The Identity Man

  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-brain
ed 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..."