“Here,” Bill said. “Move it here.” We stuffed the face and the gun behind a treadmill and a foam-core picture of Bill at least thirty pounds lighter. He had all his hair and he was standing next to a woman with a mullet and a Hartford Whalers sweatshirt. I’d seen pictures of his ex-wife—this wasn’t her. “Who’s that?” I said.
“No one,” said Bill. “That’s no one.” Then he ushered me out of the storage unit, pulled the door down to the ground, and locked the latch.
* * *
When we got back to Bill’s, the news van and a police car were parked outside. A different cop, an old man I didn’t recognize, got out of his cruiser and approached our truck. “Where is it?” he said.
“Where is what?” Bill said.
“The face,” said the cop.
Bill shrugged.
“It left late last night,” I said, “flew off somewhere.”
Then a guy spilled out of the news van and hustled over. “Where’d it go?”
“We’ve got reports saying it was around here this morning,” said the cop.
“That’s a relief,” I said. “We were just out looking for him.”
The cop turned to Bill. “How about you, Sunflower?”
“How ’bout me what?” said Bill.
“Where is the face?” said the news reporter.
The cop said, “Did you do something here?”
“Like what?” said Bill.
“Let me get in your house,” said the cop.
“Sure,” said Bill. “Got a warrant?”
* * *
The cops and the news stayed for a few more minutes, and cruisers circled past Bill’s house every few hours over the next few days. Liz texted repeatedly to ask what happened to the face, but I stopped replying. Four days after its disappearance, Joyce O’Lar from News 9 interviewed me and said a police report had been filed about the gunfire. “Oh no,” I said, feigning shock. “Was anyone injured?”
“But you didn’t see the face that morning,” said O’Lar.
I tried to make my face look pained. “Last I saw it was Thursday night. Then it just floated away.”
Soon the Big Giant Floating Head was forgotten. And I don’t know what happened to the carcass in the storage unit—whether Bill disposed of it, or it rotted in there or disintegrated. Bill and I never talked about it. Mostly we talked about gutters. It was October, and we had a lot of jobs lined up: three installations, four repairs, at least twenty cleanings. Everyone wanted us to get there before the snow fell, and we worked our asses off to keep up.
Then, that Friday, two days before Halloween, I got my driver’s license reinstated. Soon as I did, I rode my bike over to my house—Liz’s house, our house, whatever—to get my truck. I expected to see it in the driveway as usual, but it wasn’t there. So I dropped my bike in the yard and knocked on the door. Liz answered, holding a big hardcover library book under her arm. “The villain returns,” she said.
Despite our arguments, our break-ups, the time she cheated on me, even, I loved Liz; I’d loved her since the moment I first saw her strumming her guitar at the open mic at Café Attitude six years earlier. It’s true that I wrote that letter on the back of an outstanding utility bill. But it had been so long since I’d tried to express myself on the page. And I’d once thought of myself as a writer! That seemed like a lifetime ago now. I said some things in that letter, though, that I hoped would mean something to her—that I thought might change things between us. This DUI has really woken me up, I wrote. I understand everything now. Though I guess I had misspelled “everything.” I still have all these stories in my head that I want to get out on paper. And I’m going to do it, swear to God.
“Just here to get my truck,” I said.
“Wait, wait,” she said. She held up her phone. “The villain returns,” she repeated. “Say hello, villain.”
“Where is it?” I said.
Liz turned the camera on herself. “Watch this,” she said, and then turned the phone back on me.
“Come on, I’m late,” I said.
“I sold it,” she said.
“Sold what?” I said, dumbly. And then, “You’re kidding.”
“No—I’m not,” she said.
That truck had been Liz’s wedding present to me. “Liz,” I said. “You didn’t.”
“Aw. Don’t cry, villain,” she said.
I was so shocked I couldn’t speak. “You—,” I began, and then, “How—” And then I said, “Everything in that letter was true.”
“None of it was ever true.” That’s really what she said—you can see it on Facebook. And that may sound harsh, but she had every right to talk to me that way—for years I’d been an asshole to her. Plus, Liz was dating a lot of other people by then. She’d post their dates, or snippets of them, on YouTube. There was one guy who was a magician—he was really handsome. Maybe he was the one telling her to be so tough on me. Or maybe it was someone else—I don’t know.
“I miss living here,” I said.
“Say goodbye, villain,” said Liz.
I walked outside, picked up the bike, and pedaled away.
* * *
I wasn’t really late for anything—that part had been a lie. Truth was, I wasn’t going to work at all—I was meeting Bill and a few other lugs we worked with—Addie Trawl, Gil Murphy, Tall John—at the Black Cat to celebrate getting my license back. I walked into the bar and Bill held up a full bottle of beer. “Alright!” he said. “First round’s on me!”
I shook my head and climbed onto a stool.
“What’s the problem?” said Bill.
“She sold it,” I said.
“The truck?”
“Liz sold it,” I said.
“Holy shit.” He handed me a beer, and we were quiet for a minute. Then he said, “How’d she even have the title?”
“Engagement present,” I said.
“Fuck.” He sipped his beer. “Well, you’ll figure something out. Or we will. OK?”
I shrugged. “I loved that truck,” I said.
“Drink your beer,” Bill said.
I drank that beer and then another. Halfway through my third, Bill elbowed me. “You know who the real loser is here, is me. Cuz I have to keep dragging your sorry ass all over town.”
“You love it,” I said.
“Like hell,” he said.
Then we did some shots, and Gum was there, along with Fay and the Sorry twins. We watched some of the game on TV, and the room got warm and dark. “Man,” I said at one point to someone. “I need my wheels, man. I need wheels.”
“Stop saying that,” Gum said.
“Stop saying what?”
“Just stop it, man,” said Gum. Then things got foggy, and I remember Bill putting a hand on my shoulder and saying something about tomorrow, tomorrow, and then Tall John saying, “Whoa! Will you fucking look at that?” and showing Bill his phone, and Bill grabbing the phone and handing it over to me. The screen held a picture of my face—bald head, patchy beard, red nose and all—only detached from my body and floating over a skyscraper. “What,” I said, pointing, “what—what—”
“That’s Bowcher, right?” said Tall John.
It wasn’t just my face—there were ten or so other giant floating faces in the frame.
“Is that real?” I said.
And then that same image—the Big Giant Floating Heads floating over the skyscraper—appeared on TV, before switching to footage of giant faces elsewhere: some over the ocean; two over a gravel pit; a gaggle of faces over a soccer match, the players below looking dumbfounded. Some of the faces were moving—following people—and others were floating still. They were faces of all type and origin. Some had long shadowy hair and some were completely bald. Some were gaunt, and some had jowls, and some were very old. But they all had that same smile as the face we shot.
The news showed my face on TV again and Tall John said, “Says that building is in Japan.” Meanwhile, my phone was going crazy with messages and
tweets. Liz tagged me in a tweet about the skyscraper. That’s my husband! said the caption.
I put a hand on Bill’s shoulder. “I need to get out of here,” I said. He led me outside and put me in his truck.
“You OK to drive?” I asked him.
Bill slapped himself in the face. “Yup,” he said. He slapped himself again. “I’m fine.” Then he started up the engine and pulled out of the lot. I checked my phone again. “They’re all over the place, Bill. Some people are calling them clouds.”
“Those aren’t fucking clouds,” said Bill, turning onto Kemp.
“That building’s in Tokyo,” I said. “Why is my face in Tokyo?”
“Hey. Personally?” he said. “I think it’s kind of cool.”
“It ain’t your face,” I said.
“I know it’s not.” He burped. “But maybe mine’s out there too.”
* * *
By the end of the week there were hundreds of faces in the sky, then thousands, then millions. That winter, everything was faces—they were all anyone could talk about. The late night talk shows had a field day, and all the news outlets interviewed experts in meteorology and astrology. The floating heads made some people nervous—there were reports of more shootings before an international committee made it illegal—but most people embraced them. By early December you could buy bobbleheads of giant faces, artsy posters of faces at sunrise or sunset. Plus, people set up cameras all over the world to track the faces—there were dozens of sites online to identify them and match them to their lookalikes. I’d check the webcams every day to see how my face was doing. He’d drifted away from the skyscraper and over Tokyo Bay, and then he was spotted in a city called Chiba. Since then he’d held steady.
And I don’t know about you—assuming you saw your face up there, which most people did—but having that smiling face in the sky changed me. Those weeks before the faces appeared I was pretty down in the dumps. Most afternoons, I’d sit on Bill’s porch after work and just drink and stare at my phone. Sometimes I’d open Google Maps and search for my own house—the one I wasn’t welcome in anymore. The app would show me a picture of it and directions from here to there. I don’t know when that picture was taken, but it looked to be sometime the previous summer—the leaves are still on the trees and our garden hose is coiled up on the lawn. Both cars are in the driveway, too, which means we both might be home. Sitting there on Bill’s porch, I’d zoom in on my living room window, looking for a shape or a shadow. Is Liz in there? Am I?
The floating heads brought me some sort of clarity, though. Soon after their arrival, I stopped drinking so much. I became more thoughtful, more optimistic. I guess I started to think that, if my Skyface was smiling, maybe he knew something I didn’t. About my outcome. About how everything would turn out. His face told me everything would be OK, and maybe it would.
And then, that January, a wonderful thing happened when a face that looked like Liz’s—not her, exactly, but close (sort of close, if I’m being honest)—appeared floating over the Sagamanadi Sea. Over a period of two weeks, Liz’s face drifted closer and closer to my face, until the two faces were in the same city, the same neighborhood. Liz saw this and texted me a screenshot with the message, HOLY SHIT. There we were—or our faces, or our sort-of faces—floating next to each other in the sky. I didn’t text back, but the next day—a Sunday—I was sitting on Bill’s porch when Liz pulled up in my truck, got out, and stood beside it.
“My truck,” I said.
“Hi, Liz,” said Bill.
“Have you seen our faces?” she said.
“You said you sold it,” I said.
“I let my brother use it for a while,” she said, and her smile was a lot like the smile on her Skyface. “Have you seen them?”
I nodded.
“Come on,” she said.
“Just like that?”
“What do you want, flowers?” she said. “Want me to beg?”
“No,” I said.
“Tell you what.” She walked around to the passenger seat door. “You can drive,” she said. Then she got in and closed the door.
I stood up, walked down to the truck, got, in and drove us home.
* * *
I won’t lie to you: those first few weeks after I moved back in with Liz weren’t easy—we still argued, stormed out on each other, and threatened to never come back. But our faces really helped us. Whenever things got super tough, we’d turn on facefeed.com and look in on our faces—SkyChris and SkyLiz, that’s what we called them—and that would calm us down and give us some perspective. Seeing my face reminded me that there was happiness somewhere—even in the darkest moments, when you didn’t know how you were going to get along, you could look up at the sky and see something smiling at you: the stars. The moon. A tree. The pattern in a sidewalk tile. The shape your shoelace makes. A giant floating head.
And sometimes it was almost like we heard their voices. Give yourself a break, they seemed to say to us, or, Be nice to each other. And we tried. Like, if Liz had a gripe, I’d just listen to her and wouldn’t talk at all. Even if she said something that pissed me off—about her having feelings for our neighbor Glen, or how sometimes she just wanted a quiet house with no one in it, not me or anyone else—I just: listened. Because that’s what she needed most. And I think that’s what my face would have wanted.
In my mind, too, something was opening up. I started having new ideas for stories: a guy grows a wall in his mind; he takes a job praying; he competes in a failure competition; he sees big giant floating heads in the sky. And I know these ideas had something to do with SkyChris. Just his being there, watching me from above, was invigorating. It was like he was reading me, seeing me move across the page. Or was I seeing myself?
I wasn’t the only one who changed, either. For a short time there, it seemed like the whole world quieted down a little. There was a temporary cease-fire in Afghanistan, for example, and a new peace treaty between Israel and Palestine. Locally, tensions eased between Coolidge and Blix. It was like we all became more self-aware—like we became better listeners.
Soon, Liz and I started planning a trip to Japan to see our faces in person. This was pretty common—a lot of people were organizing “face quests,” including Bill, who went to Scotland in May and left me all his clients. For a long time afterward people asked me about him. “I haven’t seen him,” I told them, which was true—I don’t know what happened to him.
With more jobs than I could handle on my own, though, Liz started working with me. She was good at gutters—meticulous, patient—and we made pretty good money, enough to put a little away each month. Plus, we seemed to get along better when we worked together; for the first time, we were true partners. When I think back on that summer, I remember working on the gutters at the old brush factory, Liz on one ladder and me on another, a motherly face who we nicknamed Maude floating in the horse fields behind that building.
That July, I wrote my first story in two years. It was this story, the story of the Big Giant Floating Heads. I let Liz read it, and she said, “Yeah.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“It’s quirky,” she said. “I think it could be part of something longer. A whole novel, maybe.”
I bristled. “A novel? I don’t know.”
“Why not? Because of the last one? That was years ago now,” she said. “You’re not going to hurt anyone like that again. And besides, I want to know what happens to this guy.”
I looked down at the Christopher Boucher on the page. He looked back up at me.
“Hey,” said my wife, playfully crashing her shoulder into mine. “Am I supposed to be Liz?”
I smirked. “Yes and no.”
“Because she’s kind of a bitch,” Liz said.
I shrugged. “It’s like you said—it’s just a better story that way.”
One day that August, Liz tweeted: I love @bouchergutter so much. Just out of the blue—just to be nice. Which was maybe one of the best things to ever
happen to me. I printed out that tweet and put it on the fridge.
By the end of the summer, we’d saved up enough to fly to Chiba. We bought tickets and made the arrangements. Two days before our flight, though, I came home to find Liz crunched up in the corner of the couch. “What’s wrong?” I said.
She held out her phone. It showed a face floating over a silo, but the face was frowning. L@@k at this, said the tweet. What’s the matter Mr. Face?
“Where is this?” I said.
“Somewhere in Georgia.”
“Sheesh,” I said. I didn’t think much of it, but Liz was obsessed with it. That night we went to see my brother’s jazz band at a sketchy café in East Coolidge, and Liz spent the whole time looking at her phone. She kept holding it out to me and showing me pictures of frowning faces: webcams had picked them up in Reykjavík, Las Vegas, Mexico City, Tarry, Galway, all over.
When we got back home, I turned on the news. CNN had on a special analyst who studied these faces for a living. “Let’s not forget,” said the expert, “these entities are pretty new.”
“The faces, you mean,” said the host.
“It’s possible they have happy seasons and sad seasons.”
“Why a sad season, Dr. Orf?” said the host.
The analyst shrugged. “For the same reason we have sad seasons, Maura.”
“Maybe they’re unhappy for a specific reason.”
Orf placed his hands on the desk. “Maybe we’ve done something wrong.”
Liz rubbed her face with her hands. “Should we still go?” she said.
“Go where?”
“To Japan,” she said.
“What do you mean? Absolutely we should,” I said.
And we did—about a month after The Frowning began, we flew the seventeen hours to Tokyo. That might sound like a long time to be in the air, but it was nice—we shut off our phones and just talked. We played Cards Against Humanity. We watched a movie. “Do you know what?” Liz said about halfway through the movie.
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