As the world’s media become ever more widespread and pervasive, questions about the rights of public figures become more difficult. What constitutes invasion of privacy in a world full of cameras and microphones? If a politician is satirized, where’s the line between fair comment and libel? And if it’s legal now for a performer to have his features surgically altered to look like those of Elvis Presley, would that be true with a living actor?

Michael Bishop considers the latter question in the following novelette. His answers may surprise you.

Bishop’s most recent book is Catacomb Years, an interrelated series of stories including “Old Folks at Home” from Universe 8.

SAVING FACE

Michael Bishop

“Get back,” Rakestraw told his children, who were eyeing him curiously as he tried to chop the thick pruned branches of a holly tree into pieces small enough for the fireplace. “I don’t want you to get hit”

He waited until the five-year-old girl and her slightly smaller twin brother backed hand in hand toward the mulch pile and the edge of the winter garden. Then, to demonstrate his strength to them, he swung the ax in a high arc and brought the blade down viciously on the propped-up holly branch. One half of it flew upward like a knotted boomerang, its gray-white bark coruscating silver in the December sunlight. After windmilling a good distance through the air, the severed piece landed with a thud at Gayle and Gabe’s feet

“Damn it!” Rakestraw bellowed, dropping the ax. “I told you to get back! Your mother’d kill me if I killed you!”

The boy retreated into the muddy turnip bed, but Gayle picked up the holly log and carried it to her father. Rakestraw knelt to accept it, and she reached toward his face with her small, damnably knowing fingers.

“You diddn shave,” Gayle told him.

He started to catch her hand in order to rub his coarse chin in its palm, but the holly log impeded him and Gabe was running forward from the garden.

“Look, Daddy!” the boy cried. “Looka the truck!”

Rakestraw stood up and saw, not a truck, but some sort of fancily decorated imported van coming cautiously along the gravel road from town. He tossed the log among several others he had cut that morning and pulled his children to him. “Wait a minute,” he said as they squirmed under his hands; “you don’t know who that is. Hold still.” He didn’t recognize the vehicle as belonging to anyone in the county, and since the road it was traveling dead-ended only a stone’s throw away, Rakestraw was as curious as the twins.

The van halted abreast of them, and a man wearing a neck scarf as big, red, and silky as a champion American Beauty rose stuck his head out the window and squinted at them. He had on a pair of sunglasses, but the lenses were nestled in his hair.

“Tom Rakestraw?” he asked.

“That’s right,” Rakestraw responded.

The man in the American Beauty cravat stuck his head back in the window, flipped his glasses down, and maneuvered the rear end of his van into the yard, running over several of the uncut holly branches Rakestraw had earlier dragged to the woodpile. He made a parking space between the garden and the house, where there’d never been a parking space. Another man sat in the front seat beside him, but the driver’s clumsy backing maneuver delayed recognition until the van stopped and Sheriff Harrison had opened his door and climbed out

Benny Harrison, wearing a khaki shirt with his badge half-hidden in one of its greasy folds, was a head shorter than the newcomer and a good deal less at ease. Even though he kept his thumbs in his belt, at unexpected moments his elbows flapped like poorly hung storm shutters. He introduced the man who had backed into the yard as Edgar Macmillan, an attorney from California.

Rakestraw said, “Gayle, Gabe, go play with Nickie.” Nickie was the dog, a lethargic brown mongrel visible now as a furry lump in the grass below the kitchen window. The twins went reluctantly off in the dog’s direction, and Rakestraw looked at Macmillan.

“I represent Craig Tiernan, Mr. Rakestraw.”

“Who?”

“Craig Tiernan. Surely you’ve heard the name.” Macmillan had his hands deep in the pockets of his blazer. The lenses of his sunglasses glinted like miniature hub caps. “Craig Tiernan.”

“An actor,” Benny Harrison put in. “A movie actor.”

“He’s placed first among male performers in three consecutive box-office polls, Mr. Rakestraw, and this year he’s nominated for an Academy Award.”

“We don’t go to the movies.”

“You read, don’t you? You watch television?”

“We don’t watch much television. But I read now and again.”

‘Then you’ve seen his name in the newspaper. In the amusement section, where the movie ads are. In ‘people’ news, in feature stories.”

Benny Harrison flapped his elbows. “Tom gets the Dachies County Journal,” he told Macmillan by way of defending his friend. “And you’ve got a little library of history and farming books, don’t you? And Nora’s magazines. Nora subscribes to magazines.”

“Tiernan’s always in the women’s magazines,” Macmillan said almost accusingly. “He’s always being featured. Sometimes he gets a cover.”

“I don’t read those,” Rakestraw confessed. “Nora gets them for recipes and pictures of furniture. She shows me the pictures sometimes.”

“Has she ever told you you look like Craig Tiernan?”

Rakestraw shook his head.

“That’s why I’ve come out here,” Macmillan said. ‘That’s why I stopped at Caracal’s sheriff’s office and asked Sheriff Harrison to ride out here with me.” He took a piece of paper from an inside blazer pocket, unfolded it, and shook it out so that Rakestraw could see the matter printed on it

Rakestraw recognized it as the poster he had sat for when Harrison and two or three other people on the Caracal city council persuaded him to run for mayor against the sharp-spoken, doddering incumbent. He had lost by only ten or twelve votes, primarily because he had been unable to convince the ladies of the local women’s club that he wasn’t too young and inexperienced for the job, which in reality was little more than a sinecure. Mayor Birkett was pushing seventy, and Rakestraw had just turned thirty-two.

“Is this you?” Macmillan wanted to know. He paced toward the woodpile, then waved off his own question. “Of course it is. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.” He turned around. “Somebody in Caracal sent this to the studio. The studio forwarded it to Tiernan, and Tiernan sent it to me, along with instructions and air fare to your state capital. A friend of mine up there loaned me this van, and here I am.” A sudden gust of wind rattled the pecan tree towering over the woodpile, and the smoothed-out election poster in Macmillan’s hand fluttered distractingly.

“Why?” Rakestraw asked.

“To take care of the matter.”

“What matter, Mr. Macmillan?” Rakestraw heard the twins shouting and laughing in another part of the yard. He also heard the bewilderment and impatience in his own voice.

“Your trespass on Tiernan’s physiognomic rights, which he now has on file in Washington, D.C. Your state legislature approved local compliance with the Physiognomic Protection Act last May, Mr. Rakestraw, and that makes you subject to every statute of the otherwise provisional federal act.”

“Benny,” Rakestraw asked, “what the hell does that mean?”

“It means your face don’t belong to you anymore,” said Benny Harrison, flapping his elbows. “Sounds crazy, don’t it?”

Rakestraw let his gaze drift from the perturbed, disheveled sheriff to the attorney with the crimson scarf at his throat, who was standing among the holly logs Rakestraw had already cut

“Let me finish these,” Rakestraw said. “I’m almost finished.” He retrieved his ax and began hacking at a smooth, gray-white holly limb only a small distance from Macmillan’s foot. The attorney backed up to his borrowed van and watched the other man chopping wood as if witness to a performance as rare and exotic as ember-walking or lion-taming.

“Craig Tiernan?” Nora said. “Tom doesn’t look like Craig Tiernan.” She dug an old magazine out of the wall rack in the den and flipped it open to a double-page color layout.

“He does to me,” Macmillan countered. “I’ve seen Tiernan up close, oh, a thousand times, and your husband looks like him. An amazing likeness, really amazing.” He stubbed his cigarette out on the canning lid Nora had given him for an ashtray. “At least you know who Tiernan is, though. That’s more than I can say for your husband. I wouldn’t’ve believed anybody that uninformed or isolated, Mrs. Rakestraw. I mean, the boondocks just aren’t the boondocks anymore—the media’s everywhere. Everybody touches everybody else. That’s why it’s necessary to have a law like the Physiognomic Protection Act.”

“Tom isn’t interested in movies.” Nora examined the photograph in the magazine. “And I don’t think he looks like Craig Tiernan, either. I don’t see what you see.”

“That’s why I’m going to drive him to the capital—so we can do a point-by-point match-up of features. This procedure isn’t hit-or-miss, Mrs. Rakestraw—it’s very scientific.” Macmillan shook out another cigarette. “Okay. So he isn’t interested in movies. But how can he be unaware? That’s what I don’t understand, how he can be so unaware.”

“Do you know who the head of the government of Kenya is, Mr. Macmillan?” Nora asked the attorney.

“Hell, Mrs. Rakestraw, I don’t even know who the President of Canada is.”

“Prime Minister.”

“Okay, Prime Minister. But the Prime Ministers of Canada and Kenya don’t happen to be up for Academy Awards this year, either.”

“Maybe they should be,” Benny Harrison said. “The President, too.” He stood by the double windows fronting the road to Caracal and, when a noise overhead reminded them all of Tom’s activity upstairs, lifted his eyes to the ceiling.

“How long are you going to keep him?” Nora asked.

“I don’t know,” Macmillan replied, exhaling smoke. “He might get back tomorrow. It might be three or four days. Or a week. Depends on what the examiners report after the match-up of features.”

“Well, what happens if—if they match up?”

“There are options, Mrs. Rakestraw. Nobody gets thrown in jail or caught out for damages for looking like somebody else. —Listen, if the test’s positive, you’ll be able to talk to him by telephone at our expense. It’s nothing to worry about. You may even make some money.”

“I don’t care about that. However much it is, it won’t be worth going through all this. I don’t even see why he has to go. It’s ridiculous.” There was more noise from upstairs. “Listen to that. He’s upset with me for not helping him pack”

“Nora,” Benny Harrison said, turning around, “Mr. Macmillan’s got a legal summons for this test. That’s why Tom’s going.”

“What am I supposed to tell Gayle and Gabe? This is working out just as if Tom’s done something wrong. And he hasn’t—not a thing.”

Neither the attorney nor the sheriff answered her. Sunlight fell across the hardwood floor through the double windows, and Nora tilted her head to catch the subtly frantic inflection of Nickie’s barking.

After a time, Tom came into the room with his overnight case and asked if there was an extra tube of toothpaste anywhere. As a concession to the legality, if not the reasonableness, of Macmillan’s visit, Nora went looking for one. The men straggled out to the van while she looked, and when she found the extra tube of toothpaste, she carried it outside and handed it to her husband with a sense of vague disappointment Nevertheless, she kissed him and touched him affectionately on the nose.

“Take care,” Rakestraw said. “I’ll call you.”

Back inside the house, Nora found a check for a thousand dollars on the kitchen table. Macmillan’s lazy signature was at the bottom, twisted like a section of line in Tom’s tackle box. Nora wanted to tear the check up and scatter the pieces across the floor, instead, she left it lying on the table and returned thoughtfully to the den.

The drive from Caracal to the state capital took four hours. Rakestraw asked Macmillan no questions, and Macmillan volunteered nothing beyond ecstatic but obtuse comments about the scenery.

“Look at those blackbirds,” he exclaimed as they sped by a harvested cornfield in which a host of grackles was strutting. “There must be a thousand of ‘em!” He drummed his fingers on the dashboard in time to the disco music on the radio. He filled the van’s ashtray with cigarette butts.

But he was subdued and solicitous checking Rakestraw into the private sanitarium where the testing was to be performed. He kept his voice down in the gloomy but spacious lobby where potted plants were reflected doubtfully in the streaked marble flooring, and he gave the black teenager who insisted on carrying Rakestraw’s bag to his first-floor room a generous but far from flashy tip. Then he left and let Rakestraw get a nap.

Surprisingly, the testing itself began that same evening. A young man named Hurd and a young woman named Arberry—dressed, but for their name tags, as if for the street—came into Rakestraw’s room with photographic equipment, a scale on removable coasters, a notebook of laminated superimpositions of Craig Tiernan’s features, and various kinds of stainless-steel calibrating instruments, most of which looked sophisticated enough to induce envy in a physical anthropologist Rakestraw reflected that these two young people were physical anthropologists of a kind—they wanted to determine, scientifically, whether or not he looked like Craig Tiernan.

“Do I look like Craig Tiernan?” Rakestraw asked Arberry as, after weighing him and noting down his height in centimeters, she posed him for a series of photographs.

‘There’s a real resemblance,” Arberry said genially. She smiled at him and made him point his chin for a portrait of his left profile. “Don’t people you’ve never met before do double takes when they first see you?”

“Not that I’ve noticed.”

“Her next question,” Hurd put in, fiddling with a calibrating tool, “is whether you’re married or not.”

“Married,” Rakestraw managed between his teeth.

“Don’t move,” Arberry cautioned him mildly. In the same low-key tone she added, “Shut up, Hurd, and get your own act together.”

There was a surprisingly silent flash from her camera, and then Arberry was posing him face on. Like a tailor, Hurd was using a tape measure across his shoulders. Rakestraw found their finicky probing more interesting now than annoying, and he cooperated with his examiners as he was always urging Gabe and Gayle to cooperate with Dr. Meade when he took them for checkups back in Caracal. Chin up, face on, no bickering; child or adult, that was how you were supposed to do things… .

Arberry and Hurd were in the room with him for most of the evening, but they did give him a few odd minutes to himself as they conferred over the notebook of plastic superimpositions, flipping pages and matching features.

Rakestraw began to feel like a pretender to the name, title, and person of the Grand Duchess Anastasia. Those fervid women had tried to prove their claims by a variety of methods, including the assertion that their ears had twelve or thirteen or fourteen positive points of identity-out of a possible seventeen—with the ears of the infant Anastasia, as revealed by photographs. The difference, of course, was that he didn’t wish to establish himself as Craig Tiernan; he certainly didn’t want his examiners to find enough points of similarity to make his resemblance to the actor a trespass against the Physiognomic Protection Act. Where had such legislation come from, anyway?

But Rakestraw was fascinated by the procedures Hurd and Arberry were using to determine the extent of his resemblance. Even when they weren’t touching his jaw or forehead with cold metal instruments or trigonometrically surveying the pyramid of his nose, he hovered behind them, looking over their shoulders and eavesdropping on the cryptic verbal shorthand they used to communicate their findings to each other. Toward what decision were their measurements leading them?

Rakestraw’s powerful curiosity was not strong enough to overcome his natural reticence, though, and he sat down on the old-fashioned tufted bedspread to wait them out. As he waited, indignation seeped back into him, and a painful sense of separation from everything that was important to him.

At last Arberry said, “Mr. Macmillan will be in to see you in the morning, Mr. Rakestraw. Jeff and I are going to report to him now.”

Rubbing his frighteningly cold hands, Rakestraw stood up. He refrained from asking the question that even they expected him to ask. He was sure that the pressure of his self-control had to be visible in his face—the face they had clinically savaged for almost three hours.

Two polite, well-groomed, amiable technicians… .

“Mr. Macmillan will give you the results in the morning,” Arberry said, opening the door to his room.

Hurd pushed the scales through the door. “Good night, Mr. Rakestraw—hope you get a good night’s sleep.” He had an equipment bag over one shoulder. Arberry smiled pleasantly and followed her colleague into the long, darkened, palm-lined corridor.

They were gone.

An hour or two later the telephone beside Rakestraw’s bed made a faint buzzing noise. Rakestraw picked it up.

‘Turn on your TV,” Macmillan said through the line. “They’ve got cable here, and there’s a Craig Tiernan movie on channel twelve. A good one, too. Tiernan plays Robert Pirsig in Phaedrus. It got great reviews five years ago but bombed out at the box office—strange how those things happen.”

“Did you talk with the examiners?”

“Yeah. I’ll tell you about it in the morning. Turn on the boob tube, Mr. Rakestraw, and catch the flick.” Macmillan hung up.

It took Rakestraw a good thirty or forty seconds to find the television set, even though it was in full view and he had been in the same room with it since late afternoon. The set rested on a gilded stand in the corner beyond the dressing table, and a large potted rose geranium obscured most of the stand. The eye of the television set was cold and empty, camouflaged mysteriously by its own nakedness. Rakestraw crossed the room and turned it on.

Opening titles rolled up and over a barren early-morning landscape of cattails and marsh water; a pair of motorcycles moved silently along the highway bordering the marsh. Rakestraw sat down on the bed.

The film turned out to be full of flashbacks and flashforwards, as well as several wrenching exchanges about metaphysical matters that Rakestraw had trouble keeping straight in his head. Phaedrus was beautifully photographed, however, and he felt a grudging but genuine sympathy for the complex personality Tiernan was re-creating. Everybody in the film was suffering, everybody was on the edge of madness, and Rakestraw felt for them. An hour later he could take no more of their suffering—he got up and turned the set off.

“I don’t look like that man,” he said aloud. “I don’t think we resemble each other at all.”

Macmillan came for him in the morning and escorted him down the corridor to a dining room furnished with huge rattan chairs and tables with wrought-iron legs. They took coffee and Danish pastries from a serving board at one end of the room and found a table of their own.

“Your face belongs to Craig Tiernan,” the attorney said a few minutes after they had sat down. “That’s the verdict of the data that Hurd and Arberry came up with.”

Rakestraw laughed humorlessly.

“It’s true, I’m afraid. The resemblance is acute and actionable.”

“If I’ve got Craig Tiernan’s face, Mr. Macmillan, then he must be walking around California with all the expression of a hard-boiled egg.”

“He lives in Oregon. When he isn’t working.”

“Then why the hell is he worried about Tom Rakestraw’s face? I’m not going to Oregon. Who the hell does he think he is?”

“He may live in Oregon, Mr. Rakestraw, but he’s a personality in every state of the union and more than a dozen foreign countries. Your infringement on those rights whereby his recognition is—”

“Please, Mr. Macmillan. No more legal double-talk. Just tell me what ‘actionable’ means if Tiernan can’t win damages from me.”

“It just means he can press suit, which is what he’s doing. Don’t worry about that, though. Here are your options under the law.”

Macmillan took an envelope from his blazer pocket and began to write on it with a disposable plastic pen. Finally he pushed the envelope across the table to Rakestraw, who picked it up and hastily scanned what the attorney had listed as his options.

1. Co-ownership of the rights in question, through either purchase or grant

2. Authorization as a legal impersonator of the licensed owner, 10 percent of income derived from this source to accrue to plaintiff and his appointed agents.

3. Voluntary self-sequestration, with the owner of the rights in question retaining to himself and his agents the means of checking and ensuring compliance.

4. Immigration to a country to which legal distribution of the public works of the owner of the rights in question has either not yet been approved or not been taken advantage of.

5. Permanent alteration of those features trespassing most conspicuously on the proprietary rights of the plaintiff, to be accomplished without appeal or delay.

“Six,” Rakestraw added, placing the envelope in the middle of the table. “Voluntary self-annihilation of the offending party.”

Macmillan laughed. “Oh, come on, it isn’t as bad as that. The thing you forget is that in the case of suits under the Physiognomic Protection Act, it’s the plaintiff who’s responsible for court costs and all the financial obligations arising from the defendant’s choice of an option. This is the only law on the books, Mr. Rakestraw, dictating that a victorious plaintiff must compensate his defeated court opponent for emotional suffering and any expenses following upon the action.”

“But I haven’t been in court, Mr. Macmillan!”

“You’re there now, in a manner of speaking. Hurd and Arberry are testifying for both you and Craig Tiernan—or their data is, I should say. And the verdict of the data will be the verdict of the court. Our case seems to be a solid one, Mr. Rakestraw.”

Rakestraw picked up the envelope again. “Let me see if I understand this,” he said, glancing over it at the attorney. “Number one means that I can buy my face from Tiernan if he’ll agree to sell. Or that he can give me part interest in it if he wants to be … generous.”

“That’s right. He won’t do either, though.”

“Okay. What’s number two about?”

“The law permits three legal impersonators. Tiernan already has three, I’m afraid. Two perform movie stunts for him and one’s a double at functions he doesn’t wish to attend.”

“Like the Academy Awards?”

“Oh no—he’ll be there in person this year. He’s got a good chance to win.”

“I’ve got my fingers crossed.” Rakestraw took a sip of coffee, which by now was cold and scummy-tasting. ‘Three means that I can become a hermit and that Tiernan’s lackeys have the right to make sure I’m staying indoors in my hair shirt and sandals.”

Macmillan nodded. “More or less.”

“Isn’t Caracal hermitage enough for Craig Tiernan’s purposes?”

“I’m afraid not. Your election poster went up all over Dachies County, the sheriff told me, on telephone poles and fence posts. That’s an infringement of Tiernan’s—”

“Number four seems pretty clear. What countries might Nora, the twins, and I hope to immigrate to, Mr. Macmillan?”

“I’d have to look that up. Great Britain and Western Europe are pretty much out, though. Tiernan has big followings in those places. —Not many people choose this option, I’m told. Once you get a job and get settled, the plaintiff’s financial obligations to you begin to taper off really drastically.”

“Which brings us to number five?”

“Plastic surgery,” Macmillan said.

“Plastic surgery,” Rakestraw hollowly echoed the man.

“Right. On the house. We’ve got the facilities for it right here in this lovely sanitarium, they tell me.”

A week later, Rakestraw rode home on a bus. Benny Harrison met him at the little town’s only grocery store, which also served as its bus depot, and drove him out to his house in the Caracal sheriff’s car.

“Do you want me to go in with you?” Benny Harrison asked.

“No thanks. Go on back to town. I appreciate the ride.”

Rakestraw watched the car float away from him in a backboil of thrown gravel and drifting dust. Then he saw the door to the house open and Nora and the twins come out.

Nora was carrying a wreath of holly leaves. The berries on the wreath were like excruciatingly crimson drops of blood. Rakestraw’s face tightened in reminiscence.

Gayle and Gabe looked toward him, and when Nora said, ‘Tom?” in surprise and evident doubt, the twins heard only the name and started to rush to him—as they had always done when he came in from the fields or back from a solitary trip to Caracal.

At that moment Nickie came banging out the kitchen door, loped madly past the children, and halted at the edge of the road in front of Rakestraw. Wagging its tail dubiously, the dog soon began to bark—a sonorous and violent heaving from deep within its chest. The hair on the dog’s back stood up like a fan of porcupine quills, but it was clearly of two minds.

“Goddamn it, Nickie! It’s me! Shut up, you dumb cur!”

Nickie kept barking, and when Rakestraw looked over the dog’s ugly, persistently jerking head, he saw that Gayle and Gabe had retreated toward Nora and the house. How often, after all, had he warned them against taking up unquestioningly with strangers?

In the kitchen, Rakestraw spoke to and embraced his children. By picking up his suitcase again, he avoided allowing Nora to put her arms around him, for he was alert to the fact that she wished to do so not only to welcome him home but to prove to him that the change didn’t matter. It hurt to realize how fully Nora understood the trauma of his homecoming. It hurt even more to realize that he was not yet ready to accept the simple kindness embodied in her love.

“I’m going up to the guest room,” he said abruptly.

As he swung out of the kitchen and began climbing the stairs, Gabe began to cry and Gayle to expostulate with her mother in bewildered, high-pitched tones. Rakestraw could hear Nora patiently declaring that she had told them their father would look a little different and wasn’t it shameful to be making such a fuss when inside where it counted Daddy was exactly the same person and couldn’t they understand that he was probably even more confused and uncertain than they were.

Upstairs, Rakestraw threw his suitcase into the guest room, angrily followed it in, and slammed and locked the door.

Long after the children had gone to bed, Nora knocked lightly and spoke his name. Knowing that she would be surprised to find him naked in the dark, he nevertheless opened to her, oddly indifferent to the pathos of his own behavior. This was not Tom Rakestraw acting in this unmanly, self-pitying way but an amazing, if imperfect, duplicate. Only the faces had been changed, to protect … well, some self-obsessed S.O.B. he had never even met.

Nora closed the door and embraced him. “Aren’t you cold? It’s not even spring yet, and here you are walking around in your birthday suit.” Her hands moved gently up and down his back, as if to warm him, and Rakestraw surrendered to the extent of placing his chin on her head and embracing her chastely in return.

“I don’t feel naked before you, Nora.”

“You’re not supposed to. Clothed or not, we’re naked to each other almost all the time. We’re married.”

After a long silence Rakestraw said, “What I meant, Nora, is that I don’t feel naked at all. I think I could walk through Caracal like this without feeling any shame. It wouldn’t be me, anyway.”

“Because your face is different?”

“Exactly.”

‘You’re still the same person, Tom.”

“I heard you tell Gabe and Gayle that, Nora—hut it isn’t true. I’m becoming someone else. It started the moment I saw myself in the mirror after surgery. And it’s continuing even now.”

Nora’s fingers caressed the hair in the small of his back “Maybe we’d better hurry, then.”

“Hurry?”

“Before our lovemaking becomes adulterous.”

Rakestraw kissed his wife, disengaged from her embrace, and walked to the bed to turn back its coverlet. This was a kindness for which they were both ready, and he could deny neither himself nor Nora.

“I don’t care if they do have school tomorrow,” Rakestraw told Nora at dinner several evenings later.

“But they need their sleep, Tom, and you really don’t care who wins what. At least, you never have before.”

“This year I care.”

“Because of-”

“That’s right. Because of Tiernan.”

Gayle and Gabe were observing this exchange like spectators at a heated Ping-Pong match. The victor would determine their destinies between the approaching hours of nine and midnight.

“But it’s everything you used to despise,” Nora persisted, “if you thought about it at all. Is this Tiernan business enough to make you want to expose your children to the whole gaudy rigamarole?”

“They know what we think of that rigamarole. That’s our parental guidance, their knowledge that we disapprove.”

“They’re first-graders, Tom. First-graders.”

Rakestraw put his fork down and looked at each of the twins in turn. He had even more authority with them than he had had before. They listened to him now as if he were a policeman or a school principal.

“Do you think you can stay awake for the Academy Awards program?” he asked. “You certainly don’t have to stay up if you don’t want to.”

‘We want to,” Gayle said.

“Yeah,” said Gabe, wide-eyed and anxious.

“Lord, Tom-”

But Rakestraw, as he had known he would, prevailed. Nora did win a concession of sorts: she made pallets on the floor in front of the television for the twins.

By ten-thirty Gabe had fallen asleep with his stuffed paisley dog and Gayle was staring bravely, glassily, at a group of gowned women and bearded, tuxedoed men holding Oscars aloft for the polite approval of a Hollywood audience of celebrities and other film industry people. But because no camera had yet picked Craig Tiernan out of the crowd, even Rakestraw was growing impatient with the program.

Nora said, “Are you sure he’s even there? I think I’ve read that he usually boycotts these things.”

“He’s nominated this year. Macmillan, the attorney, said he’d be on hand. He was in a film called Yeardance. Yesterday’s paper listed him as the favorite for Best Actor.”

“Can’t we at least put the kids to bed?”

But the orchestra began playing a well-known movie theme and Rakestraw saw Tiernan, a lanky black starlet on his arm, descending a monumental tier of steps to the presenters’ lectern.

‘There he is, Nora. Wake up Gabe.”

Nora shook her head in simultaneous refusal and exasperation.

“Wake him up, Nora!” Rakestraw got down on the floor, shook the boy by the shoulders, and pulled him to a precarious sitting position. “Who is that, kids? Tell me who that is!”

On the tiny television screen Tiernan was all glittering teeth and windswept coiffure. The young black woman at his side exuded a sultriness that seemed almost to mock his innocent good looks and bearing. Applause filled the auditorium. Then the couple went immediately into their clumsy, ghost-written repartee.

Gabe was jolted fully awake by the novelty of seeing his lost father in the company of a half-naked woman. Gayle, meanwhile, looked back and forth between the television set and the man who had just eased himself back onto the couch beside her mother.

“That used to be you,” the girl said.

“That was never me,” Rakestraw responded.

Tiernan and his sultry companion presented two awards for documentaries. The Rakestraws watched both presentations without speaking, fascinated by the eerie spectacle. Daddy was—or had been—a famous movie star.

“All right,” Nora said. “They’ve seen him. Can’t they go to bed now? Upstairs, I mean.”

Rakestraw insisted that the twins stay for the Best Actor presentation, and Gayle and Gabe importuned their mother so enthusiastically that she had to relent. Tiernan’s appearance on the program had dislodged the sleep from their eyes.

Another forty minutes passed before the Best Actor nominations were read, at which time a camera located Tiernan in the crowd and focused on him for almost half a minute. Then the screen was filled with that scene from Yeardance in which the title character comes face to face for the first time with the “lepers” under his care. It was a gruesome bit of film, but quickly over with. Tiernan, spotlighted again among his applauding colleagues, suddenly looked tense and uncertain. His smile was a rictus of counterfeit calm. Rakestraw could not recall ever having exercised the facial muscles that would produce such an expression.

“He really wants it.”

‘They all do,” Nora said. “It’s natural that they should.”

The other nominees were shown, along with clips from their films. But the winner was not Tiernan. The winner was an eccentric Hollywood leading man who had made his first film during the early years of World War II. The auditorium rang with shouts and applause, and a television camera dollied in on Tiernan, cruelly, as he feigned a self-effacing grimace and then waved heartily at the victor threading his way to the stage.

“There’s the Academy Award performance,” Rakestraw said.

“Are you happy now?” Nora asked.

“Not yet,” Rakestraw confessed. “Not yet.”

The next day he drove to Ladysmith, a good-sized textile town about thirty-five miles south of Caracal, and purchased a videocassette recorder. In several different record and television shops he informed the clerks or sales managers that he wanted to buy videocassettes of all Craig Tiernan’s movies.

“All of ‘em?” asked a young woman with an unattractive blond Afro who was clerking in a shop at the Ladysmith Mall.

“That’s right—all of ‘em.”

“Well, you can buy some of the early films legit, but the most recent ones—you know, Yeardance and the remake of Dark Passage—well, you’re not likely to find those anywhere but on the black market”

“I don’t mind. Can you help me?”

“Hey, are you a cop?”

“No, I’m just a Craig Tiernan fancier.”

The girl tilted her head and gave him an appraising look. “I might be able to help you if …”

“If what?”

‘Take out your wallet and let me go through it,” the clerk challenged him.

Rakestraw took out his wallet and laid it on the counter. Surprised, the girl picked it up, glanced at Rakestraw, and then began folding out the laminated cards and photographs until she came to his driver’s license.

“Cripes,” the girl said under her breath. “You’ve got Craig Tiernan’s picture on your driver’s license. You ain’t a cop, are you? How in holy Christmas did you manage that?”

“I’ve got a friend at the Highway Patrol station.” The lie made Rakestraw infinitely happy. Three or four weeks ago he had taken an intense private pride in his truthfulness, even in situations where a small distortion of the truth would have saved him either time or embarrassment.

“All right, mister. I guess it also looks like you can pay for what you want.”

The clerk sold him the two black-market cassettes at steep prices, found five or six old Tiernan films in inventory, and helped him fill out an order for seven other Craig Tiernan vehicles. That was the whole shebang. Tiernan was still a young actor and, Rakestraw had learned, he was notoriously picky about the roles he accepted.

“That’s the third time today you’ve watched Dark Passage,” Nora told Rakestraw one midnight shortly after his visit to Ladysmith. “Bogart was twice as good in that part, too. What do you think you’re accomplishing?”

“I never saw Bogart in the part. I think Tiernan does a pretty fair job, really.”

“It’s a pretentious and outdated movie, Tom. Using the camera as a character was fine the first time around, but in this remake it just seems silly. Self-conscious. The girl isn’t as good as Bacall, either.”

“How come you know so much about it?”

“I used to watch all the late movies on TV … until you started asking me out. Come to bed, Tom.”

Rakestraw leaned forward, propped his chin on his fists, and continued to stare at the low-quality tape he had bought in Ladysmith. “You’ve got both critics and moviegoers on your side, Nora. Everything I’ve read about this one says it was a bomb. Tiernan and what’s-her-face got panned, and no one went to see it until Yeardance was released a couple of months later. Then, they say, Dark Passage suddenly got hot at the box office.”

Nora, standing in the doorway, looked with angry compassion at her transfigured husband. “The story fascinates you, doesn’t it?”

Alerted by the cryptic tone of her voice, Rakestraw looked toward her. “A man with a past he has to overcome has plastic surgery and takes off to make a new life. Sure it fascinates me. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why, either.”

“I’m going to bed, Tom. Do you want me to turn on your half of the electric blanket?”

When he shook his head, Nora left him in the den and walked through the dining room to the staircase.

Later, Rakestraw also went upstairs. But he strode down the hall to the guest room, turned on the light, locked the door, sat down at the antique vanity, and removed a small tape recorder from its drawer. Then he began contorting his altered features back toward the shapes he had known them to have only a few short weeks ago. Silently, hunching his shoulders and then straightening them again, he mimed the gestures that were Tiernan’s hallmark as an actor. After a time he began to speak as Tiernan had spoken in Dark Passage. It astonished Rakestraw how easily and successfully the impersonation came to him, but he kept his voice down in order not to awaken Nora.

Two days later, Nora was surprised to look out the kitchen window and see parked on the edge of the yard an automobile bearing on its left-hand door the insignia of one of the state capital’s major newspapers. Then a young woman with a camera case slung over her shoulder and a notebook in her hand knocked for admittance. Daffodils were growing in the grass between the kitchen door and the dirt road, and the young woman, her dark hair pulled back and tied in a navy-blue scarf, looked sunny and efficient.

“Is this the Rakestraws’ residence?” she asked when Nora had opened the heavy Dutch door. “I’m Michelle Boyer, with the World-Ledger. I’ve got an appointment to talk with your husband.”

Nora led Michelle Boyer into the den, where Rakestraw was intently watching Craig Tiernan in Good Country People, one of his early major films. Rakestraw turned off the videocassette and shook hands with the reporter, whereupon Nora, angry that her husband had said nothing to her about expecting a visitor, prepared to leave the two of them to whatever business they might have.

“Stay,” Rakestraw said. “I think she’d like to hear what you have to say too, Nora. It’s very important that she hear it, in fact.” Finally Nora permitted herself to be persuaded.

Over the next two hours Rakestraw submitted to several photographs, and he and Nora detailed for Michelle Boyer the changes that had occurred in their lives because Craig Tiernan had invoked the Physiognomic Protection Act against him.

“I was the first defendant in this state,” Rakestraw said, “and I lost on the basis of physical measurements of my skull and facial features. The data went to court, but I didn’t.”

“You’re being compensated handsomely for the trauma, aren’t you?” asked Boyer, taking the devil’s-advocate role and writing in her notebook.

“Five hundred dollars a month. Which Tiernan, out in Oregon, writes off his income tax as a business expense.”

“Are you looking for a larger settlement?”

“I’m not,” Nora put in. “I don’t know what Tom’s looking for. The monthly check from Tiernan has turned him around. He spends all his waking hours doing what you found him doing when you came in. Two months ago he would have been chopping wood, preparing the ground, ordering seed.”

“And now he obsessively watches Craig Tiernan movies?”

“He’s a changed person, and I’m not just talking about his face. He’s different inside. He admits it himself,”

“What do you want,” Boyer asked Rakestraw pointedly, lowering her notebook, “if it isn’t more money?”

“Do you think this is fair?” Rakestraw asked her in turn. “Giving up a portion of myself because of another man’s vanity?”

“You didn’t have to opt for surgery, did you?”

“Not if I didn’t mind moving to a war zone in Africa or an A-bomb test site in the Marshall Islands.”

“What’s been the effect on your children?”

‘They’re distant. They don’t really believe I’m their father. They obey me without question.” Rakestraw laughed.

“You don’t sound like Craig Tiernan,” Michelle Boyer observed. “How closely did you resemble him? Do you have any photographs?”

Nora took a padded leather photo album from one of the bookshelves and also found the infamous election poster. These she gave to the reporter, who glanced at the poster and then began turning the pages of the album.

“I think the resemblance is uncanny,” she said after a while. “I can understand why Tiernan would have been alarmed. The danger of exploitation and overexposure is a real one to a celebrity who’s worked his or her entire professional life to create a viable public image. Do you remember the Presley imitators? In those days death put Presley in the public domain, but then came the impersonators of living celebrities. Those exploiters didn’t merely imitate their famous victims, Mr. Rakestraw, they had their faces surgically altered to resemble the President’s or Bob Dylan’s or Barbra Streisand’s—while those people were still alive. Often they could libel and rip off their victims at the same time. Court cases proliferated, and a great deal of time and money was wasted. Hence, in states like New York and California, the Physiognomic Protection Act. It was probably overdue getting here, if you want my opinion.”

“But Tom didn’t surgically alter his face to resemble Tiernan’s,” Nora said. “It was his to begin with.”

‘That may be, Mrs. Rakestraw—but your husband’s face wasn’t essential to him in his livelihood. Tiernan was only trying to protect his livelihood.”

‘Tom Rakestraw was never a threat to Craig Tiernan’s livelihood,” Rakestraw said. “Never.”

“Your voice isn’t at all like his,” Michelle Boyer observed again.

“No, it isn’t,” Nora said.

As if trying to make out the lineaments of the face that underlay his old one, the reporter looked at Rakestraw. “Why exactly did you call me down here?” she asked. “What did you want me to do for you?”

Rakestraw went to the VCR unit, turned it back on, and wound it forward to the loft sequence in Good Country People. The three of them watched as Craig Tiernan, playing the Bible-selling mountebank Manly Pointer, seduced Lisette Corley as Joy-Hulga Hopewell in the scene that not only solidified Tiernan’s status as a rising beefcake star but earned him his present reputation as a formidable actor. It was impossible to watch Tiernan in this role, a piece of brilliant against-type casting, without laughing helplessly. As Nora and Michelle Boyer laughed, Rakestraw stepped forward and froze the motion picture on the screen at the precise point where Tiernan scrambled out of the loft with Corley’s artificial leg in his Bible case.

“Is that why you had me come to Caracal?” the reporter asked. ‘To give me a private screening of the Great Leg Heist?”

“Partly.” Rakestraw, facing the two women, set his feet apart, hunched his shoulders, and magically transformed himself into Craig Tiernan as Manly Pointer. When he spoke, the voice was Tiernan’s Manly Pointer voice; and when he moved, the illusion of Tiernan as a callow but caustic redneck salesman was overwhelming. That illusion obliterated the commonplace reality of the den and its homely furniture.

“ ‘I may sell Bibles,’” ranted Rakestraw in his Tiernan-Pointer voice, “ ‘but I know which end is up and I wasn’t born yesterday and I know where I’m going!’”

“Incredible,” said Michelle Boyer, applauding him enthusiastically when he was finished. “No props, either. Very, very good.”

Nora was staring at him as if he had just stripped naked at a Methodist covered-dish dinner. She was almost beginning to wonder if Macmillan had sent home to her from the sanitarium the same man he had taken.

Then the young reporter’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “That’s it, isn’t it? You’re going to try to milk your connection with Tiernan. You want notoriety, and you think the World-Ledger can give it to you.”

Rakestraw let himself slump back into his own persona, which, over the past several days, had grown more and more protean and tenuous. Nora was conscious of a firm purpose somewhere inside him, but also of the fact that this purpose was one of the few phenomenological constants remaining to him. Twice recently he had wakened at night and sleepily asked her what his name was. Sometimes, when they had looked through the photographs she had just been showing Boyer, Rakestraw had failed to recognize himself. And although he always recognized Nora’s features in the faces of their children, he said he could never—anymore—discern the imprint of his own. …

“That’s right,” Rakestraw said. “Don’t you think there’s a story here?”

“Oh, undoubtedly,” Boyer acknowledged. “But you may not like the one I’m formulating.”

“Balance it, or unbalance it, any way you like—but get in the violence done to both me and my family.”

“Not to mention your burgeoning talents as an impersonator?”

“Why not? I think they’re pretty goddamn pertinent.”

‘Tom!”

“Good-bye, Ms. Boyer. I appreciate your driving down.” Rakestraw shoved his hands in his pockets and stalked out of the den.

Nora led Michelle Boyer back through the kitchen and then walked with her out to her car. Daffodils fluttered alongside the gravel road, and the breeze was silken.

“Try to remember,” Nora told the reporter, “that he was never like this before. That means something, I think It definitely means something. I hope you’re smart enough to figure out what”

Under the headline CAHACAL MAN LOSES FACE TO CRAIG TIERNAN, / MASKS HURT WITH RARE IMPERSONATIONS, the story appeared in the Sunday World-Ledger. The Rakestraws were surprised to find themselves reading a sympathetic human-interest feature, for, despite Michelle Boyer’s sunny good looks and her short-lived delight in Rakestraws impromptu performance, she had seemed something of an apologist for the Physiognomic Protection Act and Rakestraw had ended up swearing at her. But the story—complete with side-by-side photographs of Tiernan and the “new” Thomas Rakestraw—was a virtual paean to the Rakestraws and a forthright assault on the arrogance of legislation expressly designed to protect the privileged.

“I’m proud of her,” said Nora. “I’m really proud of her.”

“The sympathies of the thing aren’t as important as the fact that my story made the paper,” Rakestraw said. “This just makes it a little nicer, a little easier.”

The following morning the telephone began to ring.

Rakestraw spoke to the editor of the Ladysmith Times, to news personnel from three different television stations in the state, and to a man with a booking agency in Nashville, Tennessee. Although he discouraged this man on the grounds that he wasn’t yet ready to leave Caracal, he made appointments with several others; and over the next three days just that many television camera crews invaded the Rakestraw house to film him doing, sans props or makeup, the loft scene in Good Country People, the metamorphosis of Karst in Singularity, and the self-blinding of the tide character in Yeardance. A different scene for each camera crew. These mini-performances were shown on evening news programs in Ladysmith, Fort Lanier, and the state capital, each with an adulatory commentary and a brief interview with Rakestraw in his obsolescent persona as a wronged country boy.

A wire service picked up Michelle Boyer’s story from the World-Ledger, and it was reprinted in newspapers nationwide.

In the wake of these events, a clip of Rakestraw’s Tiernan-Pointer performance, originally filmed by the CBS affiliate in Fort Lanier, appeared the following Friday evening on network news, after which a rash of new telephone calls struck the house. Nora, after talking briefly with a woman in Lebanon, Kansas, who said she wanted to touch Rakestraw’s perfect body with her mind, unplugged the telephone jack in the den and then went upstairs to lift the phone in the bedroom out of its cradle.

“This is certainly the week of Thomas Rakestraw,” she said disgustedly, coming back down the steps.

Rakestraw was standing in the foyer beneath the staircase. “I’ve plugged the phone in the den back in.”

“Why?”

Assuming a languid Craig Tiernan posture, Rakestraw aped the actor’s gestures and voice. “Because,” he said insouciantly, “it’s more than a tad likely we’re going to be getting a very important call, m’lady.”

“Tom,” Nora said softly.

“What?”

“Knock it off, all right? Please just knock it off.”

As well as he was able, Rakestraw knocked it off. “It’s just that I’m pretty sure Tiernan is going to try to get in touch,” he said. “That’s all.”

“To let you have your face back?”

“Probably to threaten to cut off our monthly compensation.”

“That might be almost as good as the other.” Nora turned clumsily and went back up the stairs.

Four calls and two and a half hours later, Rakestraw reached over from his easy chair and uncradled the telephone in response to its renewed ringing.

“Thomas Rakestraw?” said a voice through the wire.

“Yo.” Was this old army slang or Spanish? Rakestraw didn’t know. The word gave him a comfortable degree of distance from the apprehension he had begun to feel.

“This is Edgar Macmillan. Am I speaking to the same Thomas Rakestraw whom I met several weeks ago?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry. I—“

“You’re speaking with a different Thomas Rakestraw—whom, however, you did indeed meet several weeks ago.”

Macmillan, after a silence, said, “You probably know why I’m calling, Mr. Rakestraw. Craig Tiernan has directed me to get in touch with you to point out that because you’re presently in violation of the terms of our settlement, we intend to—”

“Halt my compensation payments.”

Macmillan chuckled, maybe in surprise. “Of course.”

“Well, Mr. Macmillan”—Rakestraw spoke into the phone with the authority of a prosecutor—”it’s my opinion that you’re just trying to steamroller me. I’ve had occasion to read the Physiognomic Protection Act very carefully, as well as the terms of our settlement, and nowhere in either is there any mention of the illegality of my impersonating the former plaintiff if I don’t happen to resemble him facially. I no longer resemble him facially. My impersonations arise from an innate talent for mimicry that is exclusively my own, and Craig Tiernan has no lawful right to attempt to restrain the expression of that talent. Impersonators have long been a part of this business. Craig Tiernan himself is an impersonator, and if he denies my right to practice, he also denies his own.”

Macmillan’s subsequent silence led Rakestraw to believe that Tiernan was perhaps in the same room with his attorney. Were the two conferring because he had put a hitch in their assessment of his likely response? He hoped so.

“Mr. Rakestraw,” Macmillan tentatively resumed, “it still remains the case that you’re exploiting the talent, the work, and the personality of Craig Tiernan, and this infringement on his career is an actionable matter which may result in your having to pay damages rather than simply receiving them.”

“Well, Mr. Macmillan, my ‘infringement’ on the career of Mr. Tiernan is a direct consequence of his infringement upon my life. I’d never even heard of the bastard before you came to Caracal. It’s an accident of his own making that I’m impersonating anyone. Please tell him that I started with Craig Tiernan for pretty straightforward reasons, and that if I wanted to, I could do just about anybody I damn well choose, including his own most recent mother-in-law.”

“We intend to sue for—”

“And I intend to countersue for unconscionable harassment after the indignity of having to forfeit the face I was born with.”

“Mr. Rakestraw-”

“And when I press suit, you might remind Mr. Tiernan, he’ll have to come to court. His plastic overlay photographs and my cranial measurements won’t be able to speak for him. Craig Tiernan and Tom Rakestraw will occupy the same courtroom, and the publicity generated will be more than he bargained for and quite distinctive in its thrust as far as he and I are concerned.”

“Mr. Rakestraw, you’re … you’re whistling in the dark.”

“How much hate mail has Tiernan received this week?”

“Hate mail?”

“How many people have written to tell him what a jerk he is for depriving an innocent man of his own face?”

“I don’t read Craig Tiernan’s mail, Mr. Rakestraw.”

“But it hasn’t all been sympathetic gushings this week, has it?”

“No, it hasn’t,” Macmillan confessed. “But that’s neither here nor there when—”

“It’s there, Mr. Macmillan. Here the mail and telephone calls are mostly favorable. That’s how I know what kind of communications your employer’s been receiving.”

“What exactly do you want?” Macmillan asked, a trace of desperation in his voice. Michelle Boyer had asked very nearly the same question more than a week ago, but the only honest reply Rakestraw could frame was one he could not bring himself to voice.

“I want to speak to Tiernan,” he said instead.

“On the telephone?”

“In person.”

“Do you propose to fly out here for that purpose?”

“Why doesn’t he come here? It’s all tax-deductible, after all. For him, anyway.”

A silence, during which Rakestraw felt sure that Macmillan and Tiernan were discussing this turn of events. Maybe the attorney had a long-distance hookup with the actor, too, and maybe his, Rakestraw’s, voice was being broadcast to Tiernan over a speaker in the attorney’s office. If they were in the same room together, Rakestraw could hear none of their conversation.

Finally Macmillan said, “Mr. Tiernan has directed me to tell you he’ll be happy to meet you at a neutral location within your own state. Maybe in a nearby community, if that’s all right.”

“Neutral location? Are he and I football franchises? Why can’t he come here? We’ve got plenty of room.”

“Think about that one a sec. or so, Mr. Rakestraw. You just might be able to come up with an answer.”

“My family,” Rakestraw said suddenly. ‘The effect on my family— Tiernan’s worried about that.”

Macmillan didn’t reply.

“I’ll make the preparations for his visit,” Rakestraw said.

The owner of a theater complex in Ladysmith agreed to open one of his auditoriums at ten-thirty on a weekday morning so that Tiernan and Rakestraw could meet in a setting both private and apropos. Having these two people in his establishment, one of them an up-and-coming local boy, was incentive enough for the owner, but Tiernan had also consented to kick in an honorarium.

Rakestraw was the first to arrive. When he entered the drapery-lined theater, he found that Phaedrus was unraveling silently against the high, canted screen. The owner, ensconced in the projection booth, was paying homage to Tiernan with a showing of the most acclaimed and probably most neglected motion picture of the actor’s career. Perhaps this homage encompassed Rakestraw as well, for the film—the first of Tiernan’s that Rakestraw had ever seen—bore strangely on the terrible change in his life.

Even without the aid of the soundtrack Rakestraw could recall every word of Tiernan’s voice-over narration for the dream sequence now unfolding. Halted midway down the left-hand aisle of the theater, he allowed himself to repeat these words under his breath: “‘My hands sink into something soft. … It writhes, and I tighten the grip, as one holds a serpent. And now, holding it tighter and tighter, we’ll get it into the light. Here it comes!’”

Aloud, at the dream sequence’s climactic moment, Rakestraw cried, ‘“Now we’ll see its face!’”

Whereupon he heard the real Craig Tiernan say quietly, from the aisle opposite his, “ ‘A mind divided against itself… me… . I’m the evil figure in the shadows. I’m the loathsome one… .’”

Rakestraw turned to face the double whom he no longer resembled. Craig Tiernan was dressed from head to foot in white; a fine gold chain circled his neck and glinted in the diffuse illumination thrown by the movie projector. He hardly seemed real.

“That’s been your basic assumption from the beginning, hasn’t it? That I’m the loathsome one.”

His heart thudding wetly, Rakestraw stared across a row of shadowy seats into a face he had often seen in his own bathroom mirror.

“Here I am, then. Direct to you from Oregon via Southern California. And this little tête-à-tête is holding up the production of a thirty-million-dollar epic. I’m supposed to be in Nairobi. Or Cairo. What do you have to say to me, Rakestraw?”

Rakestraw continued to stare.

“This is petty and self-indulgent,” Tiernan said. “But the surgery’s reversible. It’s designed to be that way in case anything happens to the owner of the physiognomic rights in question. If you’ll return to your own home and agree to stay there without any further infringement on me or my work, I’m prepared to grant you co-ownership of those rights. Macmillan will take care of the details. We’ll even continue your emotional-hardship compensation.”

“What happened to me is irreversible,” Rakestraw finally said.

Tiernan took a step down the seat aisle toward Rakestraw. “You’ll be all right when you get your face back. Some people just don’t adjust very well to that sort of surgery. Even money doesn’t help much. You’re one of those people, I guess.”

“I don’t want my face back.”

Almost as if dumbstruck, Tiernan halted. On the movie screen, Rakestraw noted peripherally, a man and a boy on motorcycles were climbing toward a stunning mountain lake. Crater Lake, probably. The man on the motorcycle was Craig Tiernan.

“What, then?” the actor himself said. “Is it more money?”

Rakestraw didn’t respond.

“I’ll up the payments if that’s really the problem. Lord knows, I’ve brought this on myself. Just don’t push me too far, Mr. Rakestraw. You’re treading dangerous ground with these publicity-seeking impersonations.”

“But I’m not breaking any law.” Rakestraw was conscious of a shift of settings on the screen. Now Tiernan and another actor in a coat and tie were arguing mutely in a university classroom. Outdoors, indoors. The film was schizophrenic “And it isn’t money,” Rakestraw added distractedly. “Not entirely, anyway.”

“Goddamn it, man!” Tiernan suddenly raged. “What am I doing here, then? Did you have me come all this way just to show yourself you could do it? Just to prove you could get me in the same building with you?”

Rakestraw returned his eyes to the real Tiernan. “I thought you ought to see me,” he said. “And vice versa.”

“Why?”

“Listen, when Macmillan arrived to tell me I was violating your rights, we had nothing in common. Absolutely nothing, despite your long-distance concern about my face. Well, now that I no longer resemble you facially, we have a great deal in common. I find that I like that. If I took my old face back, people outside of Caracal wouldn’t know who I was. They’d think I was you, and I’m not. We’re more alike today than we were before you had me altered, and although there remains a difference that’s important, I’d just like to …”

Tiernan, gripping the back of a theater seat, waited for him to conclude.

“I’d just like to thank you for opening up my life.”

That night, in bed, he rehearsed for Nora for the fourth or fifth time the details of his meeting with Tiernan. Moonlight came into their bedroom from a dormer window, and Gabe, across the hall, moaned and twisted audibly in his bedding. The nights were growing warmer.

“It frightens me,” Nora said when he was finished.

“It should,” Rakestraw said, stroking his wife’s hair. “It’s always a little frightening, a new life. You never know where it’s going.”

“Where is it going, Tom?”

Rakestraw lay back and stared at the ceiling. When he closed his eyes, he seemed to see the ganglia of his own feverish brain, like roads branching in a hundred different directions.

“Nora,” he said, without opening his eyes, “I feel filled with power. It came on me slowly, opening up inside me after the surrender that took my face. It’s been like climbing out of a well into the light. I still don’t recognize myself, but what I see isn’t displeasing.”

There was a small hitch in Nora’s otherwise regular breathing.

Turning toward her, Rakestraw said, “What would you think about leaving Caracal? About selling the farm and going somewhere else?”

“This is all I’ve ever wanted, Tom.”

“It was all I ever wanted, too—until Macmillan showed up and I surrendered to him. But I’m different now, for good or for ill. Something that was pent up has been set free, and I don’t think it’s going to go willingly back to where it came from.”

“I’d have to think about it,” Nora said evenly, turning her own eyes to the ceiling. “Where do you want us to go?”

“That’s something I still have to think about, I guess.”

Conversation failed. They lay side by side in the familiar bed, their hands touching, thinking toward tomorrow.

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