The Identity Man

PART II

THE GANGSTER WAS fifteen years old. He called himself Super-Pred-he actually called himself that. He had his own following among the scattered crews warring over the city's Northern District, or what was left of the Northern District after the looting and the fire and the flood. He had a rep for the unimaginably sudden and grotesque: frothing fits of rage that left his enemies de-boweled or otherwise damaged irrevocably. There was, for instance, one thirteen-year-old in his posse nicknamed Eyeball because Super-Pred had torn one of his eyeballs out in a property dispute over some twelve-year-old cooch-who, by the way, had been missing ever since.

Thus Lieutenant Brick Ramsey watched dispassionately as Detective Gutterson beat the little cancer down.

They were in a steel shed, what had been a storage shed out back of an auto parts shop years back. The shop itself was long gone but the shed stood even after the flooding. Corrugated steel walls and a dirt floor. That's where the boy was-on the floor, hands over his head to protect it. The blood from his nose had made a round stain about the size of a silver dollar in the packed earth.

Well, these things had to be. The Northern District was lawless now. Murders every hellish day. Gunfire all the time-so much gunfire that citizens had stopped calling it in-it was just rattling background noise to them like cicadas in the trees. Super-Pred's squad-and other squads like them-prowled the ruined streets in dark and daylight. Slink-backed coyotes, drooling for Vics. With rap-star T-shirts and golden dollar signs on golden chains and baggy pants like their convict heroes wore. One night, a pack of them broke into a woman's emergency trailer-one of those trailers the feds gave to people who'd lost their homes in the storm. They broke in and raped her to death right there in her own bed, her four-year-old daughter crouching in the corner.

That was bad enough. But last night, someone really crossed the line. Someone popped a cruiser. A cop car establishing a presence on Northern Boulevard. A couple of patrolmen doing a slow pass, giving the evil eye to the whores and dealers there. Some joker hunkered like Baghdad behind a Dumpster in an alley opened up with a Kalishnikov and peppered the car's passenger door, could've hurt the rookie riding shotgun. Shooter was gone before they could chase him down. That crossed the line. That couldn't be allowed to stand. When the police passed by, you faded, motherfucker, you vanished like the Cheshire Cat till there was nothing left of you but your shit-eating grin. That was the law of the streets.

"I'm going to leave here with your scrotum in my pocket or the name of the fool with the AK," Lieutenant Ramsey said quietly.

Detective Gutterson kicked the boy in the stomach by way of punctuation, making the punk let go of his head and clutch his belly now, all curled up and writhing on the shed's dirt floor.

Gutterson smiled down at his work. And what a likely thug he was, Ramsey thought. Two hundred and fifty pounds of pure contempt disguised as a human being. A six-foot-four frame of deteriorating muscle. A smirking, resentful expression plastered on that crewcut potato of a head, an age-old mask of hatred that spoke trouble to a brother's very DNA. Back in his dreamed-of yesteryears, Ramsey figured, Gutterson probably would have been an overseer on a southern slave plantation, all whip and hard-on. Now he was a bullying cop in whatever was left of this bled-dry city, and it was one of Ramsey's few remaining sources of job satisfaction that he could tell a dog like this to fetch and it would go fetch, despising his colored master only a little more than he despised himself for having to obey.

Gutterson was loving this, just loving it. It was probably the highlight of his week. And the junior g, Mr. Super-Pred down there-he knew it, too. He knew that his only pathway out of this mini-perdition was through the sympathies of Lieutenant Ramsey.

"You let that peckerwood do a brother like this?" he whined, clutching his gut, squinting up at Ramsey through his swollen mug.

Ramsey squatted on the shed floor so he could peer directly in through the purpling lumps of the gang-banger's cheeks to the dim gleam of the swimming child-eyes buried in them. The lieutenant smiled. A quiet, distant smile to let the boy know that the road of racial solidarity ended at the brick wall of his heart. Then he faked a friendly glance up at Gutterson.

"Used to be a preacher in my neighborhood when I was a boy. Reverend Mack. He could do a Sunday morning, all right. Full of the spirit. One day, I got up to some mischief or other. My mama hauled me into his office so he could put the fear of God in me. Her holding me half up in the air by my elbow and him standing behind his desk, looming over me like Mount Sinai, sending up smoke and fire and the word of God. And all I could think about was this picture hung up on the wall behind his desk. He must've found it in a book somewhere. Tore it out and framed it. It was a picture of Jesus stomping out sin. Couldn't take my eyes off it. Sin was this-this kind of a twisting, hissing, black serpent all writhing under Jesus' foot, with this half-man, half-dragon face, something out of a horror movie. Just writhing there, helpless, spitting hatred up at the Lord." Above him, Gutterson chuckled heavily. Ramsey choked back his hatred of the man. Looked away from him, looked down at the boy. "That's what you remind me of, son. Twisting there, writhing there on the ground. You remind me of that picture."

Super-P panted through his pain. "I'm just a brother trying to get by on the mean streets, daddy."

"That right?"

"Just a brother trying to get by, same as you."

Lieutenant Ramsey smiled down at the boy patiently but the smile was a fake, and it felt to him even at that moment like the fake it was. His whole demeanor of self-restrained dignity-his lifelong demeanor-felt to him at this point like a hollow construction, a shell he lived in like a hermit crab. The man he seemed was the shell of the man he had once set out to be, his mother's son. But inside, he was not that man. He knew he was not that man.

And because he knew, Super-P's you-and-me-brother strategy was getting to him more than he let on. In fact, his own mental image of that bygone picture on the preacher's wall was getting to him, too. Crouching over the banger in the shed, he could almost feel that snake of sin writhing and twisting and spitting sourly in his belly. And because it really did remind him of Super-P, it was almost as if it was Super-P himself writhing inside him. Not that Ramsey's sin was this gangster's beatdown. That was nothing. That was street business. That just had to be. No. His sin was Peter Patterson, killing Peter Patterson. Even now, weeks after the storm, the memory of the bookkeeper's pitying eyes stared up at him from the memory of the flame-streaked black water, the dead man's face liquid and wavering.

"You loose this cracker on me?" Super-Pred whined. "You think he your beast, but he own you same as slavery. You and me both."

Lieutenant Ramsey gave a single silent laugh but the laugh was a fake, too. This punk didn't know how close he was, how close to getting Ramsey's goat, setting him off. The lieutenant went on smiling but he wanted to shut this punk up with a bullet. Shut him up with a bullet and then do Gutterson, too-do him slow-kneecap, then belly, and finally no-longer-smirking-but-pleading-sweating-cowardly face. Kill them both as if they were the snake inside him.

"You're gonna tell me the shooter's name, little man," he said. "That's a fact." He spoke with his lifelong tone of quiet self-control and moral dignity, his fake tone now that he had Peter Patterson's pitying stare and his own writhing shame inside him. "Detective Gutterson has all day to deal with this. But me, I've got better things to do."

He stood up, making as if to leave.

That did the trick. Panic went flaring through the beaten boy. A day alone with Detective Gutterson would be a day without sunshine for damn sure.

"No, wait! Now hold on! Hold on, daddy."

Ramsey waited. Looked down with his demeanor of lofty dignity at the punk on the floor.

Super-P's body sagged there, the twisting, snakelike tension dying in him. He was finished. He just needed a moment to swallow his shame now, swallow his self-disgust at breaking down, at showing his ass and giving over. There was always that moment at the end before they gave over.

He gave over. "Fatboy," he said.

Ramsey sighed. Fatboy. Figured. Sixteen-year-old lardbutt bully-bait trying to make his bones by unloading on the police. He could be tried as an adult for this, do twenty years, two decades grabbing his ankles, asshole spiked on jail yard meat. It was a world without justice.

"Don't feel so bad," he told Super-P. "You're ashamed 'cause we see your ass? You're ashamed 'cause it turns out you're no tough guy like the rapper on your shirt or your big brother in prison? Turns out you're just another scared, fatherless punk doesn't know how to be a man and you're ashamed? Well, guess what. Rapper on your shirt? Your big brother in prison? They're scared, fatherless punks, too. Show their ass for a dollar and a kick in the shin. It's just who you all are, boy. You just gotta swallow it. Swallow it like a whore swallows cum." He spat in the bloodstained dirt. He sighed again. Fatboy. Then, to the ape Gutterson he said, "Come on."

He gestured the big thug toward the shed door and began to head that way himself. Gutterson paused to snort his disdain over the broken child in the dirt. Then he followed.

But Super-Pred wasn't done. Or that is, he was done, but he needed to pretend there was still some man in him.

"You think you're better than me?" he called up from the floor, called at their backs. "You no better than me, daddy. You just the same."

Ramsey felt Gutterson glance at him as they walked away together. Ramsey only just bothered to roll his eyes to show how little he cared. But he did care, the snake writhing in him.

"What are you but a g with a badge?" ragged Super-Pred from the floor, trying to salvage some self-respect. "Why shouldn't Fat-boy fight his turf? You just another crew out here, my man. You think we don't know? What about Peter Patterson? Whole street knows about him."

Ramsey stopped in his tracks. Gutterson didn't catch it. The big thug kept going, reached the shed door, had his hand on it. Only then did he look behind to see Ramsey frozen.

Ramsey turned slowly back toward Super-P. "What do you think you know?" he said quietly. Demeanor of lofty moral dignity. His mother's son.

The boy gangster knew he'd gone too far, tried to backtrack. "I don't know nothing." Ramsey took a single step toward him. That was all it needed. Mr. Super-Pred started babbling, "I'm just rapping. Just a tag, man. Give a brother some slack. Trying to get your goat, that's all. Just a tag I saw."

"A tag? Where?" said Ramsey in the same quiet tone. "You saw it where?"

"A house. Old house we hang in sometimes."

Ramsey nodded slowly. With that lifelong demeanor. With the snake writhing in his belly. Peter Patterson's pitying stare through the wavering water.

"Tell me the address," he said.

There was a magazine between the two front seats of the unmarked Charger. Standing in the hollow armrest between where Gutterson sat behind the wheel and where Ramsey sat on the passenger side. It was a national newsweekly. A leading national newsweekly with a picture of Augie Lancaster on the cover. Lancaster was striking a heroic pose. Fists on his hips, eyes on the horizon. They'd photographed him from below so he looked like a moral giant.

Fighting to Save His City.

That was the headline. That was actually the headline.

If stupidity were a communicable disease, Ramsey thought, journalists would have to be herded into a pit and shot like infected cattle.

He looked out his window. It was late afternoon on a dull gray day. No beam of sun-no shock of blue or any color-appeared to mitigate the bleakness of the scene. There was devastation on every side and an inhuman stillness, a heavy hollowness in the atmosphere-or maybe that was Ramsey himself, an emanation of his own interior state. In any case, brownstones stood gutted, their black windows like skull-eyes gazing back at him. Houses lay crippled and broken, sunk in mud that used to be lawns. Shops-he could see through the shattered storefronts-had been scoured of all their goods and were empty and abandoned, the walls stained brown up to the waterlines near their ceilings. There were words scrawled and painted on doorways and walls, words that had been scrawled and painted there to alert rescuers at the height of the flood. They came to Ramsey like disembodied voices, whispering out of the wreckage: Help us. Four trapped inside. One dead here. Save us. Help us.

The whole area stank. Stagnant water and sewage. It made you flinch at first, but then it made you sad. It was such a mortal sort of odor, the stench of an abandoned corpse. It made you sad and then, after a while, you got used to it and just couldn't smell it at all anymore.

Fighting to Save His City.

Ramsey's eyes went over the scene, flicking instinctively to whatever was alive. A woman wearing a gym suit and carrying a shopping bag, young but bent over as if the earth itself were on her back. Two old men sitting in chairs against a wall, staring at the wrecked world like a movie. An angry mother yanking at her toddler's arm. And here and there, again and again, the slouching, shift-eyed, yellow-eyed young coyote-men prowling the afternoon, casing locations, casing prey, meeting on corners to clasp each other's hands in an expert and near-invisible exchange of cash and contraband.

Fighting to Save His City.

Had it ever been true? Ramsey wondered bitterly. Even at the beginning when Ramsey had first followed him, even loved him, even then had Augie Lancaster ever fought to save this city? Had he ever even meant to? Well… in daydreams maybe. Daydreams like we all have of ceaseless cheering, of an endless parade, of himself, Augie, slowly passing in his top-down limousine, the hands of the poor upraised in gratitude at the spangly gold showering from his beneficent fingertips. Maybe he really hadn't known-maybe he really hadn't understood that even the dream of doing good can be the hunger for power in disguise. Maybe he hadn't recognized the strangely red-visaged angel who had whispered to him he could be king of saints only to slowly tutor him to be king of kings-king of the city kings with his vacation homes and his cars and his boat, and the vacation homes and cars and boats of his cronies…

Fighting to Save His City.

All those times he had called these people his brothers. All those times he had told them that the white man was their enemy, that only he could save them as he saved them-look!-in his dreams. All those beautiful speeches- City of Hope, City of Justice -spurring them on to this protest or that, to boycott a Jew store owner who had shot a neighborhood thief, or to picket a radio station where some DJ had made some racial crack, or to protest a white jury's verdict that had sent some black mad-dog to prison. All those times he had inspired them to bare their chests and display the scars of injustice, mobilizing them as an army of victims to blackmail another dollar out of the citadels of white guilt and fear. It was all good-all good for the king of the city kings, but for the brothers? Useless, meaningless diversions while their fatherless children prowled the streets in drooling coyote crews and their fatherless mothers smoked bone for crack cocaine which their fatherless fathers sold to them in the broken buildings that all the spangly gold from his fingertips somehow never did rebuild.

Fighting to Save His City.

Sure. Because the journalists had their daydreams, too, the guilty white journalists made gullible by their desperate yearning for virtue. The same strangely red-visaged angel whispered in their ears, too: Well done, thou good and faithful servants, here are your Pulitzer Prizes and your I-Love-a-Nigger Decoder Rings for, lo, you have lifted a dusky-colored saint into the slowly passing top-down limousine of his parade where the spangly gold may fall upon the brown-skinned masses, transforming their infirmities and all your sins into an ever-to-be-remembered goodness.

Herded into a pit and shot like infected cattle, Ramsey thought. The stupidest pack of fools on earth.

Except maybe for him. Except maybe for Lieutenant Brick Ramsey himself, who had also followed Augie, who had even loved him and also believed.

Gutterson swung the wheel and turned the Charger off the boulevard.

They came onto a short lane. The houses here stood ghostly, lopsided and broken. You could see through the staring windows that they were empty, their interiors ravaged. You could see over-turned furniture in there and piles of debris and brown stains rising to the high waterlines on the wall.

The lane dead-ended at an empty lot, a dirt-brown expanse where plastic bags and papers tumbled over concrete shards and discarded mattresses and discarded refrigerators and ovens and scrap. It made a mournful backdrop.

"This is the one," Gutterson said.

It was the fourth house down on the left, about halfway to the dead end. It was made of large wooden shingles painted pale green. Ramsey could already feel its haunted emptiness as the Charger pulled to the curb in front of it.

"This is where they hang?" said Gutterson. "Look at it. Bunch of animals."

Ramsey choked down his hatred for the man and with it any answer he might've made.

The two of them got out of the car. They started across the front yard-the ruin of the front yard. The lawn was dead and littered with rubbish: cans and bags and pieces of lumber and rebar. They stepped through it gingerly, the debris crunching and clanging and crackling under their shoes. Gutterson's hand hovered over his nine, in case anyone was in the house and up to mischief. Ramsey's hands were at his sides. He was certain there was no one in there.

They reached the front door and stood one on either side of it. A breeze off the river brought a fresh stink to them. Ramsey's nostrils stung with it and with the first hint of the smell within. Gutterson glanced at Ramsey. Ramsey nodded. Gutterson reached out and banged on the door with his fist.

"Police!" he started to say. But with a soft, damp sound, the flood-rotten wood of the doorframe splintered. The door swung in and the word died half spoken.

Another glance at Ramsey. Another nod. Gutterson drew his gun and charged the place. Ramsey more or less strolled in after him.

"Oh…!" Gutterson strangled on a curse. The stench inside was hellish. He clapped a hand over his nose and mouth. "Fucking animals," he said through his fingers. "It's like living nose-deep in shit."

He went off to search the place, moving tensely behind his gun.

Ramsey, meanwhile, put his hands in his pants pockets and ambled into the living room. The smell was even worse in here. He tried breathing through his mouth but the air tasted bad, too. It was an awful brew: sewage, garbage, rotten food, maybe some dead things, drowned rats in the walls or a cat somewhere, and just the all-around putrescence of water damage. The whole place must've been under the flood at some point. The sofa had been soaked to a hulking mush. It looked as if it had melted and then resolidified. Chairs and tables were all overturned, broken and only half recognizable, what was left of them flung randomly about like body parts in a minefield. The walls were crumbling, broken through in places to the beams and insulation. The ceiling was mildewed and sagging as if it were about to come crashing down.

"Clear!" Gutterson announced, coming in behind him.

Ramsey had already found what he was looking for, was already standing in front of one moldy wall. Gutterson moved up beside him and the two cops stood shoulder to shoulder, looking at it.

The wall was spray-painted and chalked from top to bottom, covered in tags, scrawled all over with ornate and sweeping gang handles and gang signs. Black skulls, green waves, gray thorns, red fire. Nicknames formed by tortuous swirls of color. Ramsey's eyes went over them. He knew the merciless thugs who made these marks and he despised them. He had always known them, always despised them. They were what his mother had hammered at him not to be. What the marines had sweated out of him. He had thought he'd lost his last sentimental traces of pity for them during his patrolmen years, seeing the creatures they were, cleaning their victims' entrails off the macadam. But it was strange. Looking at these marks today, he felt some distant stirring of… compassion… something. The flamelike rise of their embroidery seemed to him like supplicating hands raised to the sky, the masculine energy of their creation sounded in his mind like the soul-cries of fatherless young men, a great inarticulate bubble of boy-prayer desperately bursting under an empty heaven and then desperately gone.

"Like pissing on a tree," said Gutterson. "Animals."

Ramsey, with his air of quiet moral dignity and the writhing sourness inside him, didn't answer. Reluctantly, already knowing what he'd find, he shifted his gaze to the wall's low corner on his right hand, to the words stroked there in dripping blood-red letters.

"What the fuck?" Gutterson muttered.

The dripping blood-red letters said,

Ramsey murdered Peter Patterson! SHANNON KNEW TIME was passing but he didn't know how much. Days? Weeks? He had no way of telling. He would float upward toward the surface of consciousness but never quite break through. He would see the world above as if through water, a liquid blur of life just beyond him.

The foreigner was up there sometimes. The crazy old bastard who'd injected him. Shannon remembered. The mall parking lot. The watching eyeglasses. The back seat of the car…

The foreigner would give him drinks through a straw. He would talk sometimes, though the words also came to Shannon as if through water and he could never recall from time to time what the foreigner said. He would try to answer. He would struggle to break through the surface, to come awake fully. But the drugs-it must've been drugs-would suck him back under. Light narrowing to a pinpoint, depths closing over him. He would hear the foreigner's voice like a fading echo: "Sleep."

And he would sleep.

Now he awoke. It was different this time. He felt it right away. His mind was clearer. He was aware of the room around him, of the bed underneath him. He had a new sense of his own material presence.

He was in pain-he was aware of that now, too. His face was stiff, aching, throbbing. The pain pulsed from the center of his head to radiate through his entire body. His left arm stung like hornets had been at it.

He began to lift a hand to his face.

"Don't touch yet," the foreigner said.

Shannon stared at the hand groggily. He let it sink down again to the sheets. Slowly, he turned toward the voice.

The foreigner was standing beside his bed. He was wearing a doctor's get-up, a white coat, a stethoscope around his neck. He was adjusting a blinking machine that stood on the top shelf of a green cart. Shannon noticed now that his bed had a rail like a hospital bed and that the mattress was partly raised like a hospital mattress so he could sit up. The machines the foreigner was tinkering with looked like hospital-style machines, too. There was an IV bag with its tube stuck in Shannon's arm. Another tube ran out from under the blankets-a catheter. It was all hospital stuff.

But Shannon sensed that this was no hospital. A dim fire of panic sprang up in him, a dim fire of fear he understood was there but could hardly feel. He looked around the room. No windows. No pictures. Nothing. Just blank, white walls. No furniture but the bed and one chair. Where the hell was he?

At that point, Shannon's eyes started to sink shut. He started to slump on the upraised mattress.

"Sit. Sit up, stay up," the foreigner said briskly, coming to the bedside, pushing at his shoulder. "You have to keep elevated for swelling."

Shannon shook his head, stretched his eyes, trying to stay awake. "Where am I? What'd you do to me?"

"I cut off your legs and replace them with grinning doll heads."

"What?"

"Ta, ta, ta. Don't be fool. I joke with you. I give you new face, like I tell you. So the police, they won't know you. Is good, yes?"

"My face? You changed my face?" Shannon started to lift his hand to it again.

"Don't touch. Here. Drink."

The foreigner held up a water bottle made of blue plastic, a sports bottle with a built-in straw.

"No more drugs," said Shannon thickly.

"Drink. Is apple juice. I drug you here," said the foreigner, pointing to the IV tube.

Shannon realized he was very thirsty. He let the foreigner hold the bottle under his lips. He sucked at the straw. The apple juice tasted good-cold and sweet. Shannon took another sip, then sat back against his pillow.

His mind was getting clearer. He rolled his head so he could focus on the foreigner. He could see the man better in here than he could before, out in the parking lot, in the night. There really was something seedy about the guy. The doctor outfit couldn't change that. The whole look of him was shady and suspicious. The red-and-silver hair slicked back in its own oil and the eyebrows sprouting all over the place. The liver spots on his unsteady hands. The fluffy white hair that looked like dead dandelions growing out of his ears. And something else: that sinister laughter in his eyes, that unwholesome sparkle of chaotic wit. You got that with foreign guys sometimes. Shannon had seen it before. They acted like they'd been around forever and knew everything, like they knew the whole world was just one big joke and you were a naive American fool if you took it seriously.

"You just went and changed my face?" Shannon made himself sound pissed off about it but really he wasn't sure how he felt. It was his face, on the one hand, and no one had asked him. On the other hand, the whole business was coming back to him-the Whittaker job and Benny Torrance and the Hernandez killings. He could see where the foreigner might have done him a favor.

"Is good, yes?" the foreigner repeated with his sinister eyes sparkling. "So police won't know you."

"You could've asked me first."

The foreigner shrugged. "I also could've made you look like monkey's asshole." He diddled some more with the machine.

"No more drugs," said Shannon.

"A little for the pain."

Shannon was clear enough in his head to start thinking now, to start remembering and putting things together.

"How long've I been here?"

"Two days."

"And this was all because of Whittaker, the foundation guy? Is he the one who wanted to help me out?"

"Your friend, you mean. Your friend wishes to remain anonymous."

"What do you mean, anonymous? What the hell is this?" Shannon felt like he ought to make trouble, for form's sake, but he was beginning to suspect he had stepped into a good thing.

"Ta, ta, ta," the foreigner said again. He finished with the machine. He drew the chair up to the bed and sat down on it, murmuring, "Now we see." He leaned forward, studying Shannon's face, peering at him from underneath his untamed eyebrows. He reached out and when Shannon made to slap him off, he said, "Et-et-et" and pushed past him. He held Shannon's cheek and chin gently with his fingertips, turning his face this way and that.

"You are very ugly now, like monster," he murmured. "But soon you will be Handsome Dan, like in movies." Handsome Dang.

Now Shannon did push the foreigner's hands away. "You ought to ask before you cut up someone's face."

"Yes, yes." The foreigner seemed unrepentant, even amused. He went on studying Shannon a while in silence. Then, in a low voice, as if meditating out loud, he said, "Let me tell you how will be, how always is. I give you new face, name, papers, work to do. I even change your fingerprints and DNA."

"What? I thought you couldn't do that."

"In body, no. In computers, yes-which amounts to same thing."

"What do you mean? You mean you can get into the computers? The records? All of them? The feds, the cops, the prisons? You can change all the records of my fingerprints and DNA? You can do that?"

"I am identity mang. I tell you."

Shannon's face grew blank and distant as the implications occurred to him.

"You see?" said the foreigner, nodding. "This is what you want, yes? This is beyond wildest dreams. You will escape police now, live new life now, yes?"

"Yeah," said Shannon, thinking it through. "Yeah…"

"Yeah." The foreigner mimicked him, mocked him. "Maybe for month. Maybe for year, maybe two years, maybe sometimes three, who knows? Then you begin to make mistakes, do little things same as like you used to. You are thinking, 'It does not matter now. I am new man now.'" New mang. "'I escape police.' Then one day you don't escape. You steal, you fight, you run traffic light, you drink in street, police arrest you. Maybe you get away one time-because fingerprints are changed, face is new, you have papers. But soon you are back. You steal, you fight. You go to jail. You go to prison. Three strikes. Or you kill someone. It is all again. All my work, what's the use, what's the purpose, yes? A month, a year, two years, maybe sometimes three. Then it is all again. All the same like before."

Shannon gestured for the apple juice. The foreigner held it to him and he sucked at the straw. As he leaned back, tired with the effort, he shook his head. "No," he said. "Not me. I get what you're saying. But not me. I'm done with that life. You give me a fresh start and I'm gone, baby, gone, so help me."

"Yes, yes, yes, 'so help me.'" The foreigner waved his spotty hand. "You all think this. Fresh start. Like magic, you think. Because you are American. Because you are dumb. You think: 'This is big, wide country. I come to new place, no one knows me, I change. I have therapy, I read book, I take medicine, I have operation, I am new mang.'" He shook his head, those sinister, laughing eyes glistening. "You are never new mang. I am identity man who tells you this. You have identity like stain in fl esh, it never leave you. You have history, like stain in mind. Look at arm. Hmm? Look."

Shannon looked at his stinging left arm. There was a bandage wrapped around it, but he could see red, raw flesh peeking out from beneath the edges. "What's that…?"

"They are gone now. The little scars. I take them away from you. Soon the flesh will heal. There will be nothing."

Shannon stared-at the bandaged arm, then at the foreigner, then at the bandaged arm again. His reaction to this new piece of information surprised him. He had always hated those little round scars on his arms. He had never noticed them without a pang of rage. There were nights when he lost sleep over them, angry at his crappy luck, generally furious and forlorn. And yet now-now that they were gone, he sorrowed for the loss of them. He felt violated, wronged, an intimate piece of him stripped away while he slept.

"What'd you have to do that for?" he murmured, half to himself. He already knew the answer.

"Because they are identifying marks, no? I take them off records, but maybe someone remembers. They make for questions. So I take them." He watched, amused, as Shannon mourned over his lost scars. "So what? So I take scars-so what? Is history gone? Did mother not burn you with cigarette now? Do you not lie awake at night in anger and pain because you have no love in life, no love in heart until you die? You know this. Shannon-is not even real name. You change already. You are new mang? No. Identity like stain. You have nature, you have history. These I cannot take away. So," concluded the foreigner breezily, throwing his hands in the air and letting them plop back down into his lap, "you are fucked." He stood up. "You are not changed. You cannot change. You will do again same like before and like before, same things will happen to you. But… for now you have new face. So that is something, yes? I do what I can do."

Shannon glanced at his bandaged arm again. He couldn't shake that weird sense of loss.

"So what do I look like?" he asked. "My face, I mean."

"I show you later," said the foreigner, "when you are Handsome Dang."

"Just give me a mirror. What do I look like?"

But already the older man was toying with the machine at the bedside. "Sleep," he said.

And Shannon sank away into sleep.

The next time he woke up, he was alone, although he had the sense that a door had just closed, that someone had just left him. His mind cleared faster this time. He cranked his eyes wide. He worked himself into an upright position on the bed. Looked around him.

The IV bag and its silver pole were pushed against the wall. The tube was wrapped up on a hook on the pole. He looked down at his right arm. Nothing there now but a square of gauze taped in the crook of his elbow where the needle had run in. The catheter was gone, too. So were the bandages on his left arm. He could see the red, naked patch where the burn scars had been. He was still in pain, a lot of pain, more throbbing pain in his head than before, in fact. But that was all right, he could take it. He was glad to be free of the tubes and off the drugs.

He moved his feet over the edge of the bed and sat up. He had to wait there until his stomach stopped roller coasting. While he waited, he noticed a couple of painkillers, Vicodin, on the bedside table next to the juice bottle. That was reassuring. He'd go without them as long as he could, but he was probably going to need them soon.

He was wearing a hospital gown, one of those papery smocks that opens in back so your ass hangs out. He looked around the room for his clothes. No sign of them. That annoyed him. He wanted to get dressed. He wanted to get out of here. He wanted to get some air and be his own man again.

He wanted to see his face, too, see what the foreigner had done to him, get a look at this "new mang" he was supposed to be. There was a bathroom just past the end of the bed, the door open. That got him moving. He managed to stand up. Hanging onto the bedrail, he edged his way unsteadily across the floor.

He went into the bathroom. What the hell? No mirror. Everything else was there-a sink, a toilet, a shower-but no mirror. This foreigner was a real comedian, wasn't he? If he wasn't careful, Shannon might give him a new face, see how he liked it.

Without thinking, he reached up and gingerly touched the stubble on his cheek. He flinched. The skin underneath was still swollen and stiff and raw. Well, maybe he was better off without a mirror. He wasn't going to be able to shave for a while anyway.

He made his way out of the bathroom, to the door of the bedroom. He was still fighting off nausea, but it was getting better. He grasped the knob and hesitated for a moment. The spooky idea came to him that he might be locked in here. He would hate that. But no. The knob turned, the door opened. He padded out.

Here was another room, another white room with no windows or pictures or anything, just white walls. It was bigger than the bedroom, much bigger. There was some furniture here, too. A table, a couple of chairs, a low white dresser against one white wall-plus a white refrigerator. There was also another door. Maybe a door to the outside. Shannon decided to ignore it for now. He wasn't feeling steady enough to go out. Not to mention the fact that his butt was waving in the breeze.

He went to the refrigerator instead. Opened it. Found a sandwich inside and a carton of milk and a whole chicken wrapped in plastic. There was also a bowl with some oranges and apples. He tried a bite of one of the apples, but he could barely swallow it. He was too sick. He tossed what was left back in the bowl. It was nice to know it was there anyway. It would come in handy when his stomach stopped feeling like Adventureland.

He went to the dresser. Pulled open a drawer. Clothes! Now this was good. This was a big find. It lifted his heart. He opened the drawers one by one. Black jeans and blue jeans, underwear, socks, sweatshirts, T-shirts, even a couple of pairs of sneakers, all in his size. He lost no time about it. He got himself dressed right then and there, ignoring the throbbing pain in his head when he pulled the sweatshirt down over it, wincing through the burn on his arm when he worked it into the sleeve. No, this was really good. Getting dressed. It made him feel much better, much more human.

Now he was ready to try the other door. He went to it and again he hesitated. It was painted white like the rest of the place, but it was wooden, heavy. He tried the knob. Locked. He had known it would be. It was a police lock, too. He could tell by the plate. There would be a big iron bar jammed in a slot in the floor on the other side. No way through that, not without some heavy machinery.

He turned away. He took an unsteady breath. He was trapped in here-trapped. Had to keep calm. Had to keep smart. He told himself it was all right. He was still better off than he was back in the mausoleum, much better. Then, the cops were after him. The Hernandez killings-three strikes-either way, he was looking at prison for life. Now, if the foreigner was telling the truth, he had a new face, new records, a second chance at everything. It was a good deal. He was better off. Much.

Still he was claustrophobic. Angry, agitated. He couldn't help it. He was frustrated at being trapped in here, trapped in the white room.

He didn't like it. He didn't like it at all.

Hours went by. It was tough. Tough. A white room. Nothing to do, nothing to look at, not even a TV or a magazine. It was like prison, the stretches he'd done in prison where time became a kind of distance, time became like a long road you had to walk and walk and you couldn't speed up or slow down or stop but only walk at the same pace-that was the punishment-the monotony of the pace-a purgatory of walking down the road of time. At least in prison there was something to see and hear. There were noises and voices and other people, something to break up the tedium. Here, what was there? When he felt stronger, he ate the chicken. He took the Vicodin. He did some pushups, some crunches, as much as he could tolerate through the pain. Then that was it. There was pretty much nothing else to do. A couple more hours went by and he felt like he'd been here for years. He felt like he was going crazy. He felt like his skin was made of spiders, like his skin was crawling all over him. This was the way he felt when he hadn't done a job for a long time. When he was just working and coming home and there was nothing happening. The boredom of everyday life made him crazy just like this, just like prison did with its purgatory road.

Crazy thoughts started to come into his mind. He couldn't stop them. All his worries raced around inside his head like mice on speed. The police and the Hernandez killings and Benny Torrance. Racing around and around in his head. Karen and his old life-gone like that, like the snap of a finger. Gone forever. He thought of her, wriggling out of her skirt, smirking at him in her bra and panties, putting perfume on for him. It was enough to drive him insane with longing. What had he done? Why had he gone on another job? He knew his luck was running out. He knew it. He'd never had a big supply of luck to begin with. He looked at his arm where those little round scars used to be and he felt the old hollow rage that came to him in his sleepless hours and he felt this hollow sadness that the scars were gone and he thought: A new mang. A new mang.

Then he was back to remembering how good his old life had been. Okay, sure, he'd gotten crazy from the boredom sometimes, but there were other times when life was really good. Like right at the tail end there, out in the backyard with the daylight the way it got toward evening, golden before it went gray, and with the draw knife in his two hands working over the block of white ash that had the woman's face hidden in it, the woman he would have carved into being, sweet and feminine with long hair playing around her cheeks as she stood on her doorstep at the edge of a field of grain, searching the distance for him, eager to see him coming home on that endless, endless road. He thought of her and he would not have believed he could have felt such longing, longing so bad it seemed it might kill him where he stood. But it was like that, here in the white room. It made him nuts, with nothing to do hour after hour, with the same thoughts running through his mind like mice: Why did I do that last job? And with that psycho Benny? Looking at his red, raw arm and thinking: I knew I never had any luck. Looking at the ceiling of the white room and thinking: You never gave me any luck, you son of a bitch.

There was no clock here, so he didn't know how long this went on. Probably only hours, though it began to feel like days. He began to feel as if his head would explode, as if the foreigner would come back and find him standing there in the middle of the room with just his neck on, the flesh of it ragged, blood splattering the walls-and the thought-mice, freed from the cage of his mind, juiced and hare-brained and running all around the floor of the white room.

Then he heard the police lock slide over with a thunk. Finally! He was at the door in a flash.

"Get the hell out of my way," he said, and shoved roughly past the foreigner. The older, smaller man turned aside without resistance. Shannon charged out of the room-and then stopped cold.

He was in a hallway. White-of course, what else? Blank walls-what else? A blank white hallway about twenty paces long with another door at the end, only this door was outlined in daylight, daylight coming in through the top and bottom and along the sides so that the door was kind of a glowing rectangular shadow in the middle of it. Shannon saw he could get out that way, all the way out. That's what stopped him.

"I have key," the foreigner said, picking up his thoughts. He dangled a keychain from his thick fingers, bounced it, made the keys clink and jingle, mockingly. "Take. Go. With monster face. Go. So people say: 'Look, I see mang with face like monster. I remember. Police ask me, I tell them.'"

"I'm going crazy in here, you skeevy foreign bastard."

"In here, you go crazy two weeks, and then you are new mang. Out there, you go crazy in prison-and then you are old mang, yes? Unless they give needle for murder, then you are dead mang." He jingled the keys. "But take. Go. My work is for nothing. That is life sometimes."

Shannon wrestled with his anger and his craziness and his pride, but in the end, really, what could he do?

"Skeevy foreign bastard," he muttered-and he shouldered his way belligerently back into the white room.

"Healing is good," the foreigner said. Shannon sat on the edge of the bed. The foreigner stood over him in his doctor get-up. He held Shannon's head with his fingertips, turning it gently this way and that. "Soon you are Handsome Dang."

"Yeah, great," said Shannon. "Get me a TV or something in here, would you? I can't even tell if it's night or day or what day it is…"

The foreigner ignored him. "You are carpenter, yes?"

"Yeah? So?"

"We put you in place where there is many buildings, much work. We give you name of contractor, union card…"

"Won't they have the word out in places like that? Won't they be looking for me?"

The foreigner's eyes twinkled with that contemptuous foreign wit of his. He turned Shannon's head this way and that, admiring his own handiwork. "It will not matter. They will not know when they see you. I am good identity mang." He let Shannon go. "You will have good life. Plenty work, plenty money. Until you ruin everything and go to jail again. Identity like stain."

"Yeah, just get me a TV. Even a radio. Something. It doesn't do me much good to be new mang if I'm babbling-out-of-my-mind crazy. I can't just stare at the walls here."

That made the foreigner smile. "Yes, yes."

"And you could get me some booze, too, or at least some reefer."

"No," said the foreigner. "No booze. No reefer. But I get you something."

He brought a TV set. Left it in the white room while Shannon was sleeping. Shannon stumbled out of the bedroom in the morning-or whatever time it was when he woke up-stumbled yawning out of a Vicodin haze and saw the set on the table. It was like Christmas morning. Like the first time he saw a girl take her shirt off.

"Hallelujah," he said.

He hurried to it. Turned it on. It wasn't anything fancy-no fifty-inch plasma HD or anything-j ust a squat little box with a twenty-two-inch screen and a DVD player built into the bottom of it-something your grandmother might have. But Shannon actually stroked the side of it as if it were a pet puppy as he waited for the picture to show up.

But it didn't show up. There was nothing. A blank screen. He changed the channel. Nothing.

"No, no, no, no, no," said Shannon. He had started talking to himself in here.

He bitch-slapped the side of the TV, but it still wouldn't give him anything. His hopes and dreams of a better day fizzled within him. Then he noticed the carton in the corner of the floor.

It was the kind of carton you might find stacked in a supermarket storeroom. It used to have tomato cans in it, according to the picture on the side. But now… ah, now, it was full of DVDs.

His eyes to heaven, Shannon let out a sigh of relief and a prayer of gratitude. Okay, it wasn't a TV. It was a DVD player. Not as good, but it was something. It would have to do.

He spent the rest of that day-and the next day-watching the DVDs, one after another, three in a row sometimes. Sometimes he did pushups and crunches in front of the box, keeping his eyes trained on the screen as his body moved up and down. Sometimes he ate while he watched. Other times, he just watched.

The DVDs were all movies, old-school stuff-really old. They weren't even in color. They were black and white. Shannon had never seen a black-and-white movie before, not from beginning to end. He wasn't much of a moviegoer in general anyway. He watched mostly sports on TV. When he went to the theater or rented a film, it was usually an action picture with a lot of slow-motion kung-fu and explosions or maybe a horror flick where all the girls showed their tits and then got killed off one by one. Occasionally, he might watch a comedy with Karen. He liked the goofball stuff where guys drank beer and peeked through knotholes at coeds in the shower and so on. He also liked sports comedies where some retard tried to play football or basketball or whatever way out of his league. Karen liked those comedies, too. Some of those actors could make her laugh so hard the beer came up through her nose. Then, once or twice, she sweet-talked him into watching one of those chick flicks she liked, where some poor excuse for an asshole got all tangled up in lies with his girlfriend and finally had to apologize to her so everyone could live happily ever after. Guys were always apologizing in chick flicks, that was basically the whole plot. Shannon hated them. Watching them made him feel like someone was drilling a hole in the side of his head. Sometimes, Karen got mad because she said he ruined the picture for her with all his groaning and complaining…

But anyway, these were the kinds of things he usually watched when he watched movies. That's what was around.

But this black-and-white stuff-this was different. Just the look of the movies was strange to him at first. The look of the cars and the look of the guys in hats and ties and the women in their old-style dresses. And everyone was white-white with short hair and clean-shaven-with only the occasional shuffle-footed "darkie" coming in as a servant or musician from time to time. Oh, and the talking! There was a lot-a lot!-of talking in these pictures. Some of them were really slow and really corny.

But then some of them-some of them were good, genuinely good, once you got used to them, once you just forgot all the old-fashioned stuff and focused on the stories. There was this one Western he really liked, for instance, about a bunch of people stuck riding together in a stagecoach. They were all trying to escape from something or get somewhere and each one had a secret or a tale to tell. He liked the hero, who was taciturn and watchful and cool-and who'd been framed for a murder, just like Shannon himself. He even liked the love story part where the hero fell for the girl even though she used to be a hooker. He liked when the hero killed the guys who'd framed him. And then there was a good chase with the Indians coming after the coach. The hero risked his life to help beat the Indians so, in return, the marshal helped him escape to Mexico with the girl, which was a pretty good ending.

There was another movie he liked where the hero ran a casino during the war with the Nazis. The hero didn't want to get involved in the war but his old girlfriend showed up and now she was married to some top secret agent. The hero wanted her back and it looked like she was willing, but in the end he sent her away to help her husband beat the Nazis and he became a secret agent himself to help fight the war, too. That was a good story. Shannon thought about it a lot afterward. He sort of daydreamed about being in it. It'd be tough to give up a girl like that, he thought. The girls in these old movies never showed enough skin-the movies always faded away during the sex scenes so you never got to see anything. But the girl in this movie was smoking hot even with her clothes on. Just the way she looked up at the hero-like he was everything to her and her fate was in his hands no matter what: that was the thing-that's what would make her so hard to let go of. Shannon wasn't sure he'd be able to do it in real life, but he daydreamed he would.

There was another movie about war that he liked with the same hero who was in the Western, the same actor. In this one, he played a tough drill sergeant who had to teach young recruits how to be good marines. In the end, he got killed by a Jap sniper, but his recruits remembered him and went on to fight the war on their own. Shannon actually teared up at that last part, especially when they played the song about the halls of Montezuma. He'd always sort of thought about being a soldier or a marine and was sorry sometimes that he'd never been one.

"There was even a chick flick in there that was pretty good," Shannon told the foreigner when he came a few days later. Who else was he going to talk to? He sat on the edge of the bed while the foreigner turned his head this way and that in order to look his face over. "Karen-my old girlfriend-she would've liked this picture. But it was good!"

"Yes?" the foreigner murmured. "I never see."

"There were these two rich guys fighting over this girl. Or one of the guys was rich. He was the one who used to be her husband. They all lived in this big mansion."

Shannon was full of the story and had to tell it to someone. It was the last picture he'd seen before the foreigner came. The girl in it had been kind of an ice maiden, too good for anyone. She needed a slap upside the head, basically, which was probably what Shannon would've given her. But the rich guy handled her pretty well. He only slugged her once, in the beginning. The rest of the time he was cool and funny with her, and it finally brought her around. The girl in this movie wasn't as hot as the girl in the casino picture, but in the end she looked at the rich guy the same way, with that same look, and Shannon could see how you could go for her and how it had been worth the rich guy's trouble to straighten her out.

"At least he didn't have to apologize to her in the end," Shannon told the foreigner. "Those apology guys make me sick."

The foreigner let go of him. "Very good," he said. "Almost you are ready. I bring you mirror next time. You see."

"Hey. No kidding. Great," Shannon said. That was what he wanted to hear. Movies or no, he couldn't wait to get out of this place. And the curiosity and anxiety about his new face were killing him. He had tried, between one film and another, to make out his reflection in the dark TV screen. It came back to him dim and distorted. It was a disturbing experience. He had spent hours looking at all those handsome movie stars and pretty girls on the screen, and then suddenly he was there himself with his distorted "monster face," as the foreigner would say. After a while, he stopped trying to see it.

"So we're getting to the end of this, huh," he said now. He was excited but he was worried, too. He was worried about his face and about… about everything. "I can get out of here soon."

"Very soon," said the foreigner. "Very soon."

The last movie Shannon watched in the white room-the last DVD in the tomato can carton-was kind of stupid but kind of good, too. If anyone had been around while he was watching it, he would've said it was kind of stupid. But since it was just him sitting there, he had to admit, secretly he thought it was pretty good. It was a story about a guy who wanted to kill himself because his life sucked. He lived in this small town in the middle of nowhere. He was one of these guys who was always sacrificing himself for other people. Every time he tried to get out of this town and get a better job or get some excitement, someone would need something, and he'd have to stay and help them. Finally, time passed, and there he was, just this nobody in the middle of nowhere. That was his whole life. On top of that, his crazy uncle lost some money and the hero got framed for stealing it. So now the police were after him, too. Shannon knew what that was like. He felt for the guy. Finally, the poor bastard decided to throw himself off a bridge. But before he did, he said a prayer for help. The angels heard him in heaven and one of them came down to lend a hand. It was that kind of story. This angel showed the hero what the world would be like if the hero had never been born. It was a pretty bad place because the hero had helped a lot of people who now never would have been helped because he wasn't born. Anyway, this made the hero realize what a good guy he was and so he was happy after that, even though his life pretty much still sucked.

When the movie was over, Shannon looked inside the tomato can carton just to make sure and, yeah, there were no more DVDs. That was the last of them. The white room was silent around him, the way it had been before. He knew he could watch one of the movies over if he wanted to, and he fi gured he probably would if he didn't get out of here soon. But for now, he just sat in his chair, thinking about the last one.

It was sort of depressing to think about it. Because if an angel ever came down to show Shannon what the world would be like if he'd never been born, the world would be more or less the same as it was now, maybe even better, because there were some bad things Shannon had done that wouldn't have been done. Well-he argued in his own defense-probably somebody else would've done them if he hadn't. And what about that girl at the Whittaker Center? Benny would've left her in absolute pieces if Shannon hadn't been around to help her out. But then, if there'd been no Shannon, maybe Benny wouldn't even have been there in the first place. So that was sort of a wash. In any case, the point was, if he'd never been born, it wouldn't really matter much at all. Which was a depressing thought. He had to tell himself, hey, that guy in the movie, he could afford to be a good guy, he had a lot of advantages. He had a father for one thing. And a mother who was really nice to him. And that small town was boring maybe, but it looked like a nice place to live and not like the places Shannon had grown up in. Plus, later on in the movie, the guy had this dynamite wife, the kind of wife who really did things for him, made his house nice and kept the kids out of the way so when he came home from his crap job he could at least relax a little. Because, let's face it, Shannon could miss Karen all he wanted, but she was nothing like that. First of all, she was half in the bag most of the time. She had a reefer lit and a beer popped almost the second she walked through the door. The wife in the movie was always working on the house or making dinner, where if you asked Karen to get off her ass and get you a drink, it was a two-day negotiation, you never heard the end of it. The guy in the movie just had advantages, that's all Shannon was getting at. It was easier for him to be nice to people and always doing things for them. He had a reason to be that way.

Shannon slouched in the chair with his legs splayed out in front of him, absent-mindedly rubbing the place on his arm where those little round scars used to be. He felt nostalgic. He missed the past, the old days. But it wasn't his old days he missed, it was the old days of the guy in the movie. He missed the house in the small town and the mother and the father who loved each other and were nice to him. It was strange-because how could he miss something that had never actually happened to him? It was kind of like when he saw things in the pieces of wood he was carving, things he had never seen in real life, the face of the woman waiting at the door or whatever. It was as if the things in his head were as real as real things. It had always been like that for him. Even when he was little, he had missed this movie life he'd never lived. Even before he had known there was such a life, he had somehow known it, and had known his own life was wrong. How had he known such things? Maybe before his real life, he had had another life in which everything was the way it was supposed to be and he missed that. Or something.

He sat in the chair, wondering about it. He wondered: If he had lived that movie life, would he have been a better person? Would he have been like the guy in the movie, always doing things for people?

Anyway, that was the last DVD. The box was empty. And then-hallelujah-the foreigner came to bring him his new identity.

"Look, look," the foreigner commanded impatiently. "Look. Go on."

But for another long moment, Shannon hesitated, his heart hammering. He was afraid. Afraid to lift the round shaving mirror from where it lay on his thighs, afraid to peer into the glass at his new face. What if he really was a monster now? Or just so different from what he'd been that he couldn't recognize himself, had become a stranger to his own countenance? Bad enough to be imprisoned in the white room, but to be locked inside a body that wasn't his own…

"Go, go," said the foreigner. "Is not so bad. Look."

Shannon took a deep breath and lifted the mirror.

His first sensation at what he saw in the glass was terror, a quick, lancing jag of nauseating fear. Where had he gone? Who was that there? Who was he? But the moment passed. He was still himself. The features were changed, reshaped, but they were still his features somehow. He could still make himself out in the eyes and in remaining traces of the face he'd known. And he was still himself inside.

His terror abated. He was relieved. It was not so bad. It was good, in fact. No one else, not even people who knew him well, would ever recognize him. But he felt the same. He was who he was.

"You are Henry Conor now," the foreigner said.

"Henry Conor," Shannon murmured, gazing at his reflection. He let the name play in his mind. He didn't like it much. It sounded to him like the name of some pencil-head in a suit, a lawyer or something like that. "Why can't I pick my own name?"

"Because I make papers," the foreigner said. "This is name I put."

Shannon shrugged. A name was a name.

He went on looking. He felt better and better about the face looking back at him. Whatever else it was, it was no way the distorted monster face he'd seen reflected in the TV. The beard made him look like kind of a wild man, but he could shave that off soon enough. Underneath, it was all right.

"You do good work," he said.

The foreigner straightened from the briefcase he had opened on the bedroom chair. He handed Shannon a couple of manila folders. "Here are papers. License, passport, Social Security. Also tax returns for five years. Work history, references boss can call so he knows you are good worker." He handed him the folders.

"Nice. This is a whole big operation."

"You will have tools to work with and number to call where you can get job."

Shannon opened a folder. Saw the driver's license in there. Saw the address under the photograph.

"That's a long way away."

"This is good, yes? Far from where you were."

"Yeah, I guess that is good. I never been out there. Where'd you get the picture of me?"

"Computer morph. It's what I work from when I do face. You will shave to look like picture."

"Right. I'll look good without the beard. Should be able to get laid now and then anyway."

"That's why I leave same testicles," the foreigner said.

Shannon tossed the folders aside onto the bed. He searched the foreigner's droll and disdainful expression. "So all this is 'cause I saved that girl? I mean, this whole setup-this is all Whittaker paying me back for my good deed?"

The foreigner didn't answer. He just stood looking at him-looking at him, Shannon thought, as if he were a monkey in a cage or a child being observed on one of those hidden nursery cameras, a child playing dress-up alone in his room who didn't know the camera was there. The foreigner stood and watched him, in other words, as if he were some kind of lesser creature who didn't know he was being watched and whose antics amused him.

"What?" Shannon said. "What're you looking at?"

The foreigner merely went on watching him in that way another few seconds. Then finally he said, "Shave face. Get ready."

Shannon got ready. He shaved. He studied his new look in the mirror until it grew familiar. Then the foreigner came back for the last time.

"Here," he said. He put out one of his knobbly hands. He was holding a couple of capsules.

"No, I'm good," Shannon said. "I don't need them anymore."

"Take. Or I put needle in neck again." Shannon scraped the pills up off the foreigner's palm. "They will make you sleep. When you wake up, you have new life, like princess in fairy tale." He handed Shannon the juice bottle with the straw.

Shannon swallowed the pills, sitting on the edge of the bed. "Where'll you be?" he asked. It wasn't that he'd miss the foreigner exactly, but he was curious. He'd gotten used to the old guy, the only person he'd seen in… well, he didn't know how long.

"Lie down or you will fall on new face."

Shannon lay back on the bed, looking up at the foreigner, at his disreputable old-world countenance with the hair sprouting in all the wrong places.

"You just go off to another job or what?" he asked him.

"I disappear like smoke," the foreigner said. "Close eyes."

"Identity mang has no identity, huh," said Shannon sleepily. He was already going under, starting to blink heavily. He fought it for another second or two. Now that the time had finally come, he was nervous about all this, his new life and so on. It'd been boring in here, in the white room, but it had felt safe anyway. Without newspapers or the TV news, the cops and Benny Torrance and the Hernandez killings had all seemed very far away. He'd forgotten what it was like to be out there in the world, on the run with the law after you.

Anxious or not, he couldn't keep his eyes open any longer. He let them fall shut slowly. He lay still, countering his nervousness with images of the house from that last movie, the house in the small town with the lights on in the windows and Mom and Dad inside…

He gave a long nostalgic sigh. He missed those old days.