The Masks Come Off

We are coming on two years since everyone in the city, and the country too for that matter, began looking like extras in an old horror movie — the zombie plasm has escaped from its lab, save yourselves — or a hip B&D-themed fashion show — if you love me, wear a gag. Now, as the mandate for garage doors of the face recedes, it is time to recall what it wrought.

Fear and wrath. The basic fear was fear of infection, but this was quickly displaced onto fear of passersby who might be infected, which became wrath at those who were not wearing their masks properly. Nose out over mask, like the prow of a sailing ship? Wearing a mask that way was of course stupid, if the point was to prevent be-germed sneeze-snot from being fruitful and multiplying. But thoughtlessness or carelessness read as malice. So we the masked raged, Terrorist! Arsonist! This was not good for citizenship or brotherly love.

On the heels of wrath came its old friend, politics. If the upholders of the new order were holier than thou, then they would generate, as if by chemi­cal reaction, rebels, who went maskless on principle. Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav’n. And besides I saw online that Dr. Shmendrick Shmendrickson said the best pre­ven­tative of infection was not masks but (fill in the blank).

Vexation. Especially in the winter months, when transmission, at least in my part of the world, was greatest, replacing masks when coming in from the cold was an almost acrobatic process. Since they could not be successfully manipulated with gloved fingers, you had to remove at least one glove, clamp it to your opposite ribs with an elbow, remove with the free hand your hood or hat, and reinstall the mask which, you hoped, had been deposited in some easily accessed outer pocket. No point putting any of this outerwear back on when you were done, because you were by now inside and fishing instead for your vaxx card, as well as your driver’s license to show by visual ID that you were its legitimate possessor. These could be lessons in patience. But they were not. The other way to remask was to leave the mask slung under your chin, and then hoist it back up by the point of its beak. But that risked snapping its elastic bands if you were too brusque — and becoming even more brusque when you asked your purse-bearing spouse, Do you have another? (and if not why not??).

Permanent makeup. You may have noticed, after months of mask-wearing, how it has changed your face. I certainly have. There are the goggle marks, spreading diagonally down from either side of the bridge of the nose, that make you look like a World War I–era race-car driver or aviator, or like a raccoon. Then there are the zits, which have not befriended you since high school, but which are now installed on your chin and, most prominently, on the tip of your nose, which resembles the bulbous red hooters of drunks in 18th-century humorous engravings. Speaking of noses, wasn’t one of the most fun things about wearing masks those moments when, with a trace of a cold (but not Covid!) or after some warming drink, a little trickle of wet formed in the nasal passages and, despite repeated attempts to sniff it back, deposited itself in your shield against illness (better order that new ten-pack)?

Litter. In fairness most people have been pretty good about depositing their used masks with their other trash. But, like deflated balloons and abandoned noisemakers on January 1 and 2, a cast-off mask occasionally appears on sidewalk or street. The five-second rule says you can eat something you drop on the kitchen floor if you pick it up within five seconds. Is there a rule for the city floor? Five hours? Five days?

And, as the months have worn on, and even more so as we enter the homestretch, comes mere forgetfulness. As in those dreams in which you sit down to take a test in a subject you have never studied, or find yourself at a cocktail party naked as the day you were born, you stroll through some place of public accommodation — supermarket, building lobby, a restaurant after rising from your table — unmasked. It was your memory and your body, behind your back, taking themselves and you into the before-time. Oh that we were there.

I have followed the literature on masks a bit. I know that the value of the cheapo ones is nil, and the value of the better ones is only slightly better. On the other hand, my wife and I both remember JFK and hence are at higher risk than most. On the third hand, I avoid rather than chide the unmasked. Life is too short to pretend it’s a cable-news show. It will all soon be moot, as better science, lower threat, the spirit of resistance, and sheer weariness take the masks off.

I don’t know what I would do if I were a parent of small children. Little kids do what they’re told, while simultaneously not comprehending it. Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist captured their state wonderfully. To see my children subjected to unwise directives would be beyond frustrating.

I resent the bad effects on adult life. We do not live in a world of purdah or harems. Our women and men greet each other face to face. Halloween apart, masks are the regalia of bandits and political criminals. The anti-mask laws that used to be on the books of many states were passed to frustrate the Klan. I saw a Klans­man once, passing out leaflets by a highway interchange. White robe, pointy hat, but bare face. The law made him show it. Now, coincident with the pandemic, masks shield BLM and January 6 rioters and industrial-scale shoplifting. Can we have our faces back, please?