Jess Row - Your Face in Mine

Sit there, she says, pointing to the far side of the bed. I’ll take the chair. We can’t be too close to the window.

Were you a spy in a previous life?

I was a teenager. She sets the thermos down on my bedside table, pulls the duvet off the bed and capes it around her shoulders. A rebellious teenager, she says, with a very angry father. You get used to a clandestine existence. It’s the Korean way. Every house is its own little dictatorship, and every dictatorship has dissidents. Just like every ship has rats. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. How are you? I heard you were sick.

I think it’s just jet lag. Super-intense jet lag. I’m not used to traveling anymore, I guess. It’s all in my head. I’ll be done with it soon enough. What’s with the thermos?

I made you some congee. For breakfast. That thing is guaranteed to stay hot for twelve hours.

Seriously?

Tariko told me you were married to a Chinese woman. I thought you might want some comfort food.

That’s a pretty nice thing to do for someone you don’t know very well.

Forget it. Around here, if I didn’t cook, I’d just congeal .

For the first time since we’ve met she looks at me directly, squarely, absorbing my gaze.

What are you thinking right now? she asks.

The same thing I thought when I first saw you. That you look amazingly, amazingly , familiar. Like someone I went to school with. Not a specific person, I mean: you could have been any number of people I went to school with.

You went to Amherst, right? And before that, a prep school? East Coast?

Yes.

Then it’s not surprising, she says. When I first went to Silpa, I brought him college brochures. Colgate. Bowdoin. Mount Holyoke. And the L.L.Bean and J.Crew catalogs. Plus some things from Ireland and the UK. And Sweden. But mostly it was a northeastern college look. A Nantucket look. An I-just-went-for-a-refreshing-swim-in-Barnegat-Bay look. An I-played-field-hockey-for-Choate look. You know what I mean? You’ve got the pinkish tone, the flush, the vivacity, and then that kind of transparent marble-ish glow underneath. Like layers of parchment. Or raw pastry. Delicate but fiery. You want to surround it with plaid kilts, with pink and green. Stick a gin and tonic in there somewhere. Raise a flag to it. You know, like a girl in jodhpurs and the red riding coat and the black helmet, the high boots, the gloves, who turns and gives you this wink, like I really like to take it in the ass . That kind of thing.

And how did you — where did you — I mean, you were trying, in a sense you were trying, to replicate me .

Your perfect ideal complement. That is, if you were a little taller and more athletic. And blonder.

And richer. I’ve never even been to Nantucket.

Well, she says, in the actual terms of the project, variables of wealth don’t enter into it. Explicitly. But really, you should go. I’ve never understood this false modesty, this amnesia , white American liberals have about your own origins. Koreans don’t have that problem.

Maybe because they don’t have so much recent history to be ashamed of.

Maybe, she says, creasing her eyebrows, as if we’re two earnest young intellectuals at a cocktail party, as if to take this conversation to a new plateau of absurdity, like a layer of meringue atop buttercream frosting.

Julie-nah, I say, I think I understand about Tariko. And I’ve heard just about everything there is to hear about Martin. But you haven’t actually explained, yet, why you want to do this.

Why do you care? You’re not writing my biography.

I open my mouth, then close it.

Is that it, then?

Is what it?

All this hostility, all this alarm? What, because I’m working with Martin? Four days ago I had no idea you existed.

That wasn’t hostility, she says. That was intellectual honesty. And, honestly, concern for your sake. Because you don’t know what you’re getting into. Why you matter.

You’re the second person who’s said that to me today.

Was the first Dr. Silpa?

How did you know?

Because he’s as uncomfortable with this whole scenario as I am. It was Martin’s idea. I’m opposed to it, completely. I don’t believe in recruitment. I think it’s insane.

Recruitment for what? I’m about to say, but before the words have emerged I stop myself, as if I’ve just heard an echo, an alteration or blurring of the sounds themselves; I draw half a breath, and then stop, involuntarily, almost burping in my attempt not to speak.

Are you okay?

Explain that. Explain what you mean, please.

I mean recruiting you for the program. You understand that, right? That’s what he wants to do? I mean, do I need to be more blunt? He wants you to have the surgery and become Chinese.

Her face, Julie-nah’s impossible face, becomes painfully, unbearably clear, clear in every pore, every fleck, every tiny mole, her molded lips slightly parted now, waiting for my answer. I’ve heard the words, and now the meaning comes racing around her head, a solid thing, in her unsubtle way of putting it, and become Chinese , like a rock on a string, and I spring backward, feeling my face flattening, as if I’ve just pancaked against a wall.

Fuck, she says. Fuck. Fuck. Are you telling me you didn’t have any idea at all?

My heart, but not just my heart, the entire chest cavity, all that spongy and pellucid and semirigid tissue shoved together, is thrashing around, my diaphragm doing contortions, sending showers of sparks across my retinas, and the only thing I can do is lean over and put my head between my knees. Am I going to throw up again? My throat still feels scoured with bile.

Kelly. Kelly. Talk to me.

Can’t, I say, through clenched teeth. Can’t. Give me a minute.

Should I call Silpa? Seriously. Do you need an ambulance?

No ambulance, I say, gasping, actually gasping for air. It’s like a bad Steve Martin interpretation: Steve Martin kicked in the balls, that windbag of a mouth and the Pinocchio nose.

Jesus. Jesus Christ.

Just stop talking for a second.

Okay.

I’m thinking of a woman on a bicycle, with my eyes closed, head still between my knees, my neck now starting to cramp. Not a real bicycle, a bicycle painted in watercolor or some kind of very light oil, in a sketchy, Toulouse-Lautrec kind of a way. Cyclos Le Monde, the poster says at the bottom. She’s wearing a blue beret and an improbably long skirt. It’s a piece of generic decorative kitsch, really, something you might find at Pier 1 or Pottery Barn. Where have I seen it before, and who gives a shit? Somehow, attached to this horrid image, is a kind of explanation of my life. I suppose this is what they call déjà vu.

I need some air, is what I’m thinking. So I slowly pull myself up to a sitting position, stand, and move over until I’m directly under the fan, looking up, taking the wind full in my face.

Take your time, Julie-nah says.

Through the rushing air her voice is pleasantly obscured, a weak signal.

Collect yourself, a voice says. Collect what? My arms, still miraculously attached, move up and down of their own accord, testing the edges of the airstream. For a moment I imagine myself as a wind sock, snapping in the breeze.

Was it staged, I’m thinking, right from the start? Did he follow me, did he track me down? How many hours, how much combing the Web, would he have had to log, to know enough about me, to profile me as a candidate? Was it research, or was it just a hunch? Or a hunch that turned into an obsession? Are we talking about the cynicism of the entrepreneur who takes a chance on a random reunion, or an actual pathology, a conspiratorial, manipulative, two-a.m.-in-the-basement, caffeine-twitching madness?