#marketforces

You’ve seen me.  Or at least someone like me.  If you’ve ever been to one of those places.  A place where there’s a something happening, something that makes an otherwise nothing place into an “it” place, just for a while.  Someone famous, or at least trending, shows up and does something.  A pop-up art thing, or maybe one of those events where you are supposed to remember something or feel a thing about why something or someone is no longer there.  In that case you have to act fast, because after the whatever it is that make a place a thing for a while moves on, that place is back to just being itself.

At those kinds of places there’s a pretty good chance you’d notice this girl.  I mean, you’d notice her even if you were trying not to notice.  Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve loved the word “striking.”  You see that word used about a lot of people now.  Red-carpet-baggers.  Grandstanding politicos.  Wheaties athletes.  Isn’t it weird, though, how it’s mostly only women and girls that get called striking?  Almost never men.  When its men that do most of the actual striking.  And mostly when I see the word used it’s a big eyeroll.  Because I know from experience that “striking” is something you only get in the in-person.  The essence of someone that just hits you in the gut, makes your stomach drop.

There’d be something else about this girl, then. You get the sense that she knows something, something you don’t, but you need to know really badly, and that is what keeps you staring.

And what she knows is how precarious her tiny sliver of reality is.  I know there are wackjobs out there who think we are all kind of living inside a giant simulation so convincing we can never tell it’s all fake, which I don’t get myself because to me everything seems fake pretty much all the time.  They talk as if we are all running around against some giant green screen with Lucasarts desperately cycling the CGI scenery.  But she knows it’s the other way round.  We are this person-shaped green screen that needs to be filled in constantly.  Most people do this automatically, without thinking, and that’s the problem.  Because then you just fill it up with whatever works with the background.  But that makes for a really fucking boring movie.  I mean, imagine watching a movie where basically everyone is an extra and there are no stars.

It’s kind of the opposite of most real movies, where you have these special effects but you don’t want them to be noticed as special effects.  I mean, you are kind of supposed to notice them because it’s pretty hard to ignore a weird-ass alien or a massive explosion.  But you notice them as just a part of the world that makes sense.  When you are like, sure, that alien looks like the kind of thing I would see in my worst nightmare, so that fits.  Well that isn’t what you want when you are trying to fill in the green screen of yourself.  You want the CGI to be noticed. You know when someone tells a joke?  The kind of joke that’s like a comment, and you say, “I see what you did there?”  That’s what you are going for.  And it takes work.

So you’d notice this girl is working hard.  When she arrives in one of those places, the important ones where you need to be seen in time or it didn’t happen, well she’s immediately hustling to get the best possible shot of herself in that place.  She’s experimenting with body positions, facial expressions, camera height, what’s in the background, how her hair falls, how much and what kind of skin she is showing.  There are so many variables and where most people go wrong is that they think it’s all about trying to control as many of those variables as possible.  And the results are almost universally awful.  Expressions like their dog got hit by a truck and they were told to smile at the moment they got the news.  I get so frustrated when I see that shit online, because this disaster is now preserved for all time and it all could have been avoided if people just cared a little more, were a little more professional.

The other thing that would make you notice this girl, more than likely, is that she isn’t trying to do all this herself.  I don’t know where humans got the idea that we could fill in that little screen of ourselves with DIY images.  I mean, I get that everyone thinks they are good at DIY, but most of our homes say otherwise, right?  And after all, if how we see ourselves weren’t the problem in the first place, there wouldn’t be a need for any of this.  So, there’s usually another someone with her whose job is to work at capturing the perfect image.  The person with the lens is usually pretty ordinary looking.  You’d be hard pressed to remember what she looked like after even a couple of minutes.  You certainly wouldn’t call her striking.

So you’ve seen this girl.  You’ve noticed her.  She has stood out to you and made you wonder.  Maybe even dream a little.  You have been struck.

I’m not that girl.  I’m the other one.

The friend.  The one you’ve seen but not noticed.  The essential worker.

That girl you’ve noticed, that’s Emily.  You are probably trying to picture her, to put a face on the name, but don’t bother.  It is a lot safer if there is a mismatch between what people hear and what they see.  You don’t want people to see what they expect.  It’s a dangerous world.

But not for us.  Not really.  We go back, Emily and me.  I feel safe with her.  One thing that makes people striking, I’ve realized, is that they don’t seem themselves ever to have been struck.  Emily floats through the world, is what it is.  She’s like a ghost.  She just takes everything for granted.  It’s just how it works for the Emilys of the world.  We’ve all seen those movies that try to make out that the striking people of the world have problems just like regular people.  But that’s bullshit to make losers feel better about themselves.  The Emilys of the world inhabit a realm of high magic.  I mean, seriously, you wouldn’t notice them at all otherwise.

I’ve been doing this job for years.  Ever since we were in middle school.  I don’t remember how it all began.  How do two people find each other?  They just do.  If it’s meant to be.  And I’m grateful to her for saving me.  You know what school is like.  Or hey, maybe you really don’t.  Occasionally I see stuff from older people about how school is the best years of our lives because kids are all so innocent, and that is why we need to do so many terrible things to them to keep them innocent, and it makes me wonder if there was something just super-strange about my school because it was a terrible place.  But it turns out that’s true for most of the people I know.  People will just lie to themselves about anything so why not about having a starring role in their own high school horror flick.  Maybe that is what they mean about peaking in high school.

But for me it was just the usual kind of horror, not the scarred-for-life kind that it could have been if it hadn’t been for Emily.  I was a nothing, a nobody, but school is filled with nobodies.  I think I always understood that I was never going to be the kind of person to which interesting things happen, and I certainly wasn’t going to be the kind of person that could cook up a bogus reality for other people to imitate.  So while all the people I knew were trying to figure out what kind of influencer they wanted to be when they grew up, I knew that wasn’t for me.  But somehow Emily saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself.  That I could be a different kind of nobody, a nobody who witnesses things.

That is why none of what happened really makes sense.

I’ve been her publicist, I guess you could say, for several years now.  There was a break-in period, of course, when we were both still feeling our way.  You’d never know it now, but she wasn’t borne knowing how to be what she is.  Some things we tried in the early days didn’t quite work but we were smart enough to recognize those moments pretty quickly and to erase or bury the online evidence before the damage became too long-lasting.  Old people talk shit about “youthful indiscretions” but they have no idea.  There’s no room for that anymore.

Emily always had the raw material to work with, of course, and I proved I had the talent, the craft, to make the world stick to her while leaving her untouched.  I have the passwords to all her accounts so I can upload as quickly as possible, because time is always short.  If there’s a big project we may need to confer, but mostly we don’t.  She trusts me.  We’re pros at this.

This time we were at the National Museum of American Art.  It doesn’t really look like much from the outside, just another building with big ugly columns and stuff.  There’s also some other museum in there, I think, but I don’t really know, one almost-trending place is as good as another. Inside they have this huge central courtyard, with a glass roof and water running over random parts of the floor, which I guess is supposed to be calming, like one of those little fountains you can get at Crate and Barrel if you have too much guilt about everything and can’t sleep at night.  But I like the space mainly because you’d never guess it was there from the outside.

We were there because in the courtyard they had some kind of thing where there were all these orchids and they had something to do with women who were painters or something.  I didn’t really get it.  There were panels in woman-friendly colors scattered about and I snapped a couple of them to read later but I never did.  This woman Emily follows had posted a pic of herself in among these bizarre looking plants with #rareblooms.  It was getting a lot of likes but we both knew we could do better because her stuff was pretty obvious.  I mean, that tag is about as unimaginative as #blessed.  And she was sort of disappearing into the flowers which defeated the whole point.  I wondered who her photographer was but of course you almost never know that; it’s hard enough to hold on to staff these days and you don’t want them being poached, but whoever it was didn’t seem to know what she was doing or maybe just didn’t know her employer well enough.

We set to work straight away.  Because the space is so enclosed you don’t have to worry about weather.  This made dealing with Emily’s hair a lot easier.  She has amazing hair, obviously, or no one would be noticing her, but it is amazing in a very particular way.  It is long, dark, straight, but every strand is perfectly defined, a single exquisite line stroke etched against the world.  It looks best when it is falling straight and true, but that can be hard if there is a breeze or even just the occasional disturbance from people walking too close; it is amazing how self-involved people can be, like they don’t even notice you are trying to work.  Once she gets it set for one shot, the delicate engraved steel perfect fall of it, and we need to vary the angle, she has this way of leaving her head in place and moving her upper body so it isn’t like that cheesy way that models swing their hair around in countless haircare commercials.  I don’t know, it is like she moves her body out from under the hair, out and around.  It is quite a trick.

As everyone knows, she was wearing a lime crop top.  That’s a favorite choice for her because she has an amazing stomach, astonishingly flat and smooth, an expanse of pale butterscotch skin, a long waist with just a hint of a curve.  I know a lot of girls are playing with the whole gender fluid thing because that is just so Instagram ready and maybe for a couple of them it is the real thing but for the rest it is just another way of running away from your responsibilities.  But Emily looks exactly like who and what she is.  She had on distressed jeans, but not the super-fucked up kind, the sort that are basically more holes than fabric, because those just look too street, like you are trying too hard.  I don’t know what you’d call the ones Emily and me are wearing now but I think of them as OCD jeans, just worn in a couple of places, like you couldn’t stop rubbing your hands on that spot.

We ran through the usual range.  Emily wanted a lot of full body shots, which made sense given how big the space was.  When someone owns a space that big it makes for a great image, and Emily just owns any light she touches, she’s bent much bigger spaces to her will.  But we also played with close ups.  She has such malleable eyes.  She can make them anime big but without that vacant dead look.  I always thought it was kind of BS when I read about someone whose eyes shone, until I met Emily, and I swear to God there’s actual light that comes out of them and washes over you.  They were shining then, that much I remember.  She was enjoying herself.  She knew this was all going well.  She is always so happy, overflowing with it, when she knows there are beautiful images of her streaming out into the world.  It is like all those images not yet taken have been weighing her down and then when they slough away, drifting like old skin cells across the online world, she just gets lighter.

If I wanted to be a dick about it, I’d try blame what happened on the panties.  It is one of Emily’s secret addictions.  She just loves overly-elaborate underwear, the kind with lots of mesh and lace and bits all rucked and ruched.  And sometimes it’s totally impractical with everything else she’s wearing.  We’ve had issues before and I let her know how hard it makes my job and she apologizes and she genuinely is sorry—there’s never anything fake about her, I know that—but like I said, addiction.

Today she couldn’t help herself, I could tell.  While we were doing the full-length shots, she was having to work her legs and hips quite a bit to get just the right stretch on her abs, get her thighs to sit just right and be in proportion.  Without, of course, resorting to that lame cocked leg sorority girl thing, which is the only thing most girls ever learn to do.  Not surprisingly, whatever overwrought piece of lacy nonsense she had going on began to ride up.  That’s putting it mildly.  From the pained look on her face, that apparatus must have shot up and got itself firmly wedged into her access-by-medical-professionals-only zone.  I’d looked away to take some photos of the orchids themselves, but without Emily it was just a bunch of random boring plants and I knew I’d delete them right after.  I turned around and I see her reaching back and trying to unwedge herself.  I don’t even think she realized she was doing it; she was absently looking around, scoping out the next shot.

I still don’t know why I took it.  Honestly, I don’t ever remember taking it.  My phone has a life of its own sometimes.  More of a life than I do sometimes.  That’s a joke.  But next second I was looking at the full screen image of Emily digging a hand into the ass crack of her jeans, and I mean looking like she was really getting up in there.  But it was the look on her face.  Only an idiot these days believes cameras capture what is really there, the “real you.”  They invent stuff that isn’t there all the time, or is there only so very briefly that for human time it doesn’t even exist.  So there’s Emily with a hand up her grand canyon and this look on her face like she’s finally been able to pee after holding a full bladder for the Guinness record.  It is the most crazy awkward LOL image you’ve ever seen, the kind that no one would ever want to see of themselves.  It wasn’t just the randomness of it.  It was one of those images that was so extreme it would Pacman across the online world at light speed, becoming the stuff of re-tweets and memes and “It be so like. . .” posts for years to come.  It was that perfect lie that once out of your mouth could never be taken back and becomes a new kind of truth you didn’t know about.

I looked up.  A lattice of bright silver beams stitched together a textureless greige sky.  How do they keep those beams up there, I wondered?  Whose job is that?

I uploaded the image.  At first it was just to Facebook, which she rarely used except for necessary gestures of social empathy and for charity giving.  But I couldn’t stop myself.  Instagram (and her Finsta account).  Snapchat.  TikTok.  You ever had that experience where you post something but it is almost like you are behind yourself?  As if the world has just been waiting for this and is trying to get a head start on it?  When I posted to Twitter, I swear the re-tweets were starting to pile up before my finger had left the screen.

We walked outside and Gallery Place was its usual self.  A rhythmic thunder from someone playing a plastic Home Depot bucket kit somewhere.  Two cops standing a wary equidistance from two sullen black girls.  Somewhere, someone was shouting their truth to the world in a lapsed meds rage or maybe religious fervor or maybe a bit of both.  I’m sure Emily’s phone must have been jumping and sparking but she had it in her bag.  She didn’t want to be distracted when she was working.  She was professional like that.  The featureless sky was breaking up and late afternoon sun slashed corridors of light and shade through the high-rises.  A golden light.  The perfect light.  The kind that makes anyone look good.  Emily reached into her bag.

I have this image of her.  One of the last I took before the image.  It’s a closeup, the depth of field so narrow that the bright colors and exotic shapes behind her are a blurry abstraction, and the only thing that gives it meaning is her presence.  Her face is so clear and sharp that it feels as if I could zoom in on her eyes and see a portion of me reflected there.  But no matter how close I get, there is nothing.

You can learn more about Mark by clicking on his bio:  https://thievingmagpie.org/mark-mullen-bio/