The Right Fit
The woman in front of me wants to supersize her black coffee. Her outfit is classic corporate and her perfume has an aggressive oud note. I don’t remember seeing or smelling her. Has she just moved here? She rushes past me after getting her order, almost bumping me out of the way—surprisingly strong for someone her size. Is she really just a white-collar worker or is she something else?
The barista is asking if I want sugar or milk while suppressing a yawn. He’s been around for a while. A history sophomore at the state college—so he claims. Look at those biceps. You don’t need those for history. If we replace the uniform shirt with a leather jacket and cover the hangover with a pair of sunglasses, he will blend in with the local bike gang perfectly.
Someone behind me raises his voice and demands respect over the phone. He bought some vinyl planks and is not happy about getting ripped off. He has the hands of a baker but seems to really want people to think he’s a carpenter. Is there a reason for that?
I’ve lived in this city for five years and frequented this café in three of them. Some familiar faces are still here. Some new ones come and go. No one who’s left through that door has ever gone on to become a story bigger than the place behind them. This has always been a joint for ordinary people. The NPCs you’d come across in any role-playing game.
I wonder how many of them have blood on their hands and know about it.
Whenever I told a stranger I wanted to be an actor, I’d get silence and a polite, pursed-lip smile. From family and friends, I’d get a crackle and a slap on the back. There were twelve talent houses in the city, and I’d queried all of them. They all had the same response, which made me wonder if I’d been talking to the same person in twelve outfits—
We do not seem to be the right fit for you.
But this was indeed an age where you could be anyone and anything. Even Spielberg needed ordinary-looking folks, and Versatilian was right there to fill that niche. At first glance, the company wouldn’t strike you as an acting agency. The wall of faces on the website could be easily mistaken for a leaked DMV database. Faces that you might encounter at every corner of the street. Bodies that belonged to people with “real jobs.” In the second last row on page ten, I looked like a software developer with at least ten years of experience under my belt.
So until I got my first gig, part of me had suspected this was a honeypot collecting humans for some AI training company, while the other part desperately hoped to be proven wrong. When that first “You’ve been selected!” notification popped up on my profile, I almost broke into tears. This is it, I thought. The stainless steel Powers That Be had browsed the web, and the mighty algorithm had found a strand of spotlight for me to stand in.
An hour later, I found a package outside my front door. The envelope on top contained the time and location for the filming. Also enclosed was a credit card. For your expenses, said the accompanying note. Approved purchases are limited to food and transportation within a total daily budget of $500.
I was already liking this.
The card belonged to a “Mike Capannori” and required no signature with tap payment enabled. I couldn’t recall any talent listed on the agency website by that name. They probably borrowed a company card from someone in corporate.
The rest of the parcel was my designated outfit and a homemade makeup kit—a beard, framed glasses, and a pair of insoles to put in my shoes and bring me into the six-foot league. I scanned the QR code on the envelope and it led me to a twenty-second video demonstration of a particular gait—overall, a hands-in-pockets confident stride, with a subtle limp.
The director of this film must’ve been a proper control freak if they had such a specific vision for a fly on their backdrop, which struck a strange chord when I arrived at Grand Arc the next morning and realized there were no assistant directors or production staff to herd the crowd.
Just hang around and be normal, the coordinator instructed me through the agency’s talent portal.
In an industry commodifying personalities, “hang around and be normal” was the worst career advice you could give anyone under any circumstances.
Grand Arc was the biggest shopping mall in town and there were enough distractions to fill the day. I had no idea if the people around me were also actors, so I treated them like they were all in the same act. I didn’t notice any camera, so I assumed everything was a camera and put on my best performance as an ordinary weekend shopper. Someone who was willing to splash $500 on an extra could be making an experimental documentary solely based on CCTV footage for all I knew. What I should be worried about was that my beard stayed in place, my posture was impeccable, and I sustained the walking style in that video even after my contracted window expired at three p.m. all the way till I got home. Whoever was watching would know I was a professional with stellar skills and a great work ethic.
This could be my break.
I spent my $500 allowance on grocery vouchers and hoped they’d last me two months. They said “food.” They didn’t say “dine in.” Before I slipped the credit card back into the envelope at the end of the day and left the package outside my door as requested, I thumbed the thin plastic and thanked Mr. Capannori for his generosity as I pondered where my next month’s rent would come from.
Capannori, a bit of an unusual name. Was it Italian?
The next time I came across that name was two days later. I left the TV on local news while my microwave heated up the leftover lasagna. As my entire studio began to smell like spoiled ketchup, the news cut to an update on a murder that had happened on the other side of the city.
Louise Capannori, high school teacher and newlywed, had been stabbed twenty-six times at home the morning I was sipping my double espresso at the Grand Arc food court.
It’s always the husband. You didn’t need to be a cop to know that nowadays, but it seemed they got an exception in this case. The police questioned Mr. Capannori as a person of interest, but he was released within forty-eight hours on a pretty solid alibi, and the investigation was steering toward a violent burglary potentially connected to a series of recent break-ins in the same neighborhood.
Then I saw the face of Mike Capannori.
For a second, I thought I was looking at my own DMV photo, if it weren’t for the beard and the glasses.
The barista clears his throat and taps on the cash register with a pen. I mutter an apology and snatch my coffee as I try to count the right change with my shaky fingers, dropping several quarters on the counter. A hand lands on my back as another picks up my coins and slips them in my palm. Detective Hagen looks just as I imagined from his voice—the kind of look you’d expect from someone with a high-adrenaline job, like a firefighter or a paramedic.
There’s a faint sense of familiarity in that face. I haven’t had many dealings with cops, but I feel we’ve met somewhere before.
“Slow down.” Detective Hagen signals a pause and twists his cup as I get to the part where I saw the Capannori murder on the news. “So you’re telling me, you stumbled upon this acting agency that’s also a secret criminal organization, and now Mike Capannori has used you as a doppelgänger to get away with killing his wife . . . are we gonna get to the Illuminati somewhere down the track? If that’s where we’re going, you’re paying for my coffee.”
“How could you not get it?!” I lean in and try to keep both my voice and hands steady. “He dressed me up to look like him. He made me buy stuff with his credit card so he could pretend he was at Grand Arc that day. Everybody at Versatilian looks like they could be someone else. I bet that’s their real business—identity brokers! Are you working on any other cases with alibis that are suspiciously clean? If we look into those—”
I stop talking as Hagen lets out a loud sigh and shakes his head.
“We’ve caught the guy,” he says. “Some crackhead at the end of his rope. One night in the pit; spilled everything without us moving a finger. Said he thought the house was empty, but the Capannori girl came out of nowhere and freaked out, and his brain was cooked, so he just went berserk on her with no idea what he was doing. You know, the old story. Those B&Es were him too.”
He pauses for a second to let me take that in, then continues:
“As for that agency, I’ve confirmed with them. You’re not under their management. You . . . applied for representation a while ago, but they turned you down.”
He raises his phone so I can see Versatilian’s landing page on his screen. The underwhelming yearbook-style catalog has been replaced with a slick, professional portfolio and headshots presenting alluring, ambitious faces of hunger. The kind of “assets” you’d expect a legitimate talent management business to display. The name list ends on page nine. My face is nowhere to be seen.
I grab my phone and log into the website. My credentials still work, but all they manage to do is take me to a dashboard harboring a single entry of a rejected application, and a message that says:
We appreciate your interest in Versatilian. After careful consideration, we regret to inform you that we do not seem to be the right fit for your representation. Thank you for your application and we wish you the best of luck with your creative career.
I stare at the message, trying to understand if I'm in a dream or just woke up from one. I want to find an email or a text about the gig, then I recall that all communications were contained in the talent portal that I can no longer locate.
“This is probably enough.” Detective Hagen finishes his coffee. “It’s my day off, but I thought I’d check on you ’cause you sounded hysterical. We’re moving on from the Capannoris, so should you.”
“Hold on, so what was Mike Capannori doing on Saturday?" I ask.
“Hanging around Grand Arc."
“No. That was me.”
“We’ve checked the CCTV and matched his face, clothes, even his limp. It was him all right. The credit card record also checks out.”
“That was me! I had his credit card! It was all me!”
“Well, can you prove any of that?”
I fall silent. How do you prove you are not the character you play?
“It seems you need a holiday,” Hagen says. “Ever been to Lauderdale? Great time to get down there. Go unwind a little. You’ve probably been working too hard.”
A laugh escapes me. Then an instant of clarity flashes across my mind. I snatch my wallet and whip out the food vouchers for the biggest supermarket in town, laying them on the table one by one.
“Here, look at these! I was broke as hell. If the gig wasn’t real, where did I get the money for these?”
“Let it go, Joe.”
“They’ve got serial numbers! See? If we ask Organic Fusion, they might tell us the location where these were distributed.”
“You imagined the whole thing ’cause you want to be an actor too bad.”
“That can’t be true—”
“It will have to be.”
Someone passes the table we’re sitting by, and the door of the café shuts. I snap my head up and see the barista flip the sign to “Closed” and draw the curtains. The dozen customers hovering over the counter earlier have disappeared, leaving the shop in unsettling silence. I hear a metal click under the table. The sound of a semiautomatic ready for blood.
“Should’ve just taken your goddamn holiday.”
Detective Hagen smiles. The wrinkles around his eyes and mouth draw up lines and shapes that spark déjà vu.
Right. That’s why I thought I’d seen him somewhere before.
He looks just like Johnny with brown hair.
Johnny Felix, the Versatilian talent who looks like he could be a firefighter or a paramedic. The face that sat two rows above where my profile used to be, on page ten.
September homework:
Memory; horror
