4. Then The Pitch Part 2

Cleo held up the mask, the crown of its head pinched between her fingers.

She said, "I know it doesn't look like much." She slid one fist inside, like the mask was a puppet. Her hand fell well short of filling the head, and its features were slack, distorted, a Munch or Dalí painting not quite come to life. "But it photographs well."

I said, "I'm guessing I'll be wearing that."

Valentina said, "Yes."

"For the whole movie?"

"Pretty much."

I knew less about mask-making than moviemaking. Still, I asked if they needed a mold of my head or face to make sure it fit properly.

"You might have to cut your hair shorter. But we can adjust, pad it out, or make a new one if it doesn't fit," Valentina said, and she smiled at Cleo.

Cleo practically screamed her response. "Yeah, right. Make a new one."

She passed the mask over to me. The latex was cold and clammy. Or maybe it was my hands that were cold and clammy. Cleo fidgeted as my fingers inspected and explored the mask. Okay, I assumed I would be playing some sort of creature, given that they'd told me I didn't have many or any lines of dialogue. The mask looked ridiculous and fake, something you might pick up in a department store before Halloween. I wanted to ask if they were joking again, but I didn't want to risk hurting anyone's feelings. I thought about trying it on, but I got the sense Cleo would've stopped me from doing so with her fork. Whereas previously she'd sat in a sunken slouch, now she was curled over the table, ready to strike.

Valentina said, "Yeah, it looks underwhelming now, but it's disturbing as fuck when someone wears it. Tell him the story behind it."

"It's the weirdest thing." Cleo barely got the sentence out before the two of them broke up laughing.

Valentina said, "Be serious."

"I am!"

I laughed even though I wasn't in on the joke and assumed I very much was the joke. I dropped the mask and it flopped onto the tabletop. "You guys are fucking with me. You had me going."

They assured me they were not. I asked why they were laughing, which made them laugh harder.

Valentina finally said, "Because what Cleo is going to tell you about the mask will sound bonkers, but it's the truth."

Cleo spun her tale: The Rhode Island town in which they grew up had experienced precipitous population decline after mill closings in the '60s and '70s, so the town had consolidated its three elementary schools into two. The abandoned McKay Elementary School, the same one they would be using as one of the locations for the movie, became a not-so-secret hangout for high school kids on Friday and Saturday nights. Cleo, Valentina, and another friend, Karson, who was also going to be in the movie, explored the place on Sunday mornings or after school, when they could have it to themselves. Cleo went alone sometimes, usually during the summer. She sat in the different classrooms and wrote short stories, nothing more than a paragraph or two, about a student or a teacher she imagined had once been in the room. Upon returning home from college, and knowing Valentina was planning to make short films and possibly a full-length movie, Cleo wanted to write a screenplay that would make use of the school. Last spring, for the first time in years, she returned to the school looking for story inspiration. In one of the classrooms on the second floor, the remaining student desks, most of which had been mangled and smashed, were piled in the center of the room. It was bright outside, but not a lot of light filtered through the milky, cataracted windows. The room was dusky. If she squinted, the desk pile looked like a thicket of denuded branches. Ringed within the rubble, a shadowed lump jutted up from the floor. It looked like a head. She circled the desks, looking closer, trying to convince herself it wasn't a head, but the more she looked the more she was sure it was a head, and there, by herself in an empty room in an abandoned school in a dying town in a dying world, she thought she saw eyes and she thought she saw them blink. At this point in her story, Cleo was laughing, but it was a different kind of laughing. There are so many kinds of laughter, aren't there? She described her panicked flight from the school, the knocks and slaps of her own fleeing footsteps, not daring to breathe until she left the building, and once she was outside, the world appeared changed by what she'd seen. Cleo corrected herself; of course the world wasn't changed—and here for the only time in her tale, she stammered, searching for the right words. The world was the same, but a new part of it had been revealed. Even if what she found wasn't a head, the world was indeed a place in which she might find one. She didn't tell anyone what she saw, at least not until she showed Valentina her first draft of the screenplay a few weeks later. Upon returning to her childhood home, her bedroom, she spent the afternoon and that evening and the next morning convincing herself she didn't see a head, and if it was a head, it wasn't a real head, and by "real" she meant a head that was once atop a living body, and that this not-real head didn't have eyes that blinked. She returned to the school the next day, after work, and instead of her notebook she brought a flashlight, long and heavy enough to be a cudgel. Cleo stood at the base of the cement stairs and looked up at the brick building, at how big it was, and then she stared at the slitted mouth of the propped-open door and remembered the emptiness inside the building and how awful and wonderful it had felt to be alone within the emptiness, so she crept back into the school, listening for sounds that were no longer there, for sounds that would be heard by no one but her. With that kind of reverence in her heart, she walked up the stairs to the second floor and that classroom at the other end of the hall, where everything was where it was, where it had been. She said "Sorry" out loud to no one and turned on the flashlight, which rudely burned away the murkiness and exposed the head as a mask. She supposed there still could be a head under the mask, hiding its true face, but she didn't think that was the case, and she admitted it was weirdly disappointing to no longer believe it was a real head. (I didn't think it was weird, and I told her so.) Cleo pulled apart the desk pile until there was a path to its center. There was no blood on the floor, no neck drippings. We all giggled at her phrase "neck drippings." She tapped the mask with her flashlight and it toppled over, exposing a white neck or base. Later, when she was home, she carefully removed the mask from the featureless Styrofoam head. The foam was mealy under her fingers, sloughing off and disintegrating at her touch. The schoolroom floor within the ring of desks was extra dusty and grainy with foam granules. The tile under the head was all scratched up, and the longer she looked, the more certain she became that the scratches were purposeful. Since she was taking the mask and would write a story using it, Cleo decided to leave some sort of offering, something of herself in its stead. A gift for a gift. She pushed and piled dust over the floor scratches, then she wrote what she thought would be the first line of her screenplay into the dust. When she brought Valentina to the schoolroom a month later, the desks were still there but what she had written in the dust had been smoothed away.

I didn't believe her story about finding the mask and I said so, multiple times. Valentina and Cleo both insisted Cleo was telling the truth. I wondered aloud if what they were telling me was a scene from their movie. Valentina said they contemplated incorporating the discovery of the mask into the screenplay but had decided against it, opting to leave its origin mysterious. I picked up the mask and inspected it some more. I'd never seen anything exactly like it, but it also wasn't wholly unfamiliar. I assumed they'd made it and I said that I thought they were giving me this cursed-mask legend to inform my performance.

Valentina and Cleo spoke at the same time: "Who said anything about a curse?" and "I never used the word ‘curse.'"

I said, "Well, assuming this is legit. Any lost object is cursed."

"Isn't the mask a found object? And cursed by what?" Valentina asked.

I shrugged, and it was my turn to stammer and stumble through saying not quite what I wanted to say or mean. Maybe some of us make movies because words so often fail us. "I—I don't know, I guess, cursed by, um, whatever happened to it, you know, to make it lost."

Cleo said, "The mask wasn't lost. It was left there on purpose."

"Sounds even more cursed to me," I said, and chuckled. No one laughed. I'd hoped they would.

During the fifteen years after filming and prior to the 2008 leaked images and scenes, I haunted costume shops and made countless deep-dive online searches, but I never found another mask that looked exactly like that one.