Set the tripod in your living room and slip your phone within its grip. Click the power button and open the camera app. Bluetooth the remote. Step back into the frame and gauge the lighting. Flick on a third light.
Strip off your shirt and step into the frame. Try an angle. Try another. Move the tripod. Flip on the overhead light. Move the tripod again. Drop to the floor and do 20 push-ups. Stand, flushed, and flex. Drop your arms to your sides. Smile. Cock your head and offer a second smile. Click the remote that’s hidden in your fist. Drop the smile. Tighten your abs. Click the remote. Try a half-smirk. Click. Click. Move a potted plant into the frame. Turn in profile. Click.
Open the blinds. Side light is flattering. Smooth a hand over your chest hair: 225 likes.
Delete the 23 loser shots. Try to forget the dumb, empty look on your face in most of them. Open Photoshop. Brush out the dark circles under your eyes and accentuate the curve of your bicep. Outside the window, replace the parking lot view with a glimpse of Barcelona at night. Add a man with impressive traps, cooking at the stove behind you, wearing nothing but an apron: 678 likes.
Post an ad on Craigslist for several bearded, muscular men and, after winnowing down to the five winners, put them on friendship retainer. Pay them with an early 401(k) withdrawal that cost you a 10% fee. Collect their signed contracts and file for safekeeping.
With your remaining cash, purchase six Speedos of complementary colors at volume discount. Also, sunglasses. Coordinate your new friends together through a group text. Meet the hired photographer at your neighborhood indoor pool and instruct him to make the group shots feel “candid.”
Practice all your smiles. The wry grin. The smirk. The head tossed back in laughter. The men splash. Drops of water glisten on their delts. Confused children cling to the sides of the pool.
Back home, remove the children, their annoyed parents, and the pool’s background on your laptop. Replace with the backyard of a Palm Springs mid-century modern. Tinker with the word “amazing” in the photo’s caption. Amazing weekend, amazing new friends. Play with it. Have fun: 843 likes.
Is that enough? Have you earned the right to rest? To breathe, unbothered, for the remainder of the night?
Peer at the photo. The man to your left has bigger biceps. Examine the bulge in his swimsuit. Does the eye go there first, before your own bulge? Your hairline is receding.
Look up his online profile. Scan with sinking stomach through the kaleidoscope of his charmed life. Click on pics crowded with beautiful men. Examine the particular shade of his blinding white teeth. Smile at yourself in the mirror, then turn away from what you see.
Go back to his profile and check the last pic—the man and his square-chinned husband, decorating a massive Christmas tree in their matching pajamas. Overhead, a 30-foot vaulted ceiling.
2453 likes—do the math.
Gaze at his home’s tasteful interiors. Memorize what you can see of its layout. Check his friendship retainer contract in your files, and note his home address.
Your mother calls and you let her go to voicemail. As you pull on an outfit of black clothing, listen as she tells you that the nurses in the chemo ward brought in holiday treats and packed her a plate of seven sugar cookies and three squares of fudge to bring home. Wait until two a.m., then slip in silence from your apartment.
Drive through the cold winter town, past the brilliant lights of a 24/7 convenience mart, the grim faces of closed banks, and a man slipping on the ice outside an Irish pub, his breath trailing up into the night. Stop at a lonesome station for $2.25 of gas. Check your phone while you pump. Your contracted friend just posted a pic of his square-chinned husband, sleeping on a plush California King, wearing nothing but white briefs: 3267 likes.
Pull up to the curb of the man’s home address. The house looks different. Smaller, with rusted gutters. Kill the engine. Grab the emergency pack of smokes from the glove compartment and light one as your sister calls from rehab. Turn the phone and take nine pics of your face, cocking your head in different directions in the dim streetlight, the ember of your cigarette flaring in the dark. You listen to your sister for 23 minutes as you delete the eight loser shots and filter the remaining pic, chain-smoking four cigarettes, watching the dark house, tipping the ash through the cracked window. “Uh huh,” you say. “I get it.” You wait for her to ask you a question but eventually she just hangs up.
Slip from the car and crush the smoke in the slush under your heel. Stand for a second, measuring the silence. Count 10 breaths. At the end of the narrow street, a hooded figure of indeterminate gender pushes a shopping cart over clumps of icy snow.
Circle the small house. Note with quiet alarm the absence of the pool you’d seen multiple times on his online profile. Skulk along till you find, with both relief and panic, an unlocked bathroom window. Your feet scrape against the stucco as you squeeze your head into the warmth inside. Move a collection of generic-brand toiletries across the top of a tiny cabinet to clear a place for your feet.
Drop in to the bathroom with held breath. Crouch and listen. Count 78 thundering heartbeats. Blood rushes in your ears. No voices, televisions, or ticking clocks. Nothing but your own soft noises.
Creep down the dark hallway. Detect the sound of a snoring man and slowly, gradually, crack open the door to see one man sleeping on his back on a narrow mattress, on the floor in the far corner of the room. Endure 12 seconds of confusion as you scan the room for a square chin. Nothing but the man on a twin mattress and piles of dirty clothing The man snorts, rolls to his side, and you back away from the door.
Slip through the dark house, taking inventory of its meager possessions. The claustrophobic square footage. The pedestrian design. The empty craft beer bottles on the coffee table. Wonder if you’ve broken into the wrong house, but catch sight of a pic taped to the fridge of your contracted friend standing beside an old woman huddled in a wheelchair. Neither smile. She clutches two shawls around her neck.
You find his office and rifle quietly through his desk. You pull open his file cabinet, paw through bank statements. You scan for his biweekly automatic deposit from his job at an insurance agency and blink at the number. It’s five cents more than your own salary, which is 21% below the national median household income. You blink again and squint at the number to confirm that it’s real, then gaze out the back door, empty-headed, at a black stand of trees.
A floorboard in the hallway creaks.
You rush over to a closet in the corner, hiding in its darkness, piles of boxes around you threatening to topple. You stare out through the cracked door as the vein in your temple throbs.
The man shuffles into the office in rumpled pajamas. You recognize them from the Christmas tree pic—the one in the living room with the 30-foot ceiling. At his desk, his back to you, he clicks the space bar on his laptop three, four, five times and a screen saver pic of him and the square-chinned husband appears—they’re skydiving together, a distant red canyon far below . They give the camera thumbs-ups. Behind them, three falcons spin through the thin, blue sky.
He sits at the desk, scratches his shoulder, and opens Photoshop. He plugs in his phone, and pulls up a pic on his laptop. He appears within its frame, shirtless, standing before the bathroom mirror that you glimpsed when you broke into his house. The cold hunger you’d caught in your own reflection. You watch as he trims and distorts and supplements the image on the screen of his laptop, painting layers of confidence, companionship, and bright, heartbreaking colors. From your cramped vantage point, you grudgingly admire his skills
He emails the altered pic to his phone, where he posts it online. He stands, pulls a pack of Camels from a desk drawer, and opens the back door to the patio a good three inches. He leans against the door frame and smokes. You still haven’t seen his face, but you know the slope of his delts.
Snow has begun to fall—fat, wet flakes you can hear hit the branches of the pine trees out back. Tears spring to your eyes and you realize you’re still clutching his bank statement. Cold air seeps into the room and curls around your ankles in the back of the closet as you watch him watching his phone, checking the likes piling up in the last hour before dawn.
