Billy

 

Five years ago one Friday night a copywriter named Dennis Schulte, whom I had fired for a lack of talent, followed me to the Appleton Hyatt, where the Fox Valley Ad Club was holding its Addy Awards. Schulte caught me outside our agency's hospitality suite on the sixth floor and with witnesses galore, he threw lye in my face and pushed me over the railing. I crashed through the atrium roof and landed face-first on the sneeze guard of the salad bar of the Nakoosa Garden Café. My face was too far gone to repair. Microsurgeons lifted it off, and, something like half a day later, they finished giving me this face. Whose? That's something I'll probably never find out. The donor's family doesn't want me to know anything about them or him, except that he died of a brain aneurysm and was a few years younger than me. The chief surgeon said it was enough to know that our skin tones were similar.

 

Jane

 

I still get this frisson of guilt when Billy and I have sex, like I'm having an affair. I'm afraid to bite down on his new lips, to touch my tongue to the inside of his cheeks. When I put my tongue in his mouth I'm aware of passing a border of teeny scars, and that on the other side there's what's always been his: the roof of Billy's mouth, his tongue.

 

Billy Jr.

 

When my dad tries to kiss me goodnight I know it's his voice and eyes and stuff, but I want to get away from him. He's like all frowning and it doesn't look like him. It's like some teacher or somebody is trying to kiss me goodnight.

 

Billy

 

I saw myself falling through the atrium. I saw black hair and green eyes and a polo shirt and jeans and loafers in the mirrored glass on the outside of the elevators. I'll never really be able to see what I looked like in my late thirties up till the day I lost my first face. I was forty-one, but people though I was thirty-five. We don't have many pictures, and anyway I wasn't photogenic. I am now, though. People with full-face transplants usually look more like themselves than the donor, because the skin envelope is elastic. But the mircosurgeons who degloved my donor's face removed not just skin and subcutaneous fat and muscle, but also part of his bone and cartilage. I won't bullshit you—it took three years of healing and physical therapy just to achieve minimal function. But I'm past all that, and now, thanks to the donor and doctors, I have almost Hollywood cheekbones and a firmer jaw. I was lucky that I didn't suffer rejection or infections. The touchiest problem was fusing the donor's facial nerves with mine after my face was removed. Some people with deep full-face transplants twitch uncontrollably—their nerve signals keep misfiring. I have a little dyskinesia. It only causes me to frown when I mean to smile and to smile when I guess I mean to frown.

 

Jane

 

The social worker at the hospital told me it's medically no different than if Billy had received a transplanted hand or lower limb. Improved microsurgical techniques and immunosuppressant drug therapies allow for many kinds of transplants. But hands and lower limbs are different from faces, I'm sure, in that as humans, we're wired to recognize hundreds if not thousands of faces. It's not the same with hands.

 

Billy

 

When I go down on Jane I realize I'm pushing what had been someone else's nose and lips into her sex, and I wonder where my face had been its first twenty or thirty years. At the same time I find myself thinking a lot about what's underneath Asian and African faces, how similar their blood vessels and nerves and muscles, at least, must be to what's underneath Caucasian faces. Or how, in between the facial surface and the skeleton, men and women have basically the same inscapes. I guess I don't care like I used to about what people feel. I'm more interested in what they are.

 

Jane

 

I want to hold his chin and stroke his cheek and say, Billy you have the most beautiful eyes. And I know this sounds silly, but maybe his chin and cheek would somehow be envious.

 

Billy Jr.

 

My mother says I have my father's eyes. I know that I have hands just like him. He used to have my same earlobes.

 

Billy

 

I'm actually healed enough to be able to feel my new face burn from embarrassment. The other day I brought back molding I'd bought at Lowe's, and I didn't have the receipt, and I flushed. I was afraid my face would peel off in front of the cashier. When I got to my car, only the cheeks were still red.

 

Jane

 

The worst is that I can't read his face like I used to. I'm getting better at reading his body language. It can be pitch dark and I can tell when he's going to get out of bed and go downstairs and work.

 

Billy

 

I was thinking of growing the beard in, to see what I'd look like that way, but now I see a few white hairs on either side of my chin and I wonder whose hairs they are. If the donor never lived to see what hairs come into his beard, are they still a feature of his? Or are they all mine, since they debuted on my face? Or my ownership of his face. Years from now if his family or friends see me somewhere, will they think, boy, he (whoever he is) would have been a handsome older man.

 

Jane

 

I remember in The Joy Luck Club where the mother says she didn't lose herself all at once—she rubbed out her face over the years, like stone carvings are worn down by water. Sometimes I want to rub my face out all at once.

 

Billy Jr.

 

I won't grow up to look like my dad. If anyone who doesn't know what happened to him asks me if I'm adopted, I'll rip his fucking face off. I don't mean it that way.

 

Jane

 

I don't know which changes in Billy have been coming from Billy's soul. Forgetting all that for a moment, what's my role in all of this? Every time I talk to, look at, touch, love him, I guess—I suppose—I'm taking part in some brave new rite of transformation.

 

Billy Jr.

 

My mom's all weepy rememberin shit, and she tell me when I was little my dad traveled a lot, and like when I was three—in the morning, every weekend—I'd try pushing him out of their bed. And I'm like: Ma, you're not supposed to say that now to your adolescent son!

 

Jane

 

I showed Billy where Jung says: "Rebirth is not a process that we can in any way observe. We can neither measure nor weigh nor photograph it. It is entirely beyond sense perception." And Billy goes, "Bullshit."

 

Billy Jr.

 

This other time she goes: You're lucky you still have your father. I'm like, Ma, don't look at me like I'm supposed to remind you of him. Did you ever think maybe I changed the most? Ever think of that? And she's like, God, I can't take any more of this.

 

Jane

 

Neither my husband nor the donor has been reincarnated, since that implies the continuity of personality. I mean, the other guy's personality didn't transmigrate into my husband's body. And yet Billy, I'm real sure, is trying to figure out how to be a little like the donor.

 

Billy

 

He liked the sun, or maybe he smoked, because I have crow's feet, and he was too young to get wrinkles, I think, unless he tanned or smoked. I also have deep lines in my mouth, which must be from when he used to smile. I notice them when I frown.