“Oh, look here. All these books and magazines and things to read. You must be a smart guy. I like to read, especially comic books. You like comic books?”
K.T. was pleased to hear a question he could answer. “Oh, yeah. I really love comic books.”
“Do you have any Silver Surfer I could read?”
“Well, sure. Grab yourself a chair. I’ll find you a Silver Surfer.” He said it as if he were offering her a drink, and wondered if he should offer her a drink. But he wasn’t sure what he had. He made his way into the kitchen, pausing now and then to lift up a stack of magazines as if looking for the comic, but knowing very well where the comics were. He felt so inordinately pleased to have the exact comic she wanted to read—what were the odds of that?—that he’d forgotten there were no empty chairs in the room. With the exception of his computer chair they were all piled high with boxes of clippings, and magazines waiting to be clipped.
He glanced over nervously to see her sitting on the edge of his bed, which he kept pretty much near the center of the room so that he might drop onto it periodically if he needed a computer break. He hadn’t made it up or changed the sheets in a very long time, and seeing it now—and when you saw things through a veil of anxiety sometimes it was like seeing them for the very first time—he could see the yellow-brown pattern his body had etched into the bottom sheet. He could detect where his arms and legs had been, and his head, lighter patterns there like a facial topography. A clear spot like a mouth open in a faded mask. Instantly thought Shroud of Turin, and with that detected a small trace of blood near one corner of the image—he remembered a cut foot—but of course it looked like something more deliberate now. This gave him the idea for a sequence of images he might construct for his web site: portraits of people but with the people peeled away, only their shadows, and the shadows of their shadows, remaining. He would play with these remaining shadows, emphasizing and distorting them, perhaps distorting the objects they fell on, creating transformations wherever they touched. It would be a hopeful sequence in its way, advancing the idea that we could be effectual, even when fading into obscurity and oblivion.
There was orange juice in the refrigerator that smelled relatively fresh. He thought that would be the safest thing he could offer her.
From the other room, “Hope you don’t mind my sitting on your bed?”
What was he supposed to say to a question like that? Was she coming on to him? “Oh… fine. Wherever you feel comfortable.”
He gave her the juice when he came back in, feeling just a little alarmed that she hadn’t yet bothered to remove the mask. As if reading his mind she said, “Tommy gave me this mask last week. He says I have to wear it all the time when he’s not there. I don’t mind it too much, but it makes it a little hard to see my TV programs with it on. I have to tilt my head some, make sure the eyeholes line up, but sometimes it slips. I tried putting a big old rubber band around my head to hold it in place, but it gave me a headache.”
K.T. found a copy of the Silver Surfer and handed it to her with the juice. He didn’t like the way she was leaning back into the bed, her skirt riding up. And her belly looked even larger in this posture, rising up off her spine like an explosion. “Maybe you could take it off for a few minutes, at least until you’re done with your juice.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that. He’d have himself a fit. And he doesn’t even look like himself when he’s mad.”
“Most of us don’t, I guess. I mean, the skin on our faces is so thin, really. Any strong emotion is going to move the features around in some significant way.”
“You’re a smart man,” she said, as if just deciding. “I bet you wouldn’t make your girlfriend wear a mask even after Halloween. That’s just ignorant.”
“Well, it is a little unusual.”
“I bet you treat your girlfriend right, don’t you?” Her voice lightly slurred the words. “I bet you appreciate her for what she is.” Before he could confirm or deny she flipped open the comic. “I really like the Silver Surfer. His face is like he’s got a mask on, but it isn’t a mask, not really.”
“His face is like what they call a ‘neutral mask,’” K.T. replied, eager to offer some obscurity now that his intelligence had been established. “It’s a mask without any details, molded to the face like a hardened layer of skin.”
She looked up then. Even with the mask on she appeared slightly dazed by the concept. “Well, I don’t think it’s a mask,” she finally said. “I think he’s kind of a good looking man.” She picked up the comic and started reading. “You know you can go back to your work. I’ll just sit here reading quiet until Tommy gets home.”
The polite thing would have been to tell her he was done for the evening, then try to entertain her, ask her about her life, somehow ask her about what kind of man this Tommy was to make her wear the silly mask, but K.T. didn’t know how to do polite. Besides, he was anxious to get back into his work—this was the most he’d talked to a live person in weeks and he had no idea if he was doing it correctly or not—and she’d just given him the easy out.
A distorted image of him stared out from his second monitor. In some ways it looked better than him, a retouch job with straighter nose, stronger chin, and firmer eyes. His eyes looked so watery and unsure, as if always on the verge of tears. He couldn’t remember having made this particular self-portrait, but then again he had made so many.
He logged on, picked up his email (the client was more than pleased with the sow child), then went over to his web site.
At first he thought a hacker had gotten in. There appeared to be alterations in all of the images in his gallery. Some fleshtones had deteriorated, leaving faces with a green or grayish cast. Pixels had floated out of place, outlines blurred. But not really enough damage, he thought, for it to be actual sabotage. Maybe a problem with his graphics card. Or maybe a problem with his own eyes. Fatigue can distort the curvature of the lens and…
Something iffy had crept into the eyes of his self-portraits. Or crept out of. The flatness, the deadness was gone. The eyes, even in heads of pain, watched him.
“So you think I’m pretty?”
He’d been so zoned he’d forgotten she was there. He looked up at her, the young pregnant lady stretched out on her back on his bed full of signs and indications, mask obscuring the upper part of her face, bright red lipstick alerting him to where her mouth would be if he wanted to come over and try it out. “Excuse me?”
“I said, do you think I’m pretty?”
Definitely someone else’s life. But he could play along—he’d watched enough television, gone to enough movies. “Well, yes. Of course,” he said, delivering his line.
“Why, thank you.” She cozied back into one of his hair oil-spotted pillows. “I don’t get too many compliments anymore.”
Her pleasure saddened him. For the first time he noticed how faded her simple cotton dress appeared. The spots, the worn places. “Everyone needs a compliment now and then.” His eyes went back to the monitor. One by one his images were slipping off the sides of the screen, leaving video noise in their wake.
“Well, ain’t that the truth. Even if you know you’re ugly, and you know the other person is lying through his teeth just to get into your panties, well, you still like to hear that sweet stuff.”
He could feel his face flush, tried to will it another color, perhaps just a hint of Caribbean tan. “I don’t even think I believe in ugly anymore,” he said. “It’s all just one image set up against another. Some looks get marketed better, that’s all. Sometimes you can change your marketing, and sometimes you can’t. That’s the scary part, I think. You feel so damn helpless about it all. All these damn images of beauty and success and happiness that’ll fit inside a frame and stay there while you look at it, admire it, covet it. And if you aren’t careful, it all becomes this minefield that nobody ever gets out of alive. That image is a killer—it’s got all our need and fear balled up in one place—it’s a terrible thing and yet even the smartest of us think that’s all we are.”