A Wrinkle in the Realm

A WRINKLE IN THE REALM

By Ben Okri

Originally published in The New Yorker February 1, 2021

An online version with audio of the story may be found here (unsure about the site's paywall for non-subscribers): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/08/a-wrinkle-in-the-realm

The first time he realized that there was something not quite right about him was when a woman crossed the street as she saw him coming. He thought it was a coincidence. Then it happened again.

He began to watch those around him. One day, on the Underground, a woman three empty seats away moved her handbag to her other side when she saw him. He wasn't sure why.

After the fourth or fifth time something like that happened, he looked at himself in the mirror. He thought he was normal, like everyone else. But when he looked at himself through the eyes of those who clutched their handbags when they saw him he understood that his face was not as normal as he'd thought.

He couldn't see what was wrong with it, but the longer he looked the more certain he became. Something was wrong with him that he couldn't see. The mirror revealed aspects of his face that he hadn't noticed before. Which aspect made people cross the street to avoid him?

This troubled him so much that he was unable to sleep most nights. He wanted to talk to someone about it, but he couldn't think of anyone. When it was daylight, on his way to work, he looked nervously at people. He wondered when they would see him, and act on that seeing. But people hurried past without noticing him at all. This was as baffling as when they crossed the street. Why didn't they see him? He was purposefully looking at them, to see if they reacted to something strange in his face. But the more he looked the less they seemed to see him. The experience of being fled from at dusk, and not seen in daylight, struck him as a paradox.

After a while, he decided to test whether it was really him they were fleeing, and what it was about him that caused this reaction. He reasoned that, from a distance, at dusk, it is difficult to see the details of a person. Therefore, it had to be something about his shape, the way he moved through space, that made people want to avoid him. He concluded that it had to be the way he walked.

He experimented with different kinds of walks. He walked in a bandy-legged way. He made himself shorter and less threatening. He walked sideways, to be less conspicuous. All this only made people avoid him more. They crossed the street even sooner. One evening, he was going home from the small advertising firm where he worked. He made his way down his street, with its double row of plane trees. The trees took up part of the pavement, obliging people to go around them one at a time. He liked the trees on his street. Each one grew at a unique angle. They were the only things in the world that were good to him. They never judged him. When he went past, he always touched them.

The trees were big and silent now. He walked slowly. He saw the form of a woman far up the street and he made himself smaller. Then a man came in from a side street. The man, tall and a little bowlegged, walked toward the woman. What would the woman do? Would she cross the road at the sight of the man? Was it maleness that caused the fear? The man walked past the woman, who hadn't crossed the road. It wasn't maleness, then.

He wondered when the woman would notice him. What would she do when she did? At that moment, she looked up and saw him. Her body recoiled noticeably, and she hurried across the road.

He was hurt by this. He stopped and couldn't move, rooted in a nameless fury and shame. His mind was full of things he wanted to say to the woman. He wanted to say, "There's nothing wrong with me, you know," or "I'm not going to mug you," or "Do you think I am remotely interested in your body?" or "Why did you cross when you saw me and not when you saw the man in front of me, who looked much more dangerous?"

He had many things he wanted to say. The street was empty. It was getting dark. Then he did something that surprised him. He began to cross the street.

The woman saw him crossing. A look of alarm appeared on her face. She started to cross back. He followed. She didn't want it to be obvious that she was avoiding him, but she made one last effort not to meet him in the middle of the street. As he drew nearer, she opened her mouth in the beginnings of a scream. Just before he brushed past her, he said, "There's nothing wrong with me. I'm not going to eat you."

As he spoke he was aware of how it sounded. I shouldn't have said that, he thought.

Once he'd passed her, the woman, released from her terror, ran away at such a speed it was as if there were a demon chasing her. She made a strange noise as she ran. He watched her flee. His experiment had been inconclusive. He had learned nothing about why people avoided him.

That evening, his face looked different in the mirror. He had a regular face, with a bit of a beard, a prominent forehead, good strong lips. His jaw was a little pointy, his ears didn't stick out, and he had been told that he had nice eyes. His teeth were white. He had never smoked in his life.

But after his encounter with the woman something had changed. Something about his coloring and the general shape of his face had gone slightly awry.

The next day, he asked his mates at work if there was anything different about him. They looked at him and weren't sure. There was something different, they said, but they couldn't put their finger on what it was. He became obsessed with the idea that something about him had changed, and that the people who avoided him were responsible for that change. He was not sure how.

He went out of his way to avoid the gaze of others. Afraid that when people saw him they would take extraordinary pains to avoid him, he made sure not to encounter anyone in the street. When he saw people from far away, he would hide or turn his back to them and remain like that until they had passed.

At work, his behavior became so odd that people began to think him unhinged in some way. Those who had known him for a long time found it hard to believe. But his constant ducking when anyone looked at him, his reluctance to meet people's eyes, his frequent scurrying out of the way in corridors, which at first seemed comic, soon gave him a reputation for evasion that, with time, became a source of suspicion. Folks were puzzled by the way he'd suddenly disappear when looked at, by how he made himself as invisible as possible during meetings. They didn't understand why he never attended the parties to which he was invited, or why he never lingered for a drink after work.

Often, people would catch him in the men's room scrutinizing himself in the mirror. Sometimes he could be seen contemplating his shadow. When he spoke to people, he always seemed to be hiding his face. Soon, people began remarking on how odd he looked, though no one had really got a good look at him for some time.

He never appeared in photographs anymore. If anyone turned a camera on him, he rushed off. Then he began to avoid mirrors. He was sure that the more he feared what he looked like the more he would become what he feared.

But what was he to do about people crossing the street to avoid him? How was he to carry on with the stress of being avoided, the negation of being shunned? The anxiety crippled his daily journey home. When he got to his street, with its double line of plane trees, fear would grip him, a fear of the eyes of others. He sometimes wished that he could become invisible, so that he wouldn't have to endure the shame of seeing people flee from him.

Then, one day, it occurred to him that if he wore a mask he would be freed from these anxieties. It seemed an elegant solution. There was a stall that sold masks in the local market on Sunday mornings. He looked at many different masks. Most of them, too outlandish, he rejected out of hand. What he needed was a mask that was as much like a normal human face as possible.

He bought seven and tried them out at home. He took care to put them on before looking in the mirror. Of the masks, five seemed useful. He felt that the best way to choose the most normal-looking one would be to try it out in the office and on the walk home.

At work, no one seemed to recognize him. He was stopped at the reception desk, but when he gave proof of his identity he was allowed upstairs. His colleagues balked at his appearance. When he sat at his desk, they asked if it was him. When he replied that it was, they stared. Then they began to whisper. He was summoned to his boss's office.

"What are you playing at?"

"Nothing, sir."

"Why are you wearing a mask?"

"It's done out of consideration for others. My face troubles people, sir."

The boss studied him.

"You call this consideration?"

"Yes, sir. At least people know better who I am."

"Do they?"

"I think so. And, what's more, I can let them look at me. I don't mind being looked at with the mask on."

"But it's frightening. How do we know it's you? If everyone came to work with a mask on, life would be impossible."

"Let's try it for a week, sir, and see."

Each day, he wore a different mask. Each day, the response was the same. The manager called him into his office. By the end of the week, the manager had had enough.

"You might need to see someone," the manager suggested.

"It will all be resolved next week," he said.

"Either you see someone or we'll have to fire you."

"But why, sir?"

"You are scaring everyone. You make it hard for people to do their work."

"It will be sorted out next week," he promised.

Every day that week, his walk home had confirmed the efficacy of the masks. On the first day, women who normally would have fled across the street when they saw him now only stared at him as he went past. On the second day, a woman began to cross but changed her mind and stayed on the same side of the street, perhaps out of curiosity. By the fifth day, none of them noticed him.

This surprised him. He was certain that the masks made him look unnatural. Why were those who normally fled from him bothered by his face but not by the mask?

He took the question to the man who sold masks at the local market on Sunday mornings.

"You never told me what you were buying them for," the man said. As if to advertise the power of the masks he sold, the man wore a mask himself. On this day, he was in an Aztec mask that delighted the children as they went past. Many people stopped to buy his impressive disguises. "Now that you've told me the problem, I believe I have the best mask for you. There is one condition, though."

"What's that?"

"For the first week that you wear it, you must believe that the mask is your face."

"Is that all?"

"That's all. It's simple."

The man took him to the back of the stall, where he stored the vast quantity of masks he had acquired from all over the world. The man asked him to shut his eyes. Then the man put a mask on him and told him not to look in the mirror for a while. The man refused to charge him.

"You did me a favor. Because of you, all these people stopped at my stall. They must have been drawn here by your face, eh?" the man said, laughing.

When he got home he was curious, but he did not look in the mirror. By morning, the mask had fused with his face. He touched his cheek and felt no mask on it. He had no need to look in the mirror.

At work, everyone stared at him in wonder. The manager called him into his office and gazed at him for a long time, then sent him back to his desk without uttering a word. On the walk home, he was so preoccupied with the unusual reaction of his co-workers that he forgot to notice whether people crossed the road to avoid him. Near his house, a pretty young woman stopped him to ask for directions. She was lost. He gave her clear instructions and wished her well.

At the end of the week, one of the women in the office, a beautiful woman with long legs and fierce lipstick, who worked in the digital department, asked him what he was doing for lunch, but he didn't get the hint.

He no longer noticed his own mask, but he began to see the masks of others. When he walked home in the evenings, he wondered why he had never noticed them before. Now that he did, he saw that it was necessary to avoid them and he crossed the street before it was too late. ♦