Andrew Klavan - The Identity Man

"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.