“Honestly, I’ve just been focusing on me. It’s all been so hard lately. Barely treading water.”
This she says to me over the wall separating our lie-flat business-class pods on the flight back home. We are returning after recovery from the same voluntary surgical procedure, a new Vietnamese treatment which dulls the function of the hypothalamus. It’s a little structure, deep in the brain, that connects the endocrine and nervous systems. The cosmetic benefits were discovered by accident; originally developed for patients with PTSD-induced migraines, patients saw unexpected, miraculous improvements in the elasticity of their facial muscles, as well as a marked reduction in feelings of stress.
For brain surgery, it’s a surprisingly simple procedure. At a clinic in Hanoi, the doctors slide an exquisitely thin needle directly through the back of your neck, through your brain stem and into the gland. The needle is so thin it passes through the brain tissue without causing injury. Once the needle is in place, they inject a few microliters of an extremely potent neurotoxin into one substructure of the hypothalamus, causing cell death, effectively cutting the connection between the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland.
The white office, a blast of icy cold air in the summer humidity. Winter is the best time to visit Hanoi, of course. But winter is our annual crunch and I needed to show my face in person during bonus season, leaving May and June for the week off. So my car to the hospital, ultra premium, lost the battle against our environment, the cooling system chugging laboriously as we rolled through the crowded city center.
It is an open question how exactly the procedure cuts ten years off your face. Nevertheless, intrepid capital allocators brave the steamy streets in private cars for a taste of youth and serenity. Nobody knows how long they’ve been doing it. Every so often some executive, usually from the world of technology or finance, disappears for a month or so and progress grinds to a halt. When he or she emerges, looking reinvigorated but unhurried, the company jerks in a violent new direction with certainty and ease. The traders have begun monitoring private flight logs to pre-empt movements in the market. The market, in turn, brutally efficient engine of heat death, opens the gates. A treatment for tycoons becomes accessible to those like me who flit around them silent, underfoot.
After the initial swelling went down I awoke to the the professionally austere nursing staff. In face shields and surgical masks, placing a pair of matte-finish, blurring dark glasses over my eyes, their leader told me to expect about three weeks before full function returned. A side effect of the procedure, apparently, is an extreme defense response from the limbic system. Cut off from regular signalling, some patients report overwhelming violent reflexes on seeing a human face, including one’s own.
That night we fly home, Hanoi to New York, nonstop. The tycoons wait it out in their island retreats; we return to work, teleconferencing to avoid putting our colleagues’ heads through a screen. The trip is eighteen uninterrupted hours. Until recently none of the major carriers flew direct; the procedure’s rising popularity doubtless has something to do with it. Craning my neck to look around the cabin, I can make out the hazy outlines of dark glasses and face coverings adorning a number of other passengers. It is a brave new world we return to, gliding sleek and unbothered past our competition and above the heads of those late on the uptake, still trapped in an outmoded way of life. Why worry?
I turn my attention, if not my face, back to the passenger to my left. Her mask is bright yellow, a distinct pop of color against the fuzzy gray cabin. I remember she was saying something about work.
“…and the last sprint was just so awful. I’m up for the same promotion this year, and honestly, if I don’t get it, who knows?”
I nod, sagely, my brow reflexively knit in sympathy. But she can’t see my face, nor I hers.
“So what about you? You’ve been pretty quiet. Why’d you get it?”
Honestly I don’t know. Because my director did? Because I know he’s weak, even with his new lizardlike outlook? People used to say Zili’s judgment was clouded with fear. They were, of course, wrong; his new smooth, slack, beautiful face is perfect for what’s behind it. But where this knowledge once stirred a deep well of anger I now feel a dispassionate interest, as though watching a coin spiral around a shallow bowl, ever lower, converging at the center to a donation slot.
“The same. More or less,” I manage.
“How so? What do you do?” Does she cock her head? I’m not totally sure. Either way it’s within the glasses’ margin of error.
“I practice law.”
“Oh - what kind?”
It’s a short, two-toned ‘oh’, inflected up the kind where the notes in sequence suggest polite interest not really felt.
“Corporate. Well, specifically-”
I’m about to launch into my pro forma pitch, honed over so many first dates, sat at cute low-lit bars in the city next to some other sleek manager more excited for the dick-measuring on paper than anything in the flesh. I was about to work in how I just made partner, how we’re a little white-shoe firm, oh, you might have heard of us, until I realize how unimportant this actually is to me right now. Once her disinterest would have stirred something in my chest, made me want to collect her, possess her, defeat her, but now I’m just reacting as though I feel that way out of habit.
Suddenly we’re interrupted. There’s commotion behind us; we both turn our bodies to squint back down the hall toward the main cabin, where shouts and grunts signal a scuffle. Down the hallway, through the thin mesh curtain dividing us, I see two men, glasses askew and face-masks pulled down to their necks. They stand in the aisle, locked together in struggle, arms on each other’s shoulders. In a few seconds one twists the other into a headlock; just as quickly, a third, even bigger man wrestles them apart.
The other bespectacled, masked denizens of the business-class cabin have risen from their pods, dropping headphones to around their necks, to watch the commotion. I hear one of the men spit something short and nasty and Slavic at the other, who climbs onto a nearby seat, jumps at the interloper and lays him out with an elbow. The other guy jumps on him too. I hear a crash, scattered screams and shouts from the captive audience in coach. More big men, definitely bigger than an average stewardess, rush past us down the aisle to intervene. I wonder if they’ve picked the crew with this kind of thing in mind. A voice comes over the intercom asking us to return to our seats and enjoy the entertainment, which we all do without a second thought. I put my headphones on, but instead of selecting a movie, I keep the noise-cancelling off and listen to the sounds of the ongoing scuffle.
It takes a few minutes to subdue the two fighters. Finally, one, flanked by those huge orderlies but walking freely, crosses over into our cabin and sits down in one of the empty pods near the front. Someone has puts his glasses back on and he seems calm. I look back to my seat-mate, expecting entertaining, indignant service-based outrage, but she’s silent. Nobody in the cabin seems to care. The man pulls on a mask and noise-cancelling headphones and lies back. Someone gives a short ‘hmm’ of approval.
I wonder if he has the capacity for embarrassment anymore. I wonder if I do either. I turn my attention back to the entertainment screen in front of me and pull up a familiar title. I can’t see any of the characters clearly but I know the dialogue by heart. I lie back and let it wash over me.