by Alex Beaumais
I like to spend my mornings at the grocery store watching myself in the CCTV monitor because it shows an angle where I still look normal, like someone who might ascend. If the security guard is working, I go home to the bathroom mirror, where my swollen jaw hangs out like a broken drawer, the masseters ballooned into concrete slabs twisting my skull out of alignment. My scar tissue sings, my numb papery lips stretched into a permanent snarl, my mouth unable to close without a wet click of pain.
I look like this because I was trying to please my father, a very important man. Millions of dollars wired to offshore bank accounts paid for my Lake Geneva boarding school, for my butler, for my concert piano and education in fencing and the art of discretion. Bankers, petro-sheiks, and purse designers would come to my father as a last resort—would come in his study as I drew monsters with my crayons and he’d tell them the truth about their posture, the distance between their pupils, the number of digits in their chequing account.
He claimed we descended from an old Lombard family that lent money to the Plantagenets to invade France, but we descend from barbarians. I’m not going to tell you who. Often the men who came into my father’s study were demi-gods looking to ascend the highest pantheon. In these instances, when no gaps existed in their smile or resume, my father would resort to abuse. Once he told a man who looked like a Greek statue that he was beastly, and when the man objected, he knocked his tooth out.
I was seven, crouched behind the velvet curtain with my crayons. The man was a private island developer with harmonious maxillomandibular positioning. Blood speckled the knots and stars of the Isfahan rug. My father wiped his signet ring on a handkerchief and said, “Now you have character.”
No one didn’t benefit—no one didn’t ascend.
My father professed that beauty or intelligence had to contain the threat of its opposite. Bodacious curves titillated because they teetered on the edge of ruin like an overripe fruit. A perfume lent power when its sandalwood tones battled the stench of whale carcass. Hyper-intelligence was the yin to the yang of mental illness.
My sister is the only human in my corner. She was the one who paid for my double-jaw surgery and who listens to my breathing on speaker phone at night.
Last night she called and listened to my elegy between the swelling and oxies.
“You sound underwater.”
“You need to hook me up with a surgeon who can shave these masseters back down.”
“You need to hook yourself up with some positive self-belief. Pinky swear you’ll eat something besides protein shakes tomorrow. Promise you’ll limit grocery store visits to once a day. You said the numbness in your lip is a bit better than yesterday. See? Your brain is playing games. The pendulum swings both ways! You’re not some bumblebee flying from surgeon to surgeon, shrink to shrink.”
She told me I had value and then started laughing. She stayed on the line until I fell asleep.
Last month, my psychiatrist forced me to sign a pledge that I would engage in correct behavior, trust experts, and take prozac. Gradually, my appointments became more infrequent and were predicated on an increased dosage of prozac and fewer infractions. I was supposed to leave the house more, trust the science, take my medication, and send thank-you cards to my oppressors. My father agreed the therapy was bunk. He came with me to one of my sessions and, when the shrink was speaking on the value of compliance, told him about a radiofrequency procedure that could reduce his turbinates, minimize the nasally pitch of his voice, and help him project authority to patients. The shrink threatened to call the security guard. My father gently protested that the therapy was not working and that it ended here. The shrink told my father that ceasing medication would cause a relapse, that he was not my advocate, and that I’d signed many agreements with the state, with the police, and even with private businesses pledging good behavior.
That was just before my botched state, when my father promised to send someone from our country to attach an anvil to the shrink’s foot and dump him in a river.
The surgeon who did this to me is short and bulbously bald and has these big cocksucking lips that I assumed contained Juvederm, until I saw his children, with the same lips, either due to Juvederm or genetics. I don’t question him. He’s a Geppetto with his reciprocating saw and scalpel. His 2.4-star rating is due to housewives addicted to highlights and cottagecore who don’t know how to ascend. I don’t blame him for the over-advancement of my jaw.
The morning they admitted me to the hospital I was repeating my father’s mantra as they gassed me with the anesthesia mask. Beauty must contain its opposite. I woke up six hours later with my face bolted shut, metal plates humming under the skin like live wires. The nurse wouldn’t let me see a mirror. She told me it was protocol to wait, but disgust flickered through her smile. When I ran to the bathroom, I looked like a marble statue someone had botched with a sledgehammer. I laughed until I cried. I entered a new time horizon. At some point the stitches came out.
My father hates me now and I hope my repulsiveness can contain its opposite—that once the swelling abates, my bulky prognathic masseters project a chad lifeguard physiognomy. My sister is finding a new surgeon and coaching me. I don’t even know who she is. Sometimes I cry in the grocery store and think to myself, You’re a barbarous wretch and deserve this. Then I feel better. Who am I even speaking to? I’m speaking to myself or the world, nothing in between.
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Alex Beaumais is the author of the forthcoming novel Malta Maykop. You can find excerpts of it at beaumais.neocities.org.
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