“Well…” I said aloud and stopped. My tongue made a quick trip from the back of the roof of my mouth to my front teeth where I bit it. On top of the fact I had no idea what to say, I was doubly disadvantaged in that I had nobody to say it to. Instead, I observed the ceiling fan make a few mindless revolutions, and let out a heavy sigh.
“I didn’t see this one coming.”
The words felt good. Real. There was a palpable rock at the bottom of my stomach, brushing cold granite against the insides of my body as it rolled end over end. It felt like a sickness too large to be expelled.
I shook my head. At some level it still hadn’t clicked.
I got up and made a full circuit of the house. Nothing caught my interest. Everything seemed too mundane to serve as a bridge to help me understand how truly bizarre my life had become. I put on a pair of shoes, grabbed a jacket, and went on a walk. My mind needed time to chew. Time to digest. In spite of my natural character, I thought of nothing but the matter at hand. I walked till my feet ached, and I was glad of this. Aches are real. Real as rain drops. Real as rainbows.
I came home two hours later and sat down again. I was beginning to believe. My friend Michelle did not have cancer. Nor was she twenty-four years old. Nor, even, was she named Michelle.
“Well… damn.”
I stomped my foot.
Twice.
“I mean…” I grasped for words “… just… just damn!”
Three times, spinning in a bewildered circle.
Michelle had been… no. Not Michelle. There had never been a girl named Michelle. Still… that unperson had been close to me. I had stayed awake with her for hours in the night, when I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open, trying to soothe her… from the pains of a disease she didn’t even have. The sheer nerve of it staggered me.
“I can’t believe I sang to that… woman for four hours!” Not that I dislike singing aloud whenever possible. I sing almost constantly with the radio while driving, but it was the principle of the thing. I was quite fond of annoying my friend Nikki with selected pieces from “Sister Act” but… Nikki was a real person. Her annoyance was fun because it was genuine.
For… that liar, I had attempted to sing the incomprehensible African chant at the beginning of the “Circle of Life” which had consisted of me repeatedly mumbling “Mada wada immy immy dadduh” until the chorus had felt appropriate. All to make her laugh.
But I get ahead of myself.
Michelle was not a master of disguise. Michelle was not an incredible liar. Michelle had been able to deceive me because Michelle was a person I knew from the internet. As shocked as I was I could not help but realize that my predicament was largely my fault. I had demanded no proof she was who she claimed.
The fact that I had never met Michelle, or that I only place I knew her from was an internet forum we both posted on, hadn’t seemed to matter. We had traveled in the same on-line circle for three years. Surely, if she had not been the person she claimed someone would have found out before now. We had begun talking over the past six months, slowly growing from passing e-quaintances to people who spoke every day. Half a year… that was a long time to know someone to lose them. Lose them worse than if they had died. To lose them so powerfully they had never been.
I sat down on the couch, staring at the light of the computer screen. I chewed on my lower lip again, which is something I do when I am unsure of how to proceed. Michelle did not yet know I had seen through her illusion. My friend Rob had been the first to see something wrong. Her IP address changed like clockwork around a working person’s schedule. He had noticed because Rob is more fundamentally skeptical than I. He follows his hunches, and seeks out clues, whereas I am inclined to refrain from action until actionable evidence presents itself.
Although my hands were not clean in the rest of our “investigation.” I had then been the one to figure out her name, address, and telephone number through a not inconsiderable amount of detective work. I had even found several pictures. I had worked it out as I had worked out puzzles. I have always been good at puzzles. Logic puzzles. Math puzzles. Riddles. I had though of Michelle as nothing more than a puzzle and been able to undo her.
Little by little the knot had begun to unravel. Michelle had been a pageant mom. Her daughter had gone off to college. Her life had been left hollow. She wanted, even vicariously, the kind of attention no woman her real age ever gets. So she had become a girl in on-line communities the same age as her daughter. When asked for pictures, she supplied photos of her daughter. And to make it even worse, she claimed to have been suffering from Hodgkin’s disease. And she had kept up this lie for three entire years. Every second of every day.
I sent a few e-mails back and forth to Rob. Although I did not really want it, a confrontation seemed in order. We would speak to Michelle that night on a conference call. I sat around all day, wondering what I would say. Wondering how I felt. Wondering what kind of sick person could lie so perniciously, and wondering how I could have been fooled.
By the time the call came, I was hollow. It’s the sensation that comes over me any time my emotions become too distracting to deal with the matter at hand. It’s the sickening nausea that comes when you bundle up your humanity and put it in a box somewhere inside you until it’s safe to bring it back out again. We called Michelle. I waited for almost ten minutes for someone to say something.
Rob was joking. Jess was joking. Everyone was trying to have the same conversations they used to have. It was weird. It didn’t take long for me to realize everyone was waiting on me. I spoke the words. I cut through the laughter. I broke the silence.
“We know you’re not who you say you are. I know your name isn’t Michelle.”
She was silent as I laid it out. As I told her that I had tried my very best to find a way for her story to be true. As I told her that I knew there was no person with the name she had given me in all of Hawaii. That I had used her address to track down a name, that I had called a phone number registered to that name, and matched her voice to the one on the answering machine, and that that voice had not belonged to anyone named Michelle.
“Huh, that’s funny.” She replied. She who had groaned, almost crying, as she feigned dying of cancer. Cancer she didn’t have. “Huh, that’s funny.” She didn’t try too hard to defend herself beyond that.
Rob laid into her next, as did Jess. I’d shot the starter pistol and signaled that it was time for everyone else to dig in. It didn’t last long, only a few minutes. She claimed she lived on top of a school for part of it. That’s all I can really remember. She eventually hung up and I never heard from her again.
In a way it was ironic. A week previous, I would have given anything for Michelle not to have cancer anymore. She was a nice quiet internet addict who never left her home because her immune system was compromised. I wanted it gone, like magic. I suppose I got what I wished for. In its most elemental form, magic is an extension of bartering. Something precious is given up, in hopes that some divine intercessor will confuse apples with oranges and grant an otherwise unattainable goal.
In fairy tales the price of magic always seems less than you could have hoped, but more than you could have imagined when the time comes for the final accounting. I wanted my friend Michelle not to have cancer anymore. I wanted it with every last inch of myself. If impossible wants are wishes, you could say I wished very hard for her cancer to be taken away. I got my wish. The ancient gods of magic took away her cancer. But they had to take her away with it. Balance. Done deal.
Then this happened.
