Jess Row - Your Face in Mine

follow the shadows for rescue but as the day grows old I know the sun

What do we know about plastic surgery? he asks, rhetorically, looking around at us. What’s the consensus of the field? It’s all about taking away. Subtract, subtract, subtract. Does a sculptor start with a block of marble and glue little bits on? What is this neoclassical beauty all the doctors talk about? The least possible extrusion. Slenderness. A level plane. A level playing field. Of course, it all begins with the Jewish nose. In the Western world, at least. The nose that looks like a sail. A hatchet. Shylock’s nose. An aggressive nose, a nose that intrudes, a nose that takes. So what do you do? Cut it down to size. Reduce the curvature. Thin out the alar base. Do you know how many careers, how many lifetimes, have been spent figuring out how to shave a few millimeters off the human nose? Then take some doctor from the Third World, with an unpronounceable name, with his article on “Expansion of the Nostrils and Widening of the Cura to Reproduce African-Identified Features.” Using the first synthetic cartilage, for God’s sake! Why do you think it took so long for anyone to admit it was possible to do female-to-male sex changes? No one wanted to make a penis. No one wants to make anything. Why is that?

Babylon throne gone down gone down oh Babylon throne gone down

Because, Julie-nah says, sitting up now, if you make it, it’s not natural. It’s not augmented . It’s brand spanking new.

Correct. Enlarge a breast, and you have a woman with larger breasts. Give a young girl a rhinoplasty, and she’s just the same Sarah or Hee-jin she always imagined herself to be. Arguably, you can extend the same logic even to the original sex change. A man minus a penis is a woman. But clearly there’s a double standard at work. An enormous blind spot. In theory , all my techniques could have been developed thirty years ago. But we’re not yet at the point of accepting what the science can actually do. Why? Because our trajectories of beauty still only point one way.

The Roman nose, Julie-nah says, wide-eyed.

I and I do not expect to be justified by the laws of men

The classical ideal. The Aphrodite of Melos. It’s in the literature; it’s the foundation of plastic surgery. Look in the textbooks. Better yet, look in the museums. That translucent marble surface, the smoothness, the tight curves. That’s what whiteness means. Horaios , do you know that word? The Hellenistic Greek term for beautiful. The same etymology as hour . Meaning of the moment , or ripe . But the ripeness we’re talking about is something else.

Stillness, Julie-nah says eagerly, sitting up in her chair. Something frozen in time. Not actual ripeness, not the ripeness of a plum, or an actual teenager, say, but ripeness as a disappearing point on the horizon. Not actual beauty, more like the tomb of beauty. What do you think Botox is all about? All those whiteness creams, all those pale waif-models? It’s the death glow. The corpse pose. It’s been in the literature for thirty years. It’s not news.

Which is why RRS is going to be so difficult to accept, Martin says. It’s a fundamental reordering of the field. What if anything you wanted were possible? What if there were no trajectories, only personal choice? We’re going to have to hit this point hard when we go out as ambassadors.

Julie-nah stares at him with a strange, transfixed smile.

Tariko, Silpa says. You’ve been awfully quiet. Too quiet. What do you think?

He shrugs.

For me, he says, it all comes from the teachings of the Holy Piby . You know what that is, Kelly? The rest of these brethren have heard enough about it. But maybe I can enlighten you.

Go on.

The Holy Piby, he says, in an exhausted voice, barely audible. The foundation of all our reasoning. I had to memorize it before I turned thirteen. His voice turns high-pitched, as if he’s resuming a recitation from long ago. Written by His Holiness Robert Rogers in Newark New Jersey in the year of Our Lord 1928 and dedicated by him unto His Holiness Marcus Garvey. What does it say? It says that when the time is ripe a great angel will come to Babylon and say, Children of Ethiopia, stand, and there will flash upon the earth a great multitude of Negroes knowing not from whence they came ; and then instantly the whole heavenly host will shout, Behold, behold Ethiopia has triumphed. What else does it say?

The ice in the north and the ice in the south shall disappear. Then shall continents which are submerged arise and the whole earth shall bloom. For with thee, he shall sit in his parlor in Africa, and see a rooster treading in the moon and the bees on the roses in Venus. The laborers in Mars, strike-breakers on earth and my daughter in college in Jupiter. My children shall remind you of the things I have forgotten, for I have seen so far, but those that cometh after me, of me, with me and upon our God shall see farther even than I.

What else is there? he says. It’s all rooted in prophecy. I’ve been waiting for this moment my whole life, man. My father would have died for the opportunity. In three months I’m going to be sitting on my patio up in Mona watching the sun rise over the Blue Mountains. And when it rise, it’ll be on the color of my true face. The dark skin of a Negro not knowing from whence he came. The lost tribe. By the grace of God.

Bravo, Silpa murmurs. As if it’s a bit of oratory.

On the other hand, isn’t it? What else do we say, embarrassed by the spectacle of faith? Amen ? Martin has closed his eyes and angled his face upward, which could be read as reverence, I suppose. Julie-nah picks at her teeth.

You can see why Tariko’s our best advocate, Silpa says, filling the silence as it has to be filled. It’s a vocation . Well, it’s a vocation for me too, of course. But I don’t quite have the words to say so.

What I worry about right now, Martin says, slowly, is infrastructure. Whether we’re ready to meet the demand when the demand comes. Scalability. I’ve been doing what I can. But we’re going to need everything, when the moment comes. Customer reps. A phone bank. A website that can take a million hits in a day and not crash.

A bigger office, Tariko says.

That’s the easy part. Physical space is not the problem. It’s client relations that I worry about. Client relations, reliability of our supply chain, and, of course, waiting times. Because there’s only one Silpa. That’s the problem with doing it this way.

He’s right, of course, Silpa says, looking up at the sky. None of these changes are permanent, you know. There’s the question of maintenance, too. Drug regimes for forty or fifty years. That’s why the egg is so fragile right at the moment. I need assistants. Apprentices. Otherwise, if something happens to me?

• • •

In the stairwell Julie-nah turns and gives me a baleful stare. For a good ten seconds we stand there, like a frieze, my palm on the bannister, her body twisted, whorled, as if to catch me and fling me away.

I thought you were kidding, she says.

I did too. At the time.

Really? You’re telling me Martin’s powers of persuasion are that strong? Even if you knew that it was all one big sche—

Martin tried to argue me out of it.

Like hell he did, she says. Ever heard of reverse psychology?

I had my own reasons.

We all have our own reasons. A globule of spit catches me in the eye; she runs a crude hand across her mouth. That’s the problem. I thought you understood me. Didn’t you understand me, Kelly? We’ve got to unplug this Orchid machine. Before it makes us all billionaires. There’s a healthy point-five percent of the world’s population that has really good reasons for RRS. If you don’t say no, that’s it. You’re the final picture in our happy little mosaic.