Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

“Who?” I say.

“Your Face and my Face,” Hero says. “You freak.” There are tears in her eyes, but her voice stays calm. “Anyway. The trackers are being distributed to partygoers at raves worldwide tonight. They’re glued onto promotional material inside a CD for one of my favorite bands. Nobody you’d know. Oh, and all the guests at Yumiko’s party got one, too, and I left a CD at all of the false doors at all of the pyramids, like offerings. Those are all live right now.”

I’ve always been the good-looking one. The popular one. Sometimes I forget that Hero is the smart one.

—

“I love you, .”

Liberty falls in love all the time. But I was curious. I said, “You love me? Why do you love me?”

She thought about it for a minute. “Because you’re insane,” she said. “You don’t care about anything.”

“That’s why you love me?” I said. We were at a gala or something. We’d just come back from the men’s room, where everybody was trying out Darius’s new drug.

My Face was hanging out with my parents in front of all the cameras. The Olds love my Face. The son they wish they had. Somebody with a tray walked by and Hero’s Face took a glass of champagne. She was over by the buffet table. The other buffet table, the one for Faces and the Olds and the celebrities and the publicists and all the other tribes and hangers-on.

My darling. My working girl. My sister’s Face. I tried to catch her eye, clowning in my latex leggings, but I was invisible. Every gesture, every word was for them, for him. The cameras. My Face. And me? A speck of nothing. Not even a blot. Negative space.

She’d said we couldn’t see each other anymore. She said she was afraid of getting caught breaking contract. Like that didn’t happen all the time. Like with Mr. Amandit. Preeti and Nishi’s father. He left his wife. It was Liberty’s Face he left his wife for. The Face of his daughters’ best friend. I think they’re in Iceland now, Mr. Amandit and the nobody girl who used to be a Face.

Then there’s Stevie. Everybody knows she’s in love with her own Face. It’s embarrassing to watch.

Anyway, nobody knew about us. I was always careful. Even if Hero got her nose in, what was she going to say? What was she going to do?

“I love you because you’re you, ,” Liberty said. “You’re the only person I know who’s better looking than their own Face.”

I was holding a skewer of chicken. I almost stabbed it into Liberty’s arm before I knew what I was doing. My mouth was full of chewed chicken. I spat it out at Liberty. It landed on her cheek.

“What the fuck, !” Liberty said. The piece of chicken plopped down onto the floor. Everybody was staring. Nobody took a picture. I didn’t exist. Nobody had done anything wrong.

—

Aside from that, we all had a good time. Even Liberty says so. That was the time all of us showed up in this gear I found online. Red rubber, plenty of pointy stuff, chains and leather, dildos and codpieces, vampire teeth and plastinated viscera. I had a really nice pair of hand-painted latex tits wobbling around like epaulets on my shoulders. I had an inadequately sedated fruit bat caged up in my pompadour. So how could she not look at me?

Kids today, the Olds say. What can you do?

—

I may be down here for some time. I’m going to try to see it the way they see it, the Olds.

You’re an Old. So you think, wouldn’t it be easier if your children did what they were told? Like your employees? Wouldn’t it be nice, at least when you’re out in public with the family? The Olds are rich. They’re used to people doing what they’re told to do.

When you’re as rich as the Olds are, you are your own brand. That’s what their people are always telling them. Your children are an extension of your brand. They can improve your Q rating or they can degrade it. Mostly they can degrade it. So there’s the device they implant that makes us invisible to cameras. The Entourage.

And then there’s the Face. Who is a nobody, a real person, who comes and takes your place at the table. They get an education, the best health care, a salary, all the nice clothes and all the same toys that you get. They get your parents whenever the Olds’ team decides there’s a need or an opportunity. If you go online, or turn on the TV, there they are, being you. Being better than you will ever be at being you. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you have to be careful, or you’ll start to feel very strange. Is that really you?

Most politicians have Faces, too. For safety. Because it shouldn’t matter what someone looks like, or how good they are at making a speech, but of course it does. The difference is that politicians choose to have their Faces. They choose.

The Olds like to say it’s because we’re children. We’ll understand when we’re older, when we start our adult lives without blemish, without online evidence of our mistakes, our indiscretions. No sexytime videos. No embarrassing photos of ourselves in Nazi regalia or topless in Nice. No footage before the nose job, before the boob job, before the acne clears up.

The Olds get us into good colleges, and then the world tilts just for a moment. Our Faces retire. We get a few years to make our own mistakes, out in the open, and then we settle down, and we come into our millions or billions or whatever. We inherit the earth, like that proverb says. The rich shall inherit the earth.

We get married, merge our money with other money, improve our Q ratings, become Olds, acquire kids, and you bet your ass those kids are going to have Faces, just like we did.

—

I never got into the Egyptian thing the way the girls did. I always liked the Norse gods better. You know. Loki. The slaying of Baldur. Ragnarök.

None of the other guys showed up for Yumiko’s party. It’s just their Faces. The guys all left for the moon about a week ago. They’ve been partying up there all week. I’ve never been into the space travel thing. Plenty of ways to have fun without leaving the planet.

—

It wasn’t hard to get hold of the thing I was looking for. Darius couldn’t help me, but he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew exactly what I was talking about. We met in Las Vegas, because why not? We saw a show together, and then we went online and watched a video that had been filmed in his lab. Somewhere in Moldova, he said. He said his name was Nikolay.

I showed him my video. The one I’d made for the party for Yumiko’s pyramid dedication thingy.

We were both very drunk. I’d taken Darius’s blocker, and Nikolay was interested in that. I explained about the Entourage, how you had to work around it if you wanted to have fun. He was sympathetic.

He liked the video a lot.

“That’s me,” I told him. “That’s .”

“Not you,” he said. “You’re making joke at me. You have Entourage device. But, girl, she’s very nice. Very sexy.”

“That’s my sister,” I said. “She’s seventeen.”

“Another joke,” Nikolay said. “But, if my sister, I would go ahead, fuck her anyway.”

—

“How could you do this to me?” Hero wants to know.

“It had nothing to do with you.” I pat her back when she starts to cry. I don’t know whether she’s talking about the sexy video or the other thing.

“It was bad enough when you slept with her,” she says, weeping. “That was practically incest. But I saw the video.” So: the video, then. “The one you gave Yumiko. The one she’s going to put online. Don’t you understand? She’s me. He’s you. That’s us, on that video, that’s us having sex.”

“It was good enough for the Egyptians,” I say, trying to console her. “Besides, it isn’t us. Remember? They aren’t us.”