The Agent only managed my eyes, lower lid to supercilliary arch. A clause in our contract stipulated that the agreement could be rendered null in the event that I failed to reasonably maintain the glabella region. The glabella region, however, was not actually represented by the Agent. This part of my face was out of her purview; she simply did not have the right network to make such a niche body part marketable in the current climate.
On our second meeting she’d confided in me, “The gluteal region, that’s all anybody wants to take on right now. It won’t be easy but if we find the right outlet, I really think we can get some traction on your eyes. There are still a few people at the big houses who are willing to experiment. Here, take a few of my cards. In case you run into someone.”
The Agent’s diet soda can was always crackling, a miniature white noise machine. She took swigs of the sizzling liquid whenever her internet connection slowed or she was waiting for a voicemail to end so she could listen to the message and calculate a response in her own time. The Agent took time seriously. The Agent scheduled auctions and generated preempts and round robins. The Agent did not click heart on a Twitter post unless it was of consequence to her. The Agent had installed a program in her email that erased filler words or effusive thanks. The Agent conversed at intervals of fifteen or thirty minutes only. The Agent did not use the exclamative marker or sign her full name, except, of course, on contracts. The Agent cast no shadow.
When she ripped the satin thong and eye mask set apart and told me to start blind folding myself when I wasn’t working, I said, sure, okay.
At this point of my life, I spent a lot of time at the Z Hair Academy. For six dollars, a student would wash and dry my hair. Usually, the student used at least seven different substances to get my follicles to settle down. Aerosol spray. Gel spritz. Mousse. Wet oil. Dry oil. Cream. Pomade, even. By the time it was finished my hair lacked all movement.
At the same time that I was hoping to become a lucrative eye artist, I was also still obliged to apply for tangentially related work as a proofreader or line inspector. Although these jobs were often not in office, the interviews were in person and because I interviewed very poorly, I felt that I might compensate by perfecting my appearance.
I had never gone on an interview that, if cast by a director, I would not have been the woman selected for the job. This is something that I’m confident about: in a line-up, my posture, intelligent gaze, attentive facial expression, tailored clothing, and immaculate coiffure distinguish me. Additionally, I am qualified: imperfection presents itself to me like god’s voice to a prophet.
As a six year old, I solved magic eye puzzles at a thirteenth grade reading level.
My problem was I couldn’t sell myself. If asked what my strengths were, I hovered outside my personality, the flickering shadow of a candle cast in a half-dark room. My statements suddenly contained conditional clauses and loops in logic that suggested I had, perhaps, never met myself before.
Z Hair Academy attracted me not just because it was cheap and I had read on a job advice message board that women with “natural” hair were often not considered professional, but because the surrounding conversations reminded me of my own discursive speech patterns.
“My husband won’t let me cut my hair short,” said a woman with shoulder-length auburn hair to her stylist-in-training. “But I don’t care. Those women on TV are all wearing wigs anyway, you know? I’d look as good as they do, almost, if I had that kind of money. Plus, with the lighting they use on those sets? Those girls are barely real.”
We were seated in spinning chairs at a counter that stretched from the front of the school where customers entered all the way to the back, where the shampoo bowls whirled like toilets.
At Z, I cheated on my eye mask.
Whether I was looking directly at them or facing the mirror, I kept my gaze on the brand new students who were not yet allowed to touch real human heads. I say heads, not hair, on purpose: they practiced on wooden wig heads outfitted with real hair. To the dummies, they did things few actual customers would want done: dyed the hair platinum blonde and painstakingly weaved a hundred plaited braids into it or styled long rose-red ombréd locks into the tight ringlets of a haunted Victorian doll.
When they were done, they took the heads back to the shampoo bowls and unceremoniously washed out whatever style they had just set. I was always taken aback by the lack of sentimentality.
◆
Between my apartment and Z’s was the Certification Program I’d dropped out of when I decided to go ahead and get an agent instead of trying to get qualified for a job. I also removed the silk eye mask when driving, which I felt to be less of a betrayal to the Agent. She could ask a lot of me, I reasoned, but she couldn’t ask me to endanger myself. That was going too far.
My eyes became ultra-sensitive from all the time spent behind the mask. I began to notice things I otherwise would not. New strains of light, for example. The way factors like air quality and weather change the rate through which particles travel from their source to the object that eventually absorbs them. In general, I observed how much energy got sucked up into other energy sources and metabolized. Like the diagram from science class where sunlight feeds zooplankton who feed shrimp who feed small fish who feed mackerels who feed tuna who feed sharks. Even the ocean is capitalist, I learned.
It was with my sharpened sight that I saw a person who appeared to be myself walking purposefully into the Certification Program many months after I had left. She was dressed neatly, in the crisp items of a capsule wardrobe, her hair brushed straight back in a way I never wore my own hair. She was projecting a steady stream of language at a person I realized suddenly was my former academic advisor. It was this that made me feel momentarily certain the person was me—then, I noticed her hair crackle and fade in the wind, like she was powered by a fritzing wind-up motor.
The light changed and I concentrated hard on the horizon to avoid meeting the gaze of my old advisor as I drove by. It wasn’t that I disliked the man. On the contrary, he wore fingerless gloves and a thick Nordic sweater so he could keep typing away in his under-heated office. He worked hard to make sure his advisees became Certified and was honest as a troll beneath a bridge as to just how difficult the oral examination process was going to be.
“Your work is very original,” he said to me mildly. “What you’ve done here to argue against a gaze that’s triangulated in the traditional Mulveyesque sense is fascinating. I think what you’ve suggested has legs—the configuration of our relationality is more…what’s the term you used?”
“Crystalline.”
“Yes, multi-faceted,” he amended. “But some of the committee is going to find this jargony, unnecessarily complicated. You need to keep in mind that you’re talking with a simulations expert and a Brakhage scholar. These people have very set ideas about perspective and possibility.”
“Dog Star Man,” I confirmed for lack of any real response.
“You’ll be fine, Ms. West.” The advisor was courtly; he called all his students by their surname. “You just need to focus on articulating your ideas. You know, get the message across. Explain yourself.”
“It’s just a conversation amongst colleagues.” I had heard another student say this right after he passed his oral exams. On its face, the sentiment was demented. Peers do not possess the skillset to evaluate other peers. That was the whole point of higher education.
“Exactly!” The advisor was relieved then, so relieved he added, “Have you thought about querying agents? It’s good practice.”
Practice, I soon learned he meant, for learning where I fit in the scheme. Who I might feed and who might feed me.
Because it was apparent to me that I was going to fail the oral examinations anyway, it was not a difficult choice to quit the Certification Program once I realized I might find an agent who would do the one thing I could not manage to do for myself: speak coherently to the right people.
Agents had access, email addresses, contacts. They were in the profession of knowing people and being known. It was the closest thing on earth to psychopompery; conducting souls between realms of existence.
So I queried them. First one at a time and then in big batches.
Mostly I never heard back.
When I did, the agents always responded in riddles.
We admired your keen vision and astute point-of-view, but don’t feel we’re quite right to advocate for this project at the moment.
This baffled, because the project was my keen vision.
This project has such a unique, nuanced perspective! We cannot wait for it to be in the world and look forward to seeing where it lands!
I looked at that one several times; I could not quite figure out where it took the turn into rejection, but I knew it had.
We were so honored by the opportunity to consider your work—the fresh insights and illuminating tone really caught our interest! Unfortunately, this project is not quite the right fit for us at this time.
What, I wondered, was the shape?
Riddles in the sense that they kept me trying. They were never quite negative enough to get me to stop playing the game. So I kept querying until one day the name C. Townes appeared. It was familiar, but I didn’t know why. Cautiously, I read the string of words that appeared in the email preview box before I clicked the message all the way open.
Love the materials you sent 2/11. Talk…
Almost, I sent it to the spam folder. But some outside sense, some precognition, made me open it.
Inside, C. Townes revealed she was the Agent—an agent I myself had queried and forgotten—who wanted to talk to me about my project on the phone. It was not until the end of our fifteen-minute call that I realized she was offering me representation.
“I’ll have my assistant send you over a standard contract,” she said. “We’ll hammer it out from there.”
◆
What we had to hammer out was my name.
Of course a talent going by Carol West already existed. The Agent suggested I simply add an “on” to the end of my name. I liked the addition, the way it elevated my name from a utilitarian direction to a hotel chain.
In retrospect, it’s obvious appearances were always too important to me.
◆
The girls at Z have a vague air of being on the run.
I like this about them, a lot. It’s easy to believe they just got out of a cult because they never understand references to general pop culture things. Once I asked for Veronica Lake wavelets and the girl doing my hair said, “Where’s that? By the mall?”
To impress the girls at Z, I try to learn their language. I ask for squoval or coffin shaped nails, low lights, laminated brows. (Brows are not, you’ll remember, covered by my contract.) But you can’t impress a tour guide just by knowing which country you’re in.
Osmotically, I deduced that the girls at Z are most impressed by personal grievance. They like to hear about husband problems, work problems, friend problems. This is another reason I believe many of them are on the lam: they trauma bond.
While having little charms shaped like evil eyes pierced through the tips of my acrylic nails, I tried complaining about my fear of interviews. “My actual voice changes,” I said. “It goes all soft and, like, lispy. Like I’m a child. I’m like, who is this child speaking from my mouth?”
“Weird,” was the response from my stylist-in-training. “Are you sure you want all black eyes? We’ve got red, too.”
The girls at Z did not respond to intrapersonal problems, I realized, searching for some more outward conflict I could discuss. There are so few problems in my life that are not my own fault, I lamented inwardly while watching the black eyes dangle. Then, of course, I remembered the Agent’s other client.
Or maybe I had already been thinking of her; I must have been. Why else would I have selected, out of an assortment of thousands of charms—jewels, shamrocks, hearts, tiny unicorn heads, crosses, Stars of David, rainbows, basically anything in a box of Lucky Charms plus a lot of stuff that isn’t—the evil eye?
“I know this girl,” I said to the stylist-in-training. This was already a lie. I did not know the Agent’s other client outside of the Agent’s retweets of her successes. We did not even follow each other. “Her name is Becky with an I, but not the letter I.”
I said this in a disapproving tone that got the attention I’d been looking for. My stylist-in-training glanced up from behind her plastic nail tech goggles, “Really? Not an I?”
“No, an eye emoji,” I declared. “Becky with an eye. Beck?. Can you believe that?”
She couldn’t.
◆
Of course I didn’t follow Beck?; I couldn’t let her know I was looking.
But I did go to her Twitter profile quite often to see her frequent career announcements. It was Beck? who cultivated in me the covetous desire for a screenshot of an announcement in a hideous mix of fonts further made grotesque by the fact that they were all primary colors. These announcements appeared to be designed by the same person who created alphabet posters for primary school children, yet they came from an exclusive website. It was here where recent industry specific deals were broadcast, but the website was behind an expensive paywall so the only way for talent to get their own screenshot was if it was captured by their agent and sent to them.
The Agent was always capturing screenshots for Beck?.
About a year into my relationship with the Agent, I was looking at Beck?’s account from an incognito browser when two things occurred to me in rapid, chilling succession. The first was that my interactions with the Agent decreased in direct correlation to Beck?’s career achievements. The second was that the ridiculous name—the ridiculous, memorable, iconic name: Beck?—must have been created by the Agent herself.
And who was I? Just Carol Weston.
A dim glow in comparison to the beam of Beck?.
A dim glow in comparison, even, to myself.
◆
By the time Beck? landed a film adaptation and the entire internet (even the part not just for industry insiders but for actual consumers) was talking about how the studio would do it—how would Hollywood capture something so elusive, so intangible as the gaze?—I’d seen myself around town too often not to look into it.
There were other stories just like mine out there. Germans, especially, seemed to have had problems with this phenomenon for some time. The double walker they called the person who was not you. There were also reports from Scandinavia and Egypt. I read a story about a British metaphysical poet who claimed to have seen his wife (who was back home in England giving birth to a stillborn child) while he himself was at a market in Paris. In general, the sighting was an ill portent but not so ill that there wasn’t also an app for it.
After seeing myself hand what I knew to be a portfolio of my work to a talent scout outside the Certification Center, I uploaded a selfie into Dopple. My face pixilated and blurred as the app tried to match my features to my double. A bar at the bottom of the screen filled with purple light as the app reached its conclusion.
This took long enough that I started to have some fears. Right after I hooked my face into the grid, it occurred to me that I was probably contractually prohibited from doing so. This brought up a little ping of guilt about how often I was not wearing the silk eye mask these days. (You’ve probably noticed I’ve been doing a lot of looking.) The fear and guilt were spiked with a general feeling of disease that comes from thinking too much about one’s own pathology. I, of course, had not been able to avoid reading some Freud during my searches into my double.
He claimed that repressed things insist on returning to us with whatever flaw it was that made us look away to begin with mutated, magnified, monstrous.
I’d heard others dismiss the psychologist with a flip “you have to remember that guy was on enough cocaine to kill a horse.” Why always horse, I wondered? Also, it seemed everyone who had redirected the course of Western Civilization had been on at least some cocaine, which was more a comment about how ludicrous our expectations of productivity are than anything. Beck?, I noticed, sniffed quite a lot in her web tutorials.
No, I comforted myself with that thought that Freud sounds almost just like fraud. You have to listen to words; they are the rare thing that actually tells you just what they are, where they came from, and what’s inside.
This train of thought was interrupted by a ding that accompanied the culmination of the purple light’s trajectory. My Dopple results had arrived.
Ready to meet yourself? asked a button in the app.
I rolled my eyes. These interfaces were always so overly familiar.
But despite the promise of the question—the lexical assurance of it—my search results revealed that I, in fact, had no double.
Sorry, searcher! Looks like you’re unique! Have you considered bilocation?
I clicked the hyperlinked word and learned bilocation is the psychic ability to project yourself into a second location. Not to be confused with astral projection, the bilocated being is known as a wraith.
Softly, I ran my fingers over the magenta feathers I had allowed the girls at Z to braid into my hair. They’d put in too many so when I stood in bright light, the beams filtered through the feathers and made my shadow appear haloed. Or, as if I had a second body that had come loose and was now trying to get back in.
Although I knew seeing myself around town handing out work samples and business cards was the most intrapersonal problem it was possible to have, I couldn’t stop myself from telling my stylist-in-training about it.
I was getting my makeup done (except for my eyes, of course). It had been several months since I’d heard from the Agent at all and as a result, I mostly never wore the eye mask anymore although I did still adhere to the “reasonable protections” clause in my contract, which stipulated I was not allowed to compromise the health of my eyes in any way. The makeup brushes at Z were not sanitized convincingly, hence my refusal to allow them to make my eyes “smoky” or “cat” or “winged.”
To be clear: I’d tried to get in touch with the Agent more than once. In my last email, I had even been so audacious as to suggest we meet in person to determine a timeline for our project.
When a week passed with no response, I checked to make sure I had actually sent the message. I had. I then opened the email to make sure I’d delivered my missive with the necessary gravity. I had not: the Agent’s filter systems had reduced my letter to nonsense.
____ C._
_ ____ _____ doing well. How is the ______ in Manhattan? We’ve had an unseasonably warm stretch here_ You can’t predict _____, ____ _____? Drought _____ ______ scarcity mindset.
_ __ circling back ______ you __ __ __ look at my project? I’m concerned __ ____ ___ _____ ____turnaround time. ____ we ___ meet at ____ upcoming conference? _ ___ ____ ____ panel discussions and martinis_
I hope ____ __ surviving_ ___ ___ ___ retrograde season_
_____,
Carol Weston
Apparently whatever filter software the Agent used retroactively censored the sender’s own ideas. I’d heard the phrase striped of the niceties before, but I’d never actually seen it done.
After that, I didn’t even bother to take my eye mask to Z with me. Normally I clutched it conscientiously while I had my procedures done, but that day I had my hands free to gesticulate as I explained the situation to my stylist-in-training.
She was an especially cultish girl with the long almost translucent hair and sunken eyes of a person raised outside regular civilization, in too much sunlight. I expected her to pronounce my story “weird” when I finished.
On the contrary, she said, “Oh, there’s another school for that.”
“Another school?”
“I almost went there instead of,” she gestured to the beauty warehouse we had deposited ourselves within. “My mom said there’s more money in outer beauty than inner, though. So here I am.”
She then detailed what she knew about a school at the edge of town where the stylists only worked on energy.
“Sometimes the soul gets out of control, you know?” she explained. “It needs a wax.”
We both looked in the direction beyond the shampoo bowls, where women went into discrete but crowded rooms to have unwanted hair removed.
“A wax,” I repeated.
◆
My energy-worker-in-training was a reassuring healer archetype with long, natural brown hair and no mascara or shadow to manipulate the appearance of her enormous eyes. When people use the saying “it was like she stared straight into my soul” all they really mean is they had a conversation with someone who could maintain eye contact while listening. I’d been working on this for my dissertation before I dropped out—this fundamental idea of witnessability, of coming into contact with someone who shows you the way other people see you.
Dove led me to a room with a white floor and a white ceiling and white walls: a heaven cell. Inside the cell, I lay down on a heated table and closed my eyes while Dove invited me to find a doorway in my mind.
At first, it was just dark in there. I thought of a film I had never watched about a man who swallows a tiny camera that travels through his intestines.
“What do you see?” Dove asked.
I wasn’t seeing the intestine camera as much as remembering hearing about it, so I lied and said, “A tiny emerald door at the base of a gnarled tree.”
This felt on script, appropriate, especially the word “gnarled.” At the time it seemed like something I was making up out of pressure, but later on I’d think of how that must have been what I saw because it was what I said. It occurred to me, even if I didn’t see it.
Dove invited me to try opening the door and I did. I stuck my finger into a hole exactly the size of my finger and pulled so that the door opened into a dirt tunnel.
“Like the kind that leads to a rabbit’s warren,” I told Dove as I stepped into the cool dark.
At the energy-worker-in-training’s prompting, I traveled further into the tunnels, down beneath the tips of tree roots and the deepest sub-basements on earth, deeper even than the government’s deepest bunkers, deeper than the parts of the ocean that have not been charted, deeper than the tunnels to China children in the neighborhood where I was raised alleged to be digging. When I couldn’t think of any other ways to describe my journey to the center of the self, I stopped talking and Dove asked what I saw there.
I was quiet for a long time, waiting for a lie to show up. Nothing at all arrived though. Desperate, I racked my brain for movies about witches or time travel or Halloween in general for something but I could come up with nothing, not even the wrong thing.
It’s obvious to you, I suppose, that I was seized with the interview phobia I have already detailed at length. If there were a medical name for this phobia, I would share it with you, because names are so important. But there is not. Ergophobia (fear of work), the internet suggested willfully when I tried to label my malady.
Probably because she was an energy-worker-in-training, Dove did not understand the eclipse at the center of my self was myself. Instead, she suggested, “Is there anyone there with you?”
I guess she thought I was simply going to bump into the double there in the middle of my psyche and have a brawl over who was The Real Carol Weston. Maybe she thought we would fight, then talk it out, then hug, then meld greenly into each other like gallons of blue and yellow paints mixed with a stirrer.
“No. There’s no one here. There’s just,” then the lie appeared to me, “a book.”
Dove invited me to open the book, which I described as “a leather bound tome with a red wax seal.” The pages of the book were “old, roughly cut at the edges, translucent as a cheap Bible” and blank.
Dove suggested I try flipping through the book once more, just in case.
“Maybe pick it up this time,” she prompted.
The book was heavier than it looked, hard to shake. Its pages shivered like dust or ash caught in sunlight.
Then a card, which must have been pressed deep into the binding of the book, unloosed and fell to the center of myself. A business card that I could read without bending over.
C. Townes, the Agent
I opened my eyes to the brightness of the heaven cell.
◆
After I saw what surely you have already seen, I threw away the silk eye mask.
On my way to Z, I slowed as I passed the Certification Program and waved at my advisor’s window instead of slinking by ashamedly. I don’t know if he saw me but I like to imagine he did: ten little evil eyes winking at him from the street, nine black and one red.
The stylist-in-training was new. So much time had passed that a class had graduated and now I was stuck again with the matriculators, the mistake-makers, the hesitant. When I told the stylist-in-training I wanted fake lashes, “Big ones, like tarantulas,” she didn’t even know me well enough to be surprised.
That was fine with me. It’s an uncomfortable thing, being known—and yet. Yet, I did not desire my privacy so much that I wouldn’t give her my first real, true interpersonal grievance. It was actually more satisfying this way, because I got to start from the beginning, way back when the Agent told me she had been “putting out feelers” and there was “a lot of excitement” for my project. Back even before Beck?.
“Can you believe she’s out there, in the world, doing things in my name that I don’t even know about?” I asked the stylist-in-training. A group of had gathered, a gaggle. They all shook their heads in disbelief. They couldn’t believe.
“But the worst part,” I continued dramatically, “The worst part is she was doing it right in front of me. In fact, I gave her permission, see?” I pulled out the Agent’s card and, with an eyeliner pencil taken from my lash technician’s kit, scrawled my own name under the Agent’s. Expectantly, I stared at the gaggle.
Apparently, I had to do more than just spell it out. I had to actually explain it.
“Townes. Weston. Weston. Townes. Anagrams! Words inside other words. It was all right there.”
When the gaggle got it, they really got it.
I looked at myself in the mirror and, with my faux lashes, winked. There was nothing extra in the mirror. Finally, I’d explained myself.