Behind the Mask - A Sequel (of Sorts) to A Star Is Born

A Normal Life, Until

A Normal Life, Until

I'm afraid the story of my life from that point might start to bore you at this point. I finished college on the east coast, joined the State Department, and got a job interviewing visa applicants at the Embassy in Beijing, China. It sounds glamorous to be a diplomat, but the reality is a bit different. Junior diplomats are all assigned to the visa window overseas, where they do essentially the same job as the customs officers you encounter at an airport on your way home. I still found it interesting, and living abroad was a rush. Not a day passed without something bizarre happening in Beijing. One day it was the mirror falling off in my bathroom, exposing a clumsily-installed surveillance camera. Another day it was encountering a facial recognition-enabled toilet in a city park that metered out two squares of toilet paper per person, per day. Life in an authoritarian society was never dull.

I didn't miss the band, to be honest. I did miss making music, so I took to writing songs anonymously for other acts, and sending my compositions to Phil. And I did end up missing Sarah, or at least the idea of her. I dated a bit in China, but the cultural and language gap was too hard, and I yearned for a relationship with someone who I could connect with at a more fundamental level. I heard from some friends that Sarah got married in college and moved back to Seattle afterward. She also had a daughter, which surprised me, because I always thought she was more career focused than I was. We kept in touch on occasion via Facebook, which is how I learned she ended up getting a divorce.

When we initially set up the protocols for the band, we always knew we would need a plan if our secret got out. I think I got the idea from the Wembley debacle, which reappeared in my nightmares for years. It had been one of our biggest shows, and for some reason, the trauma of the paparazzi standoff melded together in my dreams with the sea of fans waving cellphones. I remembered a line we had written into the song "Secrets" — "Forces Lie In Wait For Your Head on a Silver Plate." That was it. Everywhere I looked, there were people who wanted to expose our secret, and I think the Wembley crowds had given meaning to a throwaway line in a song written years before.

So we agreed with Phil that if our secret got out, he would send us all a blank email with that line as the subject, and we would get in touch with him to discuss next steps.

I had almost forgotten about our contingency plan a few years later when I saw the email pop up one day at work. It had been a long day, and I had just taken a break from the monotony of the visa window to walk to Starbucks on break for an afternoon coffee. When I returned, my inbox was filled with the usual work stuff, and I started deleting madly until I saw Phil's note. I dropped my coffee, and I could feel the blood rushing to my head. A colleague asked if I was ok, and I mumbled something unintelligible as she returned to her work.

The situation would have to wait until I got off work, I kept telling myself. But what if something was imminent? Wouldn't it be better to sneak out and call Phil now, rather than risk a scene if a journalist showed up at work and asked our attendant if somebody named Black Mask worked here?

I couldn't wait. I muttered some excuse to my colleagues and went outside again, this time to call Phil. After a few tries that were complicated by the time difference, I woke him up. He proceeded to lay out what happened. Annie Phelps, one of the most respected investigative journalists at the New York Times, had made the hunt for our identities into her personal quest. She went the old-fashioned route of searching for a needle in a haystack. Annie had compiled all of our lyrics and used a metadata search to find anything on the internet that seemed to correlate. As luck would have it, a poem I wrote for a contest in high school included a few of the lyrics to "Secrets" a year or so before the song came out. The poem had won a runner up award and was posted online, which is how Annie found it, complete with my name and childhood address. Annie had reached out to Virgin to ask the question we all hoped would never come, and Virgin's press department had followed standard procedures in routing the inquiry to Phil.

I told Phil I wanted to call Annie directly. He sounded as if he nearly choked. I tried to explain that whatever chance we had of convincing a journalist to hold the story would be greater if I made a personal appeal. Now I just had to figure out what it would be.