LACE.EXE
i don’t know why i dream when she puts me under, but i do.
i had a surgery once when i was a little girl. i had been in a lot of pain for what felt to me like a very long time. there was something wrong with my uterus, the doctors finally told me. something very wrong. they had to take it out, and they kept telling me how sorry they were. ‘such a tragedy... but you can always adopt one day,’ they’d say, and then they’d make that sad little smile and pat my head. ‘what’s a uterus?’ is what i wanted to know. when they put me to sleep, they put a mask with a tube on my face and told me to count backwards from ten. i said “ten, nine,” and then i woke up.
getting laced is different. the place i wake up in isn’t a place at all, not in any way that matters.
the first time she put me under was after the first job, a garden-variety exfiltration. there's a guy, he’s at a place, i need his laptop, etc. trade secrets and whatnot. simple stuff. these tech-exec types never miss a chance to screw each other over and get away with it. i found the guy, i boosted the laptop, i ran. that's when he shot me, the bastard. the guy was just some paper-pusher in the grand scheme of things. he wasn’t supposed to have a gun. it hurt, but it wasn’t my first time. these things happen. i'm a professional, i should have been more careful. the surgeon, however, was furious. she's not the gambling type. so, four weeks later, there i was on the table. inte... what was the word...? integumentary polymerization type iii, she told me. to a caress, i'd feel just as soft and smooth as before, but in the event of a sudden application of force, such as a bullet, my skin would harden like tempered glass, force dissipating across its surface like lightning. she stroked my forearm three times, then thumped my sternum to enunciate her point. the twenty-four subcutaneous injections that came next were child’s play, but the calibration core in my brain stem was another matter.
the anesthesia smelled like lilacs. “count backwards from ten,” she told me. ten... nine...
\\\\\ \\\\\
The Surgeon drags a cold blade along a wedge of silicone, her movements automatic and complete, as if conducting a slow-motion sonata. With each pull, a single treble note rings sheer in the stale air of her office. The paperwork she’s meant to be reviewing lies in a disheveled stack to her left, cast aside but momentarily for the temptations of this familiar ritual. She savors the friction, the soothing weight of the knife, the feeling of flawless balance it has, of invisible relation to some spectral fulcrum. Briefly, she imagines tossing it into the air, watching it spin a perfect circle before floating back down to her deft but vulnerable palm, but the Surgeon is not a child. Her tools are not toys. She does not treat them as such.
The Surgeon examines the taper, then, satisfied, tenderly places the knife onto a silver tray at her righthand side. The tray wavers, giving away a slight warp in its bottom, rocking minutely across its diagonal on the flat glass surface of the oaken desk. The tray holds about a dozen other small metal instruments, which rattle. The Surgeon’s lip curls at the sound. She straightens them each in turn — an assortment of inert titanium scalpels, forceps, micro-dissectors, retractors, impactors, even a drill bit. She collects a curette, along with a thin cloth the color of periwinkle, and begins to polish it. Though many in her field replace their implements frequently to avoid wear, the Surgeon often finds herself developing keen attachments to hers, investing them with fond memories of her achievements, smug reminders of her own ambition. Her level of care for these mere objects approaches obsession, some might say, though never in her presence. Her solemnity is justified, she thinks. No expense was spared in the acquisition of such fine instruments. In the event of a grave misfortune, to replace the whole tray could cost...
The phone rings. The Surgeon replaces the curette with a soft clink and answers it with a curt “What?”
“Your favorite client has arrived.” Her secretary’s voice is dry and her smirk audible.
“Send her up.”
...more than that air-head's annual salary. hmmph... I have half a mind to... the Surgeon keeps her indignance to herself and hangs up the phone.
///// /////
the lace has no apparent logic. i struggle to describe it. no words i've yet found are sufficient, so i call it a dream. it could be the space between realities. a higher or lower atomic order. the back of the fabric. your guess is as good as mine. that first time going under, it was like swimming for weeks in an ocean with no surface, yet i was bursting through its surface and back into itself, in every moment, forever. space and time fell away, asymptotic. gravitational ebb and flow, crisscrossing magnetic fields, radioactive decay, the infinitesimal vibrations of waves and particles. i realized there is no such thing as nothing there. all of these non-things are as readily perceptible as your hand in front of your face, or the rush of blood in your ears, or the smell of your mother. the cold warmth of a gun.
leaving the lace feels like dying and being born at the same time. she brings me back with a kiss, and then she wipes away my tears.
i had a lot of questions, but in this line of work, you know you can’t ask them. i was having so many second thoughts, i couldn’t keep track of them all. i didn’t want to die for this woman. i knew almost nothing about who she was or where her money came from--not just lip lifts and hip replacements, i was sure of that much. but at the same time, i couldn’t shake the feeling that i was right on the brink of something. anyone with an encrypted network and more disposable wealth than moral scruples is and always has been free to retain my services at their leisure. the surgeon had offered me something else entirely, something unprecedented. something that all the money in the world can’t quite buy.
all the money in the world isn’t half-bad either.
\\\\\ \\\\\
The lift directly from the maisonette lobby to the Surgeon’s office space and attached apartment is inaccessible without correct credentials. Liv waves her left wrist in front of the pass-card terminal. It unlocks. She strides into the elevator, stabs the PH button, then hammers DOOR CLOSE, all the while cursing the secretary’s joviality under her breath.
...blind and deaf... get a goddamn clue, you... do I look like I have the time to... ...thinks she can speak to me like that... see what happens when... ...doesn't know who she’s dealing with...
The lift passes about ninety floors of labyrinthine research facilities, intervaled every dozen by a level of operating rooms and recovery suites. The Surgeon knows this ride takes about 45 seconds to complete, just long enough for her to retrieve a working pen and the file folder containing the client’s pre-operative clearance forms from the shadows of her desk drawers. The heavy door to her office launches open, and Olivia Lorenzo stalks into the room.
She quickly sheds her enormous white fur coat, twisting and peeling it off of her body like a lunatic climbing out of a straitjacket. Once hung on an empty coatrack, it looks to the Surgeon’s eye a bit like the hide of an alpine fox, surely gorgeous in life, but merely vulgar in death, draped by the neck. Liv wears an oversized white sweater knotted at the waist and hanging partially off of one shoulder. The sleeves, tailored far too long, are turned back at her wrists, revealing the sweater’s navy-blue rayon lining as well as the ornate monogram of some European fashion house. The golden insignia mirrors the color of Liv’s wavy dark blonde hair, which trails her movement like a dancer’s ribbon. She steps briskly to the most distant of the office’s black leather armchairs, sits, and stares at the opposite wall, as if in a hurry to wait.
The Surgeon’s office décor is sophisticated and soulless. Dissimilar to the clinical greens and blues of the ORs the Surgeon spends much of her time in, the palette here in her suite is dominated by crimson, steel gray, and black, with accents in sterling silver and annealed glass offering glints and teasing reflections. The small seating area is semi-circular, opening towards the Surgeon’s desk, offering clients no respite from her cruel glances as she scrawls this, that, and the other across documents she will never allow anyone but herself to read. As the pen’s scratching fills the room, Liv’s eyes remain fixed on the empty space between two expressionist canvases, a de Kooning and a Kline. She recognizes neither, and cares for them even less. A smattering of potted plants (real, Liv notes, though even those look fake) languish in what little light seeps through a narrow floor-to-ceiling window opposite the door. They do little to break up the room’s penetrating emptiness. After a few more moments of performative scribbling, the Surgeon’s pen drops to her desk with a crisp clack.
“Good morning, Olivia.” she says with an affected cheeriness, not the least bit convincing.
Liv says nothing for a moment, then crosses her legs, turning in her seat to look at the Surgeon with noncommittal disdain, the way a person might interview for a job they hope not to get. She sighs through her nose. “I saw a dead raccoon in the gutter on the way in today. I had to step right over the damn thing to get out of the car you sent. It made me want to throw up.” she says.
“My apologies, Olivia. This is the first I’m hearing of it. I’ll ensure that it’s disposed of.” The Surgeon is a woman well into middle age, but her looks are deceiving, for she’s kept her slender frame and her high posture, learned from hour after hour on the balls of her feet, looming over the operating table. Once mousey in her youth, her frown lines are just gaining permanency and her cheeks and forehead show only the premonitions of liver spots. She keeps her dark hair cropped short as a matter of convenience. Her eyes lack the quickness they once had. Her hands have never been steadier. She holds the document she’s just filled with the tips of her fingers, parallel to the desk’s surface, as if it might break if dropped.
“Have you eaten in the last 12 hours?” she asks.
“I want it gone, Valerie. Now. I want it all gone.”
///// /////
months later, she puts me under again. an endocrine override package, she tells me, a nano-pneumatic cortex overlay. “it will allow you to directly control the synaptic release of acetylcholine, serotonin, adrenaline, norepinephrine, catecholamine, dopamine... at will, effectively removing the biological limits to your endurance, physical or emotional.” i was learning her language by now, but i still thought it sounded far-fetched. i didn't think i’d know how to use such an ability, but i tried to shrug it off. she sensed the trepidation in my face and told me not to worry. she’d teach me. then she told me she needed a man dead.
this time, the lace evolved. i’m still submerged in non-euclidean space, like before, engulfed in the peaceful chaos of eternity. i see an orb, and nothing else. the orb opens and closes itself simultaneously, consuming itself and being consumed. i’m unsure if i'm perceiving its inside or its outside, if i am outside it or inside it. or if it is inside me. i'm not sure how to perceive it. i realize, to my horror, that i am not the only me here. i can see myself in the orb. my outer surface reflected in its... its only surface. i’m enveloped by myself, the wrong side first. i'm inside out... or am i outside in? i realize that the warped, freakish me in the orb is the real me, and the me that i thought i was is the warped, freakish shadow, a twisted reflection of a twisted reflection of a twisted reflection of a... i'm screaming but the sound is coming from the orb.
i'm seated hunched over on the operating table, my tear-streaked face in my hands, heaving sobs. she's behind me, leaning against my back, her arms wrapped gently around my naked waist. she's put me back together. her lips brush my ear, and she whispers a name.
it was only a dream, it was only a dream, it was only a dream. i know it isn’t true, but i say it anyway. for months, i try not to think about the lace. i try to keep it away from myself, away from my conscious thoughts, walled off in that place where we put things we need to be away from, but it doesn’t work. it's in my head and it won’t let me. it is me. i can’t help myself. i come when she calls.
“a sleeve of synthetic neurons will be slipped around each of your optic nerves to enable automatic motion tracking and the projection of data intake directly onto the field of view. of course, the adjoining reflex package can be added through the same incision at a later date, while...”
spending the money has gotten harder than making it. the clothes and the cars start to all look the same. the drugs don’t work on me anymore. the men don’t either. reality doesn’t seem so real once you’ve swum in the quantum ocean which lurks beneath. the lace shapes me as it wills, molds me into a finely tuned instrument of unmaking. a cybersecurity mogul locks funds suspected of being involved in a laundering scheme. his private jet goes haywire, smashes into a cliff face. a smarmy young political idealist swears up and down before the raucous masses to audit the bio-tech industry, to form powerful ethics boards with wide jurisdictions, to break up monopolies in medicine. they find him in a drainpipe. business is business. it’s in my dreams too, my real ones, to the extent that any dreams are real. now they’re too real. i've scaled the boughs of forests that never stop burning. there are mountains i've trekked towards indefinitely without ever reaching. snow rises from their caps. there are houses, but their halls make no sense, and their windows can’t be trusted, and when i jump from their roofs, i never reach the ground. i keep waking up on the table.
her lips taste like lilacs.
hovering outside my body, i watch from a suspended vantage point in the operating room’s far corner as the surgeon straddles me. my sea green surgical robe is in a crumpled heap on the white marble floor. her right hand cups my left breast. her left hand twitches between her legs, and between mine. her back arches, her hips rock gracefully, her thighs clench and quiver in the sterile air. my face is peeled completely from the bone, creased at the neck, folded downwards like a red satin handkerchief.
only a dream.
only a dream.
only a dream.
\\\\\ \\\\\
The Surgeon pauses, fixed in Liv’s mutinous gaze. She scrutinizes her in turn, seeing the young woman before her as a sculptor might, preparing to administer the finishing touches to a finely plied hunk of plaster.
“No,” she says.
“What do you mean no?”
“I mean no. I can’t take ‘it’ out of you, whatever you think ‘it’ is.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not.”
“You can’t or you won’t?”
“You knew there were risks involved when our work began, and you’ve always been compensated quite handsomely for them. We’ve always had an understanding that--”
“We? What about me?” Liv is incredulous. “I can’t do this, Valerie. I don’t know where it ends and I begin. I don’t know what’s real anymore. Inside or out. I can’t live like this and I can’t die like this either. I wouldn’t know how. What have you done to me? Do you know? Have you seen what I’ve seen? Do you think me a fool? I know you well enough by now, I...” Liv’s tirade catches in her throat. She swallows. “How could you do this to me?”
“Unwaveringly.” The word unravels from The Surgeon's lips like a loose thread. Her voice is raised with aberration, letting her client’s barrage of questions sink to the ground as unexploded ordnance. “You know nothing of my work.”
“Your work? I am your work! You arrogant...” Liv has leapt from the chair. Her hands are balled into fists, yearning for something to break. To the Surgeon, she seems a petulant child, a little girl who refuses to eat her greens. The Surgeon wets her lips.
“Without my work you would be nothing. Have you forgotten? You should tell me if you have. I’m a doctor, or have you forgotten that too? You were nothing before you ever walked in my front door and you’ll be nothing long after you leave. You’re more false than not, my plasticized thrall, and you’re in no position to threaten disobedience. Not to me, Olivia.” The Surgeon speaks with the casual air of someone ordering a kitchen appliance over the phone. “You may not, but I still remember when you were happy to make sacrifices for the sake of the practice.”
“Do I seem happy to you?” Liv snaps. “How dare you? I never wanted this, Valerie. I never knew what you knew. I never thought it would go this far.” She pauses and begins to breathe more deeply. “You know what the worst part is? I think you’ve gotten ahead of yourself. Maybe you’re right. You can’t fix me. Maybe you didn’t know what would happen before you started slicing me open, you just wanted to find out. I don’t think you could stop it even if you wanted to.” She pauses. “If you can’t take the lace out of me, then there’s nothing you can do for me anymore.”
A strange look descends upon the Surgeon’s face. She appears to think for a moment, then smiles, then crumples the form which would have logged and certified the procedure Liv was scheduled to undergo. She discards it, then sits in silence with her hands folded. Liv shakes her head in incredulity, stands, strolls to the door, retrieves her coat, and swings it over her shoulders. The instant her hand touches the knob, she hears the Surgeon speak once more.
“For thousands upon thousands of years, neurosurgical practice consisted of a single procedure. Do you know what that procedure was?” Liv shakes her head. Her mind is made up, so she decides to entertain the Surgeon’s digression. “On every populated continent, dating back to distant prehistory – the Neolithics, Babylonians, Incans, Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, and beyond – all independently developed and performed a surgical intervention we now call trepanation. Often using primitive instruments, a hole was bored, tapped, or abraded directly into a patient’s skull, exposing the membrane of the brain – the dura mater – to the open air. Anesthesia was a pipe dream.
“There were – and are - practical applications for such a measure. In the event of trauma to the region, a limited craniotomy can relieve pressure induced by hemorrhage or swelling, or allow for foreign particles or even infected tissue to be haphazardly extracted - under only the most dire of circumstances, of course. However, in the vast age of antiquity, medicine and mysticism were often one and the same. Little distinction existed between doctors and shamans. The practice of healing was downstream from belief. The mind was considered the terrain of spirits. Insanity was unlikely to be understood as such in this context. Many preferred an alternative explanation: demonic possession. Seizures, migraines, hallucinations, paralysis, hysteria... all signs that the bearer had strayed from the path of light, had welcomed sin in one form or another into their bodies. Trepanation saved their souls, if only occasionally their lives.”
With this, Liv’s patience runs out. “Is this your way of threatening me? I was under the impression you valued your time.”
“Have you not sinned greatly, Olivia?” The Surgeon’s taunt drips with pride. She pauses, savoring Liv’s hatred like a fine truffle on her tongue. “If I set free from your mind these souls of evil spirits, as you request... can you be sure that yours would remain?”
Liv steps around the sheet glass revolving door and onto the concrete sidewalk separating the Surgeon’s towering headquarters from the caterwauls of traffic, a bustling six lanes. The same luxury sedan she arrived in is still idling by the curb. Directly beneath its rear passenger door, a raccoon’s lifeless eyes stare blankly. Liv stops and stares back. Moments pass.
With the sudden obscenity of a carnival animatronic springing to action, the raccoon’s snapped, extruded limbs begin to retract, its split skull unifies, and with its fur still matted with black coagulated blood, it squeals as if startled and scampers away along the curb.
by Sarah Sosalla
Sarah Sosalla is a Pittsburgh-based writer with roots in the American Midwest. Her work has been featured by Expat Press, with pieces forthcoming from Harsh Lit and Witch Craft Mag. She can be found at https://twitter.com/semiopath.