Andrew Klavan - The Identity Man

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.'"