Gia lay back on the operating table like it was a plinth. I pressed my back against the wall, as out of the way as I could be, and hid my face behind the camera’s viewfinder. With a long needle, Doctor Sam administered the anaesthetic to Gia’s face. It would be the facelift first. Her fists clenched but she made no sound. When he stepped back I noticed Gia’s eyes were still moving. It was happening; he was going to keep her awake. I hoped, for her sake, she didn’t regret it. I had worried I might faint at the sight of the scalpel entering her face and gliding through her flesh, but everything felt like a movie through the camera’s viewfinder. A kind of dull, durational horror movie, underscored by the bleeps of heart-monitoring equipment and Doctor Sam’s requests in Spanish for various instruments. At one point he peeled back the outer layer of her skin, revealing what looked like pizza underneath: dark red streaked with fatty orange, yellow, and white tissue. The dermis. The outer layer of epidermis was then stretched upwards like dough and stitched around her forehead and ears, which stuck out untouched from the shifting, bloodied flesh below. I was surprised by how blunt and rudimentary the process was. And all the while, Gia’s eyes darted from side to side watching it unfold, like a waking dreamer caught in sleep paralysis.

After the facelift, as if emerging from a spell, Doctor Sam asked me to please leave the operating theatre. I nodded, turned off my camera, collapsed the tripod, and as I walked out I looked back to see the nurses administering sleeping gas to Gia through a mask. The surgery lasted another two hours. After it was finished, the nurses wheeled Gia back into the room and lifted her into bed. Her face was purple and swollen and she couldn’t speak, but I could tell by her eyes that she was exhilarated. The nurses affixed an IV and morphine drip into her arm and some kind of plastic tube and pouch that collected the yellow fluid draining from the surgical wounds. Before leaving, they replaced some padding between her legs and wrapped Gia’s head in reams of white gauze until she looked like a nun.