Not turning around, Manus reaches back and grabs another something. A silver candlestick. "This is my legacy," Manus says. Pitched overhand into the darkness, the candlestick turns end over end, silent the way you imagine satellites fly.

"You know," Manus pitches a glittering handful of napkin rings, "how your parents are sort of like God. Sure, you love them and want to know they're still around, but you never really see them unless they want something."

The silver chafing dish flies up, up, up, to the stars and then falls down to land somewhere among the blue TV lights.

And after the shards of bone have grown together to give you a new jawbone inside the lump of grafted skin, then the surgeon can try to shape this into something you can talk with and eat with and keep slathered in make-up.

This is years of pain later.

Years of living in the hope that what you'll get will be better than what you have. Years of looking and feeling

worse in the hope that you might look better.

Manus grabs the candle, the white candle from the trunk.

"My mom," Manus says, "her number two Christmas present to me was a box full of all the stuff from when I was a kid that she saved." Manus says, "Check it out," and holds up the candle, "my baptism candle."

Off into the darkness, Manus pitches the candle.

The bronze baby shoes go next.

Wrapped in a christening gown.

Then a scattering handful of baby teeth.

"Fuck," Manus says, "the damn tooth fairy."

A lock of blond hair inside a locket on a chain, the chain swinging and let go bola-style from Manus's hand, disappears into the dark.

"She said she was giving me this stuff because she just didn't have any room for it," Manus says. "It's not that she didn't want it."

The plaster print of the second-grade hand goes end over end, off into the darkness.

"Well, Mom, if it isn't good enough for you," Manus says, "I don't want to carry this shit around, either."

Jump to all the times when Brandy Alexander gets on me about plastic surgery, then I think of pedicles. Reabsorb-tion. Fibroblast cells. Cancellous bone. Years of pain and hope, and how can I not laugh.

Laughter is the only sound left I can make that people will understand.

Brandy, the well-meaning queen supreme with her tits siliconed to the point she can't stand straight, she says: Just look to see what's out there.

How can I stop laughing.

I mean it, Shane, I don't need the attention that bad.

I'll just keep wearing my veils.

If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.

Jump to the silver punch ladle flying off to nowhere.

Jump to each teaspoon, gone.

Jump to all the grade school report cards and class pictures sailed off.

Manus crumbles a thick piece of paper.

His birth certificate. And chucks it out of existence. Then Manus stands rocking heel-toe, heel-toe, hugging himself.

Brandy is looking at me to say something. In the dirt, with my finger I write:

manus where do you live these days?

Little cold touches land on my hair and peachy-pink shoulders. It's raining.

Brandy says, "Listen, I don't want to know who you are, but if you could be anybody, who would you be?"

"I'm not getting old, that's for sure" Manus says, shaking his head. "No way." Arms crossed, he rocks heel-toe, heel-toe. Manus tucks his chin to his chest and rocks, looking down at all the broken bottles.

It's raining harder. You can't smell my smoky ostrich feathers or Brandy's L'Air du Temps.

"Then you're Mr. Denver Omelet," Brandy says. "Denver Omelet, meet Daisy St. Patience." Brandy's ring-beaded hand opens to full flower and lays itself across her forty-six inches of siliconed glory. "These," she says, "this is Brandy Alexander.”

Jump to this one time, nowhere special, just Brandy and

me in the speech therapist office when Brandy catches me with my hands up under my veil, touching the seashells and ivory of my exposed molars, stroking the embossed leather of my scar tissue, dry and polished from my breath going back and forth across it. I'm touching the saliva where it dries sticky and raw down the sides of my neck, and Brandy says not to watch myself too close.

"Honey," she says, "times like this, it helps to think of yourself as a sofa or a newspaper, something made by a lot of other people but not made to last forever."

The open edge of my throat feels starched and plastic, ribbed- knitted and stiff with sizing and interfacing. It's the same feel as the top edge of a strapless dress or maillot, held up with wire or plastic stays sewn inside. Hard but warm the way pink looks. Bony but covered in soft, touchable skin.

This kind of acute traumatic mandibulectomy without reconstruction, before decannulation of the tracheostomy tube can lead to sleep apnea, the doctors said. This was them talking to each other during morning rounds.

And people find me hard to understand.

What the doctors told me was unless they rebuilt me some kind of jaw, at least some kind of flap, they said, I could die any time I fell asleep. I could just stop breathing and not wake up. A quick, painless death.

On my pad with my pen, I wrote:

don't tease.

Us in the speech therapist office, Brandy says, "It helps to know you're not any more responsible for how you look than a car is," Brandy says. "You're a product just as much. A product of a product of a product. The people who design cars, they're products. Your parents are products. Their parents were products. Your teachers, products. The minister in your church, another product," Brandy says.

Sometimes your best way to deal with shit, she says, is to not hold yourself as such a precious little prize.

"My point being," Brandy says, "is you can't escape the world, and you're not responsible for how you look, if you look beauticious or butt ugly. You're not responsible for how you feel or what you say or how you act or anything you do. It's all out of your hands," Brandy says.

The same way a compact disk isn't responsible for what's recorded on it, that's how we are. You're about as free to act as a programmed computer. You're about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill.

"There isn't any Teal you in you," she says. "Even your physical body, all your cells will be replaced within eight years."

Skin, bones, blood, and organs transplant from person to person. Even what's inside you already, the colonies of microbes and bugs that eat your food for you, without them you'd die. Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited.

"Relax," Brandy says, "Whatever you're thinking, a million other folks are thinking. Whatever you do, they're doing, and none of you is responsible. All of you is a cooperative effort."

Up under my veil, I finger the wet poking stub of a tongue from some vandalized product. The doctors suggested using part of my small intestine to make my throat longer. They suggested carving the shinbones, the fibulas of this human product I am, shaping the bones and grafting them to build me, build the product, a new jawbone.

On my pad, I wrote:

the leg-bone connected to the head-bone?

The doctors didn't get it.

Now hear the word of the Lord.

"You're a product of our language," Brandy says, "arid how our laws are and how we believe our God wants us. Every bitty molecule about you has already been thought out by some million people before you," she says. "Anything you can do is boring and old and perfectly okay. You're safe because you're so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it. You can't imagine any way to escape. There's no way you can get out," Brandy says.