"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.
"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.