‘Ditto’

Paxton Hilgendorff is an environmental and contemporary studio artist who recently graduated from Colgate University, focusing on sculpture and photography. Based in Hamilton, New York, his work focuses on the intersections of the natural and artificial worlds, utilizing found objects and abandoned locations in the local and surrounding community. Inspired by growth and decay, Paxton's work aims to question the ability of humans to live within nature, as well as their ability to imitate the natural forms of the world.

Ditto

It looks like every episode of our show starts in the same hotel room. This is both true and not true. Each establishing shot tracks across the corner room of a second- or third-floor Best Western with two twin beds. Caleb and I do actually sleep in those rooms, and every morning after I make my bed Caleb promptly unmakes it before the crew arrives to prove to the audience that we are Real and Raw and vagabonding just for them. 

Today we are somewhere in Pennsylvania and the sheets in this one are particularly scratchy. To be honest, I prefer that because I know they’ve been starched and bleached within an inch of their lives. If I think too hard about how many people slept in this bed before me, I end up in the shower with the water so hot I come out looking like a lobster on camera. The first rule of low-budget show making: there is no “we’ll fix it in post”. “We” is just us, months later, out of time and money.

Not that we have to operate strictly by those rules anymore. The first season, sure. Fueled by ramen and Red Bull, we shot the pilot on home video cameras and kept shooting as Caleb’s college friend worked to dig our files up from the self-sub network slush pile. I never expected anything to come of it. For me, it was one last caper before we gave up and became adults. After a few failed months on the road, we would get real jobs with our untouched business admin degrees and start swiping on dating apps. But as it turns out, Americans have an insatiable appetite for entertainment that provides two things: love and humiliation. Our show has both. 

By the time the crew arrives, we are properly mussed and wrinkled, ready to begin the hunt. I sit down next to Caleb at the childishly small table and flip on our closeup camcorder. I train my lens on his laptop screen as he reads out the email as if we’ve never seen it before. 

“Dear Caleb and Ewan,

I need help meeting the love of my life.”

It’s always the love of their lives. I’ve been developing this theory–the more hopped-up the language is, the less they really know the person on the other side. We’ve gotten emails that run for pages describing someone’s great love. When it comes down to the texts that make up their actual relationship, the communiques rarely go more than a sentence at a time.

i love u

u r everything to me

Ask them how their forever-love takes their coffee and they look at you slack-jawed. Do they insist on keeping their unpaired socks in the same knapsack as their underwear, leading to a chaotic swearing search each morning? Do they leave cold cups of coffee in every crevice of the van you share that spill over when the doors open? Do they sing badly as they clip their toenails at unspeakable hours? These are the kinds of things you should know about your great love. But they never ask.

Caleb continues. “I’ve been dating Peter for about a year now. We started talking when he commented on something I put up on Soundcloud. I’m an aspiring singer and he said he could hear things in my voice that he’d never heard before. We got to talking and now we text every day. I’ve hit my messaging limits several months in a row now because we can’t stop talking all night. I’m sure that we’re soulmates, but he lives a six-hour drive away and can never seem to make it work to meet up in person…”

He goes on to describe the more suspicious aspects of the relationship (“he looks incredible in pictures but his computer can’t video chat, last time we scheduled a meet-up he said he passed out from low blood sugar”, etc.) and I start to zone out. I’ve heard all of this before. I’ve heard about so many missed calls and car accidents that I should have a degree in excuses by now. 

“Can you help me?”

The emails always end with some version of this question. Can we pull back the curtain together? It’s just so heavy on my own.

“Looks like we’re going to Ohio,” I say brightly. Sometimes I wish the cameras would blink. 

“Have you ever been to Ohio?” he asks me. 

I want to say No, dumbass, you know that. We’re from Connecticut. Instead, I say, “I hear there’s a parking lot filled with concrete corn.”

Unlike most of our banter, this genuinely surprises him. I’ve gone off-script. I see annoyance flicker through the vein under his right eye and then he grins it away. “Sounds pretty corny,” he says, and then, “please cut that. Go…Bengals?”

Caleb has never watched a full football game in his life. “Rawr,” I say. “Here we come.”

Caleb will tell anyone that he knew the show would be a hit. It wasn’t long before “afford our rent” money became “fuck you” money and we started getting recognized in airports as the Ditto guys: the ones who track down the lover you’ve never met for better or for worse. Usually, it was for worse. We named the show after the shape-changing pink Pokemon of our youth. For Caleb, it was a fun reflection of the show’s inherent mystery: who would we find under the fake photos and Shakespearean love notes? For me, it was a painful reminder of just how long I had been in love with my best friend. Even poring over anime cards, I remember being distracted by his hands–bitten half-moon nails, propped up by a fleshy hitchhiker’s thumb. While our subjects tracked down lovers they’d never seen, I stared at mine from the backseat of a crowded van. It was pathetic, but it was also romantic, in some fucked-up way.

The irony of our show’s premise and my own closeted bullshit has not escaped me. We’re in our late twenties now and can’t drink like we used to, but sometimes we still try it on weekends along the back strips of western states. I think about confessing all the time, but the more time passes, the more “famous” we get, the fewer words I have for him that could ever make sense. Instead, I hold his head over another Best Western’s best porcelain and we tell ourselves it’s time to buy more expensive whiskey so maybe we don’t drink it all at once.

The flight is only a few hours and we spend almost that long in the airport, getting a few B-rolls of Caleba and me dragging our smallest suitcases behind us while the crew pushes our real ones on a cart out of shot. By the time we get on the plane, Caleb is ready for a nap and I’m midway through a book I bought at a Hudson kiosk a few episodes back. 

He closes his eyes as we take off and asks me what I’m reading. I explain to him it’s about a mortician who writes about death rituals in different places around the world. 

“There are communities in Tibet where they practice sky burials,” I tell him. “They put bodies on the top of a mountain to decompose and be eaten by vultures.”

“Sounds sexy,” he says.

“What do you want done with your body after you die?” I ask him, opening the plane window so he squints under his lids. Light streams in, bright and unforgiving. The guy in front of me reclines his seat the quarter inch allowed and it begins to push on my knees, ready to bruise. Below us, the earth is tilted as the plane banks a wide turn. 

“Buried in a shallow grave,” he says. “So I can really freak out some hiker in a couple of years when my bones start to show.”

“You’re an asshole,” I tell him.

He shrugs. “I assume you want to be cremated and have your ashes spread in the ocean or something poetic like that?”

“Nah. I want the ashes pressed into two little gems so they can sit in my skull and stare at my family from the mantle.”

This was worth one eye opening, His irises are a muddy swamp of green and brown, a color I hate everywhere except on him. He holds his hand up to shield his face and stares at me under his fingers. “That’s fucked up,” he says. “I’ll make sure it happens for you.”

I don’t ask why he’s so sure I’ll die before he does. I go back to my book and try to imagine myself at the top of a frigid mounting with birds picking at my bones. I wonder out loud about the smell, but Caleb is already asleep.

We land in Columbus, an unimpressive knot of highways whose airport reminds us that its most famous resident, John Glenn, went all the way to the moon to escape it. We get a few shots of the astronaut suit in the terminal before splitting off from the main crew to meet up with our interviewee. We like to keep the first encounter just us and a few hand-helds so that the subjects of each episode don’t get spooked. 

We rendez-vous with the email-sender, “Chrissy”, at a chicken restaurant called “The Crispy Coop”. We let the subject pick a public place, often a restaurant, where I never eat anything because I can’t handle the sounds of my own chewing in the footage. We get three large diet cokes and sit in the smell of grease. “Chrissy” is short and stocky and would be pretty if she had any lips at all. 

“Thank you guys so much for coming,” she says, and Caleb motions for her to repeat herself once the cameras are on.

“Of course,” I say, “we’re here to help. So tell us about Peter.”

She more or less repeats the details we heard in the email–he’s smart and funny and they're super in love–and shows us a few pictures she has of him on her phone. They’re weirdly edited, almost sepia-toned, with film grain that has to be added in. The guy is good-looking in an old-fashioned way, freckled and determined to comb his hair as flat to the scalp as possible. 

“No mirror selfies,” I comment. No selfies at all, actually. “That could be a good sign, means he’s not self-absorbed.”

“He’s literally the most selfless person I’ve ever met,” she gushes. There’s bright red lipstick on her straw and her teeth. “He’s always asking me about myself, my day, little details I’ve never had anyone care about before.”

“But you haven’t met,” Caleb points out. This is partially for the audience, and partially to see how the subject will react when pushed. It gives us a better idea of how to frame their pretty inevitable disappointment. Will it be tears? Anger? Depression? Denial?

“True,” she says brightly, “but like..when it’s meant to be, you know?”

They’d make a cute couple, I think. Her, round-cheeked and blond. Him, a pale newsboy-era rapscallion. The sun and the moon with stars in their eyes.

“So here’s how this is going to work,” Caleb is explaining. “We’ll do some research, reach out to him, and see if we can arrange a meeting so you guys can finally connect. Sound good?”

She nods, takes a sip of her soda. “I’m excited,” she says.

This is the point where I always want to warn them that things are not going to go as planned. He is not going to be the man in the picture, or if he is, he’ll be older, fatter, the father to a mysterious child sitting just out of frame. It’s not going to turn out the way you’re picturing, I want to tell her, but I don’t want to spoil the episode, so I give her a warm smile instead. 

“So are we,” I say.

Back at another Best Western, we reverse image search the three pictures “Bella” gave us and find a barren Facebook account linked to someone named Michael. This is pretty standard–people steal images from others, craft a whole identity as someone that they aren’t. The name he’d given her, Peter Standish, turned up nothing at all except a few academic essays written back in the 40s: “Pseudogymnoascus destructans and its effect on the sleep cycle of Myotis septentrionalis”.

“This paper is about bat fungus,” I say after some quick googling. “White-nose syndrome? I guess it’s been killing colonies in the US.” 

“Not exactly what we’re looking for, Batman,” Caleb says. “The only thing I can see on this Facebook page is that the guy lives in Cincinnati. Isn’t that way closer than what he told Bella?”

I reach over to the mousepad to scroll back up and our hands touch. I feel a familiar dull ache in my stomach. Absolutely pathetic, I tell myself. “Cincinatti is only a few hours away.”

“Well, I think it’s time to give this guy a call,” Caleb says. He pushes back from the laptop and stretches so I can see a tiny strip of stomach above his belt, dotted with soft down hair. He’s smiling and relaxed, like a cat perched with a kill. This is his favorite part, cold-calling people and catching them off-guard so they spill their secrets. We put the phone on speaker and listen to it ring for a while before hanging up. No voicemail. Fuck it. We’ll try again later.

We mess around online for a while longer just to confirm the Facebook profile is real. We message some of the guy’s few friends to ask if they’ve ever met him in person. To our surprise, they all say yes–they met him at parties at a friend-of-a-friend’s house or a get-together at a bar for a birthday party. Most of them remember him as quiet and a little awkward to talk to.

i thought he was kinda insecure, one of them messages us, cause he kept using these old-timey phrases to sound smart

This rings a bell for me, so I pull up some of the lovesick emails that “Chrissy” had let us sort through. I read them out loud for the benefit of the camera. I wonder if I will eventually forget how to read just to myself and will instead drive everyone crazy at the nursing home with a constant monologue of newspaper headlines. 

“My love, I want to know everything about your days down to the minute so I can picture you in your completeness at any moment…Our mortal bodies are but cumbersome stumbling blocks along the path to deepest happiness…You’ve given my life a fresh infusion of meaning and purpose…”

“Fuck,” Caleb says.

“So, to summarize,” I say, clocking a transition so awkward that my high school English teacher would have wept, “he writes her these long, fawning emails and then lies about living two hours away. He gives her pictures from his Facebook page but lies about his name. He goes out with friends but won’t meet up with the supposed love of his life in person.”

This is not the first case we’ve had like this, and it won’t be the last. We’ve learned that the odd patchwork of lies and unnecessary complications is almost always stitched together by shame. People label themselves unlovable for so many reasons–age, weight, trauma, a stutter, a hardly noticeable birthmark. One case we solved involved a woman too afraid to meet up with her boyfriend until she’d raised the money for LASIK surgery because she thought she was too ugly with glasses. When they finally met, he wore them too. It never occurs to them that the other person may see past all that, that love could function as corrective lenses.

“We gotta get this guy on the phone,” Caleb says.

When I wake up later that night, the hotel room is pitch-black. Caleb’s hand is cupping my shoulder. “Dude,” he whispers, “wake up.”

Still half-asleep, I reach up to grab his hand, fingers curling on instinct. He slips away and motions for me to scoot over, crawling on top of the covers next to me. “Let’s call him again,” he says. 

My eyes adjust to the darkness as my body tries to separate itself from dreams. I can smell the lotion Caleb puts on his hands when they crack and disinfectant wafting from the bathroom. Caleb is a solid body next to me, his form punching outlines in the dark.  He flips open his phone and cold light washes over both of us. I finally remember where we are as Caleb dials and puts the phone on speaker.

It only rings three times before a man’s voice answers. “Hello?”

“Hi,” Caleb says, his voice too loud in my ear, “is this Peter?” He uses the name Chrissy gave us first, but I know he’ll switch to the other one if he needs to. This kind of casual deception comes so easily to Caleb that it makes me wonder if he’s ever lied to my face. It should bother me more that I don’t know for sure.

“That’s great,” Caleb says, “we’ve been trying to get in touch with you…” He explains about Chrissy, about how badly she wants to meet him and how she even got us involved just to be sure he was real. 

The man laughs. “I am definitely real,” he says. 

“Well that’s a great start,” Caleb says, “so how can we help you two get together?”

“Well it’s hard,” the man says, “since I am so far away—”

“Cincinnati, right?”

I’ll give him credit: there was barely a beat of silence before the man shifts into a bashful, chocolaty reproach. “That’s right,” he says. “But drive is a drive.”

“Well why don’t we come to you?” Caleb asks, affable even with his teeth out. “That way you don’t have to make the drive at all.”

He hedges for a while, like they all do, but this is where Caleb shines—he never gives up the chase. Eventually we nail down a day later that week when “Bella” could come visit, accompanied by our camera crew. I look at the hotel clock. It’s 3 am.

“Why did you wake me up?” I ask when Caleb finally hangs up. 

“You know I don’t like to do anything without you, buddy,” he says, and gives me a light, dry kiss on the forehead. “See you in the morning.”

We head to Cincinnati in a modern wagon train, driving west on 71 in a row of vans stuffed with audio equipment and loose lenses. It’s only a two hour drive, but Peter hasn’t given us his address yet, so when we get downtown we park the caravan and wander down to the river to await further instructions.

There’s a waterfront park where we get some footage of Bella sitting lonely in a metal swing meant for two. While our DP is busy jerking off to the golden hour lighting I catch her crying silently, two tears caught in the gum of her inner eye. I go sit next to her, ruining the shot. 

“Hey, you ok?”
She nods, looking out over the river. String-light encrusted party boats sit prepped on the docks waiting for sundown. The swings are moving on their own accord as the breeze gains strength over water, a dozen rocking ghosts.

“I have a bad feeling,” she says. “Like this isn’t going to end well.”

“Maybe it won’t,” I say. “But it will end. The uncertainty, the limbo, the nights spent wondering what you maybe could have? That’s all about to end, and then you’ll know. And then you can move on.”

“What if I don’t want to?” she asks. “What if I just want things to stay the way they are?”

By now, the sun has tucked itself into the horizon line. Dusk is settling over the waterfront and turning the red bridge rust-brown. Caleb is at the edge of the water, taunting geese. He’s barely aged since we started this whole thing. I think he could probably still sneak into a kegger on any college campus. Me, I’ve had grays coming in since high school. My back hurts from sleeping on hotel beds. Maybe I can convince Caleb to change over our loyalties to a Hilton. Something classier, or at least with separate rooms. Maybe I need a moment every day to remember who I am without him next to me.

“You don’t,” I tell her. “You need things to change. It feels easier for a while, but then it isn’t anymore. You’ve just got to face it head-on.” And then I think about swinging myself in a high arc over the water and launching myself down into the cold river where I will no longer be the world’s biggest hypocrite. 

“We’ve got a location!” 

Caleb is shouting and waving his phone above his head as geese scatter around him. “I’ve got an address folks, let’s head out.”

We pack into the caravan and follow the oracle of Apple Maps into the suburbs, where the streets smooth out and curve into rotaries. Chrissy is nervously chewing on her fingers, either too distracted to notice or purposely ignoring the camera pointed at her from the front seat. We pass by rows of tidy houses, lawns strewn with toys and soccer balls. The more we travel, the more convinced I am that suburbs are the same everywhere.

By the time we reach the small white house, the neighborhood porch lights are cutting into the soft darkness. There is a man sitting outside on the lawn in a plastic folding chair, holding a glass of what looks like red wine. Right away, I can tell two things: this is the man from the photos, and the producers aren’t getting their knock-on-the-door suspense shot.

Caleb gets out of the car without a backwards glance, and I reach forward from the back seat to tap Bella’s shoulder. “You can stay here if you want while we make sure it’s him,” I tell her, and she nods, her lipless mouth a flat line. I crawl out too, strapping on a screenless go-pro and following Caleb towards the figure in the chair. We’ve found that during these initial confrontations, it’s best to keep our hands free.

The man stands up as we approach and I can tell that he’s tall, taller than me and definitely taller than Caleb. He looks a little older than the pictures. His face is bonier and worn, the freckles gone and replaced with a milky pallor. His hair is loose and floppy, not a gray in sight. “Hello,” he says. “I’m Peter. Is Chrissy with you?”

“She’s in the car,” I say. “So it is Peter, not Michael?” Caleb shoots me a surprised look since I’m the one with the go-pro and therefore am not slated to be confrontational in this scene. But the unwelcome feeling of desperation has been building in me since Columbus and picked up pace with the river and now I am set to implode on this dark lawn with a camera pointed away from my own self-destruction.

“It’s complicated,” he says, flashing his teeth. “But I’d rather explain it to her.”

“Fair enough,” Caleb says, and I go get Chrissy before I get myself in trouble. 

By the time I approach the van, she’s already halfway out the sliding door. “It’s him, isn’t it?” she asks, and I nod before letting her approach ahead of me. 

Chrissy and Peter stand for a moment at a respectable length apart, watching each other. I half expect them to start circling the yard, unable to break the invisible barrier between them. But then she is in his arms and he is twirling her soft round body into his tall thin one and they are one shape in the dark, nearly tripping over the plastic chair in their attempts to get closer. I tug at Caleb’s arm and pull him back toward the van so they can have some privacy, and this is very much not in the script so I’m pulling hard, too hard, and when he falls backwards I catch him like a waltz. 

“Let’s give them a minute,” I say softly, my face an inch from his.

“Sure thing, bud,” he says, and grabs my shoulder to right himself. We walk over to the camera crew who are having tech difficulties with some of the equipment that has bumped down the highway for so long. Chrissy and Peter are whispering to each other under the stars. We wait for a while until they approach, holding hands, and tell us they’ve worked everything out.

“Thank you,” she tells us. “This is better than I could have hoped for.”

“Yes, thank you,” he says. “For making me brave.” He has a hint of an accent I’ve never heard. 

I have questions and I know Caleb does too, but then the two of them are already turning back to the house, and by the time our crew has switched the cameras back on the door has shut behind them. We stand there for a moment before Caleb announces that he’s hungry and figuring out an outro shot will be a problem for tomorrow. I know how he can get when he’s hungry, so I quickly agree, and we head back out to the highway, leaving the lovers to each other’s long-awaited company. 

At the new Best Western on the outskirts of Cincinnati, I pull out the SD card from the go-pro to review the footage. I see Chrissy rush to where I know Peter was but now looks just like empty grass. The camera swerves left and focuses its unblinking red eye on me with Caleb in my arms. I see Chrissy in the background twirling around nothing at all as Caleb’s fingers curl softly against my back, and he does not look away.

Sahalie Angell Martin grew up on a sheep farm in Oregon. She has an MFA from the Ohio State University and teaches writing at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. Her work has been featured in Hobart After Dark, The Superstition Review, and Writer's Digest.