14

I saw this news story a couple years ago about a guy who loved someone for ten years and then discovered she didn’t exist. For an entire decade he thought he was dating a fitness model in LA, this spandex-clad girl next door with a blond ponytail and perky boobs. In reality, he was being duped by a bored housewife in West Virginia. His true love was just a digital collage of images from posters and videos, fused into a Facebook Frankenstein’s monster.

In the news segment I watched, they showed all his e-mails: thousands of pages piled on his desk like the longest romance novel ever written. There were boxes, too, stacked crates of gifts, photos, and tokens from their relationship. He even had a tattoo of her face on his right shoulder.

I still remember the look on his face when the reporter asked him how he could have possibly fallen for the scam. How could he really not have known it was a hoax all that time? Ten years! His face had turned red at first, but then he looked defiant, his wet eyes full of life.

“I was in love,” he said.

And what could the reporter really say after that?

I understand that look now.

Since my contact with Daniel the fake, I’d pretty much felt all of the feelings there are to feel. Rage and self-pity? Check. Astonishment with a hint of denial? Check. Short bouts of hopelessness ending with the occasional manic laughing fit? Yep.

There was so much that I had to rethink. So many moments that weren’t what I thought they were. It felt like I was living them all over again. Memories came back and I had to completely reevaluate them.

The video of the starlings, for instance. Even something small like that. Just a snippet of footage with tiny black birds flying in pulsing patterns over a pastel sky. A “murmuration” it’s called. Along with this video file, there was accompanying text.

This is what my body feels like when I think about you.

Who sent it? It had arrived in my in-box right around the three-month mark.

No-man’s-land.

But it’s important because I responded, at the time, by sending the first naked picture of myself I’d ever taken. I know. I get it. Spare me your judgments. It just seemed right at the time. I let my dress fall to the floor along with my tights, bra, and underwear, and I snapped the picture by holding a phone to the mirror on my closet door.

I made no attempt to hide the stuff about my body I hate. My outie belly button. The constellation of moles on my right thigh. A half-moon scar over my hip from a bicycle accident. My noticeably uneven breasts. I wrote back:

This is what my body looks like when you think about it.

I knew I shouldn’t be sending it even as I did it. I’d heard all the warnings. But what no one ever tells you is that the risk itself is the point; it’s the thrill of making a mistake on purpose. The only problem is that I thought I was making that mistake for someone in particular. Someone I knew.

Honestly, though, the sex stuff didn’t bother me as much as I thought. Worse were the things I told him. Stuff I hadn’t told anyone else. The way I used to shoot baskets in my parents’ driveway in junior high, telling myself that if I could just hit ten free throws in a row, I would no longer be ugly. My fear of the dark, all the way into high school, and the way I used to leave my blinds open so I could see the light from the neighbors’ TV.

The time I got my first period at a pool party and had to call my mom to bring me home. The time I watched all my friends make fun of an overweight girl in gym class until they brought her to tears, and I did nothing to stop them. And the admission, absolutely true, that I’d never had a boyfriend until him.

Some of these things made it to Jonah, I know. We spoke on the phone occasionally at first, and I remember his low voice saying “it’s okay,” and “but you were just a kid.” He hardly ever returned the favor, though. He wasn’t good at revealing. The only time I can remember clearly was when he told me about being hospitalized for a weekend when he was sixteen.

“All I can tell you, Tess, is that I felt worse than I ever had in my life. And I wasn’t sure what I was going to do if I was left alone. My mom found me staring into the knife drawer in the kitchen, and when she asked me why, I couldn’t answer. She called my doctor and he helped make the arrangements at a place nearby.”

I asked him if he’d ever felt that way again.

“No,” he said. “But I have to take a pill every day. Probably for the rest of my life.”

It might have been the last real thing I found out about him. Soon after that, he wasn’t interested in the phone as much. He wanted to text and chat, claiming he felt “more like himself” that way. And who was I to deny him? I liked the way he sounded in writing. I imagined us as a famous intellectual couple from history, exchanging “correspondence.” I had still never read anything as sexy and strange as Flaubert’s letter to Louise Colet in 1846.

Mr. Barthold had mentioned something about these letters when we were reading Madame Bovary for A.P. Lit, and I had quickly looked them up. What I found was better than I could have imagined.

“I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die . . . when you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.”

Damn, Gustave!

I wanted to be written to in that way, and Jonah came close.

Daniel, I suppose, came close, too.

I stayed away from Facebook for a week after that first exchange with Daniel. When I finally logged back on, I found a single message sitting in my in-box. It was not from Jonah’s account this time. It was from someone that I wasn’t friends with. The profile picture was not a face. It was a white silhouette with a light blue background, a template for a future image.

The message read:

Hello, Tess.

First of all, I don’t expect you to get in touch with me again.

This isn’t a plea for that to happen. I just wanted to explain some things to you in case you are curious about them in the future. Then, I promise I won’t contact you again.

Here goes.

First: I believe Jonah stopped communicating with you because he didn’t want you to know what was going wrong with him, psychologically. He didn’t want anyone to know much about that. I didn’t fully understand this at the time, but now I’m sure about it.

Second: I started using his account because I wanted him to break up with you the right way instead of just shutting down. That was my plan. To break up with you as him in a gentle way. I know this doesn’t really make sense, but at the time I thought it did.

Third: Once we started writing to each other, I was not able to break up with you. Either as him or as me.

That’s all.

I’m not sure what I expect you to do with this information. I just wanted you to have it. You have plenty of reasons to distrust me, but I still feel the need to tell you that I have never done anything like this before. And I’m not quite sure how it all happened. I do know that I have made a terrible situation much worse and I hope you can forgive me someday.

Okay,

Daniel.

P.S. I think Jonah would have been in love with you if he was capable of being in love with anyone. But I’m not sure he was when you met him.

I read the message twice. The first time my eyes skated over the sentences, not really taking them in. The second time, I read them carefully. I looked at the white space where Daniel’s photo should be, the face-mold sitting empty. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know if any of it was true.

The smartest thing to do, I thought, might be to accept these sentences as possibilities and leave it at that. I could take Daniel at his word and never contact him again. But there was this damn word stuck in my head. The woman at Maxine’s funeral had used it and I kept hearing it over and over.

“Rupture.”

It was the closest anyone had come to describing how I felt when I learned of Jonah’s death. Something inside me had burst apart suddenly, and I was still willing to try anything I could to put it back together.

So far, things had only grown more confusing, but if there was even a small chance that some of the pieces could snap back into place again, didn’t I have to try to make that happen? An idea came to me, and the fact that I was a little scared by it, made me think it might be the right one.

I quickly typed a message. It was short, but there was no chance of misinterpreting it. I watched it sitting there in the text box, the cursor blinking at the end of the final line. Then I hit Reply and let out a deep breath.

It read:

No more computers.
612-555-0491