“LASIK” by Nora Ray

jokes

The surgeon asked me not to move my eyes. He was specific. He told me if I moved them, the red dot would lacerate my retina. I wondered if all doctors shot threats at their patients during surgeries. He talked a lot; he giggled like a little girl when he told me the red dot would fix my stupid eyes. It left me speechless, though I didn’t know what exactly: his birdlike chuckles or the insult. He left immediately after the operation was over. I was alone in a room that smelled of my burnt eyes. They smelled like sulfur, like coal, like gasoline. The nurse didn’t comment on it, as if she had long been accustomed to burned retinas. She gave me painkillers and told me she winked at me, as if it was important. I squinted at her blurry, shady, rippling mouth. There was something wrong with her fang. I told her she had a tooth shaped like an inverted triangle. She told me to stop pretending I’d had real anesthesia and was delirious. I put sunglasses on and left. My eyes were full of sand.

Anya called me two hours later, asking me how LASIK went. I told her it went weird. I lay in bed, pretending my other four senses became supernatural. They didn’t. I still didn’t hear the sun screaming through the vacuum of space. I wish I did. Anya asked me if I was in pain. I shook my head as if she could see me and said I was bored. She asked me to imagine I was on the beach. I said that I wouldn’t see anything there. She laughed and invited me to a pool party. Eye will come if my eyes are fine, I said. She didn’t get the joke because ‘eye’ and ‘I’ were pronounced the same way.

pores

The next day I looked out of the window, ready to be baffled by sharp outlines of maple leaves of my favorite tree standing in the yard; and ready to be mad at people who didn’t have to pay to see them. The leaves were indeed pointy and blood-red, but there was something amiss about them. I couldn’t put my finger on the exact wrong thing. Sure, I could’ve made it up. I’d had an imaginary friend when I was five. His name was Rain. Rain had always bragged to me he had no pores. I used to tell him I didn’t have them, either. It turned out I had pores, I just couldn’t see them before I had LASIK done. I’d only seen tiny black dots on my cheeks, small but deep like lunar craters—luminous, multi-layered. In reality, they were like colorless pimples—voluminous, protruding. All this time the people around me looked like toads, and I’d had no idea.

I’ve never noticed my skin looked like dough, I texted Anya. She asked me if I noticed anything else new. It was an odd question. I asked her if she came over last night. She said no. It was a lie. I asked her why she shaved my legs. She called me and asked me if I was okay. I told her my legs were smooth as if I’d depilated them. She fell quiet for half a minute. I freaked out. She felt it. She told me body hair grew smoothly under the skin, not stuck out of it. She said it sadly, as if I had bizarre amnesia and she had to explain to me who she was ten times a day. I ended the call. She sent me a message. She asked me if my surgeon explained my diagnosis to me properly. I said it was astigmatism.

letters

I fell asleep. When I woke up and revisited the messages, they were:

¿ʎlɹǝdoɹd noʎ oʇ sᴉsouƃɐᴉp ɹnoʎ uᴉɐldxǝ uoǝƃɹns ɹnoʎ pᴉp :ɐʎu∀

.ɯsᴉʇɐɯƃᴉʇsɐ ʇsnɾ sɐʍ ʇᴉ :no⅄

Then she asked me if I’d come to the party.

¿ʎʇɹɐd ǝɥʇ oʇ ǝɯoɔ noʎ llᴉM:ɐʎu∀

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀∀

I opened my notebooks and wrote: ¿NO פNIOפ SI ┴∀HM

nails

Hello, a guy said. Hello, I said. Hello, a girl said.

We gathered at the pool, which was so deep and round and cool. It smelled of chlorine, but I found the scent nice, even appetizing. It reminded me of mint candies and the glass cleaner my mother used to wash mirrors. The water was the color of aqua blue. It was so saturated, almost unnatural, almost alien, almost liminal. I’d never seen this color before. The pool was so normal it looked abnormal, aberrant. They asked me how LASIK went. I said it went fine. They asked if my other senses had been heightened while I was wearing those black glasses. I shook my head and swallowed hard. They giggled. Their legs looked hairless, but if I narrowed my eyes, I saw black dots right under the top layer of their skin. Some of them certainly depilated even those dots, and to remove the hairs you needed to use something sharp to cut the skin first.

I started to shake.

I asked them why they held their plastic cups upside down, poking the bottom with a stainless steel straw instead of acting like Ǝ˥ԀOƎԀ ˥∀WɹON. I asked them why the pool water was reflected in the sky, and not the other way around. I asked them why they had no trouble speaking or eating or drinking their stupid fresh juices when their teeth were upside down—like that nurse’s—and their tongue tips were broad and meaty, as if tongue roots were turned outward.

They were quiet. I tried not to look up. I didn’t want to see their faces. I stared at my nails instead, fixed on a lunula stamped at the edge of my nail instead of its base. They told me I had heatstroke and took me inside a summer house. Its roof was on the floor, and the floor was on the roof. The distortion must’ve been normal this whole time; I used to be abnormal, aberrant. In bed I cried soundlessly, emotionlessly, almost tearlessly.

dreams

They danced by the pool for a long time. Loud music hit my temporary bedroom’s thin walls, the walls I was thoroughly observing. The shadows of a bouquet of roses lingered on the walls, and their distorted petals looked confusingly normal. What was the point of misshaping something so unyielding? I tossed and turned, sweaty and cold, trying to blink as rapidly as I could. The thought of sleep disturbed me; I wondered why I didn’t remember what happened when I was asleep in those days right after LASIK, as if I woke up the moment I closed my eyes.

I stayed awake until dawn.

The sun rose in the west.

I threw up.

It wasn’t vomit; it was a slice of pizza—hot and oily.

I threw up again.

Anya asked me why I was awake. I said I couldn’t fall asleep without her. She said she was sorry; she said she’d had so much fun. I told her I was going to sue my surgeon because he’d messed up with my eyes; irreversibly, I was afraid. She asked me not to do anything rash. I said I was afraid to sleep. She asked me why. I told her I saw odd things every time I blinked. She told me they were hypnagogic hallucinations, and it meant I was exhausted and needed to sleep. She closed her eyes. I gazed at her pimply, waxy, bald, and cold face. She started hyperventilating. Her eyes opened, only the whites stayed visible. I asked in whispers if she was okay. She didn’t respond. I touched the white of her left eye. Her breathing steadied. Her irises came back. She asked me not to wake her up anymore. I asked her what was wrong with her. She yelled at me, telling me I needed to be grateful my surgeon had fixed me, then kicked my leg, told me to sleep, and turned away to the window. The rainbow in the sky was bright. Its colors were violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. Anya’s breathing became rapid again. I turned away to the wall.

Anya wasn’t Anya.

I wasn’t myself.

A hypnic jerk turned into a hypnic fix. I became loose; I became liquid. My eyes swam in intracranial juice: warm and wet and dark. I saw things there, they were so old and so elusive and so endearing. There was my sister’s hair comb smelling of cheap plastic. There was Anya, whom I ran into a year ago at the grocery store. There was the greenish river I’d almost drowned in twenty years ago. A silly boy, Rain had called me then. I saw Rain there, too. He wasn’t kind. He squeezed my throat, and kicked my stomach, and poked at my inverted eyes. He scolded me, he told me I used to be the last normal person here, and I’d let the freak maim me, too. I didn’t respond. He said I let him break me, I let him ruin me. He told me pores and letters and nails and dreams were normal before I had LASIK. I asked him to stop talking and drifted away from him, inching toward my mother who had my father’s eyes and to my father who had my mother’s lips.

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