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I was content, hibernating in my apartment after a breakup I didn’t see coming and wasn’t ready for, streaming B-horror flicks on Tubi and masturbating three to four times a night, when my friends nagged me into going out because it was Halloween.
We headed to a liminal part of town between pop-up art galleries and disused project housing. The party was in a drafty loft lit with Christmas lights and disco balls. Almost everyone was dressed up — my friends included as the Hanson brothers from Slap Shot — but since I hadn’t planned, all I could put together was a tight white, pit-stained Violent Femmes tee and a daubed-on Hitler mustache.
The look didn’t land; nobody seemed eager to approach me for a chat.
Once we wormed through the hot crowd toward the folding-table bar, my friends handed me a plastic-cup shot. I took it back. It was sugary and gross. I spun around to cough. Looked up and wiped tears with my shirt cuff. Then regaining focus, I saw the mask for the first time.
For a split second I doubted my reality; I must have been daydreaming through movie cliches again. On the dance floor, a number of costumed people cleared a space, and there it was: dancing in my eyeline, whipping around to face me just as the laser lights hit its beautiful plastic face.
To ground myself, I looked down and away. Then around the space and saw it again but far across the room, then two of them, three…
It was everywhere at the club. Turned out, the mask was a popular choice because of some big recent movie. I hadn’t seen it: something about an ancient demon who haunts swamps or slums or web servers. But everyone I saw wearing this mask made my heart skitter.
I took another sugary shot and got the nerve to approach the mask. We went to the bar and I got us beers while it told me about its MBA in finance. It talked about growing up in Boston. On the dance floor, it kept leaning close to shout in my ear about its autofic novel-in-progress. It told me about growing up in Vietnam. Outside smoking, it went on about its more talented identical twin sister addicted to Dexedrine. It explained life growing up in Latvia. As we did bumps and made out in a bathroom stall, it cried a bit telling me about a messy divorce from its high-school-sweetheart wife of twenty years. Smoking again, it described working as a BDSM sex worker, doing a PhD in women’s studies, working at Meta, growing up in Kelowna, its DJ career, and being engaged to its high-school boyfriend but having second thoughts.
I ate up every little life detail. But what truly swelled my curiosity and affection for the mask was that it never asked me about myself. This respect for the privacy of my inner life made me forget about my recent breakup — which involved a lot of questions and stares both piercing — and move on.
Before Halloween gave way to Christmas, I bought out the remaining supply of the mask from three costume shops.
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I started going out with a girl with blunt bangs and square shoulders who got me sober. I was unsure about how to introduce the mask into our life, so we dated for six months and then got an apartment and a schnauzer together. After a period of no longer having sex — I’d also started drinking again — I got up the courage one night one night to ask her to put the mask on.
She rolled her shoulders up and back and did that Marge Simpson growl I’d recently begun to despise. I moved out a few days later. She kept the schnauzer.
Instead of trying for another serious relationship, kink apps now felt more expedient. I stated in my profile that I was a nice, normal person who made six figures, and that I was into role playing with masks. I had some success. There were beautiful moments that gave me hope: Looking down, seeing my own dim reflection in its plastic surface, letting my gaze slide down the smooth walls of its face, knowing that there was an interesting world obscured there for me to discover.
That hope was fleeting. Everyone wanted to take off the mask at some point and talk. They’d tell me about their lives, but I wasn’t interested.
Eventually I turned to paying for sex, where I could present my terms and agree on a fair price. But as great as many sex workers were when they wore the mask in bed, when it came to chatting, they were far from convincing.
It struck me that this was never about kink or even sex, but loving the person in the mask. I wanted to learn everything about it. Share my life with it. Move in, start a family, take vacations, throw birthday surprise parties, make photo albums, tag ourselves on Facebook and Instagram.
I put out an ad for actors interested in experimental reality theater. They’d get character profiles for short performances while wearing the mask. I’d start with everyday things like enjoying breakfast in bed, going to a museum exhibit, hikes in the national park, binging shows together. Vacations and families could come later.
But the actors were disappointing at improvised small talk or telling traumatic stories about their past. On top of that, our little memory-making excursions never developed into interesting plots: no spontaneous activities or unraveling conspiracies. Too often, it would turn to me and shrug its shoulders, saying, Now what?
I hired a team of writers. They worked up thorough backgrounds and wrote choose-your-own-adventure scripts. At first I pre-approved every possible outcome. But I was let down at every twist and turn by a lack of uncertainty. So I marched into the writers room — my living room — and instructed them to follow their imagination.
In one script, I stayed with the mask throughout its entire pregnancy, only to learn I was not the father. In another, the mask and I spent a weekend in a haunted cabin and battled against a gang of demon punks, leaving me with a pinched neck and shoulder. One time I spent a semester in a Northeastern liberal arts college teaching Dime Square poetry while the mask played a troubled lacrosse player with a hidden talent for spoken word.
No matter how convincing the performance when they were in character, the actors had rules and boundaries: They slept in their own rooms, had regular breaks and days off, and only performed superficial acts of intimacy. And more than once, I caught glimpses of them without the mask.
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It was Halloween night again. We were at a posh costume ball in Liechtenstein. The mask and I were dressed as characters from Eyes Wide Shut but were really there on a sexy-deadly undercover espionage mission. People kept giving the mask dirty looks because it was cheap plastic whereas everyone else — me included — wore fine hand-crafted Venetian masks.
We were on the steadily-rising action of our plot. I sensed the climax looming — the scripts were becoming formulaic — but I just had no heart to go along. The mask was trying to charm a group of lesser-royalty figures, and I stayed on the edge of the conversation barely feigning interest.
Then everyone reacted for a split second before knowing why: the sucking sound of air being spliced, a thin rope of blood flung across the pale cleavage of a young countess, the mask stumbling toward me, reaching for support, and collapsing from the stealthy assassin’s perfect shot.
The small crowd applauded politely before turning to me, waiting for me to react. I bent down over the actor, lifted the mask off their head, said I’d be right back to my expectant audience, strapped the mask onto my face, and went outside.
There was a cold, biting mist streaming down for the Alps. Nobody else was around. I strolled along Liechtenstein’s cobblestone streets and stopped by a canal to stand beneath the warm golden glow of an iron street lamp.
I must have appeared like a movie character because I caught the attention of a stranger whom I didn’t see enter the scene but was now rushing at me and calling out, Hey you. Whoever it was, they definitely didn’t come from the fancy ball judging by their cheap costume: an old tattered Sonic Youth tee and a globbed-on Charlie Chaplin mustache. Of their face, I recall nothing.
They said they’d noticed me, a lone figure illuminated by the golden lights, staring down into the shadowy canal, and that I looked interesting. Would I care to chat? Where am I from? What do I do? What brings me here? They explained they had just been unexpectedly dumped and could use a fresh human connection.
I don’t remember running away or the flight back home, but soon I was back in my apartment, screaming at the writers about this hackneyed gimmick of a meta-narrative. They swore the script was purely a sexy espionage-assasination story, that I was supposed to avenge my partner and get seduced and thwart some devastating attack, and that they had nothing to do with what happened later outside. I fired them.
I’m back to hibernating at home. I still have the mask. Whenever I’m down and lonely, I put it on, look at myself in the mirror, and remind myself I’m worthy of love. Even if I have nothing particularly interesting to say.
