Rambo Radhakrishnan's Third Eye

 

The anaesthesiologist’s slap on Rambo Radhakrishnan’s face sent a judder along his jowls, his body corpse-cold except for the micromovements of his chest. The anaesthesiologist looked up at Dr. Mandalay and Tony Pee, cocking his head as if to connote that if this wasn’t a job well done, he didn’t know what was. Once Mandalay nodded, the anaesthesiologist dissolved into the shadows.

Latex snapped on Mandalay’s hands, and he wiggled his fingers under the OT light. He hovered above a panel of surgical instruments.

 

“Examen du corps.” 

 

Tony Pee was Tony Chengayyi (Friend Tony), Tonykuttan (Little Tony), Tiki Tons, Anthony Pullickal, stout and ready, his avuncular moustache bristling under a surgical mask. He was for decades Rambo’s handler and man Friday. 

 

Mandalay rolled the sheet down sleeping Rambo’s colossal neck, stopping just at his uppermost rib. He pressed his fingers down on his pecs, the skin thick and taut until it turned into creased paper around his armpits.

 

“The double whammy. Liposuction and mammaplasty. Somebody local?”

 

“Dr. Suleyman from Ankara. Do you know him?” 

 

“I’ve heard of him. Done quite well, I must say. Why not go back to him?” 

 

“He’s on some sort of indefinite sabbatical. An artistic reset.” 

 

Mandalay chuckled. “Cosmetic surgeons and autohagiography. I will say though, that around here we typically begin our consultation with the patient conscious.”

 

“Rambo trusts me implicitly,” Tony said. “He hates consultations.”

 

“Hmmm.” Mandalay swept the sheet down more quickly to expose the thatch of Rambo’s pubic hair, his ropy penis flopping to the right of his testicles. “I’ve observed this among other South Indian clients. Corps géré.” 

 

Tony, taking some umbrage, pointed at Rambo’s massive frame. “He is a load-bearing pillar of our film industry. He is what you might call in Los Angeles a franchise. He, this, is what I reproduce. Are you so wishy-washy about your corporate enterprises here in the United States? It only seems absurd because there are so many of your muscle men on the big screen, all so similar.”

 

“Fair enough. Incidentally, I was going to ask how such a fat man could ever have become a movie star.”   

 

In Rambo’s dream, he remembered the brightest woman he had ever fucked running her thumb along his brow ridge, whispering that the eyes, chico, they never lie. Because this happened so soon after a Bollywood director called him the Al Pacino of the East, it felt extra good.

 

Mandalay began with the botox injection.

 

“Easy does it, though I can see these procedures are starting to stack up. Past a point, will it not read as a hair overt? Disingenuous, even?” 

 

Tony Pee clicked his tongue. “Better to beat the risk of aging out. I’ll tell you, there’s no coming back from that.”

 

Mandalay hissed breath through the second injection.

 

“But for an artist like him to not even care.” 

 

“On the contrary, to audiences, this is to go down kicking and screaming. This is putting up a fight. Again, I would've expected you to more straightforwardly understand the concept of investing in a body. In your line of work.” 

 

Rambo was a mud-wrestler and then a heavy in the late black-and-whities, jobs he took to escape the clench in his jaw from being a fat, useless fuck. There, he was at an ideal vantage point to examine a sensitivity in the leads he worked with, a protagonizing force that made them distinct from a nondescript thug like him. After he pretended to get pummeled by them, he spent his days off meditating and discovered a single point of competitive advantage in the bundle of muscles and nerves between his eyes—what Osho would refer to as his inward looking third eye. Even as a dumb lug, he realized that, owing to its sensitivity, this third eye could not be trained through brute progressive overload. He would just have to stare at the camera’s big, cranking black spiral and let its currents project the audience back through the sinews and blubber of his outsized body, until his inward looking third eye would begin to pick up the vibrations and puppeteer the subtle movements of his regular eyes. So, in his eyes emerged an anomalous talent. A strange set of interstitial movies followed, coinciding with the industry’s shift from black-and-white to early colour—in which he played heavies searing with sensitivity against the already stale antics of the leading men. Rambo Radhakrishnan became the protagonist in a new age of realist technique.

 

“The whole ‘body’ thing is a bit of mythologizing you’ve done on my behalf, Anthony. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

 

Dr. Mandalay began the preauricular incision, smart swoops of the blade against blue lines.

 

“But now that we’re on the subject, let me tell you a strange story. A couple of months ago, Arizona PD brought me on as an expert consultant. Out there, apparently, there’s a serial murderer who makes all the right cuts, but then uses his own cum instead of hyaluronic acid or any other conventional cosmetic filler. Arizona PD’s expectations of me were… what, I don’t know. They thought I could identify a signature in his handiwork and be able to find them their killer. This myth, I tell you, that we are beyond physicians. That there could be some ineffable sign of artistry beyond the innovations we celebrate in peer-reviewed journals.” 

 

Tony thought about it.

 

“If they haven’t found the guy, how do they know it’s his own cum?” 

 

Mandalay stopped. “I suppose you’re right. It could be everybody’s cum. Sorry, I mean, anybody’s cum.”

 

The propofol usually kept Rambo sedated, but his third eye was reacting to the botulinum toxin massaging its peripheral fibres. It appeared in his dream as the bright woman: the divorced classical dance instructor he first met at the Osho ashram. Though that room in the Mambalam Lodge reeked of cigarettes, which she hated, she still said she loved how he never ditched his wrestling name.

 

“Baby,” Rambo smiled, delighted to be so well seen, and pressed down on the large gap between her breasts. “Let’s fuck.”

 

He loved, more than anything, to fuck, and to touch the folds of her temple dancer body. She asked if he knew that the last time they did this, he had put a baby inside her.

 

“No, I didn’t!”

 

She said she knew the baby had inherited Rambo’s talent, which she could tell from the way it kicked. She said it didn’t matter if he abandoned her (which he was known to have done a couple of times) because between the baby’s eyes was the dawn of a new allele, which would be naturally selected, and so his true artistic legacy would be embedded in the genome, not die with celluloid.

 

“That’s amazing!”

 

His progeny would carry him beyond film and digital, into new, unheard-of forms he would never live to see. Awe seized his rocking glee.

 

“Should we stop? Will this hurt the baby?”

 

Her teeth dug into his shoulder, giggles bouncing through their sticky bodies as she said silly boy, not this. 

 

Then what? 

 

“Just the tug now, easy does it.”

 

Mandalay froze as soon as he saw Rambo’s mouth widen to moan. To his eventual regret, he did not use those seconds to extract the scalpel from the corner of Rambo’s forehead. 

 

“I’ve had enough, Tons! This is enough!”

 

Like a hippo thrashing in the coiled maw of a crocodile, Rambo crested up, arms flailing, IV pole slamming on the floor, electrodes ripping off his chest. 

 

“Can you explain to me why he isn’t knocked out?”

 

Mandalay yelled at the sweating, emerging anaesthesiologist.

 

“Can somebody sedate this big motherfucker?” 

 

In the chinashop-bullness of it all, the edge of Mandalay’s scalpel slid through the flap and skirted through the gap between flesh and skull as if Rambo’s skin was a plastic seal around some commodity off the shelf. It met resistance at the thick muscles of Rambo’s glabellar complex, but in one jerk of his meaty head, the blade sliced through. Rambo collapsed flat on his back, his hoggish screams fizzling out into a muttered mantra:

 

“Tony, call him, call the mudmaster, it’s all over, call him, call the mud…”  

 

Tony’s moustache spread out like eagle feathers latticed by his tightening lips, unseen under the mask. He wanted to do something else, instead of walking out of here and waking the lawyers up to initiate an exhausting medical malpractice lawsuit.

 

“Get him out!” Mandalay pointed at him. 

 

“But I didn’t even say anything.”

​

“We’re going to reconstruct all this. It’s what we’re going to do right now.”

 

And then back to the OT.

 

“But somebody get him out, please.” 

 

Turning his back on Rambo’s pitiful trickle, Tony whacked open the doors of the sterile zone with his elbows. Fin du corps. Rambo and he would have to wade through another decade of diminishing returns, but this day marked a definitive dotted line. Not everyone was so lucky, he supposed, to be able to know that for sure. He stood in front of the mirror, looking at the arc of blood flecks across the chest of his scrubs, his gloved-up hands, creased mask, surgical goggles, head cover. You couldn’t see anything about him, really. He could be anybody.