The pictures of her face haunted her, the way they were lined up one by one against the

stylized brick-clad wall of her townhouse, as though they were Romanovs in Yekaterinburg about to be shot...only they smiled with absurd created gleefulness, engineered by the hand of some artful photographer. She looked up at the ceiling, where some paintings lay shuffled like dominos about to fall, pushed tightly together on the catwalks. The townhouse was a converted theater. It had been a small artsy type of theater mostly famous for showing independent films, until it foldedmostly because the owner refused to charge attendance feesand got turned into a townhouse. She used the catwalks, only to store the paintings. She liked them up by the ceiling, out of sight, heads turned away from her, but she still had the haunting feeling that those facesher faceswere staring at her when she turned her back. As she walked through the hallwaylong and narrow, from being subdivided, with a long, thin, barely soundproof wall that separated Marsha from her persnickety neighborMarsha could not help but feel that she was walking through a gauntlet. Instead of being dressed in chain-mail hauberks and armed with scimitars, however, this gauntlets weapons were disarming smiles and gentle grace. She had no mirrors on the wall but instead an aisle of her faces staring back at her in various modes of reposethere was the photo shoot for some magazine, the promotional one for the billboard in Times Square (she secretly hated it, but the photographer seemed like a delicate sort and she didnt want to tell him), the laughing tossed-back hair bikini-clad picture from ages ago. She hated them all, really, in equal measure as she liked them. She liked to gaze upon her smiles and find small imperfections here and there like a game of Wheres Waldothe oddly, too-defined line of her cheekbone here, the microscopic zit on her skin above her lip therebut then she tore her eyes away because, she reminded herself, she was being narcissistic. And what had happened to Narcissus? But she liked to leave the grim morals of the Greeks to the pages of books rather than committing them to memory, so she continued to stareif only a bit more abashedly. Walking through her hallway made Marsha feel like she was that woman in those Crestor ads, walking through a montage of her life while intoning on the

dangers of clogged arteries or heart disease or something or the other. She remembered that as they showed footage (probably supposed to be from the 70s) the woman said, While I was building my friendships, my family, my life, something else was building in my arteriesdangerous plaque, and shed thought that was a horrible thing to say as you watched happy footage. Why bother ruining a happy moment with some stupid thing like plaque in your arteries? Then again, Marsha thought, the footage was undoubtedly engineered anyway, just like her happy bikini shoot. That day had been freezing cold, because it was Atlantic City during a cold fall, not Hawaiibecause Atlantic City was closer, that was where they shot all but the most essential footage for the show. Realizing that the happy bikini face and the Crestor womans built-up montage life in the advert were both fake, Marsha felt a cold sort of clamminess build around her as she looked at the pictures. They looked at her harshly, blaming her. The airbrushed cheeks, the disappeared blemishes, slimmed neckthey reminded her of all she did not have, and all she never had, and would never have that laughing bikini picture, most of all. It unsettled Marsha, as she walked through the hallwayfacing more pictures from her Broadway debut, that horrible one of her clutching the award trophy in a viselike gripthat so much of what she looked at was, for all intents and purposes, not true. They were not honest pictures or candid moments. They were engineered as surely as the Crestor womans fake life behind her. As Marsha finally emerged into the kitchen through the haunting hall of pictures of her face, she realized the answer to the question her friend had asked her at their luncheon the other day Why do you keep all these pictures of yourself here, Marsha? shed asked curiously. Dont you think it might come across as a tiny bit...self-absorbed? Marsha had laughed and passed it off to the fact that storage was so expensive, or that she couldnt bear to part with favored memories, but now, as she stood weakly in the hall in a baby-blue bathrobe, wrinkled saggy cheek and blemishes aplenty, clutching her cup of cocoa in a grip as viselike as the one on her award, she realized that she was looking not at memories, but rather an engineered life, a history that was as she wanted it to be rather than how it was.

It was a life as frighteningly perfect in parallel comparison to the as one hundred and twenty-one posed cropped and airbrushed photographs could be staring at her down the hall in repeated, mocking versions of herself. And Marsha turned back sadly toward her bedroom knowing she would have to walk through the gauntlet again, the gauntlet of a parallel life she had really never lived.