Clearside

            If you hang around long enough, you may still manage to find a shredded piece of an old mask under some pile of dirt here or there. The local museum picked up most of what it could and locked it up behind some glass that requires an entrance fee to get to. Stick some dead bugs behind locked glass and you’d probably have people lining up with money in their hands to look at them. Some people are really suckers; we’ve seen all sorts. We work there at the museum. Something to keep us out of trouble for the summer, our parents figured. We’re the ones that rip your ticket in half when you walk in.

            Legend has it that this one guy put on a mask after some girl rejected him badly when he told her he loved her. We’ve heard the story so many times that we’ve started repeating it in our sleep. He was in his twenties and some kind of loser, the kind who always felt bad about himself.  The messed-up kind whose feelings you constantly had to worry about hurting. We had one like him in our class. Our teacher always made us act nice to him because he wore these thick glasses that made his eyes look like they were about to pop out.  We didn’t like to look directly at them. We’d feel our eyes getting bigger. You always had to pretend you didn’t see what was right there in front of you when something was wrong with someone—until you get to know them, I guess, and then you stop noticing.

Now this guy with the mask, we’re not sure if he’s still around.  His family wasn’t too bad off where money was concerned, but he didn’t turn out all that swell lookin’ and was pretty crabby about it. Something about his face was disproportioned or something. No one ever really said anything to him about it—folks were nicer those days—but he blamed all that went wrong on that. Everyone had to be nice to him, just like “pop-eyes” in our class. So when he told this girl, who was a pretty thing apparently, she didn’t run away screaming or anything, but really looked like she wanted to.

 It didn’t matter how nice her words were after that, because the guy was half way across town sobbing like a maniac before she could even finish the sentence. Some people don’t deal with that kind of thing all that well. It could’ve just been that he had a rotten personality. There are always people who don’t mind an ugly face, right? Anyway, no one has seen what he looks like except the old folks—he burned all his pictures before sentencing himself to exile—but their minds are too worn out by time to give you a decent description. We all figured it differently from what they’ve said and put up drawings of him in the back room of the museum. Nobody really remembers what his real name was. Everyone just calls him Ugby.

            It was never hard for a story to spread in our town, because people did nothing much but talk. At some point kids even started making games out of it. They would reenact the whole scene and whoever played the part of Ugby would have to run away. The other, who played the part of the girl, had to catch them. If they weren’t caught, they would get to wear the mask, which meant they won. They enjoyed it, we’d heard. Heck, we even tried it ourselves—it was a blast!

            It wasn’t far away, where Ugby went. His family had this cabin some miles away near an abandoned neighborhood where nobody ever went. Now everybody goes there just to see where it all happened. It’s become somewhat of a tourist attraction, you might say. The local folks started taking pictures of it and making crappy post cards that sold out. Really, people surprise you with what they’re willing to buy.

            That’s how it started anyway.  The place of exile was called “Clearside.” Whoever came up with it wanted it to be clever or something, though I don’t see how. It turned into a world of its own. They even put a fence around it to keep all the nosy folks out. They used to egg their houses for choosing to put on the mask—your house always got egged when you did something different. We didn’t understand why—it’s just a waste of eggs to let someone know you think they suck—but we didn’t really care what anyone did as long as they weren’t hurting anyone.

            So what happened was that people just started to head out that way and cover up their faces with those masks all the time. A lot of people will blame things going wrong on their faces. Most of them had faces that hadn’t done them any good, we supposed.  It got so populated that they had to build more apartments so everyone could fit. Lots of people just seemed to want to hide their faces all of a sudden.

            Once you were there you had to follow one rule: you could never take off the mask if someone else could see you. The only time you could was when you were sure no one else was around. It’s the only thing Ugby asked when others followed him into exile. It was the only time he ever spoke to them. He was rarely seen after that. He might have changed his mask when no one was watching, although someone was always watching out for him. People always needed someone to follow, someone to admire. Like older kids at school who don’t notice you’re there but you want to be just like them all the same. They’re so cool. We don’t know why—they just are.  

            The thing is, this carried on for years. In fact, so many years that children were born into it. People still got married—somehow. We supposed they didn’t care what was behind the mask. They never saw what the other really looked like, but that was probably the whole point. We supposed that was one of the things that gave people whose faces people hadn’t cared much to look at a chance at getting hitched. They had certain ways of doing things since they couldn’t tell who was who on the street. They would meet where they had previously arranged or just at home.  Most people changed their masks a lot so they wouldn’t be recognized with time. They figured if they wore the same one it would be the same as having the same face all the time—and what would be the point?

            The kids that grew up there had known no other way. They’re a bit old now.  They come in from time to time to tell people who are curious about Clearside what it was like to be born into it. For them it had been pretty fascinating to see what real faces looked like and their own in the mirror. Mirrors were something you couldn’t find anywhere in Clearside—one of the unspoken rules. You would somehow shame everybody that way. But some residents eventually started sneaking them in, which is when all the trouble started, they told us. There’s always the few that ruin something for everybody else.

            It was the kids that started it all, the downfall of Clearside as they call it. Their parents had made sure to explain that one rule very well. But “You know kids…” people will tell you. They don’t want to be told what rules to follow—they’ll do whatever the heck they want. Well, we don’t always follow the rules either.  

            What happened was that they began to meet in secret to take off their masks and show their faces to each other. One of the ladies we talked to said it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen when she first saw a real one, with the skin and the eyes and the nose and lips and all their different colors. She had never known anything like it. It was a work of art to her. She even cried. We shrugged our shoulders at that; we supposed artists were just more easily brought to tears by those sorts of things. We only cry when something hurts.

            Anyway, after all these kids all saw each other’s faces, they started to want to see their own. Someone managed to sneak in a mirror. That lady who cried when she first saw someone else’s face cried some more when she saw her own. She thought it was even more beautiful how her eyes changed colors with her tears. I guess some people could think dirt was beautiful. But she said it in a way that made us want to get beat up just so we could cry and stick our faces in front of a mirror to see what she was talking about.

            It wasn’t all that bad what they did. Well, we didn’t think so anyway. We would have probably done it too if we’d lived in Clearside. The older folks who lived there, though, started catching them during their meetings. So the kids would change their meeting spot every time. But an alert was issued throughout Clearside. It was a pretty quiet alert since no one wanted Ugby to find out about anything. But the more they cornered the kids with demands of what they shouldn’t do “or else,” the more the kids wanted to do it—just like all kids everywhere.

            Their small, quiet fascination with their faces turned into a riot when the kids started getting locked in rooms all by themselves. The older folks just wanted to keep the situation under control, thinking things might perhaps settle down. Those who hadn’t been caught found ways around this. They started running through the streets and grabbing at people’s masks until they pulled them off and exposed the person’s face in front of everyone. They’d scream for everyone to look away, but it was sometimes too late—some faces were seen and couldn’t be forgotten. We figured it was the same as when a kid in our school had his pants pulled down by an older kid, showing everyone his dinosaur underwear. We laughed.  He cried.  And then we felt pretty bad when he never came back again.

            Those people didn’t take it well, either, the Clearsiders whose masks were torn off. It wasn’t long after that they would pack their things and head off back to town or even further away. It didn’t seem to matter to them that they could put the masks on again; they felt they had already been exposed. No one would ever forget what they really were under their masks. What was the point? It would never be the same. Some people liked for things to stay the same.

            No one really knows if Ugby knew what was going on. They said it didn’t seem to matter after that, that it wasn’t about him anymore. Their spirits had been shattered and eventually the fence was torn down. More and more people kept leaving until there were hardly any left. They assumed that Ugby stayed behind, but it no longer mattered once they got back to their old lives and faces. They told us that they were all pretty quiet after that.

            Most of the people who were married in Clearside went their separate ways. They didn’t like to be reminded of it, probably. They said it wasn’t easy for them to see each other as they really were. It wasn’t how they had wanted it to be. You’d think it would have made things easier, but the folks we’ve spoken to told us we’d understand when we got older. Some people will tell you that a lot. Maybe it was just a way to get us off their backs.

            We sometimes go down to Clearside in the evenings and watch the cabin for a while. We put on masks at times, just for the heck of it. We like to pretend we were living there and play around. One time we thought we saw smoke coming out of Ugby’s chimney. We dared each other to go closer and maybe see what he looks like or if he’s dropped dead, but no one really wanted to. It wasn’t that we were scared—we just figured we’d leave him alone and that he’d come out on his own if he ever wanted to. But when he doesn’t, we just go on home instead.