The Masking · 1811 to 1865
The night
This is the story the Mascarade throws a party for. You don’t need it to enjoy the weekend. It helps.
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Masks are as old as faces. For all of that time, everyone everywhere agreed that a mask was a place to hide. That was the whole theory of them.
It’s the wrong theory. A mask doesn’t cover a face. It puts a second face on top, and both of them show. The person underneath doesn’t vanish. They get another floor.
One night, on this shore
At a crowded ball, a room found that out by accident.
Things started arriving twice. A remark would land as a joke and a confession in the same breath, and the room would take both, and nobody had to choose, and nobody got caught. It wasn’t honesty. Honesty had nothing to do with it. They were being more than one thing at a time and getting away with it, and it was the most alive any of them had ever felt in a room.
A girl too young to be in there noticed before anybody else, and asked about it in the only words she had, which weren’t quite right.
Why does everything mean twice tonight?
The grammar is wrong. Nobody has ever corrected it, because the right grammar didn’t exist, and arguably still doesn’t.
She didn’t invent the mask. She noticed what a mask actually does, and the noticing is the invention, because once a thing is noticed it can be done on purpose.
It was never about faces
Up to then, a word could only say what it already meant. After that night, a word could mean more than it said. On this shore there’s a word that means to wait and means to hope, in one breath, and nobody has ever pulled the two apart.
Metaphor. Irony. Fiction. Theatre. Every joke ever told. A word wearing a second face, both of them showing, and the listener holding two things at once without having to put either down.
That’s where wonder comes from. Wonder is what happens when a thing means more than it is.
She’s on no guest list. Every account of that night disagrees about what she was wearing. The only thing they agree on is the question.
1865
The age ended in 1865, when a book of deliberate nonsense was published a long way from this shore, and what the shore had known privately for fifty years stopped being only its own.
Nobody on this shore will tell you the name of the book. Note the date, and do as you like with it.
Every May we throw that night again, and ask you who you are.
The only wrong answer is your real name.
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