The Identity Man

  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, wit
h 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 for
eigner 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.