Backlighting by Dana Moss

The first time I stole someone’s face, I was sixteen and in love. It was a love which curdled and twisted deep inside me, so I twisted my features to match. Her soft, doe eyes, her heavy brows, her blunt jawline and wide, generous, lipstick-ready mouth: they were all mine, reversed just beyond familiarity. I stared at my new reflection in the mirror and felt a shiver of desire run through me. I’ve been chasing that electricity ever since.

I met Leander on a warm evening with yellow light from the streetlamps smeared along the pavement. He’d emailed me a few days before, a friend of a friend of a former client: his sentences were jerky and abrupt and withholding, asking to meet without ever naming the service he was hiring me for, circling around it like a patch of black ice. I wanted to put my foot through it. Instead I played along and suggested we meet at my favourite bar, far away from my flat. I wore my professional face (unassuming, coltish) matched with a green turtleneck and dark trousers.

This would be my final job. For months now, I’d played along with these precarious first encounters, hoping to revive the electric desire I used to feel. For months, I’d struggled to separate myself from the faces I inhabited. Too many evenings spent frowning at old photographs of myself, trying to create a timeline of everything that happened between then and now; trying for a spark of recognition. That was me. That is me. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be ‘me’, but it felt a terrible thing to give up.

Leander arrived on time. Even without the description he provided, I recognised him immediately from his rabbit-eyed wariness. We sat in a corner booth and his leg shook restlessly beneath the table, providing our superficial conversation with nervy rhythm. I followed his lead to start with: we talked of the bar, the menu, the unseasonal warmth of the evening. He kept looking away, as if the sight of me scalded him.

He had a pretty mouth and long, tapered, pianist fingers with prominent knuckles. I was entranced by the way his fingers flexed around the wineglass; imagining, briefly, what they would feel like, not to touch or be touched by, but to control. What they would feel like if they were mine.

As my glass emptied, I grew tired of the chase. “Who do you want me to be?”

“My sister. Her name’s Helen.”

“Show me.”

He paused, perhaps unnerved by my lack of surprise. I bit back a smile. It was hard to shock me: I’d been dead loved ones, distant infatuations, exes, teachers, bitchy colleagues. Sons, daughters. I’d been wept on and shouted at and kissed. It was all the same to me—I liked the challenge. But I didn’t want him to know that. It was safer if he sat with his own discomfort. If he felt he was the one being watched.

I poured myself another glass of wine as he reached inside his coat for his phone and started scrolling. He tucked his face away from the light, labouring over the decision. The photo he finally picked was well-lit, the resemblance uncanny; not just a sister, then, but perhaps a twin, flesh made double. She stared coolly up out of the evening gloom, her eyes ghost-grey and luminous with the flash. They were beautiful eyes.

I knew her.

That was why I’d recognised Leander; not from his palpable nerves but because watching him from a distance reminded me of how I saw Helen across the room at a club. The way her beauty had hole punched my chest. It was months ago but I remembered it all: our gazes meeting, her smile, my naked face. The lurid anticipation of the approach.

“Can you do it? Can you be her?” Leander leaned across the table. I looked from his sister’s eyes back to his, and the same tremor of excitement ran down my spine. Everything else about him was shadow-shrouded and dark: the bruised hollows of his cheekbones, the curls of hair across his forehead, the suggestion in his low voice. But his eyes, as I nodded, were watchful and ghostly bright with wonder.

When I rose, he grabbed my wrist.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” I explained, feeling his thumb press hard into my pulse point. “To do the change.” My skin felt hot where he touched me. Until now, he had been a surprisingly remote figure like all my clients, aside from his electric gaze. “I’m not making a run for it. You haven’t paid me yet,” I added, though he only frowned as if to reproach me for mentioning my fee.

Finally, he asked, “Can I watch?”

“I don’t let people watch,” I said. “It ruins the effect.” My voice was more assertive than I expected. I felt naked beneath his gaze and his desire, as if he could see right through to my real face, my first face, which was half-lost even to me and certainly never of interest to anyone else. Clients had asked to watch before. I always said no.

“Please,” Leander said.

Maybe it was that word that convinced me. The part of his lips, the deceptive boyish flush of his cheeks; his face was beautifully expressive and I suppose I wanted to impress him. Maybe I was just starved of intimacy and drinking on an empty stomach. He would be my last, after all. Why shouldn’t I show off a little?

“Okay. But I want to keep her picture,” I said. His expression contorted, his mouth like an open wound, dark and tender. “I have a sort of portfolio.” It was a small price to pay to sate his hunger. And I wanted a reminder of Helen.

I sat down when his grip loosened. We were sheltered by the booth. My heartbeat was a bird trapped in the rafters, hard and quick in my chest, my adrenaline a sick, liquid sensation.

I stared down at Helen’s face and closed my eyes, focusing on her image, the severe lines of her beauty. The sulky roundness of her mouth, just like Leander’s. Her dark hair against the shadows. The memory of her touch, so different to the press of Leander’s thumb against the inside of my wrist: brief, flirtatious, gone. And I moulded myself to match. I was a fluid thing, filling whichever shape I poured myself into, existing in perpetual terrible adolescence. My nose lengthened and curved in emulation; my clothes tightened around the new, softer shape of my body; my hair grew heavier, longer. I saved the eyes for last and stared straight at Leander to mimic the colour. I breathed his soul through the air, dragging the colour in smears from one canvas to the other, until my irises were cloudy with grey and I became Helen.

Around Leander, the light of the bar shifted pink and then intimate red, casting his face in soft colour. He looked dazed with reverence. We sat in a religious sort of quiet as he stared at me, the bar murmuring around us.

“I can’t do her voice,” I said when it was safe to break our silence.

“That’s alright.” Leander’s eyes gleamed. He reached out with a shy, tentative hand, the way one approached a startled animal, and when he touched the side of Helen’s face it felt like a dreamtouch, there but not there. He thumbed the curve of her cheekbone. “You feel just like her.”

We ordered another bottle. I let Leander order, so I didn’t break the spell: I found myself wondering what Helen drank, whether the twins went out together like this, how much was fantasy and how much was reality shifted gently on its axis. It was dangerous to imagine, to wonder, but I had already broken one cardinal rule tonight. He touched me with brief, intimate gestures: his fingers against the inside of Helen’s wrist, her knuckles, his foot drifting thoughtlessly against the curve of her calf. His thumb pressed to her lower lip. It was a private intimacy which I was excluded from and yet moved by. Faces had long lost the power to affect me, people even more so. And yet I was moved.

The end of the evening crept up on both of us. Leander reluctantly slid a sealed envelope across the table. I looked away to allow him a sense of privacy and texted the photograph of Helen to myself. Another broken rule. Another thrill of electric desire.

When I looked up, Leander pressed his front teeth into his lower lip. His mouth was stained in dark patches by the wine. I desired him in a way I had not wanted anyone for a long time: hungry for his face, his touch, his fantasies. “Your nose is a bit too short,” he said, “for Helen. And the outfit wasn’t quite right. But...” His voice broke off, sounding strained. I felt drunk on my own power. “I kept forgetting it wasn’t her. And then it hit me again. Over and over. Like being at sea, knocked over by waves, trying to get to my feet.”

I struggled with a similarly irresistible force, barely able to grasp what I was about to suggest. But I liked the way he made me feel. I liked looking at him, spooking him with his reflected desires. I wanted to know what lived behind his eyes when he touched Helen. I wanted Helen.

“If I meet her, I can learn more,” I said. “I can get it right. You have my number. Call me.”

I offered him a smile as he slid from out of the booth: a full smile, my own one. In the bar light, Leander looked red and restless, and half-stunned, before he ducked to press a kiss to my cheek. His mouth was hot and the imprint lingered long after he left. Long after I erased every trace of Helen from my body and inhabited, once more, what I approximated to be my own image.

………………..

Dana Moss is a PhD student in nineteenth-century literature at the University of Michigan, although she hails originally from Essex, England. She is interested in the interplay between bodies, violence, and intimacy (sometimes all at the same time).

Twitter: @officialdmoss