致命弱点 Fatal Weakness
扬恒均 Yang Hengjun
第三章 上帝的手术刀 Chapter 3 The Scalpel of God
Part 4.2
Within just a few days of opening, business at the clinic was already taking off. Most of the time, Mike just did the more conventional kinds of cosmetic surgery: breast enlargement, liposuction, butt lifts, rib removal, penis extensions, double eyelids and double chins. Each time seeing those women come sneaking in, leaving with their heads and chests held high, I yearned to look like they did, but every time I mentioned to Mike that I wanted a bigger this or a smaller that he'd just chuckle it off and tell me to be patient. But I also noticed that though Mike was no longer a doctor, in between these routine operations, he was still spending a lot of time researching surgical skin and body construction procedures.
Then came one day, I remember it was one August four years ago. We'd just arrived at the office and I was doing the morning coffee, when there came a soft knock at the door. Pushing it open was a young Asian woman who looked about thirty, very carefully composed: an almond-shaped face, a tiny nose with the slightest upward curve, slivers for lips and, despite her single eyelids, full, large eyes of sharply defined black on white. The only thing was that she looked a little tired. I asked her to sit and she introduced herself, wanting to know more about our clinic. She said her name was Qingqing Guo, so I guess that'd be Guo Qingqing for you Chinese. As we talked, I could feel she was quite familiar with the plastic surgery circle in New York and had obviously done her homework. When she finally said she wanted to speak directly to the chief surgeon Mike, I said that this was out of the question, that Mike's schedule was booked solid for the next six months and he barely had time for his surgeries, so how could he find the time to personally greet clients? Just then Mike happened to pop in to ask about one upcoming operation, and when heard this part of our conversation, stopped to asked this Ms. Guo what she needed to talk to him about.
This Guo Qingqing saw her chance, so she threw her request out, for him to completely change her body from head to toe. By completely, she emphasized, she meant redo each part to the be the best of its kind.
I hadn't even even fully understood what this Qingqing woman wanted when I saw Mike's shoulders twitch a few times. I kept quiet, because I know that Mike's body only twitches like this when he gets quite excited. Then Guo Qingqing said money wasn't a problem as she had just received a large divorce settlement.
"What about time?" Mike asked.
"What do you mean?"
"If we do like you say, it's not just money but a matter of time as well. You're at least going to need over twenty separate operations in total, and time to recover after each one. Under normal circumstances, something like this would take about a year and a half, most of which time you're going to have to spend like any surgery patient would, in bed." As Mike answered her questions, I got even more confused. The kind of full body cosmetic redesign that she's talking about is unheard of. But as he kept answering her questions, especially seeing that Mike didn't even need to think them over, I suddenly began to feel that he had always been waiting for someone like Ms. Guo to come along, even that Mike's only reason for opening the clinic was to wait for a day just like this.
Of course, it didn't take me long to clue in. Ever since Mike had quit at the hospital, he had clearly been waiting for this day. The reason he could never seem to have raised enough breasts, suction enough fat or remove enough tattoos was because all along he had been trying to perfect his surgical skills, waiting for the day when he could use his own scalpel to fully change somebody's entire appearance. Naturally, such an opportunity was rare. First he'd need someone with about a million dollars to spend on the twenty-something operations this would require with about a hundred different knives, and secondly, she'd need to have a year and a half to spare. Even rarer is that she'd need superhuman will to withstand the continuous pain. When Mike explained all this to Qingqing and she still seemed determined to go through with it, it all seemed a little inconceivable. I kept trying to make eye contact with Mike, hoping he wouldn't get too excited and make Ms. Guo any promises, but then he asked her to come back again the next day.
That night, Mike made love to me like he'd gone insane. We don't usually speak when we have sex, but this time Mike was kissing me and ceaselessly caressing me all over, muttering to himself the size of each spot as he stroked it, except only the sizes one finds on the most beautiful women on earth. Then when he came, he almost roared as he told me that he could make each part of my body as sexy and pretty as any other on earth. Completely remaking a person's appearance, Mike said, whether in theory or in practice, was completely feasible, only that since the birth of the cosmetic surgery industry, nobody had ever tried it. He—Mike, would be the first! But because we didn't have the money, he said, or the time, that's why he hadn't started first on me. But now Guo Qingqing had come along at exactly the right time. He wouldn't admit, though, to using Guo Qingqing as an experiment. Instead, Mike said that in two years, after Guo's work was finished, that it would be my turn to be remoulded. The more Mike went on, the more excited he got, finally turning over and pressing me down again beneath his body, panting, "Honey, just you wait, when the time comes I'm gonna make you so pretty it'll put all the stars in Hollywood to shame." Saying this, he excitedly started pumping away again. In the end I agreed to Mike's plan. After all, no matter what he did, it was all for me. When Mike came a second time, exhausted and bent over my body, I felt my luck was just like my womb then, swollen and full[overflowing?].
The next day, Guo Qingqing showed up right on time and everyone hit it off well. Because the sheer scale and medical techniques involved in the plan were unprecendented, we had to operate in secret, unable to even write up a contract. We explained this to Guo Qingqing. She agreed, and so we got started.
That day, we immediately began searching the internet, collecting portraits and body stats of Eastern celebrities, which took quite some time. Our understanding of what passes for a beautiful woman over there in Asia isn't that great, so in the end we had to just let Guo Qingqing choose, and she decided to go with Vicki Zhao's eyebrows, Gong Li's butt and lips and Veronica Yip's breasts and waist.
Then in the operating room, Guo Qingqing stripped down naked, first pacing back and forth, then lying down perfectly still, later swaying from left to right, everything we needed to get all of her into the computer. The three of us sat down afterwards to put all the butts, boobs, noses, eyebrows and everything we had chosen from what we thought were all the most beautiful women in Asia, pasting them one-by-one onto Guo Qingqing's body in the computer. Then as we watched the computer compile the new Guo Qingqing, an Oriental beauty appeared, so perfect that even women would swoon upon seeing her. Looking back at the real Guo Qingqing, I only felt troubled. The woman I saw on the computer screen was no longer Guo Qingqing, but a completely different person. Just to be beautiful, I thought at the time, would I be willing to become a complete stranger? Though, this thought didn't last long. Seeing the two of them so excited they were hardly breathing, so red-faced, I was struck with another thought. Thinking back now, no matter if you're speaking of the Eastern standard of beauty or the Western, Guo Qingqing could have been described as quite beautiful to begin with. The memory's not so clear now; that was the last time I saw the body of the person called Guo Qingqing.
Starting the next day, the surgery began, step by step. The first day we sliced open her stomach, removed some body fat. A few days later we took out a pair of ribs, to bring her waist down to the average size for Miss World contestants. She eventually had three ribs taken out, and by the end, she stood almost fully double-jointed. When the wounds got better, work started on her calves, and then her chest, shoulders and arms. Every day was quite bloody.
If only things had been so simple. Day by day, as Guo Qingqing disappeared and the person Mike was creating gradually took shape, the more I noticed things that just didn't seem right. When I said Mike had thrown his whole being into this clinic, forgetting to eat or sleep, now he was putting everything into this new body; he didn't just stop eating or sleeping, but became unstable too. If he went more than a day without seeing this new Ms. Guo, he'd get abnormally jittery. But this wasn't what began to scare me, what scared me the most were Guo Qingqing's eyes. How can I describe them... You know how eyes are the one part of the body that plastic surgery can't change? That they're the windows to a body's soul? Never mind all the cosmetic surgeries I've seen, the face lifts, the rhinoplasties, you just need to see their eyes to know it's still the same person underneath. But Guo Qingqing was completely different. As the days went by, I noticed the look in her eyes slowly changing until, finally, she seemed like a completely separate person. The more time I spent with her, the stranger I noticed the look in Guo Qingqing's eyes had become, and I was afraid. The way I always saw it, a body and a soul are indivisible, and that the kind of soul you get was given to match your body. Right? But as Mike transformed Guo Qingqing's body, the soul inside clearly became affected somehow. The worst part was seeing Mike bewitched by the new soul. Mike began using examinations as excuses to watch Guo Qingqing undress or lie naked. You have to know, the Guo Qingqing at this point, after having undergone so much careful work beneath Mike's scalpel, even with her clothes on was enough to seduce anyone. When she took her clothes off, with her new clear, sculptured skin and nearly perfect body ratio, not to mention her exquisitely carved face, even I wanted to wrap my arms around her. So the foolish and drunken look that would appear on Mike's face came as no surprise. Ah, what else could I do? I was willing to believe that Mike had fallen in love with his own surgical craftmanship, and not with his creation itself.
As the more unrecognizable Guo Qingqing became, the more of a stranger Mike felt to me. Oh, how naive I was back then. I thought maybe we'd offended God, seeing as how it's him that creates all people. Around this time Mike also had become a bit muddled. Some of the things he'd say were shocking, talking about wanting to make real history out of all the sculptors of the past. He was sculpting a real human body, he said. Who would ever again sigh at a mere plaster statue? He also said that when he was done, all the stars in Hollywood would be ugly little ducklings in comparison, that he had been able to fulfill the mission to which the Declaration of Independence and God had proven unable, that he, Mike, had made it possible for people on earth to be truly equal.
On the morning of September 11th that year, I should have been first at the office to prepare some things, but as Guo Qingqing had a consultation scheduled for that day, Mike went himself earlier than usual. That's how he was, like he'd been possessed; everything revolved around his masterpiece, Guo Qingqing. That day, as terrorists crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center, I was stuck in traffic on 52nd street on my way to work. When I heard the news: it's over, I thought, both Mike and Guo Qingqing are gone. Around noon, I got a call from Guo Qingqing. I told her, "Mike's in the clinic!"
"Oh no! He hasn't finished the work yet, what am I supposed to do now?!" This was the only reaction I ever heard Guo Qingqing have to Mike's death.
"Well, did the work get finished or not?" I can't help but interrupt Catherine's story, only to immediately feel it wasn't appropriate. Catherine glares at me, then shrugs her shoulders. "I'm not sure, because this project of Mike's was way beyond the traditional, even contemporary, allowed limits of medical science. Each day was a new exploration. The way Mike was so concentrated on it, I had no idea if he was done or not. He'd be tinkering with something one day, slicing something off the next, I was just so scared. Mike had already descended into madness. He didn't just want to [create people like God does]play God, he wanted to make a goddess! As time went on, Mike felt I didn't agree with his work, and eventually we hardly spoke at all."
"After 911, what happened to Guo Qingqing?" I ask, but not without feeling sorry. The main character in Catherine's story is Mike, but the story I want to hear centers around Guo Qingqing.
"Later, we talked a lot on the phone, but we only met once. She wanted to get all the records and medical documentation from the clinic."
"And you refused?"
"Why would I refuse? Because Guo Qingqing's cosmetic surgery case was so special, we were extraordinarily cautious with her therapy records, keeping copies only in the clinic's computer. Mike also kept copies of the related files on his laptop for easy reference in his research, but all this was buried in the ruins on 9-11."
"He didn't keep backups anywhere else? Like the—"
"I told you, Mike's work, sculpting away at people like they were made of plaster, would never have been accepted by the American medical or cosmetic surgery communities. This is why we kept the whole process completely secret. And as it was kept secret, with the harm being done to Guo Qingqing, there was also no way she could have bought health insurance or anything like that. Though, this was all carried out with Guo Qingqing's full understanding and signed agreement."
"But you must have kept a photo of Guo Qingqing, post-operation?" I'm still not willing to give up on any last remnants of hope.
"I didn't. Mike made sure that until the last of Guo Qingqing's operations were complete, it would be impossible for any photos of her to be leaked, so all photos taken during the year and a half were stored on his computer. Mike's plan was to wait until his work was finished, and then shock the world with just two photos: one of Guo Qingqing before the operation, and one of his masterpiece."
