understated, perfectly clipped mustache like an accent mark over a bon mot when he uttered a witticism…
And yet there was another face under that one waiting to come out. Did he dare to find his
“Doctor? Miss Pleasance is waking up…”
He glanced up at the doorway, where his assistant waited for him: Miss Chavez, a small, pretty Puerto Rican woman in a white uniform, white shoes, nurse’s cap. She didn’t seem surprised to find him gazing into the mirror.
Chavez was a petite little creature with a heart-shaped face, Cupid’s-bow lips. Could he find that
All in good time. “Ah—yes, go ahead and begin unwrapping her face, Miss Chavez; I’ll be right there…”
Miss Sylvia Pleasance was engaged to Ronald Greavy, son of the Ruben Greavy who worked closely with Ryan. They were an influential family in Rapture.
He stubbed his cigarette out on the seashell ashtray on his desk and walked down the hall. Stretched out in the recovery room, Miss Pleasance was wearing a nightgown and socks. She had a sheet draped modestly over her. Look at those fat little arms. Too bad he couldn’t cut into those fat little arms and reduce them. Perhaps down to the bone. Even expose the bone in places. Like ivory jewelry…
Nurse Chavez had cranked the upper part of the patient’s bed to a forty-five-degree angle and was beginning to unwind the bandages. Miss Pleasance’s large green eyes were gazing out at him from the gaps in the mummylike facial wrap with a mixture of fear and anticipation. Her red hair spilled almost stylishly over one side of the bandage. He thought, once more, that there might be a certain appeal to leaving the bandages on—forever. One would see only the hair and eyes—and mystery. Like a mummy…
Sylvia Pleasance’s face was slowly revealed… Nurse Chavez gasped…
And clapped her hands together. “Isn’t she lovely, Doctor! You’ve done a wonderful job!”
He sighed resignedly: it was true. All quite lovely. He hadn’t done anything experimental with this woman. He was trying not to do anything unusual in his new practice. Just give them what they wanted. But it was hard. The temptation had been strong…
She had a conventionally attractive, delicately sculpted face now, with dimples on her pale cheeks, a matching dimple in her chin. It was a sweetly rounded visage but with all the unpleasant chunkiness gone. Her fiance would probably be pleased. She looked rather like an adult Shirley Temple. How tiresome. But the Pleasance woman cooed over her reflection when Nurse Chavez gave her the hand mirror.
“Oh, Doctor! It’s perfect! God bless you!”
“Yes, yes,” he muttered, approaching, taking her chin in his hands, turning her head from side to side, looking at it under the light from the gooseneck lamp. “Yes, only… I cannot escape the feeling that there is more, far more, to be done… some hidden perfection lurking underneath this pretty little mask!”
“What?” Miss Pleasance seemed startled. She swallowed and drew back from him. “I…” She frowned and looked at herself again in the hand mirror. Turned her head this way and that. “No! This
He shrugged. “Just as you like. I simply think…” Thinking to himself:
But aloud he said, “I’m so glad you’re pleased with the results. Go ahead and let her get dressed, Nurse, release her to her fiance, and I’ll, uh…” He turned vaguely and walked, as if through a dream, back to his office.
The way Aphrodite would want him to…
It was late. Fontaine’s office was closed, the shades drawn. Reggie was somewhere outside, keeping watch. Fontaine and Tenenbaum were alone in the fisheries’ office on a comfortable sofa. Brigid Tenenbaum was stretched out, wearing a negligee and red pumps. Fontaine was half-sitting on the edge, leaning over her, her hands clasped in his. Beside them on the floor was an empty Worley wine bottle and their glasses. Fontaine wore only his boxers and a T-shirt. His clothes were folded neatly on a chair at his desk across the room.
She seemed frightened, and yet he could see anticipation in her eyes too when she glanced at him and— as always—looked quickly away.
“You look kinda scared,” he said. “You sure about this?”
“I… do not like to be touched,” she said. “But… I need it, when the feelings of desire come. What I dream of is a man who… who simply
“Well, kid,” he said, using his ‘voice of reassurance,’ “you came to the right shop.” She’d cleaned up rather nicely and put on some perfume, even seemed to have brushed the cigarette stains off her teeth. “So this is something you haven’t done exactly—but you… imagined?” he asked.
“Yes. I am afraid to touch. But I
“What they call a contradiction in terms. That’s you, eh?”
“Perhaps. Now… please… put the blindfold on me.”
“Oh yeah.” He took the black blindfold from his pocket and tied it over her eyes. “There. You can’t see me now.”
“No… now that I cannot see you… you can touch me—if you hold my arms down…”
He pressed her arms back by her wrists to either side of her head and stretched out on her, pressing his hips to hers. She tried to twist away—but she wasn’t trying hard.
“Just remember,” Fontaine said as he did his duty, enjoying it more than he’d thought he would, “you want it done your way—you do your work my way. You work exclusively for me…”
Bill McDonagh felt a bit foolish taking the Journey to the Surface ride alone. It was made for Rapture’s children, really, to “satisfy their curiosity” about the surface world. Supposedly. In a few years his child would want to go on a ride in Rapture’s only amusement park. Bill wanted to know, in advance, if what he’d heard about the ride was true. If it was, the ride would probably upset Elaine…
He’d been here before to do some maintenance work, but he hadn’t taken the tour. He’d bought a ticket and everything.
Now he climbed into the ride car—shaped like an open bathysphere—and settled back. It lurched into motion and then creaked along its track into the tunnel.
The car rumbled slowly past an animatronic mannequin of Andrew Ryan sitting at his desk, looking almost fatherly. The mannequin moved and gestured, in a herky-jerky way, and “talked”:
