"Death Mask" by Jacob Patrick Brooks

I have a hard time getting up in the winter and today it was especially bad. It’s the cold, the dark, and how frigid my room is outside of my bed, especially with my dog still sleeping with her head poking out of the covers. She’s like a tiny furnace that has nails and perfect little needle teeth. She’s my entire world. I would be lost without her.

I eventually get up, get dressed and after swallowing my guilt, drive to work. I find a parking spot quickly and I’m getting out of my car when I spot my coworker walking towards me from down the road. He sees me and waves. God damn it. I wave back.

We somehow do this several times a week and I hate it every time. My coworker’s a sweet enough guy. Like, he’s real nice. He’s just hapless. Like a baby in a looney tune walking through a construction site. He wears a middle part that looks like a highway to his bald spot. He’s also got these big bovine eyes that move slowly behind big bus window glasses. My coworker is a decade younger, and he also has a BFA, but he has a studio in the West Bottoms, not his apartment.

My coworker waits for me at the entrance to our office, where he opens the door with a deep bow.

I nod, go inside and he follows me in.

I hurry up the creaking stairs with my coworker trailing me, asking how my morning was and

what I got up to last night. Over my shoulder I mention I’m going to see an art show nearby

during lunch.

“Oh really? At Jackson’s gallery on 76th?”

“I don’t know, maybe. It’s near here I know.”

“Jackson and I went to school together, he’s awesome. I’m doing a show there in two months.

You should come.”

“Oh that’s really something,” I say.

“You mind if I join you? I haven’t seen this show yet. He’s really doing something special there.”

Son of a bitch. I’m going to light myself on fire in the street and point at my coworker’s window until I curl up like a dead spider.

I tell him I don’t mind at all. “Sounds fun.”

“Hell yeah, man, hell yeah,” my coworker says.

I smile. I’m trying to be nicer to make the workday go faster. At the top of the stairs I turn left and he goes right. I close the door to my office and alternate between answering emails, scrolling through the hundreds of art instagram accounts I’ve followed since graduating 10 years ago (summa cum laude) and watching YouTubes of animals playing musical instruments.

A few hours pass. My coworker knocks on my door. He says, “Hey you ready to go? Did you need to get lunch?”

“Oh, no I ate already,” I say. This is a lie. I have soup in my bag that I plan to eat after the gallery. I want time to get lost on the way to the gallery, back from the gallery, and in the artwork. Romantic, stupid. I chastise myself for being mean to myself.

We walk out the front door of the office into the cold. My coworker eats a wet roast beef sandwich

he brought from home. It’s messy, covering his hands as we walk. He reminds me of a toddler with an ice cream cone in the summer. I smile, thinking about how he’s had this exact same face his entire life. Not changing since he was 9, probably. I imagine myself at my current age as the father to his 9 year old self. In my mind we fish and play catch. One night, he roughhouses a bit too hard with one of his brothers and breaks the vase I made while taking a glassblowing class before he was born, when his mother and I were still just a will they won’t they. In a flash of rage I hit him once across his perfect 9 year old face and instantly regret floods my body. My 9 year old coworker thumps his tiny feet down the dark hallway towards his room. Over his shoulder, he tells me in his current day, adult man voice, that he hates me. I spend the rest of the night drinking Miller High Lifes and smoking in the garage.

— ✦ —

I’m pulled back to earth by my coworker saying, “Why would I get a vaccine that doesn’t even work, you know? And it's so new. I just don’t even know what’s in it. So yeah we got in a big fight about it and now I don’t know what’s going on now."

“What? Yeah, that’s so cool,” I say. We’re outside the gallery now.

The gallery is on the ground floor, beneath a dermatologist, a dentist, and a private residence, in

that order. The front door is unlocked. I walk through the foyer and into a tiny room with bright

lights and dark wooden floors. On the far end is a half wall concealing a low desk where a handsome gallery attendant with a shitty little haircut looks at you once and ignores you for the rest of your life. Sometimes there’s a dog with him.

The dog also ignores you.

Today it’s just the attendant. I walk in and he looks up, the top half of his face is visible. The attendant blinks at me and looks back down. My coworker walks in and says, “Hey Jeremy, what’s up big dawg."

The gallery attendant glances, stands up and smiles. He crosses the gallery and gives my coworker a big hug. “Oh dude, Sage, it’s so good to see you, what’s up man it’s been a million years.”

The attendant and my coworker talk while I circle the room. The show’s mostly photos, little grids of polaroids elegantly placed within mattes that sometimes also frame a piece of wall paper. They look old, the photos, the work, the people. There’s a heaviness to all of it. An emotional gravitas that’s hanging above my head like a cartoon anvil.

On the wall to the left of the gallery attendant’s desk is a plaster mask hung about 5 feet off the ground. The attendant and my coworker are standing right in front of it, but they go into a backroom when I approach, leaving me alone.

The mask is a man’s face with bright, husky blue eyes, the outline of which are drawn with graphite. The face is smooth, like it’s been sanded. There’s a few wrinkles in the forehead. The chin is weak. In the center of the face is a dog’s snout instead of a human nose and mouth. I snort. The nose was black and under the dog’s lips there was a sliver of red. I snort again and smile bigger and walk around the room again in reverse. It’s a small room, so it takes no time, really. Maybe 30 seconds. Doing this is nothing to me.

I look at all the work for the third time. The attendant and my coworker are still in the backroom. I go to the dog face again. I can’t get over this thing. Something about it is just wrong. More wrong than the little squares of wall paper or grandmothers or whatever. This is the work of a sicko, a freak. It makes me mad. I scoff. I move to the first photo again, a wrinkled woman in a birthday hat looking away from the camera. Genius.

I check my phone. Plenty of time left before lunch is over but I want to move at my own pace. I am lingering because I suspect if I leave too quickly the secret to this work will be lost forever. I also am

giving myself time to figure out the best way to be mean to my coworker for abandoning me. I am thinking of new and exciting ways of being cruel. Like saying, “Seen everything yet?” or, “You getting paid by the hour?”

Another lap. No dog face. Too disturbing. Demonic. I stand by the door and grab the checklist out of a little plastic wall thing and flip through the pages until I see a little 1x1 inch photo of the mask in ¾ profile sat on the right side of the page, on the left it says:

“Of course,” I mutter to myself. I’m annoyed.

My coworker and the gallery attendant walk out of the back room laughing.

“Good to see you man,” the attendant says.

“You also, I'm gonna look at the show and then, you know.” My coworker makes a face and they laugh again. He does a quick lap, glancing at the work. He stops at the dog head for a second, then looks at me. He points at the dog's face and shakes his head. My coworker mouths, “Crazy.” I go into the foyer and wait.

A moment later my coworker opens the door. He looks into the gallery and says, “Catch you on the flip, awooo!!” The attendant howls back as the door closes and we’re out the door into the cold again.

We walk against the wind. I’m in a bad mood but I can’t help being excited. I loved the show. I feel excited by it. For the first time in forever I feel like I could work again. I say as much to my coworker who nods politely. “I mean, it was mostly over my head, but it was cool to see work I didn’t get,” I say. My coworker says, “I wish there was more work being made that looked like that. Where things feel like they were done like, not urgently, but like they were connected to something. Like they were purged more than thought about.”

I talk about the mask. How I thought it was the weak part of the show.

“How does someone even think of something like that?” I say.

“I mean, there is a story behind it,” my coworker says.

“I don’t want to know,” I say.

“It’s really simple."

“I don’t care,” I say. “I hate that piece, that show is stupid,” I say. “Sorry.”

We walk the rest of the way in silence. I hold the door open for my coworker and let him walk all the way up the stairs without me. He looks back from the top and I look away quickly and head out of sight. I take the side stairwell up. It smells like piss in here, and takes longer, but I don’t mind taking the scenic route. I get into my office, take off my coat, and lock my door. I pull out the Tupperware of soup from my bag, open the lid and sip it slowly from the corner. The plastic is sharp against my lips but I don’t want to go out there again. I don’t do anything for the rest of the day.

________

Jacob Patrick Brooks is an ex alcoholic, cigarette smoker, and psychedelic enjoyer. He has survived hundreds of assassination attempts, but holds no hard feelings because “the attention is worth the threat to life.” A CIA officer once said Brooks was blessed and highly favored by not just the President, but the LORD himself. Jacob Patrick Brooks lives and works in New York City with his longtime collaborator Crusher the Dog.

Jacob Patrick Brooks is on Instagram @worldsstrongestpainter