Your Face in Mine (36 page)

Because that story, too, will have to be told.

Don’t fuck with me, Martin says. I’m not your goddamned life coach. For the first time I can hear the ticking of fear in his voice. This isn’t about your journey, he says, so let’s get some things on the record. You signed a contract. You have duties to perform. A fiduciary obligation. And don’t think that you can hit the ground and go all renegade on us. We’ll find Julie-nah, and we’ll find you.

Okay, I say, just to keep him calm. You’re right.

We’ll be in touch when it’s all arranged, he says. In the meantime,
you have a Bank of China account set up for you. Here’s the card. Here’s the passport. I’ll whisper the PIN in your ear. You ready? He leans over until I can feel the warmth of his lips glowing on my ear.
2526.
There’s an easier way to remember it, though.

Because it spells
Alan
? I say. Who’s Alan? Am I supposed to remember him?

The plane is descending now; I feel it in my knees, my hips, the pull of the atmosphere, the engines measuring out the shock of gravity in little tugs and dips. Martin says nothing. I remember, just now, something he said to me on the flight out of BWI, when we’d just settled into our seats. I love taking off, he said, but I hate to land. Gives me the creeps. Can’t get it over with soon enough. Those flaps, you know, that flip up on the wings? Doesn’t it just seem like a toy, when you look at those things? Like fingernails. All that momentum, and then they flick a switch and squash you like an ant.

You going to be okay getting out of the airport? he asks suddenly. Because I’m not staying overnight. My flight’s in two hours.

Back to Bangkok?

Almaty. Kazakhstan.

What’s in Kazakhstan?

I don’t know. Fur hats? Lamb skewers? Mostly an oil pipeline, that’s what I hear. Oil going to China. No, seriously. Potential clients. And investors. It’s been in the works for months. No point canceling when we could be on the cusp of something new.

The alert bell pings again. We’re on the ground, we’ve taxied, without noticing it, and bumped up against the boarding gate. We stand up together, or rather he lifts me up, by the elbow. Careful, he says, watch your head. Here. He binds my hands around the handle of my laptop bag.

Martin, I say, suddenly overcome. You thought of everything.

Don’t worry about it. What else was I supposed to do? Go on, I’ll be right behind you.

These are my last few minutes, I’m thinking, or, more precisely, the thought wandering through my mind, looking for a feeling to settle on. Goodbye, Kelly. I ought to hug myself. Instead, I reach up and lock him in an awkward, grappling, swaying embrace. And then I turn and find the back of the next seat, pulling myself into the aisle. In front of me, it seems, to the left, at the exit door, is an intense brightness, and there’s a cloud of some floral perfume, as if someone’s dropped a duty-free bag. It doesn’t matter. I hear the babble of voices, dialects, accents, the toddler saying lift me up! lift me up! The wife calling, old man, don’t forget the camera, it’s right by your foot.

Excuse me, the flight attendant is saying, in Chinese, of course, coming down the aisle toward me, excuse me, we have a disabled passenger here. To me she says, loudly, taking my elbow, sir, follow me, I’ll take you through.

Is this happening? Can this be? My words. My world. I’ve been addressed; I’ve been seen. The knot of fear at the back of my neck—how long has it been there, I’m wondering, has it been there my entire waking life?—dissolves.

You’re going to make it, right? Martin asks a moment later.

I turn against the tide of shoulders and elbows.
Biezhaoji,
I almost say, turning the words on my tongue. I mean, don’t worry about me.

You’re here now, right? You’re home.

I’m home.

To Sander Gilman, for
Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul
;
Jonathan Ames, for
Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs
; Rebecca Walker, for
Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness
; Fred Moten, for
In the Break: The Poetics of the Black Avant-Garde
; Spike Lee, for
Do the Right Thing
; David Simon and all those involved in creating
The Wire;
Maxine Hong Kingston, for
The Woman Warrior
(and particularly “Thirteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”); Paul Beatty for
The White Boy Shuffle
; Adam Mansbach for
Angry Black White Boy
; Cornel West for
The Gifts of Black Folk in the Age of Terrorism
, and above all to James Baldwin for
Another Country
and for his words to white Americans, in anger and love.

To the doctors, scientists, lawyers, and their staffs who generously answered my questions: Alan Engler, M.D., Ryan Turner, M.D., Steven Cohen, M.D., Pichet Rodchareon, M.D., Chettawut Tulyapanich, M.D., Professor Victor Hruby of the University of Arizona, Professor David Gray of the University of Maryland School of Law, Professor Byron Warnken of the University of Baltimore School of Law, and David Waranch, Esq. Also to Ruangsasithorn Sangwarosakul, Matt Wheeler, and Justin McDaniel for their help making connections in Bangkok. And to Bobby Sullivan for clarifying a point of Rasta etiquette.

To Major Jackson, Martha Southgate, and Sonya Posmentier, who read early drafts and shared immensely helpful thoughts.

To Rosalia Ruiz, Laura Hill, and the teachers of U-NOW Day Nursery, Little Missionary Day Nursery, and PS 3.

To my friends and colleagues at the College of New Jersey, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and the City University of Hong Kong, for their encouragement, and in particular to David Blake for helping me secure a sabbatical when I needed it most.

To Denise Shannon, who believed in this project before I did, and Megan Lynch, who saw it through to the end.

To my parents, for their unwavering support.

To Sonya, Mina, and Asa for sharing the life that inspired this book most of
all.