The Identity Man

  Then Applebee said quietly, "You ever study calculus?"

  "Oh, sure," murmured Shannon, sketching away. "Calculus? That's all I ever do."

  "Yes," said the old man, almost to himself. "I understand. No one does anymore. But there's a lot of mystery to it. Infinite limits ... a lot of mystery." He shook his head slowly. "Sorry. These things—they run around in my brain and I've got no one to tell them to."

  "That's all right. I don't mind. It's interesting."

  There was no answer. Shannon came out of his focus on the wing long enough to glance at Applebee. Applebee was holding his pipe to his mouth and tapping the stem against his lower lip. He was looking thoughtfully over the arches and jumbles and lopsided spires of the debris lying in the high weeds. Shannon figured he was thinking about the old days. He smiled again. He liked Applebee. He was a good old guy.

  Coming back to himself, Applebee noticed Shannon watching him. And he noticed the wing Shannon was working on and how well it fit to the stump on the broken angel and how perfectly and gracefully Shannon had drawn the feathers. "Look at that," he said, perking up, delighted. "Why, that's wonderful. Where'd you learn to do that?"

  "I just can," Shannon said with a shrug. "I've always been able to."

  At that moment, the little boy—Michael—came bursting out of the house into the backyard. All his earlier solemnity was gone. He was running full speed, squealing with laughter.

  "Ho!" cried Frederick Applebee as the boy darted behind him and clutched at his legs, hiding. "What's this?"

  Michael's mother cracked open the screen door behind him, peeking around the edge of it with bright, mischievous eyes.

  "Where'd he get to?" she said. "I know he's here somewhere."

  The little boy giggled behind his grandfather's legs as the woman came out of the house and crept steadily toward him like a stalking cat.

  "I know he's here somewhere," she said again.

  The boy, unable to tolerate the suspense, broke from behind Applebee's legs and ran for it. The mother went after him and caught him and swept him up in her arms, laughing and tickling him.

  Shannon felt a hitch in his chest at this first close sight of her, the sight of her bright eyes and smile and the sound of her laughter. She was wearing loose jeans and a baggy sweatshirt, but Shannon could see her figure moving under them as she wrestled with her son. She was definitely the woman he'd seen weeping in the window, but so different from that woman, so lively and hilarious, that he half doubted the two were the same.

  "Henry Conor, this is my daughter, Teresa Grey," Frederick Applebee said.

  She came over to them, clutching the giggling, struggling boy in her arms so that his feet kicked and dangled off the ground. She was as pretty up close as she'd been through the window, prettier because she was smiling now. She had big, warm brown eyes, high cheekbones, and a chin like the point of a valentine. She had her father's squashed nose, but smaller, more graceful, like an Irish pug. Her hair sprang out all over the place in corkscrew curls, which Shannon found endearing.

  "Hi, Henry," she said. She held the boy in one arm, letting him slide his way to the ground. She offered her free hand and Shannon shook it.

  "Look at this," said Applebee, indicating the angel on the reredos. "He's doing a great job so far."

  "Oh, I'm glad!" she said. She had a warm voice, on the deep side. "My father loves this old thing. He was crushed when it got broken. Oh, you are doing a good job, aren't you?"

  "Just the wing," said Shannon modestly. "The head'll be the hard part."

  The boy squirmed free of Teresa's hold and dashed for the house. Laughing uncontrollably, he shouted, "I'm getting away!"

  "Excuse me," Teresa said to Shannon with a laugh.

  Shannon felt another hitch inside him as he watched her go chasing after the child, shouting play threats at him.

  He went back to work. He began to carve the delicate wing feathers with an X-Acto knife. The old man wandered into the house and back out again later, standing and watching, chatting about the thoughts he had had on his mind for too long. At lunchtime, the woman brought him a sandwich and a Coke. Now and then, the boy peeked solemnly at him through a rear window. Shannon made faces at the kid and pretended to shoot at him. The boy ducked and came back, fighting down a smile. He was too shy, though, to come out into the yard.

  At one point, the old man came out and gave Shannon a key, a small Medeco with a green spot stuck to the bow. "You can get in the back door with this, in through the security gate and the kitchen. In case you want to fetch the altarpiece when no one's around."

  Shannon was touched. He had broken into a lot of houses in his life, and he was touched that the old man trusted him with the key.

  It was a good day all around. Shannon liked the work and he enjoyed the family and the spring weather was fine. As he carved the delicate feathers, his mind went back to how, not long ago, not very long ago at all, he'd been a hunted man, hiding in a cemetery tomb, of all places, with life in prison or death hanging over him. The thought made him lift his face gratefully to the sun and breathe in deeply.

  A breeze reached him and a tendril of decay drifted beneath his nostrils: the stench of the fallen city.

  SHANNON FELL IN LOVE with her—with Teresa. It was something entirely new.

  Every weekend, he went to the white clapboard house on H Street to work on the altarpiece. He worked long days, the whole day, so that the work progressed quickly. By the end of only the second Sunday, he had the angel's feathery wing piece nearly done.

  While he worked, Frederick Applebee and Teresa and the boy Michael would come out in the yard to be with him, each in their turn. Applebee, for instance, would wander out of the house now and then to check his progress. He would stand around and maunder in that old man way of his about the old days and the state of the world, about mathematics and how civilization was crumbling to dust and so on. Then, later, little Michael would come out and stand with his thumbs in his pockets, swiveling his upper body back and forth. He would ask questions—how do you do this and why do you do that? One afternoon, Shannon gave him tools and some wood to play with. The boy gouged some of the wood and glued some pieces together and called it a helicopter and showed it proudly to his mother.

  Teresa visited with him, too. She brought him iced tea and sandwiches. She sat nearby and drank a glass of iced tea herself, keeping him company while he worked. She admired his skill at shaping the wing feathers to match the ones on the original angel. She asked him about his life, where he came from, what he had done. He tried to be careful in answering her questions, but he had to say something. He told her stories he'd derived from the black-and-white movies he'd watched in the white room. He said he'd grown up in Utah among the stark rock outcroppings and level desert plains. He told her he'd lived in a small town with his father, who was a banker, and with his housewife mom. He felt bad about lying to her like that, but what else could he do? What the hell? he said to himself. It made a strange kind of sense in a way, didn't it? He was telling her about the life he should have had because she was the kind of girl he might have known if he had had that life.

  That's the way she seemed to him. She seemed part of that life he'd seen in the black-and-white movies, that life he remembered but had never lived. She was the girl he remembered but had never known. She was warm-hearted and generous, cheerful and funny, so completely different from the anguished woman who'd been weeping in the window that he almost forgot ever having seen her like that. She had a natural, unaffected way of praising his work while making jokes about herself. She would tell him how beautiful and graceful his carved feathers were, for instance, and then go into some anecdote about how clumsy she was with her hands. She would make faces and do silly voices as she told the story, slipping from her precise and mellow diction into street rhythms for humor and emphasis, or even sticking her tongue out to one side and crossing her eyes at a punch line to startle him into laughter. She never tried to seem sexy or
alluring or mysterious with him. She was just comical and regular, the same way she was with her son. Shannon watched her with her son sometimes. He watched her teasing the boy out of his heavy solemnity with goofy jokes and faces. He watched her wrestle with the boy, giggling in the dirt, or play some madcap version of football with him that was as good as wrestling. She was always full of that kind of energy and cheer.

  "I try to make sure he gets to do guy stuff," she told Shannon as she sat beside his workplace on the remnants of a cinderblock wall. A field strewn with garbage spread out behind her. She drank from her mug of tea and kept an eye on the boy where he played with plastic soldiers in the sparse grass at the other end of the yard. "Daddy throws a ball with him sometimes, but he doesn't have the energy he used to have and ... he was never much into sports anyway. I try to make sure Michael gets to do some roughhousing and ... you know. That sort of thing. Luckily, he's still little. I don't know what I'm gonna do when he has to learn to swing a bat and stand up for himself in a fight and all that."

  Shannon looked up from his work long enough to glance over at the boy—and at the woman watching the boy. A vague understanding dawned in him. Without really putting it into words, he started to see why they all came out to the backyard to watch him work, why they all talked to him like this and asked him questions and told him their thoughts. It was because of her husband, because her husband had been killed in the war, and now there was an empty place in the family where he had been. Shannon didn't fill that place, he simply stood in it, like those actors who stand in for a star before the cameras start to roll. He could've been anyone—any man, at least—and they would have talked to him because he was in that place, because the boy missed his father and the old man missed the company of his son-in-law and the woman missed her husband. It was as if they were talking to that other man by talking to Shannon.

  As this occurred to him in that vague way, Shannon felt a sort of hollow sadness without really knowing why. Without really knowing why, he said: "The little man must miss his father, huh."

  "I guess so," Teresa murmured in a faraway voice—watching the boy and speaking as if she wasn't thinking about what she said. For a moment then, just a moment, Shannon saw her again as he'd seen her first. The same wild suffering shimmered beneath the surface of her distant expression, barely there, then gone. She faced him and smiled. "How boring am I, right? I know how much a man likes to hear a mother talk about her kids." She tilted her head over, shut her eyes, and snored loudly to make him laugh.

  Shannon ignored the jokiness this time. "What happened to him? Your husband."

  "Oh ... please. Don't get me started. Talk about depressing. Just what you need, right? Trying to work with me over here sobbing."

  "I don't mind. Sob away. I wondered, that's all."

  She gave a big sigh, as if to say, All right, you win. "He was a staff sergeant in the infantry in Iraq, in a little city south of Baghdad. Some Iraqi engineers had been brought into his FOB, his base, to do some work, and the base came under rocket fire. Everyone went scrambling for the bunkers, but two of the civilian engineers sort of froze, you know, out in the open. Carter—he was the fastest man. He could outrun lightning. He could've gotten into that bunker, too. But he turned around and ran to the engineers instead. Grabbed each one by an arm and shoved them into the bunker in front of him. Just as they got there, another rocket came in and Carter got hit by shrapnel. He was just outside the bunker entrance. The Iraqis didn't get a scratch, but Carter..."

  She took a leather billfold from the front pocket of her jeans. She opened it and handed it to him. Shannon looked down at a snapshot of her husband, Carter. He was a round-faced man with a grin full of youth and friendliness—nothing like the grim, determined heroes he had seen in the black-and-white war movies in the white room.

  "They gave him the Bronze Star with the valor device," she said proudly, "and the Purple Heart and the Combat Infantryman's Badge ... and here I go." But there was no sobbing, not at all. Her eyes just grew damp. She touched the corners of them and it was over. "I warned you."

  "Sounds like a hell of a brave guy," said Shannon, feeling even more hollow than before. He gave her back the billfold.

  "That's what I really worry about," she said. She spoke in her light, jokey tone again, but he could hear the tears just underneath. "How am I going to teach him that?"

  "To be brave, you mean?"

  "Everything. All the things Carter just was. I try to tell Michael what he was but ... you can't even say the words for it anymore without sounding silly. Have you noticed that? Carter had things like honor, things like valor. He was noble. Those used to be good words, right? But somehow they got ... stupid-sounding, you know? Kind of— ugh—heavy and overbearing and even comical. How does that happen to a word? He can look on the TV"—she was talking about the boy now—"he can look on the TV, he'll see all these men struttin' around, all muscle and gold and guns. Struttin' around like they somethin' fine, like they tough, you know? Talkin' about slappin' they hos. Carter was nothing like that. Carter was a man. He treated me like..." She didn't finish. She fought back her tears. She shook her head. "Even the word man," she said. "How does that happen to a word?"

  Shannon, at this point, felt like absolute shit. How could he ever compete with a husband like that? He didn't even admit to himself that he was competing with him, but he felt bad anyway. He tried to belittle his rival in his mind. Yeah, big hero. Killing people for the government. Lets the government sell him some line about God and country or whatever and sucker him off to some war they're probably making money off of somehow. Lets himself get blown up for a couple of ragheads who didn't want him there and probably would've stabbed him in the back soon as look at him. What's so great about that, killing people for the government and getting killed for some poor ragheads in some lousy war?

  It was a nice try, but it didn't work. He knew in his heart it was all garbage, just stuff he was saying to keep from feeling so small because he'd never done anything noble or honorable like that. But he still felt small. He felt like absolute shit.

  He began his work on the head of the angel. He used the band saw at his job site again. He shaped that special piece of red oak he'd found at the store so that it would fit the broken place where the old head had been. When he got to the Applebee house, he fastened the block of wood to the broken figure with a dowel. Then he went to work on it with a mallet and gouges, hammering away, chipping the block down to the general shape he wanted.

  As he worked on it, his misgivings grew. Or that is: he had had misgivings all along, but hadn't acknowledged them until now. Now they came to the surface. When he first accepted the job from Applebee, he had told himself it would be no problem to reconstruct the angel's face from the photographs he had. But the photographs were small and unclear. It was hard to make out the details. Also, there was the wood, this specific block of wood he'd found. It had its own shape to struggle with, its own angel face buried at its core. He saw this face in his mind's eye, but only vaguely, like the angel in the photograph. Like the angel in the photograph, the details were hard to make out.

  During the week, he found himself searching people's faces. The faces of the other carpenters and electricians on the site at work. The faces of people at Betsy's restaurant when he ate dinner there. The faces of passersby when he went running for exercise. He was looking for inspiration for his angel, but he couldn't find it. When the weekend came, he chiseled away at the block of red oak, but he didn't know what he was going to make. He began to dread the moment when he would have to start working on the angel's features.

  One early morning, he was jogging through a damaged suburb on the edge of the Northern District, the most crime-ridden district in the city. He was in a runner's reverie, focused on his breath and the flap of his sneakers against the pavement. The bald guy didn't register on his mind until he ducked away around the corner up ahead. Only then, when he was gone, did Shannon wonder: Was that him? Was that the
guy from the green Crown Victoria, the drug-thin guy with his cheap suit and his shaved head who seemed to keep showing up everywhere? Shannon had forgotten about the guy for a while, but now he wondered: Was he back? Was he spying on him?

  Shannon increased his speed, hurrying to get to the corner. When he did, he scanned the scene, searching for the bald guy. Instead, his attention was caught by something else: there was a crowd gathered on the lawn of one of the houses here. There were police cruisers parked in the driveway and at the curb out front, their red flashers revolving in the still-shadowy dawn. Shannon slowed to a walk, breathless and sweating. He approached the edge of the crowd. He looked through to see what was going on.

  A man had been shot dead. He was lying sprawled in his lover's lap with a black hole in the center of his T-shirt. He was about Shannon's age, small and slender. He had a narrow, weaselly face and a thin moustache. He wore only the blasted T-shirt and his Jockey underpants.

  His lover—the lover who knelt on the lawn and held his corpse—was also a man, an older queen wearing a feminine quilted bathrobe and a plastic shower cap on his head. He was holding his lover on his lap and screaming—screaming raggedly, wildly, stretching out his hand to the crowd around him as if appealing to them, begging them to make things right.

  A cop stood over the two lovers, looking down at them. Shannon noticed the cop was smirking—probably because the lovers were queers and the older one was wearing that bathrobe and the girly shower cap. But Shannon felt only pity for the screaming man. He could see how much he loved the dead guy. The robe and the cap didn't amount to much next to that. Even them being fags—what did it matter? Look at the poor bastard. His heart was broken.