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 Thailand 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.
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.