"…he's just this guy, you know?" – Douglas Adams
Guy. It's what we ended up calling him, as he didn't talk a whole lot in the early days, and we had to give him some sort of a name. It was Jake who was actually responsible for naming him – Jake, the youngest of us and the last survivor we found on the East side. When we'd finished all the other introductions, Jake turned to the smiling mask and said, cheerfully enough "So, who's this guy, what's his story?" And from then on, Guy it was.
"That's so tragic," Brandon said, with the casual airiness that had become so much a part of how I saw him. Everything was tragic. Every new body, every broken piece of flotsam we found. I suppose that surrounded by so much tragedy, it wasn't surprising he'd latched onto it as his favourite word. Somehow it didn't make things any better for me. "Alisa, come and look at this one. He was obviously on his way to a party or something."
I hung back, head turned away so all I could see was the corner of the mud-stained cloak. "I don't want to look. Please, can't we just go? Brandon. Brandon, I want to go."
I know. That was pathetic of me. I think I've become a bit stronger now – we all have, even Guy himself, and he was strong in the first place. But Brandon was persistent. "Seriously, I've never seen anything like it. He's still got a mask on and everything."
He bent down toward the crumpled, sodden body, and then I did move forward, to grab his arm. "Well, don't try and take it off, do you really have to - Jesus!"
Because as he was reaching out for the mask's ties, the masked body was rearing up in the mud and a knife was flashing before us, gripped in the man's hand. I could hear his breathing at that point. That's what I remember most, funny, when he must have looked such a horror, but what I've held onto is the sound of his breath hissing harshly through the lips of his mask. In and out, breath rattling in his chest and throat. His lungs had probably been full of water, too, just like mine.
The mask is very plain, by the way. It's not like one of those fancy Venetian things, all gold and swirls and stuff or with a bird's beak or an animal's muzzle. Guy's mask is like an ordinary person's face, sort of pale cream. It has a definite smile to it, and the eyebrows, moustache and beard are picked out in black lines. The cheeks have a touch of rouge to them. It's almost a clown mask, but it can look happy or sad or angry anytime it likes, that's the weird thing.
I guess you're wondering why I'd go into so much detail about a mask. Well, it's because he never takes it off. No, not ever. I've known Guy for almost a year and a half now, and I've never seen any face but that mask. That's who Guy is to me, now. Honestly, if he took it off tomorrow and turned out to be Brad Pitt underneath I'd be upset, because it wouldn't be Guy. It wouldn't be the man I've come to know.
It looked pretty scary that first time, the frozen smiling face with the knife glittering below in the watery sunshine, and I have to say right now, Brandon was great - he pushed me behind him immediately and held up both his hands to Guy, showing him he wasn't armed, just like in the movies.
"Woah, woah, woah! Take it easy. Take it easy, all right? We're not going to hurt you. Please, put the knife down. Please. Put it down."
But he didn't move. We just stood there for almost a minute in silence, me and Brandon on one side and Guy standing there poised with his knife on the other, like he was about to stab the both of us, then Brandon tried again, bless his heart.
"Please. My name's Brandon, and this is Alisa, okay? Brandon and Alisa. What's your name?"
And still the mask didn't speak, although I could still hear him breathing, and gradually he began to lower that knife. It seemed to take hours. Brandon's smile grew as the blade became less threatening. "Hey, we're really glad to find someone else alive. Are you okay? Are you hurt?"
But we didn't get any answers from the faceless man. He just stood there, staring at us from behind his mask, until Brandon eventually said: "Can you hear me?"
And the man we eventually called Guy nodded, slowly, making his shoulder-length dark hair bob: at which point I think I stopped being afraid of him. He was real. He was human. And he was alive and alone, just as I had been.
Brandon, after a lengthy one-sided conversation with Guy on the silt beach, persuaded him to come with us. I wrote down some of it, just so you'll get an idea of what it was like communicating with Guy in the early days.
"Are you hurt?" A shake of the head: no.
"Did you used to live round here?" Nod: Yes.
"Aren't you going to take that mask off?" Emphatic no.
"Isn't it a bit uncomfortable?" Shrug: not really.
"Well, if you're sure." Nod.
"Are you…are you hungry?"
That was me. I had a Mars bar in my pocket that had washed up on the remains of Fleet Street. I took a step toward him and offered it to him when he nodded, just slightly, warily.
Later on, I worked out that Guy didn't eat except when he was alone. But even then, even at that early stage of distrust, he was perfectly polite. He took the chocolate from me, held it in his gloved hands, and the mask smiled in the bleak light. I smiled back.
"You can have it," I said. "I don't mind."
The only question we couldn't get an answer out of him on was "Are you a mute?". We'd established he wasn't deaf, or slow, but it was an ongoing puzzle to Brandon as to why Guy couldn't or wouldn't speak to us. It was something he asked that first day: "Hey. Er – so. Can you talk at all, or is it like, some sort of thing you've had since birth, or…?"
And Guy had stared at him with the deep black of the mask's eyesockets for several minutes, but there had been no answer in his body language. It wasn't like we even had any paper or pens to try and get him to write. Later, when Guy had vanished off on one of what we would soon start calling "Guy's walkabouts" – he would disappear, sometimes for hours on end, but he always came back, finding us unerringly even if we'd moved on from where he'd left us – Brandon told me his crazy theory, which was that Guy was a roving mime artist who really got lost in his work. The mask also formed part of this theory.
Oh, yeah. We asked about the mask, too, every yes or no question we could think of to put to him, until even Guy - patient, polite Guy - held up his gloved hand in a gesture of enough. The answers, as far as he was concerned, were obviously clear. No, he wasn't going to take it off. No, it wasn't stuck on. Yes, the same applied to the gloves. Yes, it was to do with something that had happened to him in the past.
Not knowing drove Brandon wild with curiosity. Not something I shared: it didn't matter much to me. So Guy was a mute in a mask. So what? He was warm and alive and I could hear him breathing nearby when we slept at night. He was a survivor, and obviously a dedicated one because he had more than one of those knives tucked under his cloak and he knew how to use them very well. I figured that he was just doing a hell of a lot of thinking in there, behind that mask, and that when he was ready he'd talk.
As it turned out, I was pretty close to the truth.