M.M.
A fictional photo story
This short story is the result of an unusual collaboration. It is inspired by photographs posted to Instagram by Richard “Koci” Hernandez, an Emmy-winning multimedia journalist and two-time Pulitzer nominee. Spurred by conversations between Koci, Melissa, and two other writers, Melissa was inspired to write a story in which the narrative structure mirrored the structures she noticed in Koci’s photographs, especially elements of doubling, mirroring, and opposites. These structural choices then informed the development of her characters. She was inspired in part by Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson. The other writers used very different techniques. Follow the series here.— Jackson (Editor)
So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away--and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man. I am not sure which of us it is that’s writing this page.—Jorge Luis Borges
LET ME CALL MYSELF MARK MILFORD. I can’t give you my real name—even though it’s common, you could say it’s well known within certain circles. I should first tell you that I haven’t lived the most honest life. I’ve been accused of being the following: a drunk, a cheat, a fraud, a con artist. I know it seems common to believe that people mostly become “bad” by degree—a small boy who cheats at a game of marbles in his youth, say, is convicted of embezzlement and fraud in his middle age. But it was different with me. I’ve been told by some over the course of my life that I was “born bad”—but even that assumption is wrong. Too simple, even. I was born perfectly normal, but you can definitely say goodness fell out of me one day like a loose tooth.
I’m getting on in my years, and I suppose I’m telling this story because I crave a certain sympathy, a certain understanding. I hope you’ll truly believe of me that all of my actions since my life became knocked loose have been beyond my control. Sometimes I even wonder: am I someone else’s dream? Is that why I feel that I can’t take hold of my life? For that might make more sense than what I’m about to tell you: that all my actions feel as though they are the orchestrations of a foreign subconcious’s unfathomable puppet strings.
Does this mean I’m not blameless for the things I’ve done? I’m not sure. That will be for you to decide.
***
I SPENT MOST OF MY CHILDHOOD at a school like many others of that particular era: all concrete and faded paint lines and fog-rusted jungle gyms that inexplicably burned your palms if you dangled from them for too long. The echoing shrieks of children bouncing off the cement at recess. Then the shrill sound of the school bell would ring out, at which point the entire schoolyard was made to freeze to the count of ten. Faces frozen in inscrutable screams of what looked to be either thrill or terror. This is where it all began.
I was of middling popularity. But there was one boy who I could never seem to impress. Oddly enough, we had the exact same name—Mark Milford—though we were of no relation as far as I could tell. We did look a bit alike, insofar as all generic boyness looks indistinctly alike—crew cuts, dirt under the fingernails, grass-stained t-shirts. Our mothers’ spit behind our ears.
The other Mark seemed to always be competing with me for everything: grades, friends, playground fights. I can still recall the the first time he spoke to me. I was telling my friends one of those tall boyhood tales of bravado—something involving a made-up story about confronting one of the older boys in our neighborhood to return a football he’d stolen from us. “And then I cornered him at the end of Bella Vista St. where it dead ends into the creek. And I pulled out my switchblade and…”
“There’s no creek on Bella Vista.”
All heads turned to Mark. Then back to me. Flustered, I replied, “Oh, c’mon! You guys know what street I’m talking about…it doesn’t even matter! The point of the story is…”
But it was too late. The seed of doubt had been planted, and I had lost everyone’s full attention. It was embarrassing, though I did my best to not let on that it bothered me. Still—looking back it’s clear to me that it was at that moment that I began to fear him, that he would somehow always be looking to “out” me. For what I wasn’t exactly sure.
What bothered me more is that everyone seemed to assume we were brothers. We even shared the same birthday. Despite all of this, I didn’t dislike him. We fought in the way that boys of a certain age are wont to do, yet some sort of illusion we both sought to uphold kept either of us from permanently yielding the upper hand. It’s difficult for me even now to tell you how I truly felt about him: he drove me crazy, but I also deeply craved his attention and respect. We came to one of those uneasy friendships exclusive to that strange sort of boyhood alchemy: we became thick as thieves, yet we both knew that to turn our back for even a moment to the other one would yield in deep claw marks. There was this, too: I have always hated my name. Mark Milford! Have you ever heard a more boring and ordinary name? And so to be constantly confronted with this other, better Mark Milford, was the source of a kind of ghostly self-loathing, a sense of always losing against…myself.
What could have ripened into mutual respect only deepened my resentment. Mark always seemed to be quietly and insidiously studying me. We even had a long-running joke within our circle of friends in which he was able to perform a spot-on impersonation of me. I hated it, and he knew I hated it. It was like looking into a distorted fun house mirror that somehow showed a plain and ugly truth, like looking at my skin turned inside out. The things I hated about him were the things I hated about myself.
We grew older, and I began to forget about Mark as we were shuffled off to different high schools. With time and distance, I wrote off my fascination and suspicion of him as childhood imaginings gone wild. My teenage years were soaked through with the typical recklessness and petty rebellion: stealing, vandalism, cheating. One night I invited a few of my pals over for a night of drinking my father’s gin and gambling. The night became hazy, and I was flush with both alcohol and the cash I had won when the doorbell rang. I walked down the flight of stairs to the gated entry and could make out a boy about the same size as myself.
As I moved to unlock the gate and get a closer look, the boy leaned in and grabbed the metal bars between he and I. “Mark…Milford….” he hissed with absolute venom. I shook my head violently in an attempt to clear my vision and stumbled backwards. When I opened my eyes the figure was gone, though his voice reverberated in my head. I thought I heard the sound of teenage boys laughing as they scampered down the block, though when I stepped outside of the gate, I didn’t see a soul around…the street was utterly empty. When I returned to my friends I didn’t tell them what had happened—how could I even be sure myself? Perhaps my mind was just playing tricks on me. Even though I attempted to brush it off, I was rattled: I could swear I had heard the antagonism in that hiss before.
***
I SPENT MY COLLEGE money quickly, and not on books. Through my gambling I quickly became indebted to the school’s less savory characters. In a desperate bid to pay off my creditors I stopped going to my classes and began playing cards full-time. But here’s the thing: I was an absolute cheat and fraud to these fellows, too. One night I lured in a naive young freshman who struck me as having plenty of his parents’ money to spend. I instructed my fellow card sharks in just how we would endeavor to rob this poor fool of his riches, slowly but surely. As the night wore on, it boiled down to just me and him. The rest of them gathered round to watch. I had gotten him good and drunk, and he was becoming more and more sloppy in his dealings. I could sense my comrades salivating like wolves over a deer who can’t see what sort of dark and menacing woods he’s stumbled into. He had quadrupled his debt. His face had gone from flushed to deadly pale. I was about to insist we stop playing when he uttered a low moan and put his head in his hands. “That was all the money I had for the year,” he whispered.
With an ominous crack the power blew out. Amidst the shuffling and shouts I heard the door creak open. Rather than the poor young guy sneaking out, as I had anticipated, I sensed another presence enter the room, silhouetted by the streetlamp outside. Matches struck about the room but failed to sustain enough oxygen to catch into flame. “Fellas,” I heard a familiar voice say hoarsely. “Fellas, there’s something you should know. The man holding the cards at this table has been conning all of you for some time now. Check his pockets and you’ll see.” Pandemonium ensued as many arms grabbed mine and threw me into the wall. A match illuminated my face. “Who said that?” I demanded. But a horror had seized me the minute the lights went out, a gaping horror that knew what would happen next had only one possible direction. Hands tore at my pockets. The same light illuminated a few pieces of jewelry I had slowly pilfered off my friends: gold rings, diamond cufflinks. And all of the court cards in the deck. A hiss went around the room. The man who I had owed the most money to held me up by my neck and spit into my ear: “you owe me money and you have the gall to steal from me? I better never see your face at this school or in this town ever again.” He punched me square in the mouth and I spit out a bloody tooth into my palm. He at least had the decency to hand me my jacket.
And so I fled. But before I fled, I noticed something peculiar. The jacket he handed me looked by all appearances to be mine—the lettering and colors of the school, my initials embroidered on the breast pocket. But as I stumbled out, I realized that I was already wearing my jacket.
***
WHEN I CHECKED INTO a dingy hotel in an anonymous city and gave my name, the clerk smiled at me sweetly and said, “but Mr. Milford, there must be some mistake. We have you down as having checked in yesterday.” Spooked that my creditors had found me, I fled yet again.
And again and again, at every turn: people had already met me. Another Mr. Milford had applied for and accepted the job. Yet another Mr. Milford had scooped up the apartment I was trying to rent. I even fell in love with a woman who suddenly refused to see me. “But what have I done?” I begged her over the telephone. “You know what you did,” she sobbed. Try as a might, I couldn’t convince her that there must have been some mix-up. As I’ve mentioned, my name is quite common. But this level of coincidence seemed unnatural. It felt…hostile. An anciently familiar kind of hostile.
I felt like I couldn’t take hold of anything: love, money, stability. All had slipped through my fingers. Sure: I had been a bit of a scoundrel growing up. But ever since I had been exposed at the card game, my life had been knocked loose. I had no control anymore.
Finally one day I saw him with my own eyes, walking quickly through the crowd ahead of me. The source of all my life’s rottenness. He had grown up, as had I, from that generic boy on the playground to a now-hardened man with the same blurred, inscrutable features. Mark. Mark Milford. I thought about that long-ago jacket that had been my undoing: M.M. Of course. It had been him all along. The familiar voice, the imitations, the creeping sensation of pure self-loathing. I saw him and then he was gone, as quickly as if I had imagined him.
I tried to tell a few new acquaintances I met along the way, once I felt I could trust them, about the other Mr. Milford, my nemesis, my usurper. They usually nodded politely or exchanged worried glances with each other. “Well…there are quite a lot of Mark Milfords in the world,” they would tell me. “I’m sure I’ve met a few myself.” I knew I sounded crazy. Soon it was all I could talk about.
***
AFTER BEING SUBJECT to this vague terrorism of identity for years, I resolved to put up with it no longer. I knew it was only a matter of time before he showed up again. I was living in New Orleans at the time, grifting and gambling and drinking heavily. The bottom of my life had dropped out long ago. The annual celebration of Mardi Gras was underway, and I drunkenly lurched through a maze of party-goers, bottle of booze in hand. Everyone’s masked faces seemed frozen in expressions of ecstasy or terror, echoing each other as far as the eye could see. I was on my way to see a woman I had feelings for, a woman who had told me to meet her under a certain lamppost on a certain corner. As I walked up I saw her speaking intimately to a man wearing a mask that obscured half his face, a mask identical to the one I was wearing. Fury welled up in me. “Milford!” I screamed. I broke the bottle in my hand and charged at him with the razored edge.
He darted from me, and I chased him through the crowd, into a building and up a stairwell. I backed him into a corner of an empty room.
“You will imitate and intimidate me no longer,” I spat into his face. I shoved him from wall to wall, and he made no move to resist me. “Why won’t you fight me?!” I shouted. “You can only ruin me if we’re not face to face?” With a final thrust I could have sworn I plunged the sharp edge of the bottle into his gut. Yet somehow he was already half through the open window. He turned to look at me, his face contorting into a sneer. As our eyes finally met I saw his hand creep up to cover the unmasked half his face. With horror I discovered that my own hand was also covering that half of my own face, as though my hand had moved without my own consent at the sight of his. He laughed gently and leaped out the window.
And what do you think I saw when I looked down at the ground below? Just a dirty mask fluttering in the wind, mingling with the hundreds of masks on the street below. I put my hand to my face again. My mask was gone.
Good read?
This story is the third and final installment in a series of fictional photo stories. The first story and second story were published earlier this week in the collection Stories Worth Seeing. Click the green “Follow” button below to learn about other visual stories on Medium. You can also learn how to tell your own visual stories here.
This story was written by Melissa Graeber, edited by Jackson Solway. All photographs were taken by Richard “Koci” Hernandez.
