Picture a sort of banner or strip of skin hanging down loose along your neck but still attached to the bottom of your face. The skin is still attached to you, so it still gets blood. This strip of skin is still alive. Take the strip of skin and roll it into a tube or column. Leave it rolled until it heals into a long, dangling lump of flesh, hanging from the bottom of your face. Living tissue. Full of fresh, healthy blood, flapping and dangling warm against your neck. This is a pedicle.

Just the healing part, that can take months.

Clatter and tintinnabulation of ringing metal against metal chimes and gongs in the car around us.

"Sorry, I guess," Brandy says. "There's shit on the floor, got under the brake pedal when I tried to stop."

Music bright as silver rolls out from under our car seats. Napkin rings and silver teaspoons rush forward against our feet. Brandy's got candlesticks between her feet. A silver platter bright with starlight is slid half out from under the front of Brandy's seat, looking up between her long legs.

Brandy looks at me. Her chin tucked down, Brandy lowers her Ray-Bans to the end of her nose and arches her penciled eyebrows.

I shrug. I get out to liberate my love cargo.

Even with the trunk open, Manus doesn't move. His knees are against his elbows, his hands clasped in his face, his feet tucked back under his butt; Manus could be a fetus in army fatigues. All around him, I hadn't noticed. I've been under a lot of stress tonight, so forgive me if I didn't notice back at Evie's house, but all around Manus flash pieces of silverware. Pirate treasure in the trunk of his Fiat, and other things.

Relics.

A long white candle, there's a candle.

Brandy slams out of her seat and comes to look, too.

"Oh my shit," Brandy says and rolls her eyes. "Oh my shit."

There's an ashtray, no, it's a plaster cast of a little hand, "It's okay."

There's a little rushing sound, the sound of rain on the roof of a tent or a closed convertible.

"Oh, God," Brandy steps back. "Oh, sweet Christ!"

Manus blinks and peers at Brandy, then at his lap. One leg of his army fatigues goes darker, darker, darker to the knee.

"Cute," Brandy says, "but he's just peed his pants."

Jump back to plastic surgery. Jump to the happy day you're healed. You've had this long strip of skin hanging off your neck for a couple months, only it's not just one strip. There are probably more like a half-dozen pedicles because you might as well do a lot at once so the plastic surgeon has more tissue to work with.

For reconstruction, you'll have these long dangling strips of skin hanging off the bottom of your face for about two months.

They say that what people notice first about you is your eyes. You'll give up that hope. You look like some meat byproduct ground up and pooped out by the Num Num Snack Factory.

A mummy coming apart in the rain.

A broken pinata.

These strips of warm skin flapping around your neck are good, blood-fed living tissue. The surgeon lifts each strip and attaches the healed end to your face. This way,

Now Manus peers at me, sits up and scrapes his head on the open trunk lid. Man, oh, man, you know this hurts, still it isn't anything tragic until Brandy Alexander chimes in with her overreaction. "Oh, you poor thing," she says.

Then Manus boo-hoos. Manus Kelley, the last person who has any right to, is crying.

I hate this.

Jump to the day the skin grafts take, and even then the tissue will need some support. Even if the grafts heal to where they look like a crude, lumpy jaw, you'll still need a jawbone. Without a mandible, the soft mass of tissue, living and viable as it is, might just reabsorb.

That's the word the plastic surgeons used.

Reabsorb.

Into my face, as if I'm just a sponge made of skin.

Jump to Manus crying and Brandy bent over him, cooing and petting his sexy hair.

In the trunk, there's a pair of bronze baby shoes, a silver chafing dish, a turkey picture made of macaroni glued to construction paper.

"You know," Manus sniffs and wipes the back of his hand under his nose. "I'm high right now so it's okay if I tell you this." Manus looks at Brandy bent over him and me crouched in the dirt. "First," Manus says, "your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life."

To make you a jawbone, the surgeons will break off parts of your shinbones, complete with the attached artery. First they expose the bone and sculpt it right there on your leg.

Another way is the surgeons will break several other bones, probably long bones in your legs and arms. Inside these bones is the soft cancellous bone pulp.

That was the surgeons' word and the word from the books.

Cancellous.

"My mom," Manus says, "and her new husband—my mom gets married a lot—they just bought this resort condo in Bowling River in Florida. People younger than sixty can't buy property there. That's a law they have."

I'm looking at Brandy, who's still the overreactive mother, kneeling down, brushing the hair off Manus's forehead. I'm looking over the cliff edge next to us. Those little blue lights in all the houses, that's people watching television. Tiffany's light blue. Valium blue. People in captivity.

First my best friend and now my brother is trying to steal my fiance.

Jump to Manus sitting in his piss and silver in the trunk of his red sports car. Potty training flashback. It happens.

Me, I'm crouched in front of him, looking for the bulge of his wallet.

Manus just stares at Brandy. Probably thinking Brandy's me, the old me with a face.

Brandy's lost interest. "He doesn't remember. He thinks

I'm his mother," Brandy says. "Sister, maybe, but mother?"

So deja vu. Try brother.

We need a place to stay, and Manus must have a new place. Not thp ???

"I went to visit them at Christmas, last year," Manus says. "My mom, their condo is right on the eighth green, and they love it. It's like the whole age standard in Bowling River is fucked. My mom and stepdad are just turned sixty, so they're just youngsters. Me, all these oldsters are scoping me out like an odds-on car burglary."

Brandy licks her lips.

"According to the Bowling River age standard," Manus says, "I haven't been born yet."

You have to break out large enough slivers of this soft, bloody bone pulp. The cancellous stuff. Then you have to insert these shards and slivers of bone into the soft mass of tissue you've grafted onto your face.

Really, you don't do this, the surgeons do it all while you're asleep.

If the slivers are close enough together, they'll form fibroblast cells to bond with each other. Again, a word from the books.

Fibroblast.

Again, this takes months.

"My mom and her husband," Manus says, sitting in the open trunk of his Fiat Spider on top of Rocky Butte, "for Christmas, their biggest present to me is this box all wrapped up. It's the size of a high-end stereo system or a wide-screen television. This is what I'm hoping. I mean, it could've been anything else, and I would've liked it more."

Manus slides one foot down to the ground, then the other. On his feet, Manus turns back to the Fiat full of silver.

"No," Manus says, "they give me this shit."

Manus in his commando boots and army fatigues takes a big fat-belly silver teapot out of the trunk and looks at himself reflected fat in the convex side. "The whole box," Manus says, "is full of all this shit and heirlooms that nobody else wants."

Just like me pitching Evie's crystal cigarette box against the fireplace, Manus hauls off and fast pitches the teapot out into the darkness. Over the cliff, out over the darkness and the lights of suburbia, the teapot flies so far that you can't hear it land.