by Bill Bunn
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I am the face of this world. I am the only thing permitted to share recognizable wholeness to communicate with visitors to our world.”
“Am I dead?” Steve asked, genuinely concerned.
“No, you are not, which is why I am here.”
“What world is this?”
“I cannot say. It is a world of so much. I cannot begin to describe it. I suppose you could call it a world of pieces.”
“The World of Pieces? What do you mean? Where is this?”
“It is here, Whole One,” replied the mask.
This isn’t planet Earth any more.
“When you say `whole one,’ do you mean human?” Steve asked.
“I mean whatever you are, if you are anything at all.”
“I see. Do you have any other whole ones here?”
“Yes. I should think so. We have everything here.”
“What do you mean you have everything? I haven’t seen a single thing here.”
“Oh, you haven’t? Speak the name of something out loud,” the mask commanded.
Steve glared at the mask and said, “Car.”
With a whoosh a ghostly image of a car appeared in front of him. Steve could tell it was a car, but not what kind of car. It was just some vague kind of a car.
“Whole one,” Steve said. A picture of Steve appeared. Steve stood staring at a ghostly image of himself.
“I’d like you to follow me,” said the mask. “You look tired, so we would like to offer you some hospitality—perhaps a meal.”
“I’m looking for my mother and my Great Aunt Shannon. I’m not sure I have time for hospitality.”
“You must refresh yourself. You look tired and hungry,” said the mask, sweetly.
Steve felt his tiredness hit him suddenly, like a tsunami. He wanted to sleep. The thought of a meal caused him to salivate.
“Why don’t we make you a meal—a feast for a Whole One,” the mask said. Steve nodded timidly to hide his enthusiasm. He balanced his thoughts between a meal and his quest to find Aunt Shannon and his mom. The meal felt more important at this particular moment.
“Where is my mother?” Steve asked suddenly.
“What is a mother?” questioned the mask.
Steve struggled to frame the question so the mask might understand. “I guess you would say that a mother is a whole one who gives birth to other whole ones.”
“Ah, we do have a mother here,” said the mask. A ghostly image of a motherly figure appeared. It wasn’t Steve’s mom. It just somehow seemed like everyone’s mom, and no one’s mom.
“Is my mom here?” Steve asked emphatically.
“We have fingers and toes, lips, fingernails, tissue and lipstick. Your mother couldn’t be here.”
“But you said you have everything. You must have my mom here, too,” Steve asserted. “She came here a couple of years ago. My great aunt is here, too.”
The face seemed to grimace. “We have teeth, nostrils, earlobes, and ankles. Bits and bytes, baskets and gaskets, atoms and molecules—glorious, perfect pieces.” As it spoke a lump seemed to rise out of the ground just ahead of them.
“What are you talking about?” Steve asked.
“I’m not talking about anything—we’re just using words, stringing letters together—one letter, then another one, and then another one.”
The mask turned towards an opening in what looked like an elaborate, lavish tent. Steve followed. Inside the opening was a palatial dining room with a very long wooden table. The table was covered with food. Steve walked over to the food and grabbed at a grape he saw before him. His hand reached the grape and closed around it. But his fingers passed right through it. His fingers were grasping at the air; the grapes wouldn’t feed him—they were ghosts of real grapes.
“You cannot eat this food yet,” said the mask. “We must perfect you first.”
“It’s not real food.”
“It’s not real food, because you aren’t a part of this world yet. You are an imperfect collection of imprints—a Whole One. This world contains the seeds of what might be, pieces that can be put together, arranged in any way that might suit us. We have found our perfection, not by embracing generalizations, nor by finding universal truths, but by breaking things apart.”
“Sorry. Don’t follow,” Steve snipped, testing to see how this entity handled his tone.
“Whole Ones, like you,” continued the mask, “are the only things that struggle with what is right and wrong. You are the only things that suffer the pain of whole existence. Your smaller parts do not suffer as your whole self does. Your skin cannot feel disappointment. Your eyeball doesn’t want a mother. Your foot doesn’t ask why it exists.” The mask paused. “You see, your molecules can’t be right or wrong. They just are. And perfectly so.”
“But you can’t do anything if you’re in pieces,” Steve argued, his hunger flavoring his words.
“Your talent is perfect until you use it, as a glass of water is most perfect before it’s sipped. Perfection exists only as we are about to use our pieces to do something. If we actually succeed, we lose the perfection in the trying.”
The mask’s smooth silver voice brought out Steve’s tiredness. He stared impatiently at the food.
“You can be perfect if you come and live with us.”
“What will happen to me if I live with you?”
“You will be perfect. Your mother’s disappearance won’t bother you anymore. You won’t have to face the police if you stay here. You won’t have to go to school any more.”
Steve felt sleepy. “How do you know about my mother?”
“I know everything about you, Steve,” the mask replied, tenderly. “I can see everything that you ought to be. And I can see what’s left over. Do you want to eat? What you see before you is the perfect food. Look at it. Do you see anything wrong with it?” Steve moved closer and tried to grab some bread. His fingers cut through the loaf and came out the other side. Ghost bread. Ghost food. The whole spread shimmered just as ghostly illusion should. His stomach growled audibly.
It figures. I’m haunted by food.
Steve moved over to a couch sitting against the wall and tried to sit on it but fell right through it and onto the ground.
The ghosts of furniture and food.
“Perfection has no truck with the imperfect. It will not let you touch it until you are clean. It is everything that a couch ought to be. If you were as perfect as that couch, you could sit on it, and likewise you could eat the food set before you.” Steve’s mind felt as numb as it had when he’d been lost in the snowstorm. He nodded as the face continued its hypnotic conversation.
“You shall be perfect. You shall always be about to be, and no part of you shall be capable of failure. Only Whole Ones fail. You shall live with us in the World of Pieces.”
“I see,” Steve said with blank eyes and a monotone voice.
“Do you want to join us? Do you want to eat? Do you want to sleep?”
Steve smiled a deep, sleepy smile and nodded.
“You only need let us help you attain perfection and you shall have it all. What you know can be stored in perfection—zeros and ones—clean, brittle, and bright. What you are can break down into primary pieces and then secondary ones, and so on and so on, until you achieve perfection—no more pain, no fear, nothing.” The mask smiled. “If you join us, you shall know everything in its perfection. And you won’t need to go to school to learn it.”
Steve looked up with glazed eyes. “I’m tired of fighting,” he admitted. “I work so hard to keep everything together. My world is already shattered in pieces. I might as well look like what I am. I don’t think I can make it.” Steve’s speech slurred as his mind and body grew heavy. He felt as though he could never get up off the floor, and he didn’t care. “I have nothing to live for. My life is already gone to pieces.” A new thought slowly curled into his thinking: “I know my mother’s here. You said she
isn’t, but I know she is.” He stared at the mask and waited until his eyes focused. “Can I live with my mother?”
“Yes,” said the mask softly.
“Then, I will live here with my mom,” Steve said carelessly. His head slumped down towards his chest. He fell asleep.
He woke up slightly as he felt himself being lifted from the floor. His body floated out of the room and out the door of the tent. A few yards in front of the tent curved the shore of some kind of big lake or ocean. The force carried him right to the edge of the ocean and stood him up on his feet.
He heard the mask’s gentle voice say, “Raise your arms.” Without doing anything himself, Steve’s arms went up automatically. Skinny arms dangling in the huge sleeves of a coat that wasn’t his.
“Now, we will perfect your little finger.”
His sleepy eyes looked around. He watched his own hand. A force of some kind, not visible, pulled the pinky finger off his left hand. He didn’t feel anything.
As the little finger on Steve’s left hand separated from the rest of his body, it didn’t hurt. In fact, it felt rather soothing. The finger floated in front of him, and then it separated at the two finger joints into smaller pieces. The fingertip split into the fingernail and surrounding flesh. And so it went until the pieces of his finger became so small they were no more than a fog of bits hanging in the air.
Finger smoke.
Some sharp thought poked Steve’s thinking and forced him awake.
“Wait. Stop!” Steve shouted as loudly as he could.
The mask suddenly reappeared with a blink in front of him. “We are helping you become perfect,” it said in a soothing tone.
“I don’t want or need that kind of perfection. Give me my finger back.”
“I’m sorry, but it is already a part of our world. It can never come back to you.” Suddenly the force that was supporting Steve left him, and he collapsed on the ground.
“Where are my mom and great aunt?” he yelled as he picked himself up.
“They have become part of our world,” answered the mask.
“Let them out!”
“I cannot, but you can go and live with them.”
“I won’t live with them. You have to let them go.”
“You are merely a Whole One. Against our entire world, what can you do? You have no idea what to call us, or what we are. Yet we know you, and what you are. You are just a collection of parts, borrowed from what we are. We are perfect. You are not.”
Steve didn’t know how to respond. He stared at the mask. “I want my finger back. What did you do with it?”
“You gave us your finger,” replied the mask. “You gave us your finger of your own free will. You told us that you wanted to `live here with your mom,’ didn’t you? You promised us the rest of you, too. You belong to us now.”
Duck Boy. Duck Boy.
Steve backed away from the mask, frightened by its power and the realization that he had given his life away. “I want my finger back,” he said in a squeaky voice.
“I cannot give it to you.” The mask’s smile didn’t fade, but it suddenly looked vacant and empty. “It is now more perfect than you could ever be.”
Duck Boy. Duck Boy.
Steve wanted to be strong. He wanted to demand that the mask give his finger back, but he couldn’t.
“You must give us the rest of you, now,” stated the mask. “Your life now belongs to our world.”
“It does not. My life belongs to me,” Steve said quietly.
“It belongs to us. You gave it to us,” insisted the mask.
“I didn’t give it to you,” Steve protested, unable to meet the mask’s vacant eyes. “You misunderstood what I said.”
“A word spoken in our world is as good as the deed. You belong to us. Your life is ours. You must join the ocean of pieces you see before you.”
“I won’t give myself to you. You said words weren’t really words —they’re just shapes in a row,” Steve said quietly, as firmly as he could. “So what I said couldn’t mean anything anyway.”
“You are whole, and you spoke whole words—you do not speak letters, as I do. It is not a matter of giving or keeping yourself. You already gave it to us, so your life is ours,” declared the mask with an empty smile. “You belong to us now.”
Steve panicked and swung his backpack from his shoulders onto his arm, grabbing his mother’s plaque. He plunged his hand into the bag to grab the dictionary but accidentally touched his own notebook instead.
The mask didn’t betray any emotion.
Steve felt the electrical numbness work up his arms and into his entire body. He fought the urge to release his notebook and his plaque. The landscape flattened into a picture and he was surrounded by a whirlwind of light. The picture grew smaller and smaller until it was the size of a small snapshot. The whirlwind of light began to fade and the picture floated lightly to the ground, disappearing into nothing.
“He’s in the bedroom,” a voice yelled. A herd of heavy feet trampled up the hallway of his house to where Steve was standing, dazed and disoriented. It took Steve several seconds to figure out that he was in his own house. “Put your hands in the air where we can see ’em,” bellowed a man’s voice.
Steve pulled his hands out of his backpack and lifted them into the air. The bag slid up his arm to his shoulder as his arms raised. Two officers entered the room with their guns drawn, pointed at Steve. One of them slid her gun back into her holster and pulled out a set of handcuffs.
“Cuff him.”
She wrenched Steve’s hands from the air and pushed them behind his back, removing the backpack from his right hand and setting it on a table nearby. She pushed the sleeves of his heavy coat away from his hands to expose his wrists. Then she locked his hands together behind his back with a pair of handcuffs. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be held against you in a court of law…”
“Could you make sure my backpack goes with us, please,” Steve asked as sweetly as he could, knowing that this kind of request could be refused. He tilted his head in the direction of the backpack.
The other constable flicked on the lights in Steve’s bedroom and inspected Steve’s bag. She opened the backpack and pulled out Steve’s notebook with the two others, the mirror plaque, an alarm clock, and dictionary and rummaged through the remaining items, smiling as she pulled out a pair of underwear.
Oops. Duck Boy.
“They’re clean,” she laughed to the arresting officer.
“The underwear or the backpack?” asked the other officer.
“Both,” she said. “We’ll bring it for you. It is the Christmas season, after all. Though you are some kind of sicko.”
They pulled Steve’s hat and gloves from his coat pockets, after patting him down and removing everything they could find, and wrapped him up for the journey to the police station. Then all three headed into the winter white to the police car.
“Good thing we left the lights goin’,” yelled the female officer into the wind. “We’d a never found the car without ’em.”
She was right. The storm had swallowed the car entirely. The only thing that stood against the winter blast was the lights. They loaded Steve into the police cruiser. After a little trouble pulling out of the growing snowbank and onto the road, they headed back to the station as the winter storm buffeted the car.
“What time is it?” Steve asked. The woman officer glanced at her wristwatch.
“It’s a little after three-thirty,” she said.
After a slow and slippery ride, the car bumped over the curb and came to rest in a growing bank of snow outside the station. The two officers led Steve into the police building downtown; one of them carried his backpack for him. Inside, they removed his gloves and hat, the handcuffs.
“We don’t need his fingerprints,” the woman said. “We got ’em on file already, from when his mom left.” She didn’t bother to correct herself.
Steve glanced down
at his hands, as he remembered.
No pinky.
He felt the space where his baby finger had been. His finger still felt like it was there, but it wasn’t.
So it wasn’t a dream.
“Do you want a lawyer present?” the policewoman asked, almost monotone. “Anything you say in the interrogation room can be used as evidence against you. A lawyer makes sure that you don’t say anything that will get you in trouble,” she explained.
“I don’t need a lawyer,” Steve returned quickly.
The policewoman shrugged. “I’ll probably need someone to OK this, since you’re a minor, but if that’s your decision, we’ll proceed.”
“I’d like to proceed,” Steve affirmed. The woman nodded and handed him some paperwork to sign. When she was done, she clacked the handcuffs back on his wrists—this time in front of his body—and led him, still wrapped in his coat, with his backpack, hat, gloves, to an interrogation room. She handed his bag to a man who was waiting outside the interrogation room and led Steve inside.
The interrogation room was more like a prison cell with a table and chairs. The room was scarred with abuse—holes in the wall, bruised and dented furniture, the chairs and table all bolted securely to the floor. Steve sat for a long time, waiting for someone to show up. His backpack was still outside. So he just sat awkwardly with his hands, handcuffed, in his lap.
An hour later Detective Larry walked into the room, his eyes dopey with sleep, his mouth set in an angry line. In his hand he carried Steve’s backpack. He opened it and tossed it onto the table. Then he slammed the door; the sound echoed in Steve’s ear. After he knocked on the backside of the door, Steve heard the scraping sound of some kind of lock fixing it in place.
“Hello, Steve,” he snarled. “Thought you could outsmart us, huh?” He paused, assessing Steve’s state and mood. “I’m going to ask you some questions, and you had better give me some answers. Do you want a lawyer present? Have you made your one call?”