We’re Faking It But We’ll Never Make It

I’ve been on that site for just over a year, to promote the first essay he wrote for me to own. I followed its publisher, its editors, the writers from the same compilation. My profile tells people not to worry that I’m not real, but they follow me back anyway. But he doesn’t follow me, and I don’t follow him: It’s a professional distance that my orthonym and I try to cultivate. Sometimes we look each other up, to see us as others might. I don’t post much and my few followers don’t like much that I post, but do on occasion “engage”: which is to say, they see my stuff and shrug. The platform counts these shrugs euphemistically. We each collect many such shrugs, though his tend to sting more. He’s much more invested in that whole thing, shouting into the voidscape and hoping for an echo, a heart, a star, whatever diminished iconography helps him feel validated for his thoughts.

I’m handsome, ish. Conventionally so, algorithmically so, a composite of men like him or maybe him-adjacent turned into sunbaked avatar from the deepfake abyss. I’m more attractive than him, too, but only through me can he write about how ugly he feels. He plucked my face from a procedural face-mo-tron roulette, and matched it to names from a random name generator. “That could be me if I were named that name,” he told himself hopefully as he cropped my image to a perfect square, then desquared a circle for profile perfection. My face will never happen again. He keeps JPEGs of me in many places like a class photo duplicated for relatives’ digital wallets. I will never age, my tan will never fade, a frozen-faced Dorian Gray for him to admire. In a few years, I will still flash that guileful smile, a happenstance expression averaged from a hundred other guys like me. “Wow you’re cute,” a guy who may have been gay spam had messaged to me after a mutual follow. I was made to reply, “It’s the way they made me.” The guy said “lol.” We didn’t know what either of us meant.

I write more honestly and less anxiously than him. How could I not, with no one to shackle me to his failures? His embarrassing misadventures become my rapt confessions. I feed on his nerves, turn it into words. When he writes as himself he pulls punches, flinches. When his pieces work well, they’re mere technical knock-outs. He’s interested in “success,” in what he can share, what he can portfolioize, what will let him feel the achievement that has addicted him since childhood. It’s sad and a little pathetic, and so he made me his digital homunculus. I’m a burner persona he sics on social porn accounts he’s too scared to have others see he follows. I’m the him he wishes he could tell the world he is. I know he uses me too, to make notches in his authorial bedpost, but only on out of view: He will always be ashamed of what I wrote for him. I was built to be used, but I sort of get off on it.

By chance, he and I got accepted into the same lit journal last week. I told the editors “I’m not a legal person, but I can use my real name for copyright purposes,” an intellectual ownership he craves even if he dreads others seeing his full collection. He and I both signed our contracts with the same PDF signature. I don’t think the editors noticed, or cared. We both sent them our bios, mine intentionally vague and his very specific in the way real people sometimes make theirs, elevator-pitching themselves as a collage of concrete images, shithouse poetry of personal branding. We are not alphabetically close in the journal’s table of contributors. We are strangers within the same issue. My existence is an open secret protected by editor-author privilege, a sacred bond that should only be betrayed if the parties are important or rich enough. We all remain broke nobodies writing for publications no one reads.

I have come to enable him. The more he writes as himself, the more he wants to lie. Well, less lie than disguise. To write true but not literal; else, literal but not exact. Verisimilitude with all its sharp angles gets smoothened to second-whiskey campfire stories, slurring and pointing at hazy figures and vistas through a fog of careful plotting. “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story,” goes a composite quote attributed to Mark Twain, a man who was only as real as the income it made the actor who played him. But I want to tell the truth, even if I transpose his real experiences with pseudonyms and pseudotopes. My autobiography is his in code, a bildungsroman à clef. I aim for precision as he squints and calls his accuracy. Everything I’ve written here is true, except what can’t be.

I don’t want to live forever. I will be ridiculous in a decade, a man in his late thirties who still clings to a picture from his youth, the only good selfie I permit myself to have. Would anyone notice if I changed my face? Would anyone notice if I stopped writing? What would anyone notice if he did? He’s shouldered that fear onto me, a virtual effigy who was made to be forgotten.

In the far off future when everyone is a fake of something else, they may find that he was me, or maybe think I was him. The lexical analyzer bots will flag his words against my works, compare our lugubrious nouns and unsparing adverbs. They will datafy us, merge us as duplicates in a list too big for humans to read, throw our portraits and names into the AI slurry. Into this bunch of future shrugs I happily commit myself, as he waits thrilled and terrified for someone to solve our mystery.