A Wall of Masks (Excerpt)

     She takes out her therapist notebook and makes a therapist note. I keep going:

    “If each explosion means something more is lost in the mask world, (or is that my world?) what is it that is being lost? Lives? Memories? Evidence of a crime? What crime?  Facts and history? A chance to find the guilty? How am I supposed to do that? And what do I do if I do find them? And what if the guiltiest one is me? Or is it buildings and streets, the neighborhood where so much happened? Sensations, sounds, smells and tastes and textures?”  Then, in a synesthetic slide, my attention is back to the masks on her office walls:

     A snarling, whole head rubber “Karen” mask, a plastic retro Rat-Fink A-Go-Go, tongue-wagging snarl mask, a white and blue vintage plastic Elsa Lanchester, Bride of Frankenstein mask, a full-head rubber Metaluna Mutant with exposed brain in glow-in-the-dark green and blue from This Island Earth mask, a grinning frozen-smile Mr. Sardonicus mask, an Oliver-Reed 1963 Curse of the Werewolf version in rubber with acrylic fur mask, a Lon Chaney Jr. 1942 The Wolfman version rubber and fur wolfman mask.

     Jackie says, “Which of these really speak to you?”  She gives me the white cup and I down today’s dose. After considering the masks for a time, I see they have all begun to talk. Taking the meds angry and literal is perhaps not for the best. They mumble at first, then light into maudlin bar fly blabber. Rubber or plastic or ceramic, the lips, slits, holes or slashes pucker, crinkle, crack, grimace, twist and pout as if awakening, reluctant, stiff from a long sleep or stupor.  The voices and sounds are as varied as their personas and parts. I see a thousand and one beggar’s nights, ringing the doorbell and crying trick or treat to the grownups, or opening the door from the inside and holding a bowl of candy and looking down as the grownup at the adorable ghouls and goblins ghosties of an innocent Fall.

     “Jackie, your masks won’t shut up.”

          She knocks on the wall with bruised knuckles and the jabbering stops. She returns to her seat behind me. The quiet sounds like Autumn leaves in the wind.

14

“God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another.”   -Act lll Scene 1 Hamlet

     I have no better way to say it. I would prefer that this talk therapy not involve words, please. Maybe that was the hope with the whole psilocybin thing. Jackie’s voice. Or Felice’s voice.

    I swig today’s dose, angry as a film noir mug at the bar. I snarl at Jackie, “Since this has been in my bloodstream and maybe changed me already, would I even know it if this were a placebo?”

     She’s surprised. “That would be unethical. I promise you; I would never give you a placebo without your knowledge.”

     “You’re not just messing with me.”

     “I’m not just messing with you.”

     “But why…” My voice is trailing off, or speech and thought are changing places: “Why is the insurance agent Dora Sel channeling Simon Weil? It seems to me that she sees insurance liability as Weil sees individual identity: something to be diminished in the name of Attention to the Other…”

     “I’ve never seen that side of Dora. I’ll have a talk with her about it…”

     I settle down and study the new masks: a green rubber Cthulu mask, a brown and black blank Deku mask, a rubber full-head Spiderman mask, a gold and red buck toothed and pointy-eared Balinese Barong demon mask, a blue and silver silk Mardi Gras hummingbird mask, a black tubular-headed red and white Japanese Kabuki mask, an elongated, carved coconut ritual Guere mask, an off-white and blue black Makande body mask, a vintage rigid plastic Ben Cooper pirate mask.

     I don’t talk for awhile. She says,  “What are you reading now?”

     “I finished the book your book about Lyle Talbot, The Entertainer. Now I’m reading a memoir of Susan Sontag, Sempre Susan, by Sigrid Nunez. A lot of it takes place in the 1970’s-1980’s Upper West Side, in Manhattan. That was kind of my scene.”

     “Nostalgia.”

     “I don’t do nostalgia. Just recognition. Sigrid Nunez wrote another book, What Are You Going Through? It’s a quote from Simone Weil. She actually lived on the Upper West Side in 1942, right around the corner but thirty years before.”

    Her nod says, duly noted. Won’t make that mistake again. “So you do have a past. You’ve been in love. You’ve had a family in New York. Could you talk about that a little?”

     “I thought we were going back to the factory.”

     “This is on the way.”

     I settle into the couch. “My wife and kids. We’re not together.”

    “Why?”

    “Something…I don’t even know if ‘happened’ is the word.” Jackie’s almost inaudible pen sound, something between whisper and rustle. (She uses a medium bic on a pad of Pictostone paper, which she has told me is made from limestone, and not wood pulp. I have tried it, and it is buttery smooth. A little like a Bic or Papermate on newsprint, but even softer). And my thumping heart, and the masks’ cast shadows, (slowly moving?), and one large cloud in the window, humping space, like my slow shifting bulk on a couch. With the window an inch open, a breeze of warm ambient chirr flutters a mask.

   “I have no better way to say it. I would prefer this talk therapy not involve words, please.”

 A vintage Fred Flintstone mask, a scowling GI Joe mask, a white and blue rubber Medusa mask, a rigid plastic vintage Uncle Scrooge Mask, a rubber Mr.Spock mask.

15

     I have to clear my throat. Again and again, and again. Jackie sets a glass of water on the table. I stare. “It’s ok. Just a double dose of ketamine and psilocybin, cut with ecstasy, fentanyl, cocaine and Xanax.”

     She fluffs the pillow. “So we’ll be out for a good long while today.”

     “You’re a laugh riot.” I leave the water untouched. Jackie laughs. Her voice sounds as dry as mine. I say, “I think we need to talk.” She laughs again. It is an odd thing to say to your talk therapist, especially coming from someone who could barely speak a few weeks ago.

     Over our “storied” time together, Jackie’s vibe has come to feel safe, ordinary, predictable, yet I understand little of who she is, or even, strangely, her appearance when we are not face to face. Today I will memorize the look: jeans and a slightly oversize black cotton sweatshirt, a little ratty with pile (and cat hair?), side-parted silver blond hair tugged into a limp ponytail, squarish black frame glasses, too heavy and severe for her fine pale features. Think a youthful mid-60’s or even 70’s Patricia Clarkson. Or Joan Hambling, the maniacal Chaucer professor in The Chair. This can swerve unpredictably into the purring, slightly sinister accomplice, like Jennifer Jason Leigh in Existz, Annihilation, or just about anything else she’s in, or even the side-eye cynic of Natasha Lyonne’s Charley Cale in Poker Face. Who could possibly ask for more in a therapist? She’s perfect. Perfect. I can just hear one friend or another’s reaction: “Your fucking therapist is a mixture of Natasha Lyonne and Jennifer Jason Leigh, she likes movies and books and masks, and you’re thinking of dumping her? Are you fucking insane?!”

     As a matter of fact…

     She pats the pillow again as kindly Patricia Clarkson. “OK?”

     I settle back. “No dose today? I mean the regular one, without the coke.”

     “You said we need to talk.” (Said with a little Jennifer Jason Leigh).

     A 1930’s-style retro plastic Popeye mask, a rubber Two-Face Batman villain mask, a goateed and horned red devil mask, a plastic Disney version Sleeping Beauty mask, a rubber full head Ronald Reagan mask.

    I settle back.  “I need to know what is going on here.”

     “Fair enough. But can you narrow the parameters a little? What ‘here’?”

     A plastic 1960’s Adam West-era Bat Man mask, a feathered, wood and leather tubular Kachinka-style ritual mask, a rubber pull-over 21st century The Flash mask, a rigid plastic vintage Wonder Woman mask, a rigid plastic vintage masked Lone Ranger mask.

     I dig in my back pocket for my notebook, a small pad of Pictostone limestone paper inspired by Jackie’s example. “Here in our sessions. I’ve tried to diagram them.”

     “Good-oh.”

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1. I come in. There are masks on the walls.

2. I am a witness, and a patient.

3. I take ketamine. I can talk.

4. The fire outside is real. The one inside not. Or is it the other way around, or both unreal, or both real?

5. Therapist thinks inside will solve outside.

6. I don’t understand the connection. Therapist says time is running out. Why?

7. I need help. I don’t know if she can help.

8. I have to get back, before the explosion happens.

     Jackie takes the chair by the couch, where I can see her. She reads the notes. “A good, lucid account of where we’ve been so far, and some key questions that remain.”

      “I don’t think I’m a good candidate for ketamine therapy.”

     “Why not?”

      “I don’t know about ‘good and lucid,’ or where I end and the factory begins. Or the fire outside and the one inside. Or you and Felice…”

     “I’m like Felice, huh?”

     “I also don’t know why I said that.”

     She gets up and straightens one of the masks. “Did you finish the insurance questionnaire?”

     “Oh shit.”

     “It’s ok. I think you can do it online if mailing it is a hassle.”

     “It’s not that. The last question is…like I said, it sounds like Simone Weil or something. ‘Would I agree that expanding my personal boundaries could lead to greater empathy,’ or something. Maybe Dora Sell said dissolving my boundaries. Dissolving my boundaries! I’m afraid I never had any to start with. Isn’t that what happens in schizophrenia?” 

     “Are you ticklish?”

     “What?”

     “Ticklish.”

     “I guess a little.”

     “Where?”

     “I’m not going to tell you that.”

     “OK. Don’t tell me.” She holds up her arm and pulls down her shirt sleeve to tickle her armpit. It is unshaven.  “I am really ticklish there. Growing up I had two brothers. They were merciless.”

     “You’re not laughing.”

     She rolls down her sleeve.  “Almost no one can tickle themselves into laughing. Except schizophrenics. Try it at home. If you laugh, call me and we’ll stop treatment.”

     I go home, and I can’t get a  laugh.

16

     A Bela Lugosi-era full head rubber Dracula Mask, a plastic vintage Uncle Scrooge mask, an open-brained Mars Attacks-style full head rubber mask, a full-head latex duck head mask, a latex South Park/Kyle overhead latex mask, a rubber, full-head Steampunk Mutated Mickey Mouse mask, a rubber Ushanka-Russian winter-hatted robot skull Fancy Bear Computer Hacker mask.

          Jackie’s voice gathers the office around me again. One mask after another repopulates the glowing walls.

     She’s got the new New Yorker: “This is from an interview with Naomi Klein about her new book, Doppelganger: ‘We live in a culture that has told people very clearly, you are on your own in this cruel world. Your job is not to look after a whole society—Margaret Thatcher said there is no such thing as society. Your job is to optimize yourself and your family, to create a little fortress around you and your loved ones, and, if you succeed, that is your heroic narrative…she says that we live in a system in which we are all inside and implicated…’ Oh, and this: ‘Freud sees the doppelganger, the uncanny, as a species of frightening that changes what was once familiar…’ Do you remember why you had to hurry after entering the burning factory? Back in the beginning?”

   “What? I felt the heat through my suit.”

  “Yes, but also because the evidence was fading. The signature of the event was coming apart.” She flips through her notebook and reads a passage: “…Any interference (macro, nano, quantum) will degrade and erase. It started the moment I stepped over the line. But at least I can factor me into the mix. I think. So, first things: who are these seven whose time has come? How long before mine?  Then a spark, a spinning ember, who knows? My pants go up in a flash THIS HURTS…”

     I flinch. My words, my pain.

    Her mouth looks like a plum of paint in a Soutine face. “You said, ’I can factor me into the mix.’ I was struck by that. Do you know what you were talking about?”

     “I remember saying it. I don’t know where it came from or what it means. Some free-association stuff. Dream talk.” I gesture to take in the masks, the office, her world. “I was hoping all this would lead me back into the world, but I’m afraid it’s just taking me farther away from it.”

   “But even in the factory, in all that smoke and chaos, you can factor you into the mix. Which I took to mean that you know you are mixed up in this, but you are also apart, and have agency.”

     “Yeah. OK. But agency to do what?”

     “There were seven ‘Other Men’, the type-cast B-movie actors of your childhood. Let’s see.” She checks her notebook again. “Lyle Talbot…”

     “Lyle Talbot, Morris Ankrum, Thomas Brown Henry, Jackie Coogan. Maybe Laurence Tierney and his brother Scott Brady. I’m not sure.”

     “Which makes six. One more to go.”

     Something falls into place, and it feels bad. “I know. I know!  Number seven is going to have my face, isn’t it?! The camera does a rushing close up! The music blares SHOCKING REVEAL! That’s it! There is no big secret of the Seventh Victim. Felice can knock on door Number 7 and I can keep buzzing on door number seven until the metal number 7 falls on the floor, till her knuckles are bloody and my finger is numb, and nobody is ever going to open the goddam door!”

     Jackie springs up from her chair, goes to the door, and opens and closes it once. Twice. “Shall we go for seven?”

     “Jackie, I get it. Sit down.” She repeats it once more and then is back in her chair. “Well?”

     “I had a dream last night that had me laughing and gasping, up and down, all night.”

     She opens her notebook and clicks her pen.  I tug out a tissue from the box and start massaging it into a dense hot ball. My voice is faint and trembling, but gets faster, harder, louder, as if I’m running out of time, out of air:  “I was walking across a parking lot. Suddenly it was overwhelmed with a mob carnival, a 3-D James Ensor painting crowded with masks…” I fumble with ill-fitting descriptors, like one tool after another slipping off an odd-sized nut. “They’re talking in words of faces in my face:

 A verb of nose, a noun of chin.

A brawl of little languages, and big.

Languages of a billion, and of one.

     “Multi-lingual multi-dimensional cons. Being bullied, played, shilled, scammed, sized-up, flimflammed, suckered, worked-over, ripped off, code-switched, taken to the cleaners, taken for a ride, taken, rolled, cleaned out, stooged, bamboozled, marked, cajoled, sweet-talked, sold the Brooklyn Bridge, sold a bill of goods, sold down the river, bum rushed, sucker punched, baited, switched..!”

     The tissue is shredded nearly to powder at my feet.

     I look up and see Jackie staring at me with big eyes.  “This is very important. You are feeling deceived. Really angry. Why not take the job with Bob and Rob?”

     “What?”  I have to gulp air. This isn’t deceived. This isn’t angry. This is soul-arson, all black inside. Ash bags of lung. A tar ball of heart.  “I thought the purpose of our therapy was to help me! Help me come back to the real world!”

     “Taking the mask factory job is a necessary step in that direction.”

     “The factory isn’t real.”

    “It’s interesting. For me the factory is becoming more real. For you it’s become less real.”

     “Stop the therapy shit.”

    She waits. Her face is still, but I can see something wounded in her eyes. After a time her voice is hesitant and small. “I know it sounds clichéd, but what if some people are keys and some people are locked doors, and most of the time they don’t match, but sometimes…”

     “Oh, you mean true love?”

     “It’s much bigger than that. It’s…”

     I stand, shaking and woozy.  I’ve got to get away from her, from the office, from the masks. The grip on my own mask is slipping. She is about to see my face, for real. I can’t let that happen, but if I stay a moment longer, it will. Jackie says, “Tom. Wait.  Please, don’t leave. I can explain.”

     “Sure you can explain. This is all going to be great for your study, or whatever it is. You lied to me. This is all a set up. A therapy game. Find someone else. I’m done. ”

     Jackie’s face is white and her eyes are shiny with tears. I haven’t seen it before: she’s afraid.  I’m sweating and breathing hard. I’m probably white, too. My mouth is dry and sour and I can smell my own sweat. I leave and don’t look back.

          I didn’t answer Jackie’s e-mails or calls. I didn’t talk to anyone or show my face, any face, for a while. I was running out of savings and my social security barely paid the bills. The rent on my over-priced basement apartment was coming due. I couldn’t live in my car because I didn’t have one. A friend helped me with a loan and I got lucky finding a part-time LTE job at a learning center tutoring newly released prisoners. Once I was making a tiny paycheck again I came home nights to collapse onto my battered mattress as if it were a royal four-poster canopied in silk.  Lucky, lucky. I still had a laptop and phone and started sending out stories to journals and drawings to shows from a local coffee shop that let me sit with the same cup of coffee half the day.  My paintings and writings were in boxes in storage that I could only afford because of another friend’s help. There was back and forth with some other people about another place, but that would mean a roommate, which I wanted to avoid.  Medicare got me a twice a year check-up and shots, and I walked every day, did a little yoga and felt halfway ok. So here it was, what appeared to be my tarnished, worn thin version of the golden years, and most days I was grateful it wasn’t a handful of lead or coal or broken glass in my hands, but a fistful of a half-way doable life.  I tried not to think about the factory fire, the students, the masks, or my face, but the thump and the whirr of the furnace next door kept bringing it back, usually in the middle of a night already in shards of broken sleep.  Sometimes I wondered what my Dad would think of me now. I tried not to go there either. He wouldn’t have recognized my face anyway. I could have passed him on the street, or my son or ex. None of them would know me, or if they did they’d quickly turn away, and that would be the smart thing to do. I believed in forgiveness, second chances, redemption of a sort. But the sort I needed, whatever that was, looked to have been withdrawn long ago, and I hated redemption stories anyway and wasn’t about to pine around for mine. Better, I thought, to focus on helping the people trying to make it after prison. Whatever they were going through made my small battles more manageable, and maybe wanly hopeful. One day I was working with a guy named Omar to develop his employment resume. We had a room in the local library reserved for the prisoner support group. Attendance could be erratic. I was grateful he’d shown up. The wall was a white board and in black erasable marker we brainstormed his work history and skills as “an incubator for small businesses.”:

A Sou Chef business.

A non-Uber Uber Driver Business.

A Drug Courier Business.

A Dog Walking Business.

A Drug Look-Out Business.

A Drug Dealer Business.

A Drug Distributor Business.

A Car Mechanic Business.

A Car Jacking Business.

A Drug Counseling Business.

A Construction Worker Business.

A Construction Site Thievery Business.

A House-Sitting Business.

A Baby-Sitting Business.

A Horse Stable Boy Business.

      It was a code-switching session: transform a history of sketchy or illegal hustling into entrepreneurial moxie, and make Omar a stand-up, start-up, can-do, Horatio Alger for the Gig-Economy-type guy. I was happy to help. As far as I knew, Omar had never directly hurt anyone except himself. He was sober and in AA, had got good reports from his parole officer, but his loquacious charm was gaily festooned with sociopathic red flags, as seductive and amoral as a carnival barker and his flea-bit sideshow of freaks. And I could be, after all, another one of the attractions.

     He said, “All I want is a fair chance to make it right.”

     “I’ll try to help you make a resume right. But you’re the only one who can make your life right.”

     “Of course. I know that.”

     Did I know it?

     I took the marker and crossed off the Carjacking Business and the Robbing Construction Sites Business. He said, “That’s all in the rearview mirror, Tom.”

     “So what’s ahead?”

    One of the library staff knocked on the glass. Our time was up. Omar said, “Saved by white knuckles.” He fluffed his newly pink hair. “You like it?”

     “Sure. The future is pink.”

     He photographed the board with his phone and thanked me for my help. After he left, I was gathering my stuff when he popped his pink head back in. “What’s ahead for you?”

     “I’m going back to someone.”  I thought of Felice and door number seven. “I’ll see you next time.”

   Next thing another e-mail from Jackie, this one a staggering long epistle that made me wonder why she didn’t attach it as a word document. But then, both would be equally easy to delete.

  This time I did not.

17

     I sit down and ask Jackie for some water. “Just water, please.”

     She looks at me hard and says, “You came back. And something is happening. To both of us.”

     She’s right.

     There is a knock on the door. Jackie says, “Don’t open it!” Knocking again, then banging, more banging. Kicks. Thuds of body blows. The door shudders. Strains against the hinges.  I step to the door. Jackie yells again, “Don’t open it!”

     I ignore her. I go to the door, and a mask falls from the wall. Then another. Then half the wall. All of the masks. The floor is ankle deep in masks, brittle and bright as autumn leaves. The office chills. The masks are picked up in a vortex of wind around my legs. Like dried leaves, the masks have a crisp crackle in collision with each other, the walls, the windows, the door, the crunch thunk of mayflies or cicadas, beetles or other winged crustaceans, swarming around a bayou lightbulb, thwacking into glass or wood or drywall. A mask rushes by Jackie’s face. A red line opens across her forehead. An instinct sends us diving to the floor and scrambling under her desk.

     The office wind is a shrieking cyclone of masks. Some alchemical centrifuge has hardened the masks into edged blades, or plunging shovel heads, or ninja throwing stars with jack-o-lantern eyes and teeth. They sing and sink into walls, rip open the couch into gutted foam, thonk and twang a jaws-harp shiver into the door, and overhead into Jackie’s desk. Sliced books drop from shelves like bisected samurai, and now-lethal noses and chins furrow and rake the carpet and floor beneath. The window is crazed, cracked, shattered and demolished by hundreds of collisions.  Jackie and I huddle into fetal balls, our heads wrapped in out arms, praying under a rain of blades. We stay still and the attack subsides. Covering the carpet by my face are slices of text, a collage of Jackie’s academic papers on masks and consciousness, masks and identity, masks and anti-identity, masks and metaphor, masks and ritual, masks and fascism, masks and anti-fascism. Somewhere in the mix were technical diagrams of a giant mask housing an operator at controls. The mask was a vehicle of some kind, but it was unclear whether it moved through space, time, language, thought or dimensions, or all five in channels where the distinctions didn’t matter.  I looked up and Jackie was studying me. The cut across her face had just missed her eyes. I wanted to see if the masks were listening. I spoke in a quiet voice, and nothing stirred outside the shelter under the desk: “After the breakup I was homeless for a while. I couldn’t seem to focus on anything for more than a couple of minutes. I lived in a shelter. All I could do was go where I was told, do what I was told. You stow your bag here. Your cot is there. The bathroom code is this. The door code is this.

     The days were aimless walking. I remembered when something shifted inside: it was Halloween, and I found myself in a crowd of little kids on Beggar’s Night. All I could think was, maybe I can snag some candy. There were a couple of adults bringing up the rear and I just followed along. Most of the kids had elaborate costumes, heavy on the Marvel Universe, Disney and Pixar, but there was also homemade whimsy: gauzy tulle and tinfoil princesses, low budget white sheet ghosts, a wizard with a giant cone hat. A sheet ghost’s bright eyes found the eye holes. She said, “You don’t have a mask.”

     “I don’t.”

     “Here.” She fumbled under her sheet and produced a cheap plastic mask. Some kind of bug. “It’s too hot. You can keep it.”

     “Thanks.” Another ghost gave me a bag. At the next house I held out my bag. The man at the door said, “And who do we have here?”

     I couldn’t speak. The ghost girl said, “He is some kind of bug.”  I got an apple, a Snickers and a bag of M&M’s. The next day I found the basement apartment and moved out of the shelter. I left the mask behind on the cot.