Hounds

The man had no face. Or more precisely, he had a flap of skin stretched over the maw of his head, a way station between the busted gourd his face had been and the crude child’s rendering of a face it may, after dozens of surgeries, someday be. Jess forced herself to look at the smooth divots where the eyes should have been, as though she were staring down an essential human nightmare, one that would reveal something fundamental about herself if only she contemplated it long enough.

The man’s story was told on PowerPoint slides in triptych: beginning, middle, and still inchoate end. The guest seated at the foot of the table did not turn away or change expression, but Jess watched the color leach from his face. Surgeons assumed everyone regarded human bodies the way a butcher eyes a pig, and Jess often had to remind the doctors what graphic meant.

They sat with bottles of cold water sweating onto the conference table, windows overlooking a dull parking lot, while coolly forwarding through slides. The surgical program Jess coordinated had become known around the country for complex reconstructions for service members. Their guest was a young staff sergeant himself, just off active duty, who now worked for a billionaire interested in veterans’ causes. “He never served himself,” the staff sergeant said, “due to a bum knee.”

The surgeon explained how a full face transplant from a donor could provide superior results, how the entire infrastructure of the face—bone, muscles, arteries and all—would be sawed off the donor’s head then screwed on and stitched up, in one clean piece.

“Where would the donors come from?” the staff sergeant asked.

“Private foundations,” the surgeon said, “interested individuals. Some funding from the hospital, given the innovative nature.”

Jess dropped her pen on the floor. This was the signal they’d developed to tell a presenter when he or she got off course, since the doctors were tired of Jess kicking their shins under the table.

“Sergeant, did you mean the transplant donors?” Jess asked. The only thing surgeons thought about more than blood was money.

The young man smiled and nodded.

“Of course,” the surgeon said. He explained they would need to be on life support, still connected to a blood source. “A dead brain and a living face,” Jess had heard him say, but was thankful he had the good sense not to use the unartful language now. He explained how they could create hyperreal masks that could be placed over the donor’s face for an open casket.

“For the family’s sake,” he said.

“You sure I can’t get you a coffee?” Jess asked the staff sergeant. He was still pale. He must have seen worse during deployment, she thought, but perhaps it was exactly that, not shock but fresh trauma that made him blanch.

Jess understood. Sometimes it was too much. Sometimes she would stare at the presentation but let her mind slip away and think—of all things—of her sorority days, girls in boxer shorts crammed butt to butt on a sagging couch, their legs stretched out on the coffee table, tan and firm. How they would play lazy-ass Rockettes, drunk kicking from the couch. She had not thought of herself as a sorority girl, but her freshman-year roommate had been afraid to pledge alone, and Jess found she fit. They called her the majorette because she was the one to kick off a party—to let out a howl, to drag girls onto the dance floor; she brought the anxious ones out of themselves, unleashed the wild. The same quality made her good now, with the military men. She was athletic, a little loud, blonde and attractive, but with a deep voice and slumped posture that suggested a masculine comfort in her own skin.

Jess would try to layer the woman she was now, in a black suit slightly too tight in the shoulders and short in the legs, over that sorority girl, but they did not quite align, creating fuzz around the edges. In college, people had sometimes...