Before we bring him in, maybe we can open the floor to some questions. This will be your first time meeting him. He’s very comfortable with people evaluating him. Because right now he’s being looked at almost as an experiment. Which he is. He’s a human-subjects experiment.

Richard Norris was 22 when he shot himself in the face. This was back in 1997. He doesn’t remember how or why it happened, but his mom, who was three feet away, said it was an accident. She remembers pieces of Richard’s face showering her body. This was in the living room. The gunshot had blown off his nose, cheekbones, lips, tongue, teeth, jaw, and chin, leaving just his wide brown eyes and a swirl of nameless twisted flesh.

The miracle that would come to define Richard’s life begins with these tragic details. Like most miracles, with each retelling, the edges of the story sharpen, the colors become more vibrant, and the shadows disappear. Ashamed of his appearance, Richard became a hermit, living for nearly a decade on a foggy mountaintop in rural Virginia with his parents. They covered the mirrors in the house so Richard wouldn’t have to look at his hideous face. He stayed in his room even to eat, wore a black mask on the rare occasions he came out. According to legend, one time the cops stopped him at gunpoint, mistaking him for a robber.

Then one day, searching on the Internet, his mom found Eduardo Rodriguez, a Baltimore reconstructive facial surgeon. He promised Richard he would make him normal. Over the next few years, Rodriguez performed dozens of surgeries using Richard’s own flesh, fashioning a nose-shaped appendage out of tissue from his forearm and a small chin out of flesh from his legs, but these crude approximations failed to make Richard normal. Meantime, Rodriguez had a grander idea in mind. He was driven to achieve perfection. He had been practicing face transplants on cadavers. What he envisioned for Richard was the most extensive transplant any surgeon had ever attempted: He would give Richard a whole new face.

"It’s showtime," Rodriguez said one day.

"You’re my godsend," Richard’s mom said.

"Let’s do this thing," Richard said.

The surgery started at dawn on March 19, 2012. The face of a recently deceased 21-year-old man came off as one solid flap, skin, muscle, bone, nerves, blood vessels, tongue—everything as one piece. Rodriguez removed what was left of Richard’s disfigured face, dissected down to the skull. He attached the new face midway back on Richard’s scalp. He stabilized it with screws, tapped the jaw together, and finally draped the skin and sewed it down like a patch on a coat or a pair of jeans.

You can see the junction; the incision actually goes here in the coronal, extends in front of the ear, and goes posteriorly all the way down, uh, to the neck.

Rodriguez and his team worked nonstop for thirty-six hours, and when they were finished, Richard’s mom looked at her son and felt like he was somehow resurrected. "We have Richard back!" she said on the phone to Richard’s dad, who had not had much of anything to say for many years.

With his new face, Richard, now 39, became a media sensation for a time, the story of the miracle told many times over until it hardened even in Richard’s mind into a kind of precious jewel.

Maybe we can scroll through some of the clinical photographs while we’re talking. I feel very happy about the bony union here. That’s the donor palate. And that’s the donor floor mouth. The donor hair, it’s a little darker than his. His is a little bit more salt-and-pepper.