HALLOWEEN ROMANTASY | The Masque Pt 2: I Asked a Monster to Be Seen

0:03 Hello and welcome to A Halloween Romanticy. Episode 2 masks off. A Halloween Romanticy.

0:36 Now, he said, will you run? And I want to tell you I ran, because it would make me sound sensible, but I have never once in my life done the sensible thing when the interesting thing was standing right there wearing a face I carved. So instead I said, not until you tell me what I'm running from, and not until you let go of my wrist, because I decide where I go. I have decided where I go for nine years. and I am not about to hand that to a man on the one night I was finally having a good time. He let go of my wrist, like it had burned him, which, given what I would shortly learn about him, is funnier than it sounds. There is no time, he said, then talk fast. So he talked fast, there on the balcony, with the bell tolling

1:24 us toward midnight. The morning mask is a hunt, It has always been a hunt. Once a year the host gathers his court, the old and the hungry and the no longer human, and he binds their natures into mannered human shape with a set of masks. And he salts the party with a handful of real human guests, the artist, the musician, the pretty stranger, the ones no one will miss by morning. And at midnight the masks come off, all at once, and the binding breaks, and four hundred monsters...

1:57 Remember what they are in the same instant, and the host feeds on the hunt that follows. On the running and the fear, the way you or I might warm our hands at a fire. He has done it for longer than your language has existed, the stag said. And this year, he has the finest binding he has ever had. Because this year, he found you. And you, I said.

2:21 What are you?

2:22 He was quiet. The antlers cut their shadow across the ruined garden. One of them, he said, finally. And his voice broke on it in a way that undid me. One of the hungry things. I have worn a human face at this party for 200 years and hunted when the masks came off because that is what I am and there has never been a reason not to. You have to understand what that is, to be a thing like me. There is no cruelty in it, which is somehow worse. A storm is not cruel. The tide is not cruel. I have come to this house every hallows for two centuries and put on a borrowed face and been charming for an evening and then, at the bell, remembered what I was and run down something soft and frightened across these grounds and felt nothing about it after

3:16 but the clean emptiness of a thing that has done the one thing it is for. That is what he made us to be. That is all the night has ever been. and then I stood in a doorway tonight and watched a woman cross a room to tell me the eyes of a mask were set alive instead of wrong. And I have spent every minute since trying to get you out of this house, because for the first time in 200 years, I do not want the hunt. I want you not to be in it. He looked at his own hands. I was going to get you to the gate and never let you see my face. Let you remember a stranger who was kind. That seemed like the best thing I had to give you. To save you.

3:56 and stay a mystery. And there it was, the exact shape of him, and I knew it, because it was the exact shape of me. That, I said, is the most cowardly romantic thing I have ever heard, and I make masks for a living, so I know cowardly romance when I hear it. You were going to decide for me. Save me and vanish, so I never got to see what you are, and turn you down, or not, with all the information.' You'd keep your mask on even while you took mine off. That is exactly what he does.

4:30 I pointed at the doorway where the host had stood. He keeps everyone masked so nobody has to be chosen. You were about to do the same thing and call it a gift. I have been given that gift my whole life. People deciding what I can handle. I am so tired of it I could scream. The bell tolled.

4:51 11.50.

4:54 I don't want to be saved, I said. I want to be let in on it. There is a difference and it is the only difference that has ever mattered to me. He stared at me. Behind the stag mask, his eyes, which I had set slightly wrong, were doing something I had never seen a person's eyes do, which is fill up with the specific terror of being about to be seen. If the masks come off and the hunt begins, he said slowly, 400 of them will remember what they are at once. I cannot stop that. No one can. The binding breaks at midnight. It is the oldest law of the night. And that, finally, was the thing I could do something about. Because I am not a woman who runs, and I am not a woman who gets saved, but I am, God help me, the

5:43 finest maker of masks alive, and a binding is a made thing, and anything a pair of hands can make, a pair of hands can unmake. or remake, or turn. Who told you the binding breaks? I said. Who told you the unmasking has to mean the hunt? It has always meant the hunt. Um, it has always meant the hunt because he made it mean that, I said. And I was already moving, back into the hot bright crush of the party. The stag at my heels, because I had restored those masks with my own hands, and I knew them better than anything living. I knew the warmth of them and the gladness of them. And a thing that is glad to be worn is not a cage.

6:29 It is a choice waiting for someone to offer it. He binds their nature and strips it off them at midnight and compels the hunt. But the binding doesn't have to release into compulsion. It can release into choice. The masks don't make them monsters. The masks let them decide. He just never let them. I knew it the way you know your own trade in your hands long before you can say it in words. A mask forces nothing.

6:57 A mask offers. That is the first thing you learn and the last thing you understand. For 44 years these had been made to snap shut at midnight and dump their wearers back into the host's hunger. But the snap was his, not theirs. A compulsion laid over the top of the real work like cheap varnish over good wood.

7:19 strip his compulsion off and the binding underneath would do the honest thing a true mask does which is hold you in a shape only until you choose to set it down i could not unmake 400 masks in 10 minutes i am good i am not that good but i did not have to unmake them i only had to tell the wearers the truth about what they were holding because a compulsion that nobody believes in anymore is just a suggestion and a suggestion is a thing you are allowed to decline I got to the great hall as the clock began. 400 masked faces turning up toward it in hunger. The host on the stair above them, with his arms spread like a conductor, like a man about to be fed. And I did the thing I had come, without knowing it. 44 masks, and nine years,

8:11 and one impossible night to do. I reached up, in front of all of them, in front of the host, in front of the stag, and I took off my own mask. Nine years. I want you to understand. Nine years of a face no one got to see, carefully, on purpose, because the last time I let someone see the real one they looked at it and left and I decided, the way you decide at 25, that a wound is a personality, that the mask was the only lovable thing about me. I took it off in a room full of monsters. because I finally understood that a binding you offer freely is the opposite of the one he forces. And you cannot ask 400 people to choose their own faces while you are hiding yours. My name is June, I said, to the whole hall, my voice

9:03 shaking and then not. That's my real name, and that's my real face, and nobody has seen it in nine years. He told you the unmasking is the hunt. He's wrong. I made these masks. and I'm telling you what they're actually for. The clock struck the first note of twelve. At midnight, you don't lose your human face. You get to choose. Monster or man. Hunt or home. His or your own. He never told you there was a choice because the choosing is the one thing he can't feed on.

9:44 So choose. The clock struck twelve. The masks came off. All at once. Four hundred of them. The oldest law of the night. And for one held breath, the hall was full of monsters. I will not pretend it was not terrifying.

10:00 It was.

10:01 Teeth and antlers and things with too many joints, faces out of the oldest dark. The swan woman unfolding into something vast and white and screaming beautiful. The fox-masked man all grin and no mercy. The old hunger came down over the hall like a tide coming in. I could feel it even as a human, the pull of it, the permission in it. The host's two hundred times proven promise that this was what they were, and all they were, and there had never been anything else to be. I watched four hundred monsters feel the hunt reach out for them, and I watched them hesitate. because one bare-faced woman had just told them there was a door. And the stag, in front of me, taking off the mask I had made, and underneath it, a face that was not a man's

10:52 at all, antlered, and inhuman, and wrong-jointed, and lit from somewhere behind the eyes. A creature of the wild hunt, beautiful and awful, the single most frightening thing I have ever stood in front of. He flinched. waited for me to run. They all did, every monster in that hall, poised on the edge of the host's compulsion, waiting to feel the old hunger take the choice away. I looked at the stag. I made myself look, and keep looking, at the whole terrible truth of him, the way I had asked him to look at mine. And here is the thing nobody tells you about being truly seen. It is the most frightening thing there is, and it is the only thing that turns a monster back into a person.

11:43 The longer I looked, the less I wanted to run, and the less afraid I was, the more the awful became magnificent, because fear is just beauty you have not chosen to look at yet. There you are, I said to him, just that, two words, and the whole of it. Not, I'm not afraid, which would have been a lie, and he would have heard the lie. Not, it's all right, which is the thing you say to a child. Just, there you are. As in, I have been looking all night.

12:17 As in, I see the thing underneath the thing, and it turns out to be you, and I am not going to look away from it. I have carved 400 faces in my life, and I had never once said the truest sentence a face can ever be shown, which is only that it has, at last, been found. And he chose. I watched him choose. in front of his whole starving court, with the host screaming on the stair for a hunt that was not coming, I watched the stag decide to be a thing that is wanted instead of a thing that is feared, and one by one, all through that hall, the monsters chose with him, not because I saved them, because I showed them there was a door, and then I was undignified enough to walk through it first. The hunt did not come. The host

13:07 stood on his stair, with four hundred guests declining, for the first time in longer than language, to be used. And a thing that feeds on fear, and the chase, found a room with neither. And I will not tell you he died, because I do not think his kind does, but I will tell you he went thin, and grey, and furious, and small, and then he went away. The way a fire goes, when every hand in the room decides at once to stop warming itself at it. The stag and I did not stay for the end of it.

13:42 We went out through the ruined garden, into the cold and the clean, under a moon, finally doing nothing theatrical at all, just shining, and he was still wearing the terrible, beautiful face, and I was still wearing my bare one, and we were both shaking. for the same reason, which was that we had each just done the one thing we had spent our whole long and short lives swearing we never would. You can put it back on, I said.

14:11 The human one. If it's easier. I've seen you now. It counts whether you wear it or not. He considered that, this creature of the old hunt, with a gentleness that looked strange and perfect on the monstrous face. I think, he said, I would rather be seen. It turns out it is the thing I was starving for. I thought it was the hunt. And then, because some jokes survive anything, you set my eyes slightly wrong, you know, on the mask.

14:42 I set them alive, I said. I keep telling you. What happened after that? Under that plain, honest moon, I am going to keep, because it is mine, and because a woman who has hidden her face for nine years... is allowed to keep one thing just for herself and the person who finally saw it. I will tell you only that there was nothing hidden in it, which was the whole point, that his hands were nothing like a man's, and I did not care, that there was a wildness in it, a careful woman should probably have been frightened of, and I had left careful somewhere back in the burning house, that he touched me the way you touch the one true thing in a room full of lies. like he could not quite believe he was allowed, that being wanted

15:31 as the actual thing you are, with nothing masked and nothing deciding for you and no good reason on either side except that you choose it, is the only version of the thing that was ever real and that I had spent nine years staging the counterfeit and would not be going back. I never did learn his old name.

15:52 He has one. It is long and in a language that predates mine. and he offered it, and I told him to keep it, because I had named him myself the moment I saw him across a crowded room. And a name you are given by someone who sees you is worth more than the one you were born into. He is my stag. I made the face he wore, and then I asked him to take it off, which is, I have decided, the entire definition of love, and I would know, because I spent my whole career on the other half of it and never understood the first thing until a bell rang at 11.40 on the worst and best night of my life. I still make masks. I am still the finest alive. But I do not wear one anymore. Not to events, not to him, not to anyone.

16:44 And when people ask why the mask maker goes barefaced, I tell them the truth. which is that I finally found the one thing worth more than choosing what people see, which is being seen, all the way down, the awful and the alive, and chosen anyway, in the cold, after midnight, with the masks off. Thank you for listening to The Mask.

17:08 May you be brave enough to take it off, and lucky enough to be looked at and kept. Happy Halloween.