by Unknown
I shrugged. “Beard. Hair. Flowing robes. Eyes.”
“But the faces have always been different somehow, haven’t they? The hair longer or shorter, the beard fuller, the cheekbones higher or lower, fuller or more drawn, even the hue of the skin has been different—yet somehow you always recognize the face.”
“Okay … ?”
“Ever wonder how many different versions of that face exist in statues or paintings or sketches?”
“Thousands, I would think.”
“Seventy-two, actually. Followers of the Prophet Abdu’l-Bahá believe that everything in nature has ‘two and seventy names.’ That’s almost right. The thing that has always annoyed me about the various religions is that, with rare exceptions, their beliefs are too compartmentalized. This is what we believe in, period. I’ll tell you a secret: they’re all wrong—individually. The problem is none of them can see Belief holistically. If they were all to ‘gather at the river,’ so to speak, and compare notes, you’d be surprised how quickly people would stop setting off bombs and flying airplanes into skyscrapers. But I digress.
“Everything in nature does have seventy-two names. But certain of these things also have seventy-two forms. Like the face of Jesus, for example.”
“You’re telling me that Christ has been portrayed as having seventy-two faces?”
“No, whiz-kid, I’m telling you that Christ had seventy-two faces. Every picture you see is nothing more than a variation on one of them. Faces change over the course of a lifetime, dear boy. All in all, each of us wears seventy-one.”
“I thought you just said—”
“—I know what I said, I recognized my voice. There is one face we possess that is never worn—at least, not in the sense that the world can see it. The best way I can explain it is to say that it’s the face you had before your grandparents were born. That is the face I need from you. It exists here—” He cupped one of his hands and covered his face from forehead to upper lip. “—in the Rami Temporales.”
“In the muscles around the eyes?”
“No, those are part of the Rami Zygomatici, an area controlled by the Temporales, which is a much larger and influential group in the temporo-facial division of—oh, for goodness’ sake! Are you in the mood for an anatomy lesson? Are you worried that I’m going to pull out a scalpel and cut away? I’m not a graduate of the Ed Gein School of Cosmetology, so put that notion out of your head this instant.”
I stopped at a red light on 21st Street. “Then I guess I don’t understand what you mean at all.”
“Perhaps we need to expedite things a bit. Turn left.”
The light changed and I made the turn. Even though the entrance to the park should have been a good six miles farther, here we were. I pulled into the parking area and we climbed out.
“I have some luggage in your trunk,” said Listen. “If you wouldn’t mind … ?”
It was a large, bulky square thing that reminded me of a salesman’s sample case. I lifted it out of the trunk and damn near snapped my spine. “What’s in here, the population of a small Third World nation?”
“Is a tad on the heavy side, isn’t it? Sorry.” Listen took the case from me and dangled it from one hand as if it weighed no more than a tennis racket.
“Do you have a favorite spot here?”
“You already know the answer.”
“Of course you’re right. I just wanted to see if you’d lie to me again like you did about having your picture taken.”
“How did you know that?”
“I do my homework, dear boy. You’ll be turning forty-two in July, and since the day of your birth you’ve been photographed exactly one-hundred-and-nine times, counting your employee identifications and driver’s licences. By the time they’re your age, the average person has been photographed close to a thousand times, be it individually or as part of a group. But not you. One-hundred-and-nine times, that’s it.”
“It’s over there.”
“What is?”
“My favorite spot.”
“Ah, yes, the picnic area near the footbridge. Where Penny Duffy kissed you when both of you were in the eighth grade.”
I took a seat at the picnic table while Listen walked up to the footbridge and took in the entire park.
“Know anything about ‘places of power’?” he said.
“Like Stonehenge?”
“Exactly. Stonehenge is a perfect example. The Irazu volcano in Costa Rica, the Ruins of Copan in Honduras, Cerne Abas Giant, and Bodh Gaya where Buddha achieved enlightenment are a few others. Places where the forces of the Universe are intensely focused and can be harnessed by the faithful.”
“Don’t go all New-Age on me, okay?”
“Don’t make me ill. There are well over a thousand such spots, but believe it or not, only seventy-two are genuinely significant. Only seventy-two are filled with such power that you can feel the Earth thrum like some excited child who’s filled to bursting with a secret their heart can no longer contain. This park—” He made a sweeping gesture with his arm. “—is one of those seventy-two places. The Indian Burial mounds here are so potent they’re scary.”
“Is that why we’re here?”
“Yes. What needs to be done, needs to be done in a place of power. Such are the ways of ritual.” He joined me at the table. “I have to tell you certain things to aid you in making your decision. Whatever happens, know that Amy’s and Tommy’s future health and happiness is safe.” He reached down to flip the first of four latches on the case. “The first time a stranger approached you with a story, you were seven years old. It was an elderly woman who was in tears because she’d lost a cameo her late husband had gotten for her overseas during World War One. You sat there on your bike and listened to her and then you said—do you remember this?”
I nodded. “She said she always wore it so she could feel him near. She talked about how he’d loved her homemade strawberry preserves, how she still made a batch every year to give as Christmas presents. This was three weeks before Christmas. I asked her if she’d already made her preserves and she said yes. I knew right away that the cameo’s clasp had come loose from the necklace. It had fallen into one of the preserve jars. I didn’t tell her that, though.”
“No, but you did ask the right questions so she could figure it out. Do you know what would have happened if that woman hadn’t approached you? She would have taken her own life New Year’s Eve. This was a dangerously depressed gal, Joel, one who’d been the focus of her childrens’ worry since the death of her husband. You saved her life that day.”
“No …”
“Oh, yes. And since that day, because you have ‘one of those faces,’ people keep coming up to you, don’t they? Asking for directions, spare change, if you know a good restaurant … or to tell you things. Rami Temporales, the face beneath the flesh. That is what draws them to you. They recognize it in you just as you can recognize the face of Jesus or Shakespeare, because regardless of how many variations there might be, the face beneath the flesh—the First Face, the one you had before your grandparents were born—remains unchanged.” He opened the case and laid it flat. From one end to the other it was at least four feet wide and three across, perhaps two feet deep.
Something wasn’t right. I’d seen this thing closed, had tried to lift it, and though it weighed a ton there was nothing to suggest it would be this wide, long, or deep when opened.
Then he opened it again. Two sections into four, each covered by a square of black material.
“Since your encounter with Cameo Lady, you’ve lost track of how many people have approached you. But I haven’t. Do you know what you are, Joel? You’re a safety valve. People see your face and know you’ll be sympathetic, so they have no qualms about unloading their woes on you. Do you think it helps them?”
“I have no idea.”
“Hm.” He removed a small notebook from his vest. Flipping it open to the first page, he began reading aloud. “Over the course of the t
hirty-four years since Cameo Lady, your listening to others has prevented forty-three rapes, one-hundred-and-twelve suicides, sixty-seven episodes of child abuse, thirty-three divorces, ninety-eight murders, and so many cases of spousal abuse I ran out of room to record them all.” He tossed the notebook to me. “Look it over later if you’d like. The point is that all the time you’ve secretly felt was wasted while you listened has actually made a difference. If I asked how many people were affected by you today, you’d say … ?”
“Two. Sandy’s friend and the guy outside the Sparta.”
He shook his head. “Five, Joel.” He held up his hand, fingers spread apart. “Five. And one of them—not the fellow outside the restaurant, by the way—would have already snapped and be torturing a child nearly to death right now if it weren’t for the ninety seconds they spent talking to you.” He went back to the case. Four sections became eight. Eight became twelve. Twelve became sixteen, each section attached by hinges to those above, below, and on either side. Already something that should have only taken up maybe six square feet covered at least fifty. Had he been unfolding some massive quilt I wouldn’t have felt like the world was disintegrating around me. But this thing was making confetti out of the basic laws of physics. I was standing in the middle of a live-action Escher painting.
Sixteen sections became twenty-four. Twenty-four became thirty-two. Every compartment covered in black, creating a square, bottomless dark pit.
“What are you?” I asked.
Thirty-two sections quickly became forty-eight. “What, is it? Not who. You catch on fast. Yes, I was being surly. Apologies.”
“Are you going to answer the question or should I just wait for a postcard?”
Forty-eight sections were now sixty-four. “Consider me a reconstructive surgeon. My area of expertise is, of course, the face. One in particular.” With a final flurry of hands and flipping, the sixty-four sections became seventy-two.
“There,” he said, standing back and admiring the massive obsidian square which lay where the ground and grass used to be. “Whew! Sometimes this really wears me out.”
“What the hell is it?”
“Funny you should mention Hell. I had to go there in order to get a few of these—and don’t think that wasn’t a bushel of dreadful fun.” He pulled aside one of the black compartment covers and the rest, like slats in Venetian blinds, folded back to reveal what lay underneath. “I don’t have all of them yet. Counting yours, I still have eleven to go.”
In each filled compartment, nestled in a thick bed of dark felt, was a glass mask. Several were full-face, while others were half or three quarters, but a majority were of isolated sections: the forehead and nose; cheeks connected by the nose bridge; the lips and chin; temples and eyes; the cheeks alone; and one mask, looking like one of those optical illusion silhouettes you see in Psychology textbooks, was of the forehead, nose, lips, and chin only. No cheeks, no temples, no eyes.
“I thought this one would interest you,” said Listen. “Not that there’s anything especially significant about it for you, but something about its shape I knew you’d find fascinating.” He pulled on a pair of the whitest gloves I’ve ever seen and removed the mask. On closer inspection, as the sunlight danced glissandos over its shape, I saw it wasn’t made out of glass but some thin, transparent, seemingly organic material that held the shape and acted as a prism on the light.
“Okay. Time you knew the rest. Have a seat.”
“Jesus, Shakespeare, Buddha—all of their faces recognizable even though none were ever photographed. Yes, there’s an element of the collective unconscious and the archetype involved, but it’s a little more complicated than that. People recognize those faces because somewhere in the back of their minds that’s what they want them to look like. Jesus should look benevolent and spiritual, Shakespeare intelligent and creative, Buddha wise and all-knowing. Everyone has these characteristics in mind when picturing them, and so they are always present in portraits and sculptures and sketches. Consensual reality, to over-simplify it: ‘I believe this is what it looks like, so that is how it appears.’ The same holds true for the face of God, Joel. But just as the portraits of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Da Vinci, Galileo and the rest change from likeness to likeness, just as any human being’s face changes over the course of a lifetime or a even a day—your happy face, your leave-me-alone face, your confused face, et cetera—the face of God changes. And it’s not supposed to. But He doesn’t have the advantage of an archetype buried in peoples’ minds. That’s where I come in.” He squinted at the mask, blew on it, then used his fingertips to brush away some dust or pollen. “I keep forgetting what dirt magnets these things can be. Where was I? Ah, yes: the face of God. Have you ever noticed how the horrors of this world seem to never cease coming at you? Hideous mass murders, bombings, wars breaking out in distant countries, rapes, missing children, mutilated children, men walking into fast-food restaurants and opening fire with automatic weapons … the inventory is inexhaustible. There’s a reason. Simply put, it’s because no one has even the slightest idea what God’s face looks like. Everyone guesses, and though some of those guesses might have a particular element nailed down, none of them comes close to the real thing, because there isn’t one. That’s why there’s this gaping hole where that face should exist. So, a while ago, God—Who wouldn’t know Vanity if it bit Him in the soft parts—consented to allow me to build a face for Him. Being an overly-curious sort, I naturally had to inquire why He’d never made one for Himself. It turns out that He did, but he gave it away. It was the last thing He did on the Sixth Day. He divided His face into seventy-two sections and scattered them into the Universe.”
It took a moment for the full impact of this to hit me. “So you’re saying that … that I—?”
“Possess a missing section of God’s face, yes.”
I looked at the masks displayed before me. “How did you manage to find any of these?”
“It would bore you to death.”
“Give me the Reader’s Digest version.”
“Prime numbers. Seventy-one—the number of faces you wear in a lifetime—is a prime number, so I took a shot in the dark and began with that. All the digits of your birthday are prime numbers which add up to the same: 7-13-59. Every genuinely significant event that’s occurred in your life has happened when your age was a prime, today included—remember, you’re still forty-one. It took me several thousand years to figure this out, but once the equation revealed itself, the rest fell into place. I took the true age of the Universe, divided it by seventy-one, divided that sum by seventy-one, and kept repeating the pattern until I was left with a sum of one. I then divided each of the seventy-one individual sums by seventy-one and … you’re way ahead of me, aren’t you? There was much more to it—factoring in alterations made to the Earthly calendar for solstices and, of course, that pain-in-the-ass Gregorian business—but in the end I pinpointed seventy-one specific years scattered through all of history, and in each of those years, using the prime number formulae, I pinpointed one person whose life not only fit exactly the numerical pattern that had been discovered, but who had been blessed—or cursed, depending of course on your point of view—with ‘one of those faces.’ That’s the short version and believe me, it wasn’t as easy as it sounds.”
“What happens if I say no?”
“I thank you for your time and go away disappointed. I provided for the possibility that at least nine of you would refuse. I can reconstruct most of His face with what I already have, and guess the rest with a large degree of accuracy. But I’m stubborn, Joel. I am so close to having all of the sections. It’s been my life’s work and I will not be stopped. I won’t resort to Inquisition or Gestapo or Khmer Rogue tactics in order to achieve my goal—even though I could.” He held up the mask. “So—”
“—you need my decision.”
“Not until you know what will happen if you say ‘yes.’ ”
“I assume that people will stop singling
me out like they’ve done my entire life.”
His eyes narrowed into slits. “Don’t let’s be flippant, dear boy. Think about everything you’ve learned today. Think.” The notebook.
I pulled it from my pocket and looked at the pages. “Oh, no …”
“Oh, yes. People will no longer single you out. Your face—which you’ve always thought was so very nondescript—will become just that. Someone meeting you for the first time won’t be able to remember what you look like ten minutes after you’ve parted ways. You’ll be just another faceless face in a sea of faceless faces. Now, being the social butterfly that you are, that’s probably not going to bother you too much. However—”
I held up the notebook. “The stories.”
“Exactly. Since you will have given me your First Face, those same people who won’t be singling you out also won’t be telling you their stories. And because they won’t be doing that, there are going. To be. Consequences. Do you understand?”
A tight, ugly knot was forming between my chest and throat. “I understand,” I whispered. “Is that all?”
“No. There’s one last thing, and it might be the deal breaker.” He told me.
I listened carefully.
Thought about everything I’d learned. And said yes.
“Lean back.” He placed the first mask on my face. It weighed no more than ether. Then, one by one, he removed each successive mask and layered it on top of the one before until I wore all of them.
Have you ever used one of those sinus-headache masks? The ones that have that icy blue glop inside? That’s what it felt like. An overpowering wave of cold spread across my face, seeped into my skull, through my brain, and formed a wall of frost in the back of my head. I shuddered and reached up.
Listen grabbed my arm. “Don’t touch it. You’ll lose your hand.”
Soon it became a pleasant liquid numbness. I sighed and maybe even smiled.
“Feels better now, does it?”
“… yes …”
“Then it’s done. Keep your eyes closed, dear boy. When you open them again I’ll be gone. It’s been genuine pleasure meeting you, Joel. You’re a decent man who still has a lot to offer the world. I fervently hope you’ll believe that some day. Now take a deep breath and hold it for a few seconds.”