Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

“You slept in,” Tyler said. I felt his eyes on me, but I couldn’t even look at him.

  I turned in a circle, tears ready to leak from my eyes as I looked for any sign of damage, but there was nothing, and it made me even more suspicious. What had they done?

  “What are you doing in here?” I shrieked, again, borderline hysterical. “Don’t touch anything.” My hands flew to my collarbone and I worried it, over and over. “I thought I had the only key.”

  “Chill,” Marlin said, brows up, hands pressing the air in a calming motion. “We’re here to help.”

  “Why are you reading my notebook?” I barked.

  Jes turned another page. “You go through our stuff, we go through yours,” she said with a shrug.

  “We have some time, and we can help you.” Jack stood up. He had no patience for my panic. “I don’t have to be home this weekend. Jes canceled a gig in the city. Marlin pushed her meetings. Ty—whatever, Ty’s at your disposal. But if you don’t want us here, we’re happy to leave.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head, clutching my stomach. “No—don’t go. Stay. Just—just give me a minute,” I muttered, gesturing to them to stay seated. “Finish your coffee.” Marlin took a sip. Jes turned another page.

  Scowling furiously, I dragged lumber, blocks of foam, tools, and adhesives into the middle of the studio. When I was ready to speak, my voice trembled with adrenaline.

  “I need help making frames.” The words pushed into each other. I paused, shook my head to clear the anxiety, and searched for reference photos on my camera. When I found an old one I passed it to them on the steps and tried to explain.

  “I like it when the frames look like Fruit Roll-Ups made in outer space by very sentient aliens,” I heard myself saying. “They should have a gritty-translucent-fruit-leather depth…and sometimes they should sparkle. I mean, like a lot, a lot of sparkle. Like a disco.”

  “So?” Jack sounded annoyed.

  “Uh, so—we have to make them. The frames, I mean. From scratch. First we make two dummy paintings. One is to make the mold, the other is to cast the frames. We stick the foam to one of them, and I’ll carve it. Then we coat the foam in layers of latex—that’ll make the mold—and then we have to make seven casts, one for each painting. They’re all different colors. There’s a chart in there. And, um, we also have to make silicone nubs for the back part. That’s for the wall.”

  They blinked at me dispassionately.

  “That’s it?” Marlin asked. They seemed unimpressed.

  “Well, I mean, then I need to put the frames on the paintings and build the crates.”

  “I think we should make two, maybe three molds,” Jack said. “It’ll go faster.”

  “Won’t they look different?”

  “No. We’ll make one, then the other, from the same positive. It’ll be exactly the same.”

  “Trust him,” Tyler said. “All those objects in his nets—he makes them, as you say, from scratch.”

  After that—it was like I didn’t even need to be there. The four of them worked in the smoothest, easiest concert I’ve ever seen; they had a rhythm and a pace all their own. They didn’t reach for the same tools, or the same lumber, or step in the same place—not once. I was the one in the way, and soon backed off.

  “Call out the measurements,” Tyler ordered.

  “What?”

  “For the dummies. Call out the measurements as we cut.”

  “Oh—uh—I guess I could do it that way,” I assented. “Hold on.” I paged through the notebook and felt only marginally useful as I called the measurements. Jes ran the table saw, Marlin positioned the lumber, and Jack screwed it into place.

  Tyler stood off to the side. He’d given me his job, only to be polite.

  “You guys are very good at working together,” I observed as they glued the foam to the frame with absolute precision, without a smudge, without a drip, without a single mistake.

  “No kidding.” Jes snickered. She looked at Tyler with an expression that said, I cannot wait to be free of this stupid idiot.

  I used two very fine hot knives to cut the foam: both curved, one like a scythe, the other a shallow crescent. The foam sloughed off in sheets, falling away in buttery peels as I formed the long, rounded lines of the frame. I felt them watching me—and I didn’t imagine it—there were waves of approval as I cut the support wedges in the back, the ones that would become the notches upon which the paintings hung. They murmured something to each other, and I imagined that it was kind.

  When it was time to apply the latex, I tried to speak to Jes, Jack, Marlin, and Tyler with the voice that I used for assistants. I did not bring my hand back when we reached for the same tool or move out of the way when we stepped in the same direction, and I bit my cheeks every time the word sorry threatened to bubble up from the back of my throat.

  After a few hours, a new hierarchy settled into place: When I moved, they stepped aside to let me pass. When I reached for something, they handed it to me. They waited for me to speak before speaking. And at the end of the day, there were three molds—something that would have taken me a week on my own.

  “This—this looks like years of work,” Marlin said to me as I locked up, pointing to my paintings. “You did this alone? In three months?”

  “It was more like two. Yes, I did.”

  She shook her head. “It’s enough to break someone.”

  “Carey did it,” I said to her. “Carey did it a thousand times.”

  “I guess so,” Marlin said, turning away. “I guess Carey did.”

  * * *

  The next morning, I tacked a chart to the wall.

  painting

  color

  frame

  Prudence

  interior pink and Verdi green

  unripe peach

  Humility

  4 a.m. night sky navy

  metallic silver w/ 2% acid green

  Chastity

  eggshell and pearl, rainbow

  dun gray (the darkest feather on a pigeon)

  Temperance

  the bloodiest red

  rothko chapel purple

  Modesty

  grease yellow

  fuchsia (disco)

  Purity

  almost white

  absolutely crystal clear,

  carbonated

  Obedience

  every black

  absolutely crystal clear,

  carbonated

  Tyler arrived first. I pointed at the chart without making eye contact.

  “Will you speak to me today?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I’ll mix Humility, then.”

  “Fine.” I turned my back on him.

  “Have you eaten anything?” he asked. I didn’t reply.

  When Jes arrived, she took my camera, photographed the model frame, and plugged into her laptop. “Hey—” I tried, but she held up her hand.

  “I’ll rig up a model in CAD. It’ll help us calculate the exact quantities of resin to mix,” she said.

  “Oh.” It wasn’t a bad idea. “Thank you.”

  Jes was mixing the second test batch of translucent silver and acid-green resin while I asked for more and more glitter until she rolled her eyes and dumped half a cup into the sample bucket. We poured it into the mold with buckets, spreading it with wooden panels, brushing it up the sides and checking the levels, the Kermit disco pond settling exactly as it ought to.

  Marlin walked over with my silver brush-holder. “This is rad,” she said, affixing one of Carey’s old brushes to it—the dagger, the one with the long bristles. “Look at how much distance.”

  “I know,” Tyler said, smiling. She handed it to him and he dipped the brush in the glitter, then swept it across the floor, six feet away. A long, draggy line appeared—exactly the same as the one on the body that had been in YOKEFELLOWS—and then I saw it.

  I finally saw everything with the right pair of eyes.

  Tyler painted.
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  Jack made molds.

  Marlin shaped bodies.

  Jes calculated materials.

  “We know each other by our lines,” I whispered. “We know each other by our lines.” I went over to the line of glitter on the floor and ran my finger through it. Tyler stopped and watched me, struck silent.

  “We know each other by our lines,” I said again, this time nice and loud. Marlin looked over, and then Jes—and then Jack. I said it again. “We know each other by our lines.”

  They stared at me like I had lost my mind. I’d never been so clear about anything.

  “We know each other by our lines,” I enunciated, pointing to one of them with each word. “I was so impressed. What a crock,” I spat.

  “What are you talking about?” Jes asked—what a faker—in a voice so feeble I didn’t know why she bothered. Tyler stood on the other side of Purity, petrified with dread. I took my fingertip of glitter and wiped it across his cheek. His green eyes looked into my clear ones, fear pulsing from his pupils, and then—I knew that I was right.

  “You did it,” I said. “You made Carey’s work.”

  They looked at each other—one to another and back again—and transformed from a solid, impenetrable foursome to a pile of broken glass. They fell apart in front of my eyes. What had once been a great wall was now a group of ragged people.

  “You did it,” I said again, my voice low now, commanding them, angry with them.

  “You all did it!” I said, shaking my head. “What a pack of liars. I—worked so hard.” I paced, frustrated with the fountain of rage that was exploding beneath my feet. “I worked so hard this whole time because…I thought Carey worked so hard. I thought she was this practical artist like me and you were these, like, intellectual, experimental geniuses who never got your hands dirty, not ever. I thought, oh God, I thought that she was this model of, like, a compulsive person who was fine as long as she made things, that she lost her mind when she stopped. I thought it was, like, this signpost. Be like her. But none of it was real. You did all of it. YOKEFELLOWS. To yoke me as his yokefellow, right? That’s what she wrote…Or you wrote. You wrote it, in the notebooks. All the different colors of ink. And when you stopped helping her, she killed herself.”

  As I’d stared them down, pacing back and forth in front of them like an angry general, the four of them had moved next to each other. They stood in a row, hands at their sides, mouths agape.

  “And this is bad, but—to keep it a secret for so long,” I said accusingly. “Oh my God. Susan was right all along. What’s eating you? What’d you do? What did you do to her?”

  Tyler looked at the rest of them in slow motion.

  “Are we agreed?” he asked.

  “Why do you care about agreeing with each other?” I snapped. Anyone could see that their bond was broken. Why the charade?

  Still—he waited, and one by one, they nodded.

  “The last time we disagreed, Maria Clarke killed herself.”

  “Maria Clarke? What does she have to do with anything?”

  “Maria Clarke was the actress who played Carey. Carey Logan was not a real person,” Tyler said. “She was not a real person. She was our project. It was all of us. Always.”

  * * *

  They told me everything. From the beginning, when they made the first sculpture, to meeting Maria and inventing Carey Logan. It was the biggest fraud imaginable, and they told it with their heads in their hands, crying, arguing, offering justifications, half-truths, selfish righteousness, absolute shame, and unabated sorrow. Sometimes they were the heroes, Maria, the villain; sometimes Maria was a martyr and they were her sacrifice. Sometimes they were simply people locked into a problem. It held all the prisms of who they were, and all of their truths and projected wants mixed up together, and I saw what a mess it all was among them.

  It boiled down to a few simple facts: Maria Frances Clarke was an actress they hired to play the part of Carey Magnolia Logan. When they wanted to stop—when they had made enough money—they told Maria it was over. But she was not ready to do anything else; she’d never done anything else. They tried to stop her. They couldn’t.

  She wanted to be Carey.

  She could not live up to it.

  It destroyed her.

  * * *

  I walked outside, closed the door behind me, leaned against the wall, and cried. The person that I looked up to most in the world was a lie. The man I thought I was in love with kept his boot on her neck for fifteen years, and lifted it when he was finished, and left her alone by the side of the road.

  “These people,” Carey told me, that night on Grand Street, “will make not only your work, but you yourself into a commodity. They’ll buy you and sell you. Let them. But make sure you always do it on your own terms.” She meant Pine City. They bought her, sold her, controlled her. “She was built that way,” Tyler told me, one of those nights on the deck, when I commented on Carey’s success. “She was the center of attention without doing anything,” I’d said to Jack. His careful reply: “That’s the most accurate description of her I’ve ever heard.” Jes and Marlin kept their language in check—but not their work. Jes’s film presented Carey as an imitation, while Marlin refused to change her hand, continuing to make the same hexagons, the same anatomies, the same lines.

  The notebooks, the multiple colors, the blocky handwriting disguising actual handwriting. Dagger line, T6 calf—decided to leave it. Tyler, Marlin, Jes, or Jack speaking to each other. A directive, not a notation. There’d been something about spiritual abuse. Someone called her an ungrateful bitch, I remembered, seeing the pointed scratch on the page. “I cried when I hung up…my role requires me to undertake more emotional and spiritual abuse than everyone else.” That was Carey—Maria—documenting how people treated her. “I’m scared he’ll make me demo talent,” she’d written on another page. A real fear. Not an insecurity.

  “I want to express myself,” she told the Times, when she “switched” to performance—no—reduced—distilled. She was telling the truth. She wanted to express herself.

  I’d misunderstood all along.

  I leaned against the wall outside my studio—her studio—their studio—and kept crying. I felt so sad, and so foolish, and so alone. It was the first time I’d cried since my apartment burned down. I thought it would make me feel better.

  It didn’t.

  * * *

  I returned to the studio, threading my way through my paintings, sitting on the steps. I did not speak. After a moment they gathered at my feet like guilty little children, looking up to me as though I was supposed to mete out their punishment and forgive their sins.

  “What is the A/B vote?” I asked, my voice steady.

  “A is, we tell,” Jes said. She was the strongest. “We go ahead and tell; we tell the gallery, we tell collectors, we tell anyone who will listen. B is, we wait and see how long it takes to come out, and we take that chance that it never will. Tyler and I have been on the A side. Marlin and Jack are B.”

  “The problem with A,” Marlin interrupted, “is that we’re talking about at least a hundred counts of fraud in the first degree. The artworks themselves are products of a fraud, subject to state and federal charges, based on the transaction. We didn’t commit tax fraud—we took all the money through a company called Carey Magnolia Logan and paid her out through that—but we did take in over three and a half million dollars from Carey Logan. We filed a fake birth record and death certificate with the county; that’s a federal crime. Criminal charges would put us in jail, and civil lawsuits could come from any collector. All it takes is for one single piece to decline in value, and then we’re getting sued. This lawsuit alone has cost us thirty thousand dollars to defend and we haven’t even met with the judge yet. Plan A is asking to lose everything in exchange for peace of mind.”

  “The problem with B,” Tyler responded, “is that if we simply wait, someone will unravel this. DROP OUT will undeniably raise the price of the other w
ork. With B, we are raising the price of our own eventual suffering.”

  “With B, there’s a good chance that nobody ever figures anything out,” Jack reminded him. “They haven’t so far. Why would they?”

  “She did,” Tyler and Marlin and Jes said in unison, looking at me.

  “What would Carey have wanted?” I asked.

  “Carey’s not real,” the four of them said in chorus. I wondered how many times they’d repeated that to each other.

  “Sorry. I’m still getting used to it. Maria, I mean. What would Maria have wanted?”

  “Maria was not an artist,” Jack said harshly. “She was only a performer.”

  “I know,” I said. “I saw her drawings. But—nonetheless, I think you owe her a vote.” I set my hand on Tyler’s. He took it, gratefully, and it surprised me, how easy it was to make him feel something, now that I would never feel anything again. “DROP OUT, and all those last performances. I don’t care if you think they’re bad. They’re hers. She was a part of this. She should get to vote at least once.”

  “She didn’t vote. That wasn’t her role.”

  “That’s completely unfair,” I said. “Her notebooks are crystal clear. She wanted people to see that film.”

  “She ruined our lives,” Marlin said, looking up at me. “She put her dead body in our hands. She asked us to validate something that we can’t validate.”

  “No, she didn’t,” I told them. “She didn’t ask. She told. She did exactly what she wanted. It’s not yours to hold hostage. You don’t get to choose for her. I don’t care if you think it’s bad. It’s hers.”

  Eight eyes, pained and sharp, snapped onto mine. They knew I was right.

  “A,” Tyler said before I was even done speaking.

  “A,” Jes followed.

  “A…A,” Marlin stammered. They all looked at Jack.

  “A,” he said. “Absolutely A. She wanted to be her own person so badly.” He sat down and put his head between his knees. “This is going to ruin my life,” he said. “Goodbye job. Goodbye to my wife and children. Hello bankruptcy. Hello prison.”