The Monster

Sumin lay supine on the operating cot, squinting underneath the surgical lamp, which was mounted to the ceiling, its plastic arm adjusted low so that the disc-shaped lamp was centered directly on her face. She turned away, squeezing her eyes closed and feeling them water from the intensity of the light. “Does that have to be so bright?” she asked.

Seunghyun’s face appeared above her, first as a silhouette, but then coming more into focus. He didn’t answer her question. “No allergies of any kind, right?”

“No,” Sumin said. “I already told you that.”

“And you don’t have sleep apnea or any similar disorder?”

“No,” she said. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“I need to know these things,” he said, a bit of frustration underlying his words. He sighed and pulled over a small stool to sit down beside her. “I don’t have a medical history on you, so I need to trust that you’ll tell me these things, that you’ll be honest. It’s important. We’re talking about your safety here. If you have a breathing disorder like apnea, for instance, the anesthesia could put you at risk.”

“I don’t have apnea or anything else,” she said, as she squeezed her eyes tighter to block out the light.

“Okay,” Seunghyun said. He brushed his hand down her arm, tracing his fingers over the IV line hooked to her vein, and then held her hand. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Are you ready?”

Sumin nodded and then felt his hand leave hers. She opened her eyes and looked over to the steel table in front of which Seunghyun was now standing. The top of the table was covered with close-up photos of Taeyeon’s face that the two of them had taken off the walls of Sumin’s apartment that morning. Seunghyun had spent hours studying the photos and was now casually flipping through them one last time. Finally, he breathed in deeply, set the photos aside, and walked back over to her. “Remember what we talked about,” he said, as he checked the settings on the anesthesia machine. He reached for the mask and then turned to her. “About being ready to handle everything after.”

Sumin impatiently nodded. Earlier, Seunghyun had kept insisting that she needed to understand the psychological effects of such a drastic surgery. He had wanted to make sure that she would be stable enough to handle the sight of someone else’s face in place of hers, particularly when that face was of someone she loathed so deeply. Sumin had told him that she would handle things just fine, but she knew that on some level that wasn’t true.

Seunghyun slowly lowered the mask to her face. “Just relax and breathe normally,” he said.

As she breathed in the gas, she felt herself begin to drift away and all she could think about was how she—her self, her very identity—was, in fact, drifting away. When she would wake, that person would be gone, at least on the outside. All this time, she had been calm, albeit a bit anxious, but for a moment, just a split second before the gas overwhelmed her, the fear that she had been suppressing all this time suddenly took hold and her thoughts raced with raw realizations: that she was crazy, that this entire idea was crazy, and that she wouldn’t be able to handle any of it. But most of all, what she realized was what she had never before been able to admit: that she needed help, serious help.

That was her last conscious thought.

Sumin tried to open her eyes but the brightness was unbearable. She could hear Seunghyun calling for her, his deep voice whispering for her to wake up, but his words were garbled. She opened to speak but, as she did, a sudden pain rippled throughout her face, somewhat paralyzing her in that she couldn’t move or even think; she could just feel, and what she felt was like no other pain she’d ever experienced. Her skin and the underlying muscles felt taut, seemingly stretched so tightly that she was sure it would all soon give out and break wide open, leaving her with no face at all. There was a numbness to the pain, but not a numbness that dulled the severity; instead, it seemed only to enhance the foreignness of the face, like touching a part of oneself that had fallen asleep and not registering the touch as one’s own. Inside this numbness, there were sparks of what she could only assume were nerves twitching in shock. Her eyes began to blink in sync with these twitches, almost uncontrollably.

“Help,” Sumin mumbled, as she tried to control her blinking and open her eyes. “Please.”

Seunghyun pushed the mounted ceiling lamp away, the light leaving the operating table and now illuminating the photos of Taeyeon still strewn across the nearby metal tabletop. “You’re okay,” he said. “I know you’re in a lot of pain, but I just started a morphine drip. You should feel relaxed soon.”

“I want to see,” Sumin said, as she brought her hands to her face. Immediately upon touching her face, she began to panic, feeling what seemed not like skin but instead something rough, something dead. Just as she was about to claw at it, she felt Seunghyun pull her hands away.

“Don’t,” he said, sternly. “It’s just gauze.”

Sumin continued touching her face, no longer clawing, but exploring. The gauze seemed to cover her head completely, leaving only her eyes and mouth exposed. “I need to take this off,” she said, as she struggled to sit up.

“Just relax,” Seunghyun said. He gently placed his hand on her chest in an attempt to keep her down, but Sumin pushed his hand aside and forcefully sat up. She then reached around her head, both hands searching for the end of the gauze so that she could unwrap her face and see what had been done. Seunghyun slowly backed away, apparently not interested in fighting with her. “I told you before, you’re not going to look like her right away. There’s going to be swelling, a lot of it. And bruising.”

Sumin ignored him and began unwrapping the gauze, growing more anxious with each layer that she unraveled. When the last of the gauze fell from her face, she slowly reached up to touch her skin, her fingers gliding over the lumpy, swollen wreck that was now her face. “Oh my god,” she whispered, her eyes instantly tearing up.

“Sumin, please,” Seunghyun said, walking over to her.

Sumin swung her legs over the side of the cot and nearly tripped over her IV line as she fumbled to her feet in search of a mirror.

“Sumin, just wait a minute,” Seunghyun said, as he followed her around the room.

She found a small hand mirror on the metal tabletop beside the photos of Taeyeon, and quickly held it up to her face. What she saw was neither Taeyeon nor Sumin, but instead some sort of monstrous hybrid. She held a hand to her cheek, feeling—and now seeing—the blotchy bloatedness stippled with dots of dried blood along the sutures. Her eyes were merely slits embedded in the swelling, with the encircling bruising a deep purple, and the eye bags beneath red and puffed out like massive blood blisters.

“I told you it would look bad at first,” Seunghyun said, reaching for her. “It needs to heal. Just let me put the gauze back on.”

Sumin wanted to lash out at him and accuse him of doing this to her on purpose, but the moment her new face tensed up in anger, she felt intolerable pain. The anger was still there, boiling within her, but her facial muscles were stiff and wouldn’t allow her to express it. With no way to release her anger, she felt like some sort of pressurized chamber, ready to blow.

She lost herself in that moment, overcome by another blackout. What happened during this time was gone, just another lapse in her memory.

When she awoke from this lapse, she found herself back on the operating cot. The surgical lamp above her had been turned off. The room was lit only by the glow of Seunghyun’s phone. He was sitting on the stool with his back to her as he hunched over his phone, staring at the screen. Sumin slowly sat up and peered over his shoulder, seeing then that he was staring at a photo of her, apparently taken just before the surgery, when she was lying unconscious from the anesthesia.

Suddenly realizing that she was awake, Seunghyun fumbled with his phone, trying to cover the screen.

“You took a picture of me?” Sumin asked.

He must have realized he had been caught because he sort of slumped at that moment, as if giving up. “Yeah,” he quietly said, as he turned the screen back on. The image was still open. “I just wanted to remember your face.”

Sumin turned away, not wanting to look at the image of her old face. “What happened before? I just remember being so mad…”

“You called me a monster,” Seunghyun said. He put his phone away and the stool to face her. “You said you always knew I was a monster from the moment you met me and that I only did this surgery so that I could make you a monster, too.”

“I don’t remember saying that.” Sumin knew then that she must have had one of her blackouts. She bit down on her lower lip, wondering exactly what she had done. “Did I hurt you?” she asked.

“You tried,” Seunghyun said, standing up now. He seemed to tower over her, making Sumin feel quite small at that moment, but then he walked away, his figure but a shadow in that room.

Sumin watched him as he leaned against the wall with a sigh, looking at her from afar.

“I upped the morphine,” he quietly said, as he lit a cigarette. “You shouldn’t be feeling any pain.”

Sumin looked at the IV in her arm. It was true, she didn’t feel any pain. She didn’t feel anything at all. It was like an eerie calmness had come over her. She reached back up to touch her face again, noticing then that he had rewrapped her head in the gauze. She tried not to think about what her face looked like beneath the bandages. “How long before it heals?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Seunghyun said. “For just one procedure, it might take a week for the bruising to go away, and maybe another two weeks for the swelling to be completely gone. But you’ve had multiple procedures, pretty much every type of facial surgery there is. I’ve never done something like this, all at once like this…”

He was still talking but Sumin had stopped listening. She had just wanted a straight answer, a definitive timeline, and once she realized that he was as clueless as she was, she began to think about other things. She realized that if she was in hell before the surgery, she was in some sort of limbo now, straddling ground between her old life and the new one she would soon lead. In the meantime, she had no face—not a real one, anyway. She had the face of a monster, though this was only temporary, she reminded herself. It was just the world’s way of trying to bring her down and make her suffer one last time. “Well, however long it takes, I’ll endure it,” Sumin said, interrupting him.

Seunghyun took a drag off his cigarette and breathed the smoke out slowly. “We both will,” he said.