Dreamtime, Two

Doctor Kee’s face bobs up and down, a hazy blur. From the IV plugged into my arm, the anaesthesia sweeps its cold tentacles into the recesses of my mind once more, the clear plastic mask held over my face collapsing everything within into cold and quiet…

Pictures of my desired face are projected on the computer screen, but in this moment, they look murky, unclear to me, the details refusing to attach. I feel as if I’m staring into a mannequin’s face.

“How much time do you need?” I ask.

“These records are comprehensive,” Dr. Kee says, flipping through the notes that Mr. Samuel had prepared in advance. My modifications to them were slight; addendums to account for my recent trip to Jessica’s and other details. “If they are all accurate—”

“They are.”

“I can operate tomorrow,” he says.

“I thought you’d usually need a week or two to prepare, evaluate the documents, figure out the procedures…”

Dr. Kee has pulled a mirror out of his pocket now. It fits in the palm of his hand, and then stretches out from floor to ceiling, and I stare into my reflection, no, it’s his reflection, but I blink and his face has morphed into Mr. Samuel’s, stern and proud, saying: “But for you, greyhound, anything.”

He’s here! I need to tell him everything, so much has happened, so much to explain…

I reach out a scrawny arm, it’s too short, my eyes widening, seeing all the wires and pins and osteotomes sticking out of it, the face in the mirror looking back with a massive gash running down the side of it, my face, no, his, a mallet striking the side of my nose, and stars fly…

My mouth is a wide cavern filled with knives, but the blades, they cut inwards, incisions slashing open my cheeks into ribbons, the nurses standing by watching quietly, and I beg them to do something, anything, my head swivels around and sees all four of them just standing there, here’s Ella Sue, smiling for a selfie, snapping photos of hersellf in her tight jeans, and then next to her, Tiffany, laughing with a hand on Ella Sue’s shoulder, but her mouth makes no sound, just posing for the omnipresent cameras.

The other two nurses are whispering to each other now. They must be angry, I feel it, the way they’re talking, that heat is raw vitriol, but when I look over, I see Holly holding on to her Elianne’s hand, smiles on their faces as they watch mine melt into a thousand shapes, Dr. Kee’s hands crafting it into some final form that only he sees…

Elianne is standing by my side. I look up into those innocent eyes of hers, thinking that she must be twenty now, and what a lady she’s blossomed into, not that I’ve seen her before, but my mind draws upon the pool of images that’ve been filed away, media appearances with Father, paparazzi shots in the Hamptons, Instagram feeds of the young socialites…

“Fuck me,” I say softly, both a self-critical invective and a command, but it’s no longer Elianne standing there.

Her face has morphed into Kara’s, golden hair and round eyes twinkling under the office lights; the background has become an ever-shifting collage of Van Goghs and Vermeers, one second a fantastic swirl of color, the next receding into flat dark tones, but she stands before it all, watching that orchestra of paint, back against me, and I wonder, can she understand it?

“Welcome back,” the nurse says, smiling beatifically. She has cute dimples.

I want to smile back, but then I realise my face is burning with a dozen pains. It takes me a second to feel the layers of gauze and bandages attached to my face, and then I cannot stop noticing it.

“Want to eat?” she asks. “You can tap my hand once for a ‘yes’, twice for a ‘no.’”

She rests her hand over mine.

Even tapping her hand once takes some effort. The doctor broadened my shoulders with deltoid implants, soft silicone things that will apparently look natural once I heal up.

He also broke the bones in my leg and inserted a telescoping rod that will, over the next two weeks, make me another inch taller. Just enough to change my height for good—Erin pointed out it would also throw off any gait-based identification techniques.

“We have you on a liquid diet for the next week while you stay with us,” the nurse says kindly. “It’s standard procedure after all the work that was done on your face, you really don’t want to be chewing with that new jawline and all the sutures in your mouth.”

I make a strangled noise that sounds something like: “Eeek-uuggh….”

“Let’s also keep talking to a minimum for the next few days,” she laughs. She turns away for a second, walking to the other end of the little suite they have me recovering in, and she comes back a moment later with a notepad and a pen.

“Here, you can write down anything you need,” she says.

I scribble down some words in a chicken-scratch that even I can’t decipher. But she’s a nurse, and she’s used to the handwriting of doctors.

“Cheekbones?” the nurse says. “Oh yes, you shouldn’t be eating because your cheekbones were lifted too. Don’t worry, I’m sure the end results will be fantastic. Dr. Kee always gets it right.”

I try my best to smile back, and fail miserably.

“Now, here’s lunch,” the nurse says, opening up the mini-fridge in the corner of the room. The small racks are stuffed to the brim with translucent flasks, each filled with a viscous, murky green liquid.

The nurse unscrews the lid off one of the flasks, and a saccharine smell spreads through the room. Fuck me. I remind myself of the goal, and slowly lean over to begin the process of ingesting that bottle of nutrients.