Your Face in Mine

by Jess Row

  The gray hour.

  And with this thought, as if on cue, Martin’s Mercedes comes rattling through the gate, its mirrored windows glinting, his arm reaching toward me in a lazy wave.

  2.

  We didn’t bargain on this happening, Martin says, as we pull back out of the driveway, nearly colliding with a vendor pushing a handcart of green coconuts. We thought we vetted her carefully. I mean, as much as we could, in complete confidentiality, without a Korean speaker on staff. Silpa put her through the whole battery of presurgical tests. We read her academic papers. Man, that was hard going. Cyborg Reveries: The Post-Racial Holodeck. Kimchi Tacos and Rhizomic Koreanness. Hired a guy in Seoul to follow her around discreetly for a couple of days. Interviewed her supervisor from her postdoc at Brown. You know she was at Brown? Girl’s got serious credentials. Woman, I should say. Colleague.

  Though the driver has the air conditioning running full blast, I’ve rolled down the rear window, wanting the fresh air on my face. The initial dizziness has passed; now there’s just a prickling weak feeling everywhere, and the same sourness on my tongue. Pre-nausea. I need something to grip, tightly: first the door handle, then the handle above the door, the one ordinarily used for hanging dry cleaning.

  Kelly, you all right? You look a little green.

  I think it’s just jet lag. Usually it hits me the first afternoon. Guess it’s just coming early.

  Oh, yeah? I’ve got some pills for that, if you need them to sleep.

  This isn’t jet lag, I’m thinking. It’s conceptual lag. We pull around a corner and through another gate, between high stucco walls, emerging into a bright shout of sunlight and a clamoring four-lane road. On the far side there’s a village of shacks with flat corrugated roofs, an outdoor mechanic’s shop, a food cart with plastic tables set out in a long line, inches from the traffic. An elderly woman in another white surgical mask unhooks a chicken and hacks it into pieces, paying no attention to the whining motorbikes and pink taxis nearly brushing her elbow. Above the village, on rusting steel struts, an enormous Pepsi billboard, freshly pasted, with a woman glancing out over her shoulder, her face framed by a dark fringe. It’s Jennifer Love Hewitt, I’m thinking—thin, pale, pouty, obscenely high cheekbones. The text is in Thai, of course, except for one word: Aum. When I look again the eyes stare back at me. Not Jennifer Love Hewitt. Not Jennifer anything.

  But did you get a sense of why she wanted to do this?

  Martin pulls at his earlobe, as if testing whether it will stretch. Yes, he says, I mean, yes, we thought so, and no, as it turns out, not at all. She started off saying that it was a scholarly project. Immersion. That’s what anthropologists do. She’s been studying body modification for years, you know, sort of shopping around, looking at tattoos, scarification, revirginizing, eye surgery—you know that’s huge for Koreans, right?—and when she found us, she sort of realized that this was it. She wants to drop a bomb on the whole scholarly world. More power to her, I said. But then she came in with these pictures—she wanted to be a cross between Kate Moss, Mariel Hemingway, and Gwyneth Paltrow. I mean, the whitest of the white. We’re talking about stuff Silpa hadn’t even really considered. She wasn’t satisfied with wearing contacts the rest of her life; she wanted retina replacement. Freckles. She wants to be the kind of white girl who doesn’t tan. White like in an Ingmar Bergman movie. White like she’s lived on some island in Maine her whole life.

  And Dr. Silpa agreed to do it?

  For him it’s sort of the final frontier. Whiteness is tricky, too, you know. Look what happened to Michael Jackson. Of course, I mean, his methods were crude. But no matter what, it’s always about taking something away. You practically have to go back into the gene pool to make it right. The basic technology is simple, as I understand it, but it can only do so much. To get that ultra look, that Tilda Swinton thing, you have to go in there and strip all the melanin away. It’s practically like introducing albinism. I don’t understand the chemistry; Silpa can explain it to you. But Julie-nah—aren’t we supposed to be calling her Julie?—she said, no matter how much it costs, no matter how long it takes. Here’s one thing we found out: she’s not living on a professor’s salary. Her father was an executive at Samsung. There’s serious money there, though she’s done all she can to hide it. Never talks about him. Never talks about her family at all. No phone calls home, nothing.

  Our driver, a different driver from the one the night before, is sucking on a piece of sugarcane as if it’s a cigarette. Tall, gaunt, very dark, with charms tattooed the length of both forearms, and a Bluetooth headset blinking on his right ear. This is Kham, Martin says, following my gaze. Kham, ni kheu peun khung chan Kelly.

  Sawatdi krup, he says to me.

  Sawatdi krup, I say, automatically, and turn to Martin with what I hope is a politely questioning look and not blank astonishment.

  You speak Thai?

  Some, he says. Not as much as I’d like to.

  Anything else you want to tell me? While we’re on the topic of surprises?

  He laughs and leans back in his seat, and for the first time, I take in the whole picture: white baggy linen pants, woven sandals, and a loose, silky, salmon-colored shirt. Half exclusive spa, half Third World oligarch. But whatever he thinks he’s trying to be, it’s working. Something about him is unclenched, slackened, unwrapped, unwound.

  You’re looking for an apology, he says. Okay. I didn’t give you the whole picture. It was kind of a need-to-know situation.

  I didn’t need to know that there were others?

  Did you press me on the specifics of what was going on over here? I didn’t hear that. We had all that other drama to work out, remember?

  It changes the whole picture. If you’re not the only one, I mean, why talk about just you? Why not make it a group portrait? Because you’re the first American? Because you’re the first African American?

  Because I’m the leader. The instigator. The public face.

  The owner, you mean.

  He unscrews the top of his water bottle deliberately and takes a long swig, the cords in his throat distending with the effort.

  You’re going to deny it?

  Deny what? he says. What does own mean, exactly, Kelly? Non-Thais aren’t allowed to own majority shares in Thai companies. Silpa’s name is on the incorporation forms. President, founder, and CEO. And I wasn’t the only one to capitalize it, either. I’m a minority shareholder, actually. Twenty percent. Officially, I’m a board member. And an independently compensated spokesperson and PR consultant. And anyway, five percent of the shares are compensation just for participating. For being an experimental subject. Tariko and Julie-nah each have five percent, too.

  So who else is involved?

  You mean where did the actual money come from? Lots of places. Silicon Valley. China. Russia. Oman. Mostly that was Silpa’s doing. He has some very loyal customers from back in his sex-change days. People came from everywhere. They say that in the area of genital reconstruction—shaping the penis, making the labia—he’s the best that ever was. Other procedures, too; off-the-books stuff, things that aren’t supposed to be possible. And total discretion. Don’t bother him asking about it. The point is, the money’s there. In his world, money’s always there.

  And all those people, whoever they are, they know what the Orchid Group does?

  Not in any detail, he says. We’re not talking about active investors here, Kelly. They trust Silpa. That’s the main thing. They know it’s some new initiative of his, some new procedure, and that’s about it. The actual money amounts to them are pocket change. Two million here, three million there. We’re talking about people that place hundreds of bets like this. Silent partners. Some of it actually came in in cash. And in gold. Stock swaps, other kinds of things. Thailand’s a good place for assets to hide.

  Then what do you do, Martin?

  Run the website.
Run the housing. Where you’re staying, I mean. People who come to Bangkok for this kind of work can’t stay in the Dusit like they’re getting a nose job. The privacy has to be absolute, for one thing. And we’re talking about six months, at a minimum. Eventually we’ll have houses all over the city. I tell you, as much as anything these days, I’m a real estate investor. Can’t tell you how many places I’ve looked at. And staffing. Gardeners, cooks, drivers, secretarial. Tariko won’t be around forever, more’s the pity. There’s plenty of Rastas in Thailand; I keep telling him he should stay and open a backpacker café or something. But for him it’s Jamaica or nothing.

  We’ve pulled out of street traffic and up onto an elevated highway: Chalern Maha Nakhon Expwy, the sign says, in English and Thai. From this height, Bangkok looks almost a little like Los Angeles: blue-tinted office buildings, sullen concrete apartment blocks, billboards for Minolta and Pepsi and the iPhone, shopping malls with garish neon signs, palm trees poking their dandelion heads up everywhere. Only it never ends. I sit up straight, my stomach lurching, and twist around, taking in the three-sixty view. The city stretches out, edgeless, bordered by its own haze. I count what look like six separate downtowns. The traffic shifts and slings around us, fast even by Van Wyck or 405 standards, something tense and manic in the way the taxis swap lanes, six inches closer than American drivers would allow.

  Fourteen million people, that’s the conservative estimate, Martin says. And it’s flat. Nothing but rice fields to hem things in.

  Uh-huh.

  Look, I’ve been to any number of big cities. So have you. On a certain level, as a businessman, you don’t have to tell them apart. You don’t want to. One five-star hotel is as good as the next. You just want to make your point and get home. But I’ll tell you something: you’ll never find a big city, a megacity, less anxious than this. What I realized, right away, once I got here: these people know how to live. It’s like Paris, only with humility, or Tokyo without that robotic politeness. Thailand was never colonized, right? So there’s no inferiority. They never got all wounded and fucked up, like the Indians, the Africans, the Arabs. Thai culture is like a cell; it works through osmosis. There’s a flow, a give-and-take. That’s the Buddhist way. So you get these amazing secretaries who speak three languages, can run a spreadsheet like nobody’s business, understand foreign exchange and how to get stuff through customs, use smartphones and listen to Dvorák, and then you get to talking with them and you realize they believe that their family apartment is still haunted by their grandfather’s ghost, and they have to go pay five thousand dollars to a monk at some wat in the middle of nowhere, upcountry, to perform a remote exorcism or some shit like that. And the thing is, it’s all okay! It works! These are some seriously unconflicted people, that’s what you have to understand. We like to think we’re comfortable with absurdity. They don’t even see it that way. It’s all continuity to them. Frankly, I aspire to the Thai condition. Not that I’ll ever get there.

  Speaking of which, I say, you have to tell me who I’m talking to. Martin Wilkinson, the figure at the center of my book, the person, or Martin Wilkinson the businessman?

  Are they different? They’re not different.

  I didn’t sign up to write Iacocca.

  You don’t have to. It’s a compelling story in itself. Look, either way I’m selling the concept, aren’t I? Why should it surprise anybody that I have some skin in the game? So to speak. Anyway, look, Kelly, take your time. Remember: we’re here for as long as you need. And really, what I wanted to talk with you about now, before you meet Silpa, is you. How you’re doing. How you’re feeling. I dropped a hell of a bombshell on you and we haven’t even hardly discussed it.

  Of course, I’m thinking, of course he would wait until the very last moment to bring it up. On the plane, I came prepared to talk—notepad, laptop, iPod, and all—but as soon as the dessert course was cleared he popped two pills with a double Glenlivet, reclined his seat, turned on his side, and slept till we landed. Whereas I drowsed into my headphones, fitfully, finally giving up and reading the Lonely Planet nearly cover to cover. He’s avoiding something, I thought, staring at the magenta hump of his shoulder, the thin Thai Air blanket wrapped around him like a fashionable winding sheet. Abiding. It’s an Art of War move. I had to smile at that. At least, I thought, I know how I’m being played.

  I’m doing okay, I say. I think I’m adjusting. To a different scale of things. More dimensions. More questions.

  What the hell does that mean?

  It means, I say, trying to sound only a little irritated, I’m working through osmosis. Like you said. Bit by bit. You expect me to be coherent? I just got here. It’s three in the morning my time. Don’t ask me to explain it now.

  Fair enough, he says. I won’t rush you.

  • • •

  After forty-five minutes, through two major traffic jams and three slowdowns, after I’ve rolled the window up and down five times, trying to balance the slamming heat and the roiling in my stomach, we pull off the highway into a bustling concrete-block commercial area, the buildings all about six stories—a furniture showroom, a motorcycle dealership in bright yellows and reds, a 7-Eleven, a glassed-in restaurant with an English sign saying Halal Huice Coffee House. This is Bangkok, then, I’m thinking, the everyday city, the city as it is, not as the tourists or city planners wish it was. Not as I or Martin wish it was. Now that we’re off the highway the traffic has slackened to a manageable six lanes, a constant stream of buses, pink and yellow and green taxis, tuk-tuks, and the omnipresent whining low-cc motorcycles. If I have dreams about Bangkok, I’m thinking, they’ll be signaled by the buzzing of motorcycles.

  We’re here, Martin says, as Kham pulls to a stop behind a delivery van unloading bundles of bamboo. Sandwiched between a food stall and a cheap clothing store, set slightly farther back from the street than one would expect, there’s a set of shiny marble steps and a blue-tinted glass door with a white orchid and a circle of Thai script, including the letters M.D. Some of the tint has peeled off.

  What does the sign say?

  Silpasuvan East-West Medical Research Institute. Or something like that.

  Not looking for off-the-street customers, are you?

  We’re not looking for customers, period, Martin says. They find us. He laughs. All the great companies start in garages, don’t they? This is our garage. Look, man, don’t be nervous. He doesn’t bite. Geniuses, real geniuses, are nothing to be afraid of. Up close, anyway.

  Based on your vast experience?

  He stares straight ahead.

  I’ve known two in my life, he says.

  Who else? I ask. And then, as soon as the words have sounded, I know.

  Do I really need to spell it out?

  No.

  Two is enough, I think, he says. For any one lifetime.

  —

  We cross through the doorway into a gust of cold, sterile air, hospital air, and remove our shoes, as one does everywhere in Thailand. Neat rows of shoes, expectantly, around every entranceway. With his big toe Martin scoots me a pair of black Chinese cloth slippers. Suki, he calls out, and from the end of a long corridor a tall, pale Thai woman in a royal blue business suit comes hurrying toward us, clacking her heels.

  Mr. Kelly, she says, holding out her hand, and simultaneously I feel the thickness of the fingers, the mass of the knuckles, and look up at her cheekbones and the wideness of the jaw. A ladyboy, of course, as Martin said. A trans man. I’ve forgotten all the words. Very glad see you, she says. Sawatdi kha. Come this way, he’s waiting.

  Suki is our one-person office staff, Martin says, a little too loudly, as we follow her back to the elevator. She’s been with Silpa forever. Since before he scaled back. Dr. Silpa was the number-one MTF doctor in Bangkok, isn’t that right, Suki? That’s male-to-female.

  I was his patient, she says, holding the elevator door and ushering us in.
Before that. A satisfied customer.

  She smiles, widely, openly, and I note, as I never would otherwise, how difficult it must be to get up in the morning and lipstick yourself perfectly, pencil in the daggerlike eyebrows, spread the mascara to its right thickness. Which is not to say she’s different from any relatively flashy woman in any office. Or, rather, she is: but only because she has nothing to do with me. The thing about ladyboys, I read in the guidebook on the plane, is that they’re not transsexuals in the accepted sense of the word, they’re not passing, they’re truly a third gender, with its own variety, its own continuum of appearance and attraction. This isn’t for you, her body says; this isn’t open to your scrutiny. These are just tools used for another purpose.

  I think they say heat wave tomorrow, Suki says. The elevator is tiny, barely three inches above her head. Forty-two. You want to sit outside or inside?

  Outside.

  Too hot for Americans. She giggles.

  My friend here gets a little carsick, Martin says. Agan kleun hyan. He needs the fresh air.

  —

  What I notice first about Silpa—what I remember, even now, as a thought process, an unfolding observation—is, my god, he’s small. He comes through the sliding glass doors, winds his way around an enormous slate planter filled with birds of paradise, and then emerges onto the terrace, where we’re sitting, next to a low gurgling waterfall, drinking iced jasmine tea, a tiny, very dark man in a lab coat, dark suit pants, and black rubber slip-on shoes that make no sound at all. A narrow, delicate face, high cheekbones, unnaturally large goldfishy eyes, long lashes. If I were to stand up—I’m not tall myself, five-seven on a good day—he would come up to my chin. I’m not sure he’s even five feet tall. Don’t get up, he says, waving us back down. At ease, at ease. He cups my outstretched hand, surrounding it with ten fingers, only momentarily, and lets go. Kelly Thorndike, he says. What a pleasure. Thank you for joining us here. You must find this whole phenomenon somewhat improbable.