The Shallowfakes

What forgeries of counterfeit achievements truly reveal.

- Virginia Heffernan

Photoshop played an outsize role in the odious college admissions scandal that broke earlier this year. Rick Singer, the concierge to the stars who pleaded guilty in March to money laundering and racketeering in a scheme to get rich children into luxury-brand colleges, used the software to graft the heads of teens onto the muscled bodies of elite athletes. With the Photoshopped water polo image in particular, the one that helped an undistinguished high schooler get recruited by USC, Singer seems to have created a mythological creature—a Ceto for the digital age. Call them the Collegiae: They’ve got the heads of princesses and the bodies of serpents. To mark the moment, a Twitter friend, Peter Mohan, ginned up an image of me as a Collegiae. At first it didn’t compute. But then there she was: my own partial profile awkwardly under a deadly serious swimming cap, atop a muscular neck, broad shoulders, thick biceps and triceps, a performance one-piece—my splendid physique waistdeep in sky-blue pool water, at keen presence to a polo ball.

Water polo is widely praised as the most horrifying Olympic sport—vicious handball, but with the exciting lung sensations of waterboarding. Amusement mounted. What a gem! Why spend hundreds of hours drowning in a muggy pool when a few minutes of Photoshop can supply you with a winner’s glory and trapezius? And the primitive magic of illusion: It looks like I’m playing water polo, but I have never played water polo! Evidently I’d been reunited with a loving, playful alter ego willing to brook nosebleed-inducing body checks so I could stay in bed, taking selfies in a USC T-shirt. She—me, in the picture—was like one of the aboveground real people in Jordan Peele’s Us; I was her deformed and indolent Tethered, and our reunion made me whole.