Chad

The nurse is talking me through the procedure, but I am distracted by her face. The whole thing is overdone: lips grotesquely plump, eyebrows like black stickers. The skin itself looks over-taut and hurts me to look at. Instead, I try to see the face behind the face, the vulnerable fascia beneath the blocked lymph nodes and migrating dermal filler. I conclude that it is plain. What a pity. 

It is a tough bind—even I can recognize that—the way women can neither be plain nor artificially beautiful. Unless their efforts work extremely well, it is only an approximation of beauty, which is uglier to us even than plainness.

  In that way, I like to think we are evening the score. My community. 

“Sound good?” the nurse concludes, and I nod solemnly, having heard almost nothing. She slides a large wad of papers over to me along with a pen with a plastic fork taped to the end of it. “This is a waiver,” she says. “Sign pages one, three, thirty-seven, fifty-three…” 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something about retinal collapse, forced arbitration. I flick through and scrawl my name wherever I find a yellow highlighter swoosh. 

“Great!” the nurse says, snatching the papers away from me as if confiscating them from a small child. She stretches her lips and brandishes the teeth she paid for, which are all the same shape, color, and size. There seem to be too many of them. I imagine the real teeth below them, stubby like stalactites inside a cave.

I don’t return her smile, which rapidly loses steam. She has that nervous way women sometimes get around me, when I refuse to pander to their feminine wiles. That is my strength as a man. Only one woman besides my mother gets anything from me, and that is the girl who works in the shoe department at the mall.

The nurse backs out of the door, mumbling something about getting the doctor. She seems relieved that the interaction is over. 

We both are. I have the itch to check my appearance. But there’s no mirror in here—strange, for a cosmetic clinic. I pull out my phone and scrutinize myself in the selfie camera. 

I have small bruises along my jaw and brow line, having recently upgraded from hitting myself with 10-pound hand weights to hitting myself with 20-pound hand weights. My mandible bone is still disappointingly weak, the microfractures not seeming to create volume beyond the initial swelling. But the bruises add a certain something, like I’m the type of man who inspires violence in others. And the pain feels good after a while.

When the doctor enters, I quickly put my phone away. As far as he’s concerned, this is just another day for me. Anticipation is for pussies.

He beckons me to the dentist-style chair in the middle of the office and I climb on, feeling like a boy with my feet dangling. He leans me back and begins to strap my arms down on either side.

“As you know, the procedure happens while you’re awake,” he tells me. I did, in fact, not know this. His breath smells like cigarettes and Java Monster. “But with the sedative, you won’t feel a thing. It’ll be like you’re floating above your own body.”

“Then what are the straps for?”

“Just in case,” he says, holding my gaze for a length of time that could be considered meaningful. I notice his own eyes are a dishwater green. Certainly not one of the colors in the thumbed-through brochure in the waiting room.

“Why haven’t you done this yourself?” I ask, but he only chuckles slightly, and with a flick of his wrist injects me in one constrained arm. Before I can protest, I feel myself fading.

“One, two, three…” counts the doctor. Satisfied with my locked-in state, he props my eyes open and sits down, rattling over a metal trolley carrying two aquamarine discs on a wet paper towel and an almost comically long scalpel. Comical, perhaps, if it wasn’t being directed at my eye. 

As promised, I am floating somewhere up by the popcorn ceiling. I’m not sure what is more excruciating: seeing the sharp object begin to slice the jelly of my eyeball or getting this new angle on my superhuman flaws. 

I look puny in the large medical chair, even compared to the doctor (and he only lifts books, which are not particularly heavy). From here I can see that my hair—dyed jet-black on the advice of the community—is growing out, and the paler brown roots have a disconcerting quality, like my hair is dying as it meets my scalp. 

I wish I could go somewhere else, away from the ghastly image. Then I realize that I can. I float up through the ceiling and into the room above. A woman is being sawed into like a hog roast, four huge silicone protrusions waiting to be inserted into her like birthday party Jello. 

Disgusted, I go further still, through the fluff of ventilation and up onto the roof of the clinic.

There is a loose shoe up here, and some industrial turbines that must have something to do with heating and air. Who cares. I proceed further into the hard blue sky. Blue as my eyes will be. 

Somewhere down there, a life-changing surgery is being enacted on my body—which is now just a nagging pressure on a long, unseen tether. I will finally be the “after” to my “before.” From mid-tier normie to at least Chad-lite in just forty-five minutes of in-office ocular surgery.

From this perspective, the clinic looks small and rundown—not a likely place for my transformation, not really, but the only place willing to do this procedure anywhere this side of the border. The only place that accepted the terms of a very dubious payment plan.

At one with the sky, it all feels insignificant. I see a small figure being wheeled from the clinic to their car, covered head-to-toe in bandages, as if they’ve been in a very bad accident. If I was still in contact with my mouth, which is hanging slack somewhere down in the surgery room, I would laugh. I would laugh and laugh.

I don’t know how long I’ve been up here. What is time without a body to be ravaged? High above the strip mall parking lot, I am at peace. 

Then I feel myself being tugged back down.

I am back inside the prison of my body, in one of the clinic’s cell-like recuperation rooms. There is pain in my eyeballs and along my arms where the straps were indented. The first face I see is the nurse’s again. It has a blurred, uncertain quality, like I’m looking at it through a wet windshield. 

“Welcome back!” she chirps, although I’m sure she hates me. “The operation was a success.”

I have no patience for small talk and say one word only: “Mirror.” 

“Certainly!” There is a subtle hardening in her voice. She fetches a hand mirror and holds it in front of me. Among the reddish peaks and valleys that make up my face, there are two new bright-blue pools. But when I try to look at them closely, they become ill-defined. 

“Don’t they look great?” the nurse says, appearing in the mirror beside me. I angle it away from her. This is my time, not hers.

“I can’t… see them properly.” It is like a bright spot is moving when my eyes do, like when you stare too directly at the sun.

“Is it the eyes?” she asks, cocking her head to one side in faux sympathy.

“Yes, my eyes! I can’t use them,” I say, impatient.

“Oh, a little temporary vision loss is totally normal. This was all in the paperwork,” she says brusquely, snatching the mirror back with a scratch of her artificial nails. “I’ll fetch the doctor for you.”

She hurries away, and I am left alone again in the small room. From somewhere else in the clinic, I can hear screaming.

Whatever. I try to check the community forum—the only people I can truly trust—but the white light of my phone screen seems suddenly unbearable. I am alone with my thoughts, like an asshole.

The doctor comes back after what feels like forever, and without notice, shines a bright light into each of my eyes. It is excruciatingly painful. 

“Everything looks great. Very… blue. It’s just a little corneal swelling,” he says. “Wear these for a week.” He hands me a plastic pair of blacked-out glasses. “The nurse will be back to discharge you.” 

Then he is gone again. Something about an inaccessible male authority figure unnerves me for reasons I won’t scrutinize.

The nurse comes back once more with a wheelchair, which she insists on me sitting in. “My legs are fine,” I complain.

“Okay! You’re free to go,” she says as if I haven’t said anything. “Unless you have any further questions?”

“I can’t really see?” I venture.

“I think the doctor covered this.” She grasps the handles of my wheelchair and starts for the door.

Parking me in the waiting room, I immediately take off the glasses. Grown men don’t use glasses, which are a weakness worn on the face. I sit and wait for my mom to come and pick me up.

When she arrives, I recognize her immediately by the squeak of her slip-on Skechers. She rotates the same three pairs, each in pastel colors. She is not at all glamorous, which for a mother feels appropriate. Necessary, even.

“Holy shit, hon. You look like a husky!” she exclaims, then quickly wheels me to her Honda as if leaving a crime scene. 

The drive home is unusually quiet. Mom sniffs a few times, and I wonder if she’s crying, but I can’t quite make out her face.

***

I first met Mall Girl while out shopping with my mother. 

Mom flaps and fusses on weekends about me spending too much time in my room alone. But I am not alone; I am online. She likes to force me to accompany her on some dull errand, like her life is just one long trip to the grocery store.

That day in the department store, newly humiliated from being in the bra section—my mother has disproportionately large breasts and her bras look like two hats sewn together—we entered the relative safety of the shoes. Mom insisted that I try some on, and unwittingly summoned Mall Girl into my life.

“How can I help you?” 

“My son needs some smart shoes for job interviews, but he tells me his feet hurt unless he’s wearing sneakers.”

Mall Girl frowned, then knelt. She expertly slid off one of my Nikes and grasped my slightly moist sock. 

“I think you might be an extra-wide,” she said, and I took that as a compliment. She looked right up at me when she said: “I’ll go grab some options for you.” 

It was then that I noticed the following: the distance between her pupils was sub-optimally short, her dark bangs were clearly hiding a rash of cystic acne, and her maxilla was recessed, leaving her mid-face unsupported. But her brown eyes sparkled behind metal-framed glasses, and despite her obvious imperfections, her looks package pleased me overall.

When she returned with two extra-wide shoeboxes, I even got a little hard.

Flustered, I took the shoes and shoved the left shoe onto my right foot. Mall Girl let out a giggle unlike any I’d ever heard—more a guffaw than a giggle, really, and more an air-raid siren than a guffaw. 

It was then that I knew I was in love with her.

Using the new shoes, which Mom bought and I hated, I got a job handing out samples at the frozen yogurt shop that just happened to be opposite the mouth of the department store. If I stood slightly off-center from the storefront, I could peer in and catch a glimpse of her. That is, until my dickhead manager fired me for “seeming distracted” and “standing confusingly far away from the store.”

But I didn’t tell Mom about that right away, and I still went to see Mall Girl.

Once, I told her my new shoes were chafing my heel just so she would touch my feet again. Another time, I took photos of her from behind a sales rack of women’s coats so I could see what the community thought. They averaged her a sub-6, but I think she’s a 6 at least. 

That’s what love does to a man.

***

It has been a week since the surgery, and my eyesight has not gotten any better. In fact, it seems to get a little worse every day.  

My mother has not forced me to accompany her anywhere. Sometimes she leaves the house without even telling me. I only know she’s gone when I hear her car pull out of the driveway.

I think she’s upset about my eyes. She doesn’t even know I can’t use them.

At least I am beating new records of beating off in her absence. Watching porn is uncomfortable, but I close my eyes and think about Mall Girl touching my feet. When she looks up and sees my newly blue eyes, she switches from my feet to my cock. I think they call that manifesting.

I imagine Mall Girl smells the way my mother does on the rare occasions she goes out for the night, when she leans over to kiss me goodbye and her mouth smells like toothpaste and her neck like vanilla, makeup settling in the wrinkles around her eyes.

On Saturday, Mom finally breaks her silence. Luckily, I have finished jerking off for the day, and when I hear her knock at the door, I am excited to see her, although I can barely make her out as she stands in my bedroom doorway.

She walks in and sits on the bed. The sheets are thick with crumbs and cum, but she doesn’t mention it, just sits down, the comforter crackling slightly under her weight. She is a mound of pink and beige. I try hard to focus on her face.

After a pause, she begins: “Sixteen hours I labored with you.” 

I stifle a groan. I hate it when she starts on her girlboss shit.

“When you came out, you were covered in goo. But when they cleared you up, you looked just like my grandfather. I hadn’t seen his face since I was a little girl and suddenly it was there, in my arms. It was the strangest thing. But nice, too. I felt like you had a little bit of him inside you, like you were going to be okay.”

“Right. You’ve told me this before.” 

“My grandmother always used to say that was what first drew her to him: his kind eyes. We get older, you know, but our eyes never change.”

What are we even doing here? I’ve seen photos and my granddad’s eyes were dull as dishwater. I give an ambiguous grunt that makes my mother lose her patience.

“Do you understand what I’m trying to say to you, Garrett?” she snaps. “The way we look is a product of generations of people who love each other so much that they create other people with their love. Other people who look like them… Jesus, you’re not even looking at me!”

I thought I had been. She leaves, not quite slamming the door but not quite not-slamming it either. 

Of course, she is wrong about everything. Beauty is a currency more valuable than crypto. Besides, my father couldn’t have loved her very much—he walked out when I was just a baby. 

Damn it, I should have said that. You always think of a good line too late.

***

My phone alarm sings its ugly trill at 11 A.M. It is Sunday, and Mall Girl works on Sundays.

There is a perfect ring of nothing in the middle of my gaze, but I cannot ask my mother to drive me—not now, not today. What if Mall Girl wants to blow me in my car and Mom is sitting there, sipping on her Stanley and scrolling on her phone, her soft body looking small behind the wheel.

So, I drive. I drive in fits and starts, and I’m honked at more than once, but I know the journey well from my froyo-slinging days. I make it. 

The forever-daylight of the mall hurts my eyes more than being outside. Not wanting to blow my load—my load being high-quality looking and seeing time—I opt to raise my arm over my eyes in a vampiric gesture. 

In my head, I visualize each bench, each trashcan, each concrete planter, and attempt to avoid them. 

“Hey, watch it!” a man’s voice says after I stumble over something unexpected. I make out some large feet next to some very small ones, which I deduce belong to a child. “Freak,” the voice mutters.

I remember a headline that said men taking on women’s roles in the household leads to low testosterone.  My own father’s decision to leave us, while painful, was ultimately the more masculine choice.

I continue, tracing the terrazzo tiles as best I can. I tell myself I’ll know I’ve reached the department store when the polished speckles give way to industrial carpeting. But the first thing I recognize is the smell. 

I’m a bloodhound now, half-blind. It is cheap perfume wafting on an air-conditioned breeze, creating the illusion of freshness despite the unvacuumed carpets and insidiously clogged air vents, like a person who has showered everything except the parts that really matter.

Taking a left into the store, the pain in my eyeballs spreads hotly across the upper half of my head.

I make it to the shoe department with no trouble except one alarming cracking noise, which turns out to just be the head of an errant mannequin, then take a seat and wait for a sign of Mall Girl, my head in my hands.

“Uh, can I help you?” I hear soft steps approach me and an uncertain female voice. Not hers.

I shake my head emphatically from behind my raised arm and her footsteps retreat. I can hear whispering, something about “that man over there.” And then I hear a laugh that is unmistakably hers. The air-raid siren of my dreams.

I stand up straight to accentuate my frame and walk confidently toward the sound. Mall Girl is just an angelic gray shadow in a fluorescent lighting sky.

“Hi, I’m Chad—” I begin, my arm outstretched in greeting.

Then, a feeling in my face like being hit with a soccer ball. A bursting sensation somewhere near my brain. 

“Woah,” exclaims Mall Girl, who must have noticed my new eyes. “S- sir? Are you okay? Your face is bleeding… like, a lot.”

I try to respond. I start to respond. I open my mouth, but a strange feeling comes over me. I feel the carpet tiles come up to meet me and I can smell their dank smell. 

I realize I am on the floor, and people begin to crowd around me. There is a tannic wetness on my cheek that starts dripping down my neck. What is in my head is not pain but the absence of it, the absence of something that used to be there. Two things, maybe.

“Call 911!” someone yells. 

“Yes, hello? A man has collapsed and his eyes have, um, exploded?” says another, in a forced calm.

Someone kneels beside me and I am sure that it is Mall Girl. Her sweet-smelling hair tickles my arm, and I was right: she smells like vanilla. I know that she has finally noticed me. It is just she and I alone in the hot, wet darkness.

“Can you hear me, sir? Sir? Mister, uh… Chad?”