Your Face in Mine (22 page)

—

I need to hide, I can’t help thinking, I need to leave, I need a conduit, a way out. I need to become not me. As I settle back into bed, beyond sleep, I feel myself grasping Martin’s hand at the edge of a cliff, the wind behind us, straining my calves to stay upright, and then, by some wordless signal, we jump at the same moment, jump over the thick shining waves, the stone-dark bottomless
ocean.

Out of a dream of my childhood, a hike up Mount Cardigan on a bright autumn day, scampering up a long granite face at a gentle incline, bursts of October light filtering through canopies of yellow and red and orange—I open my eyes to the sun streaming through a gauzy curtain above my bed, the shutters drawn back, the branches of a rubber tree thrusting up into a pale sky strewn with jet trails.

Five or six different species of birds are singing all at once, competitively, trying to drown one another out. An avian pep rally. It’s the sound of mid-morning, they’re saying, the day fully established, the hard business of seed cracking and grub probing under way, and I look down at my watch and see
10:30
. Someone should have come to get me by now.

But since they haven’t, since the day seems unscheduled—not that Martin ever gave me an itinerary, an agenda, not that I have any proof of being here other than a stamp in my passport and a boarding pass jammed into a shirt pocket—I sit up in bed and take a long breath, a waking breath, whatever that means. When you wake up in a new country, I’m thinking now, your senses are the sharpest. Newness, to the touch, to the nose, to the tongue, is a series of small insults. I ought to be paying full attention. I’m on retainer, after all: a professional
visitor. A professional
writer
. Why is that so hard to say? I should be taking everything down.

The room—which was dark when I came in, past midnight, and I tumbled into bed without even turning on the bedside lamp—is much bigger than I imagined. The bedroom opens into an alcove with a writing table and a couch, and the look is Thai Resort Classic, even I can see that, all teak and rattan and silk, lustrous green-and-gold scarves hung on the walls, a pair of brass kneeling monks on the coffee table, an antique-looking map labeled
SIAM
over my bed. Thorough, expensive, and generic: too perfect, like a stage set for one of those reality TV shows where I’m a strapping nitwit from Des Moines, a doe-eyed dental hygienist from Wilkes-Barre. On the writing table, in a square glass vase, a bouquet of orchids, of course, bound up with pencil-thin shoots of yellow bamboo. The room smells of incense and also something drier, more chemical: wood polish. Antiseptic. Pledge, Dettol, Febreze. Someone has put a lot of time into this, I’m thinking, a room that says,
you are having an experience. You are getting what you paid for.
Without demanding of you anything at all.

Someone downstairs—the birds have died down for a minute—is speaking Japanese.

It’s been years, and I hardly studied it conversationally, mostly just scholarly Japanese, the stock language of articles on Asian literature and linguistics, but I can pick out a few words, here and there, the shape and direction of the sentences.
Of course we pay for . . . the airport . . . no visa requirements . . . full private bath. Yaha. Yes, Yaha.
What does
Yaha
mean? I wonder.
I will mail you the brochure!
he says, whoever it is, speaking formally, as to a client, a customer.
Call me back!
I can almost hear the bow. In Japanese, even speaking on the phone, you bow.

A secretary, I’m thinking. An assistant of some kind. Maybe, from the sound of it, a separate business on the side. Nothing unusual about that. Just that Martin didn’t mention it. But who thinks of everything? In a place this size, would I expect to be all alone?

The house belongs to him. I’m remembering this now. How, in the car, pulling through the gate, Martin couldn’t resist a proprietary smile. You get sick of staying in hotels, he said. No matter how nice they are. And in any case I have business interests. Makes sense to maintain a presence. An address. I let clients stay here sometimes. These perks, you know, in the business world, sometimes that’s all that matters. People are shallow. Sometimes all they want is a gesture.

It’s a pretty elaborate gesture, I might have said, though just to make an obvious point.

Now I’m up and moving around, feeling a hollow cramp of morning hunger, postflight hunger. My laptop bag is on the writing table, untouched. My suitcase stands to one side in the bathroom, or dressing room, since it has mirrors, a chest of drawers, a pressing stand. Empty. Someone came and put my clothes away while I was sleeping, and added a bathrobe, a set of blue silk pajamas still in their plastic wrapper, a pair of plastic flip-flops and a pair of leather thongs, and, as I see when I open the closet, an off-white linen suit, more or less my size. Or, when I slip on the jacket, almost exactly my size, the cuffs only an inch too long. What is this, I want to say to Martin, Fantasy Island? Or callbacks for a Tennessee Williams play?

On the other hand, it’s a pretty nice suit.

I need coffee. Coffee, a few words with Martin, a plan for the day. I shrug the jacket off, leave it hanging on the doorknob, choose what seems to be the most neutral outfit, a black polo shirt and jeans, and slip out the door, in my stiff new sandals, into the blue-tiled hallway, open to the outside, with tall arched windows at both ends, and down the stairs, only dimly remembering where to go. When we arrived last night the house was dark, floating in a constant hum of crickets or katydids, and there was only Phran to greet us, a short, stocky man, very brown, in a blue sarong and a Dallas Mavericks T-shirt, who carried all our suitcases upstairs at once. Now I come into a kind of central gallery, a breezeway, done in the same blue tiles, and, following a smell of
coffee, flowers, and overripe fruit, into a large, open kitchen, or kitchen/office. At the kitchen end a woman in a blue smock dices vegetables with a cleaver, her face covered with a surgical mask; at the other end, along one wall, sits a bank of three computer screens, and a short, slender black man in front of them, his dreadlocks done up in a knot atop his head, tapping a pen on the desk and speaking, into a headset mic, in the voice I heard upstairs: perfect, unhesitating, native Japanese.

And so on instinct, as travelers do, as scholars do, as a matter of habit and protocol, when he says
sayonara odeshka
and turns to me, with a broad, bloodshot smile, I say, in Japanese, good morning, I am Kelly Thorndike, may I have the honor of your name?

God! he says. You startled I. Sorry. Pleased to meet you.

His English has an overloud, exclamatory, gummy quality to it; it takes me a minute, as if two frames of a photograph have to be overlaid, and then I realize he’s speaking with a Jamaican accent, a kind of effortful, labored accent, like Philip Michael Thomas on
Miami Vice
. I’m Tariko, he says. The office boy. Head Web lackey and secretary of all things Orchid. Did Martin tell you who I am? Your Japanese is not bad!

I feel, for some reason, the urge to wring my hands, and simultaneously the need to sit down; inside and outside my body, the world for a moment has the consistency and smell of melting candle wax. Behind me I hear the
skitch-skitch-skitch
of plastic sandals, and the woman in the surgical mask appears, carrying a plate of three croissants and a cup of something dark and milky. Sit down, please, she says, and gestures to a small side table. Helpless, boneless, I follow her, and when she pauses for a moment before leaving, I take a bite of croissant and chew it with my eyes closed, trying to remember what a croissant is supposed to taste like.

Tariko, I say, finally, which are you?

Which am I what?

Which were you, to begin with?

Oh! That. Should have introduced I properly. I’m transitioning, of course. Originally Tariko Ogawa, from Kanazawa, Fukui Prefecture, and in six months, Ras Leon Coxholden, from Spanish Town. I’m the first. The first Japanese, that is. To go all the way.

Well, I say, it’s very convincing. And then, in Japanese: When I heard you upstairs, you sounded completely Japanese. When I came down here, you looked like a Jamaican. No doubt at all.

Dr. Silpa is a miracle worker. By Jah’s grace.

Would you prefer it if I spoke only English?

If you don’t mind. I have to use Japanese on the computer, of course. Talking to potential clients. And brethren. But otherwise I try to stay with English. Part of my process.

Are there Japanese Rastafarians?

Of course, Japanese Rastas! I’m second generation. He reaches over to the table and flips open a thin wallet and shows me a much-creased, laminated picture. Bob Marley, in his late stage, raccoon-eyed, slack-jawed, his dreadlocks thick and tumescent, shaking hands with a tiny grinning shaggy-haired Japanese man in a tie-dye T-shirt. My dad ran the first Reggae Sunsplash. Nineteen seventy-eight, he says. Took the first Japanese pilgrimage to Ethiopia. No, I’m dread as they come. One hundred percent Nyabinghi, I-tal from birth. So it’s natural, for me. This project. This
journey
.

His smile has a certain infectious warmth; it exudes contentment, confidence, ease.
Why make it so hard?
that smile says. The mark of a natural salesman. He could sell junk bonds, burglar alarms, time-shares, used cars, Mormonism. Whatever it is, I’d think about it for an extra moment. I’d be tempted.

You’ll have to forgive me, I say. I’m a little out of my element. Martin didn’t tell me that anyone else would be here.

I’m not surprised. We’re a bit of a state secret. But look—take your time, man. You just got off the plane. Take it
easy
.

He turns back to the computer, and I take another three bites of my
croissant and a sip of coffee. Bite, breathe. Bite, breathe. Out on the street, out of sight, a motorbike roars by, unmuffled, loud as a chain saw. The sunlight pouring in through the doors has a pale, dusty tinge, and I’m beginning to realize that among other small insults, the day is taking on real heat, massive, physical, dry-season heat, not the plangent tropical skin bath I expected. We can’t see anything but the garden, of course, but I can feel an echo, a restlessness in the air, a subaural buzz, the resting tone of the vast city. After a day or so I won’t even notice it anymore.

What does it mean, I ask myself, that Martin didn’t tell me? Did I really think, did he really lead me to believe, that he was the only one? Out of the whole world, out of all the possible variations? The first American, maybe. The first white to black? And then, as Americans do, I didn’t stop to consider the rest of the world, all the other possibilities?

Tariko, I say, I have a question.

Yes?

In Japan, is it a secret, too, what you’re doing? No one else knows?

Of course it’s
secret
, he says, smiling broadly, as if it’s the most foolish question in the world. Or else why wouldn’t you have heard? News travels fast in the first world.

And when you go back?

Never going back. Not me. No point to it. At the end of this I’ll be in Jamaica for good. Jamaica in body, Zion in soul.

And your clients, your potential clients?

They know what’s on the site. Haven’t you seen it? We’re still updating all the time, but there it is. He gestures me over to the screen and clicks the browser’s refresh button. That, and only that.

A dark blue screen appears, with a line drawing of an orchid unspooling in white across it, and then, at the bottom, like credits in a movie, one line comes into view, fades, and is replaced by another:

Who Are You?

When You Look at Yourself in the Mirror, Do You See . . . You?

Do You Dream in Another Language?

Do You Dream of Starting Again in a New Skin?

Start Here.

The Orchid Group invites you to consider the possibilities of a new you: an entirely different appearance, from skin to hair to physical features of every kind. At the frontiers of reconstructive and reassignment surgery, we can accommodate the needs of clients who feel that their psychological health depends on a radical physical transformation other than gender. We are a full-service healthcare provider, based in Bangkok, that offers psychological assessment and counseling, lifestyle enhancement, language and dialect tutoring, sequential transitioning care, and a full range of surgical procedures under the leadership of Binpheloung Silpasuvan, M.D., Harvard Medical School, former Assistant Professor of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, University of Rochester. Our staff are native speakers of English, Thai, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog, French, German, Italian, and Russian. All of our services are offered in complete confidentiality. We offer payment plans and loans through HSBC, Thailand, Ltd.

The text block fades, replaced by a mosaic of smiling faces: an African woman, very dark, with a kente headband; a dashing, square-jawed Asian man with a pearly grin; a strawberry-blond girl, Swedish or Polish or maybe Russian; a thin, ashen-faced hipster in an Oxford shirt and enormous square glasses. As I watch, each photo dissolves into a new one: an Arab man with a goatee, a severe-looking Latina with arching eyebrows, a Native American man in a suit, a Filipina or Indonesian woman in a hijab, a teenager with a Jennifer Grey nose and bobbed curly hair, a Chinese kid with dyed blond spikes and
Thug Life
tattooed across his breastbone. It’s exhausting, trying to label them all. To enumerate the possibilities. Like a Benetton ad, of course, that’s what anyone would say, only hitched to the mathematics of a Fibonacci sequence. A difference machine. A deck of cards that always reshuffles itself. A self-reproducing maze, a cancer cell, adding a new layer at every turn.

This Isn’t You Seeing Tomorrow

This Is Tomorrow Seeing You

That’s what you call it? A radical physical transformation other than gender?

Yeah. Doesn’t sound quite right, does it? But right now we don’t really have any choice in the matter. You can’t say
race
, otherwise the hounds will be at your back. Can’t say
ethnic
. Same thing. It’s confusing, no doubt. I’m the one who’s here answering the phones all day, trying to tell people we can’t make them into a dwarf, can’t make them six feet tall, can’t make their penis two feet long. It’s time to lift the veil, if you know what I’m saying. I guess that’s your job.