The Man Without a Face (1,225 words)

For a period of seventeen months some years ago, the evening news was swept by a curious phenomenon. It started out like any other news program, airing at 9 PM Eastern Time, and going over the headlines in a plain and professional manner; sometimes a guest or two would appear to make the hour a little livelier than usual; but for the most part it was just the man in the black suit (what was his name? It started with A—or perhaps R), sitting behind his white desk, which was slightly unusual for not bearing the logo of the channel, speaking steadily in his controlled voice, seldom pausing, and never faltering.

Then as more and more people began to tune in to this channel (often it just happened to be on in the background while the viewer went about some mundane activity, such as cooking or cleaning or drinking) one man made a startling observation: the face of the anchor was never visible. It was blurred out like the faces of people who refused permission to have their faces broadcast on TV. 

But why would the anchor of Weeknight News want his face blurred out?

This question was posted on an online question-and-answer forum by a person whose account has since been deleted. The answers—typical for Internet discussions—ranged from jokes to paranoid conspiracy theories.

The country at large was silent on the issue of this newsman, whose name nobody seemed to remember, and he was spoken of only in the passing on the fringes of the online community.

Then all of a sudden the leader of an African nation was assassinated on live television during his Independence Day address to his country. Everybody who had been present had a different account of what had happened, or none at all; and the video footage from six different angles was examined and reexamined by intelligence organizations from around the world. None of them could make anything of it. In one frame, the leader was alive and well; in the very next he had four bullet holes in his chest, and his eyeballs had rolled to the back of his head. Ultimately the cause of his death was ruled a heart attack, but everyone continued referring to it as an assassination.

The mysterious assassination did not perturb greatly the residents of America, who have always devoted little of their waking thoughts to the Dark Continent, until one day a car mechanic from Wisconsin discovered that the assassination had been reported on the Weeknight News the week before it had occurred, and promptly uploaded the excerpt to YouTube with a reference to the Illuminati in the title. He did not once stop to think whether there had been a mistake; but others did, and over the next few weeks, people from all over the country tried in vain to find evidence that the video had been made after the assassination. In the process they only corroborated the original video (which had been taken down shortly after the original posting, and the account associated with it terminated) with prerecorded segments from their satellite TVs.

Still, the Weeknight News attracted little attention apart from an increased viewership that watched with increased attention and unease the faceless news anchor reciting in an even voice news that on closer inspection turned out to be nonsense. People began wondering whether the show was satirical, and only happened to be right quite by accident about the African leader’s death. This was reinforced by the fact that the guests, who were appearing more and more frequently on Weeknight News as the weeks passed, and who claimed to hold important positions in Washington D. C., were never heard of by anybody outside the show. There was simply no evidence that they existed, even though their faces, which were not blurred, and their dignified and authoritative bearing would have made them recognizable anywhere.

It soon transpired that the Weeknight News seemed to report on events that had not yet come to pass. This was borne out mainly by high-profile news, since that was the most easily verifiable kind, and had lower chances of being attributable to coincidence. It was nevertheless not known how soon after the report the events would occur.

When people tried to get in touch with the channel in order to find out more about Weeknight News and the mysterious people associated with it, they were unable to find any contact information. A Google search of the channel’s name, CXY News, yielded only the message, Did you mean CBS? Yet the channel unmistakably existed, and no one knew where their office was.

The last bit of news ever heard from the Man Without a Face, as he had come to be known among those who were especially enchanted by his mystique, was that an earthquake stronger than any that had been felt before had torn California from the rest of the United States, and buried the state and all its inhabitants forever at the bottom of the sea. Then he and CXY News disappeared from the television screen altogether, and all evidence that he had ever existed was suddenly and mysteriously erased from the Internet. He was alive in memory only, and only his most fervent admirers still remembered him. The rest of civilization treated them like people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens, and laughter followed them wherever they went to celebrate and remember the Man Without a Face. Unlike UFO abductees, however, whose beliefs rendered them impotent with fear, the Faceless (as the followers of the vanished newsman called themselves) were men of the highest mental caliber, who were moreover driven by a religious need to convert their fellow men to the Cult of the Faceless.

By the end of the decade the Faceless had written over a thousand volumes detailing their philosophy. They lived in California awaiting the earthquake which their preternatural leader had predicted before his disappearance, for to be part of the cataclysm was their highest aim.

The earthquake finally struck on the morning of June 15, 2078, and the Faceless and all their texts and possessions plunged to the bottom of the sea, where they were subducted underneath a tectonic plate that closed over them as the earthquake subsided, and thrust them deep into the Earth’s mantle, where they perished as completely and thoroughly as anything in this world can perish.

And the Faceless were forgotten for another half-century, until one day the President decided to give a televised address to his country, and the citizens saw that his face was blurred out.

And that was when they remembered that they had elected no one that election year. That was when they realized that it was not the Faceless that had perished, but they; and those beings that had hitherto been believed dead had in fact passed into the true world to be one with their Master, their visages wiped blank as with an eraser, for the world that in the books had been known as Earth was on the inner surface of the sphere that is creation, and the fire that had once been kept at bay in the infinite blackness outside had crept in through the cracks; and only those who had followed the Man Without a Face had ascended to Paradise.