She kept it because she couldn’t throw it away and couldn’t look at it and couldn’t stop looking at it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The mask had been a prop. That was the official story, the one she told the few people who still asked questions \u2014 a theatrical prop from the last show she had performed in, before the show closed, before the bookings stopped, before the particular cascade of small catastrophes that had rearranged her life so completely that the woman who had once stood on stages in front of thousands now crouched in an alley off Michigan Avenue in Chicago, holding a smiling replica of the face she used to perform behind, trying to remember if it had ever felt like hers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her name was Tess. It had once been a name that appeared in programs, on marquees in regional theaters across the Midwest, in the Arts section of three newspapers whose print editions no longer existed. Tess Harlow. The name had carried a specific weight for approximately seven years, the weight of a career that was not famous but was real, the weight of a life organized around craft and rehearsal and the terrifying nightly act of standing in the light and being entirely visible to strangers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She had been good at it. This was the part that still found her, the part that arrived in the cold of the alley and sat beside her uninvited \u2014 she had been genuinely good at it. Not the smiling. Not the performance of performed happiness that the mask represented with its fixed and pleasant expression. She had been good at the real thing, the difficult thing, the Chekhov and the Miller and the new playwrights nobody had heard of yet, the work that required you to find something true inside yourself and offer it without protection to a room full of people who had paid to see exactly that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She had been good at being true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The addiction had its own timeline, its own internal logic that she understood now with the retrospective clarity that arrives too late to be useful. It had begun, as these things often begin, not with a dramatic choice but with a series of small reasonable decisions that were individually defensible and collectively catastrophic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A prescription after knee surgery. The knee had been an occupational hazard \u2014 stage combat, a fall badly caught in a production of a play she had loved and could no longer think about without a specific compound grief. The prescription was appropriate. The dosage was correct. The doctor had said what doctors say, and she had listened and followed the instructions and healed and then discovered that healed was not the same as okay, that the thing the medication had treated was not only the knee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It had treated, also, the noise. The constant auditory texture of being Tess Harlow \u2014 the anxiety before every performance, the relentless self-assessment, the voice that catalogued every moment of every show in terms of what could have been done better, which is a useful voice when calibrated correctly and a consuming one when it is not. The medication had turned that voice down. She had not understood, until it turned it back up upon stopping, how loud it had always been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The rest of the timeline was not unique. This was important to say because addiction narratives get flattened into morality tales and the morality tale version always has a clearer villain than the real version, which was mostly just a woman making decisions in the dark with the information available to her, which was incomplete, which is always the case, for everyone, and the only difference is whether the incomplete information you’re operating on leads you toward the alley or away from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She had the mask because the director of the last show had pressed it into her hands on closing night, a gift, a joke that was also not a joke \u2014 “Something to remember us by,” he had said. He had meant it kindly. He had been a kind man who did not know that closing night was also the night Tess understood she was not going to be able to keep the life she had built, that the accounting had been done and the numbers did not work and that she was going to lose things, the only question being what and in what order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She had lost them in this order: the apartment on Wicker Park, the callbacks from her agent who stopped being her agent, the relationship with a man named Joel who had tried and been right to stop trying, the storage unit with most of her furniture, the sense of a future that was more specific than the next twenty-four hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She had kept the mask.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She looked at it now in the alley light \u2014 the street lamp catching the smooth synthetic face, the smile that had been manufactured to represent the universal approximation of pleasant, the face that looked like someone whose life had not taken her down any alleys, whose phone battery was not dead, whose last meal had been \u2014 she did not think about the last meal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The face looked back at her with its permanent pleasant expression, and Tess felt, looking at it, the strangest compound of emotions: grief for the woman the mask was supposed to represent, the version of herself she had performed for years; and something else, something she was not yet able to name but that arrived in the same chest-space as anger, which was the recognition that she had never actually been that face, that even at her most successful she had known it was a performance, and that somewhere underneath both faces \u2014 the mask and the alley \u2014 there was a third one she had never fully stopped to look at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The third face was the problem. The third face was also, she suspected in the way you suspect things you’re not ready to fully believe, the answer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"