Your Face in Mine (5 page)

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.

Now, an adult again, I heave myself out of the water, checking to make sure my Downtown Athletic Club guest pass is still attached to my swimsuit, and the bored attendant—a short Latina in a black track suit, who looks too young even to have graduated from high school—leaves off texting long enough to hand me a thick, fleecy towel. I’ve finished as many laps as I can stand; swimming for exercise—really, any kind of repetitive exercise—bores me to death. What I love about water is being able to slip into it and cut the world off, sealing that membrane of silence. Maybe I was one of those babies who never wanted to leave the womb.

Is it always this quiet in the middle of the day? I ask her.

Nah. Not always. Sometimes there’s conventions. But otherwise, I don’t know, I guess people have to
work
.

I dry my face, my neck, and work downward, scrubbing my flaccid, untoned arms, my knobby chest with its spray of moles, its odd patches of hair. I haven’t been in a pool—haven’t been in public, in a bathing suit—in the seven months since August. And like all people of my complexion, who live in northern climes, whose skin barely sees the sun eight months of the year, I’ve turned the color of white wax or lake ice, the color of an eye clouded by glaucoma.

Martin, in the next lane, hasn’t stopped once in twenty minutes. He alternates between freestyle and breaststroke, dipping and ducking his head like an efficient waterbird. I wouldn’t call him a natural swimmer—he scissor kicks, and doesn’t keep his line straight, veering across into the left side of the lane—but he compensates with stamina. You can see it in his exaggerated shoulders, his fistlike calves. If you weren’t here, he told me, I’d go for an hour without a break. It’s the only way I can think.

In my bag is the manila folder he handed me as we walked in. Some notes I started taking about a year ago, he said. Thought I’d write a book. Anyway, it might be a place to start. Or it might be pure bullshit.

I dry my hands carefully and open the folder. Ten pages, stapled, like a high school term paper, with his name in the upper left-hand corner.

O
N
R
ACIAL
I
DENTITY
D
YSPHORIA
S
YNDROME
(RIDS): A S
ELF
-D
IAGNOSIS

This paper is offered as an attempt to open up dialogue about one of the major overlooked mental phenomena of our time. I offer it as a personal reflection and an appeal for scientific and pharmaceutical research into this urgent issue.

I have the physical appearance of an African American male. In seven years of living with this appearance, it has never been questioned or found unusual by any of my friends or my intimate partners, including my wife of four years, who is also African American. However, this appearance is based on a carefully created medical procedure that was carried out in Bangkok, Thailand, in 2001–2, by Dr. Binpheloung Silpasuvan and his medical associates. Specifically, Dr. Silpasuvan carried out a series of facial surgeries, scalp surgeries, body-sculpting procedures, and pigmentation treatments, transforming me from my original appearance as a Caucasian-Jewish “white” male into a convincing African American. I returned to the United States with an altered passport and have since presented myself as the child of adoptive white parents, now dead, with no information about my biological roots. This is the story that everyone around me—my wife, my intimate friends, my pastor—takes at face value.

Those are the scientific facts, shocking as they may be. What is even more shocking is the syndrome that drove me to this extreme, costly, and risky decision. I discovered, in my early adulthood (I was twenty-eight at the time of the procedure), that my long history of psychological problems, including depression, agoraphobia, and involvement in illegal activities, was the result of being born in the wrong physical body. I term this “racial identity dysphoria” because I believe it is in many ways similar to the gender dysphoria that is so commonly reported in the news.

What justifies my belief that I was in fact born in the wrong race, as transsexuals claim to be born in the wrong sex? Some will surely believe that this is nothing more than a publicity stunt, or perhaps a perverse expression of “white guilt.” The first charge, I believe, is answered by the fact that I have kept my true identity a secret for so long, and that until now I have made no effort to “go public.”

Guilt just did not enter into it. Not then, not now. I never felt that it was “bad” or “wrong” to be a white person or a Jew. Of course, I
was aware of the history of slavery, the civil rights movement, apartheid, job discrimination, and so on; but I was never led to feel a sense of responsibility or even involvement in the history of black people in America. My father, my only surviving family member (my mother died when I was an infant; he is now also deceased, as of 1995), was a profoundly self-absorbed person, a historian, an archivist, who had very little interest in contemporary society at all. I grew up around black people and have had black friends for as long as I could remember, but I was not, to any great degree, ever made fun of, isolated, mocked, or bullied for being white. In other words, my dysphoria cannot be associated with some trauma, some discreet, explicable, psychological cause, at least not one I can identify. Transsexuals are usually given a battery of tests before they undergo sex-change procedures. Were there to be such a test for racial reassignment surgery, I believe I would pass it.

What I can say is that I always (until the moment my bandages were taken off) knew in some way that I lived in the wrong body. I’ve spoken with transsexuals (in fact, I came to know a few of them during my time in Thailand, as they are Dr. Silpasuvan’s primary base of customers) who’ve told me exactly the same thing. There is an inchoate sense in which something is wrong long before there is a sense of what could be done to make it right.

It helped (you could say, in a sense at least) that I did not grow up in a judgmental family or a family that really was very interested in my appearance or what I might do to modify it. I never experienced any pressure to dress a certain way or live up to a certain kind of social appearance. In fact, whether or not I put on clothes in the morning was almost entirely up to me. Furthermore, beginning in my early teenage years, I existed in a social milieu that, to put it bluntly, tolerated, even encouraged, freaks.

You might have thought that this atmosphere of social liberty (some might even call it neglect) would have led me to radically alter
my appearance in the conventional ways, by dyeing my hair, for example, or getting piercings or tattoos. I never had any appetite for such things. In fact, I dressed in a monotonous, unimaginative way, barely keeping enough clothes around to make it from week to week. I lived inside a cocoon, one could say, poetically, I suppose, waiting for the real change to happen.

It was the suicide of my best friend in the spring of 1993 that caused me to radically rethink the course of my life—

I fold the pages back, quickly, abruptly, and replace them as they were in my bag. Martin is as he was, churning through his daily mile, flashing me the happy grimace of the endorphin addict. My ears fill up with the silence, the ambient non-noise, of all this empty space: lapping water, humming ventilation fans, low, indistinct Muzak, the attendant’s flip-flops slapping the tiles as she paces back and forth, waiting to hand out her second towel of the morning. Expensive silence. How much money, it occurs to me just now, we spend to create these sterile bubbles, these vacuums abhorred by nature. How much money Martin spent; and now he wants to be the first with the brick, the needle, to let the pressure out, to let the world come roaring in? It makes no sense; it makes perfect sense.
Look what I’ve made,
he’s saying to me, through the stinging chlorinated air.
I made this. I made this.

Why have I never had much entrepreneurial spirit, that competitive, world-defining, world-acquiring instinct, so identified with my kind? Wendy always used to find it amusing that young people in Wudeng would come to me for business tips, assuming, in those days, that as an American I would have absorbed supply-side economics in the womb. I had nothing to tell them. This silence, this anticipatory silence, gives me tremors. The future, you could say, gives me tremors. And there Martin is, reaching after it, claiming it, his muscled arms as classic as a Rodin sculpture, or a hood ornament. Pulling me, phaeton-like, with him.

Why, I wonder, why does he even need a story at all? What does he need to explain? Look at his happiness: isn’t that reason enough?

•   •   •

Y
ou know what the girl’s name is? Finlayson. Finlarson. I think it’s Swedish. Anyway, she comes up to me and says, Mr. Perkins, I’ve got the records you requested now, follow me. And she actually opens up the counter and lets me walk back into the stacks with her. Starts taking down boxes and showing me things. Old deeds, lien records, structural assessments, for the whole area. I wish I’d had a camera, or a backpack; I would have just started squirreling stuff away while her back was turned. And then Vonetta comes around the corner and sees me there and says,
excuse
me! We are
not
allowed to have the public back in here for any reason! And this Finlayson girl says, this is the Office of Public Records, and I’m a state auditor. Can I have your name, please?

I’m surprised Vonetta didn’t have a stroke.

She turned purple like a goddamned grape.
Get the hell out of my office!
she says.
Nobody talks to me like that in my office! I am a city of Baltimore employee and a shop steward of AFSCME Local 522!
And Finlayson says, I don’t care if you’re the mayor, I’ve been instructed to open up these records pursuant to discovery in this case, and if I have to get a marshal in here to do it, I will.

Lee, Martin says, I think you’ve shot your chances of ever getting anything out of that office ever again.

That’s exactly what Vonetta said. She gave me this burning-up look and said, don’t
bother
coming in here no more, Lee Perkins, and I said to Karen, looks like I’m going to have to buy you a lot more tickets on that Baltimore–Annapolis bus. And she says, don’t bother, just get me a gas card; if I drive I’ll get here quicker.

Girl got balls.

She has no idea what she’s up against.

Vonetta Harper’s going to take early retirement.

Forget that. She’s got her little minions, and they’re just
trained
in the fine art of playing solitaire and ignoring requests.

What I know so far: Lee Perkins, to my right, is a lawyer, an assistant district attorney, who works on property misuse and real estate fraud. Paul Delacroix, across the table, runs the ESPN office at Camden Yards. Marshall Haber, next to Martin, teaches history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. We call ourselves the Chamber of Commerce, Marshall said to me, as we were being introduced. That way we can expense the meal. We’re one another’s clients. On paper, that is. Or sources, in my case. I view this as research. Weekly research at the DAC. It’s on my calendar.

For the most part it’s as if I wasn’t there at all. I sit back from the table, pad in my lap, clicking and unclicking my pen under the table, but writing only a few words, names, and phrases. When Martin explained what I was doing, they nodded, and Paul said, Martin Wilkinson, spokesman for the Talented Tenth, which produced a mild rumble of laughter.

Kelly, Marshall says, turning to me now, what you need to know about Vonetta—I’ve tangled with her, too—is that she’s the most powerful woman in Baltimore. Hands down. God love her, she may be a tyrant, but she knows everything about everything. You can’t register a deed or file a property transfer or a zoning request without her. You know in that TV show,
The Wire
, they had all that stuff about drug dealers and property developers? That was all based on her office. She was pissed because they wouldn’t give her a walk-on part. Tried to revoke their filming permits.

That was her one shot at the big time, Paul says. She’s too ugly for reality TV, God knows. Else she’d go on
The Apprentice
and be the Bad Black Lady, like that other one, the crazy one.

Let’s change the subject, Martin says. We increase her power by
talking about her, right? Everyone knows Vonetta’s all reputation. A dictatorship of one.

Baltimore, the city of fiefs.

It’s not like it’s so different other places. All politics is local, you know that saying? Anyway, people fight because the stakes are so low. If you had a
proper
city, you know, a
working
city, where landlords didn’t just walk away from whole blocks at a time, and the government wasn’t always going around declaring X property derelict and Y property uninhabitable—

You’re saying if people actually wanted to live here.