Your Face in Mine

by Jess Row

  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.

  • • •

  Well, 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.

  Maybe in a minute. Give me a minute.

  Take all the time you need.

  Remember, I’m asking myself, remember thinking as a joke about becoming Beat Takeshi? Is there a sound I could follow back to that source? A sound, a texture, a taste? When I was first learning to cook Chinese food, Wendy would push me out of the way with her hip and say, that’s not the way to do it. It won’t taste right that way. What was I doing wrong? I would ask. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. Her mother was more straightforward. Once she tasted some black chicken soup I’d made, squinted, and said, the problem is, Lao Kaili, you’re not Chinese.

  I walk over to the bedside table and unscrew the thermos Julie-nah brought, letting the steam rise under my nose. How do you describe the smell of congee? The glutinous starchy smell of cooked rice, obviously, and then the undercurrent of smoked meat, the knuckles or hock or whatever spare bit was cooked in the pot. I look down; she’s distributed salted greens and bits of fried onion on the surface. I stick a finger in—it’s boiling hot—and lick it off. If I wasn’t afraid of searing my throat I’d guzzle it all right now.

  I could follow this, I’m thinking. The food you crave when you’re sick. When you’re flat on your back. The first food in your baby daughter’s mouth. I could follow it, could I, could I follow it all the way down, all the way back?

  Wendy speaking:

  You could. You could.

  You want to know what it was, for me? Julie says.

  She sits cross-legged in a wreath of smoke.

  I let myself fall into the chair next to the window, on the far side of the bed. Just close enough that if I reached out a foot—not that I would do such a thing—I could touch her leg.

  It was Love Story, she says. You know that movie? From the Seventies? I saw it when I was in high school. Bizarrely enough. For a class on American culture. The teacher had a strange sense of humor. I mean, yes, it is ostensibly about autonomy and freedom from one’s parents and so on. But try showing that movie to a roomful of sixteen-year-old girls who’ve hardly even been on a date. We went through a box of tissues and an entire roll of paper towels. And I, I, I mean—I was the most affected, you could say, of all of us. When I looked at Ali MacGraw’s face, my eyes burned. The way she spoke to him. The way she laughed. The way she suffered. It was all there! You didn’t need the subtitles. I’d never seen a face like that. I tried, when I was at home, looking at the mirror, to make all those expressions. And I couldn’t. I had no range of feeling. My face was hollow. It was a mask. By comparison, it wasn’t even human.

  So, look, she says, it wasn’t as if I’d never seen a white woman’s face before. The ads were full of them. But after that I couldn’t stop staring at them. Bus stops, billboards, magazines. I started cutting out pictures of white women laughing and saving them in an envelope. I thought it would be a good art project. This was a top girls’ school; our teachers were very savvy, very postmodern. By Korean standards. We knew what feminism was. We knew what the male gaze meant. So I told myself that it was an intellectual interest, and I went on telling myself that all the way through college and graduate school. I was desperate to go to college in the United States, but Dad wouldn’t let me.

  So what you’re saying, I say, I mean, for you, in any case, we’re not talking about a racial dysphoria, a disorder, a sense you were born in the wrong body—

  Freud says that before anything else, the ego is a body ego.

  What the hell does that mean?

  She shrugs. It’s pretty simple, she says. You have to listen to what your body’s telling you. At any stage. We’re so focused on child development, adolescent development—as if, as adults, we
stop changing and become one solid thing! Why shouldn’t I wake up one day and say, I need to change? No, it wasn’t always there. Not for me. No, it wasn’t biological. I wasn’t born in the wrong body. Whatever that means. Will I survive how I am? Of course. But why settle for survival? We’re talking about choice. Conscious, adult, rational choice. Should I use these words? Consumer choice. Does that make you uncomfortable?

  Should it?

  Of course it should. Are you kidding? Why do you think I’m here? Because we’re on a mission of mercy, operating on babies with cleft palates? Or to cash in, once it’s all revealed? For me this is political. Somebody has to do it.

  If it’s political, are you for or against it?

  What do you mean?

  I mean, is this a protest? Are you, say, antibiotechnology, against cloning and eugenics, consumer subjectivity, that kind of thing? Or is this a transgressive, liberatory, post-human project? You’re telling me I’m supposed to be uncomfortable; what am I supposed to be uncomfortable about?

  You really want an answer to that question?

  No. I want to go to bed. But since you’re here, yes, absolutely.

  Well, okay. You took feminist theory in college, right? Remember the chora? The chora is a provisional term for something that can’t be described. Your original, prelinguistic self. Before you can even really call it a self. The state of perfect harmony between inside and outside. Milk flows in, shit flows out. What Lacan called the Real. Before gender, before any idea about what you are. It’s like the dark matter of human identity. We all know it’s there, but we can’t prove it directly.

  And what does this have to do with—

  Impatient, are we? Just listen. So the whole question that biotechnology raises, you know, is, in a way, can we get back to the chora? I mean, is there a way of cracking open our consciousness so that we can get to the state before determination, before categories existed?

  Pre-individuation.

  Well, that’s exactly the question, right? Is there such a thing as a self before there’s a racial self, a male or female self? It’s one of those classic mind-body questions. If doctors could sustain your brain after your body died, and preserve, say, your optic nerves, so you’d just be a brain and two eyeballs in a jar, capable of seeing the world, capable of consciousness, but otherwise body-less, who would you be? Would you be yourself? Would you still be Kelly? In other words, if consciousness isn’t embodied, is it even still human? Okay, so that’s still a theoretical question. But what if we made consciousness portable, across racial lines? It’s like nuclear fission, you know, one of those projects that could create limitless electricity for the planet, only there might not be a planet at the end of it. It’s the nuclear option. We have to decide, if we had the choice, would we eliminate gender? Would we eliminate race? Or, rather, make it all a matter of choice, a matter of means? That’s what I want to find out. After all this theoretical babble, finally there’s a way to test what we’ve all been talking about.

  Give me a hit of that, would you?

  She grins. I was wondering when you were going to say that, she says. Want me to roll you another one?

  Not unless you’re afraid of my germs.

  Hold on a second. Let me get it going.

  She lights the joint, stands up, and comes over to me. From where I’m sitting, when she lifts her arms, I can see the pinkish, freckly skin of her stomach, the large mole next to her belly button, the slight pudginess around the waistband of her jeans. I’m thinking about the way a woman’s pelvis, from my point of view, in any case, always seems to point into itself, seems to draw the eyes down between the legs, a kind of gravitational pull. She turns the joint around, leans over, and puts it carefully, unnecessarily, between my lips, the neck of her shirt hanging open. She’s not subtle. I suck the smoke greedily, and hang on to it, gritting my teeth, and exhale, feeling my pores opening, my tissues softening. Then the rawness catches in my throat and I have to cough.

  I used to think, I say, when I’ve regained the ability to speak, that that’s what Wendy and I were doing when we had Meimei. A child in between. Indeterminate.

  And did it work out that way?

  I used to love playing with people’s heads. We’d be sitting in Baskin-Robbins, just me and Meimei, chattering away in Chinese, and from the back—or from a certain angle—with her you couldn’t tell. Her hair was a kind of tawny, deep-maple color. Occasionally there’d be some old woman watching us, with a screwed-up face, you know, one of those Fox News fanatics, the ones who believe that Obama’s a Muslim and the Chinese are taking over. And I would lock eyes with her. Just to say, this is the future. This is what you’re scared of. Meimei never noticed, of course. And the truth is that no one would have doubted she was anything but Chinese. She had just enough of the eyes and the skin tone. And, of course, her name. I insisted on the name. Wendy wanted to call her Julia. It was all just wishful thinking, all of it.

  Why do you say that?

  Well, what were we pretending, exactly? What was Wendy pretending? That she would find some happy medium? She believed so completely in America, but even so, she was already sick of it. That’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. Anyone who believes immigration is some kind of panacea hasn’t actually met many immigrants. They turn hard, most of them; they curl up, they desiccate. All that imaginative effort, all that plasticity—it lasts a year or two, and then it stops. You learn the language, or not. You assimilate, or maybe leave it to the kids. And then the kids—I mean, an American childhood is an ugly thing, even to those of us who lived through one ourselves. Cheetos and Super Mario Brothers and belly-button rings. All that sugar. All that waste. She hated shopping for Meimei—going to Babies “R” Us or Target or Whole Foods and having to walk down those long aisles. It made her nauseated. She said so. All that insulation, all that bourgeois padding. That’s what she craved, and that’s what would have done us in, in the end.

  I came pretty close to having that life myself, she says. I had a Wendy once, too. In Providence. Ryan was his name.

  Another professor?

  No, no, he worked at a coffeehouse. A townie. He went to—what do you call it?—community college. His professors were all hardcore Marxists. Althusserians, neo-Maoists, Sandinistas, Shining Path. He was dying to have a baby with me. Class war through interbreeding. It was what the whole place believed in, apparently. We used to sit on my balcony and drink cheap Chilean wine and he would get all choked up talking about the Fifth International and Year Zero. I almost did it, too.

  What? Became a convert?

  Had a baby. I had an offer from Tufts; I could have stayed. We might have been in the same playgroup.

  I wouldn’t have stayed with Ryan, of course, she says. And that’s what did us in, in the end. He knew. I was intractably bourgeois, a weak utopian. Like you were. She reaches out and passes a finger across my forehead, as if to smooth my hair. Know what that means? Of course not. I wouldn’t have. It’s from Lenin. We’re liberals, we can’t help it; we negotiate our dreams. He called it absolute impotence, playing at democracy without really believing in it. Or, in this case, playing at equality. The end of racism. Wishful thinking. Whatever else you want to call him, Martin’s not utopian. That makes him a revolutionary. The courage to act. That’s what got me. I was searching for something else. Shopping, actually. Looking for makeup, something a friend recommended, when Orchid’s website came up. The beta version. I must have typed some weird combination of keywords. Anyway, he happened to be in the office here, and I managed to get him on the phone.

  She takes a hit but blows it out immediately, not bothering to hold it. Her face has the placidity of a long-disappointed lover. Which, I’m thinking, whether or not they ever slept together, is what she is.

  I had high hopes, she says. I’ll admit it. I was starry-eyed. Martin talks a good game when he’s trying to get you to do something. I
started off calling it a revolution in consciousness.

  And it’s not?

  Just listen to how he tried to get you aboard. It’s another commodity fetish, in the end. Body mod. I mean, that’s the logical endpoint of the world we live in, isn’t it? In Korea now every other girl I know has had ssangkkeopul susul. That’s the double-eyelid surgery. Can you imagine what will happen the next time there’s a big blackness craze in Japan, like the ganguro girls? Tariko’s had to cap the waiting list at two hundred just for them, did you know that? Each with a five-thousand-dollar nonrefundable deposit. And they’re not even sure what it is they’re signing up for. One of these days we’ll wake up and there’ll be two kinds of human beings, the mods and the plains. The done and the unwashed undone. Yeah, race will disappear, blah, blah, blah. It’ll stop being the smoke screen it’s always been. Frankly, it’s the last barrier to a world run purely on money. The future of whiteness is colors. Damn, that sounds good, doesn’t it? I should write that down. Maybe Tariko can use it.

  Or, I say, equally possible, isn’t it, that everyone will just want to become white?

  Imagine if that happened, she says. Go ahead. Imagine it. What happens in a culture where everyone has exactly the same basic coloring, the same basic feature set?

  Spray-on tans.

  Exactly! Look at any monocultural society. Privilege flees from itself. Whiteness flees from itself. Can’t you see that’s what I’m doing? Now that I’m almost at the end? I can’t stand myself anymore. I’ll have to take up Kabbalah or tantric yoga or something.

  You’re giving your body to theory.

  I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.

  She laughs, and kicks off the blanket. Her legs, curled up on the chair, are the color of something I remember but can’t quite describe. When it comes down to it, I think, I don’t have enough of a verbal palette for colors. Especially shades of pale skin. Who does, other than perhaps the Inuit, with their supposed two hundred words for snow? Something like blue ivory, or curdled skim milk. Muscular, a little thicker than I would have imagined, with wide, almost chubby feet.