1.

THE ANCIENT-LOOKING DOCTOR, with half his face in shadow, seemed to be leering at me.

He was also busy drying his hands on his dirty lab coat, which had a smattering of bloodstains, more brown than red. For my part, I was sitting on his examining table, stripped to the waist, my feet dangling like I was a little boy. A little boy with a bullet in his shoulder.

It was two a.m. and very dark outside, and the only light in the room came from a weak bulb in the ceiling, fluttered at by a moth who had mistaken it for the moon and would be dead by morning. Of course, I knew about such things, having flown toward false moons all my life.

Then the doctor stopped drying his hands—at least he had washed them—and said, “You have an interesting face. Almost Jewish.”

“That’s what all the girls tell me,” I said.

That made him smile, and I got a glimpse of old yellow teeth, which went nicely with his jaundiced bald head. Then he extinguished the smile and said, “What caliber is the bullet?”

“Caliber” sounded like “cali-bear” coming out of his mouth, and he spoke English well enough, flawlessly even, but did so with a strange Russo-Mex accent on account of the fact that he was a Russian Jew who had washed up in Mexico City in the early ’80s when the Soviets were getting rid of their Jews, a bit of information he had already imparted to me—he was a talkative old man—and I said, “I don’t know the caliber. It was a rifle.”

“Hunting accident?” he asked, knowing full well it wasn’t.

“Yeah, hunting accident,” I said, and he nodded, smiling to himself, and began removing the flimsy gauze bandages I had applied to my shoulder. While he worked, his little pink tongue kept darting out from between his lips, wetting a small blister, which I tried to tell myself was a cut from shaving, but I knew otherwise.

He turned on a surgical lamp to better see what he was doing, and his examining room was a converted bedroom in a private, off-the-books hospital in Rosarito, Mexico, roughly forty miles south of San Diego.

I had crossed the border a few hours before, and it was the kind of hospital—an isolated old hunting lodge in the mountains above Rosarito—where you could pay in cash and not give a real name, and where you went for specific ailments, like gunshot wounds and bad DTs. I happened to be there for both items on the menu: there was the bullet in my left shoulder, and I also had a hideous case of the French fits from too much cocaine.

I could have detoxed off the coke in the States, but no American hospital would have treated me for the bullet wound without calling the cops, which was why I had crossed the border for medical attention. That and other reasons.

The doctor finished removing the bandages, showing a sensitive touch, and placed them on the little metal table next to the operating lamp. Also on the table was a tray of medical instruments and the syringe of morphine he had already shot me up with to calm me down.

From his lab coat, he removed a pair of black glasses that had magnifying lenses on them, and they looked like something I would have liked to order from the back of a comic book when I was a kid, if my father would have let me.

The doctor put the glasses on, and his brown eyes got all big and distorted, and he showed me his yellow teeth again, just to be nice, and then he bent over and studied the hideous mound that was protruding from my shoulder and looked ready to burst. It was the size of a grapefruit, and the bruising from the bullet’s impact had painted it red, purple, and green, with some bilious yellow peeking through wanting to join the party. In the center of the colorful mound, where the bullet had entered, there was a black scorched hole, which I had filled hours ago with Krazy Glue to stop the bleeding.

The doctor let out a little whistling sound and took off his comic-book glasses. “There’s a lot of fluid built up,” he said. “Mostly blood and pus, I imagine.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “Let’s get the bullet out.”

He grunted in the affirmative but then pointed a gnarled finger at my face and said, “I can also fix that. Five thousand more.” What he was referring to and pointing at was the four-inch wormlike scar on my cheek, which I had gotten a while back when a meth head had cut me open with a hunting knife.

“That old scar?” I said. “What about the whole face while you’re at it?”

The morphine had me feeling glamorous and glib, and I didn’t expect him to take my question seriously, but he said, “You need a new face? Why? There are people looking for you?”

I didn’t answer him, but there were people looking for me. Bad people. Dangerous people. And not all of them were cops. Which was another reason I had crossed the border, and while the doctor waited for me to say something, he went back to leering, which might have been his resting state, and his little pink tongue kept darting out to make sure his blister was still there. Not wanting to divulge anything, which was why I had come to this medico in the first place, I leered back, and it was a standoff.

Then he said, “Okay, don’t tell me. People come to me because I’m supposed to not ask questions. But I do ask. I can’t help it. I’m nosy.”

Then he squeezed my wrist, gently, wanting to show me he was a warm person, a kind person, which he was and wasn’t, and he said, “So for a new face I can give you a good deal. Ten thousand, on top of the five for the scar, plus other costs I told you already for the bullet wound and the drug detox.”

“That’s it? Fifteen thousand for a face?”

He shrugged and smiled, a smile of acquiescence, and said, “Okay. Ten thousand. Why haggle?”

He had misread my tone. He had thought I was being ironic and that I was negotiating, which I wasn’t at all. I thought fifteen thousand dollars not to be me anymore was a bargain, a once-in-a-lifetime deal, and not just because a new face might help keep me safe from the people who wanted to kill me. It would be much more than that; it would be a chance to be free of the fool I’d had to look at in the mirror for fifty-one years, the fool who had followed me everywhere, wrecking my life every chance he could.

Of course, what I wanted—liberation from myself—was not something any surgery could ever deliver, but I was high on morphine and sodden with a lifetime of self-hate, and so I made the snap decision to get a new mug. At a discounted price. From an ancient, unlicensed quack with bad eyes and a herpes sore on his lip.

I said, “Sure. Ten thousand for a face. That’s fair.”

I didn’t let him know he had been bidding against himself, and I figured he must have been desperate for the money to have lowered his price so quickly, but it was something else.

“You’ll be pleased with my work,” he said haughtily. “My training was in plastic, and you wouldn’t think it now, seeing me like this, but I did an additional year of studies at the Royal London Hospital, in 1975, learning the latest techniques—I was the only Russian—and after that I was the assistant to the head surgeon for the Bolshoi. You’ve heard of it?”

“The famous ballet company.”

“Yes, and it wasn’t just torn ankle ligaments. The directors of the ballet—under orders from the Ministry of Culture—wanted the girls, especially the primas, to have the hooded eyes of Anna Pavlova, and the boys were to look like Nureyev, even though he was a defector. It was their way of saying, ‘You can all be replaced, even you, Nureyev.’ So, you see, young man, I’m a sculptor. Like Rodin. But with bone and muscle and tissue.”

He said the s’s in “tissue” with the sibilance of a Brit, and he smiled again, showing off his little yellow teeth, and I realized then he didn’t really care about the money. He wanted to give me a new face, wanted the chance to practice his craft—we all like to do what gives us meaning—and he said, “So. Handsome or plain, Mr. Lou?”

I had told the doctor my name was Lou but hadn’t given a last name. Lou, of course, was a phony, and I had chosen it after a good friend of mine, Lou Shelton, who had died in 2019. If I had given the doctor my real name, Happy Doll, he would have thought that was the phony. But it was real—my parents hadn’t thought it would be a joke—and it was in all the databases, and, of course, I didn’t want the doctor to know who I was. I didn’t want anybody to know. It was time to disappear for a while. But maybe someday I could go back to my life, the life Happy Doll had in LA.

“Handsome or plain, I don’t care,” I said to the doctor. “We can also stick with ugly. It’s gotten me this far. But what do you suggest? You’re the artist.”

“Handsome,” he said. “I’ll turn you into Gregory Peck. I like old American stars. They were men. Now everyone looks like a boy. Don’t you agree?”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“My point, Mr. Lou, is that Gregory Peck was a man. And a fine actor. One of the greats. Played a Jew once. And I keep thinking you look Jewish. Tough and big but Jewish. With blue eyes, like Paul Newman. He was Jewish. Most people don’t know that.”

He was hot on the subject, and so I threw him a bone. “I’m half Jewish,” I said.

“I knew it! I know bone structure. I know genetics. I know Jews. What’s the other half?”

“Irish.”

“Who was the Jew? Mother or father?”

“Mother. She died when I was born. I was raised Catholic.”

“Still Catholic?”

“No. I study Buddhism. But I’m not very good at it.”

“Doesn’t matter. Your mother was Jewish, so you’re a real Jew. Like me. The chosen people. But they left out a part. Chosen to be hated. So what do you think? Gregory Peck?”

“I did like him in Moby Dick,” I said. When I was in the Navy, they had played it several times, over the years, on movie night, and that image of Peck as Ahab, dead and lashed to the whale, his arm waving his men on to destruction, has always stuck with me.

“Yes, Peck was very good in that film,” the doctor said. “One of his best roles. Or what about Tyrone Power? Because you’re dark and still have your hair, I can also make you look like him. His nose went up. No one will ever think you’re a Jew again, which isn’t a bad thing. And Tyrone Power was a big star. Very big. He was Zorro. The Mexicans love him. They play Zorro late at night on the television. I know because I never sleep. Not for years.”

“Let’s stick with Gregory Peck,” I said, and the doctor, a real cinephile, it turned out, perhaps because of his insomnia, smiled and nodded in agreement, with a twinkle in his eye.

Then he picked up a scalpel off the medical tray, and for no reason at all he poked his thumb with it and a pearl of black-red blood bubbled to the surface. He studied it with interest, then looked at me as if he had woken from a dream, and said, “Sorry, nervous habit.”