He lost his second wife in Buffalo.
She hid behind his books and slipped away
on their due date
...
[+]
When she arrives at the hospital, Lily is not asked to wait in front of the operating room. She strides in on the dot, protected by an entourage of two secretaries answering questions of appointments and IDs. Left sticks close; Right took the bullet yesterday.
He tried to convince Lily to reconsider. Today he tries to be invisible.
By the time Lily turned thirty she'd done enough software design and startups and such to become the queen of fucking everything, with enough money for it to self-duplicate. Once a celebrated child prodigy, she has built herself a steady position as both a tech billionaire and a frequent visitor on the cover of the Vogue.
When she wasn't making money, she spent most of her twenties with this surgeon. She's had her forehead shaved, obviously, and her jaw and the bridge of her nose. Still, she likes to hide as much as she can under her bangs and shades, like Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. The shades hide her eyes, watchful for the gazes that evaluate her face, her curves, her skin. The skin that she will soon shed.
Left helps Lily undress as Right goes through the surgeon's unavoidable questionnaire. Yes she is sure, yes she knows what she's doing, yes she is aware of the risks and complications, but is Doctor aware of the risks and complications listed here by Miss Waters' attorney if anything goes wrong?
Right was there first. His name is Elton, no matter how much Lily pretends not to remember. Elton brought in his boyfriend Liam when the staff manager politely told the former Left to resign. Camilla, Lily recalls another name she pretends to forget. Elton called her Cam.
Camilla's hair was outrageously thick and curly besides. She hadn't had any work done and didn't seem to have a skincare routine. She didn't even treat her hirsutism or shave the thin black hairs on her upper lip! Yet everyone treated her the way Lily wanted to be treated, with the shes and the hers and opening doors and making condescending jokes Camilla could get angry at. Her periods smelled like jasmine and roses for all Lily knows.
Her effortless femininity was too much. Lily got rid of her, and Liam jumped at the chance.
When she lies silent in endless operating rooms, Lily often imagines Elton and Liam going home, where they probably house half a dozen unemployed queers with what she pays them. She is an endless source of gossip. If the money would not keep Left and Right by her side, the material would, and everyone wants their part. For all Lily knows, Camilla herself stays with Elton and Liam, guzzling on an endless supply of the hottest tea the queer community has seen since Drag Race.
The surgeon reaches the end of his proverbial dance with Right.
– Very well. If Miss Waters understands there will be no going back.
– I sure fucking hope not, Lily mutters.
The familiar prick of a needle. A new red spot next to the ones she makes once a week. She promises herself to switch to patches, to protect her new skin. She tries to tell Left to have her endocrinologist calculate the new dosage, but her lips refuse to move. A little drool pools from between them.
Right wipes her mouth and smiles, an old-school queer's impeccable fake smile.
Lily dreams of a palace in Cambodia that rivals that of the king. She owns it. Twenty-five princesses from all around the world live within, with a hundred servants and half as many guards. The princesses are not of royal birth but hand-picked as babies after rigorous DNA testing, chosen for a life in paradise.
They do regular princess things: endless massages and hot baths neither too short nor too long, yoga twice a day, healthy but delicious meals of nothing but the freshest organic ingredients. They paint and write poetry and even play instruments, just not stringed ones that might hurt the soft skin at the tips of their fingers. They are to take no lovers from each other or outside, lest grasping fingers and grazing lips bruise their breasts and necks, or worst of all, pregnancy stretch the skins of their bellies.
Every now and then one wants to leave, and the others discourage her. If she persists, she realizes that the guards are under strict orders to keep them safe from all harm and threatens to prick her wrist with a calligraphy pen. The head servant will take her to a secluded room, show her pictures of her family and promise them a great fortune if she goes back in and keeps herself and others in line. If she does not agree, she gets a private ride back to her family. The car waits outside, and most escapees come begging for return within the day.
For a day her skin can still be saved. Any longer and she won't be taken back, no matter how much she pleads. Ten of the girls are reserve anyway, a pre-calculated waste margin. One slips in the shower, another gets a paper cut, three run away.
Left flies to Cambodia and takes his pick: twenty young women with the most delicate, untouched epiderma in the world get to leave the palace and go abroad for the first time in their lives. The unnecessary girls are left behind. Their servants are reduced to twenty, and the princesses feel a bit less pampered than they should be, but that's how princesses tend to feel anyway.
Lily likes giving other girls the chance to be princesses almost as much as she likes turning herself into a queen. What's the use of being the most beautiful self-made woman on the planet without someone to compare to?
So, the princesses are flown to a private European hospital, to little rooms next to this one, to be sedated and harvested. Most try to end their own lives after waking up, and the staff is under no obligation to stop them. The survivors are returned to the palace, to heal and live and die as they wish. Their service is complete and their retirement prepaid.
When Lily wakes up, she is sore all over. Right removes the bandages, theatrically gasps and turns away. It hurts his eyes to look at her. But Lily only wants to gaze upon her own skin, to submerge in it, though at first she can only bear to peek from corner of her eye. She is blinding, like midday sun reflecting off an endless landscape of untouched snow.
The surgeon has laser-cut the best parts of so many perfect skins. An artist, he has organized the princesses' keratinocytes, melanocytes, and Merkel cells into neat lines and rows: Lily is soft, she is untouched, she reflects more light than a mortal human. There are no moles, no wisps of hair, no coarse patches or red spots. She is perfect, so perfect she almost believes it.
The untouched queen does not think of the princesses who grew her. Why would she? She sometimes eats pork, too, from ethical farms where the pigs live a good life before they are quietly and painlessly slaughtered for the greater cause. Like a farmhand takes care of her cattle, the princesses are well maintained in Lily's loving hands.
Hands?
Lily looks down. The skin is all it should be, but the bones are not. Her palms are still too wide and fingers too thick, the proportions all wrong. Big ugly man-hands.
She turns to a mirror. Her face is blinding, her body is blinding, her almost-everything is blinding. If not for these two little-but-too-big things.
Sooner or later a doctor will come up with a way to shave the bones in her hands. After the operation she will need new skin to match; the palace will need to be filled again. Lily wants, no, needs the hands of a princess.
She smiles just a little, careful to not stretch her new face. The hands of a princess?