I aim the laser at the freckles and broken capillaries, zapping the sun damage on her face, that constellation of hyperpigmentation in the shape of an upside-down heart. She smells like sex and tuna melts as smoke rises from my magic wand. Burnt flesh fills the small room with an aroma of ecstasy, an atavistic throwback to Homo erectus and Australopithecus.
Tears stream down sunken cheeks, dampening the white wax paper atop the leather bed where patients lie about their lives and occupations, paying a fortune for fifteen minutes of glory. Some feel pleasure—agony is the norm. Truth is that people just want to disappear into the wrinkles, walk back through the ages and faded visions in their bathroom mirrors.
Are you okay? They are always able to withstand the aggression of the lasers. They clench their sandaled toes and pink fists, these specimens of perfection on the operating table with sweaty underpants, breasts compressed unconsciously beneath sundresses, halter tops, and business attire.
The technology is a testament to humanity and its persistent pursuit of perfection. Every second the body is one swan dive closer to death. Genius fashioned for superficiality has jammed the parking lot behind the strip mall with cougars. It is always hunting season. You can hear their tires spinning on asphalt as stomachs growl. We are exhausted. They are easy targets. Lunchtime is the best time to spot them. Their faces are cherry red and often bruised—yet the swelling subsides suddenly—like waves being pulled out by a tsunami.
+ + +
She sweats from creaseless forehead, though the air-conditioned room is so cold her nipples are hard as the jawbones of dead sharks. We are no wiser than animals shedding skin in the wild. For the first time, I can see the exponential reversal of evolution. I wipe the globs of goo from her face with a tissue and ask if she can look in the mirror. The cosmetic laser is more addictive than heroin. I am her hero. Another target waits in the room down the hall.
+ + +
I drive home and watch the scars and strange marks on the face of the vagrant who climbs onto the hood of my Mercedes to wash the windshield. I told him No thank you with a shake of the head and a wave of the hand, but he has his own ambitions. He lifts the wipers and rubs the residue of fluid and grime with his filthy napkin. He slaps the wipers back in place as the traffic light changes to green. I hand him a bunch of dimes from the cigarette ashtray and he looks at my face as if seeing the latent wrinkles my machines have hidden so well for years.
+ + +
Time catches up to us all. I get lost in the neck of my wife over dinner. She refuses to go under the lasers. I am as addicted as my patients. When we go to cocktail parties the ugly people compliment my skin, how young I look. I look like a pyramid of fresh money. My wife looks like a sandwich bag of quarters.
+ + +
We pile into the car after dinner and her perfume makes love to the hairs in my nostrils. We drive to another function, our son burning for attention. We drop him off at a friend ́s house and head to another meeting with doctors discussing the madness of mankind. We are highballs personified. In reality, we are modern men depleting the natural resources of an aging cougar population. There is no glory in growing old naturally, and the trophy is a laser in an office that smells of fresh hundred dollar bills and burnt human flesh. There is nothing less glamorous than making people feel beautiful on the inside while scraping the rust and tarnish from their exteriors.
+ + +
Half a day is spent losing my laser in their tattoos. That is when you can see inside a patient; you become a psychiatrist, often knowing more about the layers of the onion than a culinary student. Butterflies, marlins, misspelled Chinese idioms, cherries, mermaid, initials of ex-boyfriends who gave them herpes, and dragons mapped out over time. It takes at least eight sessions to get the deeper colors of the ink from their skin, and sometimes it can be impossible to eliminate all traces of the tattoo. Even when it is gone, there is this missing space where the person used to be. It is now a new body, and the past is scrubbed and blended into the unbranded parts. Sometimes they tell me about the tattoo, the story behind it or the reason they need it gone. I nod and hand them their safety goggles. There are things I’ve heard that should put some of my clients in prison, but then again, they already are. Obviously everybody is trapped in this shell that cracks melanoma and metastasizes beneath blistering skin. I zap my targets till they turn purple. The labyrinth of my laser is an art form in the making. It should be an Olympic sport.
+ + +
One of my secretaries sticks her head into the room with the Fraxel laser and tells me my wife and son died in a car accident an hour ago. They were pronounced dead on the scene and were transported to an area hospital. Of course I cannot process this information, cannot stop zapping that acne and pus, those scars and comets and meteorites in a man ́s face. The mountains get blurry beneath my goggles. My hand is shaking, but the magic wand hits the perfect spots, back and forth across the surface of the moon.
+ + +
My patients are treated with care. The corpses can wait, but the living organisms must be serviced. Superficial patients paying with cash, opening a line of credit they should not be granted; they rarely fail to pay. This is an addiction. The decision to finish my schedule instead of looking into the mangled faces of my angels is one that only a God-given laser doctor can understand. There was nothing I could do for my family after the accident. They would have wanted me to zap the faces of cougars, rake in a couple thousand dollars before driving like a lunatic to identify the gore that they once wore with such glory.
+ + +
The local news does a piece on my laser center and the clients double almost overnight. The sky is the limit. The lasers have given me new life, resurrected the flesh and heart of dead humans. There is a current in the madness of each session of zapping faces and tattoos. I ride each wave and surf it back to shore. The patients cry with agony, then laughter and joy. In the machine, my magic is more than fragments of lasers designed to change the planet. We are the spaceship that outlasted NASA. We are the green creatures dancing through the dust of a perverse universe clustered around supernovas.
