This is not a mask

This is not a mask.

I was twelve. I was Bullitt. None of my friends understood why my Halloween costume was a turtleneck and why I wasn't carrying a lightsaber like they all were. Even Mark had one, and he was Chewbacca. But I loved cars and I wanted to be Steve McQueen, so I was Bullitt, and Bullitt was so fucking cool he didn't need a lightsaber. His Mustang was his lightsaber.

But so they screwed off for the cemetery to duel and to smoke the Camels Dustin had found in his mom's purse, and I was left alone with my shoulder-holstered capgun and my grinning pumpkin, half-full of candy. It was all right. We knew this was our last time around the neighborhood together, the last time candy would be our main concern. There was no point in making a big deal out of it.

And I had my own agenda anyway. I wanted an apple with a razor blade in it. Miss Watkins had spent the better part of the week leading up to Halloween lecturing us on the dangers inherent in the combination of candy and strangers; her shrillest tone and most lurid images were reserved for the dreaded Razor-Blade Apple. None of her students had ever had the misfortune of biting into one of these horrors, thank the lord, but a teacher friend of hers in Danville had a cousin whose son didn't let her check his Halloween haul before digging in, and now he has to be fed through tubes. Tubes!

I had to find one. This became my mission. Before I outgrew Halloween, I had to save it. I had to find either A) a childless old crone, B) a quiet loner with a large cellar, or C) the person you'd least suspect; then, having identified the most likely suspect, march up to his/her door (I envisioned a creaking porch and boarded-up windows, unless I landed on choice C, in which case it would be a ranch house just like mine), ring the doorbell, shout "Trick or treat!" while still looking cool in my turtleneck, and receive the doctored apple; and then, finally, gather a crowd to witness as I slice the apple in two and carefully yet triumphantly remove the deadly razor blade. Sirens blare, two uniforms lead the crone/loner/suburban housewife away in cuffs, and Charlie Winter is the savior of Halloween. This is what Bullitt would do. This is what I was going to do.

****

The borders are thin tonight, Charlie. You see a mask, and you see my face. They are the same, tonight, in this place. Your friend in the black mask swordfighting with a flashlight, tonight he is Dustin and Darth Vader. The children in sheets are their own ghosts, tonight; they are already dead. Look under the sheets sometime, Charlie. See if those white things crawling out of their eyes are maggots or just rice. See if that red is coagulated blood or dried makeup. See if it is both.

I found the house. The windows weren't boarded up. The porch wasn't creaking; there was no porch. I'm not sure if it actually was or not, but I remember the house being perfectly octagonal. And the person who answered the door--I say person because I can't remember if it was a man or a woman, old or young--was wearing a black turtleneck just like mine. And a mask, or possibly not a mask. Maybe just a face. It said its name was You. You asked me to come inside.

Tonight we are either dead or alive. And if you are alive, then it is at the expense of another; if you are alive tonight, you have killed. But sometimes people are both. I've seen you, Charlie. I know you. You are your own murderer. You will kill yourself. You have killed yourself.

What I have to ask you now is: Do you want to know why?

I was Bullitt. I did what Bullitt would do. I went inside.

****

You placed the apple on a table in the center of a room that appeared to be circular. The room was not circular. When I looked closer, I could see that there were corners--more corners than I could count, than I could even see. A room of near-infinite sides. Maybe infinite. Only You would know for sure.

The red of the apple appeared supersaturated in the dim room, the color of blood newly released to the air. You spoke:

Is this what you were looking for, Charlie?

"I don't know."

You wanted this, Charlie. You wanted to find me. You wanted to find this apple. And now that you have found us, you don't know what you've found?

The costume had given me strength, resolve, but now it was dissolving. Even then I knew the power of masks, but that power was failing me in that room with infinite corners. I knew You was in the room with me, but I could not see it; I could only smell You. The smell I don't have to remember, because I smell it all the time: You smelled like fall, like smoke in cold air.

I don't have to remember this, because I am always living it. It's always five o'clock somewhere, my dad used to say; it's always October 31, 1977 somewhere too. And no matter what the calendar says, Halloween is the last day of fall. It is when winter begins.

There are two apples on the table, Charlie, though you see only one. One of the apples has a razor blade inside. The other does not. But until someone bites the apple, both possibilities exist.

You want to be a hero, don't you, Charlie? You want to expose this evil?

I should reach for my capgun, I thought. Fire a few shots. Maybe You wouldn't know the difference. I could escape.

There is only one way to be the hero, Charlie. Someone has to take a bite.

I did not reach for my capgun. I reached for the apple instead. It was the size of my dad's fist, as hard and cold as a fist.

I took a bite.

The juice flooded my mouth, mixing with something else, something metallic and warm, and I felt something so beyond pain I had to believe it was pleasure. There was something odd in my mouth, something that didn't feel like fruit. I spit it out. It landed on the floor, slicked with blood and quivering.

After a moment I recognized it as most of my tongue.

Something thin and bright sliced through the roof of my mouth into my sinuses. I felt it behind my eyes, cold and sharp. I dropped the apple. I fell. You said:

You found it, Charlie.

I died.

****

I bit into the apple and I tasted apple and nothing else; no blood, no steel. You had left or disappeared, and so You didn't see my disappointment. I took the apple with me and finished it on the walk home. I packed the turtleneck in the bottom drawer of my dresser, and next Halloween I went to a movie with Allison Clark instead of trick-or-treating. My mother drove us in her Buick. We sat in the back seat and didn't dare hold hands.

My name is Charles Winter, and on October 31, 1977, I died so that I might live. Monk, displaying his usual level of wit, likes to say that I'm my own personal Jesus. In his more cynical moods he draws the obvious parallels with Genesis and says that by eating the apple I cast myself out of Eden, which I don't need that incomprehensible twit to tell me that.

I had dreams about that Halloween for years afterward. When I was fifteen I woke in the night with blood in my mouth and toothmarks on my tongue--my body trying to recreate the effects of the razor blade. I've since learned those weren't dreams, but memories--memories of my other lives. I remember what dying feels like. I remember the taste of juice mingled with blood, and how the word "red" described not only what I saw, but what I smelled and tasted and felt and heard. I remember the tip of my tongue lying on the polished wooden floor like a fat pink comma.

I didn't see You again until my twentieth birthday. I was leaving the library and crossing north campus (yes, the library on my birthday, but that's another story) when I smelled leaves burning and felt the air go chill. There was You on the sidewalk, holding something that caught the orange light from the streetlamps. You held it out to me; it was a jar, with something small and dry and shriveled inside. My tongue. Charlie Winter's tongue. A piece of me, the dead boy, the hero.

Do you know what this is, Charlie?

"I do."

****

Extrapolation:

The piece of yourself, the artifact, this is important--a reminder of your death. It's what allows you to jump. I have the dry piece of tongue, like jerky; Monk has a fingernail stained with two kinds of red, from blood and from the brick of the back wall of the Galway pub where he was beaten to death. He tried to hold himself up with the wall, but his assailants were many and had steel in their boots. Nico carried her front left canine tooth in a locket around her neck. Rumor has it that Kage has his own mummified fetus on his person at all times. That's why Kage is a ghost--he died before he could live.

Most people, like 99.99999 percent, don't or can't remember when one of their other selves dies. They just dream about it. If you ever dreamed of falling, but wake up before you hit the ground, somewhere, in other world, you died. If you, in your sleep, have ever been chased by someone, but never saw his face--in another world, he caught you, and you saw who he was, and you recognized him in the second before he killed you. Your dreams are memories of your other selves. They are the particles that make up the cloud you call your life. You wake up safe from the dream, but elsewhere, your frail body hits the pavement, the knife runs you through, the hands close around your neck.

If you want to be like me, next time, try not to wake up.