Dave - Tyler Plofker

Sorry, let me explain.

We had a coworker named Dave who wore a mask of some kind of hardened clay or mud every day. By the time he started with us, it was cracking and chipping, and its paint was almost entirely faded, only some remnants of blue near the nose and red near the eyes still visible. Creases ran through its thick cover like deep valleys eroded by familiar streams: the stream of his morning greeting (a never changing, “How’s it going?”), the stream of his blow on lukewarm office coffee, the stream of his exaggerated, Excel-induced grimace, the stream of his leaving-for-the-day half-smile. We only saw slivers of his real face near the eye and mouth holes, and those spots were still encrusted with the mask’s brown residue.

He didn't talk much. When asked any question about his life—how his weekend was, how his holidays turned out—he would perform a rendition of sameness, spit platitudes while his creases grew deeper. “Too fast,” he would say. “Not long enough,” he would say.

Sometimes he would join us for lunch, attending when asked but never on his own. I probably invited him more than others did, but only because his desk was on my way to the pantry. When he sat with us we often forgot he was there. He would follow our faces, laugh at the right times, and say nothing. One afternoon when some coworkers were talking about how terribly they wanted to see the new Fast and the Furious film, he smiled and nodded along. Another afternoon when different coworkers were talking about how they never wanted to see the new Fast and the Furious film, he smiled and nodded along.

Nobody—neither us nor Dave—ever talked about the mask. He just smiled and laughed and grimaced and worked and left and came back and said the same things over and over and over.

Then, one day, when we were all in a conference room talking about assets and liabilities, talking about how we needed to debit this and credit that, Dave leaned back in his chair, pulled out a small handgun, and shot himself in the middle of the face.

The mask shattered, its shards falling onto the table and floor, some even, because of the strength of the blast, landing onto the laps of my coworkers, and all of us inhaling some of its dust. Dave was unharmed. The mask had shielded him completely. His skin, at least the skin not covered in streaks of brown, was so pale it was almost translucent and sagged everywhere—the corners of his mouth and eyes drooping downward into what looked like a distorted frown, though it was just his face at rest. He blinked once or twice and cleared his throat. He looked at us, looked down at the broken pieces of his veil, looked at the floor and the table and the wall and all around him. Then he pulled the trigger again.

I'm the only person still working here that was there then. Even the old bosses are gone. You joined us about a month after the last one left. So I’m asking you, now that you understand, now that you know, now that I’ve explained it, to please, please take that thing off.

***

Tyler Plofker is a writer in NYC. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Identity Theory, Maudlin House, Idle Ink, Defenestration, Bear Creek Gazette, Sublunary Review, and elsewhere. In his free time, you can find him eating sugary breakfast cereals, laying out in the sun, or walking through the streets of New York City in search of this or that. He tweets badly @TylerPlofker.