The Identity Man by Andrew Klavan

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.
    "There was even a chick flick in there that was pretty good," Shannon told the foreigner when he came a few days later. Who else was he going to talk to? He sat on the edge of the bed while the foreigner turned his head this way and that in order to look his face over. "Karen—my old girlfriend—she would've liked this picture. But it was good!"
    "Yes?" the foreigner murmured. "I never see."
    "There were these two rich guys fighting over this girl. Or one of the guys was rich. He was the one who used to be her husband. They all lived in this big mansion."
    Shannon was full of the story and had to tell it to someone. It was the last picture he'd seen before the foreigner came. The girl in it had been kind of an ice maiden, too good for anyone. She needed a slap upside the head, basically, which was probably what Shannon would've given her. But the rich guy handled her pretty well. He only slugged her once, in the beginning. The rest of the time he was cool and funny with her, and it finally brought her around. The girl in this movie wasn't as hot as the girl in the casino picture, but in the end she looked at the rich guy the same way, with that same look, and Shannon could see how you could go for her and how it had been worth the rich guy's trouble to straighten her out.
    "At least he didn't have to apologize to her in the end," Shannon told the foreigner. "Those apology guys make me sick."
    The foreigner let go of him. "Very good," he said. "Almost you are ready. I bring you mirror next time. You see."
    "Hey. No kidding. Great," Shannon said. That was what he wanted to hear. Movies or no, he couldn't wait to get out of this place. And the curiosity and anxiety about his new face were killing him. He had tried, between one film and another, to make out his reflection in the dark TV screen. It came back to him dim and distorted. It was a disturbing experience. He had spent hours looking at all those handsome movie stars and pretty girls on the screen, and then suddenly he was there himself with his distorted "monster face," as the foreigner would say. After a while, he stopped trying to see it.
    "So we're getting to the end of this, huh," he said now. He was excited but he was worried, too. He was worried about his face and about ... about everything. "I can get out of here soon."
    "Very soon," said the foreigner. "Very soon."

    The last movie Shannon watched in the white room—the last DVD in the tomato can carton—was kind of stupid but kind of good, too.