“You, sir, should unmask. Indeed it’s time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.”
Masks
by Orrin Grey
“You were his friend, right?”
His granddaughter’s voice on the other end of the phone, her words clear and free from static. I wait to answer, don’t want to, because how do I say, “I don’t know?” For months now, he has been coming over to my house to play xiangqi two or three nights a week while we drink hard cider and talk about bullshit. Does that make us friends, or just two lonely old guys with nobody else to talk to?
Whatever I feel in my heart, what comes out of my mouth is bound to be an affirmative, because what else can I say? And besides, she is so far away—London, of all places, with children of her own that I can hear in the background—while I am so close—his own townhouse just two doors down from mine, only empty spaces between us, because this neighborhood is dying, just as he was dying, just as we all are dying. One uncomfortable phone call at a time.
She hasn’t said the words, but the implication is clear in her voice. If I don’t do it, men will come. Strangers. Impersonal men who will throw it all into boxes and, from there, who knows? The Goodwill? The landfill? No place where it matters. No place where it will be appreciated.
Am I the old man’s friend? I don’t think so. Do I want to do it? No. So why do I say yes into the receiver, my voice bounced across thousands of miles to his granddaughter in London?
The answer is guilt. No more noble a motive than that. (Continue Reading…)