'I Want Everybod

IN JUNE 2021 AARON JAMES WAS ELECTROCUTED ON THE JOB AND LOST AN EYE AND HALF HIS FACE. A GROUNDBREAKING SURGERY HELPED REBUILD HIS LIFE

- EILEEN FINAN and WENDY GROSSMAN KANTOR

Aaron James loves a mirror these days. "I can't go past one without stopping," says James, turning his head from side to side on a recent Zoom call to show off his new face, clearly still in awe by what he sees. "I'm blown away." In fact, he says with deadpan delivery, "I was hoping I might've got in on People's Sexiest Man Alive!"

In the two years after he was electrocuted while on the job as a lineman in June 2021, James had shunned his own reflection. A handsome, burly, bearded man before the accident, he didn't want to see his changed reality written on his face: scar tissue crisscrossing his cheek; a smooth, closed bump where his nose once was; a small hole in place of his mouth; an empty socket where his left eye had been. "It was heartbreaking," he says. "I wanted to keep my old face in my memory. I didn't want that to be my face." But this past May, doctors at NYU Langone Health gave the 46-year-old father an extraordinary transformation by performing the world's first eye and face transplant. "For the first time since the accident, I don't want to wear a mask," James says. "I want everybody to see what's been done."