“It isn’t what it looks like.”
“Well what is it then? It looks pretty fucked up.”
“I just found it. I just stumbled upon it and you walked in right at the moment I saw it.”
“So you’re telling me you just found this picture? Where?”
“I’m kinda wondering the same thing about you. You’re in the picture and I just found it and I’m wondering why you have this picture and what it means.”
“You’re in the picture too and you’re looking at it in Photoshop right now and I can see you’ve selected my face.”
“Yeah I just found this open like that and I’m wondering what I’ve just stumbled into. It looks sick. Sick and twisted and I came here to do my job and I just happen to find this weird thing displayed on my monitor and you just happen to walk in right as I see this. Frankly I think you set me up. To what ends remain thus far a mystery. Sick.”
“I’m calling Tom.”
Chris walked out of the office and I think I played it cool. He couldn’t prove anything. Not that there was anything to prove. Yeah I played it cool and he’s gonna look like a total asshole and Tom will take my side, no doubt, and Chris will look like the sick fuck that he is. With Chris out of the room I could continue refining the selection around his face and apply a filter to all the layers in the image when I was done, film grain the cherry on top completing the sundae of the photographic evidence of Chris and I being great friends, spending time together at the beach. Fun in the sun, just the two of us. I exported the finalized jpeg and emailed it to myself from my personal email address and deleted the photoshop file, including emptying the recycle bin. The perfect crime. But it wasn’t a crime. It was just two guys having fun together at the beach and it happened, I was there and so was Chris, as this photo evinces.
Chris had pictures of his family on his Facebook page, a totally normal guy. He started working at the office a few weeks ago, replacing the former general manager, my immediate superior, and he was much closer to my age and seemed laid back and that was cool. I got curious and looked his name up on Facebook and there he was getting married to his unremarkable nurse wife. There he was holding a fish he caught. And there were his morbidly obese children. Maybe they grew out of it, I thought. Maybe they were just fat years ago, a phase. But no, here was my boss with his young adult daughter walking her down the aisle of her own wedding, the fat on her face threatening to eat her eyelids, her forehead a glistening souffle. I caught myself grimacing as I scrolled through the pictures of his fat kids. Fat as fuck. Chris wasn’t, in fact he looked in decent shape. His wife wasn’t fat. My new boss has fat children.
My first instinct was to look at pictures of guns. So I did for a few minutes and felt a little better but then I remembered my boss’s fat kids, I couldn’t help it, and the unease returned. What does it mean? What does it mean when your new boss is close to your age and is healthy and attractive and his kids are fat as fuck. What the fuck does it mean. More pictures of guns, then pictures of medieval polearms, then back to the Facebook page to sit and stare at the fat daughter. She’s so fat that her face expanded and she became Chinese, the fat forehead Chinaman look, an increasingly common mask of the age, a symbol of the leveling of everything, neoliberalism’s triumph, the face so fat as to obscure expression but the only expression to be expressed anyway was hunger, pain or hunger, so maybe its obfuscation was for the best. A face bloated enough to conceal the constant exertion and pain required to grow more of itself; I imagined hydrogenated oils stored in Coca Cola bottles stacked in perfectly symmetrical lines extending well beyond the horizon and the fat Chinaman’s face, genderless and sweating, beaming down from the sky, a sun requiring fuel, the furnace ever burning with human pain and disgust, a golem of the modern age. I exited the Facebook page and tried to continue working and I would find myself lost in work for minutes at a time, awareness of anything beyond the screen faded away, but then my boss would get a phone call and his ringtone (a bad country song, it was charming in a way) pulled me out of the brief timeless eternity, I remembered I was a person and I was working at a job and I had a new boss and my new boss had children who were fat as fuck. I went back onto Facebook.
My boss’s wedding photo would work best. I copied the photo and put it into Photoshop; my boss’s face was in profile and he was smiling, he could easily be looking at anything, I thought. I went back on the internet and searched for images of guys having fun at the beach and there were plenty to choose from. I picked one with a couple of guys who were obviously friends, waist-high in the water and smiling, some cloud coverage softening the shadows, a good match for the lighting in my boss’s wedding photo. It was harder finding a photo of myself to complete the composition. I looked through my own Facebook and was disappointed; I tried taking some new pictures with my phone but the lighting was off and it would be too difficult to edit so in the end I uploaded my face to a free AI image variation generator and set some parameters and included a lighting reference and after a couple rounds I settled on a good picture, one where I was smiling and the shadows were proper.
Chris walked back into the office holding his phone and announced “Tom is here on speaker.”
“What the hell is going on, Lane?”
“Not sure what you mean, sir.”
“Chris tells me that you’re looking at weird porn during work hours.”
“I think we’ve had a misunderstanding. Sometimes I have to edit pictures for this job. It wasn’t porn. I was just doing my job.”
“Chris says you’ve got a picture of him and half naked men on your screen.”
“Oh that? I actually found that when I walked into the office this morning. I don’t know what it is. And Chris walked in right as I saw it and I thought that was kinda weird. I walk into the office this morning and there’s this weird picture on my computer and the new boss happens to walk in and see it. And then he calls the owner and I’ve been working here for years with no issues and suddenly I’ve got this new boss and this weird image on my computer and it’s his word against mine. I’m not sure what to think, sir.”
Silence hung in the air while Chris eyed me up and down.
“I’ll call you back, Chris.” The silence returned. Chris cleared his throat.
“You’re fucking weird, dude.”
“What do you mean?”
“You never talk to anyone. You don’t eat lunch with the rest of us.”
Chris’s expression shifted from anger to mild disgust. He turned and walked toward the room’s exit.
“What’s this?” I asked as I held up the sheet of paper I just printed.
Chris stopped mid-stride and re-approached my desk. His head pushed towards the paper I held aloft as he squinted.
“What the fuck?”
“Looks like you were having a great time with some weird guy. Looks like you two are good friends. Looks like you–” Chris used an open palm to strike the side of my head. I fell from my chair, vision blurred and ears ringing. More than the physical pain of the assault, I felt the sting of betrayal on my soul. Tears filled my eyes. My new boss, a friend, seemed to forget all the laughs we shared. He seemed to forget our time together having fun at the beach–our shared anxieties about the future and hang-ups about our past, our goals, personal and professional, ground to dust under the heel of this monster, this friend I no longer recognized. I wondered how his children felt. His children! Still fat, no doubt, I understood more of their plight as their father kicked me in the mouth and I felt my teeth adjust in my jaw and tasted blood.
I woke up still on the ground, my arms either bound or not working. It was dark and warm and smelled like sweat. I turned my head and realized my head was in Chris’s lap. He brought a bite-sized Three Musketeers candy out of his pocket and held it in front of my mouth expectantly. I was temporarily blinded when Chris took a picture of me chewing, flash on.