Silk

1.

His face looks gaunt, even through the steam haze on the bathroom mirror. He wipes a streak clear with his hand. In the harsh light of the LEDs, the hollows of his cheeks are darkened by both shadows and stubble and he slips with the razor. A bead of blood forms and trickles down his chin. The air is too hot and too close, the way everything feels after the Sickness.

He squints at himself as he applies mousse to his hair. It’s been stippled with salt and pepper for the last decade. Elaine used to call it dignified. That’s when they’d lie in bed together watching back through the newscast, late at night in a room lit solely by the flashing of the television. There was a time that they stood side-by-side on a billboard next to the freeway, beaming with smiles the size of a school bus. Someone put a bullet hole through his forehead after a report on gang violence. His hair looks greyer now, he thinks.

He’s buttoning his shirt one-handed when his phone vibrates on the bedside table. He bumps his knuckles on the blue-green tissue box as he reaches down, and he’s glaring at it when puts his thumb on the unlock button. Glancing at his phone, he instinctively drops it back on the table. 

Eight pitch black eyes stare up at him. They’re arranged almost into a diamond shape across a human forehead–his forehead. He recognizes his own jawline and hair. He’s smiling his classic television grin, but his lips are perforated from inside with thin, black tendrils sticking out and angling back onto his face in straight lines. It takes a moment to place them. Spider legs. He can see more jet black eyes glistening in the cavernous darkness of his mouth.

The text reads: first day back.

The number is blocked. His fingers stumble over the screen as he deletes it without thinking–instinct at this point. He’s all too aware of the digital harassment laws. Closing his eyes, he can see a middle aged cop with a gut and a mustache shrugging, saying unless it’s a threat, my hands are tied.

He takes a deep breath, closing his eyes and shaking his head, like the motion will knock the image loose from his mind. 

Responding just lets them know it’s an active number.

He hears Elaine’s voice in his head. At least they’re not photoshopping you naked.

He slips back into the familiar morning rhythm, though the interruption gnaws at the back of his mind. He’s looping a plain navy blue tie into a windsor knot when the doorbell rings. He takes a sip of coffee, wincing at the bitterness as he shrugs on his suit jacket. He takes another sip anyway, then sets off down the faux-mahogany flooring of the hallway. Awards cover the walls–anchor, reporter, and at the earliest, radio DJ. They’re spaced at perfectly exact angles. Even before the Sickness, he liked order. The whole house is spotless, modern, and blank.

Elaine called him chubby after the billboard shoot. Just a little aside in the newsroom, a playful smirk flitting across her face. Later, when the damage was done–the real damage, not the little flirting jokes–and the NDA’s were signed, he called her something foul and the mediator said “we don’t use that word anymore.”

“I guess I’m just old-fashioned,” he replied.

It didn’t make him feel any better. Side-by-side on the anchor desk, Elaine addressed the camera exclusively, staring down the barrel of the lens like a man taunting a firing squad. Eventually corporate demanded she face him or find another job.

The doorbell rings a second time as he rounds the corner. It takes him a moment to fumble with the chain. Even his fingers look skeletal, fragile as spider’s legs. He blinks back the dazzling late-morning sun, forming his grimace into a smile. The Sisters are here to wish him well on his first day back. 

“Hello, Mr. Stone,” Nari says.

His television name. Decades ago, at the very beginning of his career, an executive told him Finkelstein was too Jewish for air.

“Hello, Nari. Hello, Sarang.”

Sarang smiles a broken, crooked smile, nodding slightly. Her tongue and throat were heavily damaged in the fire, the burnt tissue spreading up her face and permanently closing her right eye. She prefers not to speak, instead holding out a paper lunch bag.

“You really didn’t have to,” he starts to say, but Nari interrupts.

“It’s your first day back. That’s something to celebrate.”

Sarang nods along.

The day is already hot and humid. Nari wears long sleeves and jeans. Aside from an inch or so of scarring on the back of her left hand, she looks like a perfectly ordinary woman in her mid-20’s. She was in the shower when the fire started, made it halfway out the window before the flames licked across right shoulder and down her torso and thigh.

“Thank you, girls,” he says. This time his smile is genuine, despite the heat and brightness of the day making him squint and setting his skin crawling.

“You look thin,” Sarang whispers in her halting, croaking voice.

“And you look lovely, my dear,” he says, squeezing her hand. “Wish me luck out there.”

“You’ll need it,” Nari says. There’s a pause, and then she laughs and Sarang inhales and exhales more heavily and he wraps them both in a hug.

“You two are the best part of me,” he says softly.

Then he climbs into his car and pulls out into the blazing anonymity of the freeway traffic. A woman with a mouthful of burger stares down at him from the billboard on Exit 83. She has the glazed eyes and too-perfect skin of an AI image.

There’s a wreck miles ahead and he crawls his way to work, eventually passing broken glass and mangled chrome. His hands tighten on the steering wheel, a web of veins standing out under his pale skin.

 

2.

It’s close to a year since he’s been to the station. In that time, someone mailed an anthrax package to a station in Memphis, and there’s been a stabbing outside the ABC affiliate in Phoenix. He taps his keycard on the sensor set into the wall by the exterior door. The receiver beeps, but the light stays resolutely red. He taps a second time, then a third, feeling his temper start to swell–then a shape moves on the other side of the glass, a shadowy figure bulging out of his reflection.

You’re looking chubby, Daniel.

There’s a click as the door opens and Delores smiles at him.

“So sorry, Mr. Stone. It’s a new system.”

She squeezes his too-small shoulder in a suit that was perfectly tailored the last time he left work.

“Welcome back,” she says.

The hallway is filled with smiling images of his face and his co-host of the last three years, Amy. Down the hall: the morning anchors, the weather team, placards on the wall highlighting award after award. He passes a television screen, sees his own face smiling out at him with the tagline a consultant team recommended: First on the scene, every time. He’s opening the door to the newsroom as the TV cuts to a familiar video of him in front of a burning building, dropping his stick mic and wrapping his suit jacket around the shoulders of a stumbling girl covered in burns. Her jet black hair spills over his shoulder as he helps her towards the ambulance. It’s been years, but the promo tests well with viewers every time.

He watched it a thousand times during the Sickness when he lay sweating and freezing on the couch. In the darkest times, he wondered what he would have done if the camera wasn’t rolling, if he wasn’t desperate for the comeback.

The newsroom looks brighter and cleaner than he remembers. He’s not sure if there are more computers. Overhead, TV screens are tuned to CNN and NBC and the competing local stations, and maybe it’s the lingering impact of the Sickness that makes the movement and chatter scrape over his senses like broken glass. A dozen talking heads stare down from every direction as he makes his way to his desk. 

The doctors never found a cause for the Sickness. A parasitic infection, like a tapeworm, maybe, Dr. Golden said. But they couldn’t find the worm. 

A handful of young, unfamiliar producers are hunched over their keyboards, but the anchor pod is empty. He catches a glimpse of Deonna Bart, veteran investigative reporter, on her way to the news cars with a camera man following close behind.

His desk is spotless as always and mostly bare aside from a sheet with the station phone tree tacked to the divider. He kept a photograph of the Sisters next to the monitor for a time, but it gave Amy the chills. He wrinkles his nose at Amy’s desk next door. It’s an explosion of color and noise and pictures from her graduation a few years earlier.

“Daniel?”

He turns, instantly wiping his expression clean.

“It’s so good to see you,” Amy says, smiling wide to reveal a row of perfectly white teeth. “We weren’t expecting you in until this afternoon.”

She hugs him and in that moment he can tell she feels how bone-thin he is, how deeply the Sickness has scraped him clean. She pulls back, the concern in her eyes obvious even as she holds her smile in place. The effort involved is obvious.

“I wanted to get settled,” he says. There’s an awkward pause. “I’m sure I have a lot of emails to get through.”

“You look good,” she says, lying fluently.

Amy’s petite and pretty and speaks with a hint of southern twang that he’s not convinced is genuine. Her accent gets stronger and more distinct when she’s on air. Late at night, lying in bed together where no one could hear, Elaine used to call her Baton Rouge Barbie.

They’re just replacing me with a younger model, Elaine spat as she cleaned out her desk.

It’s not my fault they chose me, he told her.

That’s a lie and you know it, Daniel.

You told them, didn’t you, Daniel?

Didn’t you?

“I’m covering midday,” Amy is saying. “Albert’s out sick.”

“Long day for both of us,” he says.

“Award-winning journalist Daniel Stone, rejoining us this evening,” Amy says, mimicking her on-air delivery. “Daniel, glad to be back?”

“Only place that ever felt like home,” he replies in an over-the-top newsman voice. The response is immediate, unthinking, but it sticks with him as he settles in.

He has thousands of unread emails, as expected. There’s something calming, therapeutic, even, about the process of moving through them, gradually deleting a year’s worth of memos, promotions, press releases, and news tips. There are well-wishes and get-well-soon’s mixed in. At first, anyway. There are fewer and fewer over time.

A couple old coworkers stop by to say hello. The news director strides out of his office for a firm handshake and a nod of the head. Each time they pull him out of his focus, the noise of the room, the competing voices and the brightness of the lights set his skin crawling. He submerges himself back in the repetitive motion of tapping through message after message. He times his breathing to each click.

A message from anon.123, no subject, takes a moment to open and he taps again, then jumps back from his computer with a hiss of shock.

The hair is burnt away from the scalp, skin blackened and blistered and eyelids gone. His eyes are rolled back to the bloodshot whites, eight black pupils seared into the sclera. He’s wearing a massive made-for-TV grin. A smile the size of a school bus. His teeth are sharpened into points, lips burnt back to the gums.

He taps a key and the image vanishes. One of the associate producers is staring over from a nearby edit bay, but the dividers hide his computer screen. He smiles weakly back and tries to remember her name. A cold sweat is forming on the back of his neck.

His final week before medical leave, a woman called the station over and over, screaming a wordless wall of noise into the receiver. He’s taken phone calls from screaming lunatics since day one. It’s worse today, he thinks. It used to be harder to reach him, and the really weird ones couldn’t immediately generate their worst thoughts.

He takes a deep breath. The next email is a press release from the health department, followed by a self-gratifying statement from a state senator and a viewer photo of a sunrise dated last month. Now he’s feeling wary, his rhythm broken, but he keeps clicking through. It’s a week before the next message.

No subject. Anon.321. He glances around the room. There’s no text in the body of the email, but a video is attached. His hand hovers over the delete key. The file is titled DANIEL.mp4. Like the last one, the message was sent directly to his email, not the news tip line.

He forwards it to his phone. After another glance around the newsroom, he strolls out, measuring his stride to appear calm, and locks himself inside the executive restroom. 

 

3.

His grin is wide and horrible, stretching ear-to-ear without reaching his eyes. His face is undamaged. At first, he fills the entire screen, but then he backs up, revealing faux-mahogany flooring and a hallway lined with awards. He’s naked and emaciated, a perfect replica of himself. Each rib stands out under the flesh and a bright light overhead illuminates and shadows every bone. This version of him doesn’t speak, just stares and grins. The audio is all static, like the sound after the needle drops but before the record begins.

His fingers, long and thin as spider’s legs, pale like something out of the deep ocean, reach up and dig into the hollows below his clavicle. They tear through the flesh like linen. He doesn’t bleed. His smile doesn’t move. His fingers peel away the skin and muscle of his chest in a long, thin sheet. Underneath, his ribcage glistens wet and pure white. The bones quiver and snap at regular six, four, and two inch intervals. Near the bottom of his sternum, eight horrible, pitch black eyes wink open. 

The Other Daniel twitches, then falls backward. He catches himself on his hands, chest pointed up to the ceiling. Now he starts screaming, and the flesh and blood Daniel holding the phone hammers the button to lower the volume. It’s dead silent when the Sisters move into frame.

Nari is dressed in a hospital gown, revealing the bubbling landscape of scar tissue that stretches all the way up her right leg, across her back and down her arm. Sarang wears a matching outfit. She’s completely unblemished below the neck. The flesh below her ruined right eye twitches and throbs. Both women are smiling as they lift the bone creature out of Other Daniel’s body, a long silken threat dangling like an umbilical cord. Even without audio, it’s obvious Other Daniel is still screaming.

The screen goes black.

 

4.

He stares at his phone for a long time after the video ends. At one point, he raises a finger to scrub back through, then his hand drops back to his side. He’s seen the AI videos of imaginary home invasions, deepfaked celebrities, and even the build-your-own girlfriend porn. It’s the routine now–looking for tell-tale signs of unreality before video makes it to air. The perfect replication of his body feels like an impossible violation.

The appearance of the Sisters isn’t necessarily surprising. Korean immigrants, new to the country and uninsured, bills spiking every day in the hospital–a treasure-trove for the right journalist with the right eye for pathos. 

It’s the kind of story brands are made of. That’s what the consultants said. 

It’s kind of PR you need after a highly public spat. A sob story, and a chance at rebirth–with enough interviews, enough fundraisers, enough traction on social media.

He takes a deep breath, pockets his phone, and walks back into the newsroom. There are more anonymous messages in his inbox, but he speeds past them now, marking all as read. He pauses too long on a GIF, sees his eyelashes form twitching legs, his pupils split into sixteen black orbs and his eyes crawl out of his still-grinning face. This one’s set in his bedroom, a green and blue tissue box on the bedside table.

He can barely focus in the afternoon meeting. Rookie producers stumble through the five and six o’clock rundowns, glancing down at their notes between every story. He blinks and sees spiders and the shuffling of papers sets his skin crawling so he closes his eyes to envision the newscast. Leading the block with local crime–break-ins in the hills, a pedophile teacher, then on to national politics, back local with a softer feature on a nonprofit. Amy smiles and nods her way through, suggests restacking a local politics story higher at six. It’s the kind of suggestion Elaine would make.

He wonders if he could sue her for digital harassment, unauthorized use of his image. Maybe he could sue the whole AI platform. Maybe there’s a story there, he’s thinking–high technology, a jilted lover, a look behind-the-scenes to see how the sausage is made. 

Elaine aphorism: Without the camera you’re just a sad actor, alone on the stage.

“Daniel?”

He opens his eyes. The whole table is staring at him. Amy looks worried.

“Headache,” he says, running a hand through his hair. He puts on his award-winning smile and his worst TV voice. “First on the scene, every time. Right, folks?”

A collective groan echoes through the room. Amy chats happily with the producers as they file back to their desks. He reads through scripts, tweaking wording and punctuation and eats the PB&J Sarang packed for him at his desk, heading into the studio a half hour before the newscast. It’s dimly lit and mostly empty. The meteorologist in the weather corner is wearing a pair of air pods and tapping away at a projection on his computer screen.

Election nights, tornadoes, the bombing of the federal building on 5th–the really long nights–he’d tap Elaine’s foot with the tip of his shoe during the six o’clock newscast; a quick staccato rhythm his dad learned in the Navy. Short-long-short-short. The “L” at the beginning of let’s party.

She kept the baggie in the back corner of her bottom desk drawer. They would cut lines in a utility closet, then blaze through the night with infinite energy. 

You told them, didn’t you, Daniel?

Didn’t you?

The camera isn’t recording but he can see his reflection in the preview screen as he steps onto his old mark. He’s pale, gaunt, and greyer than before. The backdrop of the studio makes the changes even clearer. He stares himself in the eye and practices his award-winning smile. Even that feels weaker than it did before the Sickness. 

Eventually the floor director arrives and Amy joins him at the desk and the on-air light flashes red.

“Award-winning journalist Daniel Stone, rejoining us this evening,” Amy says. “Daniel, glad to be back?”

 

5.

The early newscasts vanish in a blur. Amy heads out to meet her fiancé for dinner and he walks out the doors of the station into the humid evening air. It’s late in the season to be this hot and the sun is already dipping, light poles and telephone lines sketching long shadows across the asphalt. 

He smells the smoke first as he rounds the corner of the building toward the parking lot. Then he sees the cherried end of her cigarette. She looks bad. Deep shadows under her eyes, hair dry and cut at an unflattering asymmetrical angle.

“They’ve been running promos all week,” she says. “Daniel Stone, back on air.”

“Hi, Elaine.”

She takes a pull on the cigarette, blowing smoke into the air between them before speaking again: “You look like shit.”

“You sent the videos,” he says. It’s not a question.

“Don’t know what you mean.”

He watches her face closely. She doesn’t look quizzical or affronted or ashamed. Mostly, she looks tired.

“Barbie’s doing better,” she says. “Better than she was.”

“You sent the pictures.”

Elaine looks at him for a long time.

“Must be another jilted ex-lover.”

She glances at the cigarette between her fingers. “You know how long I went without one of these, Daniel?”

He shrugs. “When’d you start again?”

“You know when,” she says.

She holds it out and he takes a drag.

“It’s the only bad habit I have left,” she says. Then: “You told them where to find it in my desk. I just need to hear you say it.”

His phone vibrates. His hand moves instinctively to his pocket.

“Motherfucker, I’m talking to you,” she hisses, her voice cracking a little.

Now her phone chimes in her pocket.

“I’m—”

Her phone goes off again. Now his.

Again.

It starts to ring, impossibly loud, and she pulls it out of her pocket, hits ignore, but it doesn’t stop. Elaine puts the phone to her ear. Her eyes widen and she stares at him, mouth hanging open, before holding it out to him.

“It’s for you,” she says.

“Hello, Daniel,” Other Daniel says through the crackling of the phone static. “I have something to show you.”

 

6.

The house is dark when he skids into the driveway. He steps out of the car, legs weak, heart pounding, and takes long, slow steps up to the front door. The handle is ice cold. It sets his Sickness-fried nerves on fire but he takes a deep breath and walks inside.

The entryway is a funneled cocoon of silken web, covering the windows and turning the dusk sunlight into a silvery, sepia glow. The door shuts behind him. His heart pounds and he feels like he’s walking through sheets of static on an old black and white television screen. He’s not sure what propels him down the hall and up the stairs. 

More silk cuts off the hallway on either side, leaving only the bathroom door. The spotless white of the tiled walls and floor reflects the cold light of the LED bulb above. He stares into the mirror, broken now, with cracks forming an interlacing web of razor sharp glass.

His reflection is grinning a familiar award-winning smile. A smile the size of a school bus. Behind him, two figures move up the stairs, dressed in hospital gowns. He turns, but the house is empty. In the mirror, the woman on his left has a human head with eight pitch black eyes dappling her face. On his right–an arachnid head, pincers the size of kitchen knives, and eight hazelnut brown human eyes. Each woman takes hold of one of his arms. He feels his flesh sizzling and blistering under their touch.

His mouth moves beyond his control and Other Daniel’s voice comes out of his throat.

“I’ve been growing in here for a long time, Daniel.”

He screams as Other Daniel bursts out of the exoskeleton of his body.