The camp office had once been a farmhouse, in an earlier century. It was a single-story, wood-clapboard building in need of new paint, nestled between two ancient oak trees at the top of the hill overlooking the lake. Now it housed the camp director’s office, in the main room inside the front doorway, the infirmary, through a doorway on the left side of that room, and the camp store, through a doorway on the right side. None of the teenagers had ever noticed that it had an attic.

But it was now the weekend, that quiet period between when the previous week’s families had departed and before the next week’s arrived. So most of the staff had the day off. Julia, Anton, and Marcie were all in their first year on the summer staff, having just finished their first year of college. It didn’t pay much, but there were worse ways to spend your summer. They had been hanging out on the porch of the now empty office when they decided, on a whim, to explore inside. That’s when they had first noticed a narrow doorway at the back of the wall that the infirmary shared with the office. Opening the door had revealed a narrow stairway leading up to an attic.

The attic was cramped and dusty, with only enough headroom to stand fully upright when at the center, under the apex of the roof. Among the accumulated junk, they had found an old trunk, opened it, and discovered stacks of ancient magazines from the old days – mostly Life and National Geographic. Print magazines themselves were a fascinating anachronism for them, but as they sat on the dusty floor, leafing through them, the depictions of social life from a bygone era were even more intriguing.

The ubiquitous cigarette ads in Life from the early 1950s caught Anton’s eye.

“Look at this!”

He showed the others the back page of an issue. A clearly then famous baseball player, whose name he did not recognize, smiled with a bat over his shoulder and a lit cigarette in his fingers, cheerfully endorsing the brand, as if this somehow related to his athletic prowess. The ad copy noted, with authority, that doctors say cigarettes “aid in digestion.”

Julia was more intrigued by the National Geographic issues. The pictures stood in such stark contrast to those of the very modestly dressed Americans of the 1950s, with their depictions of indigenous peoples casually wearing nothing but beaded loincloths.

But it wasn’t the ancient clothing, or lack of it, that drew most of their fascination, as they tried to imagine what it would have been like to live back then. It was that no one was wearing masks.

“Imagine that,” Marcie mused, putting a magazine down on her lap. “You could see everyone’s real face. You would know what they actually looked like. You would know what they were actually trying to say.”

“Duh? They didn’t have masks back then. Don’t you know anything about history!” That’s what Julia said, but it came out through her mask as, “I hear you, Marcie. Life must have been very different then.”

Ordinarily, Julia would have been privately annoyed at being edited by her mask, but this time, in retrospect, she could appreciate the save. She had been unintentionally rude to Marcie – in her mind. If that careless comment had gotten through, she would now be wanting to take it back.

“Do you think people ever take their masks off in private?” Anton wondered. “I mean couples – people in a relationship? Do they take them off when they have sex?”

“Ew, gross!” Marcie complained. “Why would anyone do that? Do you really want to see someone’s real expressions at that point?”

“How would you know what that looks like?” Anton replied.

“You can see it in old movies. It’s not very pretty.”

“And what if your partner is unattractive?” Julia joined in. “You wouldn’t want to see that. Better to leave them on, I think.”

“Have you ever seen your parents without their masks?” Anton asked.

“Once,” Julia volunteered. “My mother left the bathroom door open by mistake.”

Anton and Marcie immediately turned to her in anticipation. They were both wide-eyed behind their normal-eyed masks.

“She was OK … I guess.”

“I don’t feel comfortable talking about this,” Marcie said. “It’s private.”

“But we each see ourselves in the mirror every morning, before we put the mask back on,” Anton offered. “So we know how much difference there is.”

“Which do you like better?” Julia asked, with a sudden bold curiosity. “Your masked self, or your native self?” Her mask let it through, but dampened the enthusiasm.

This was a little personal, Anton thought. But he and Julia had been exchanging subtle signs of mutual attraction recently, so now he wanted to give an honest answer. “I’m OK, I guess. You forget what you really look like, after a while. So if you’re having a bad day, the consistency of your mask is reassuring. How about you?”

“I guess I’m OK too.” She really meant it.

“Same here,” Marcie added. It wasn’t an honest answer. She thought her native self was unattractive. But that was OK, she reasoned. If she had given an honest answer, her mask would have said something like what she actually did anyway.

“The professor in a cultural history course I took last semester said there used to be something called pretty privilege in the old days,” Anton said. “Attractive people would get better grades and evaluations, get promoted more often, get better seats in a restaurant, be more likely to win elections, or be excused for their mistakes, or be praised for their accomplishments.”

“Why would people do that?”  Marcie asked. “What do looks have to do with any of those things?”

“That’s the point. She said that people didn’t consciously think about this. It’s just the way we are wired. People are attracted to attractive people instinctively. So this influences our treatment of others, whether we realize it or not. That was one of the original motivations for masks, she said. We couldn’t change human nature, so we gave everyone a similar attractiveness score on the Mersheim index.”

“Think of how awkward dates would be!” Julia said. “I mean without masks. You’d have to know how to say the right things all the time. And you’d probably be misunderstood, or say something too soon. My grandmother said that back in the day they had these dating apps, where you would see people’s photos and swipe left or right depending on whether you thought they were attractive enough. But the photos often didn’t match the real people when you met them. There would be a lot of posturing, presenting yourself as how you wanted your date to perceive you, but trying to get your date to answer honestly so you could figure out how they really felt. She said it was a terrible way to try to form lasting relationships. It was all based on manipulation.”

“Think about it,” Marcie said. “We all want to form romantic connections so badly, and most of us would never get there without mask help.”

“Thank God for that!” Julia exclaimed. “Have you ever tried one of those un-curated social media sites, where the AI doesn’t rewrite your messages before they’re sent? They’re cesspools – people always flaming and fighting with each other. I think sometimes we don’t appreciate how good we have it nowadays. Your avatar is your mask, and your messages match what your mask will say when you meet in person. So there is no deception, and no need to oversell.”

She had actually thought this. There was no mask filtering when it came out. But as she reflected on what she had just said, she was a little less sure. Wasn’t it really all deception now – carefully choreographed and flawlessly executed? 

She had recently been picking up the subtle signs of interest from Anton as well. I wonder what he’s really like, she thought. On a whim, she tried to dare him to take off his mask. Her mask said nothing at all. She had never experienced this before – a complete censoring. Makes sense, she thought. The AI was trying to protect her – and Anton.

But her intense curiosity remained. She tried signaling with her hands, making a gesture resembling a taking off of the mask.

Anton was confused by this. Does she want me to take my mask off? Or is she asking if she should take hers off? Either way, he was now caught up in the same curiosity. He tried making a similar gesture himself. She did nothing but smile – or rather, her mask did. He would have to take a risk, the very risk masks protect you from. He would have to go first. So he did.

Before her mask could finish composing a surprised, shocked expression in response, she had pulled it off to yield a broad smile on her actual face.

As the two teenagers beheld each other in their natural states, each noticed the same thing. They were both reasonably attractive, competitive enough with their masked appearances, but neither would have achieved a perfect Mersheim score. Each natural face had some subtle asymmetries. But these added to their subjective appeal. Each face was more unique than a standard Mersheim image. It felt more personal, more discovered.

But the most pronounced difference was in their eyes. Not their size, or shape, or color, but their focus. Each looked the other directly in the eyes. There was no discomfort, no embarrassment, no need to turn away. This intense beholding of the other’s eyes was something the masks protected you from. So it was a new experience. And it was intoxicating.

They each felt a growing warmth, in body and face, that signaled a strange, new kind of emotion. Not just of affection for the person in front of you, but from the sense that the affection was being clearly returned. You had taken a one-sided risk, and had been rewarded with unconditional acceptance. You had barely known the private feelings of this person, but now you were certain that you did – at least this aspect of their feelings. You felt that you could open up to this person – completely unfiltered – without fear of embarrassment. You wanted to open up to them.

“So this is what it’s like,” Anton smiled, finally.

“Yes. Not at all what I expected.” Julia smiled back.

“It’s almost Biblical, isn’t it? Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. We’ve just eaten the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, and our eyes were opened, and we saw that we were naked.”

“But we were not ashamed,” she smiled. “You aren’t religious, are you?”

“No. You?”

“Not at all. But it does feel like we’ve stumbled upon something that we were not supposed to see. What could be wrong with this? Is it so exhilarating because it’s forbidden? Like underage drinking? Will we eventually get used to this, so then it won’t feel so special?”

“I don’t know. But it is special now. I feel like I can share private things with you now.”

“Like what?”

“There were things I wanted to say to you before, but just couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t, or didn’t?”

“Both. The few times I actually tried, I got edited by the mask. All that protection – and it was protecting us from something like this.”

“Yes! I was thinking that exactly. It was supposed to be risky, scary. This doesn’t seem risky at all.” She smiled at him for a moment, confident that he would see her actual emotion. “Tell me something private – something you always only think in secret, or that always gets edited away.” She couldn’t control her wild smile at this point, and was overjoyed that it was getting through.

He thought for a moment. “Ever notice how on group chat lists, when someone posts a contentless message like “Happy Halloween” or something, everyone feels obliged to respond with the same message. It’s not like anyone’s saying anything meaningful, one way or another. They just don’t want to be the one who doesn’t echo it. Nobody adds anything personal, or meaningful.”

“Yes! I don’t respond. Or if I do, I say something meaningful. Do you?”

“No. Just like you. If I have something meaningful to add, maybe. Otherwise, I treat it as the meaningless social convention that it is.”

Marcie was initially drawn to the unmasking in the same way one can’t help looking at a car crash. What would happen next? Now she was beginning to feel like the third wheel, and it annoyed her. So they both turned out to be pretty attractive on their own. Good for them. No need to rub it in. She couldn’t relate to this at all. “Guys, get a room,” she said. But it came through the mask as “This is getting a little personal. I think I’ll just read the magazines for a while.”

Julia and Anton barely noticed her.

“Have you ever stolen something?” Anton asked, exploring the limits of their private-to-private revelations.

Before Julia could answer, a voice came from the bottom of the stairs. “Who’s up there?” It was the camp nurse, from the infirmary.

“Just us,” Marcie answered. “Julia, Anton, and Marcie.”

Then they heard her footsteps climbing the stairs.

Anton suddenly felt the window of the magic moment closing, so he tried to make a last second proposal for meeting again – in private and maskless. “Do you suppose we could …”

But Julia was already putting her mask back on. She paused at the start of his question to give one more furtive, eyes-to-eyes glance. He stopped mid-sentence and met her eyes. It was a metaphorical long goodbye, as if they were waving to each other from a distance. Then both put their masks back on before the nurse reached the top of the stairs.

“What are you guys doing up here?” the nurse asked.

Still annoyed, Marcie tried to tattle about the unmasking, but her mask edited it out. “We were just looking at old magazines.”

“It’s so dusty up here,” the nurse said. “I’ve never been up here before. So much junk. You probably shouldn’t hang out up here because of all the dust.”

“Look what we found,” Julia pointed to the open chest. “Old magazines from the 1950s. Back before masks were invented. We started looking at the pictures and then were trying to imagine what life would be like without masks.”

Julia looked over at Anton with a sly wink, but she knew it wouldn’t get through the mask. She wondered if Anton was trying to do the same.

“Well, those certainly were different times,” the nurse advised.

“Why does everyone say it’s a bad idea to take off your mask when others are around?” Anton asked. “Has anyone tried it?”

“Oh, I’m sure people do. It’s not illegal or anything like that. It’s just good advice – like good hygiene, or good social behavior. The masks are there for your protection.”

“Protection from what?” Julia asked.

“Protection from the downsides of human nature – embarrassment, discrimination, quarreling, misunderstandings. In the worst case, from violent conflicts. We are a very social species, so there is always a conflict between your personal desires and the desires of others around you. We can only function if we can manage to cooperate and respect each other. But we have a long, sordid history of wars and exploitation. We are easily angered, and slow to see the consequences of our actions. We’re not natively well-equipped to cooperate. So we rely on masks to do this for us. Just like we are not natively well-equipped to do arithmetic in our heads, so we rely on calculators to do that for us.”

Upon reflection, this made a certain amount of sense to Julia. She didn’t really know what it would be like to interact with others without a mask – except for the brief encounter with Anton. And she had to admit, most of the times she had been edited, she was later glad she had been. It was kind of liberating, actually. You just say what you want and it comes out in a way that makes it more likely that you will get what you want. The mask is doing the social negotiation for you.

But it still felt so … artificial. “But aren’t we all being dishonest by letting the masks represent us to others? Would honest interaction be so bad?”

“Honest interaction could work, between the right kinds of people,” the nurse replied. “Some people have the skills, and the temperament, and the patience, and the willingness to forgive. But that’s not a likely combination of traits for most people. Very few of us can be completely honest and not either offend others or expose ourselves to ridicule. If one of you is empathetic, and trusting, and forgiving, and the other is manipulative, the first will be taken advantage of. If you are both manipulative, you will quarrel a lot. Even if you’re both empathetic enough, there is still misunderstanding. We assume other people are like ourselves, and interpret what they say from our own point of view. We’re often wrong about that, you know.”

“So you’re saying, for humans, acting is better than honesty?” Anton asked.

“Well, in a way yes. Social species are always acting when they express themselves publicly. They have to do that to get along. Masks simply optimize this acting. They don’t misrepresent your private intentions, they simply express them better – making it more likely that you will achieve them.”

“I think most of us are introverts,” Marcie chimed in, feeling a little less introverted than normal. “I know I am. So this kind of levels the playing field for us with the extroverts.”

“You’re right, Marcie,” the nurse responded. “Most people are introverts. That’s been well-documented. Natural extroverts – the life-of-the-party types – are outliers. They are just naturally better skilled at acting in public.”

“Then why do they need masks?” Anton asked.

“Well, because they are no better at anticipating the consequences of their actions than anyone else. Perhaps less so, because their public personality gives them a sense of false confidence.”

As this thought gently settled in to the private mind of Anton, reasonable though it was, it didn’t seem to square with what he had just experienced with Julia. “But aren’t romantic relationships different? Don’t you have to be completely honest and trusting with your partner for it to work?”

“Think about it, Anton,” the nurse said. “Every romantic encounter is essentially a negotiation between you and your prospective partner – dates, courtships, relationships, marriages. When you negotiate, you don’t really know the private motivations of the other person, so you have to be careful about revealing your own.”

Julia was still not completely sold, given her recent experience in the Garden of Eden. “But couldn’t the best kind of romantic relationships be different? I mean, wouldn’t they work out best when you are completely honest with your partner, and trust them to be honest with you?”

The nurse smiled. “That’s a lovely thought, isn’t it? If only it were practical. Exactly the right two people could pull this off, I suppose. They would both have to be satisfied with their natural physical appearances, and be so incredibly in tune with each other emotionally that they hardly ever disagreed. Or both be so dedicated to preserving the relationship that they would always try to first accommodate their partner, or give them the benefit of the doubt, or forgive them.”

“Why isn’t that practical?” Anton asked.

“There just aren’t enough people like that, individually. Then you would have to have two of these already unlikely people actually meet each other.”

“You make it sound so depressing,” Julia complained.

“Well, statistics don’t lie. The rates of divorce and separation, of domestic violence, of casual hookups, of infidelity, are much lower now compared to what they were before masks. I don’t think this was ever the primary motivation for masks – it was to lessen social conflicts and violence in general, and to eliminate unfair biases based on people’s physical appearance – but it turned out to be a welcome side effect.”

“So you don’t think we are being dishonest about how we actually look,” Marcie asked.

“If you mean should we not feel guilty about artificially improving our physical appearance, then yes! Absolutely! Humans have always been doing this – first with body painting and ornaments, then with fashionable clothing, and makeup, and hair coloring, and cosmetic surgery. All we’ve done with masks is to optimize this – for everyone. We’ve leveled another playing field, and made it so convenient. After you wash your face and brush your teeth in the morning, you just put on your mask – set it, and forget it.”

Marcie liked that explanation.

The nurse coughed. “The dust is getting to me.” She waved her hand in front of her face. “I think you should put the magazines back, and let’s all go downstairs – or take some with you, if you want.”

The teenagers looked at each other, then began putting the magazines back in the trunk. Julia and Anton looked at each other, each momentarily forgetting about the mask-on/mask-off distinction, but each quickly remembering as the other’s mask failed to maintain eye contact.

Julia remembered that Anton had started to ask her something but didn’t finish, just before the masks went back on. What was he trying to ask? Did he want to meet up again – without the masks?

Anton remembered where he had left off, in mid-sentence. He was pretty sure Julia would have accepted, if only he had had enough time to finish. The mask would never let this through now, and Marcie and the nurse were also present, so he had to find another way to communicate. He tried to do a subtle mask-off gesture with his hands, like he had done the first time. It had to be more subtle this time because he needed to follow it with some sort of gesture meaning ‘later’, or ‘not here’.

Julia was confused by this. He couldn’t mean ‘take your mask off’, or ‘I’m going to take mine off’. There were others present. She tried to signal this by glancing first at Marcie, then the nurse, each time moving her head in their respective directions, just in case the mask wasn’t mirroring her glances. Then she shook her head subtly from side to side in a ‘no’ gesture.

’No?’, Anton thought. She doesn’t want to take the masks off again? Had she changed her mind? Why? He was sure they had made a connection earlier. He had felt it … he thought. Maybe he felt it because he wanted it to happen, not because it did happen. Maybe she wasn’t into him as much as he was into her. Maybe, … maybe she liked his mask better than his real face! This sent a cold shudder through him. Maybe she was disappointed, and just being polite.

All of this introspection took some time, so Julia was trying desperately to figure out what his intention was. But his mask displayed the most neutral of expressions. She realized that the mask itself couldn’t resolve his inner state of mind, meaning that Anton was privately conflicted about something. What? Hadn’t they formed a real connection earlier? She had felt it … she thought. Or had she just imagined this? It was the first time she had ever locked eyes with someone before like that, so maybe she misinterpreted it. Maybe that happens all the time without masks, and it doesn’t mean anything. Or maybe he was having second thoughts now? Why? Maybe he liked her mask better than her real face!

As they walked down the steps from the attic to the infirmary, Anton was still clinging to the notion that he and Julia could be that perfect maskless couple that the nurse had acknowledged was possible. But she had also said the probability was very low. Did Julia have enough of those traits? How would he know? Did he have enough of those traits? He had just turned nineteen! How could he possibly know that? Did they need masks to make this work, after all? If she didn’t like his real face, the answer was ‘yes’. But she had seen it. It might be too late now.

Julia had her own version of doubts now. Anton seemed to have cooled considerably toward her, she thought. Had the nurse convinced him this was a bad idea? Was the nurse right? Did they need masks to make this work? She wanted to be that perfect maskless couple. She could imagine it – she could taste it. But she had to admit that she had nothing to go on but imagination. Were either of she or Anton well-suited for such a relationship? She had no earthly idea. You can’t just wish things into existence. And if Anton had liked her mask better than her real face, maybe this wasn’t even salvageable with masks. Had that peek behind the curtain ruined the illusion?

When they reached the infirmary, and walked out through the office onto the front porch, Anton said “See you later,” with an expressionless mask, and turned to walk away.

“Same,” said Julia, with an equally expressionless mask.

Neither mask had made eye contact.