BioShock Rapture

He stubbed his cigarette out on the seashell ashtray on his desk and walked down the hall. Stretched out in the recovery room, Miss Pleasance was wearing a nightgown and socks. She had a sheet draped modestly over her. Look at those fat little arms. Too bad he couldn’t cut into those fat little arms and reduce them. Perhaps down to the bone. Even expose the bone in places. Like ivory jewelry …

Nurse Chavez had cranked the upper part of the patient’s bed to a forty-five-degree angle and was beginning to unwind the bandages. Miss Pleasance’s large green eyes were gazing out at him from the gaps in the mummylike facial wrap with a mixture of fear and anticipation. Her red hair spilled almost stylishly over one side of the bandage. He thought, once more, that there might be a certain appeal to leaving the bandages on—forever. One would see only the hair and eyes—and mystery. Like a mummy …

Sylvia Pleasance’s face was slowly revealed … Nurse Chavez gasped …

And clapped her hands together. “Isn’t she lovely, Doctor! You’ve done a wonderful job!”

He sighed resignedly: it was true. All quite lovely. He hadn’t done anything experimental with this woman. He was trying not to do anything unusual in his new practice. Just give them what they wanted. But it was hard. The temptation had been strong …

She had a conventionally attractive, delicately sculpted face now, with dimples on her pale cheeks, a matching dimple in her chin. It was a sweetly rounded visage but with all the unpleasant chunkiness gone. Her fiancé would probably be pleased. She looked rather like an adult Shirley Temple. How tiresome. But the Pleasance woman cooed over her reflection when Nurse Chavez gave her the hand mirror.

“Oh, Doctor! It’s perfect! God bless you!”

“Yes, yes,” he muttered, approaching, taking her chin in his hands, turning her head from side to side, looking at it under the light from the gooseneck lamp. “Yes, only … I cannot escape the feeling that there is more, far more, to be done … some hidden perfection lurking underneath this pretty little mask!”

“What?” Miss Pleasance seemed startled. She swallowed and drew back from him. “I…” She frowned and looked at herself again in the hand mirror. Turned her head this way and that. “No! This is what I wanted! Exactly! I’m amazed at how you got it! I wouldn’t alter it a jot, Doctor!”

He shrugged. “Just as you like. I simply think…” Thinking to himself: If I could just cut a quarter inch off the nose … and then … perhaps narrow the forehead, entirely remove the orbicularis oculi …

But aloud he said, “I’m so glad you’re pleased with the results. Go ahead and let her get dressed, Nurse, release her to her fiancé, and I’ll, uh…” He turned vaguely and walked, as if through a dream, back to his office.

Surgical knives are so limited. If only there were some way to transform people on the cellular level. If one could only sculpt people genetically; if only a surgical artist could reach into the very essence of a person, transform the subject from within—just the way God would.

The way Aphrodite would want him to …

Fontaine’s Fisheries

1953

It was late. Fontaine’s office was closed, the shades drawn. Reggie was somewhere outside, keeping watch. Fontaine and Tenenbaum were alone in the fisheries’ office on a comfortable sofa. Brigid Tenenbaum was stretched out, wearing a negligee and red pumps. Fontaine was half-sitting on the edge, leaning over her, her hands clasped in his. Beside them on the floor was an empty Worley wine bottle and their glasses. Fontaine wore only his boxers and a T-shirt. His clothes were folded neatly on a chair at his desk across the room.

She seemed frightened, and yet he could see anticipation in her eyes too when she glanced at him and—as always—looked quickly away.

“You look kinda scared,” he said. “You sure about this?”

“I … do not like to be touched,” she said. “But … I need it, when the feelings of desire come. What I dream of is a man who … who simply takes me. I will make some token resistance. But it will not be real. I must fight a little. I can only do it that way…”

“Well, kid,” he said, using his ‘voice of reassurance,’ “you came to the right shop.” She’d cleaned up rather nicely and put on some perfume, even seemed to have brushed the cigarette stains off her teeth. “So this is something you haven’t done exactly—but you … imagined?” he asked.

“Yes. I am afraid to touch. But I must be touched…”

“What they call a contradiction in terms. That’s you, eh?”

“Perhaps. Now … please … put the blindfold on me.”

“Oh yeah.” He took the black blindfold from his pocket and tied it over her eyes. “There. You can’t see me now.”

“No … now that I cannot see you … you can touch me—if you hold my arms down…”