Jess Row - Your Face in Mine

You’ll have to forgive me, I say. I’m a little out of my element. Martin didn’t tell me that anyone else would be here.

I’m not surprised. We’re a bit of a state secret. But look — take your time, man. You just got off the plane. Take it easy .

He turns back to the computer, and I take another three bites of my croissant and a sip of coffee. Bite, breathe. Bite, breathe. Out on the street, out of sight, a motorbike roars by, unmuffled, loud as a chain saw. The sunlight pouring in through the doors has a pale, dusty tinge, and I’m beginning to realize that among other small insults, the day is taking on real heat, massive, physical, dry-season heat, not the plangent tropical skin bath I expected. We can’t see anything but the garden, of course, but I can feel an echo, a restlessness in the air, a subaural buzz, the resting tone of the vast city. After a day or so I won’t even notice it anymore.

What does it mean, I ask myself, that Martin didn’t tell me? Did I really think, did he really lead me to believe, that he was the only one? Out of the whole world, out of all the possible variations? The first American, maybe. The first white to black? And then, as Americans do, I didn’t stop to consider the rest of the world, all the other possibilities?

Tariko, I say, I have a question.

Yes?

In Japan, is it a secret, too, what you’re doing? No one else knows?

Of course it’s secret , he says, smiling broadly, as if it’s the most foolish question in the world. Or else why wouldn’t you have heard? News travels fast in the first world.

And when you go back?

Never going back. Not me. No point to it. At the end of this I’ll be in Jamaica for good. Jamaica in body, Zion in soul.

And your clients, your potential clients?

They know what’s on the site. Haven’t you seen it? We’re still updating all the time, but there it is. He gestures me over to the screen and clicks the browser’s refresh button. That, and only that.

A dark blue screen appears, with a line drawing of an orchid unspooling in white across it, and then, at the bottom, like credits in a movie, one line comes into view, fades, and is replaced by another:

Who Are You?

When You Look at Yourself in the Mirror, Do You See… You?

Do You Dream in Another Language?

Do You Dream of Starting Again in a New Skin?

Start Here.

The Orchid Group invites you to consider the possibilities of a new you: an entirely different appearance, from skin to hair to physical features of every kind. At the frontiers of reconstructive and reassignment surgery, we can accommodate the needs of clients who feel that their psychological health depends on a radical physical transformation other than gender. We are a full-service healthcare provider, based in Bangkok, that offers psychological assessment and counseling, lifestyle enhancement, language and dialect tutoring, sequential transitioning care, and a full range of surgical procedures under the leadership of Binpheloung Silpasuvan, M.D., Harvard Medical School, former Assistant Professor of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, University of Rochester. Our staff are native speakers of English, Thai, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog, French, German, Italian, and Russian. All of our services are offered in complete confidentiality. We offer payment plans and loans through HSBC, Thailand, Ltd.

The text block fades, replaced by a mosaic of smiling faces: an African woman, very dark, with a kente headband; a dashing, square-jawed Asian man with a pearly grin; a strawberry-blond girl, Swedish or Polish or maybe Russian; a thin, ashen-faced hipster in an Oxford shirt and enormous square glasses. As I watch, each photo dissolves into a new one: an Arab man with a goatee, a severe-looking Latina with arching eyebrows, a Native American man in a suit, a Filipina or Indonesian woman in a hijab, a teenager with a Jennifer Grey nose and bobbed curly hair, a Chinese kid with dyed blond spikes and Thug Life tattooed across his breastbone. It’s exhausting, trying to label them all. To enumerate the possibilities. Like a Benetton ad, of course, that’s what anyone would say, only hitched to the mathematics of a Fibonacci sequence. A difference machine. A deck of cards that always reshuffles itself. A self-reproducing maze, a cancer cell, adding a new layer at every turn.

This Isn’t You Seeing Tomorrow

This Is Tomorrow Seeing You

That’s what you call it? A radical physical transformation other than gender?

Yeah. Doesn’t sound quite right, does it? But right now we don’t really have any choice in the matter. You can’t say race , otherwise the hounds will be at your back. Can’t say ethnic . Same thing. It’s confusing, no doubt. I’m the one who’s here answering the phones all day, trying to tell people we can’t make them into a dwarf, can’t make them six feet tall, can’t make their penis two feet long. It’s time to lift the veil, if you know what I’m saying. I guess that’s your job.

So Mr. Wilkinson told you that part.

Of course. The whole marketing plan. The computer pings; a chat box has opened up with a line of Japanese. Tariko glances at it and makes a kind of twenty-first-century shrug, slightly shifting his weight back toward the screen: are you more important than what my device is telling me?

I’ll let you get back to work, I say, but Tariko, one more question.

Of course. Anything.

How many of you are there?

Of me? Of us? Prototypes, you mean? Two so far. Officially.

Including Mr. Wilkinson?

Including him, three.

Will I get to meet them all?

You already have.

I look over at the woman in the mask, back at her dicing, now, but still within earshot. Julie-nah, Tariko says, don’t be shy. Take that thing off. Come here.

When I turn in her direction she’s already slipped her mask down under her chin, and looks so much like someone I should know that for a moment I wonder if she’s famous, or, say, an Amherst grad, a WBUR employee, a Harvard woman? She has any Korean woman’s pencil-straight black hair, held back in an ordinary high ponytail, but very light skin, a little more pink than I would have expected, a thin, aquiline nose, a wide mouth, full lips, and round, curious hazel eyes. I would have guessed, in another circumstance, that she was biracial. In truth, if you dyed her hair she would have no discernible Asian features at all.

Julie-nah, she says, hands tucked beneath her breasts. Kelly, right? You’re Martin’s biographer? Welcome. Make yourself at home.

She speaks with the flat, disaffected politeness of a gallery receptionist in Chelsea, and then looks over my head at Tariko, as if to say, can I go now?

Julie-nah’s mad because you took her spot, Tariko says. She was hoping to write the big book on RRS. From a scholarly point of view, of course. She’s a professor .

But also a participant?

I put the question to the air halfway between them, expecting Tariko to answer, but hoping Julie-nah will.

Anthropologist, he says. This is fieldwork. We’re her tribe. Like getting tattoos if you work with the Maori.

I was an academic, too, I say, turning in her direction, still feeling, against all indications, that I know her, that we should already be acquainted. At Harvard. East Asian Studies.

And? She’s back at the counter now, still chopping. Whatever she’s preparing could feed fifty.

And I left. Went over to journalism. Public radio.

Why? Your adviser didn’t like you?

No. Not at all. It’s such a direct question, coated with insult, that I have to swallow a moment before going on. I needed money; I had a baby daughter. There weren’t any jobs out there I wanted to take. We didn’t want to leave Boston. And anyway, I was done with what I wanted to do. One book, one area of research. I was exhausted.