Jess Row - Your Face in Mine

Do you have someplace in particular in mind?

He waves a finger at me.

Not till you sign on, he says. Then you get the whole picture.

Sign on to do what? Produce a documentary? Write a book?

All of it. The whole package. I leave the specifics up to you. What I say is, if someone’s good at telling a story, the format doesn’t really matter. You work in radio, fine. Start with a tape recorder. That’s good. People don’t notice so much. I mean, eventually I want to wind up on Diane Sawyer. But look, baby steps. You start by doing research. Two months of research, give or take. Here and in Bangkok. You’ll be compensated all along the way. Then we make a decision about how we’re going to blow this thing.

Bangkok, too?

Of course. That’s where it all happened! My womb. My chrysalis.

I have to think this through, I say. I mean, I’m interested . Who wouldn’t be? And I’m your friend. I’m still your friend, right?

You wouldn’t be here otherwise, he says.

I mean, I wouldn’t hire me, necessarily. For this kind of thing. I’m not one of those people with a huge Rolodex.

Come on. You’re being modest.

I’d say I know people who know people. At the Times. The Atlantic. Slate. Politico. HarperCollins. Simon and Schuster. Are there any sure things in this world? No. Could I make it happen? I guess so.

That’s all I need. But my point is, it’s you . The security has to be absolute. I like to keep things intimate. You’re just in the right spot. Couldn’t have come along at a better time. I know you. Always did. You were always the solid one.

And I have a stake in this story, too.

Yeah, you do. Maybe more than you realize.

He stares at me, and I have the sense — it’s something around the eyes, the way the lids pull back — that’s he about to indicate something, to make a sign, but he doesn’t. Not in any way I can read. What falls into that hole, that chasm, between us? What other than Alan? So that’s what it is. And I almost want to blurt out, apropos of nearly nothing, I’m broken, too. I’d like to have those balls. But this is me we’re talking about, and this is the age of irony, of never making a statement you can’t serve up with a sardonic twist. Well, I say, we came from more or less the same place, right? So why you and not me? I mean, not me specifically. All of us.

All white people.

Yeah. I mean, out of all the white people on the planet, why would you be the one to go first, to figure this out? That’s kind of interesting, wouldn’t you say?

Kind of interesting. This is the story of the fucking century.

Our salads arrive, enormous piles of cucumber, tomatoes, olives, dolmas, artichokes, feta, and he gazes at me silently for a moment, until the waitress pulls away.

The future is the future, isn’t it? Isn’t that what I look like? And the future is for those who get there first. I’m asking you to think, you know, entrepreneurially. I know that doesn’t come natural if you’re out of the private sector. But maybe this is your time, Kelly. This could be your moment. God doesn’t close a door without opening a window.

You go to church?

Druid Hill Park A.M.E., he says. What, you thought I was going to stay Jewish? Become one of the Black Hebrews, the thirteenth tribe? Come on, he says. Look at me, Kelly. I’m black . If you want to be along for this ride, you have to make your peace with it. Black and never going back. Listen to me, I sound like some kind of crazy missionary.

No, I say, not a missionary. A convert.

However you want to put it.

To buy myself a moment, I take a sip from my water glass, then tip it back and drain the rest. Nothing, it seems to me, has ever been quite as delicious, quite as necessary, as that glass of ice water, tap water, with its faint medicinal aftertaste: fluoride, chlorine. All the ways we are silently, involuntarily, protected. I think of the bourgeois hippies in Marin County, the ones who refuse vaccinations and believe cancer comes from radiomagnetic fields, who buy shipped-in tanks of water, as if they lived in Haiti. How difficult it is for us, for the insulated ones, to understand what it means to risk anything at all. If I could I would run back through the hallway of time and tell my younger self, stop hedging your bets and learn what it means to have a catastrophe. But all I have now is the terrible present, the catastrophe over and accomplished, and myself, a squeezed-out rag, a rotten iceberg, and this impossible person staring at me and waiting for me to make up my mind.

Months after the accident, in a particularly courageous moment, I took out the manila envelope of condolence cards, and forced myself to read each one before tossing it into the recycling bin. At the bottom of the stack was a typed sheet of paper without an address or postmark. Or signature. It had been stuffed through the mail slot in the door: there was a rust mark on one crumpled edge. Emanuel Swedenborg , it read. Life goes on even if the vessels that receive life be broken. Life goes into new forms.

It isn’t enough to wait, I’m thinking. In the meantime, I need something to do .

Okay, I say, and I hear a little clink , a nail, or a penny, dropped into my glass, a signal that time no longer stands still. I’m interested. Count me in. What’s the first step, then? Interviews?

Ground rules, he says. Forget you ever knew me before last week. You’re a freelance journalist working on a story about black entrepreneurship, okay? Something long, a think piece. For The New Yorker . You know what I mean. Act a little naïve, but you still have to know your basic shit.

And how did we meet up?

Through a friend of a friend of a friend. Facebook. LinkedIn. How it always happens these days. First step is you’re going to shadow me for a few days. A little tour of my world. Can you take the time off?

I think about Barbara and her silver braids, her enormous, antiquated Dell monitor, and the outrageous numbers scrolling across it.

I’ll manage something.

Look, he says, there’s something else. I never said anything about what happened to your family.

I’d rather you didn’t, if it doesn’t come naturally.

No, I was holding back. It wasn’t appropriate. But I just have to ask. How are you even standing up? How do you make it through the day?

I don’t know, I say, which is, of course, the exact truth. There’s no other option, is there? I did all the steps. I saw a therapist. I took medication for a while. You don’t just roll up and die, no matter how bad it is. Happiness, you know, it’s fragile. Whatever you care about, it’s fragile. That’s about all I can say. I’m no hero.

Well, now, he says. Welcome to the rest of your life. O brave new world, that has such people in’t ! You know that line?

Of course, I say, startled, everybody knows that line, and then I remember: we read it in high school, junior year, in Mr. Fotheringill’s class, “Utopias, Dystopias, and Fantasy Worlds.” Jesus Christ, I say, it came true.

Yeah. Without taking the Lord’s name in vain and all.

Right. Sorry.

We look at each other and laugh, and I feel tears, fat tears, swelling out of the corners of both eyes: something like terror, and something like joy, for the moment indistinguishable.

As a child I was famous for my lungs: I could swim a length and a half of an Olympic-sized pool holding my breath. On the swim team, in middle school, I won sprints that way, on a single gulp of air, swimming blind, my field of vision turning orange, then black, clamping my teeth around the balloon of air swelling in my mouth. But my favorite trick of all was to pinch my nose and sink slowly to the bottom of the pool, dribbling bubbles like a scuba diver, till I rested, face-up, on the bottom, looking at the surface’s glassy underside, the world in reverse. I could stay down there for seven or eight seconds, which in underwater time is forever.