This Is a Picture of Michael Jackson

The following is an excerpt from a longer piece, now available in book form as part of a new publishing project. If you’re in NYC, please come to the launch event this Sunday! I’ll be reading and hosting. You can also pre-order the book online.

The night before I flew home to watch my father die, my flatmates put on a documentary about Michael Jackson.

There were two couches in the living room. Soren was stretched out on one and Faith was stretched out on the other. I stood between the couches and waited for someone to move. The documentary began.

On screen, Michael Jackson was making his way through a packed stadium of football fans. Beside him was a tall, strong-jawed man identified in white text as Uri Geller.

Who’s Uri Geller again? Soren asked.

A musician, Faith said. I mean, a magician.

Oh, right, I confirmed, though I’d never heard of Uri Geller.

The film cut to a desk with some typed papers and a publicity photo of late-stage Michael dressed in a teal blazer, face shining like marble, cheekbones rouged, lips painted, hair flattened and carefully flipped where it met the shoulders.

Alright, guys, I said, Who’s moving? They ignored me. It was all in good fun. We were the type of flatmates who bullied each other relentlessly, but who also took note of who didn’t like coriander, setting aside a separate portion of guacamole at dinner.

Finally, Soren scooted over to make room for me. I sat down on his couch and looked at him with a little smile as if to say, Of course you’d be the one to cave. And then I looked over at Faith, who was still lying across the full length of her couch, and I smiled in a way that said, You’ve won this time. And then I thought, but didn’t say, I’ve had sex with both of you. And then I looked at the TV.

A young Louis Theroux was sitting in a hotel room in central London. The year was 2002. I couldn’t believe how young Louis looked. I’d never seen him so young. Was he my age? He had a white plastic phone in his lap and was trying to get Michael Jackson on the line.

We’d only been watching for a few minutes when Soren stood up and went to the kitchen, saying, Don’t pause it for me. He came back with a pint of vegan ice cream and a spoon.

I should note that I was vegan too but nowhere near as vegan as Soren, though of course there aren’t gradations of veganism; you just follow the rules, or you don’t. I followed the rules, but I still felt like Soren was vegan in this very intentional way, whereas I was just scrabbling along, eating food that happened not to contain animal products.

The film played on while Soren made slow progress on his pint, pausing for minutes at a time between bites. I thought about how a pint of ice cream could seem like a lot of ice cream for one person, but a pint of beer was nothing. Anyone could put away a few pints of beer, no problem. Then I thought about the flat I was living in before this one.

My previous flat had been governed by a live-in landlady who kept impossibly close tabs on me, though there didn’t seem to be any cameras—I’d checked all the likely places. It was like she was so attuned to the house that she could just walk into the kitchen, and the countertops would be like, Hey, just so you know, your tenant’s been putting really hot plates of food on me, even though you told her it warps the plastic.

A few months into my tenure, the landlady sat me down to say I was spending more time at home than she’d been led to expect from our initial conversation—a conversation in which I’d said I was rarely at home, was almost always out, never got a chance to rest, was too caught up in my crazy hectic life around the city to breathe.

I hadn’t been lying, or rather I hadn’t known I was lying. I really did feel like I was spending too much time out of the house. I left at noon and returned at four each day to start cooking dinner, and even that brief excursion took a lot out of me. The sheer effort of walking out the door, the number of tasks to check off beforehand, was so great that it was almost not worth it.

The landlady was a nutcase, and she definitely did go into my room and move things around when I wasn’t there, and she definitely did insist that I place the salad spinner to the left of the stockpot even though it honestly didn’t make a difference whether it was to the right or the left, but that said, the woman did have a point about my habits: I was home all the time.

The simplest solution would’ve been to start leaving the house more often. I was not a simple woman. My solution was to neutralize my presence, minimize all traces of life, making it impossible to determine whether or not I was home at any given moment.

This entailed complete isolation in my closed bedroom. It also entailed sealing the blinds shut, taping them to the wall so that no light could leak out from my room into the backyard, where the landlady might go to look up at my window. It also entailed avoiding all communal spaces.

How different things were different at the new flat! It was nice to commune again.

Soren finished his ice cream and got up to throw away the container and wash the spoon because that was the type of person he was. His cleanliness bothered me for two reasons: it set a standard of behavior I could never personally meet, and it also struck me as performative, though of course that was only because I’d never once cleaned anything for my own benefit.

The hygienic impulse in me was weak. When I was alone, it seemed to vanish altogether. Alright, I thought toward Soren, We get it, you’re on top of everything. God, he was taking ages to wash that spoon. It made me want to shake him and scream into that perfectly washed, rested, salaried face, My man, lighten up! Live a little! But it also made me want to marry him and tie him to a chair and refuse to release him until he told me how he’d grown up to be so good and whether he thought I still had a chance at goodness in this lifetime or whether I’d have to die and start all over from the beginning.

On screen, Louis Theroux was visiting Uri Geller’s house, an English countryside villa decked out with mirrors and gilt. We watched Louis beg Uri to set up an interview with Michael. Louis pulled out a copy of the publicity photo which, for some reason, he’d been carrying on his person and which, perhaps even less understandably, he seemed to think would strengthen his case. Once again: Michael in that teal jacket, studio lights shining in his pupils. How was I only just now noticing the statue in his arms? It seemed to be a bronze: the roughly sculpted form of man hunched over in thought. Could it be a replica of Rodin’s “Thinker”? I considered saying this aloud before remembering that Faith and Soren worked in tech.

Louis continued to hold the photo out to Uri, saying cryptically, This is an approved photograph. To which Uri replied with diplomatic nonchalance, I think Michael looks great here. Then, seeming to doubt himself, Uri added cautiously, It could even be a look-alike. You never know.

Louis took the picture back. This is a picture of Michael Jackson.

When I first came to view the flat, I pulled all the stops: I said I was tidy even though I wasn’t; I said I was planning to stay in London even though I didn’t have a visa and in general didn’t do plans; I said I earned consistent money even though I was a freelance portrait painter, which didn’t even sound like a real job, and definitely didn’t pay like one, and furthermore I hadn’t had a commission in months and was on the hook for three loans at three banks in two different countries, and hadn’t received my deposit back from the previous flat on account of the carpet stains.

It was getting desperate: I was in talks with a retired CEO in his mid-eighties who’d offered to take me to the horse races then pay me a thousand pounds to remove my clothes in a suite at the Ritz-Carlton; it wouldn’t even cover a month of rent. Everything was falling apart, and I was untidy in every sense of the word and yet I kept calling myself tidy even after I’d moved in and proved myself otherwise.

Ladies and gentleman, this is the world’s greatest tribute artist, the best on the planet. An impersonator danced across the screen in sequined jacket and black leather shoes, feet gliding, hands splayed. We all laughed.

It looks nothing like him, Faith said.

The posture is all wrong, Soren added.

I can’t believe this guy sold tickets, I said, though I couldn’t really tell a difference between the impersonator and the real thing. It seemed to me that no one in the world looked like Michael Jackson anymore, least of all Michael himself.

I pulled my knees up to my chest. Louis was now interviewing Michael Jackson’s father in a dimly lit room at two in the morning. I pressed my feet into Soren’s thigh. On screen, Joe Jackson was drinking a beer and speaking very slowly. I never beat Michael, he said. I hit him with a switch and a belt.

I felt weird having my feet on Soren’s leg just then. I waited for a less charged scene, but the next shot was of a tabloid front page reading, in massive print, Jacko: I sleep with boys.

Louis still couldn’t reach Michael. All he could do was stand outside his hotel with all the other fans. Rumors of an impending appearance spread through the crowd, and suddenly Michael was there, waving to everyone from the deck of his tour bus, his frozen white mask of a face floating atop his little body, making no sense at all.

My god, Soren said, I really don’t remember him looking like that.

It’s amazing he just went around like that for years, Faith said.

I said nothing.

Louis Theroux to Joe Jackson: When you look at Michael now, in particular when you look at his nose, what do you think?

I don’t think anything. That’s what he wanted.

What if I wanted the same thing? Looking at Michael, I felt more recognition than revulsion. I ached for the kind of power that made such radical edits possible. I could imagine wielding that power similarly: making myself insubstantial, scraping my body down to nothing. I would’ve sacrificed anything, even beauty, to be small and new.

Do you also appreciate things small and new? Then you may like my book, which contains the rest of this piece. Hope to see you at the launch event!