Bobbi Kottman couldn’t remember the moment she decided to hire a private detective, but she felt the calendar notification vibrate in her purse. Her white heels gliding over dirty concrete, she straightened her wide-brim hat and powder-blue scarf. She didn’t want to be recognized, but if anyone saw her, she wanted to look the part—a classic femme-fatale, ready to sprawl across a fainting couch in a hard-boiled mansion. This was her old neighborhood, after all. The one she and Paul lived in before they got married. Before he ruined everything.
The sun glared off the shop windows, sneaking past the corners of her designer sunglasses, triggering another migraine. She tucked her head under a blue awning and walked around the scattered patio tables and potted plants. The chimes on the door rang, and a soft voice said, “Welcome to Summer of Love, how many are we today?”
Bobbi lifted a white-gloved finger to the hostess and scanned the room. As a well-known interior designer, Bobbi took in the 1960s-themed diner. The waxed checkerboard floors, posters of Beach Boys albums hanging over red and blue sparkled booths. Simple-minded tourists sat like staged fixtures while two men with screwdrivers and sweaty foreheads huddled around a vintage milkshake machine.
Bobbi knew this wasn’t really an old diner that survived decades of rent hikes, but a popular chain restaurant only a few years old. She still remembered the building as an upscale French restaurant she’d designed herself. She could still see the round back, Louis XVI chairs and silver chandeliers. The staggered pieces of art along the wall, meticulously arranged to look as natural as splattered paint. She remembered spending hours picking the perfect shade of olive upholstery along the bar so it would glow against the gold trim at sunset. Nothing here in this 1960s diner was authentic. Like everything else in this town, it was financed and designed to resemble something it wasn’t.
Out of the jukebox, “I Say a Little Prayer” by Aretha Franklin played.
She looked for a trench coat or bowler hat, anyone mysterious enough to be P.I. A plump little man with bleached blonde hair and a green floral shirt stood and waved her down, his arms short and stubby like a Gainsborough chair.“Mrs. Kottman? I thought that might be you. I’m detective Greene.”
Bobbi slid into the booth and took note of his dainty handshake and wondered what kind of private detective wears khaki shorts and alligator loafers.
“How are you holding up?” He folded his hands into the prayer position.
Bobbi couldn’t remember the moment she posted on the FindMyPI job board. She wasn’t sure how many profiles she thumbed through before landing on Mr. Greene. It’d been one week since the photos arrived in her inbox. Photos of her husband, Paul, with another woman. Some faux leather, chaise lounge slut. One that undoubtedly had been passed around every estate sale in town.
Bobbi opened the photo folder and slid her phone across the table.
Mr. Greene went through the slide show. “Well, these are naughty, aren’t they?”
Bobbi watched him through her sunglasses. She’d memorized the photos. Her Paul and this thin-bodied hat rack holding hands at the coffee shop. Feeding each other bites of crepe at the farmer’s market. The photos all had a paparazzi angle, like the “Celebrity Couples Doing Ordinary Things,” section of a cheap tabloid.
“You see a lot of this?” Bobbi asked to break the silence.
“Oh, heavens yes,” Mr. Greene said. “It’s a classic case.” Catching himself, he added, “But uniquely painful, I’m sure. All happy marriages are the same, but every scandal is scandalous in its own way.”
Bobbi drummed her white-gloved nails on the fake formica table, almost hard enough to make a sound. “So, what do you think?”
Mr. Greene sighed and pushed the phone back across the table. “I think they’re getting better at this.”
A tall, thin young man, hunched like a mid-century arc lamp, appeared at the edge of the table. “Greetings Flower Children, my name is Toby, and I’ll be your vibe dealer.” He spoke through a plastic face shield with a native LA accent of disinterest and judgment. “Questions on the menu?”
“I’ll have the MLK Chocolate and Vanilla Dream Shake,” Mr. Greene smiled.
“Milkshake machine’s on the fritz. Anything else look groovy?”
Mr. Greene scanned the menu. “How about a Betty Flat White?”
The server turned and gave Bobbi a teenage grin. “Hey there Peggy Sue, our lunch specials today are the Cubano Missile Crisis, The Lunar Landing Lox—”
“Americano,” she cut him off. “Over ice.”
“One Betty Flat and a Malcolm Xpresso on the rocks.” He drifted away from the table slowly, repeating the order out loud to himself.
Out of the jukebox, “Take a Little Piece of My Heart” by Janis Joplin played.
“Tell me, Mrs. Kottman.” Mr. Green rubbed his manicured hands together. “Have you confronted your husband about these photos?”
“My husband says the photos are fake. He denies everything and promised me he’d get to the bottom on this but—”
“But of course he hasn’t!” Mr. Greene cut in. “They never do, do they?”
Bobbi watched Mr. Greene check his reflection in her sunglasses. “Do you know who might have sent these photos?” he asked. “Do you know if anyone might be trying to blackmail your husband?”
“My husband used to blurt out every detail that popped into his empty breakfast nook of a brain, but now, he doesn’t tell me anything. Which is just more evidence he’s blabbing someone else’s ear off.” She looked around the diner, suddenly realizing how overdressed she was. “Are you going to help me, Mr. Greene? Are you going to follow my husband?”
Mr. Greene grinned and waved a limp wrist. “Mrs. Kottman, this isn’t a Raymond Chandler novel. That’s just not how things are done anymore. I could hack his location history, but that takes time and money. I suggest the first thing we do is determine the legitimacy of these photos.” Leaning in closer, he asked, “Tell me, Mrs. Kottman, are you familiar with deepfake technology?”
Bobbi already knew more than she wanted to about deepfakes. How blackmailers and college students used machine learning to manipulate images and videos. Movie star faces on porn star bodies. Government officials dressed as Hitler. Last week, she watched a video of the President arm-wrestling an alligator she was fairly certain was fake.
Bobbi felt a dull pain in her neck creep up into the base of her skull. “And what type of experience do you have with deepfake technology, Mr. Greene?”
Mr. Greene’s mouth hung open like a pleated window tier. “Did you hear about the scandal last year?” He looked over his shoulder and said softly, “The one with the masturbating businessmen?”
Bobbi watched the story on 60 Minutes. Thousands of men around the country, all caught masturbating in their offices on video. Right there in front of their computer, not realizing someone hacked the camera on their monitor. Most of them got fired. All of them denied ever doing it. “I heard all about those disgusting men and their office jackoff parties. What’s it got to do with my husband and his casting couch whore?”
Mr. Greene shook his head. “And isn’t that just what’s wrong with the media today? You never get the full story. No, sweetie…The real scandal is what happened next. My team solved the case. We discovered what no one else could see.”
Toby the vibe dealer rolled up and placed their drinks on the table. Mr. Greene lifted his cup to his lips and blew. “It starts off as your typical blackmail scam,” he said. “Some poor schmuck gets an email saying, ‘We hacked your computer camera and have video of you celebrating Palm Sunday while your wife’s out grocery shopping. Pay up or your whole contact list gets the footage.’”
Bobbi stirred a sugar packet into her Malcolm Xpresso. The tension in her skull warmed and spread across the back of her head.
“Most men are wise to the scam. They call the bluff, knowing the blackmailer doesn’t really have any footage. But that’s where this case was different. Each blackmailer in this case included video footage.” He lifted his pinky finger and sipped his Betty Flat White. “Can you imagine? Thousands of videos of men across the country. Faces glued to the monitor, shaking hands with the milkman right there at their desks. Whacking it like angry schoolboys after choir practice.”
“Most of the men,” Mr. Greene continued. “They rolled over and paid. I mean, who’s going to believe them? The video footage is right there. But hundreds of the men ignored it. They called the blackmailer’s bluff, hoping it would just go away. These men all lost their jobs. Some of them lost their wives. They hired lawyers, detectives, and software engineers, but no one determined if the videos were real or fake. Some of the men started to fear they were guilty. That they’d developed some form of masturbation amnesia.”
“Well, I’m sure some of them were guilty,” Bobbi said. “Most men would whack it to a crescent sofa if it had the right curves.”
Mr. Greene put his pointer finger in the air. “Ding, ding, ding!” he said. “Many of the men were guilty. And that’s exactly how we cracked the case. We discovered the one thing all the real videos had in common.”
Bobbi considered getting up and leaving, but her migraine kept her in place. “Ok, Mr. Greene.” She bowed her head and rubbed her temples. “Go ahead and tell me. What did the real videos all have in common?”
“Shame,” he said.
“Shame?” she asked. “What do you mean, shame?”
Mr. Greene took a long sip of his coffee. “You see, Mrs. Kottman, when a man beats the bishop—particularly in his place of business—there is a singular moment. The moment the images on his monitor stop and he catches his own reflection. The moment excitement explodes into absurdity. Real men know the split-second of terror that follows the release of tension. When that comet tail of pleasure fades into an ice bath of embarrassment. All the real videos showed that moment. Once we noticed that, the rest became obvious.”
Out of the jukebox, “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” started to play.
“Deepfake technology can do a lot,” Mr. Greene said. “But it couldn’t replicate that flash of human shame. In the deepfake videos, none of the men showed a refractory period. They all just went right back to work, answering emails without even washing their hands.”
The migraine grabbed the front of Bobbi’s head and blurred her vision. She counted five long breaths, in through her nose and out her mouth. She looked at Mr. Greene. “Not that this hasn’t been a fascinating conversation, one that I won’t soon forget, but please, I’d really like to know how you plan on investigating my husband.”
“Of course, dear.” Mr. Greene patted the side of his mouth with a napkin and refolded his hands. “But first, can you please tell me a bit more about your relationship before the photos arrived? Did you already suspect your husband was cheating?”
The question surprised Bobbi, but she was glad he asked. She’d been wanting to tell someone how Paul changed since they got married only one year ago. How he’d once been the velvet drapes in the study, protecting her from the August heat; ready to open the moment she needed light. He’d been reliable and reassuring like a storage ottoman, always creating more space than he took up. But as that first year went on, and the winter catalogs arrived, she found that he offered her as much back support as a bar stool.
He’d stopped sneaking up behind her with a kiss as she did the dishes. No more moments of startling affection to keep her guessing. More often, she’d fall asleep at night without feeling the tips of his fingers running up and down the backs of her arms. Bobbi wanted to tell Mr. Greene how, for no apparent reason at all, Paul started brushing his teeth in the guest bathroom. And given that she’d just remodeled the master with his and her sinks, this was the most insulting part of all.
But Bobbi didn’t say any of this. Instead, she removed her wide-brim hat and let her hair fall over her shoulders, waves of worn-out blonde and brown balayage shining under fluorescent light. She peeled the sunglasses off her face, revealing eyes red and raw, holding back a wall of tears ready to pour down her face.
“Oh, dear.” Mr. Greene passed Bobbi a stack of napkins. “It’s ok. Let it out now.”
Bobbi slammed her fist onto the table. “I just want to know what’s real. Is that too much to ask? Just for once in my life, I want to know the truth and decide for myself what happens next.”
“Oh, sweetie.” Mr. Greene pouted his lip. “I know this is difficult, but I do have just a few more questions.”
Bobbi wiped her eyes and put her sunglasses back on.
“Since this all started,” Mr. Greene asked, “have you noticed any strange advertisements on your social media feed?”
Bobbi couldn’t remember the exact moment it started, but she had been seeing strange ads since the photos arrived. Online advertisements for divorce lawyers and women’s support groups. Special offers for solo vacations and match-making services. And when she went through Paul’s email and social accounts, she saw ads for couples counseling and make-it-up-to-her jewelry sales.
“And what about your decision to contact me, Mrs. Kottman? What prompted you to post your case on the FindMyPI job board?”
Bobbi grabbed the edge of the table to keep the room from spinning. “I…I can’t remember…I was online and then…it just happened. And now, I’m here.”
Mr. Greene sighed. “That’s what I was afraid of. Augmented Reality Marketing. I’ll tell you, it’s been great for my business, but I do hate what it does to good people like you.”
Bobbi gripped the table, trying to keep balance.
Mr. Greene leaned back in the booth and took the last sip of his coffee. “I miss the old days of advertising. Back when it was enough to just create a void in your imagination. The old, mad men of Madison Avenue, they used to only plant the seed of discontent and let you be the one to sow it into reality. Simpler times, am I right?”
Bobbi closed her eyes and started counting her breaths. She tried to time travel back to when this booth was a white table cloth in her perfect French restaurant. When the broken milkshake machine was a case of eclairs and the Beatles memorabilia were portraits of Matisse and Dega. Her migraine raged now, ringing her ears and locking her joints. “I…I don’t understand any of this, Mr, Greene.”
“Think about it,” he said. “Why would advertisers wait around for you to decide something is wrong in your life? With Augmented Reality Marketing, they can tear a hole in your world with personalized disasters that look and feel real. And once something feels real…Well, that’s at least one version of reality, isn’t it?”
Bobbi threw her hands onto the table and pulled herself toward Mr. Greene. Close enough to grab him by his end-table shaped frame. “What the hell are you saying to me right now? That these photos are just…ads? That this whole thing is just some advertising campaign to sell me products and services?”
Mr. Green raised his hands to calm her. “Mrs. Kottman, they’re selling the same thing they always have. Reassurance. Reassurance that your life really is as empty as it feels. And that this is your chance to fix it.”
Out of the jukebox, “What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong played.
Mr. Greene stood up and ran his hands over his khaki shorts, smoothing the creases. He put his little hand on Bobbi’s shoulder. “Give me and my team a week to run some tests on these images. I’ll contact you soon.”
Bobbi sat in the booth, staring down at the table and rubbing her temples. After a few minutes alone, her fingers naturally crept toward her cell phone, and she began scrolling through the images of Paul again. She zoomed in. There wasn’t any shame on his face but there was another look. An undeniable Paul look she recognized but hadn’t seen in a long time. One she almost forgot existed until she saw it burning into someone else. That bear hug of brown eyes that promised to love her forever. If deepfake technology can’t replicate shame? How would it ever be able to replicate that look? she wondered. That look only she knew. It was in every photo, plastered onto his face like art deco wallpaper.
Across the diner, a mother and her young daughter sat down in a sparkly red booth. Bobbi thought about what she might tell her own mother if she decided to leave Paul. Her family and friends all loved him. She’d decorated their love publicly for so long. To strip away that augmented reality she herself created wouldn’t just be sad, it would be cruel. And even if she was somehow capable of breaking the habit of being in love with him, was she ready to be the kind of person who’s incapable of maintaining the love she’d flaunted for so long?
Bobbi knew believing Paul meant she’d never be able to trust her intuition again. Even if the photos are fake, she thought, aren’t my feelings about his distance and the trouble in our relationship real?
Bobbi’s migraine dulled and she straightened her back, composing herself. In her tired brain a new idea glowed like an Edison bulb. If she’d already been living in an augmented reality, if every truth in this gaslit world was already altered, couldn’t she choose whichever version she wanted? Couldn’t she redesign that room in her mind without the mess of facts and feelings?
Out of the jukebox, Bobbi thought she heard the Rolling Stones but couldn’t be sure. As she listened, a new thought took over. One that asked, Who am I to decide what’s real anymore?
Bobbi watched the mother and daughter across the diner. The daughter’s tiny legs dangled over the checkerboard floor as she dragged her finger up and down the laminated menu. “Mommy,” she asked. “Why won’t this scroll?” The mother smiled and asked if she wanted a milkshake.