HUMILIATION of a SAMURAI

eight MARGARET part two

It was dark outside when I awoke on the couch in the front room, nestled among piles of apparel like a fast-fashion dragon lounging on her gaudy hoard. My phone flashed beside a crushed carton of cold McNuggets and a half-empty bottle of wine. I had no memory of leaving the apartment. I definitely didn't remember phoning the hospital administrator's cell number, but her business card was on the coffee table and my outgoing call log proved I had.

She left a voicemail confirming my appointment at Moorfields Eye Hospital at eight o'clock.

Please dress comfortably and get plenty of rest. You'll be sitting through a marathon of procedures that normally take place over the span of weeks.

Clearly the NHS were eager to do the right thing in short order and close the book on their burden of care.

I bit the tags off a pair of sweatpants with sequined broadswords running down the legs. Pulled a snakeskin-patterned peasant blouse over my head and tried to keep the floppy sleeves out of the sink as I washed up and waited for an Uber to take me to Moorfields.

An ocularist came in on her day off to create my prosthetic. Joanna lost her eye to cancer in her twenties. After a brief consultation she filled the void in my head with a fast-setting alginate. The hardened lump she removed looked like a nibbled bit of saltwater taffy.

The firmed alginate was packed into a plaster mold and while that was curing Joanna painted a copy of my iris. We spent hours seated knee to knee, often close enough to kiss as she mixed pigments and referenced the real thing. Despite a lot of sneaky staring, I couldn't figure out which of her eyes was made of glass.

"I'm blinkered on the same side as you," she said. "We're twinsies. And prosthetics are rarely made of glass. We use an acrylic compound."

Joanna cast a wax model of my eye. I mastered the technique of installing and removing the off-white oblong countless times as she worked from a tinker's quiver of tiny tools, shaving away layers thinner than skin to perfect the fit.

We stopped for a break in the afternoon. Joanna was applying another dose of topical anesthetic to my aching eye socket when her colleague arrived with doughnuts and a tray of tall lattes. She launched her wheeled chair across the floor and commandeered the refreshments as Stuart put on a lab coat and washed his hands.

"Stuart, you magnificent bastard," Joanna said, paddling her feet to scoot her chair alongside mine. She put a cup in my hand and peered into the paper sack on her lap.

"Margaret, this is Stuart, my mentor. He's a bino so technically he's not one of us, but I promise he's a genuine diamond. The man knows everything about prosthetics except for the experience of actually losing an eye. Six years ago he fitted my first piece and encouraged me to become an ocularist."

Stuart smiled warmly and sat down with a dad-grunt. He removed the lid from his latte and blew tiny ripples over the swirled surface.

"I saw a glimmer of aptitude and ambition in this one," he said, nodding toward Joanna.

He took a long sip and stared wistfully into his cup.

"Now I believe I was looking at the wrong eye."

Joanna stopped rummaging through the doughnuts and slowly lifted her middle finger from the sack.

"You and your horse, mate," she said.

Stuart smiled, set his cup on the glowing white workbench behind him. He squared up in front of me and clapped his hands on his thighs.

"Shall we?" he asked.

Joanna munched on a doughnut as Stuart held the artificial iris beside mine to inspect the color. He uncapped a Sharpie, marked the center of the wax eye and compared its alignment to my eye as I looked up and down, left and right.