by Jess Row
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, seq
uential 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.
So Mr. Wilkinson told you that part.
Of course. The whole marketing plan. The computer pings; a chat box has opened up with a line of Japanese. Tariko glances at it and makes a kind of twenty-first-century shrug, slightly shifting his weight back toward the screen: are you more important than what my device is telling me?
I’ll let you get back to work, I say, but Tariko, one more question.
Of course. Anything.
How many of you are there?
Of me? Of us? Prototypes, you mean? Two so far. Officially.
Including Mr. Wilkinson?
Including him, three.
Will I get to meet them all?
You already have.
I look over at the woman in the mask, back at her dicing, now, but still within earshot. Julie-nah, Tariko says, don’t be shy. Take that thing off. Come here.
When I turn in her direction she’s already slipped her mask down under her chin, and looks so much like someone I should know that for a moment I wonder if she’s famous, or, say, an Amherst grad, a WBUR employee, a Harvard woman? She has any Korean woman’s pencil-straight black hair, held back in an ordinary high ponytail, but very light skin, a little more pink than I would have expected, a thin, aquiline nose, a wide mouth, full lips, and round, curious hazel eyes. I would have guessed, in another circumstance, that she was biracial. In truth, if you dyed her hair she would have no discernible Asian features at all.
Julie-nah, she says, hands tucked beneath her breasts. Kelly, right? You’re Martin’s biographer? Welcome. Make yourself at home.
She speaks with the flat, disaffected politeness of a gallery receptionist in Chelsea, and then looks over my head at Tariko, as if to say, can I go now?
Julie-nah’s mad because you took her spot, Tariko says. She was hoping to write the big book on RRS. From a scholarly point of view, of course. She’s a professor.
But also a participant?
I put the question to the air halfway between them, expecting Tariko to answer, but hoping Julie-nah will.
Anthropologist, he says. This is fieldwork. We’re her tribe. Like getting tattoos if you work with the Maori.
I was an academic, too, I say, turning in her direction, still feeling, against all indications, that I know her, that we should already be acquainted. At Harvard. East Asian Studies.
And? She’s back at the counter now, still chopping. Whatever she’s preparing could feed fifty.
And I left. Went over to journalism. Public radio.
Why? Your adviser didn’t like you?
No. Not at all. It’s such a direct question, coated with insult, that I have to swallow a moment before going on. I needed money; I had a baby daughter. There weren’t any jobs out there I wanted to take. We didn’t want to leave Boston. And anyway, I was done with what I wanted to do. One book, one area of research. I was exhausted.
Every life takes its own pathways, Tariko says. Right?
Right.
No, Julie-nah says, wrong. She turns to face us, her mask slipped back on, with a block of tofu in one hand and a cleaver in the other. What do you know about every life? Either one of you? What do you know about your own lives, for that matter? Pathways. There aren’t any pathways. Only patterns you don’t recognize yet. If you knew it was a maze, you wouldn’t take the bait, would you?
There’s a certain refractory gleam in her eyes, a light thrown off from another source: the look of a fanatic. The absolute certainty and the oblique carelessness, the gnomic casting away of words. It repels me like a force field. I take another sip of coffee, stand up, and walk the other way, through the hallway and out the open door.
This is morning, I tell myself, for the fourth or fifth time. This is Thailand. The yard is as manicured as every other part of the house: an undulating lawn, close-cut, and enormous, almost comic plants spilling over the neat borders of piled river stones. Thick shrubs with heavy, shiny, waxy leaves, ginkgo, bougainvillea, ferns, camellias. Here and there are enormous ceramic jars, as big as bushel baskets, filled with water, lotuses blooming from lily pads on the surface. I look into one and see tiny goldfish, or what I assume are goldfish, flicking about, some no bigger than my smallest fingernail. Phran stands barefoot at one corner of the garden, near the wall, gathering mangoes with a long two-pronged hook. The mangoes—entirely green—fall into his palm, one by one, and he tosses them easily into a bushel basket. Seeing me, he smiles and raises his free hand in a half wai. How you sleep? he asks. Sleep okay?
Excellent, thanks.
Want anything? Kitchen?
Julie-nah gave me breakfast.
At this he says nothing and returns to his work, peering up into the tree’s canopy for hidden fruit.
There’s something deeply wrong, enormously, intensely wrong, but here, in the sunlight, the smell of the bougainvillea, and the faint rumbling of the city outside, a blast of tinny Thai pop from a car radio, a shouted exchange in the street, two friendly voices singing at each other, it fades, without disappearing. A faint, barely noticeable, smell of rot, an open latrine somewhere on the premises.
It’s been so long, nearly five years, that I’ve forgotten the simple gladness of waking up in Asia. Not at home, not at home, the little song my heart used to sing, every time the plane landed in Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo. As if I’d gotten away with something. Of course, I had gotten away with something. I had escaped. I have escaped. Even if only hypothetically. A hypothetical escape from an actual crime. Why did that never enter into it? Why, in all those years, did I never pause to consider myself a fugitive, if only in my own mind? Not once. Because I was so sure that no one knew?
On the far corner of the garden, across the driveway, is the spirit house for the property, a miniature temple, white with a red roof, set on a pedestal, and hung with orchid garlands as offerings. San phra phum: the name comes back to me from the Lonely Planet I read on the plane. Every house in Thai
land has to have one, no matter how humble or small. The roof, with its curlicue edges, each side curving toward the sky, always reminds me of flames licking upward. Every house is a house on fire. As the Buddha said in the Fire Sermon. You should regard your own body and everything around you as if it were on fire. Was it the flames of desire, or the flames of impermanence? Or both, or are they one and the same? The result is the same. Every house is a house burning down.
Leave. The word hovers in the air, as if the bushes have breathed it. What would I need? Just a quick trip back upstairs: my passport, my wallet. The envelope of baht Martin handed me in the airport: spare you an ATM charge, he said. Here’s some walking-around money. We’re somewhere out in the suburbs; it might take me an hour or two to find a taxi. But how hard could it be? Twenty U.S. dollars and a universal gesture, the flattened palm rising up to the sky. There are alarm bells ringing across continents in my brain.
Phran touches my sleeve. He’s come up next to me on the grass, silently, and holds out in his palm a dark purplish fruit cut in half. Mang kut, he says. Thai fruit. The inside looks like a peeled head of garlic: little white sections, half-moons, in a woody shell. Gingerly, I take two. They dissolve on the tongue—isn’t that the phrase?—like very soft pineapple, or a lychee, with a chewy, nutlike piece at the center. Amazing, I tell him. He hands me the rest. Eat more, he says, and gestures with the folding knife in his left hand.
Something’s happening, I notice, too late, as I pop the final section into my mouth. A counterreaction, a sour liquid rising in my throat and pooling under my tongue, and at the same moment my knees tremble, a definite, single knock, a jolt, a need to sit down. An allergy? I have no allergies. No intolerances. Not even, when it comes to food, any very strong dislikes. My stomach, now, has woken up, something is happening, it’s beginning to turn. No so much nausea as dizziness, disorientation, as if my blood is being drained and diluted, half-strength.
