“But, Lisa, I should have known something wasn’t right. Mindy noticed—she said you had been, well, a little depressed since coming back from China and thinks you started to self-medicate then. She was the one who found you, you know. If she hadn’t arrived when she did…” My mother clenched her fist in front of her mouth to stopper a fresh round of sobs.
“Mindy found me?” I asked, trying to keep up with my mother’s racing, breathy narrative.
Hand wrapped protectively around her throat, my mother nodded rapidly. “She… she said that you two had an argument and you stormed out of the restaurant, already ‘messed up,’ as she called it. She tried to call, but you wouldn’t pick up. Suddenly, an intuition took hold of her, and she jumped in a cab. She banged on your door, but there was no answer. So she called your cell and heard it ringing inside. Thank god you had given her a key to the apartment. She found you…” Fresh sobs. “…on the floor…” Silvery strands of saliva threaded her open mouth like cobwebs. “…lips blue…” Her limp little tissue was a soggy lump of uselessness in the palm of her hand. “…totally unresponsive. She gave you CPR until the ambulance arrived.”
The change in pressure as the door opened woke me. My eyes didn’t seem to be working right, as if I were wearing glasses whose lenses were too strong, and it took me a moment to recognize Yolanda, hair crackling with red, green Tilt-A-Whirl eyes ablaze. “Bloody hell, it stinks in here,” she muttered to herself, patting the pockets of her power jacket, bringing out a silk handkerchief to place over her nose and mouth before stepping into the thin slot of space between my bed and the wall. “You look a fright, Lisa.”
“I don’t feel so good either,” I groaned, suddenly aware of how my scalp crawled and my skin itched, of the thick carpet of scum on my teeth and the cheesy feeling in the folds of my skin. “Will you let me out of these straps?” I strained weakly against the leather.
The glassy gleam of her eyes told me she was enjoying herself. “Is that any way to ask for a favor?”
“Please, Yolanda, goddamn it. Please.”
“It was for your own good,” Yolanda said as she unbuckled the straps. “Dr. Panzov didn’t want you ruining his handiwork.”
“How long have I been here?” I asked as I rubbed at the chafed flesh of my wrists.
“You’ve been out for a few days. Madam thought it best to sedate you after the operation.”
“Operation? What operation?”
“A Dr. Panzov operation. You are very lucky, you know. He’s a leader in his field, and most people have to pay out the nose for what you got for free.”
“Oh my fucking god,” I gasped, my hands flying to my chest, relieved to find that my breasts fit snugly into my cupped palms, just as they always had.
“Not there,” Yolanda cackled.
“Then where?” I asked, my fingers tentatively wandering to my face. The flesh around my eyes was swollen and sticky, narrowing my field of vision to a peephole, and it hurt to even lightly stroke the air around them. “My eyes?”
Yolanda blew softly on my face and something tickled my upper lip. When I tried to brush it away, I followed the filament to my nostrils and discovered that they were filled with something. I plucked at the strings with horror—another life-form had colonized my body, a moth maybe, crawling up my nose to spin its cocoon. A little wisp broke free, floating off my finger: cotton gauze. My gentle probing caused a lightning flash of pain, conjuring in its garish glare Dr. Panzov’s fist flying toward my face. He must have broken my nose. Trying to keep my voice calm, I asked, “May I see a mirror? Please?”
“I’ve got something better,” she said, unfolding the laptop she had been cradling in the crook of an arm. Angling the screen toward me, she pressed the power button and the machine started up with a hot exhalation and a whir. For a moment all I could see was the ghostly shimmer of my face reflected in the black screen, eyes puffed to slits and a swath of white straddling my nose; then the screen illuminated with me laid out on a gurney under a papery blue surgical drape, eyes shut, nose a swollen crescent, body limp. A figure in a blue scrub cap stepped into the frame. He looked at the camera with a grin. It was Dr. Panzov. Immediately, dread gripped me like a vise. “Noooo,” I moaned. “Nooo, nooo.”
“Oh, come on, Lisa, it hasn’t even started yet,” Yolanda purred, staring transfixed at the screen.
Someone else entered the camera’s eye, swabbing at my cheeks and nose with a sponge, oily liquid clinging to my skin. The camera caught a glimpse of mismatched eyes as she bent to place a gauze mask over my mouth
“Is that you?” I slurred, my tongue thick and useless in my mouth.
“Yes.” Yolanda snapped her fingers jubilantly. “I used to be the best damn OR nurse in Port Elizabeth. Shh, now.” She nodded seriously at the computer screen, where Dr. Panzov was needling into my nostrils with a scalpel and slicing through the septum flap. Blood oozed languidly down my cheeks, and Dr. Panzov dabbed it away with an almost tender regard.
“My nose?” I wheezed, my hand flying up to stroke the bandage that covered it, sending staticky crackles of pain through my body.
Offscreen, Yolanda winked hard at me, while on-screen, she handed Dr. Panzov a hook, which he used to lift the skin off my nose, exposing the glistening red underflesh. Yolanda held the hook in place as he began to snip away at the cartilage, sometimes pressing so hard that my whole face sank in. He extracted a bloody shard, small as a baby’s tooth, and set it on a tray that lay just outside the camera’s eye.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I said, bile washing up the back of my throat.
“Oh, don’t be a nuisance,” Yolanda groaned, leaning over to pick up an enamel pot from under the bed.
Hot saliva began to foam out of my mouth, and I curved over the enamel bowl, expelling little clouds of spit.
“Shall I pause it?” Yolanda asked impatiently, the smooth vermilion hook of her fingernail hovering over the keyboard.
I shook my head. “It’s almost over,” I said, more to myself than to her.
But it wasn’t almost over. When I looked back at the screen, Yolanda was hammering a flat chisel deep into my nose. “I’m breaking up that knot of bone that forms the bridge. That is, that formed the bridge,” she helpfully explained. Then Dr. Panzov was going at me with two hands, wrestling as if with the devil, pulling his shoulders high, jiggering his instruments this way and that, scraping and gouging until I thought he would tear off his gloves and burrow his bare hands in there. Finally, he extracted a glistening, gore-flecked hunk of bone, turning it this way and that like a trophy for the camera. And it was a trophy of sorts, one that Honey could nail up in the hunting room between the bristly snout of the tusked wild boar and the spiraling horns of the mountain sheep, for it was as if Dr. Panzov had tunneled his cruel instruments into my body to extract my very soul, or the closest thing that I had to a soul. My eyes were the eyes of every Korean adoptee, but my nose was mine alone, never found on the face of another human being until I met Honey. It had taken me the first two decades of my life to rise to the challenge of my nose and become worthy of it, to embrace it as my own true birthright, to wield it proudly as the flagship feature of the one and only Kim Jae-Lisa Sarah Pearl, sui generis.
“Where’re you going, bokkie?” Yolanda asked as I slumped down onto the mattress. “Come on, sit up. Show’s not over yet.”
“All I did was go with Jonny when he invited me! How could I say no to him?!”
“Don’t try and blame this on the Young Master. You should know better than to play his games. If you had bothered to ask any one of us, Wendell, Dr. Panzov”—she gestured at the screen, where he was delving deep into my skull with a curved pair of scissors—“even Lahela for fuck’s sake, we would have told you you were heading toward trouble.” Realizing that she was getting off topic, she redirected her attention to the screen. “Now, here, Dr. Panzov is inserting a graft strut made of a sliver of your own cartilage to give the tip of your nose an adorable
perk.”
Separating the gelatinous flaps of my septum with tweezers, Dr. Panzov tucked in the strut before skewering the flaps and the cartilage with a steel pin, using curved scissors to guide a tiny comma of a needle through the skin as he sewed it all in place.
On-screen, Yolanda was gently prodding a two-pronged fork up my nostrils, while offscreen, Yolanda narrated in the hushed, soothing tones of a nature documentary. “Here, I’m shaping the nose, making the passages straight and free of obstruction. And now for the hard part, getting rid of that hook at the end of your nose. This is delicate work—you have to admire the good doctor’s skill.”
Indeed, as I watched Dr. Panzov’s gloved hands do the fine work of snipping and sewing, I had trouble imagining that on the other end of them was the booze-swilling, sadistic henchman who had punched me unconscious. After carefully enmeshing the loose meat at the tip of the nose into a net of surgical thread, Dr. Panzov trimmed the excess skin around my nostrils with a few deft swipes of a scalpel before lowering the hood of my nose back onto my face, turning each nostril inside out as he pulled the needle through, leaving as the only visible evidence of the operation a tiny track of knotted thread like barbed wire across the skin of my septum. The video abruptly stopped, and Yolanda snapped the laptop shut.
“At least it’s over with,” I whispered, knowing, actually, that it wasn’t over with, and it would never be.
“Not a bad show, hey, Lisa?” She sprang up from the bed, running finicky fingers over her skirt to straighten it out. “Ting will be in soon with your dinner and some tablets for the pain. Better eat something first before you take them.”
As she pivoted toward the door, I clutched the frilled hem of her peplum jacket. “Can I see a mirror?”
She pulled her jacket from my grasping fingers. “You don’t want to see a mirror yet, bokkie. Wait until the splint comes off.”
“What did I do that was so wrong, Yolanda?” I importuned. “Why did she do this to me?”
Bringing the laptop up to her chest, Yolanda sighed, pinioning me with the laser gaze of her glowing green eyes. I stared back, willing myself not to look away, staring first into the eye that was stretched at a precipitous angle, the skin pulled so tight that her eyelid could not fully close, then into the other eye, the one that she winked with, less sharply angled but with a hard overhanging ridge of flesh where the filler that had been injected to create the illusion of a single lid had settled.
“You have no idea how hard it was to watch you preen and strut and act like you were better than us. The way you took advantage of Madam’s love for you. But then you went too far, as posers and strivers always do. Poor Madam was so upset when she discovered your perfidy. She cried on my shoulder and wondered what she had done wrong. I assured her that her only sin was to love you too much. I advised her to be a good mother and discipline you, no matter how much it hurt her, or you would never learn your lesson. No, no, meisie, you don’t get to look at me like that. I warned you many times not to fuck it up. But did you listen to me? Last time I’m going to tell you this, dumkop: obey Madam. To the letter.”
She flicked a fingernail against my nose splint, leaving me writhing in pain as she strode out the door, heels clattering triumphantly down the corridor.
Ting must have been waiting outside with my dinner, because she suddenly materialized at the foot of the bed, placing a covered tray and a pitcher of water on the small table that was wedged into the corner. Balled up tightly in a sickening vise of pain, I followed her with my eyes but did not, could not, speak to her. She assiduously avoided my stare as she replaced the chamber pot I had wretched into with a fresh one, pausing only as she was getting ready to leave the room for a quick glance at me, maybe to make sure that I was alive. Eyes like two black bars, face completely immobile; she was unreadable. “Ting,” I whispered. And then she was gone.
It was the water that finally beckoned me to the table, the promise of wet relief for the burned crisp of my tongue, the brittle crust of my palate, the splintered rind of my lips. But when I took a sip, the swirl of water against the roof of my mouth rekindled the cooling ardor of my pain.
In a saucer next to the pitcher were the two pain pills that Yolanda had advised me to take. I picked one up. It was big, about the size of a penny, a smooth circle with beveled edges that caught the dim light in a glossy flash. Etched diagonally across one face was a slash, like the groove in a screw head. The other side was featureless. It could have been anything: acetylsalicylic acid, paracetamol, codeine, hydrocodone. I put it down next to its mate.
Lifting the dome off the tray, I found a simple meal of Japanese comfort food: cubes of tofu bobbing in miso soup freckled with thin slices of green onion, a triangle of rice wrapped in seaweed, a small array of homemade pickles, four snow-white slices of nashi. I pictured Miura-san expertly skimming the golden skin from the dewy pear flesh, and then I saw Dr. Panzov trimming the skin from my nose, and the tears that I had been trying so hard to suppress spilled forth from the bruised portholes of my eyes, and it hurt because I cried and I cried because it hurt.
When Mindy brought me home from the hospital, she combed through my apartment, throwing out all the pills I had hoarded like loose change: a pastel blue Valium, two salmon-colored Xanax, a red-and-white capsule of phenobarbital, a small collection of snow-white Ativan. “Look, Lisa, I am not going to ask you to promise to never take pills again,” she said, her plump lips uncharacteristically pressed into a hard, straight line. “I know that’s not realistic. But I do want you to know that finding you comatose here was one of the worst moments of my life, and if you really cared about me, you wouldn’t put me through that again.”
“Oh, come on,” I cajoled. “It’s what a medical student lives for! The chance to save someone’s life. I did you a real favor.”
“OK, I won’t lie to you.” She flashed a wicked grin. “It was kind of a thrill. But you know how they say a doctor shouldn’t operate on her loved ones? Well, now I know why. Panic at the thought of losing you definitely wobbled that laser-like focus I needed. I just wanted to go straight to the CPR without wasting time calling 911.”
“So you actually did CPR on me?” I asked, hugging my knees and rocking forward. “You, like, put your lips to mine?”
She nodded seriously.
“Eww!” I tried to play it off with a joke.
“Your lips were blue and cold, your skin was clammy. You were completely gone. There was nothing left of you but the pod of your flesh. You were a stranger to me.” She narrowed her eyes into spearheads. “I’m not going to joke about it, Lisa. You almost died.”
I reached out to grab an arm that was angrily folded over her chest. “And you saved my life. Just like you’ve always done. I know it must get tiresome.” I finally pried the arm loose and clutched at her hand. “No more pills, Min Hee, I promise.”
She squeezed my hand so tightly that I could feel the bones grinding against each other. “I’m depending on you, Lisa. You’re gonna be my maid of honor when I get married, you’re gonna be there when I give birth, you’re gonna make the speech at my retirement party…”
“…help you pick out your gown when you win the Nobel Prize in Medicine…”
She let my hand go, flashing a pleased smile. “The same year that you get the prize in literature.”
“One usually needs to have written something to win that prize, so I hear,” I quipped, grinning so she’d know I was just joking.
But she wasn’t ready to joke. “Well, then write, Lisa. You’ve been talking about it all your life. Stop talking about it and do it! What are you waiting for? Are you afraid of failing? Are you scared of the rejection? Are you worried you’re not good enough?”
“No!” I protested, taken aback at her vehemence, wavering between being insulted and being honest. “I do write! Look!” I grabbed up a spiral notebook and flipped the ink-filled pages at her. “See?”
“OK, that’s great. But that’s not a novel, Lisa.
” She grabbed my face in her hands, thumbs stroking my jaw, the dimple under her right eye trembling. I knew it was as painful for her to say what she said as it was for me to hear it. “You’re twenty-three, Li-li, and it’s time for you to put up or shut up. Write your goddamned Great Adoption Novel or never, ever say anything again about me and medical school. Do you really want to be a writer?”
She stared deep into my eyes. I don’t know what she saw there, but I saw a pale smudge that was the reflection of my face on her dark pupils.
I nodded slowly.
“Then fucking write.”
Chapter 13
“She was an entertainer, but she was looking for approval. It was: ‘If you like me, maybe you’ll keep me.’”
–Lionel Richie on his daughter Nicole
I held out for as long as I could, though it was not very long. Time was measured by meals; each meal arrived with two white tablets, which I immediately hid under my napkin, not out of defiance, but to fulfill my promise to Mindy.
But the pain was incredible. Agony surged in waves from my violated nose, circulating through my trembling body, passing through my exhausted heart, which insisted on hammering too hard and too fast for someone who did nothing but lie in bed. Even eating was painful, and I could force only a few bites before hurt won over hunger. Physical pain melded with mental anguish, and I wasn’t sure where one ended and the other began. Honey had played me like the fool I was, puffing me up until I got so swollen that I popped of my own accord. She wasn’t a mother, she was a monster, and she had me firmly in her grip, squeezing and squeezing until… Until what? Until I became like her? Until I was a shattered shell of a human, like the other members of the Gang? Until the physical manifestation of her ownership of me was written all over my face, as it was on Yolanda’s? One thing was certain: by breaking my nose, Honey had also broken the spell that had, I realized with not a little shame, so easily charmed me, the cowering optimism that if I played her game, she’d let me win. I played by her rules, and she changed them. The whole point of the game was that I would never win. But so eager was I to gain her approval, to be liked by her, even to be loved by her, that I blinded myself to the warning storm clouds that hung darkly on the horizon.
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