by Jess Row
Silpa gives me a sultry, low-lidded look and holds his arm out straight, beckoning me with one finger.
You want the big moment? That was the big moment for me. I don’t want Prince. I’m not gay. I want to be Prince. He understands. He knows it’s going to happen. If he was a chemist he’d have done it himself. I see that just by looking into his eyes. Amazing, right? And you know what it is? This is a person who says yes to everything. Yes to change. Nobody has to wear the clothes they came in with. Nobody has to be stuck in one body. Dig, if you will, the picture. To me, that was America. And the funny thing is, it takes a Thai guy to understand it. The melting pot. I mean, that’s what this is, right?
He leans back in his chair and drains his glass. And I notice, for the first time, how thin his arms are, thin and nearly cylindrical, right up to the shoulders. Like iron bars. Phran brought him a plate of satay and sliced pineapple and he hasn’t touched it. When we had our lunch together the other day he must have ordered six dishes and taken three bites of each. A man who runs on some other energy source.
Tell him about the science, Julie-nah says. Lying back, a forearm over her eyes, as if it’s midday. I love it when you talk about the science.
no one remember old Marcus Garvey no no one remember
I’ll give you the short version, he says. Skin darkens because of melanin production, right? Melanogenesis, that’s what it’s called. A hormone, melanocyte-stimulating hormone, binds with the receptors in the melanocytes in the epidermis. This sends a signal to the genetic material in the melanocytes—a signaling cascade. The cascade sets off the production of eumelanin—that’s the good stuff. The black and brown stuff. So the crux of the matter is, how do you create melanogenesis on its own? At first I thought it was simply a matter of going back and reproducing the MSH. But that didn’t work. The half-life is too short; inject it and it just disappears into the bloodstream. I needed a new peptide. A stable analogue, all the way from scratch, that would bind with the melanocyte and run through the whole process in just the same way. Every enzyme had to be right. Not just the melanocortin 1 receptor; all the melanogenesis genes—tyrosinase, TYRP1, and DCT. It was enough to make any biochemist tear his hair out.
Well, what else did I have to do, in the middle of the winter, in Rochester? I synthesized peptides, one after the other. After my labwork, after all my other responsibilities, I just commandeered the centrifuge and sat there till two or three in the morning. It took six months, and then I got it. [Nle4, D-Phe7]-α-MSH. My baby. Melanoxetine. The perfect biomimic. Hundreds of times more potent than natural MSH, and utterly stable as a pharmacologic compound. The first, the only, artificial agent to induce melanogenesis. You can look it up; the patent’s been pending for nearly a decade.
carried us away in captivity required of us a song how can we sing King Alpha’s
One day he’s going to win the Nobel Prize for it, Martin intones.
I showed it to my lab supervisor, Silpa says, and this is what he said: either you’ve just invented the world’s best tanning drug, or a brand-new form of skin cancer. Or both. Refused to have anything to do with it. So I bought my own mice. Set up my own lab, in the kitchen of my apartment. It took another year, a full set of trials, to prove noncarcinogeneity. No anchorage-independent clonogenic cell growth. No metastatic tendencies at all. Then, I imagined, it would be easy. I submitted a paper to JAMA. No luck there. Submitted to The New England Journal of Medicine. The reviewer wrote back, This drug has no clinical application outside of questionable and theoretical cosmetic procedures. No one would willingly consent to have his skin darkened permanently.
So where was I, then? With no published results, no biomed corporation would touch it. I could file patents all I wanted. I was such a true believer! It would make you cry. All around me, it seemed, people were getting rich. It was the Eighties! Nobody was content with a mere clinical practice anymore. All you had to do was put your hand on the magic compound and you would sprout golden wings and fly off to Cambridge. Or Palo Alto. Call it a tanning supplement, my friends told me. I could have just hired some Indian jerks to synthesize it on the fly and sold it over the Internet. But that wasn’t the way! I kept thinking, someday people are going to want the real thing. In this way I’m still a Marxist. Formally speaking. I don’t believe in incremental change. In working within the system. It’s cost me tremendously. But now the result is almost here. It is here. You people are the result. We have only the one corner left to turn.
follow the shadows for rescue but as the day grows old I know the sun
What do we know about plastic surgery? he asks, rhetorically, looking around at us. What’s the consensus of the field? It’s all about taking away. Subtract, subtract, subtract. Does a sculptor start with a block of marble and glue little bits on? What is this neoclassical beauty all the doctors talk about? The least possible extrusion. Slenderness. A level plane. A level playing field. Of course, it all begins with the Jewish nose. In the Western world, at least. The nose that looks like a sail. A hatchet. Shylock’s nose. An aggressive nose, a nose that intrudes, a nose that takes. So what do you do? Cut it down to size. Reduce the curvature. Thin out the alar base. Do you know how many careers, how many lifetimes, have been spent figuring out how to shave a few millimeters off the human nose? Then take some doctor from the Third World, with an unpronounceable name, with his article on “Expansion of the Nostrils and Widening of the Cura to Reproduce African-Identified Features.” Using the first synthetic cartilage, for God’s sake! Why do you think it took so long for anyone to admit it was possible to do female-to-male sex changes? No one wanted to make a penis. No one wants to make anything. Why is that?
Babylon throne gone down gone down oh Babylon throne gone down
Because, Julie-nah says, sitting up now, if you make it, it’s not natural. It’s not augmented. It’s brand spanking new.
Correct. Enlarge a breast, and you have a woman with larger breasts. Give a young girl a rhinoplasty, and she’s just the same Sarah or Hee-jin she always imagined herself to be. Arguably, you can extend the same logic even to the original sex change. A man minus a penis is a woman. But clearly there’s a double standard at work. An enormous blind spot. In theory, all my techniques could have been developed thirty years ago. But we’re not yet at the point of accepting what the science can actually do. Why? Because our trajectories of beauty still only point one way.
The Roman nose, Julie-nah says, wide-eyed.
I and I do not expect to be justified by the laws of men
The classical ideal. The Aphrodite of Melos. It’s in the literature; it’s the foundation of plastic surgery. Look in the textbooks. Better yet, look in the museums. That translucent marble surface, the smoothness, the tight curves. That’s what whiteness means. Horaios, do you know that word? The Hellenistic Greek term for beautiful. The same etymology as hour. Meaning of the moment, or ripe. But the ripeness we’re talking about is something else.
Stillness, Julie-nah says eagerly, sitting up in her chair. Something frozen in time. Not actual ripeness, not the ripeness of a plum, or an actual teenager, say, but ripeness as a disappearing point on the horizon. Not actual beauty, more like the tomb of beauty. What do you think Botox is all about? All those whiteness creams, all those pale waif-models? It’s the death glow. The corpse pose. It’s been in the literature for thirty years. It’s not news.
Which is why RRS is going to be so difficult to accept, Martin says. It’s a fundamental reordering of the field. What if anything you wanted were possible? What if there were no trajectories, only personal choice? We’re going to have to hit this point hard when we go out as ambassadors.
Julie-nah stares at him with a strange, transfixed smile.
Tariko, Silpa says. You’ve been awfully quiet. Too quiet. What do you think?
He shrugs.
For me, he says, it all comes from the teachings of the Holy Piby. You know
what that is, Kelly? The rest of these brethren have heard enough about it. But maybe I can enlighten you.
Go on.
The Holy Piby, he says, in an exhausted voice, barely audible. The foundation of all our reasoning. I had to memorize it before I turned thirteen. His voice turns high-pitched, as if he’s resuming a recitation from long ago. Written by His Holiness Robert Rogers in Newark New Jersey in the year of Our Lord 1928 and dedicated by him unto His Holiness Marcus Garvey. What does it say? It says that when the time is ripe a great angel will come to Babylon and say, Children of Ethiopia, stand, and there will flash upon the earth a great multitude of Negroes knowing not from whence they came; and then instantly the whole heavenly host will shout, Behold, behold Ethiopia has triumphed. What else does it say?
The ice in the north and the ice in the south shall disappear. Then shall continents which are submerged arise and the whole earth shall bloom. For with thee, he shall sit in his parlor in Africa, and see a rooster treading in the moon and the bees on the roses in Venus. The laborers in Mars, strike-breakers on earth and my daughter in college in Jupiter. My children shall remind you of the things I have forgotten, for I have seen so far, but those that cometh after me, of me, with me and upon our God shall see farther even than I.
What else is there? he says. It’s all rooted in prophecy. I’ve been waiting for this moment my whole life, man. My father would have died for the opportunity. In three months I’m going to be sitting on my patio up in Mona watching the sun rise over the Blue Mountains. And when it rise, it’ll be on the color of my true face. The dark skin of a Negro not knowing from whence he came. The lost tribe. By the grace of God.
Bravo, Silpa murmurs. As if it’s a bit of oratory.
On the other hand, isn’t it? What else do we say, embarrassed by the spectacle of faith? Amen? Martin has closed his eyes and angled his face upward, which could be read as reverence, I suppose. Julie-nah picks at her teeth.
You can see why Tariko’s our best advocate, Silpa says, filling the silence as it has to be filled. It’s a vocation. Well, it’s a vocation for me too, of course. But I don’t quite have the words to say so.
What I worry about right now, Martin says, slowly, is infrastructure. Whether we’re ready to meet the demand when the demand comes. Scalability. I’ve been doing what I can. But we’re going to need everything, when the moment comes. Customer reps. A phone bank. A website that can take a million hits in a day and not crash.
A bigger office, Tariko says.
That’s the easy part. Physical space is not the problem. It’s client relations that I worry about. Client relations, reliability of our supply chain, and, of course, waiting times. Because there’s only one Silpa. That’s the problem with doing it this way.
He’s right, of course, Silpa says, looking up at the sky. None of these changes are permanent, you know. There’s the question of maintenance, too. Drug regimes for forty or fifty years. That’s why the egg is so fragile right at the moment. I need assistants. Apprentices. Otherwise, if something happens to me?
• • •
In the stairwell Julie-nah turns and gives me a baleful stare. For a good ten seconds we stand there, like a frieze, my palm on the bannister, her body twisted, whorled, as if to catch me and fling me away.
I thought you were kidding, she says.
I did too. At the time.
Really? You’re telling me Martin’s powers of persuasion are that strong? Even if you knew that it was all one big sche—
Martin tried to argue me out of it.
Like hell he did, she says. Ever heard of reverse psychology?
I had my own reasons.
We all have our own reasons. A globule of spit catches me in the eye; she runs a crude hand across her mouth. That’s the problem. I thought you understood me. Didn’t you understand me, Kelly? We’ve got to unplug this Orchid machine. Before it makes us all billionaires. There’s a healthy point-five percent of the world’s population that has really good reasons for RRS. If you don’t say no, that’s it. You’re the final picture in our happy little mosaic.
I let myself sit down on the tile step.
Anyway, she says, what do you expect is going to change? Even if it takes. Even if it’s perfect. You think, what, you’ll be less divided, more yourself? You’ll just be the same ball of questions as always. Believe me. I can tell. You don’t get that jolt out of being a congenital liar. Not like Martin. You’ll be a freak.
Julie, do you ever get tired of deciding what’s right for the world?
No, she says, wide-eyed. Don’t tell me. Don’t fucking tell me.
I mean it. Speaking, myself, as someone like you. A professional mind. An inquirer. A critic. Isn’t it ever tiring, to you, just a little, being an arbiter all the time? You know the joke about the French? It may work in practice, but will it work in theory?
What the hell does that mean?
You know what I’m talking about. The tingle of empty accusations. All this conspiratorial fault-finding. Hegemonic diagnostics. It’s all one big autoimmune condition, isn’t it? Look, maybe it works when you have tenure. Or cradle-to-grave health insurance. Or a rich dad who works for Samsung. But look, from my perspective, I’m out of a job.
It’s Daewoo, actually. And I thought you were on Martin’s payroll.
Oh, I am. For the time being. But I’m talking about real money for once. What’s wrong with that? Money that lets you make decisions.
It’s as if some rind, some slippery, rubbery substance, has detached from my gums; I find myself chewing at the words.
You know how they want you to make money? she says. Why they’re so desperate to make a Chinese connection? Tissue farming. What the fuck else? All those prisoners, all those no-name corpses. Hair. Skin. Retinas. Healthy teeth. Cartilage. You ready to get into that business, Kelly?
Speaking as someone who’s already in it?
She laughs.
Oh, you have no idea about me, she says. Don’t even bother to guess.
But isn’t that the point? It’s up to you. Shouldn’t we own up to that? White people that we are.
Don’t call me that.
Why? Isn’t that what you wanted, Julie-nah?
It was a project, she says, all but crying now. It was a provocation. I wanted to make myself into an instrument of my own desires. A demonstration of the emptiness of buying out—
I could have told you not to bother. You really think you need to tell people what they already know? After all, who’s to say I haven’t bought all of my identities? Not just this one. This, come to think of it, is the second time.
That’s cold, she says. You sure you want to go that far, Kelly? That’s really cold. It’s your wife we’re talking about. Your wife, your child.
Don’t tell me about my wife and child, I would have said to her, to anyone, ordinarily. My jaw seems to want to flap open.
Call it closure, I say. Closure comes in unexpected ways.
That’s sick.
Since I can’t have you, I want to say, I have to become you. Where did that phrase come from, all of a sudden? Though I don’t quite understand it, it seems to be all that needs to be said. Then why can’t I quite fit the words on my tongue?
I’m tired, I say to her. Speaking past her. I have an appointment with Silpa first thing. Can we continue this later? My door is always open.
Don’t be an ass.
To talk.
I’m through with talking, she says. Aren’t you? It’s time for decisions. And not waiting for a reply, or a question, she pivots and disappears.
10.
On a dark screen six feet tall, a screen I could fall into, I watch life-sized, naked photographs of myself, one after another: frontal, profile, half-angles, close-ups on the chin, the nose, the eyes. It’s like a bizarre video installation, I’m thinking, a work of performa
nce art, crossed with an initiation ritual. There are creases I never noticed under my chin, a constellation of moles beneath my left armpit. My eyes show the faint beginnings of crow’s feet. My penis is a strange dark color, sullen, almost bruised. A photograph like this, I’m thinking, is harsher than a mirror under bright light: something about its being preserved makes it harder to face.
But it won’t be preserved.
You’re making me self-conscious, I say. Maybe I should just get an ordinary facelift. A little liposuction.
Let’s get started, Silpa says, turned away from me, clicking away at the desktop monitor across the room. Begin by focusing on the face. For practical reasons, and aesthetic reasons, the principle here is to do as little as possible to achieve the desired effect. So we’re not talking a severe epicanthal single fold. Really the enlargement and adjustment of the eye socket will be quite small. The result will be like this. I’ll change the skin tone, too, to give you the full effect.
The new image spools down from the top, the same thinning hairline, the faint widow’s peak, slightly narrowed eyebrows. Only with the eyes does the face become someone else’s. I know those eyes, I’m thinking, I recognize those eyes. Someone I knew in Weiming, someone at Harvard? How many thirty-something Chinese men have I known? Stop! I say, a little louder than I intended.
What’s the problem?
That’s a photograph, right? That’s not me.
It’s not a photograph. It’s software. Didn’t I explain this? Predictive modeling. Those are your eyes, Kelly. Really, the change is very minor. It’s essentially just padding the eye socket a little around the edges. And then adding a slightly folded epicanthus. I’m surprised it startles you. To me the effect is almost not enough. I could make it much more pronounced. Should I continue?
When I don’t answer, he taps the keyboard again, and the rest of the face appears, centimeter by centimeter. A smaller nose. Slimmer lips. Narrower shoulders. He’s reducing me by ten percent. A flatter stomach, bonier hips. Even the knees are less pronounced, somehow. And the skin? Only when I look away and look back do I see it: a weakening of the light, a slightly sepia tone over my normal color.
