Mockbuster

I exist inside every photograph except my own.

I got my first taste from a chatroom at my friend’s house in middle school. He’d deceived a woman in her thirties, told her he was eighteen. The lie felt natural. As easy as breathing. She sent us impossibly explicit photos and we took turns typing messages, trading out our places in his dad’s grey office chair to tell her what we were doing to her body. Yet my friend wrote something that gave us away as the pair of sweaty-fisted boys we were. She vanished, no doubt afraid, while my friend got spooked and deleted her photographs. I didn’t know it right away, but that day had awakened a need.

I learned to prowl and sharpened my lies in stolen images. In the days before webcams were cheap, people were more trusting of fewer pictures. Online personas stood on the back of a few photos hosted on Photobucket.

I had a folder for everyone I wanted to pose as. Sunglasses and suits leaning on open door BMWs for skin-starved forty-somethings. Long-haired guitarists with tattoos across their knuckles for the goths. College boys for pupils awaiting graduation and the affirmation of someone older and cooler and real. The truly depraved needed no picture at all. Just the truth that I was only 14, which excited a greater number than you would care to believe.

I would grow my collections on the back of trust built over weeks or days or hours of acting. I still have the data on USB. Vivid descriptions of what they made disappear inside them and recordings of their whispered and moaned desires and the things they wanted me to commit onto their flesh. Graphic images of orifices filled by root vegetables and vacuum cleaner extensions and shampoo bottles. I carried on until I felt each lie evaporate or they disappeared themselves, I assumed either consumed by shame or discovery.

As time marched my quarry became more aware. More discerning, of me and a hundred thousand other monsters breathing gangrenous swells through the long grass. They wanted my face pictures, new pictures, any pictures of me doing something now, something recent, something to prove I was real. A golden era came to a close.

Yet technology updates and so do I. My lies are now in my clothes, in my face, how I walk and the words I use. My early victories provided transferable skills. Learning to use a photograph and a name and to lie convincingly attaches equally well to a drivers license, a passport, a police badge. Just like the new collection I am building, there is no real difference to me besides the consequence of getting caught.