Your Face in Mine (27 page)

Robin Wilkinson

>Okay. Okay. I’m over it.

>Do you think it’s going to work?

Kelly Thorndike

>Is what going to work?

Robin Wilkinson

>Whatever these “procedures” are. I mean, have they tested them out? Are there any actual cases involved?

Kelly Thorndike

>Yes.

Robin Wilkinson

>How many?

Kelly Thorndike

>Enough. There’s proof.

Robin Wilkinson

>I looked up Silpasuvan. He’s been at this awhile. Can’t believe some of the stuff he’s published. I’m not in the field, but I would imagine this would be raising red flags with the bioethicists.

Kelly Thorndike

>Things are a little different here as far as that goes.

>Can I ask you a question?

Robin Wilkinson

>Since we’ve come this far.

Kelly Thorndike

>What are you going to do with this information?

>You there?

Robin Wilkinson

>I don’t know.

>Nothing.

>Look at how tired I’m getting not even bothering to punctuate anymore . . . I told Tamika that if she ever sends me an email looking like this I’ll take away her phone.

Kelly Thorndike

>I’d call you, but my phone doesn’t work here.

Robin Wilkinson

>Not sure I could take hearing your voice right now.

>I’m a human being, after all.

Kelly Thorndike

>?

Robin Wilkinson

>Believe me. I love my husband.

>Where are you right now, btw?

Kelly Thorndike

>In my room.

>It’s 1 a.m. here.

Robin Wilkinson

>Is Martin home?

Kelly Thorndike

>Not sure.

>Want me to check?

Robin Wilkinson

>Forget it.

Kelly Thorndike

>Go on.

Robin Wilkinson

>

>

>

Kelly Thorndike

>Think the program is freezing.

Robin Wilkinson

>No, I’m here.

>As I was saying, I love my husband, but he treats me like Wonder Woman. I don’t give him any reason not to.

>Neither one of us is really good at the whole vulnerability thing, putting our guard down.

Kelly Thorndike

>I get that.

Robin Wilkinson

>Accepted a long time ago that when he’s with me he’s 100 percent and when he’s traveling we hardly even talk.

Kelly Thorndike

>Are you asking me?

Robin Wilkinson

>Are you telling me?

Kelly Thorndike

>What time is it there, it’s in the middle of the afternoon, aren’t you at work?

Robin Wilkinson

>Just got back from a conference in D.C., doing laundry, waiting for the girls to get off the bus.

Kelly Thorndike

>What are you wearing right now?

>Sorry that’s not what I meant to say.

Robin Wilkinson

>

>

[Robin Wilkinson has left the conversation]

Late at night, a knock on my door.

I’ve fallen asleep sitting up in bed with the binder across my knees, open to an article about maintaining airway access during rhinoplasty. Trying not to think about Robin. My laptop is closed, shut down, sealed in its case. I won’t go back online till morning. Whatever that was, it’s over. Can’t touch it. I erased my browser history, my message queue, did a Privacy Purge of my profile. And I’m sure she did the same. I imagine us clicking the same buttons, clawing our way back. Erasing our histories. You could call that a kind of romance.

And now instead I’m thinking, for no particular reason, about Paul Phillips.
Fuck you, hymie.
BCC has been closed now for three months: did he find another job? I ignored the outburst and wrote him the most glowing recommendation I could, then mailed it to his home address, in a box with his kids’ gap-toothed school pictures, his autographed Ravens helmet. The restraining order wouldn’t allow him within a hundred feet of the building. Is it guilt, this feeling? At being a pawn, a bystander? Something irretrievably done, or still undone? In a thicket of wondering I drifted off, and now I’m pulling a shirt over my head and wiping the spit from the corner of my mouth. Hello? I say, as softly as I can manage.

No answer.

I open the door six inches, and Julie-nah glares at me. Skinny jeans, bare feet, her hair loose and spilling over her shoulders. As if she’s just come from a walk on the beach. Under one arm she’s got a small steel thermos.

Can I help you with something?

You can let me come in, she says, softly, almost mouthing the words. I open the door all the way, and she slips inside so quietly I hear her hair swishing by.

Keep your voice down, she whispers. I don’t want
them
to hear me. Do you have some music you can turn on or something?

I take my iPod from my carry-on, plug it into the clock radio by the bed, and put on the last thing I was listening to: Miles Davis’s
Porgy and Bess.
She gives me a skeptical look and takes down the wall-mounted remote control that operates the ceiling fan. At the highest speed, a gale-like wind so strong we have to move out of the way, it has a mellow but discernible hum, a drone beneath the music, an extra layer of tubas and baritone sax under Gil Evans’s orchestration.

Sit there, she says, pointing to the far side of the bed. I’ll take the chair. We can’t be too close to the window.

Were you a spy in a previous life?

I was a teenager. She sets the thermos down on my bedside table, pulls the duvet off the bed and capes it around her shoulders. A rebellious teenager, she says, with a very angry father. You get used to a clandestine existence. It’s the Korean way. Every house is its own little dictatorship, and every dictatorship has dissidents. Just like every ship has rats. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. How are you? I heard you were sick.

I think it’s just jet lag. Super-intense jet lag. I’m not used to traveling anymore, I guess. It’s all in my head. I’ll be done with it soon enough. What’s with the thermos?

I made you some congee. For breakfast. That thing is guaranteed to stay hot for twelve hours.

Seriously?

Tariko told me you were married to a Chinese woman. I thought you might want some comfort food.

That’s a pretty nice thing to do for someone you don’t know very well.

Forget it. Around here, if I didn’t cook, I’d just
congeal
.

For the first time since we’ve met she looks at me directly, squarely, absorbing my gaze.

What are you thinking right now? she asks.

The same thing I thought when I first saw you. That you look amazingly,
amazingly
, familiar. Like someone I went to school with. Not a specific person, I mean: you could have been any number of people I went to school with.

You went to Amherst, right? And before that, a prep school? East Coast?

Yes.

Then it’s not surprising, she says. When I first went to Silpa, I brought him college brochures. Colgate. Bowdoin. Mount Holyoke. And the L.L.Bean and J.Crew catalogs. Plus some things from Ireland and the UK. And Sweden. But mostly it was a northeastern college look. A Nantucket look. An
I-just-went-for-a-refreshing-swim-in-Barnegat-Bay
look. An
I-played-field-hockey-for-Choate
look. You know what I mean? You’ve got the pinkish tone, the flush, the vivacity, and then that kind of transparent marble-ish glow underneath. Like layers of parchment. Or raw pastry. Delicate but fiery. You want to surround it with plaid kilts, with pink and green. Stick a gin and tonic in there somewhere. Raise a flag to it. You know, like a girl in jodhpurs and the red riding coat and the black helmet, the high boots, the gloves, who turns and gives you this wink, like
I really like to take it in the ass
. That kind of thing.

And how did you—where did you—I mean, you were trying, in a sense you were trying, to replicate
me
.

Your perfect ideal complement. That is, if you were a little taller and more athletic. And blonder.

And richer. I’ve never even been to Nantucket.

Well, she says, in the actual terms of the project, variables of wealth don’t enter into it. Explicitly. But really, you
should
go. I’ve never understood this false modesty, this
amnesia
, white American liberals have about your own origins. Koreans don’t have that problem.

Maybe because they don’t have so much recent history to be ashamed of.

Maybe, she says, creasing her eyebrows, as if we’re two earnest young intellectuals at a cocktail party, as if to take this conversation to a new plateau of absurdity, like a layer of meringue atop buttercream frosting.

Julie-nah, I say, I think I understand about Tariko. And I’ve heard just about everything there is to hear about Martin. But you haven’t actually explained, yet, why
you
want to do this.

Why do you care? You’re not writing my biography.

I open my mouth, then close it.

Is that it, then?

Is what it?

All this hostility, all this alarm? What, because I’m working with Martin? Four days ago I had no idea you existed.

That wasn’t hostility, she says. That was intellectual honesty. And, honestly, concern for your sake. Because you don’t know what you’re getting into. Why
you
matter.

You’re the second person who’s said that to me today.

Was the first Dr. Silpa?

How did you know?

Because he’s as uncomfortable with this whole scenario as I am. It was Martin’s idea. I’m opposed to it, completely. I don’t believe in recruitment. I think it’s insane.

Recruitment for what?
I’m about to say, but before the words have emerged I stop myself, as if I’ve just heard an echo, an alteration or blurring of the sounds themselves; I draw half a breath, and then stop, involuntarily, almost burping in my attempt not to speak.

Are you okay?

Explain that. Explain what you mean, please.

I mean recruiting you for the program. You understand that, right? That’s what he wants to do? I mean, do I need to be more blunt? He wants you to have the surgery and become Chinese.

Her face, Julie-nah’s impossible face, becomes painfully, unbearably clear, clear in every pore, every fleck, every tiny mole, her molded lips slightly parted now, waiting for my answer. I’ve heard the words, and now the meaning comes racing around her head, a solid thing, in her unsubtle way of putting it,
and become Chinese
, like a rock on a string, and I spring backward, feeling my face flattening, as if I’ve just pancaked against a wall.

Fuck, she says. Fuck. Fuck. Are you telling me you didn’t have any idea at all?

My heart, but not just my heart, the entire chest cavity, all that spongy and pellucid and semirigid tissue shoved together, is thrashing around, my diaphragm doing contortions, sending showers of sparks across my retinas, and the only thing I can do is lean over and put my head between my knees. Am I going to throw up again? My throat still feels scoured with bile.

Kelly. Kelly. Talk to me.

Can’t, I say, through clenched teeth. Can’t. Give me a minute.

Should I call Silpa? Seriously. Do you need an ambulance?

No ambulance, I say, gasping, actually gasping for air. It’s like a bad Steve Martin interpretation: Steve Martin kicked in the balls, that windbag of a mouth and the Pinocchio nose.

Jesus. Jesus Christ.

Just stop talking for a second.

Okay.

I’m thinking of a woman on a bicycle, with my eyes closed, head still between my knees, my neck now starting to cramp. Not a real bicycle, a bicycle painted in watercolor or some kind of very light oil, in a sketchy,
Toulouse-Lautrec kind of a way.
Cyclos Le Monde,
the poster says at the bottom. She’s wearing a blue beret and an improbably long skirt. It’s a piece of generic decorative kitsch, really, something you might find at Pier 1 or Pottery Barn. Where have I seen it before, and who gives a shit? Somehow, attached to this horrid image, is a kind of explanation of my life. I suppose this is what they call déjà vu.

I need some air, is what I’m thinking. So I slowly pull myself up to a sitting position, stand, and move over until I’m directly under the fan, looking up, taking the wind full in my face.

Take your time, Julie-nah says.

Through the rushing air her voice is pleasantly obscured, a weak signal.

Collect yourself,
a voice says. Collect what? My arms, still miraculously attached, move up and down of their own accord, testing the edges of the airstream. For a moment I imagine myself as a wind sock, snapping in the breeze.

Was it staged, I’m thinking, right from the start? Did he follow me, did he track me down? How many hours, how much combing the Web, would he have had to log, to know enough about me, to profile me as a candidate? Was it research, or was it just a hunch? Or a hunch that turned into an obsession? Are we talking about the cynicism of the entrepreneur who takes a chance on a random reunion, or an actual pathology, a conspiratorial, manipulative, two-a.m.-in-the-basement, caffeine-twitching madness?

Heretical and criminal methods.

Martin, I say, mouthing the words, almost. You found me. It feels good to say it. Who else would have believed you? With the evidence of, what, your own body? Before-and-after pictures? When something was missing, or, rather, when everything was missing?—a coherent plan, a shred of evidence, of preparation, of anything other than Martin himself, his own body? And the story.

Who would have believed that story, other than me?

Why pretend it was a coincidence? I clench my fists. If you brush by
a person on the street, that’s because you knew them in five hundred previous lifetimes. Karma locked us together. Here I am, I’m thinking, forgiving him. Almost out of a sense of duty. What did I want to say to him, when I watched him walking away on that street in Towson in 1993, after the funeral?
We still have each other.
Men, heterosexual men, can’t say such things, can they? Not at age nineteen. So we have to think of other, harmful ways to say it. We have to harm each other to make our dependence clear.
Puer aeternus. Pueri aeterni.

Did he know I’d been to China? That I had married Wendy? Did he know I’d watched their coffins go into the crematorium one after another, the ashes mixed?

He knew he could draw me in somehow. That’s the kind of sick genius he is. He knew I’d be lost by now, and ready to jump out of my skin.

Martin, I say, mouthing the words again, maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m just raw materials, too.

And then another voice, Wendy’s voice, unmistakably:
you’ve been inside yourself far too long. Time to come out. Time to come out.

•   •   •

W
ell, I’m just going to talk, then, Julie-nah says, after a few minutes have passed and I’m still staring straight up into the fan’s rotors, as if dangling from an invisible noose. Maybe it’ll help. I doubt it, but just maybe. So look. You have to understand that for this thing to work, this enterprise, they need to have as many successful models, prototypes, whatever you want to call them—us—as possible. And in particular what we don’t have is anyone transitioning
to
an Asian GI.
Goal Identity
. Has Martin told you that term? Anyway, it’s a real stumbling block. Granted, the candidates are going to be rare. For the moment. But you can’t launch a product like this in Asia with the implication that somehow Asians aren’t, well, as desirable. You need that press conference and it needs to look like the world. So it all started back in
January, when we got a call from Martin. A conference call. Silpa was there, too. He says,
I’ve got the perfect one, but he’s not there yet. He needs some coaching—

Julie-nah, I say loudly, so she can hear me, that’s enough. I get it.

You do?

Yeah. I lick my lips, readying myself for the lie. I suspected it all along.

Then maybe you’re a better candidate than I thought.

Instead of answering, I step out from underneath the fan, my body flushing with warmth, and cross the room to switch it off. Miles’s muted trumpet trickles across the room—it’s a cliché to say it, to even think it, but what else can you say?—like smoke.

What would it be like, I’m thinking, to take a sound and follow it to its logical conclusion, as if it had a logical conclusion? I pick up the iPod and flick the wheel until it lands on
Bob Marley
. All I have is an album of ambient remixes, something a friend sent me for a party mix years ago. I click on
Exodus
. A whooshing sound, a lot of echoing congas, and then the throbbing bass line, the
tsks
of the hi-hat. I listened to just enough Marley in college to know the words by heart.
We’re gonna walk, all right, through the roads of creation.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Julie-nah says.

From a pocket in her shorts she takes out a small, flat, red-and-white metal tin. An Altoids tin. And inside, of course, an expertly rolled joint, dagger-sharp at both ends, and a yellow Bic lighter. This is another thing I learned at Brown, she says, lighting up. Don’t leave home without it. She swallows the smoke in a gulp, tilts her chin toward the ceiling, and blows it out in a blue stream. You’d probably prefer vodka or Scotch or something, she says. Better for the nerves. But Tariko won’t have it. I mean, sure, for a party or something. But he doesn’t like it in the fridge.
This
, on the other hand, he’s happy to supply. All you have to do is ask.