Your Face in Mine (32 page)

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.

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.