The After-Party

I saw you at the masquerade ball early in the evening. Later, everyone was slipped an envelope apprising them of the “Red Room,” the location of the after-party.

Where you show up in a hooded cloak. The mask is actually the one thing that stays on because, when entering into this labyrinth, this 3:15 A.M. witching time of night, the visage of your vulnerable soul would be unable to breathe without it. Stripping your cloak to the floor, you sacrifice your earlier delusion that a masquerade ball is enough to set aside your physical and ideological identity. This is where reality disappears into hyperreality. You are a simulation of yourself. No more pretending (that you’re not pretending).

The animal as nature intended it appears curiously creeping into darkness’s light. You are naked and asked to crawl on all fours for the rest of the event and bow to a man in a goat mask who hands you a dog treat and orders you to obey Satan. A slap on the ass and a scratch on your head signals that you are now welcome to the after-party. You wallow your way into the next room moving anxiously on all fours surrounding yourself with “others” who are low to the ground on their own four stilts preying on a gathering of willing and open vessels they see as opportunity…

The after-party is where the masks come off, revealing that there were never any faces behind the facades (people are their facades).

The after-party, in other words, is the moment when the masks of ideology slip away, and we are confronted with the raw reality of our desires. In this obscene carnival of excess, we glimpse the true contours of our unconscious drives, laid bare amidst the wreckage of the night’s festivities.

“After the end” means, simply enough, the beginning of abandon.