While Alex--or Alexis, or whoever
he is--sits in the waiting room at Mt. San Rafael hospital, world renowned for
its innovative surgeons and their breakthroughs in gender reassignment surgery,
he can’t help but wonder what he is doing there. As he stares blankly at the glass
double doors with a decal emblem of the caduceus situated in the center, he remembers
the last time he walked through those doors, splitting the caduceus in half as
he made his exit. At that point he hadn’t received the gender reassignment
surgery he so longed for, but he did leave as a woman.
As a prerequisite to the surgery, he
had to assume the role of a female, his target gender, for a year. For a full
year, he endured the agony of high heels, the constriction of an over-stuffed
bra, and the gawks from both sexes who collectively decided there was a latent
masculinity belying his feminine façade. He suffered through the year so he
could undergo the true transformation he was certain would alleviate his
uncertainties regarding gender and self. He thought that by inverting himself, creating
a void to fill his emptiness, he might restore balance to the body which he
perceived to be perfectly alien to him.
Sitting
in the waiting room of the world-renowned hospital, his year has passed. He is
moments away from the big surgery, and he is suddenly struck with an epiphany.
Examining himself as if from outside himself, like an apparition separate from
his body, he sees someone more alien to him than his previously masculine visage.
He looks at the plum-red lipstick, the eye shadow, the cover-up’s futile
attempt to mask the wiry black hairs sprouting like spider legs on his face,
and he begins to detest the image. At the sudden loss of uncertainty, he resolves
to leave through the double doors, stripping the femininity from himself as he
again splits the caduceus in half.
Alex is
overcome with a sense of calm as he drives away from the hospital. He finally
sees himself. He laughs as he catches a glimpse of his blue eyes in the
rearview mirror of his Toyota Camry. They are heavily laden with green eye shadow,
and the more he looks at them, the more they appear as the eyes on the feathers
of a peacock. As if coming down with a case of Stendhal syndrome, he fixes his eyes
on his eyes. Still driving, however, he slams into the back of a truck stopped at a red light
in front of him.
Upon
impact, his airbag deploys, but a malfunction in the deployment of the airbag
causes it to eject at nearly twice the normal speed. With eyes wide open, the impact
causes both of his eyes to rupture, resulting in immediate blindness. Blood
pours out from his vacant eye sockets, mingling with his green eye shadow. He
appears as Oedipus after he gouged out his eyes with his mother’s brooch. And like Oedipus, he finally sees the truth.
