“Please think about this question, Doctor. Did you ever have the impression that someone apart from Bradley was helping in Fatima’s design?”
I watched his brow furrow while he cocked his head to one side and stared at me. “Really, that is a possibility? I never thought of that, but I did wonder where the marine was getting some of his ideas from. Sometimes he spoke more like an art dealer than a soldier.”
“Any idea where the name Fatima came from?”
A bright look. “Curious, isn’t it? I was present when they decided on her new name. Bradley said: ‘What you gonna call yourself, honey?’ And she said: ‘Fatima, daughter of the Prophet.’ She took us both by surprise, as you would imagine. I realized afterwards that as a Karen she would have been subjected to all sorts of missionaries, Muslims as well as Christians. Bradley said: ‘You sure?’ And she said yes. It was the only thing she was ever uncompromising about.”
He stood up. He was unexpectedly short, no more than five-six; sitting down, he projected power and authority with a fashionably sleazy touch; standing up, he was a small guy with something to prove. “Look, if this is relevant you can have copies.”
On the other side of the room Dr. Surichai kept his computer, a tower on a desk next to a twenty-inch flat screen. I caught a glimpse of a diagram of a penis while the doctor moved the mouse and made keystrokes. He went to a file manager program and called up a file named Fatima. He ran quickly through some graphics of sexual organs, Adam’s apples, then stopped at a diagram of a breast.
“This is the sort of thing I mean.” He nodded at the screen.
Someone had used a computer program to map out the contour of a breast against a green matrix of crisscross lines which seemed to represent a torso. “This is breast diagram number seventy-six. I’m not kidding, he numbered them and sent them to me via e-mail. They’re large graphic files and clogged up my system before I got broadband. You see, this is merely the outline. If I click on the nipple, like so, I get nipple detail.”
The image changed to something which might have been a broken tower from an ancient monument. The dimensions could be measured by reference to the green matrix grid. “You see, he even worked out what size nipple he wanted, how long it should be, the size of the areola. See?” Now the screen was filled with what was recognizably a giant nipple with black areola. “One thing you have to say for the guy, he wasn’t hung up about being black. He was proud of his African roots, which was one thing I rather liked about him.”
“The only thing?”
The doctor shrugged. “As you can imagine, I get all sorts. The fanatically involved lover is a standard character in my line of work, although he’s rarely as intelligent or persistent as Bradley was. What I couldn’t quite get used to, though, was a layman looking on the surgery with such a cold eye. Surgeons have to be like that, but if the patient was my lover, or someone close to me, I don’t think I’d be quite so obsessed with the aesthetics-I’d just want to make sure they achieved the gender identity they craved, on their own terms, to give them psychological relief. After all, that’s what the operation is supposed to be all about. Now look.”
The image changed to a full breast outline, with arrows and incision marks. “He’s even working out exactly how he wants the saline bags to be placed. You see, in breast enlargement you put the saline inserts behind the mammary gland, lay them on the chest cage itself. They’re kept in place by the breast, but they move a little, which gives the realism, which is why everyone these days prefers saline to those ridiculous silicone inserts which set like concrete and actually echo when you tap them!” The doctor made a face of professional revulsion.
“But Bradley here is going one stage further. He wants to measure the precise position of the saline bag, down to the tenth of a millimeter, as if he’s positioning a gun emplacement or something, to achieve precisely the breast contour he’s aiming for. I’ve never come across anything like it. Frankly, when it comes to breasts, there’s a certain leeway-most patients realize that real breasts change shape all the time, depending on whether the woman is standing, sitting, lying down, et cetera, and they’re happy if an enlargement more or less follows nature. But Bradley was aiming for something specific-I suppose a personal erotic image, the tit of his fantasies. Now, you see?” The image changed to a representation of a full torso against the grid, seen from side and front. “He’s actually very good. This is the effect, as he explained to me many times. The breast has to be just slightly large for the torso, but only slightly, giving the appearance of a full, firm bosom, but not something too flappy-that was his word, ‘flappy.’ A lot of men have their own idea about tits, but I’ve never known anyone to analyze it in such detail. Firm, but not unnaturally so, friendly, in other words soft and yielding, large but not so as to make her look top-heavy or overblown-another of his words. I told him he was seeking the impossible-if you want soft and yielding, you have to give up on firm. If you want large and soft, you’re not going to get a constant shape at all, it will change all the time. He would say, ‘I know, Doctor, I know, you have to aim for the perfect balance, that’s all.’ We spent hours, days on her breasts. He really drove me to extremes of detail I’ve never gone to before. In the end we got his perfect tits, and they are rather nice, don’t you think?”
Suddenly I was looking at Fatima, naked to the waist, her familiar breasts pointing at me, that slight smirk on her face as in the portrait opposite Bradley’s bed. “Just tell me, Doctor, while all this was going on-what was Fatima doing? After all, it was her body you two were discussing.”
“ ‘Passive’ is too insulting a word. But she wasn’t inclined to assert herself much, either. Bradley usually visited me on his own, but when she came with him, he was careful to include her. ‘That okay, darling? You’re gonna knock ’em out’-that sort of thing. I think she believed he genuinely wanted the best body for her, and probably had a better understanding of beauty than she did. Also, you have to bear in mind this guy was a very powerful presence. A giant and maybe even a kind of a genius in his way. It was hard for me to argue with him or contradict him. And she adored him, you could see it in her eyes. This guy, this god, came out of the night, turned her whole life around, gave her self-respect-after all, we’re talking about a street prostitute who never had anything, transformed into a kind of a star. She was ready to go along with him in just about everything. I wouldn’t say she was without personality, though. Not passive, just appreciative.”
“You never saw them argue?”
The doctor thought about that one. He frowned. “Not argue exactly, but you have to bear in mind the cultural divide here. Fatima has jungle roots. She would talk about them having sex when it was all over, she would go right to the point of the exercise in other words, and he was a bit of an American prude. He didn’t like to talk about their intimacy in front of me, which Fatima and I both thought was odd. After all, I was building the body he was going to worship, when it was all over. Fatima wanted to be sure her new vagina would satisfy him, would give the full pleasure, but he wasn’t comfortable talking about that. In all our discussions, it was the visual aspect he was interested in, he hardly mentioned what the experience of sexual intercourse was going to be like.”