Jess Row - Your Face in Mine

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Where I started, Silpa says, was with the skin. Of course. Otherwise, how would I have gotten the idea, how would I have glimpsed it? Even as an impossibility?

He shakes the ice in his glass and stares up at the sky: a long band of violet clouds receding away from a smoggy peach-brown sunset. We’re on the roof: a long tiled deck that traverses the rear of the house, not visible from the street. Phran manning the barbecue, Martin and Julie-nah and myself stretched out on lounge chairs, Tariko hunched over his laptop, playing DJ.

I’ve spent nights with matches and knives leaning over ledges only two flights up

It was just a summer job, he says, working as a technician in my adviser’s lab. The research was on pigmentation disorders retrofabricated in mice. Vitiligo. Have you heard of it? White blotches on dark skin. Very damaging, in some cultures. Humiliating, shameful. Even worse than albinism. You’ll have babies being abandoned, men who can never marry. It’s an autoimmune condition — the immune system attacks the melanocytes, but only here and there, nobody knows why. In any case, treatment can go two ways: make the skin lighter, or make it darker, to correct the patchiness and give the patient an even tone.

I’m like a steppin’ razor don’t watch my size I’m dangerous

Lightness is quite difficult, he says. You start with monobenzylether of hydroquinone. We don’t know how, exactly, but it wipes the cutaneous layer clean. As if melanin never even existed. You have to use it sparingly, because there’s the risk of skin cancer. And, some say, immune overcompensation. But darkening? Darkening the skin, permanently, consistently, beautifully? Nearly impossible, that was the consensus at the time. In any case, hazardous. Every possible conventional treatment was toxic. And, as they never tired of telling me, undesirable . Who would pay for it? Who would pay for a beautifully toned, brown, perhaps even a little reddish, maple color, a mahogany color, or a rich, full, espresso, actual blackness? Like Grace Jones. Like Seal.

Miles Davis, Martin says. Kobe Bryant.

Peter Tosh. Tariko speaking. Dinah Washington.

Queen Latifah, Julie-nah says. Oprah. I love Oprah.

Duke Ellington, I say. Angela Davis.

Right, Silpa says. You understand. In Rochester on my days off I went and sat in the movie theater and just watched one film after another. Brewster’s Millions. Dune. 48 Hours. Conan the Barbarian. Purple Rain. That was how I learned English and ruined my appetite for candy. And I wanted to say, look, you take a movie like Purple Rain , and then you think there’s no desire, no wanting, to be like that beautiful man?

When I start to laugh, everyone turns and stares at me.

Why? Silpa asks me. Don’t you think it’s true?

I’m not arguing with you. I just can’t believe it all starts with Prince.

You’re the writer. You can put that in your book. You know that song, “When Doves Cry?” Dig, if you will, the picture? Go look at the video again. Prince is all naked in a bathtub, and he stands up, and the camera is just looking at his face. And then he holds out his hand and does this—

Silpa gives me a sultry, low-lidded look and holds his arm out straight, beckoning me with one finger.

You want the big moment? That was the big moment for me. I don’t want Prince. I’m not gay. I want to be Prince. He understands. He knows it’s going to happen. If he was a chemist he’d have done it himself. I see that just by looking into his eyes. Amazing, right? And you know what it is? This is a person who says yes to everything. Yes to change. Nobody has to wear the clothes they came in with. Nobody has to be stuck in one body. Dig, if you will, the picture. To me, that was America. And the funny thing is, it takes a Thai guy to understand it. The melting pot. I mean, that’s what this is, right?

He leans back in his chair and drains his glass. And I notice, for the first time, how thin his arms are, thin and nearly cylindrical, right up to the shoulders. Like iron bars. Phran brought him a plate of satay and sliced pineapple and he hasn’t touched it. When we had our lunch together the other day he must have ordered six dishes and taken three bites of each. A man who runs on some other energy source.

Tell him about the science, Julie-nah says. Lying back, a forearm over her eyes, as if it’s midday. I love it when you talk about the science.

no one remember old Marcus Garvey no no one remember

I’ll give you the short version, he says. Skin darkens because of melanin production, right? Melanogenesis, that’s what it’s called. A hormone, melanocyte-stimulating hormone, binds with the receptors in the melanocytes in the epidermis. This sends a signal to the genetic material in the melanocytes — a signaling cascade. The cascade sets off the production of eumelanin — that’s the good stuff. The black and brown stuff. So the crux of the matter is, how do you create melanogenesis on its own? At first I thought it was simply a matter of going back and reproducing the MSH. But that didn’t work. The half-life is too short; inject it and it just disappears into the bloodstream. I needed a new peptide. A stable analogue, all the way from scratch, that would bind with the melanocyte and run through the whole process in just the same way. Every enzyme had to be right. Not just the melanocortin 1 receptor; all the melanogenesis genes — tyrosinase, TYRP1, and DCT. It was enough to make any biochemist tear his hair out.

Well, what else did I have to do, in the middle of the winter, in Rochester? I synthesized peptides, one after the other. After my labwork, after all my other responsibilities, I just commandeered the centrifuge and sat there till two or three in the morning. It took six months, and then I got it. [Nle 4, D-Phe 7]-α-MSH. My baby. Melanoxetine. The perfect biomimic. Hundreds of times more potent than natural MSH, and utterly stable as a pharmacologic compound. The first, the only, artificial agent to induce melanogenesis. You can look it up; the patent’s been pending for nearly a decade.

carried us away in captivity required of us a song how can we sing King Alpha’s

One day he’s going to win the Nobel Prize for it, Martin intones.

I showed it to my lab supervisor, Silpa says, and this is what he said: either you’ve just invented the world’s best tanning drug, or a brand-new form of skin cancer. Or both. Refused to have anything to do with it. So I bought my own mice. Set up my own lab, in the kitchen of my apartment. It took another year, a full set of trials, to prove noncarcinogeneity. No anchorage-independent clonogenic cell growth. No metastatic tendencies at all. Then, I imagined, it would be easy. I submitted a paper to JAMA . No luck there. Submitted to The New England Journal of Medicine. The reviewer wrote back, This drug has no clinical application outside of questionable and theoretical cosmetic procedures. No one would willingly consent to have his skin darkened permanently.

So where was I, then? With no published results, no biomed corporation would touch it. I could file patents all I wanted. I was such a true believer! It would make you cry. All around me, it seemed, people were getting rich. It was the Eighties! Nobody was content with a mere clinical practice anymore. All you had to do was put your hand on the magic compound and you would sprout golden wings and fly off to Cambridge. Or Palo Alto. Call it a tanning supplement, my friends told me. I could have just hired some Indian jerks to synthesize it on the fly and sold it over the Internet. But that wasn’t the way! I kept thinking, someday people are going to want the real thing . In this way I’m still a Marxist. Formally speaking. I don’t believe in incremental change. In working within the system. It’s cost me tremendously. But now the result is almost here. It is here. You people are the result. We have only the one corner left to turn.