If my body was made of marble I’d sink without the need for stones in my pockets.
FLORA LEASK ARIZPE
It was hard enough finding time to see a doctor, let alone get them to listen to my request. Let alone have them assent to it.
A fern coiled in on itself in the corner of her desk. Its plump-looking plastic sheen made it difficult to tell if it was real or fake. Dr Fuentes looked a bit like the fern.
She was the one.
Dr Fuentes was famous for giving rich whimsy exactly what it asked for. Want to be five inches taller? Want talons instead of feet? A long, hairy tail – no – a bald one, like a rat’s? Fuentes was there to meet your demands on a high-cost, low-curiosity basis. Don’t ask me how I found her.
The point was that I told her what I wanted, and she nodded. Although she pursed her lips in a sphincter of disapproval, she nodded.
I sat, white gloves resting on the paper containing my vital statistics, the corners of which fluttered in the air conditioned microclimate of the plastic surgeon’s office.
“I believe the procedure could be done with hydrogen, for the frozen-finish-effect. It would also cause your skin to become several shades whiter, which would help with final marbling layer. Then a coating of varnish. Any other added texture would be a job for the artists.”
I agreed with some sort of vague noise, not caring who was going to do what or how. My mind was already drifting comfortably back into the tracks of the dream, a part settling into its well-worn groove. Imagine: to be able to exist, in the real world, as I knew I always should exist. To combine the image of the other with the image of myself. To look on the outside how I felt on the inside.
I have been something half-eaten for most of my life, half an idea, a deserted clay figurine. I could never accept myself as I was, even before I knew there was any possibility of becoming what I saw myself to be.
I lived the life of a nail-biter, a shaky, frenetic, person, unable to focus on the simplest tasks. I was constantly distracted by what I wasn’t, consumed by one desire only: to be a marble statue.
My flesh was an uninvited lodger. It would become my whole vision if I thought about it too much, if I allowed the panic of its inescapability to drag me under. It was a joke that someone had played on me – god, or evolution, or my parents, who cares.
From very young I knew I was meant to be cruel, untouchable, cold, unbothered by breathing, a slab of stone, and a platonic beauty. At five years old I was taken on a walk through the botanical gardens near home, which – among the cherry trees and herb gardens – was populated with classical figurines of naked women. It was the single most important day of my life so far – as if I had realised that my muscles had been cramped since birth, and that now, finally aware that there was another way, I would die if I couldn’t find a form of release.
My first, a crouching water nymph, peered over her podium at me, and immediately an invisible thread connected us. Pink cherry blossoms swayed, she, solid, watched me watch her. It was like looking in the mirror and seeing myself for the first time. She gloated; I languished. I discovered envy. I touched her smooth white skin with my shaking pink hand, and the comparison hurt me as much as I knew it sustained her.
“And afterwards I, uh, would remain conscious, Dr Fuentes?” my voice wavered after the “I”. I wasn’t scared of something going wrong, I was scared of never knowing how it would feel to become what I wanted.
When I was young my parents treated me like my sister – that is to say, like a human. They saw me, a messy pink blob, as a biological wonder. I knew it disappointed them when I started to reject them, their company, their world, in order to spend more time on my own. But I couldn’t stand how they reminded me of myself; besides, alone I could ruminate on my shortcomings as human. A daily practice of comparing myself to famous statues was painful but satisfying, like plucking a stray chin hair or squeezing pus from a pimple. My favourites were Venus de Milo, The Veiled Virgin, the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Their facelessness allowed me to see myself on their podiums and clothe myself in their shrouds (sometimes the Statue of Liberty would do it for me, too, if I was in the mood for delusions of grandeur).
“Absolutely. You’d need carers to assist you with providing nutrition and hydration through various gastric and intravenous tubes, respectively. I trust you have someone in mind?”
The question was procedure. Dr Fuentes’ lips pressed into one another firmly, disapproving but handwashing, their tension creating striations in pink bulbous cliffs, with flakes of lipstick peeling from ridges and crevasses.
The plastic fern’s leaves bobbed, seemingly of their own accord.
In museums I would enter states of heightened excitement. Being surrounded by them, pristine, superhuman, calcified, I felt elated and miserable. I couldn’t stop looking at how beautiful their faces and bodies were. Simply staring at a hardened abdomen, at breasts which would never yield to anyone’s touch gave me a sense of overflowing enjoyment. Sometimes I would be frozen to the spot for hours (the museum staff knew me by name). My body called for the same calcification – specifically an enmarblification. The tacky purple, blue, and red veins replaced by grey, white, black; speckles on a perfect stone egg.
When I was twenty-five, I decided I had suffered long enough. My depression had reached new heights as I felt my body begin to lose any of its adolescent tautness. Nothing interested me, my sole connection to my family was my sister who would check in on me occasionally. I had been working, saved money through falling downwards into an uncaring job where I served uncaring people uncaringly. My legs ached continuously from the long hours standing and my skin was always greasy from that hot air that seems to emanate from people in groups. Every time I felt an ache in my side or my back it reminded me of my imperfect state, and I’d often break down because of how difficult I felt it was to be a living, breathing thing.
It still wasn’t enough. I’d had to take out a few loans to meet Dr Fuentes’ excruciating prices. My parents and sister would be faced with the bill, that I felt bad for. But I was so close to getting what I wanted. Would you deny someone life-saving surgery?
There was one I’d almost allowed to broach the wet, unstable membrane of my body. A university student sculptor who I volunteered to pose for (I often did this as an antidote to particularly bad body image days). I almost had sex with him. Statues possess permanently what human bodies only have impermanently: virginity. At least, virginity would be what the human equivalent is called – technically the statue can’t be a virgin because of it is an impenetrable thing. A statue of a woman scorns an attempting intruder with her own solid rock hardness.
For the first time I felt the sexual functions of the human body as I watched him watch me, felt the hormones pumping through tubes and vessels, the cartilaginous net which held me together. My mind and body bifurcated. I felt doubt for the first time; not only would I need his flesh for this sexual encounter, but I’d need mine too. We didn’t kiss. He placed one finger in my mouth. I spat it out.
“Yes, I have that figured out.” I stopped my white gloved hands from tapping nervously on the plastic desk at the lie. Of course I wouldn’t need to eat or drink once my transformation was complete. A ridiculous idea. The point was to become the barrier.
In the end it was his look that made me step back – within it I sensed a degradation which came from a potentiality within me. He was guessing what I would be like inside (I don’t know if I hated the idea of being hollow, or the idea that I was filled with organs, more). He looked at me that way because I was something tangible, obtainable, something to grab, to smell, to taste. Not like a statue, which belongs to no-one but art. Beautiful for spectacle alone, not beauty for biology’s sake. Beauty for its own unreachable, unknowable motivations. A still, dry, and elevated beauty.
The sculptor wanted to see me again after that, he said he saw something different in me. He knew I was untouchable, so – of course – he wanted to have me. It was quite affirming in a way; I nicknamed him Pygmalion and never saw him again. In both art and love the past is isolation, the present obsession, the future creation. The isolation and obsession I could handle on my own, thanks, and I was to become my own creator soon enough.
More specifically, Dr Fuentes was.
“Well then. We can begin by taking blood tests and non-invasive scans as soon as you have the money transferred into the account. Are you sure you would rather transfer the lump sum? We also have monthly payments available.”
Dr Fuentes reached out and stroked the fern with a hand that looked so much older than the rest of her that I knew I had come to the right place.
When I’m dead they’ll put me in a gallery, mistaking me for any other statue of a woman. I will have no placard on the wall, there will be no trace of my past life. The public will queue to see me, and I will peer over my podium back at them, gloating and cold. I will be unable to see, speak, taste, smell, hear, cry, move, or feel, but finally I’ll be myself. Finally real beauty: untouchable, closed, and cold.