What K.T. was being paid for, of course, was to make it look good. It wasn’t supposed to look as if someone had grafted a boy’s head onto a hog’s body. Skin tones and textures had to match, color blends had to be seamless. There had to be some hog in the boy and some boy in the hog. Despite your good sense, you had to believe your eyes. You had to believe that a creature such as this in fact existed.
He was almost done with the project, and even though he’d been staring at the image constantly over the last day or so, seen it even in his dreams, he still couldn’t stand to look at it. So he looked at the picture and yet he didn’t look at the picture. He looked at pixels, he manipulated bits and bits of bits, but he could not bring himself to look at this picture.
He had performed one additional manipulation, unasked-for, but which he knew from experience the client would want, even though he might not have the right words to ask for it. K.T. had tweaked the areas around the eyes and the mouth to make the boy’s anxiety more pronounced. No additional charge. A boy sow down in the mud, suckling his young. Completed. He didn’t know what the client would do with such an image. He didn’t want to know. He emailed a low-resolution sample, let the guy know how to download the higher quality version from K.T.’s site.
The rest of the evening K.T. worked on his web site, scanning images from magazines and newspapers, adding elements to aspects of his own face already in electronic storage. His web pages contained samples and descriptions of his business, price lists and submission information, but the deeper you went into the site the more personal it became, until finally you arrived at K.T.’s personal newsletter, Mews, and a gallery of images he’d created, including many self-portraits. He’d tried to explain in several different ways in the newsletter that the multitude of self-portraits on the site was not evidence of some runaway narcissism, but simply to avoid the emotional and legal complications inherent when you manipulated the faces of other people without their permission.
The title Mews had been a spur-of-the-moment invention, risking silliness in its multiple meanings. He lived in a complex called Dogwood Mews, meant to emulate an old English neighborhood with its facing townhouses and cobbled courtyard, the dogwood at its center in fact a sculpture of a tree out of wire and fibrewood and plastic laminates, the woodgrain a photographic image bonded to melamine. There were also word plays: “News” which he watched constantly but never seemed to believe or understand, the muse of inspiration of which he appeared to have very little these days, the musings of solitude which he had in plentiful supply, and finally the mews of complaint, the pitiful whining of a homeless or tortured cat, scratching and puking at the door. He’d originally included an image of a tortured cat as part of the masthead, which had outraged some so much he’d finally removed it. He kept explaining in his emails to these cat fanciers that the image had been manufactured, that he tortured images not animals, but many didn’t seem to believe.
Most who bothered delving into these deep recesses of his site were more interested in his self-portraits than animal rights issues, however. Here his image suffered skinning, marring, evisceration, zombification, pixilation, posterizing, inversion, hue saturation, spherization, castration, immolation, all the tortures of the damned, and yet the only fallout for his physical being appeared to be intensifying fatigue.
Sometimes he recounted for his readers/viewers the steps involved in creating such personal disaster, but most of the time he was content to let them view the images without the technical background. People made assumptions about him on the basis of these images and sent him offers of aid both financial and psychological, long confessions, virulent diatribes, veiled threats, and more than one marriage proposal. He posted several commentaries suggesting that perhaps they interpreted too much, that an image took on a life all its own once manipulated, divorced from its original source, it’s all just electrons, folks, charged particles and vapor-thin appearances and cosmic dust, but the outpouring had showed no signs of a decrease.
He had a second, larger monitor rigged up next to his first. After transferring some of his self-portraits to video, he would display them here, now playing twenty-four hours a day. This permitted exact-size images of his distorted head he might observe while working, talk to, stare at eye-to-eye. Disconcerting sometimes, especially if any animation was involved. The mouth dissolving into a smile full of bone, eyes full of charged desperation in confrontation with the creator.
This, perhaps, was what had sparked his increased use of the bathroom mirror. Something to touch base with periodically, an anchor, even if K.T. didn’t always like what he saw there.
Suddenly he could feel a razor-thin line of anxiety forming at the right corner of his mouth. It stretched across his chin and hooked into his jaw. He scrambled out of his chair and ran into the bathroom. Stacks of images flowing out over the rug, opened envelopes containing uncashed checks. A wicker basket full of unanswered bills on the floor next to the toilet. He wondered briefly if they might cancel each other out. A sour strain of body odor and spoiled food, but buried too far under glossy magazine layouts to do anything about. No one knew where all the bodies were buried, despite their claims. Children were killed everyday over the internet and no one lifted more than a mouse-clicking finger. Children’s faces stolen and peeled away, leaving their bodies awash in a sea of red electrons.
In the mirror: his face soaked in cold sweat, fluorescent highlights in the whites of his eyes. He pushed closer to the glass and examined his face for rips: a nervous twitch by the mouth, a deep crease, but no trace of blood. He breathed a trembling sigh of relief. He looked terrible, but it was just an image, and he of all people knew that images could be edited.
A thunder of surround sound. The walls appeared to shake around him, his fingers twitching in accompaniment as if typing in changes. A couple of deep breaths to calm himself—he figured it was all a problem of sleep deprivation; he got obsessed with the work sometimes and simply couldn’t be bothered with sleep—but his breath tasted of dank places and bad food and would not heal him.
A beating at the door. The infrequent visitor. He slipped back into the living room, performing a rapid survey of cleaning and straightening possibilities, and finding none elected to open the door anyway, not wanting the beating to continue a second longer. A pregnant woman stood in his doorway, weaving and drunk. He vaguely recognized her as a neighbor from across the way, despite the fact that a purple half-mask with plumes of ascending feathers covered the upper part of her face.
“So I heard you typing. Most nights I walk by I can hear you typing. Are you an all night typer or something?”
The mouth that said these words was unmasked, but outlined in a bright red lipstick that made it much more disconcerting than the half-mask above. The lipstick had an aging effect. Even with the mask he could tell the woman could be no older than thirty. The lipstick mouth added decades. It waited patiently for an answer. “Well… I work with computers,” he said. “I hit the keys pretty hard sometimes.”
“I wouldn’t know much about that stuff. But the thing is… my boyfriend’s gone out again, and I’m scared being all by myself. Can I just wait here ’til he gets home?”
K.T. heard the words, but he really had no idea what she was saying. It might as well have been a foreign language. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken in person to a woman other than a checkout clerk. He wasn’t sure he’d ever spoken to a pregnant woman. So he did what he always did when someone spoke to him in a foreign language. He tried to be the polite American. He nodded his head a great deal and smiled, even when she walked into the room. He didn’t ask why she was wearing a Halloween mask in the middle of July; it would seem seriously rude to show any curiosity at all.