My $50,000 Dream

I walk the streets of my hometown I haven’t visited in several years, reminiscing about my childhood and youth spent here. I stop near my former home, a five-story apartment block, and look at the windows of my apartment. I had a pretty good life there with my mom and sister, and now I’m trying to imagine who lives there and if they enjoy the apartment as much as we did.

“Lana??? Is that you?” I suddenly hear a vaguely familiar voice and turn to it.

“Yes?” I respond, unsure if I should engage. I recognize the woman immediately after I see her. She was one of our nasty neighbors I never really liked, who apparently still lives in the same apartment she lived with her family many years ago.

“Oh my God, you look so old!” she exclaims. “If every wrinkle is a mark of bad experience, you must be having a really hard life.”

I’m dumbfounded. She is as wonderfully passive-aggressive and insulting as she always was, and I again feel like a little girl she was scolding for no reason at all. She must be in her 80s now and obviously doesn’t look in the mirror often if she thinks I look old. Or perhaps she is just as in love with herself as she always was.

“Mom, how could you say things like that! It’s just cruel and rude!” I hear another vaguely familiar voice from behind. It’s her son Alex, slightly younger than me, an adult man now in whom I can’t even see the teenager he was when I left.

“Lana, don’t take this too close to your heart. Mom is getting worse and blunter as she ages,” he says, smiling broadly.

The woman waves him off dismissively and goes home. Alex lingers, asking me questions about my life in America and sharing his news. I try to answer with “yes” or “no,” without elaborating too much. I feel uncomfortable about the interaction and am looking for a way out.

“You know, we could do something about that,” Alex finally says.

“About what?”

“Your wrinkles,” he air-circles my face with his index finger. “My good friend is a cosmetic surgeon, he could help.”

“I like my wrinkles, thank you very much.”

“Oh, c’mon, no one likes wrinkles. Don’t you want to look younger?”

“I know exactly how I look.”

“Well, a procedure like the one my friend can give you will be a fraction of the cost of what you’d pay for it in America.”

“Alex, I am totally fine with natural ageing.”

“Would you at least go there with me, so that we could show you around and you could see if his clinic is really as cutting-edge as it is in America?”

For some reason, I have trouble saying “no” and we end up at this friend’s clinic. The doctor, named Victor, shows me around his pristine, modern medical facility, telling me along the way how he could help me with my “problem.”

“I have no problem with my face, thank you very much,” I am afraid the second cycle of the same conversation is coming up. Alex is nowhere to be found.

“But every woman wants to look younger than her true age,” Victor tells me.

“Well, then you’ve met one woman who doesn’t,” I say.

“Let me at least show you our facilities with non-invasive treatments,” Victor says.

I reluctantly agree, just to be polite. He takes me to a room with what looks like advanced massage chairs.

“Would you at least agree to our face massage and LED-light therapy?” Victor asks.

“Oh, I have an LED-light facial mask at home that I use every day,” I say.

“Ah, it makes sense now why your skin looks so even and radiant, minus…” he is looking for the word.

“Vitiligo,” I say. “I’ve had it since childhood.”

“The red-light therapy is supposed to help with that as well,” Victor says. “Do you feel any difference?”

“Not particularly, but then I don’t use the red light only. I have the mask on the setting that runs all the lights on rotation,” I respond.

“So, would you like to try it here then, for a full half-hour session?”

I hesitate at first, but then think, how much can it cost if my entire mask was $200 when I bought it. Certainly, I can afford it. I agree and am immediately invited to a chair by a pleasant and friendly aesthetician. She then gives me a drink that has an unfamiliar but exciting smell.

“I hope it’s not a drug?” I ask, as if jokingly.

“Of course not,” Victor responds, laughing. “It’s mainly the heart of the lotus flower, to enhance the effects of the procedure.”

“Alright then,” I drink the delicious tea-like warm substance and lie down on the chair. The aesthetician puts a mask on me that looks exactly like mine at home, even with the same controls I recognize right away.

“Please, no microcurrent stimulation,” I plead. “It irritates and burns my skin even on lowest settings.”

“As you wish,” the aesthetician says as Victor leaves the room.

I lie there under the mask, and the drink makes me feel relaxed and a little light-headed, almost hallucinatory. My mind churns out all sorts of scenarios and stories I wish I could write up.

Finally, 30 minutes end and the aesthetician takes the mask off my face. I rub off the traces of the microcurrent stimulators on my forehead. Even inactive, they dug into my skin under the mask’s weight.

“How do you feel?” she asks.

“Good. I have exactly the same mask at home,” I respond, “so the sensation is not new for me.”

“Would you like to take a look at yourself?” she asks and gives me a hand-held mirror. I take a peek and see a significantly younger face with no vitiligo blotches.

“Wow, I wish I knew red light could take it all off in just one session!” I say.

“It’s not just the red light, it’s also our proprietary drink formula.”

“With the heart of the lotus flower?” I ask, already thinking where I could get the online recipe.

“Yes, as the main ingredient. But there’s a lot more in it, including high mountain herbs and other rare plant essences.”

“And of course you won’t tell me the other ingredients,” I say half-joking.

“Of course. We want you to come back here for more sessions,” she says.

“Well, at least you are honest about it,” I say appreciatively.

“You must be getting hungry?” the aesthetician suggests.

“As a matter of fact, I am. Is that also the drink’s effect?” I ask.

“Partly,” she smiles back at me. “There’s a cafeteria near the lobby.”

“Thank you. And where should I pay for the treatment?”

“The billing kiosk is there as well,” she responds politely and disappears into another room.

I go back to the lobby and head straight to the cafeteria. The prices there make my head spin. So expensive, and all in dollars, not the local currency. The cafeteria lady senses my hesitation and says, “If you’ve had any procedure done here, you can order anything you want. It’s a part of the package.”

I order chorba, i.e. my favorite Turkish red lentil soup, a salmon croissant sandwich with tomato and lemon basil, and a small tiramisu for dessert with herbal tea. Everything tastes divine and I enjoy the food, eating alone at a small table.

When I am almost done with my lunch, Victor emerges out of nowhere and joins me at the table.

“How did you like the treatment?” he asks.

“It was great!” I say, trying to finish chewing the last piece of the sandwich.

“And the food?”

“Absolutely delicious. What was in that drink? It made me hungry and seems to have awakened a new appreciation of food in me,” I say, genuinely impressed.

“It’s our proprietary formula,” Victor says, smiling enigmatically.

“That’s what your aesthetician said.”

“How would you like to pay for the services rendered?” Victor abruptly shoots at me.

“Do you accept credit cards?”

“Of course, we are not on some ancient periphery anymore. Fully integrated into the international financial system. Visa or MasterCard?”

“Visa,” I tell him, pulling the credit card out of my wallet.

He gives my credit card to one of his employees, asking her to run it for red-light therapy. We chat while we wait, and I gush about everything around as a truly happy customer.

The woman brings back my card about ten minutes later and says, “Your card has been declined.”

“That cannot be!” I say. “I just used it two days ago in Istanbul and put in the travel advisory. It should be working fine.”

I hear a ping of an incoming text on my phone. “An attempted charge exceeds your credit limit. For your security, your card has been blocked.”

I translate the message to Victor. “My card has a credit limit of thirty thousand dollars. How much was your charge?”

“Fifty thousand,” he says confidently, staring at me without blinking.

“What?? In what world does one session of red-light facial therapy cost fifty thousand dollars?”

“In our world of luxury services for successful and rich people. We sell these elite treatments as a package, ten sessions at five thousand each. The session also includes a very rare drink formula and lunch you enjoyed so much.”

“Five thousand dollars for a 30-minute session of red-light therapy I can have at home at any time? Using a two-hundred-dollar mask? Even with the drink and lunch, it’s absurdly expensive!”

“Not for our clients. We are providing luxury services to wealthy clients. They don’t care about how much the mask costs, they care about the treatment and service we provide.”

“That might be, but you cannot charge me for the sessions that I haven’t had yet. It’s illegal. You can charge me only for the services rendered.”

“If you pay only for one session you will never come back,” Victor gives me a predatory smile.

“You bet I won’t, this is a ripoff!” I exclaim, and other clients around us give me dirty looks.

“Please do not be hysterical,” Victor says, waving in a couple of security guys who come up to tower over me. “You are disturbing our clients. We don’t need a scandal by a freeloading client here.”

I suddenly feel deflated and judged as if I’ve done something illegal. “Please give me the bill for five thousand dollars and let’s be done with it.”

“Your total bill is fifty thousand dollars,” Victor says, not wavering.

“I don’t have that kind of money,” I respond quietly, totally defeated by his brazenness.

“You can apply for a loan with us,” he says. “Our lending department will be happy to help.”

I finally wake up, relieved to be free from the dream. It was one of those incredibly realistic lucid dreams I have sometimes, when I know it’s just a dream and I can will myself out of it at any point.

Here is the thing that kept me in: I indeed have an LED facial mask at home for skin therapy. I bought it about ten years ago, when the technology was new, in the hope that it would help me keep my vitiligo contained. I used it faithfully for about a year but did not see visible results and it was just sitting at home.

Then I left the country for Georgia and after I came back several people pointed out that I looked “fresh” and less stressed. Coincidentally, another friend asked me if I knew anything about LED facial therapy for her rosacea. I remembered about my mask and let her try it out for a week. She thought that she felt the results almost immediately and decided to buy the mask for herself.

So, I started using the mask again every day before bed, running half of the session on red light only and the second half – on rotating lights. I often think about how science-fictional this would have sounded even 15 years ago: I now go to bed wearing an electronic mask that shines different wavelengths of light into my skin.

I’ve been doing that for over a month now and I know that it works because the vitiligo spots on my chin and neck are almost gone. I don't really know if the mask deserves the credit. It might be a coincidence, a placebo effect, or simply my vitiligo blotches traveling as they do, but I have the change documented in before-and-current photos. It also gives me a little more confidence in my appearance, changing my life in tiny subtle ways.