Al M. Wakeman
Is that really my face? I suppose it must be. I don’t remember where any of these wrinkles came from. But there’s my award winning grin, my all-American jaw, my mostly Turkish hair.
I focus on it harder than I have for a long time. It’s not the face in my head. When I scratch my nose, when I screw up my eyes, when I accidentally bite my tongue, this isn’t the flesh I imagine. I imagine the way I looked decades ago, when I was still fresh and so was the money I burnt up all around LA.
I look over my shoulder at my wife, softly sobbing in her night gown. I’ve noticed her face ageing, I suppose she must have noticed my face melting in real-time. She has the same eyes though. They haven’t warped or wrinkled. And when she stares at me through tears she knows how much it cuts me up.
I can’t bear it, so I turn back to facing forward, so I’m staring into my own face, when I say “Alright, alright, let’s take this easy. One step at a time.”
I do my best to impersonate my own smile.
About three years ago, my flatlining career felt a little murmur. I scored a role as a minor antagonist in one of those superhero movies. Totalled less than 10 minutes of screen time. But it paid for the house in Biarritz. And it gave the public the pleasure of remembering ‘oh yeah, him.’
It was a heartbeat of relevance. The sort you learn to leap on to survive out here. And Lou Midwest, my closest friend and agent since I was a kid, was the sort of rattlesnake who knew exactly when to strike.
“It’s all about the merch nowadays.”
“I don’t know what that means Lou.”
“Merchandise. Shit with your face on. But in an ironic way.”
So because of this stupid movie where I played some space prick called Morgoth the Really Really Bad, I now had to go to meetings about merch. You wait years for your next break, and then when it comes you find yourself trapped in a board room having to pay attention to the sort of people who chose to do a degree in marketing.
“It’s got to be ironic, you see. You know, sort of intentionally bad, like it’s a joke.”
I glared back at the kid as he explained the concept of irony to me. As young and slick as if he’d just emerged from the womb. He talked like he shot out wearing that suit.
It was evident that the marketing group thought irony had been invented some time in the 2010s, and they felt it necessary to show me a series of slides to really hammer home the concept. A hand-knitted, organic alpaca wool sweater vest, dyed vomit green. A bumper sticker inviting other drivers to ‘Honk! if you’re listening to Alice Coltrane’s 1971 meteoric jazz sensation Universal Consciousness.’ A hoodie boldly proclaiming:
I Love Jesus
And Pizza
When the slides finished, the marketing worms smiled at me the way they’d spent weeks practicing back on the mothership. Like they were waiting for their pat on the head. Like if I didn’t treat them like old friends and clever little boys, every time my name came up at a party for the rest of their lives they’d let their friends in on a little secret that I was actually a total asshole.
“Just print whatever shit you think works, you’re the experts here.”
That’s how a lot of my life’s troubles have started. Being intentionally flippant to spite someone I barely know, and not realising the consequences until later. Though how could I have known what would happen? Like any of them knew what would happen. They all just pretended afterwards.
“What do you mean masks, Lou?”
“You know like you’d get at a costume shop. Cheap, plastic things.”
“That’s my face you’re talking about, have a little respect.”
“Obviously I ain’t talking about the original money maker here. But the marketing dinks thought it would sell well with college students.”
I guess I never really had a catchphrase, or a particularly identifiable role. Just me and my face. It’s what I’d always lived on, so I guess that’s what I’d keep on doing. It just kind of felt weird, like I was the butt of some joke that I didn’t get. All I knew was the punchline was my face.
Obviously that was one of those existential problems the brain occupies itself with while it waits for a real problem to present itself. But it didn’t have to wait long. It was about a month after the masks went on sale that the first robbery happened.
“It’s fantastic! Your kisser is everywhere man.”
“Don’t give me that ‘no such thing as bad publicity’ spiel Lou. They killed six tellers.”
The flatscreen in Lou’s office was paused on the coverage. Four guys, and they’d caught three within 24 hours. The first guy they’d got through his card, buying four rubber masks from a shop only a couple blocks away, equidistant between his house and the bank. Three Frankensteins and one Hollywood has-been. From the numbers, I’ve got to assume that Frankenstein’s monster was their first choice, but they settled for me when the shop ran out.
Once they got the first guy, they got the next two pretty quick. All three Frankensteins. Which left one version of me completely unidentified, off on a beach somewhere with his winnings. A caricatured, cheaply printed, but disappointingly recognisable version of my face was on the screen for weeks before they gave up on the guy. It was almost as bad as Lou’s smug grin, when he got to tell me for the millionth time since we’d first met that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
I was now one of the best-selling costume masks in the country, among the prestigious company of Jason Voorhees and the president. And what I understand now, but didn’t appreciate back then, is that criminals are an excessively superstitious bunch.
Perhaps the guy got away out of sheer luck, or because he got out of the country the quickest, or because he didn’t use his own goddamned credit card to buy the masks he was going to use in a robbery. But a conspiracy theory went round that the real reason fate smiled on him was because he was wearing my face. What are the odds that the only guy wearing my mask would be the one to get away? Apparently, one in four was not the right answer. If you found the right forums, the answer, it turned out, was mathematically impossible. Among hardened criminals, whose lives contained enough conspiracy and fortune to really go in for stuff like that, this was entirely plausible. The leading theory was something to do with the lines on my face. Apparently the government has way more advanced face tracking cameras than they let on, and they can even scan your face through a mask now. But my face, like some sort of perfect barcode, is the ideal combination and spacing of lines so that it completely wigs out the high-tech super-futuristic face scanning system. So that’s when the real trouble started. All in the same fortnight, a 7-Eleven, a couple of houses and another bank all got robbed and it seems that yours truly was the culprit.
So then they decide to pull the mask from shelves. Not that it mattered, by that point we couldn’t keep up with demand. Some poor schmucks had been pulling double shifts somewhere in Hermosillo, 16-hour days staring into my vacuum moulded wrinkles. They must have had quite the fiesta when my face got discontinued.
It’s not a particularly pleasant feeling to know that your face is contraband in 48 states. If anyone ever gets around to writing my autobiography, I’ll make sure to do extra signings in Nevada and Hawaii.
Of course, nothing stokes the fires of conspiracy like a government ban. From there things got a little silly. Theories of the government studying the pattern of my face for hi-tech stealth equipment, maybe they were developing something even more potent, a version 2.0.
But then that all doesn’t feel so silly now, when it’s the reason a man wearing my face is holding a gun at my wife’s head. Another has gone to shut the dog up. The third me is looking straight at me.
“Look, look fellas. There isn’t anything like that and if there was you think they’d let me just keep it in my house?”
“Shut it man, we know the truth, hand over the advanced mask.”
“I’m a washed up has been, I don’t have access to the US government’s latest tech, even if it is based on my face.”
“Nah man, all you elites are in bed together. They say this new one is an almost perfect copy of your face, can fritz any camera.”
“Look kid, the only thing that looks exactly like my face is my face. Why don’t we all take it easy, chalk this up as a professional misunderstanding, you go home now and I won’t call the cops.”
My two rubbery faces turned and looked at each other. The slight overlap of the eyeholes stopped me from seeing what message was coded in the look they shared.
“Ok man, I hear ya.”
The leader put down his gun and reached into his heavy black jacket and pulled out a knife.
“Yours is the one and only.”
Al M. Wakeman is a writer based in Yorkshire. He recently won the Leeds Writer’s Circle prize for short stories and has been published in inScribe. A collection of his works can be found at almwakeman.com.
