“Do I look Jewish to you?” I asked Dixon.

Dixon was standing at the sink next to me, staring at himself intently in the mirror; he tore himself away to take a look at my reflection and said, “Irish. You’re a Mick if ever I saw one.”

“Micks don’t use words like ‘schmuck,’ do they?”

“If they’re from the big city they do. New York, say.”

“That where you’re from?”

“No. Detroit. But I had a layover there once. I put the lay in the word, lemme tell ya. Now, there. Look. Will ya look at that. That proves it. Once and for all.”

He was covering one side of his face with his hand. Looking at himself with one eye.

“Proves what?” I asked.

“That I’m nuts,” he said, out of the side of his mouth that showed. “Now, look.”

He covered the other side of his face. Looked at himself with the other eye.

“They’re completely different, see.”

“What is?”

“The two sides of my face, you dumb sonofabitch! They should be the same, but they ain’t. My goddamn face, it’s split it in two. This fuckin’ war. Oh, I got a screw loose, all right.”

He turned away from the mirror and put a hand on my shoulder and grinned; there was a space between his two front teeth, I noticed. “We’re in the right place, you and me,” he said.

“I guess we are,” I said.

“Semper fi,” he shrugged, and strutted out.

I took a crap. That’s something I hadn’t forgotten how to do. I sat there crapping and finishing my smoke and thinking about how I wanted to get out of this place. How I wanted to go home.

Wherever the hell home was.

I flushed the shitter, went over to the sink, and threw some water on my face. Then I went out to meet the doctor.