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, sequential 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.