by Sean Stewart
ODESSA quickly greased the inside of the alginate mask with Vaseline, then filled it up with fresh plaster. Twenty minutes later the plaster had set. She worked off the alginate mold, and Sloane found herself looking down at a plaster impression of her own face.
Odessa drew a long breath and flexed her fingers. She glanced at Sloane through her wire-rimmed bifocals. “Now: let’s see about finding a Sloane who’s a match for old Momus, shall we?” From a can underneath her workbench she gathered a handful of clay.
Sloane struggled to speak.
“What’s that?” Odessa said. “Oops. Sorry, doll,” she said, tapping Sloane lightly on the lips.
Sloane’s voice came back. “Thank God,” she blurted, the words bubbling out from her like water from a kinked hose suddenly put straight. “Whew. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Maybe later. For now…well, dear, your version of you is part of the problem, isn’t it?” Odessa took a small ball of clay and stuck it to the end of Sloane’s plaster nose. “The life mask should fit perfectly against your face, but now I’m going to change your contours a little. Some uptilt to that shy little nose of yours, for instance.” She smoothed the clay onto the end of Sloane’s nose, tilting it up, making it sharper and more like her own. “And the eyes…you have such downcast eyes, sugar. Always looking at the ground. Not the right spirit for Mardi Gras.” Sloane watched as Odessa remade her face. Her eyes became thinner and more sly. Her muzzle thrust out; her cheeks grew higher and sharper. And where her own eyebrows were straight and unremarkable, the ones growing beneath Odessa’s fingers swept up at the outside edges.
It was an hour of work, careful and meticulous. When it was done Odessa leaned back, pressing her hands against the small of her back. “There you go, my girl,” she said, as Sloane leaned forward over her shoulder to examine the mask. “What do you think?”
A vixen looked up at her, a sly flirt with a dangerous smile. “That’s not me,” Sloane said.
“Not yet.”
Odessa’s fingers were grey and dirty, her glasses powdered with plaster dust. “It’s well into afternoon,” she said. “What say we get a bite while we wait for that to set?” With a sigh she got up from the workbench and picked her way across the dining room, stiff from sitting so long. Sloane followed the witch as she pushed open the swinging door to the gigantic kitchen where the Maceos’ staff of Chinese chefs had once cooked for two hundred people a night. It was immaculate. As messy as Odessa’s workbench was, she always kept her kitchen spotless. She was a wonderful cook, with two different pecan pies to die for, one pale and light with a faint scent of vanilla, the other dark as Mississippi mud and dense as an anvil.
In the middle of the kitchen floor was a trapdoor that Odessa always left open. According to her, one of the Chinese potboys had been assigned to sit there with a line and catch fish for the dinner special during the Maceo days. Now the sound of the sea came welling up from the hole in the floor, along with a powerful briny smell of salt and wet wood. Odessa bustled in the kitchen, throwing together a lunch of fried redfish with red beans and rice.
After they had eaten, Odessa made a negative mask and then another positive one, this time in gypsum cement. She put a big pot of water on the stove to heat. Then she burrowed down to the bottom of her fabric trunk and pulled out a long hank of leather. Carefully she wrapped the leather over the cement face. Next she submerged the whole head in the hot water on the stove. She turned the gas off and let the leather steep for about ten minutes. Then she passed the bust to Sloane, telling her to knead and wring and twist it. “Your turn, sugar. This is a new life you hold in your hands. A chance to start all over. This is your new face. From now on you are the only one who will touch it.”
Sloane stretched and pressed the leather, pushing it deeply into the mold’s eye sockets with her thumbs and pulling it taut across the vixen’s high, sharp cheeks. When the leather was stretched tight and tacked down, Odessa handed her a curious tool she called a “sticketta,” a wooden butter knife she had sanded down from a busted pool cue.
It was very hot. Sweat gathered thickly in Sloane’s armpits and beaded on her forehead. She sat with the mask in her lap, rubbing and coaxing and pressing at the leather with the sticketta. Slowly she lost herself in her hands. She no longer heard the sea muttering around the pier posts below or the fan sweeping overhead; even her eyes seemed only another kind of touch, a confirmation of what her fingers already knew.
A face began to rise out of the leather, a laughing face, darker than her own and more knowing. It grinned at her and she felt uneasy, off-balance. She was intensely aware of the skin of her real face, tightening along the ridges above her eyes. Blood tingled in her cheeks.
It was a shock when Odessa broke the silence. “That’s enough for now, sugar.” Next she gave Sloane a hammer with a head made from steer’s horn, sanded silky smooth. Sloane began pecking away with the pointed end, working on one feature at a time. The blows from the hammer compacted the leather, crushing it down, and forcing it ever more tightly onto the mold. It took her an hour to do her right eye and the plane of her right cheek. As soon as Sloane had covered one area with dimples, she would go over it again with the sticketta, rubbing the ridges down, smoothing away every tiny wrinkle and imperfection. Drawing it tight.
She felt her own skin pull taut between her cheekbones and her jaw. The corners of her eyes began to pull up, and even though her back was aching and she was desperate with thirst in the stifling heat, she felt herself start to smile.
Hours went by.
FOR a long time her mind was empty, still as a pool of brown water. Then, slowly, images and memories began to float to the surface. The tip of her hammer fell pattering over the mask, releasing little traces of leather smell and the memory of Momus standing next to her. She remembered how real he had felt, and the fish-belly whiteness of his skin. Jane keeps one Galveston, I another, and the Recluse watches the door between the two. The memory of that moment hung in her mind as she finished hammering along the plane of her left cheek. Then she picked up the sticketta and rubbed. And as she rubbed, she pressed the memory out, coaxing and stroking the surface of the mask until the memory began to fade, pressing and pushing until she had rubbed out the very last glimpse of his white skin, and all that remained was the smooth tight plane of leather under her fingers.
As an herb, crushed, gives forth a tiny burst of scent, so the blows of the hammer each brought forth packets of memory; breaths of desire, despair, hope, grief. Visions of pain, moments when for all her skill and effort she had not been invisible enough.
She rubbed them out.
It was amazing, that you could do this. It was incredible to her that she could take even an encounter with a god and erase it, drain it, smooth it away. But the longer she worked, the easier it became. She saw her mother, lying in bed and staring at Sloane, afraid to die and more afraid her daughter wouldn’t live up to her responsibilities. The doubt in her eyes was humiliating, and Sloane was very glad to rub it out, pushing it away with tiny patient strokes of the sticketta.
Certain angles and ridges she left untouched; the twin arcs of her eyebrows and the cheekbones below them. In time these ridges came to stand out even more sharply, making hard shadows under the glare of the workbench light.
Jane and Sloane up late at night in her mother’s office, she shouldn’t have been bored but she was, and she was ashamed of being bored. All she wanted to do was go to bed, go for a walk, work on a blouse that lay half-finished on her sewing table, trade gossip with Ladybird Trube, anything. Lazy. Frivolous. Weak, said a voice in her head. It was a bossy, resentful voice and it was always saying things like that. If you really cared about anything besides yourself you’d—
She rubbed it out.
I didn’t do you any favors, letting you hide so much. You were such a scared little girl.
She rubbed that out, too.
Bent under her mother’s wasting arms, helping her awkwardly
to the downstairs bathroom and afterward watching her struggle to pull up her underwear again. She rubbed that out furiously, trembling with anger.
The drought. The look in the faces of the poor as they passed Ashton Villa. The poor themselves, big-bellied with rice, faces lined with thirst, yellow with jaundice, poxed or sunburnt or clammy with yellow fever: she made them all go away, rubbed them smooth and shiny and voiceless.
Resentful, clever Joshua Cane who desired her: gone.
Further back, Sloane sitting motionless before her vanity mirror, her mother behind her, carefully braiding her hair. Her own serious expression, her mother’s sure touch, the great Jane Gardner terribly vulnerable, helpless with love for her daughter. “You are my sunshine,” she had sung in a whisper, and she had kissed Sloane on the top of her head, and they had been safe together.
That memory made Sloane angrier still and she rubbed it out, rubbed and rubbed and rubbed.
The two of them playing together in the surf, Sloane a small child now, rare laughter in her mother’s eyes and salt water beaded in her hair, Sloane like a bag of giggles that had burst open, laughing and whooping as her mother jumped her over each incoming wave—
Everything, every thought and feeling and memory that came up, she rubbed it out. She was so angry her whole body shook with it. Only after hours did the fury begin to fade, after hours and hours and hours, finally getting almost smooth enough, the soft brown surface of the mask like oil beneath her fingers.
Then she was rubbing out the last wrinkles one by one, feeling more cheerful all the time, flat and sharp and grinning. If it hadn’t been for the fierce, stretched, tingling pain in Sloane’s face, and a curious tightness in her chest, she would have said it was the best she’d felt in ages.
Chapter Six
THE MASK
AS Sloane finished her work the high, blank feeling continued to sing through her. Humming to herself, she applied seven coats of lacquer to the inside of the mask, then smoothed it to a silky gloss with a strip of 400-grit extra-fine sandpaper. She dyed the leather a russet red, working the color in with a shaving brush, adding more some places than others, so the whole face took on the brindled look of an animal’s pelt. With a pinch of cleanser from an ancient canister of Comet she rubbed some of the dye off, leaving pale highlights along the raised ridges of the mask so the sharp brows and cheeks stood out more dramatically. Then she cut face straps and attached them with rivets.
The only moment of discomfort came when she had to cut out the eyeholes. Odessa had her set the mask on a rounded piece of driftwood and handed her a gouge, a chisel with a slightly cupped blade. It was strange to see the mask staring up at her, something so like her own face and yet so very different. It made Sloane uneasy and she whacked the gouge harder than she had meant to. She felt a stabbing pain in her left eye, and it went dark on that side as soon as the mask’s leather pupil had fallen away. “Odessa—” The Recluse shook her head and moved the gouge over the mask’s right eye. This time the pain was even worse, and when Sloane had finished she was blind.
The darkness she found herself in was full of noise. For an age there had been no sound but that of her own breathing, Odessa’s fan, the restless sea below them both. Now, however, she could hear gusts of laughter, snatches of conversation, and the clinking of plates and cutlery. A piano tinkled in the background. Sloane lifted the mask toward her face. The sounds grew louder, as if she were approaching a crowded room. They faded again as she lowered it back to her lap.
She put on the mask. She could see perfectly well. Every table in the Balinese Room was crowded. Conversation roared around her. Candlelight glittered on silver and crystal. A woman in a black evening gown with pearls around her neck threw her head back and laughed, so close Sloane could have touched her. “Hey!” someone said, pointing at Sloane. Every head at the table turned to stare at her.
She tore the mask from her face and found herself back in quiet darkness. “Not yet,” Odessa said. “And I’d choose a less public place to make my entrance, if I were you.”
“I can’t see.”
“That will pass. Can I get you something to drink, doll?”
“Yes, please,” Sloane whispered. For the first time she realized she’d had neither food nor water since Odessa had removed the mask from her face, hours and hours before. Her throat was hard and dry and stung with the fumes of lacquer and paint thinner and dye. She tried to speak up as Odessa left the room to get her a drink, but her voice was a croak. “What time is it?”
“Almost dawn,” Odessa said over her shoulder. “It’s nearly tomorrow.”
THE sun came up as Sloane walked home. After so long inside it was strange to see broad light in the sky, to feel the horizon so far away. She carried the mask in her purse like a terrible secret. It was already hot outside, but it would get hotter still. Dry pots and pails sat under the gutters of every inhabited house. Roosters flapped and crowed as she passed, necks extended, screaming from fence posts and toolsheds and porch roofs. Chickens scratched in the barren dust. The high, tense energy that had filled her as she built her mask seemed to disappear with the sunrise, leaving her dizzy and exhausted.
She ran the last block to Ashton Villa, her stomach in a knot. Maybe her mother would have died while she wasn’t around to see it. Or—and the hope was almost as terrible as the fear—maybe she would come home to find Momus hadn’t betrayed her after all. Maybe there would be some sign that her mother was getting well. Just the full use of her arms would be a miracle. Anything to show that the disease had finally halted its inexorable advance.
She slipped into her house, crept across the foyer, and cracked open the parlor door. Though it was barely dawn Jane Gardner was awake and seated in her wheelchair. Her arms lay dead in her lap, the skin blotched with liver spots. The knot in Sloane’s stomach pulled tight. “I’m back,” she said.
“I see that.”
“You’re not—” Sloane bit her lip. “Can I get you anything?”
“I’m sure you’re very tired,” Jane Gardner said. She was looking at Bettie Brown’s stuffed Bird of Paradise in its cage of glass. “When Odessa sent a message to say she was keeping you overnight I hired a nurse. She’s bringing my tea.”
“I—”
“I’ve said for weeks you shouldn’t be spending so much time on me. A nurse is more practical.”
Sloane’s face was burning. “I’m sorry.”
“What are you apologizing for? I hate it when you apologize all the time,” Jane said. Her p’s when she said “apologize” were definitely losing their shape, becoming slurred and breathy, almost like f’s. “Make good d’cisions and let that be the end of it.” She turned her head away, facing the wine-colored portieres that separated the parlor from the dining room. In the distance, footsteps were approaching. Sloane could hear spoons rattling on a tea tray.
Numbly she turned and left the room.
ONE week later, just past dawn, Sloane found herself hovering on the sidewalk outside Joshua Cane’s house. Her mother hadn’t died yet. Sloane was just back from Mardi Gras. Beside her, drought-withered ivy hung from a faded metal signpost left over from the days before the Flood:
San Jacinto Neighborhood Association
CRIME WATCH
We report all suspicious activities
to our police department.
I’m the sort of thing these good people should report, Sloane thought wryly. Her head was pounding, her feet ached, and every now and then a little more blood oozed out of a shallow cut above her left knee. The stain had rubbed onto the inside of her right thigh as well. She was wearing a short tight cotton dress and silk stockings, not like her at all but they matched the mask—they matched the person she became when she put it on. What a tramp she must look, her dress splotched and smelling of booze, the beautiful silk stockings Odessa had given her on her twenty-first birthday slashed, laddered, and bloodstained after a night in Momus’s kingdom.
For her mother to see her
in this state was unthinkable. Nor could she show up at Randall Denton’s mansion looking like this, or Jim Ford’s, or the Trube Castle. She had to get changed, or at least cleaned up. Despite the awkwardness of her last visit to Joshua Cane’s house, he was the only person she knew unimportant enough that she could risk being seen in her present state.
Besides, you rather like the idea of showing up on your admirer’s doorstep in a short dress, don’t you…?
That was the last of the evening’s wine talking. Hush, she told it.
By daylight the apothecary’s house looked small and shabby, but its ten-year-old coat of paint left it better off than its neighbors. A worn suit in a closet full of overalls. Sloane tiptoed up to the front porch. The third step groaned, sounding unnaturally loud this early in the morning. Sloane winced, glancing around to see if any of his neighbors were watching her.
Joshua must have heard her on the steps, for a curtain twitched at the front window and his face appeared. A moment later he stood in the doorway. An early riser, apparently: he was already washed and dressed. “Am I in trouble?”
“Not that I know.”
“In that case, come in.”
The first time she had met Josh here, she had been in shock and it had been night. Her memory of him was a confused impression of hissing gas lamps, overpowering pharmacy smells, and hard fingers touching the strap of her dress. Today she saw him more clearly. He was roughly her own age, a small man in his early twenties with the fleshless face and wrists of someone who finds cooking and eating an annoyance. He had dark eyes under surprisingly heavy black brows, a bony face, and curly black hair cut very short. It was a neat job, but with no real understanding of hair. Does it himself, I bet.
