Your Face in Mine (33 page)

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?

•   •   •

I
n 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.

I let myself sit down on the tile step.

Anyway, she says, what do you expect is going to change? Even if it takes. Even if it’s perfect. You think, what, you’ll be less
divided
, more
yourself
? You’ll just be the same ball of questions as always. Believe me. I can tell. You don’t get that jolt out of being a congenital liar. Not like Martin. You’ll be a freak.

Julie, do you ever get tired of deciding what’s right for the world?

No, she says, wide-eyed. Don’t tell me. Don’t fucking tell me.

I mean it. Speaking, myself, as someone like you. A professional
mind. An inquirer. A critic. Isn’t it ever
tiring
, to you, just a little, being an arbiter all the time? You know the joke about the French?
It may work in practice, but will it work in theory?

What the hell does that mean?

You know what I’m talking about. The tingle of empty accusations. All this conspiratorial fault-finding. Hegemonic diagnostics. It’s all one big autoimmune condition, isn’t it? Look, maybe it works when you have tenure. Or cradle-to-grave health insurance. Or a rich dad who works for Samsung. But look, from my perspective, I’m out of a job.

It’s Daewoo, actually. And I thought you were on Martin’s payroll.

Oh, I am. For the time being. But I’m talking about
real money
for once. What’s wrong with that? Money that lets you make decisions.

It’s as if some rind, some slippery, rubbery substance, has detached from my gums; I find myself chewing at the words.

You know how they want
you
to make money? she says. Why they’re so desperate to make a Chinese connection? Tissue farming. What the fuck else? All those prisoners, all those no-name corpses. Hair. Skin. Retinas. Healthy teeth. Cartilage. You ready to get into that business, Kelly?

Speaking as someone who’s already in it?

She laughs.

Oh, you have no idea about me, she says. Don’t even bother to guess.

But isn’t that the point? It’s up to you. Shouldn’t we own up to that? White people that we are.

Don’t call me that.

Why? Isn’t that what you wanted, Julie-nah?

It was a
project
, she says, all but crying now. It was a provocation. I wanted to make myself into an instrument of my own desires. A demonstration of the emptiness of buying out—

I could have told you not to bother. You really think you need to tell people what they already know? After all, who’s to say I haven’t bought
all of my identities? Not just this one. This, come to think of it, is the second time.

That’s cold, she says. You sure you want to go that far, Kelly? That’s really cold. It’s your wife we’re talking about. Your wife, your
child
.

Don’t tell me about my wife and child,
I would have said to her, to anyone, ordinarily. My jaw seems to want to flap open.

Call it closure, I say. Closure comes in unexpected ways.

That’s sick.

Since I can’t have you, I want to say, I have to become you
.
Where did that phrase come from, all of a sudden? Though I don’t quite understand it, it seems to be all that needs to be said. Then why can’t I quite fit the words on my tongue?

I’m tired, I say to her. Speaking past her. I have an appointment with Silpa first thing. Can we continue this later? My door is always open.

Don’t be an ass.

To
talk
.

I’m through with talking, she says. Aren’t you? It’s time for decisions. And not waiting for a reply, or a question, she pivots and disappears.

On a dark screen six feet tall, a screen I could fall into, I watch life-sized, naked photographs of myself, one after another: frontal, profile, half-angles, close-ups on the chin, the nose, the eyes. It’s like a bizarre video installation, I’m thinking, a work of performance art, crossed with an initiation ritual. There are creases I never noticed under my chin, a constellation of moles beneath my left armpit. My eyes show the faint beginnings of crow’s feet. My penis is a strange dark color, sullen, almost bruised. A photograph like this, I’m thinking, is harsher than a mirror under bright light: something about its being preserved makes it harder to face.

But it won’t be preserved.

You’re making me self-conscious, I say. Maybe I should just get an ordinary facelift. A little liposuction.

Let’s get started, Silpa says, turned away from me, clicking away at the desktop monitor across the room. Begin by focusing on the face. For practical reasons, and aesthetic reasons, the principle here is to do as little as possible to achieve the desired effect. So we’re not talking a
severe
epicanthal single fold. Really the enlargement and adjustment of the eye socket will be quite small. The result will be like this. I’ll change the skin tone, too, to give you the full effect.

The new image spools down from the top, the same thinning hairline, the faint widow’s peak, slightly narrowed eyebrows. Only with the eyes does the face become someone else’s. I know those eyes, I’m thinking, I
recognize
those eyes. Someone I knew in Weiming, someone at Harvard? How many thirty-something Chinese men have I known? Stop! I say, a little louder than I intended.

What’s the problem?

That’s a photograph, right? That’s not
me
.

It’s not a photograph. It’s software. Didn’t I explain this? Predictive modeling. Those are
your
eyes, Kelly. Really, the change is very minor. It’s essentially just padding the eye socket a little around the edges. And then adding a
slightly
folded epicanthus. I’m surprised it startles you. To me the effect is almost not enough. I could make it much more pronounced. Should I continue?

When I don’t answer, he taps the keyboard again, and the rest of the face appears, centimeter by centimeter. A smaller nose. Slimmer lips. Narrower shoulders. He’s reducing me by ten percent. A flatter stomach, bonier hips. Even the knees are less pronounced, somehow. And the skin? Only when I look away and look back do I see it: a weakening of the light, a slightly sepia tone over my normal color.

This is crazy. What are you going to do, Silpa, shave down every part of my anatomy?

What do you mean? We’re only talking about alterations to the face. Plus skin tone, of course, which is chemical. No other surgery.

Then why do I look so different?

He laughs. It’s the eyes, he says. I see it all the time. Change the eyes, tweak the nose, and it’s a different person. Haven’t you heard the old saying about how a nose job takes off fifteen pounds?

No.

I suppose it’s a joke in the business.

Who is this man? I close my eyes and open them again, slowly, and again; I turn my face away and back; I get up from the stool, go out into
the hallway, shut the door, open it, and reenter. Who are you?
How
are you? How did you come to be, sourceless human being, person from nowhere, person who has never existed, who should never exist? It’s a vertiginous feeling, a feeling that starts in the feet and gathers momentum in the thighs, as if I’ve leaned over a balcony railing, drawn by something I’ve seen fifteen stories down. A vertiginous feeling, that is, of having leaned against the natural settling order of one’s joints, but also a feeling that originates between the thighs. Arousal. Arousal out of something deeply wrong.

What this is, I think, without stopping to explain the thought, what this is, is a kind of incest. A violation of the natural process. A skipping ahead.

Let’s go through the next steps, Silpa says. I turn back to face him, and he folds his hands in his lap, retreating into doctor mode. First, we make up an agreement and sign it. It’s a formality, but we have to do it, because it’s a two-way financial transaction. Because by electing to pay for the operation, you become a shareholder in the company. Understood? Next, you write your RLTP plan. You’ve read Martin’s, right? In your case I think we have to forgo the actual period, because of the anatomical difficulties. But you need to have a full day of reflection before the surgery begins.

What anatomical difficulties?

Because in your case, unlike Martin, there’s no way you can pass without the operation being complete. You understand, right? There’s no halfway point here. Once you go, you go all the way.

I understand.

Immediately after that—really as soon as possible—you have to give me your passport. Altering U.S. passports is an enormous task these days. We have the best technicians working on it, but it can take more than two weeks. Because of all the new security features. What other passports are you going to want? PRC? Taiwan? Singapore?

I can choose more than one?

You can do more or less whatever you want. We’re starting from scratch, aren’t we? The only question is how much you want to spend. And of course, some things are off limits. No one can become a North Korean citizen. The CIA has been trying for sixty years. And of course, outside of the realm of the impossible, there are still time constraints. Complete U.S. or UK or German citizenships take six months. With Scandinavian countries or Canada, if you have enough money, it’s better to start elsewhere and go through immigration. By those standards the PRC is actually extremely easy, if you go through the right channels. We have an ex-PLA contact here in Bangkok who can do it in a week—passports, ID cards, all the relevant databases, everything. I think the going rate is around two hundred thousand baht. That’s about seven thousand U.S. Taiwan is a little more—maybe three hundred thousand. But, of course, as a U.S. citizen you can live in Taiwan as long as you like. It’s all a matter of where you want to feel at
home
.

How much does changing the U.S. passport cost?

Oh, don’t worry about that. Martin’s covering it. It’s his gift to you. I think he called it your
country club initiation fee
. You must know what that means better than I do.
Of course, you know, U.S. citizenship can be problematic, once you get into a certain income bracket. You might take this opportunity to choose a tax haven. Those are the easiest, of course. The Cayman Islands, for example. Or Monaco. I believe Martin himself has his assets somewhere in the Caribbean. Antigua, or the Virgin Islands.

I’ll have to think about it.

Of course. And we have an accountant, too, who works with us. Kamala. A very nice Indian lady from Singapore with an MBA from the Wharton School. She speaks Mandarin, Cantonese, Toishan, Hindi, Malay, English of course, French, and Italian. She can talk to you about all the financial ramifications. I know that’s not your specialty. Nor
mine. The most important thing, frankly, is the narrative. You have to have it down. You have to
believe
who you are. Or else there’s a risk of a certain schizoid feeling.

You make it sound so straightforward.

One day it will be. All this documentation, it’s just a charade, really. A smoke screen. Soon none of it will be necessary. You know what they do now, with sex changes? Change-of-gender cards. It’s an announcement that comes in the mail, like a wedding or a birth.
I will now be known as Martha instead of Mark.

And that’s all right with you?

His smile is almost giddy. There’s something elastic about his limbs, as he crosses his legs, leans back, wiggles the chair a little, getting comfortable.

The need is there, he says. Let’s put it another way. The
desire
is there. Does this just sound like a pile of crap to you? Stay with me for a minute. Let’s say, just for argument, desire is a kind of a wormhole, a door in time. Any deep human desire is really just an expression of how things will be in the future. How did we get airplanes? As soon as
Homo sapiens
stood up, he wanted to fly. For a time we thought we would all become angels in heaven. Or flying arhats, or celestial apsaras, in a future life. Then that dream popped like a bubble.
Then
we built airplanes. Get it? Look around you! Look at yourself, as an example. Your ancestors would think of you as a god. You can fly across the world in a day; you can live just about anywhere you like. Marry anyone you like. How far in the future can it be when people say,
I don’t want to be
me
anymore?
Isn’t it just as simple as that? Listen, it’s already happening.

For those who have the resources—

You think this is an argument for decadence? You need to read Marx more carefully.

He slides open a desk drawer and hands me a palm-sized photograph in a battered tin frame. It’s black-and-white, poorly printed, with
water stains at the corners: a group of young men in white shirts and dark armbands around a table, talking earnestly, papers and books, flags and batons, piled up in front of them.

I was there, at Thammasat, he says. 1976. That was our Tiananmen Square. Our May of ’68. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? Hok Tulaa.
The Thammasat University massacre. Don’t feel bad. They don’t even teach it in schools here. But you can go down to the campus and look at the memorial. Suffice it to say this: out of the seven people in that picture, I was the only one who survived. We were the student liaisons to the Federated Trade Unions of Thailand, and when the student rebellion happened, when we took over the campus, we all slept outdoors in the same tent. I just happened to be the one furthest away from the street. When the Red Gaurs came, the paramilitaries, I cut a hole in the side of the tent and ran straight to the river and dove in.

I—

Don’t say anything! You don’t have to express your condolences to
me
. I’m alive. And their bodies were burned out in the countryside, in pits, so no one could mourn them. Anyway, I escaped. I swam. It was like swimming in motor oil. Eventually a boat picked me up and drove me ten miles upstream. There were Communists all over Thailand in those days. I was handed from one to the other, all the way up to Isaan. I spent three years up there on a commune learning how to grow bananas and sugarcane. And reading Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh. Those were the only books we had. Until I finally had my realization. It’s very simple.
Too
simple, really. Just this:
the dialectic is nothing to be afraid of.

He takes a flat cardboard package from his breast pocket, shakes two pieces of gum into his palm, and unwraps them carefully, still looking at me. The writing is in Thai, but I recognize the colors: Nicorette.

I mean, what other conclusion can you draw, from all that analysis, all that modeling, all those patterns? Eventually it’s going to happen as Marx predicted. In the broadest general sense. Capital is not self-sustaining. We know that much. What else have we seen, in our lifetimes? The expansion of the world economy is finite. What we think of as decadence is really only a shadow. Technology is neutral. That’s what medicine teaches us. Stainless steel was first developed for weapons. Now it saves a million lives an hour. Chewing gum. Developed as candy for children, now it’s saving my lungs.

He chews more aggressively, exaggeratedly, to prove his point.

And who are we saving?

Who the hell knows? Excuse my language. But look, Kelly, you’re part of this now. You have to learn to think in larger increments. Decades, not years. Eras, not news cycles.

Millions, not thousands.

Billions, not millions.

He laughs at my face, which, I imagine, has registered some kind of dismay. At what? Being behind the curve?

Want my advice? Leave your Protestant guilt behind. Make that a promise to yourself. Read all those books you never thought you needed. Carnegie.
The Art of the Deal.
The
Seven Habits
one. And this, too. He reaches into the lowest drawer of his desk and hands me a battered hardcover without a dust jacket, the corners foxed, the binding split.
Awaken the Giant Within.
I can’t remember the name, but I remember the teeth: a giant, voracious mouth, a jaw like a moray eel. He had infomercials on late-night TV when I was in high school. Anthony Robbins, Silpa says. Call it trash. Call it vapid. I call it my bible. Does that shock you? Good. That means you’re ready. Read it before we put you under, and you’ll wake up a new human being. Genuinely. No, take that copy! I know it by heart.

Why should I believe you? I wonder. Looking at him, for the last time, out of my own eyes.
The dialectic is nothing to be afraid of.
This
could all be a bit of theater, custom-designed for my benefit, and it wouldn’t matter.

I don’t need a rationale, I should tell him, I don’t need a conceptual
framework
. I’ve had my entire life to come up with that. The switch has been flipped.

Thanks, I say. I mean, thank you. Sincerely. For doing this. For the opportunity.

He grins. Never thank a surgeon until you’re in recovery, he says. It’s bad luck. But okay. I appreciate it.

There’s really no way for me to express—

You don’t have to, he says. That’s the wonderful thing about my line of work. No words are necessary. I get to be the first one to hold up a mirror and see the look on your face. That’s my payment. That, and the cash. You’ve talked to your bank, yes?

It’s all set.

It’s a beautiful thing we’re doing, he says. Put that in your book. You’re still writing your book, aren’t you?

I’m not sure.

Because it’s no longer about Martin.

He gives me one of his blank smiles, his eyes receding into their creases, their laughing folds.

Among other things. There was the matter of an agreement.

Oh, he says, that money was more like seed capital. It’s the kind of thing you write off in an instant. Don’t let that worry you. We all work together as a unit now. Your energies may be better spent elsewhere. The field’s moving very fast these days. Books are a little slow.