The Likeness - Episode 4 of 4 - "The Original"

0:10 Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories. This is The Likeness. Episode 4, the original. I am going to tell you what I did. And I need you to understand that I thought about it for a long time first. The police were not an option. I want to be honest about why. Because I have heard people say, when I've told this story in the years since, that calling the police was the obvious move. And they can't understand why I didn't. But here's what I had. Two notebooks, one in my handwriting and one with photographs. An entry log showing my fob used on nights I wasn't home. Emails accessed and unchanged. Texts and voicemails sent from my number that my carrier couldn't trace. An obituary in a cloud folder.

1:25 Nothing with a name on it. Nothing that couldn't be reframed by the right person with the right angle. as the elaborate self-documentation of a man unraveling post-divorce. I had thought about this. They had thought about this too. Everything they'd done had been designed to be deniable. The groundwork wasn't just relational, it was legal. If I walked into a police station with what I had, the first question they'd ask was whether I was currently in therapy. The second question would be about the divorce. So I didn't call the police. I did something that required more from me.

2:08 In a different way. I called everyone. Not to convince them. I want to be clear about that distinction because it matters. I wasn't calling to be believed. I was calling to be on record. There is a difference between those two things. And understanding the difference was what let me make the calls without falling apart. I called Carol first. I told her everything, in order, the way I've told you. I told her about the notebooks and the entry log and the email access and the obituary. I told her about the messages she'd received that weren't from me and why they'd been sent. She was quiet through most of it.

2:50 When I finished, she said, Marcus, what do you need me to do? Not, I believe you. Not, are you sure? Just, what do you need? I told her I needed her to know. I needed this conversation to have happened. She said she understood. I called Renata. She cried a little, which is unlike her, and apologized for the four months of silence. And I told her there was nothing to apologize for, and I meant it. She asked if I was safe. I said I didn't know yet, but I was working on it. I called Janet. This one was harder because I was asking her to revise the framework she'd been using to understand me, to move me out of the category of stressed and struggling and into something stranger and more frightening. She was quiet for a long

3:50 time after I finished. Then she said, The entry log. That part I can't explain away. I said, I know. She said, what can I do? I said the same thing I'd said to Carol. Just no. Just have this conversation on record between us. I called Dennis my professional reference, who owed me nothing and had already cost me something.

4:17 I didn't approach it with accusation. I told him someone had been impersonating me and I believed he'd been contacted by that person. And I wanted him to know the truth. he was more shaken than I expected he said he'd received a call months ago from a man who knew specific things project names, client details things that weren't public and it said I'd asked him to pass along some concerns Dennis said I should have called you directly I know I should have I told him it was done and I didn't blame him and I needed him to remember this call I called Greg last. Greg, who hadn't spoken to me in eight months over something I'd apparently said at his birthday dinner. He picked up on the second ring, which told me he'd been waiting too. He said,

5:14 I've been wanting to call you. I said, I know what happened. I need to tell you why. By the time I'd finished all six calls, it was past midnight. I sat in my kitchen and felt something I hadn't felt in weeks, which was not quite relief, but was adjacent to it. The shape of the thing that had been done to me was visible now to other people.

5:43 It existed outside my own head. That mattered. Whatever happened next, I was no longer the only person who knew the shape of this. I still had five weeks. Until the date, on the obituary, I decided not to wait five weeks. I set the trap on a Tuesday. I chose Tuesday because the entry log showed both unauthorized uses of my fob had been midweek, never weekend, which suggested a pattern.

6:26 I left for work at my usual time I took my usual route to the subway but I didn't get on the train. I doubled back through a different street, entered the building through the parking level using the second fob I'd never reported missing, took the stairs instead of the elevator and let myself into the apartment. I left the lights off. I sat in the kitchen in a chair angled toward the hallway and I waited. This is the part of the story That is hardest to tell.

7:00 Not because of what happened, but because of what the waiting felt like. Three hours of sitting in my own dark apartment, listening to it breathe, thinking about all the times I'd been in this city and someone had been here too, learning the sound of the radiator and the weight of my coffee mug and the exact angle at which I sleep. There's a specific kind of violation in that.

7:28 Different from being robbed. Different from being followed. Someone had been inside the ordinary texture of my life, the small, unremarkable details that make a person specific, and had been using them to construct a claim on something that was mine. The most mine thing there is. Myself. At 9.47, the front door opened. I know the sound of my own key in that lock. It's a particular two-part sound. The mechanism turning. Then the slight resistance of the door against the frame before it opens. I heard it happen. I heard footsteps in the entryway. The rustle of a coat being hung. My coat, I realized. On my hook. I turned on the kitchen light. They were standing at the end of the hallway. I've thought about how to describe

8:27 this moment, and I don't think I can do it fully. The mind isn't built for it. You know, intellectually, that this is another person, separate and distinct. Not you. But the accumulated evidence of your own face and your own posture organized into someone else's body produces a kind of short circuit. My brain kept trying to process it and kept failing. like a word you repeat until it loses meaning.

8:58 We looked at each other. They didn't run. That was the first thing I registered. They'd been caught, plainly and completely, and they didn't run. They stood at the end of my hallway in my coat, and they looked at me with an expression I recognized, because it was an expression I make. A particular quality of stillness that means, I am taking something in before I respond to it. The silence lasted a long time. Then they spoke. The voice was close. Not exact. The timbre was slightly different, the way a photocopy of a photograph loses something the original had.

9:45 But the cadence was mine. The pauses in the right places. The slight habit I have of leaving a sentence technically unfinished, as though the last word is understood. They said, you weren't using it. I asked them what that meant. They said, the life, the city, the fresh start. You came here and you were going through the motions. You weren't present in it. You weren't building anything. I said, that doesn't belong to you. They said, I know. but you weren't using it. I want to tell you that I understood them in that moment. I want to tell you that the horror of recognition, seeing your own cadences coming back at you from across a hallway, being accused in your own voice of insufficiently inhabiting your own existence, produced some

10:41 clarity about who they were and why. But it didn't. They were not a person I could understand. They were a person I could only look at. Whatever had produced this, whatever years and damage and need had led to a three-year project of becoming someone else, it was not something I had access to. There was no door in. I didn't call the police. I know. I know how that sounds.

11:11 But I had no evidence that would survive contact with a good lawyer, and I had, standing in my hallway... Something more valuable than an arrest I couldn't make stick. I had a choice about what happened next. The only real choice I'd had since I found the first notebook. I told them I wasn't going to call the police.

11:35 They went very still. I told them I was going to leave. Not them. Me. I was going to leave this apartment, this city, this life I'd been poorly inhabiting. I was going to go home, back to the city where my daughter lived, where my sister lived, where the people who knew me specifically and concretely were, the people among whom no imitation of me would survive contact for long because they knew the original too well. I told them that what I was leaving behind, like the job, the apartment, the half-built fresh start, they could have it or leave it, I didn't care. What I was taking was the only thing they couldn't replicate. The people who knew me. The relationships, however damaged, that still had the

12:31 real Marcus in them. I told them, if I ever find out you've done this to someone else, I will be harder to dismiss the second time. They said nothing. I picked up the bag I'd packed that morning. I had known when I left for work that I wasn't coming back, and I walked past them in the hallway and out the front door. I did not look back.

12:58 I drove through the night. I called Phoebe from the road and she answered immediately, which meant she'd been awake, which meant she'd been waiting. I told her I was coming home. She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, Good. That's good, Dad. It took a long time for things to repair. Some of them haven't fully repaired. Renata and I are close again. Closer maybe than before the way a bone sometimes is after it heals. Carol and I found our way to something easier than what we'd had in the months after the divorce. Dennis put me in touch with someone who offered me a position that turned out to be better than the one I'd left. Greg and I have had dinner twice. We don't talk about what happened. Mostly we talk about other things, ordinary things.

14:04 The same things we always talked about, and I am grateful for the ordinariness of it in a way I wouldn't have been before. Phoebe and I are careful with each other now. Not in the way that means damaged. In the way that means attentive. She calls more than she used to, I call more than I used to. We check in. We are specific with each other. This is what I did today. This is what I'm thinking.

14:31 This is what is actually true. I did not understand before all of this how much of a relationship is made of exactly that specificity. The granular, particular, irreplaceable texture of knowing someone from the inside It cannot be replicated by someone who's only watched from outside a window. I don't know where they went. This is the part that stays with me. I don't know if they moved into that apartment and tried to live my life and found it as hollow as I had. I don't know if they moved on to someone else, found another person living at a careful distance from the people who loved them, began again, are three years into it by now. I don't know if they're still watching me. From whatever distance

15:26 I've put between us. Waiting to see if I'll drift far enough from the shore to be worth approaching again. I check. That's what I can tell you. I check my sent messages. I check my entry logs. I check the backs of radiators in any place I stay for more than a week. I look at the people around me and I ask myself. Quietly. Whether I know them well enough that they would notice. Whether they would notice, whether I would notice. And I never move far from the people who know me. That's not a small thing to have learned, but I would have preferred another way to learn it. Ghost, Scary Stories is a production of Calaroga Shark Media. Some elements of AI may have been used in this production, but it was written, edited, mixed

16:37 and produced by real, live people. Executive Producers Mark Francis and John McDermott.