The Masked Mind Revealed: Recollection

There are moments after orgasm when every pale little hair on the pillow emerge well-defined and the dull hammering of time ceases to hit that one remaining cranial nerve right where it hurts the most and instead mutes and mellows into a constant not unpleasant thrumming. Sensations brought acute and shining and strange, because it is better and sadder and more intangible every time I feel it.

Dmsqdmn17: Perhaps you know the feeling?

SuppleCinStringSextus: feeling it right now are we?

Dmsqdmn17: She’s asleep. I borrowed her laptop here in bed.

SuppleCinStringSextus: how was it?

Dmsqdmn17: I’m just devoting myself to a private dream. She won’t touch me because there is a new boy and it wouldn’t be right.

SuppleCinStringSextus: where r you?

Dmsqdmn17: Chicago.

SuppleCinStringSextus: dude?? last I heard you were in galveston. whats the deal? still tracking down ur brother?

Dmsqdmn17: ya

SuppleCinStringSextus: Why?

Why indeed? And why am I back in the cold nervous interim of this city where, utter courtships ended and sleepless I lie, staring out the window of this beautiful girl’s condo— this girl in whom I gaze at longingly full of fury and purpose and want to bury my all deepest secrets somewhere in the middle of— where pure and pointless stars burn hidden in the pale whorish smoke of Midwestern anywhere and nowhere, Nigel out there doubtless dreaming of bringing about his own calculated disaster and I ought to get to him first, Why?

Because of Jen. Because of half a hundred thousand dollars. Because he is in this great nation where there is no greater national ambition than to follow the whims of your own dreaming wayward dreams, be they unique or mass-produced by marketing teams and assembly lines and stolen: and it is the great human tragedy that befalls all men when some obstacle thwarts their arrival at that admirably intended destination. Be it through laziness or bad luck, or worse yet, achieving your goal only to find out it was what you only imagined you needed. And years ago when the starting guns went off, that sterile smack and infantile wail at the clandestine unfairness of reality, my brother lunging from the gate just a few minutes before my own gasping leap into the race and it all commencing into the series of dreams that has been the narrative of our lives, Nigel has never again felt the vicious slap or any other, because he affirmatively preempts them with slaps of his own. While I, sad masked and wary, take the hits of luck and fate and failure again and again, and this time I can let it go no further.

Let me tell you a story about Jen. Let me tell you the story I told the last time I was in Chicago when this beautiful creature beside me now met me and slapped me yet again on Nigel’s behalf.

“I saw him. Here.”

“When?”

“October, maybe. Late September. I don’t remember. I’m sure it was before Halloween. Well, the first time was anyway.”

“You’ve seen him more than once!?”

“Well the first time I wasn’t really sure it was him. It was downtown and it was really crowded— a real fancy restaurant— and I thought it was you, but he wasn’t dressed like you, and it didn’t make any sense seeing you there but the resemblance was…”

“Nigel doesn’t look anything like me!”

“Yeah, a little bit, if you took the mask off…”

“What were you doing downtown at a fancy restaurant?” She blushed a bit and turned away to the side. “Come on in, it’s freezing out here.”

Her apartment smelled like girl clothes and soup cans. A notice on the state of the flailing airline industry on her refridgerator, underneath a postcard from Niagra and a sticker asserting ‘Guster is For Lovers’. Her eyes had widened when we sat down on the couch, my things in a little pile on top of my shoes by the door. She got back up and poured tea. Anxious, I twittered and glared.

“I’m not the same.”

“You look great!”

“No baby, I mean, I’ve changed. We’ve changed. There’s just been… there’s a lot going on in my life right now. A lot of stuff you don’t know about.”

Another slap.

“This change got a name?”

“You don’t know him.”

“Seems I don’t know anyone. Anymore.”

“Oh baby!” She scooched close and I leaned away. Where have those hands been? Who else is keeping their shoes here overnight? “We’ve just gone out a couple times. He’s nice. He reminds me of you, actually. But the first time we went out it was some business banquet downtown and we got all dressed up and that was the first time I… thought I saw…”

“Mom says he quit his job this summer.”

“Texas?”

“Yeah.”

In an awkward silence we weigh our variables and I consider flight. Run away. Flee. What’s the difference between running towards a future you don’t know and running away from a present full of assurances you can’t believe in?

“Why are you looking for him?”
“Nobody knows where he is.”

“So? When’s the last time you saw him? I thought he was like this. Disapearing, reappearing… who cares where he is?”

“Oh believe me, I’d be happy never running into him again. But I’m worried that someone’s in trouble, and I just don’t want to see that happen again.”

See what happen?

When we were in High School, Nigel got sent off to a boarding school and I didn’t see much of him after that except during summers and holidays. He started going out with this girl named Jen. She was really very sweet, shy, sensitive and cultivated but a little unstable, and he manipulated her a bit so every little thing she did, suddenly she was doing it for him. Jen’s family was pretty well-off and before anyone could stop him, Nigel had pretty much ingrained himself in with them, and he was engaged right after graduation.

I called him often that first year of college because it was a rough year for me, and every time I reached him he seemed to be out on the town, never with Jen. Always girls, but never her. Our sister had taken a sisterly fondness to the future in-law, and that was part of the reason it was so hard to see her like he left her.

A mental breakdown, they called it. They found her locked inside her dormroom alone after she hadn’t answered her phone for four days. She was incoherent and suicidal, her room was freezing but she was sweating and panting and wouldn’t let anyone so much as come close enough to touch her. They hospitalized her and we tried to visit but it wasn’t like visiting a real person. More like a caged animal. There was a fear deep in her eyes when you caught them between darts around the edges of the room. Nigel, who had been away with a strong alibi, feigned both shock and concern upon his return, but never came with us to visit, and didn’t even seem too broken up about Jen’s fate until her father broke off the engagement and…

…That’s when, I later found out, Mom and Dad got a desperate email from Nigel asking for money. Jen’s father had been paying a hefty portion of Nigel’s tuition, and with the break-up, Nigel found himself dangerously strapped for cash. They paid of course, he the eldest son, what has added up to be nearly 50 thousand dollars. Dad is still working weekends to pay it all off. And Nigel, after threatening legal action with Jen’s father over the withdrawal of his finances, shortly found himself ground graciously back on his feet, gainfully employed at a rival firm, and dating a delicate, graceful and lovely young girl from Providence whose father ran a small shipping fleet.

It would be no difference to me if I never saw him again. I think about him during the holidays, and perhaps this year I will find him where I have always found him at Christmas. In the fractured realities of my shattered psyche.

“Am I sleeping on the bed with you?” I asked.

“Dunno. Have you been a good boy this year?” I thought back on the year now slipping perilously into the effervescent void, on all the hearts I’d broken and left wantonly behind in just these past 12 months and answered truthfully, “No. No I haven’t.”

But I said it with a smile and she pulled back the covers a little further and I climbed in. Even when I’m not wearing the mask, I’m still masked. I smile and nod and get what I want out of people. Like my brother, I imagine. Reckless, bold and compulsive, finding women like Jen, innocent fragile bystanders in the wayward motives of his mind, they must seem almost to offer themselves merely by their existence as a challenge to him to conquer, subdue and destroy something beautiful. And it wasn’t enough for him just to ruin Jen, though we never found out how he did what he did to her. There were more, scattered corpses cast victim to his torturous subjugations and left shattered shadows of the women they once could have been. He got better at it. We heard about them less and less, a story here, a rumor there, girls so deluded that when they woke up, broke and destitute, they still felt sorry for not being able to give him more. Bankrupt girls hellbent on first sending Nigel whatever money they could make, “to pay him back”. There were stories, fewer and fewer, and then not at all, and all the while he took from them more and more. He finished top of his class a year ago, and landed a coveted spot in some eco-friendly managerial consulting firm… not before taking off with the newest catch, Christine, on a tour of southeast Asia. Still haven’t heard what happened to her… hearing that he had been seen in California was the clincher. Strangers, recognizing him by the twisted double-ironic helix of blood we share between our veins, worried about some pretty little girl on his arm… and enough is enough.