t was a Saturday afternoon that Stav first dreamt of his own death mask. In the dream he stood at the head of his dining room table, silently watching friends pass a plaster image of his face around.

"Heavy," said one friend, hefting the object with both hands.

"His eyes are closed," said another, tracing his eyelids with the tip of a finger.

"He looks peaceful," said a third, followed quickly by a fourth who thought he looked troubled.

"I’m not dead, though," said Stav from the head of the table, but they paid him no mind. "It doesn’t even look like me," he insisted, but when the mask was passed all the way around and deposited on his plate, he saw that it actually did look like him; not withered and gray like an old man, but as he looked now.

"Where did you get this?" he demanded, but he was dreaming and no one could hear him. When he looked down at the mask again, the eyes were open and watching him.

Awakening, Stav left the house and went out into the yard. He raked leaves until it was dark, tearing at the grass with nervous vigor, his mouth set. By ten o’clock that night the dream had been pushed to the far corners of his mind. Climbing wearily into bed, he fell asleep instantly. Yet as soon as he was asleep, he found himself standing back at the head of the table watching his death mask go from hand to hand.

"It’s like a Jello mold," said one friend.

"Why did he want a death mask made?" asked another, gently putting his face over her own and looking blindly around the room.

"They made a death mask of Mozart, I think," offered someone, "and James Joyce."

"Who said I wanted a death mask?" Stav asked, rapping his knuckles on the table, but no one paid him any mind.

"I hate it," his girlfriend, Tatiana, said, accepting the mask and dumping it unceremoniously on his plate. "It’s gruesome."

"I’m not dead!" Stav insisted, but was not surprised when they turned their attention to their soup, and began talking of other things.

"Great soup," someone said, and Tatiana smiled. Then she laid her napkin over his calm, white face and passed around some bread.

Waking, Stav leapt to his feet. Only ten minutes had passed since he’d fallen asleep. Tatiana watched him in silence from her side of the bed. There was a book propped on her knees. "Dammit," breathed Stav, his eyes wide, "I think I just dreamed I was dead."

Tatiana closed her book on her finger. "Yikes," she said.

"Yikes is right."

"What happened?"

"I don’t know, but somebody made a deathmask of my face."

"Yikes."

"What does this mean?" Stav stared at the floor in concentration.

"If a Viking dreamt of death it was a sign of fertility, an impending child, perhaps."

"Even if I were a Viking, Taty," Stav managed, amidst his consternation, "I doubt that I would be pregnant." And with that he went down to the kitchen to think.

He ended up calling a man he had met at a party who could communicate with the dead, but only three days of every month, when his wife was menstruating. At the party the man had put himself into a trance and spoken to a dead child who had fallen down an air shaft, a man who had lived in ancient Rome and been run over by an oxcart, and a taxicab driver from down the street who had died only the day before. The taxicab driver had been very concerned, even from beyond the grave, that his wife would find out about his pornography addiction when the contents of his work locker were turned over to her. The seer, whose name was Ernest, had been unable to speak with any other dead people that evening, explaining that it was the final day of his wife’s period and that his reception was spotty at best. The man had said this with the utmost seriousness, but everyone had laughed at the unintended pun, except for his wife, who had spent the entire evening clutching her arms to her sides and staring out of the window in silence.

Ernest remembered Stav’s girlfriend but not Stav. "I remember the aura around her. It was the brightest blue. A really incredible blue."

Stav, who knew that Tatiana had wanted to punch Ernest in the face after his frank discussion of his wife’s cycle, was unsure what to say. "Blue is her favorite color," he managed finally, and explained the reason for his call.

To his credit, Ernest was silent for a long time after Stav finished talking. Finally he spoke: "You are concerned that you have dreamt of your own death mask and that now you will die?"

"I want to know what it means. Is that what it means?"

"How do you feel?"

"You mean, do I feel like I’m going to die? No."

"Have you made any provisions that would see to it that a death mask would, in fact, be made upon your death?" The voice was without emotion, of a professional gathering facts.

"God, no."

"Good."

Stav felt a glimmer of hope and was suddenly glad he had called the man. So what if he talked to dead cab drivers by way of his long-suffering wife’s reproductive organs? Tatiana was too quick to judge people. She would never understand these things.

Ernest was speaking again, absently, as if thinking aloud: "Of course, this can’t be a good thing, dreaming of one’s own death mask."

Stav had to admit that, no, this probably wasn’t a good thing.

"Was I at the table?"

Stav said no, resisting the urge to apologize for not inviting the man into his dream.

Another long silence followed. Ernest noisily smoked a cigarette, then cleared his throat. "You don’t really hear about death masks anymore," he said thoughtfully.

"They made a death mask of James Joyce, I think."

"Joyce, huh?" Ernest spoke as if perhaps he’d had a long-standing feud with the dead Irishman. Absurdly, Stav pictured him bent over, red-faced and pointing, shouting into his wife’s lap with enraged conviction, spittle flecking her thighs.

"And Abraham Lincoln." Nobody could argue with Lincoln.

"Well, let me think about this a while. I’ll think about it and stop by tomorrow." Then he hung up.

The rest of the night was uneventful. Stav slept soundly, and if he had any further dreams they had left him by the time he woke in the morning. It was Sunday and he didn’t leave the house. He avoided the stairs, knives, and electrical outlets. When the neighbor boy showed up selling candy bars for school, Stav stood off to one side of the front door, close to the wall, until he heard his bicycle squeak out of the yard. He’d always seemed like a nice kid, but this wasn’t a day to take chances.

Ernest arrived after lunch, backing his car up the driveway and honking. "Help me unload this stuff," he called, and handed Stav a bucket and several shoe boxes.

"What’s this for?"

"Plaster of Paris; to make a death mask."

Stav emptied his arms. "I’m trying to avoid this stuff and you deliver it to my door?!"

Ernest shook his head. "I thought about it all night. You dreamt that some of your friends were passing around your death mask and eating soup, right?"

"Right."

"But you didn’t dream anything about actually dying?"

"No."

"So we’ll make the mask, invite the people over, explain to them what is going on and that you mustn’t be acknowledged during dinner, and, voila, your dream is reality. Harmless reality. Can you get your girlfriend to make the soup?"

Relieved, Stav went into the house to talk to Tatiana. She agreed to the soup, and the party, but was not impressed with the death mask idea. "It’s gruesome," she said, and Stav couldn’t help smiling.

The death mask was harder to make than either of them had thought, especially with Stav’s insistence on breathing while the mold was attached to his face. "Do you think Mozart struggled this much?" Ernest wanted to know, "or Lincoln?"

"They were dead," Stav countered, and wiped his eyes and mouth with a damp cloth. The basement floor was littered with hunks of drying Plaster of Paris, all with partial molds of his squirming face; a collection chronicling the various stages of suffocation. "I have to breathe."

"You have to put straws up your nose." Tatiana said from her perch on the steps. She was watching while she waited for the soup to cook.

With the straws, Stav was able to relax and they got a perfect mold in one try. From there it was a simple matter of spraying the mold with sealant, filling it with a thin layer of Plaster of Paris, then extracting the three-dimensional cast.

"It’s beautiful," Ernest said softly, holding it as gently as a newborn baby. "It truly is."

And it was. A perfect likeness in a way Stav had never seen himself: with his eyes closed. He found it fascinating.

"You look very serene," Ernest whispered, holding it up to the light.

"He looks dead," blurted Tatiana, getting up to answer the doorbell. She still found the idea gruesome, and she still wanted to punch Ernest in the nose.

They watched her disappear up the stairs. "What an aura," Ernest said, his voice reverent. "An amazing blue, with just the tiniest hint of red. I hadn’t noticed that before."

Stav, who still didn’t know what the man was talking about, merely nodded.

The guests were all willing to participate after Stav explained the reason for the party. Everyone took their places and, with a flourish, Ernest unveiled the mask. Stav stood at the head of the table in silence, watching as it went from hand to hand.

When everyone had held the mask, hefted it, put it over their own face, commented on it, Tatiana placed a bowl over it instead of her napkin and passed around the bread. "I’m using my napkin," she said without looking at Stav, and Ernest nodded that this minor deviation was acceptable.

After dinner, everyone welcomed Stav as if he’d just arrived and Ernest was introduced. Wineglasses were refilled and the mask was admired anew. At one point, falling back onto the couch in the throes of a sudden revelation, Ernest predicted that someone in the room was pregnant, perhaps with twins.

"Ridiculous!" everyone roared, laughing, but when Stav looked at Tatiana, she was watching him from behind the unreadable white features of the mask, her eyes wide under his own calm brow.

Copyright © 2000 J.D. Toffler