Photo Op
By tbottaro
- 198 reads
Robert reached for his knife and slit across Betsy’s eyebrows. These eyebrows were ugly, sagging things and he took pleasure in removing the extra skin, a pleasure similar to cleaning the wax out of your ear. A pleasure it still was even though he no longer agreed with it.
She wanted to look like Marilyn Munroe. She made a career out of it, as an impersonator. He couldn’t understand how she did it. She looked more like a fat Joan Rivers and was a complete nut job. “You know, I really think I’m her reincarnation,” she once said. He hated himself for humouring her.
After removing the blubber from her brows, he pulled the ends together and sewed them up. She didn’t actually have eyebrows because she drew them on with a pencil. This absence of hair combined with the stitches made her look some sort of deranged, threadbare doll and made it easier for him to do what he was doing.
He moved on to her lips next, skewering the top one and pulling the implant through with a hook. Glancing back and forth at the photo of Marilyn on the plastic clipboard in front of him, he trimmed and shaped the implant accordingly, then closed the incision up.
Even though she was a nut job and not a very nice person (she was a gold digger married to a 90-year-old oil tycoon and had made every single person in the practice feel like a piece of shit), Robert could relate to her. Something must have happened to make her that way. Maybe she was a fat kid. Maybe her mother was cold and disapproving. Or maybe she looked up to Marilyn so much, she lost the truth of who she really was, like he had, with his father.
Her breasts were next. She already had implants but she wanted them bigger. Marilyn was a D cup but she wanted a double D. That’s what the agencies were looking for. He decided to give her something bigger.
“Cosmetic surgery is the way to go,” his father had said. “The death rate is low and the money is good. And it’s a positive thing. You won’t have to deal with any distraught family members and the person is always going to come out better for it. Everybody wins.”
But Robert now knew this wasn’t true. The money was good but the person hardly ever came out better for it.
After putting the silicone bags into her chest and stitching up the incisions, Robert snapped off his gloves, listened for her breath and went to the sink to wash his hands. Slathering the soap from fingertips to elbow, he scrubbed his arms vigorously until they turned red. It dawned on him that this was a waste of time but he had done it out of habit.
“It’s time you start thinking about what you want to do with your life,” his father had said. “Any ideas?”
“Not sure, really,”
“Well, what do you like to do?”
“Um, I guess I like playing the guitar. Joe and I were thinking about starting up a band,”
“That sounds like fun. So you want to be a rock star so you can get all the girls!” his father had said, slapping him on the back too hard and chuckling in that way he did to fill the silence when no one else laughed with him.
That was the closest he got to doing something he was passionate about. His father was a doctor, so it was expected that he would be too. Him asking what Robert wanted to do with his life was another way of asking what kind of doctor he wanted to be.
He listened for the heart monitor’s steady beep, then grabbed the pencil and began to draw her eyebrows back on again. He wanted to give her something more dramatic then she was used to, black instead of blond and a more exaggerated arch.
With the eyebrows finished, he sat down on the sofa and checked his pocket to make sure they were still there. He needed to be prepared. He needed to know where they were at all times. Any delays, even slight ones, would give him a chance to change his mind.
“I’m handing my resignation in,” he had said.
“Oh don’t be ridiculous,” his father had responded.
“I’m serious, I am, next week,”
“Is this because of that woman dying on the operating table? These things happen. It wasn’t your fault.”
“Maybe that was the final straw,” Robert lied, “But I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. I’m sick of it, the materialism, the superficiality. It’s not me.”
“And just what is you? What will you do now?”
“I’m not sure yet, take some time off. I think I might be depressed or something. I don’t know, I don’t know. I think I just need some time to figure things out.”
“Cash isn’t indispensible, Robert. What happens after that?”
Robert had merely shrugged his shoulders and left the house. He hadn’t seen or spoken to him since. That was how his father dealt with emotions.
Three hours had now passed and Robert was getting twitchy. His knee bobbed up and down uncontrollably, and his eyes shifted from the clock, to the heart monitor, to Betsy, then back to the clock. Every sound was magnified and insanely repetitive, tick, tick, tick, beep, beep, beep, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. Finally, she stirred, moaning and mumbling, as they always did.
Jumping up and grabbing the mirror from the counter top, Robert walked quickly towards her. He wanted to get this over with as soon as possible.
“Betsy, it’s me, Dr Anderson. Can you hear me?”
“Mm hmm,” she said, her eyes fluttering open.
Robert waved his hand in front of her face, and watched her glazed eyes blink a few times, then clear up. It was time.
“So tired,” she said. “But feel relatively okay. What time is it? I want to get out of this goddamn place. Can you pump me up with some morphine? You bastards never give me enough morphine. Is my nurse here to collect me yet?”
“She won’t be coming,” Robert said.
“What do you mean she won’t be coming?”
Robert said nothing and pressed the button to raise the head of the bed, so that Betsy now sat upright.
“I thought I’d show you what I’ve done this time first,” he said, removing the sheet that laid on top of her. She was still too weak and drugged up to fight.
“W-what are you doing? It’s freezing. Where are the bandages? I usually wake up bandaged?”
“Not this time. I’ve done a special surgery. You can see the changes straight away.”
Robert placed the mirror on her bare stomach and stood behind her so he could see her reaction. Her eyes went to her breasts first, which were still bruised and bloody and now so large they squashed together and pushed her arms out to the side, like water wings. She then moved to her face, first to her eyebrows, then to her lips, which were so plump, the top one touched her nose and the bottom one hung open with the extra weight and covered her chin.
She looked back at Robert through the mirror, who now had a Polaroid camera in one hand and a knife in the other.
“Wh-why are you d-doing this?” she said. He could see her using her peripheral vision to find a way out, but she wouldn’t get far even if she tried. They were locked in his panic room.
“I wanted you to see what you’re doing to yourself. I want to get rid of people like you. I want to rid the world of the disgusting superficiality that you represent.”
And with that, Robert snapped the Polaroid and drew the knife across her neck. He would send the photo to the press tomorrow.
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