It won a prize! Well, sort of, but honorable mention still counts and it was first runner-up to the story that won

ECHO AND NARCISSUS

I’ll start with the best memories. This is my internal photo album and I can arrange it by what pleases me. The whiz-pop sound of cameras clicking and the near-nuclear heat of the lights shining on our faces. Being photogenic is the ability to stay wide-eyed and smiling. No matter what.
We met in rehab; it sounds better than saying mental hospital. Imagine this as being very Liz Taylor—Larry Fortensky only we were both younger and better looking. He was tortuously thin in those days; skin stretching over his high cheekbones and the precipitous swell of his forehead. I believe in the glamour of anorexia. Brand me as politically incorrect but we all know it is true. Thin is aesthetic, each muscle, each shift of bone and sinew gains prominence. He sat swaddled in blankets during group therapy. I wore blankets too, but to cover the scars, not due to my modesty. I was happy with my body and proud of my scars. Do you know how hard it is to carve the first sentence of the Constitution into your own body? But the therapist said that not everyone could stomach looking at the ragged “we the people” running up my right arm. The wounds were still too fresh and oozy for me to wear clothing comfortably. Besides, the drapery felt like a toga, like I was the Statue of Liberty herself.
Those days seem like a dream to me now. Other people might say that was due to the pain and the medication but it was all blurry before that. All that week, during all the planning, I was just clean out of my head. Exhilaration and fear make a marvelous adrenaline cocktail in the body. I felt amazingly brave. I scored the Novocain off Sam, my coke dealer. The ease with which he procured it proved what I had suspected for months, that he had been cutting my weekly allotment of cocaine with a generous dose of the numbing drug. Never one to do things haphazardly, I draped my room in white scrims and backdrops. How I agonized over the placement of the web cams. Then, I stocked up on Exacto knife blades and cotton rags. The prospect of a new and deeper pain made me glad.
All that week, I smiled pretty for the camera. No sighs and tantrums, no flip outs at the assistants, no insane lunch demands. I was as docile as those hungry midwestern girls standing outside of Ford Modeling with their two hundred dollar portfolios in their hands.
And all that week, they loved me. The photographers, the handlers, the makeup artists. That was the shame of it all. It made me realize what a bitch I had been beforehand. To see how grateful they were for small kindnesses seemed confirmation that what I was about to do was infinitely right.
Anyone could have prevented it; I posted all the info on my website. The therapist says I wanted to be stopped. I’m not sure she’s right. I just wanted to see if I could pull it off. These limbs, this commodity of me, I finally marked as my own. But I was smart enough not to completely demolish my meal ticket; I never touched my million-dollar face.
If it had been a cry for help I would never have gotten as far as I did. I would have stopped at the first cut or maybe even before that. I wouldn’t have kept going until I passed out. They say I would have died if one of my fans watching the live web cast hadn’t called 911. Does this mean I was suicidal? If anything I was guilty of bad judgment. I certainly didn’t pick the right friends. Emily left after the first cut and Derek, forget about Derek. All his talk about artistic integrity followed him out the door once he thought the police might be called.
But you can’t change the past; everything is a lesson. At least that is what I told myself as I sat in those interminable therapy groups, staring at the zoned-out zombies I was forced to spend time with. And I would have lumped Markus in with the rest of them except he asked me the one question nobody else had.
“Why the Constitution? I heard about what you did to yourself.” He said to me one morning while we were waiting in line for medication (Paxil for him, Xanax for me). Those were the first words he ever spoke to me.
I stared at him. He had a surprisingly deep and resonant voice for a one hundred pound man. But I got the feeling speech was an effort, that the motion of his own jaws could be enough to weary him.
He spoke again. “You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want. If it’s personal.”
“I wanted to be free.” It seemed like the simplest answer.
“Then why not the Declaration of Independence? That’s about freedom. The Constitution, that’s a contract, it’s about commitment.”
“Maybe I got the two confused.” I grabbed my pills and stalked away. This wasn’t my first time in a freak factory and the first rule, the only rule, is don’t engage. It only encourages them. It creates problems. I intended to do my time as quickly and quietly as possible. To say all the right things and convince them of my newly minted sanity.
But then I thought about it as the day worn on. Thought about how he was the only one who was even curious. I was so alone. My actions had cost me all my friends on the outside. Later, during quiet hour, I sat beside him.
“I was reading John Locke. All that stuff about the state of nature and how the commonwealth is supposed to provide man with the ability to better preserve his property and his natural rights.”
“What?” Markus stared at me with his oddly golden eyes.
“Earlier, you asked why the Constitution. Well, I thought about it and I think that’s why.”
“What’s why?” Those eyes. He looked like a dumb but faithful dog. A Labrador retriever maybe. No wonder women liked him; he seemed both noble and tame.
“John Locke,” I sighed, “the rights of each individual person to pursue his or her own destiny free of impediments. That’s what I was trying to get across.”
“You’re a strange girl,” he said and shut his eyes.
I was disappointed. I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe that he would turn out to have a scholar’s knowledge of philosophy and we could wile away the hours discussing the benefits of Nietzsche. Had I forgotten for a moment where I was?
But after that we started talking and I learned that while he wasn’t the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, he wasn’t the dimmest either. We were kindred in that we had both sought escape in ways that would seem incomprehensibly cruel to the uninitiated. We skipped therapy together and went for supervised walks in the manicured gardens. On long days with little to do, Markus was an oasis.
The therapists encouraged our friendship. “You two make a lovely couple,” Nurse Jane said when she noticed us curled up on the couch, reading the trade magazines to each other.
“Isn’t she great?” Markus leaned over and kissed me on the forehead.
“You only like me because I know which gossip items are true,” I grumbled, waving the paper at him. For the first time in months, I felt normal. The virtue of good pharmaceuticals, I suppose. My scars were healing, the skin knitting itself together in thin red rows. In the mornings, Markus helped me apply cocoa butter, gently kneading it in with expert and dispassionate hands.
He got out before I did. I would have made it out first if the nurses and administrators and therapists were men. Instead, Markus charmed the steely matrons with ease. Even at his thinnest, he radiated an aura of masculine capability. His arms were so thin he could wear his watch all the way up to his elbow, and still they let him go home. I stood on the porch and watched him painfully making his way out to a waiting taxicab. I was sure he would die of heart failure within the next few days.
But he didn’t. By the time I was released, four weeks later, he had gained twenty pounds and was screen testing for the role that would launch him into megastar territory. I called him after I was settled in my new apartment. We met for coffee. He ate two pastries washed down with a large mocha latté.
“This movie’s going to be big.” He looked so healthy, all glowy with anticipation.
“What’s the plot?” I said wearily. I was far past the point of believing in blockbuster fictions. Too many friends of mine had told me about the next big blockbuster they’d be starring in, only to see it go straight to video. I’m glad I never decided to do movies. Modeling is far less risky. I couldn’t imagine spending months in some remote location with a whole crew of strangers investing myself in a role, in pretending to be something else. When I modeled, I was myself. Blank, perfect, not even named in the layouts. Our model wears an Ungaro dress. Still, the pictures were of me, not of me pretending to be someone else.
“It’s a retelling of Medea. You know, the Greek story with the chick who goes nuts and kills her kids.”
“I’m familiar with Medea,” I replied dryly, “so I’m assuming you’ll be Jason.”
“Jason, yes, that’s the guy’s name. Anyway, the movie takes place in the present. I play a software developer who steals an idea from his wife and makes a million dollars and then, well, you can figure out the rest.”
I didn’t think this movie would go anywhere. But as a gesture of support, I agreed to go with Markus to the premiere. The hype was unbelievable. All the major news affiliates were there and everyone wanted to talk to him. It made me glad that I had worn a dress with long gauzy sleeves to cover my scars. The dress was modest from the front but cut low and deep over my smooth unscarred back. We were the ideal couple, tall, thin and wildly photogenic. The next week the papers were full of rave reviews for the movie and pictures of Markus and me together. Suddenly, the offers piled in for me as well, scars or no scars, crazy past or not.
That was when he decided to build the house. Unlike me he had actually listened to the things the therapist had said at the center. He knew enough to take time and choose his next move, or movie, wisely. So in the meantime he decided to build a house.
And that was Markus, too. Anyone else I know would have moved into an already built mansion by the sea, hired a decent decorator and been done with it. But Markus, still a Wisconsin boy at the core, he wanted to build his own home. Where you go grew up determines your dreams perhaps. Me, I’m a Manhattan girl at heart. You move in, you rehab the place, and you move out. I couldn’t see the bliss involved in starting from bare ground and working your way up.
I helped Markus find the architect and the contractor. I was so certain he was going to be cheated at every opportunity. Markus was going to sink all his money into a tacky midwestern monstrosity of a house. He took me out to the site for the first time. The plot of land was small and rocky, not even enough room for a pool. No view, at least not by California standards. The land was in Topanga Canyon, high on a hill and with scrub forests all around. Not exactly the trendiest neighborhood in town. If he had moved just a couple of miles westward he would have been in the heart of seaside Malibu. Instead Topanga Canyon is so hilly and woodsy it seems more like horse country. I stood there in my Manolo Blahnik stilettos, scarcely believing what Markus had chosen for himself. But the air was clear, a rarity this close to Los Angeles, and the sky was blue and all the houses in the vicinity were small and funky. Not a tract house in sight.
Markus pulled out a folder of pictures from his backpack. We sat on the hood of his Lexus and he held up a picture of each house up in front of the land.
“Do you think a house like this could go here?”
“M., where did you get all these pictures?”
“Magazines and stuff. I’ve been saving them for years. What about this one?” Markus held up another picture, squinted and moved it higher to block out the sun.
“Too spiky. This land seems awfully tilted, won’t it be hard to build here?”
“Maybe I should build one of those eco-houses, you know, the ones where they build right into the side of the mountain.”
“How much did you pay for this land?” I had a feeling he got badly taken.
“Not telling,” he said, shoving the pictures and the folder into his backpack, “now, let me show you, there is a creek at the back of the property and everything.”
Six months later, Markus broke ground on the site. The contractor let Markus drive the backhoe for a minute just so that Markus could make the first cut in the rocky earth. I wasn’t there. Dirt is not exactly my favorite thing. But I didn’t escape entirely. He had the whole groundbreaking filmed, so I saw the replay on tape. Two hours of grainy footage of construction equipment, and hardhatted men running around swearing. Not exactly world-beating stuff, but Markus was prouder of his little home movie than he had been of his hundred million dollar blockbuster.
I would never see him happier. Some days he’d be out working with the construction crew, hammering nails into the frames. I used to drive out to the site, steering my black and cream Mini around the deep ruts in the dirt road. Markus would be crawling all over the roof or standing in the foundation’s pit. He would come rushing over, jeans streaked with yellow and white dust, hair tousled, his long tan arms scratched and bruised. He was close to perfect weight then, maybe a bloop of fat around the abs, but other than that sheer perfection. He would drag me around the site, pointing out each new board, how it was all coming together. Back then he hardly gave his reflection a second glance. His agent worried about him working on the house himself. Worried that any number of disfiguring accidents could occur. But he would laugh it off and say he was careful.
The house took shape quickly. Not even a year later, we gathered for the first party. By then I had a whole host of new friends. Funny how success does that. Being on the arm of one of Hollywood’s leading men did wonders for my reputation. I became famous by association and ended up with a job taping fashion and style segments for a local channel. We had a perfect summer. Sangria-drenched afternoons out on the back deck, stay-at-home Saturday nights with videos and Chinese food. We were fabulously ordinary. And if he never touched me, and if there were times I thought he stared right through me, even that was bearable. We were a couple in every way but one.
I got greedy. Looking back now, that is what I would name that raw, snaky emotion that caused me to want more. All my new dishy female friends wanted to know what Markus was like in bed. I didn’t know. They wanted to know if he had said he loved me, if we were going to marry. They made it seem so vital, so important. I couldn’t tell them that when I spent the night it was always in the guest bedroom.
On a hot October night, driving back from a party in Encino, I did the unthinkable. I let my hand rest on his knee while he drove the twisty Topanga Canyon road. He didn’t say anything but when we got to the house he gently disengaged my hand and put it back in my lap. Wordlessly, he walked into the house. I sat there for a moment. I started thinking and then I started fuming. Maybe it was the four Margaritas I had consumed earlier, but by the time I confronted him in the living room, I was righteously angry.
“I’m sick of this,” I yelled.
Markus didn’t look up from the television, “What?” He had become accustomed to my sudden mood swings, my quick frustration with everything from parking tickets to rude waiters.
“This is bullshit. Are we friends, are we more? Are you gay? Do you want to fuck me? What, is, this?” I stood in the doorway, color rising to my face and heating my whole body.
“You’ve had a lot to drink. You should go to bed.” He kept his eyes focused on the television. How easily it soothed him, the same damn syndicated shows he had seen over and over were more important than the girl in front of him. Still, I persisted.
“I need to know. Do you want me?”
“Don’t spoil it.” He clicked off the remote. I had his attention now, his amber eyes watching me with a wary cat readiness.
I should have stopped there. I should have walked away. But I couldn’t. I kept thinking about my friends and how they might laugh at me behind my back. If he was gay, if I was a beard for him, I at least wanted to know it. “Markus, if you are gay, you can tell me.”
“I’m not gay.”
“You don’t think I’m pretty.”
“You are a model, of course you’re pretty.”
“How pretty/” I began to walk toward him slowly, shifting my hips as I walked.
“Very pretty. Now, go to bed.”
“Not unless you come with,” I said, closing the distance between us. I sat on his lap and twined my arms around his neck. Before he could move, or speak, or protest, I fastened my mouth on his and kissed him long and hard and deep. I could feel his hands trying to push me away but I wouldn’t be dissuaded. Due to my position on top of him, I had him good and pinioned. I felt the fight go out of him and I slowly pulled my head away.
“How was that?” I asked in a slurry voice.
He stood, upending me off his lap. “I can’t be touched,” he yelled, his voice thin and reedy like a child. He ran up the iron spiral staircase that led to the second floor, making a beeline for his bedroom. I could hear the door slam and then the click of the lock.
The fight had gone out of me. I wearily went to the guest suite, slid out of my dress and into bed. We would sort it all out in the morning.
I awoke at dawn with a fierce hangover and a deep sense of shame. Not wanting to stay and explain myself, I took the coward’s way out. I scribbled an apology on a note pad in the kitchen, and left before he woke up. All the way home, scenes from the night before played in my head. When I recalled how rigidly he pulled away from me I wanted to die. There is nothing worse than not being desired. I got back to my apartment and rummaged around for something to cut myself with. All my kitchen knives were serrated; I wanted something with a clean edge. I was trying to dismantle my disposable razor when the phone rang. I picked up thinking it might be Markus. Just some telemarketer trying to sell me magazines but the distraction broke the rhythm of my behavior. After I slammed the phone down, I no longer felt like hurting myself.
I didn’t speak to Markus for a while. I didn’t know what to say. He didn’t call me. I didn’t call him. When I read in the trades that he had signed onto a new movie, I wasn’t surprised. With the house done, it seemed natural that he would seek a new distraction.
The movie was being filmed in Canada. I imagined Markus would be right at home in the woodsy towns of British Columbia. And maybe after the six months of filming he could come home and it would be like nothing ever happened. After a few months, he sent me a postcard from Vancouver. The role was very demanding, he said. He was playing a junkie. The director asked him to lose twenty pounds for the end sequences. For realism. He thought that I might worry if I saw pictures of him somewhere so he wanted to clue me in first. I knew it was a bad idea, ex-anorexics aren’t supposed to mess with their weight. But clearly I no longer had best friend status so I said nothing.
Markus came home from the shoot, stark white and ghost-thin. Beautiful, but so fragile, as if he were made from rice paper. In person he looked slightly grotesque but on screen he was luminescent. The press for the movie was huge. His pained poet face gleamed from a host of magazine covers.
The movie was brilliant. A gritty, realistic picture of life on the streets. Everyone loved it, but I found it painful to see Markus so degraded. At the climax, his character, a street hustler was brutally raped by an undercover police officer. The theater was dark but I could see the outline of Markus’s face as he watched himself. He looked so triumphant while his screen image was defiled.
I hoped maybe he would take some time off between projects, like last time. This was not like last time. Instead, he took a recurring part on a police drama. He seemed a bit pale and fey to play a detective but fame means never having to be exactly right for a part. I was just glad to have him close by. I showed up on the set all the time, mooching off of craft services, hanging out in his trailer and making a nuisance of myself. He didn’t seem much to mind and I imagined that things were like they had been before.
One afternoon I showed up unexpectedly and burst into his trailer without knocking. Markus was leaning against the table, shooting something into his thigh with a syringe. I gasped and shut the door. He came hurtling out a moment later.
“It’s not what you think.”
“Did you get hooked while you were doing the movie? Researching the part?”
“No. It’s not smack, I’m not a junkie. It’s BYS.”
“What?”
“BYS, I forget what the initials stand for. I know the “y” is for youth. It’s a hormone or an extract or something. My new doctor hooked me up.”
“Are you sick?”
“BYS replenishes your cells. It keeps me young.”
“M., you are young.”
“I’m nearly thirty. I’ve got to take precautions.”
I let the subject drop. I didn’t want to push him. I wanted us to be friends again, for it to be like it was in the old days. If that meant keeping my mouth shut, so be it.
I looked up BYS on the Internet. I wasn’t sure who this new doctor was but BYS wasn’t FDA-approved for use on humans. It was some sort of stimulant given to racehorses. I found a bunch of websites that would allow me to order BYS from Mexico or Canada. They touted its benefits as a youth restorer, a weight loss aid, and a wrinkle reducer. It was an all-purpose panacea for Hollywood types. I also discovered websites packed with warnings about BYS. Seizures, blood clots, heart attacks—BYS was seriously bad news. There were also rumors that it could cause depression or anxiety. How could any doctor be so negligent as to prescribe this drug for Markus? I printed out the warnings but I kept them in my backpack, waiting for the right moment to speak with him privately.
That moment never came. This morning, I drove out early to the house. Saturday, and I wanted to go to the Getty. Markus sounded distant and reluctant on the phone but I cajoled him into coming with me. All along the wide, sunny freeways between his house and mine I imagined the day we would have wandering the long cool hallways filled with art. Later perhaps, in the afternoon quiet of a cafe, I could show him the printouts and tell him my fears.
His house was eerily quiet. I wandered through rooms, as clean and sterile as any hotel room, but I could not find Markus. He was outside, on a deck chair, wrapped in blankets despite the steadily escalating morning heat.
I walked up to him and kneeled down beside the chair. He turned to me slowly, his eyes, heavy and clouded. “I don’t feel well,” he said simply.
“M., what did you do?” I put my hand on his temple, it was icy cold and clammy. “I think we should go to the hospital.”
“No, I want to stay here,” he answered, his voice thick and sleepy like a child at bedtime. “Sit with me, please.”
The sound of his slurred syllables frightened me. I reached for his arms, trying to pull him out of the chair. The blanket slipped and revealed the bony wings of his shoulder blades.
“Still trying to get me naked? Just like Gary. Just like everybody. I’m so fucking tired.” He shut his eyes and his breathing rattled in his chest.
I didn’t know who Gary was. It didn’t matter. I thought about calling 911. But then I thought about the press and the publicity. Markus shipped off to another rehab center. The same process again and again. I remembered nearly bleeding out on my bed and wishing someone was there beside me.
I pulled the blankets tight around him and I moved another chair close to his. I sat down and reached out for his hand. He intertwined his fingers with mine and gave them just the hint of a squeeze. I closed my eyes and waited with him, listening to the slow irregular movements of his breath. Somehow, I drifted off to sleep for a moment and when I awakened he was dead.
I sprung into action immediately; there would be time to mourn later. One good thing about manic depression is that it teaches you how to handle panic, to have a calm center in the midst of spiraling descent. First, I would clean things up. He would have wanted a pretty death or at least not an ugly one. I dragged him to the couch and hoisted him up to a reclining position. He was as light and dry as a bird. I combed his hair and smoothed his stiffening face. I took all the vials of BYS out of the refrigerator and put them in my car along with the box of syringes. When the police searched his house, I wanted them to find nothing more toxic than aspirin.
I was thorough. I thought about changing Markus’s clothes but I didn’t quite think I could handle that. As I tidied the house, I felt normal, cheerful even. I caught myself singing or talking out loud, sometimes to Markus, sometimes to myself. I told him what I was doing, how I was going to take care of it all for him.
The hardest part was leaving the house for the last time. I didn’t mind his death so much as long as his presence lingered in the house, as long as I could stay with him. Maybe I am a coward too, just like the friends who abandoned me. I didn’t want to face the police and the questions, let them draw their own conclusions. My fingerprints everywhere, let them draw their own conclusions about that as well.
I head down the 110 freeway in a fugue state, ignoring the vistas of hilly green flashing by me. He had succeeded; freed both of the confines of his body and of the need to contribute any more to his growing legend. After all, James Dean only made three movies. I saw a documentary about him once and I remember the interviews with his now aged lovers. Wrinkles obscured whatever beauty remained. I catch my own eyes in the rear-view mirror. Such lovely almond-shaped eyes. The choice is suddenly clear: to death or to Rio, the world’s capital for plastic surgery. One thing for certain, it is finally time to do what I have been avoiding for years—it is time to put knife to face.