress.
I stand motionless as I wait for the rat to scurry at me, ready for round two. I can feel it orchestrating its best plan of attack. I wait. I brace myself. But after thirty seconds it still hasn’t shown its hand. That’s when I hear a light scratching. And cautiously, I peek over the other side of the mattress.
The rat, it’s slowly dragging its body across the floor with its front paws. Its back legs refuse to move.
A twisted smile creeps over my face. Like it’s one of my fake images, I picture Epiphany’s face superimposed on the rat’s ruined body. She’s beaten, broken. And as I bring my foot up, I pause. Her whiskery nose twitches and Epiphany-rat, she says, ‘Look at you. You couldn’t hurt me if you wanted to. You’re pathetic. See you in Mexico.’
So I stomp as hard as I can. The rat’s bulk cracks and collapses beneath my foot and when I lift my leg there’s a little pool of blood forming below its body.
And I’m euphoric. I feel like this actually hurt Epiphany in some way.
But then I notice the rat’s belly is still rising and falling in that pool of blood. It’s eyes – they’re still moving. It looks so afraid. Confused. Not understanding why its body won’t work how it’s supposed to. And I think of the shark, which makes me think of me, which makes me think of Emma in her hospital bed, her stomach rising and falling.
The rat keeps squealing in these short, painful bursts.
Suddenly, I so desperately want to end its pain, but I can’t bring myself to fuck up killing it again. So instead I scoop the rat up in my hands. Its heart beats rapidly against my palm. Then I bring the rat to the broken window, its little red eyes looking wildly around, looking down at the street from the three-storey height.
I don’t watch it hit the ground.
And under the rusty tap I scrub the blood from my hands in the chocolate-milk-coloured water. I scrub until my hands are raw. Until my skin splits. And even then I still feel the rat’s heartbeat against my palm.
11
Horny Halfling
The sun has almost set when I wake on the mattress to find Epiphany standing over me with a white laptop. The mattress, it’s the closest I’ve had to a normal bed in more than a day. It was too much to resist. Outside the window the sky is purple and in the far distance you can see the lights of Chicago’s skyscrapers just twinkling on.
And how embarrassing, I’m the houseguest from hell. The place is more of a dump than it was before Epiphany left. The pool of rat blood is still semi-fluid. The mattress’s guts are scattered everywhere, its tiny incision now a gaping hole. After my mercy killing I checked every conceivable place for the tape. I prised up floorboards. I pulled down decaying drywall. I even ripped the couch cushions open. But before I can begin to make excuses for the state I’ve left her shitty apartment in Epiphany hands me the laptop and says, ‘The videotape isn’t here, Jerry.’
‘You’re lying.’ I take a step towards her. Mom told me never to hit a girl, but I don’t think Epiphany counts.
‘I’m not a fool, Jerry,’ she says. ‘The only reason you are so accommodating is because you’ve realised the videotape proves your innocence. It’s the only card you have. It’s why you haven’t run to the police while I’ve been out.’ She says all this in a matter-of-fact way. This is just how things are. ‘You can’t think I would have left you alone with it?’
I feel so stupid. ‘Where is it?’
‘Mexico.’
‘Bullshit,’ I say. And I’m about to say, How would the tape get to Mexico? But then it hits me. ‘It was in that package I put in the mailbox.’ I feel sick. I had my freedom in my hands and mailed it away, International Next Day Air.
Epiphany studies me with her cool, green eyes. There’s no gloating or pleasure when she speaks. ‘I need you to help me, Jerry. The tape was the only way I could ensure you would. You’ll go wherever it is.’
And I picture my videotape lying on the beach under the Mexican sun, sipping a Mai-Tai.
‘I need you and you need the tape,’ she says. ‘If you go to the police I will simply disappear. You have no way of finding me. You’ll sound like a madman, and, because of your condition, the authorities will think you are. You’ll go to jail, Jerry.’
‘My condition?’ I say.
‘You see things,’ she says. ‘You see people who aren’t there. That’s why you didn’t think I was real.’
How could she possibly know that?
‘The newspapers, Jerry. Your mom. Your doctor. The press has got to them all. They mention your disorder, your … tastes.’
Then to underline her point about how fucked I am she hands me the Chicago Tribune. It’s the evening edition. Looks like the weather is going to be cold; might snow. The Bulls won last night; that’s good. Oh, and right on the front page, there’s my name and face in black and white. The picture they’ve used, it’s the one from my mom’s bedroom, my online college graduation picture. The one with my hideous crooked smile and fat eye-zit. Even I have to admit that I look like a murdering rapist that would attack his mom with a dildo. I read how I’ve become the most wanted man in the city. I read how I’m on medication. I read how I stabbed a colleague in the eye. How I tried to rape someone last night.<
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And I think, This isn’t good.
I think, This isn’t true.
I think, Couldn’t Mom have given them a better photo?
The look on Epiphany’s face, it tells me, There’s no point in arguing.
It tells me, You’re trapped.
And it’s right.
‘You should get started,’ she says and hands me the white laptop. It’s not mine.
‘Where’s the power supply?’
‘I could only get the computer.’
‘You stole this?’ I say, not quite sure why I’m shocked that the girl who put a tripod in an innocent man’s eye stole something.
‘Will it work?’
I open the lid. Someone was working on a spreadsheet when Epiphany nicked it. The battery level is almost full and it’s picking up a Wi-Fi connection from somewhere. ‘Yeah, it’ll work,’ I say. ‘But I don’t have a lot of time. Four hours max.’
‘There’s a bus leaving tomorrow morning,’ she says. ‘We will need the passports by then.’
‘It’s not like I’m ordering something from Amazon,’ I say. ‘This could take him a little bit of time.’
And Epiphany, she looks at me like she’s about to say, ‘This has nothing to do with South America, Jerry,’ but then she recoils just a little bit. She swipes at her ear, like she’s swatting an invisible fly away. It’s not the first time I’ve seen her do this. I ask about it and she says, ‘Just some ringing in my ear.’
‘Ringing in your ear?’
‘We’ll need money for the trip,’ she says.
I guess that conversation’s over.
So I say, ‘Don’t look at me. I lost my wallet, remember?’
‘There’s a pawnshop down the street,’ she says.
I look around her shitty apartment. ‘I don’t think we’re going to have anything they want.’
Epiphany doesn’t laugh. ‘Give me your watch,’ she says.
‘No way,’ I swat my hand over it. ‘This was my father’s.’
‘All the more reason,’ she says, as if that’s a real argument.
And I know she doesn’t mean to, but she inches up to me in a, well, it’s almost a seductive way. Just like women do who know how to get what they want from men, without using tripods, or blackmail, or sharp little blades. And she inches up to me until we are chest to breast, and she takes my hand and turns it over in hers. Even though her fingers are long, my palms dwarf her hands. It would take both of hers to cover one of mine. And as she works at the clasp of the watch, I feel the warmth coming from her body.
Maybe it’s because I haven’t been this close to a woman in, well … that’s not important. But, her touch, truthfully, it arouses me a little. Her green eyes, from this distance they don’t look so wicked as they do inviting. She looks me up and down. And my resistance, it stops when I feel the tips of her fingers tickle my wrist as she unfastens the clasp, then slips the watch from it. And as Epiphany takes a step back, as she goes all cold again, she walks out the door and says, ‘Get started. We don’t have a lot of time.’
Slam.
I look at my bare wrist and think of my dad. Then I think, No, just do whatever it takes to get to the tape. The watch was gaudy anyway. Big and gold and not my style.
There’s a guy I know through a fakirs forum. And yes, that’s fakir with an ‘i’. That’s just how they spell it. Like you didn’t know. This guy, he goes by the name Horny Halfling and he’s regarded as one of the best fakirs around.
The way faking works is, first, you decide who you want to fake and what you want them to be doing in the picture. Let’s say you want Jordan Seabring getting it up the ass. Now you need to find a body shot. Body shots come from regular porn pictures. Google ‘tits’ or ‘fuck’ or whatever and you’ll find more body shots than you can imagine. So to create a fake of Jordan Seabring doing anal, you need to find a picture of some woman getting it in the ass.
Go ahead, write this down. I’ll wait.
What’s tricky is you need to find a body that’s as similar to the celebrity’s body as possible. If the actress is fair-skinned, putting her head on a tanned body wouldn’t look realistic. If the actress has smaller tits, finding a body with double D’s won’t look right. In faking you want to make it look as real as possible.
After you find your body shot, you need to find a good headshot of the actress. Headshots come from scanned magazine photos or celebrity gossip sites. If you want a shot of the actress with her mouth open, so she looks like she’s enjoying it, you want to stick to candids as most publicity shots are closed mouth or beaming, white-teeth smiles that a person wouldn’t realistically be wearing if they were getting it in the ass.
Once a fakir finds the head and body shots, he works on joining them. Sometimes the fakir can just paste the headshot onto the body if the two are close enough in size, shape and skin tone. But the real champs – like Horny Halfling – they paste the head onto the body and repaint the entire image in Photoshop to make it look as uniform and lifelike as possible. And the best images are. You would swear they were real. I once saw a picture of Audrey Hepburn double-dicking at Tiffany’s and there was no way I could tell it was a fake. Faking, it’s more of an art than anything else.
Fakirs post their works to online forums where other fakirs critique them. The best fakirs rise to rock-star status in the forums. They have huge followings. They take the controlled fantasy that is Hollywood and present it to you in a more exposed, forbidden form.
I log into the New Fake City forums and send Horny Halfling a private message. After years of critiquing and requesting fakes from him, we’ve become friends. Not real friends, mind you. Internet friends. Common-interest friends. The only real-life things I know about him are that he also lives in Chicago and he learned how to fake while working the boring overnight shifts at Kinko’s – that, and he’s paranoid as shit and believes that the US government is part of some New World Order trying to enslave the lower classes.
Halfling initiates a direct IM session.
‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he types, ‘I think I found out who just killed Bill Clinton.’
‘No one killed Clinton. He’s still alive,’ I type.
‘That’s a duplicate. An imposter,’ Halfling types. ‘The real Clinton was murdered in 1994.’
‘Look,’ I type. ‘I don’t have time right now. I’m on low battery. I need a favour.’
Halfling, he can go on these rants forever. He’s one of those people who can suck you into his theories, because you just need to show him how wrong he is. We have that kind of relationship, the kind where we end up bickering about menial things and by the time we’re done we’re on the opposite sides of the argument from where we started.
‘Look at his policy shifts in his second term,’ Halfling types. ‘No one changes like that. They killed him. Set up their own guy. Put a lookalike puppet in the White House.’
I type, ‘I really don’t have a lot of power.’
Halfling types, ‘You know who else is running out of power? The middle class.’
I type, ‘No it’s not.’
‘And it started when they killed Clinton and put a puppet in the White House and the country fell for it.’
‘That’s stupid,’ I type. ‘No one, NO ONE would be able to pull that off.’ Then I add, smileyface.
Even though I have an overwhelming desire to correct him, I remind myself to keep it lighthearted. I still need his help.
Halfling types, ‘You’re right, it’s only just ALL OVER the internet.’
‘No it’s not,’ I type. Grumblyface.
‘It’s all over the sites I go to,’ Halfling types.
And I type, ‘I’m sure not everyone reads the sites you do.’ And then I add, winkyface.
Winkyface.
‘You’re totally brainwashed, like the masses,’ Halfling types.
No winkyface.
We’re going to be here all night if this keeps up.
So
I type, ‘Look, you may be right. I read the same thing once on Yahoo’s homepage. But then it was pulled like they never wanted anyone to see it.’ I type, ‘I didn’t want to believe it.’ I type, ‘It’s just hard to accept…’
And Halfling types, smileyface. He types, ‘That’s how I first felt when I was alerted to all this.’
And before he gets carried away with his theories again, I type, ‘I need a favour.’
‘What?’ he types.
‘A big favour.’
He types a confusedface.
‘A stick-it-to-the-man favour.’
And I ask if he still works at Kinko’s? I ask if he still makes fake IDs?
‘Of course,’ he types. ‘How do you think I make money? You can’t make a living from being a corporate wage slave.’
So I ask if he could make some fake passports.
Halfling types, ‘Easily.’ Bigsmileyface.
He types, ‘But you’ll need to keep them in a passport holder. I can make them look like real ones, but they won’t feel exactly real if you touch them. The card stock won’t be perfect. They won’t have the digital chips inside them.’
I type, ‘Will that be a problem? If we’re going by bus?’
He types, ‘Where?’
‘Mexico.’
He types, ‘I don’t think so. Buses don’t have airport-like security. NAFTA made sure of that.’
I want to type that I don’t think NAFTA had anything to do with transportation, but I don’t.
And then Halfling types, ‘We?’
And I type, ‘Yeah, I’ll need two. Is that OK? I don’t have money, but I can give you my passwords to all the Adult Empire sites.’
‘That’s fine,’ he types. ‘But I’d do it for free. Anything that shows them they don’t have all the power.’
And I type, ‘Thanks.’ Smileyface.
‘So who’s “we”?’ Halfling types.
‘Just this person,’ I type, not knowing how much I should say.
‘OMFG!!!’ he types. ‘IT’S A GIRL ISN’T IT?!?!?!?!?!?’
Epiphany Jones Page 8