You haven’t even told me what you want me to do.
It’s right in front of us staring us in the face, so to speak, right? My story. I need someone to tell it. To spring it on the world, the way it needs to be done.
What you need is a publicist.
Yeah, maybe, he says. Somewhere along the line. But first I need to have the whole thing worked out. I need a narrative. Not just for myself, you see. There are other people involved. Expose one part of the story and you expose it all.
You mean the surgery. The doctors, the hospital, the research—
Of course. And of course you must be curious. But honestly, it’s nothing that surprising. Mostly it’s been done before. Collagen, rhinoplasty, eyelid changes, voice box alterations. A lot of nipping and tucking. You’d be surprised at how little it takes to make a difference.
And the skin?
Drugs, he says. Dr. Silpa, my doctor, he’s got it all figured out. He did decades of research on this stuff. Synthetic melanin. Tailored precisely to the shade you want. It’s all proprietary; the patents are in. But look, that’s not what I’m talking about; that’s just research. The technical stuff you can write up in a few pages. What I’m talking about is the story, the emotional logic of the whole thing. That’s the crux of the matter. Why me? Why was I the pioneer? In a hundred years this’ll be as common as a nose job. But there always has to be a first one. Your job is to prove that I’m not out of my mind. Ever heard of Christine Jorgensen?
No.
I’m not surprised. But ask your grandparents — anyone who was around in the Fifties — and they’ll know that name. Dimly. Jorgensen was the first person to have a sex change and write a book about it. A Personal Autobiography. I got a copy from eBay; it’s in my office. I’ll show it to you sometime. She was a huge celebrity. When she came back from Denmark — that’s where the surgery was — there were crowds at the airport. This was 1952. The tabloids were all over it. She appeared on talk shows. Sid Caesar made jokes about her. She made it a possibility; fifty years later, it’s just ordinary business. So I’m the Christine Jorgensen of the twenty-first century. That’s the business model. Only now, of course, we have to be globaclass="underline" everywhere at once. Americans are stuck on the idea of race, no question. Here we’re going to be facing some serious hysteria. At first. But the thing is, there are a hundred other ways to play this in a hundred other places.
Do you have someplace in particular in mind?
He waves a finger at me.
Not till you sign on, he says. Then you get the whole picture.
Sign on to do what? Produce a documentary? Write a book?
All of it. The whole package. I leave the specifics up to you. What I say is, if someone’s good at telling a story, the format doesn’t really matter. You work in radio, fine. Start with a tape recorder. That’s good. People don’t notice so much. I mean, eventually I want to wind up on Diane Sawyer. But look, baby steps. You start by doing research. Two months of research, give or take. Here and in Bangkok. You’ll be compensated all along the way. Then we make a decision about how we’re going to blow this thing.
Bangkok, too?
Of course. That’s where it all happened! My womb. My chrysalis.
I have to think this through, I say. I mean, I’m interested. Who wouldn’t be? And I’m your friend. I’m still your friend, right?
You wouldn’t be here otherwise, he says.
I mean, I wouldn’t hire me, necessarily. For this kind of thing. I’m not one of those people with a huge Rolodex.
Come on. You’re being modest.
I’d say I know people who know people. At the Times. The Atlantic. Slate. Politico. HarperCollins. Simon and Schuster. Are there any sure things in this world? No. Could I make it happen? I guess so.
That’s all I need. But my point is, it’s you. The security has to be absolute. I like to keep things intimate. You’re just in the right spot. Couldn’t have come along at a better time. I know you. Always did. You were always the solid one.
And I have a stake in this story, too.
Yeah, you do. Maybe more than you realize.
He stares at me, and I have the sense — it’s something around the eyes, the way the lids pull back — that’s he about to indicate something, to make a sign, but he doesn’t. Not in any way I can read. What falls into that hole, that chasm, between us? What other than Alan? So that’s what it is. And I almost want to blurt out, apropos of nearly nothing, I’m broken, too. I’d like to have those balls. But this is me we’re talking about, and this is the age of irony, of never making a statement you can’t serve up with a sardonic twist. Well, I say, we came from more or less the same place, right? So why you and not me? I mean, not me specifically. All of us.
All white people.
Yeah. I mean, out of all the white people on the planet, why would you be the one to go first, to figure this out? That’s kind of interesting, wouldn’t you say?
Kind of interesting. This is the story of the fucking century.
Our salads arrive, enormous piles of cucumber, tomatoes, olives, dolmas, artichokes, feta, and he gazes at me silently for a moment, until the waitress pulls away.
The future is the future, isn’t it? Isn’t that what I look like? And the future is for those who get there first. I’m asking you to think, you know, entrepreneurially. I know that doesn’t come natural if you’re out of the private sector. But maybe this is your time, Kelly. This could be your moment. God doesn’t close a door without opening a window.
You go to church?
Druid Hill Park A.M.E., he says. What, you thought I was going to stay Jewish? Become one of the Black Hebrews, the thirteenth tribe? Come on, he says. Look at me, Kelly. I’m black. If you want to be along for this ride, you have to make your peace with it. Black and never going back. Listen to me, I sound like some kind of crazy missionary.
No, I say, not a missionary. A convert.
However you want to put it.
To buy myself a moment, I take a sip from my water glass, then tip it back and drain the rest. Nothing, it seems to me, has ever been quite as delicious, quite as necessary, as that glass of ice water, tap water, with its faint medicinal aftertaste: fluoride, chlorine. All the ways we are silently, involuntarily, protected. I think of the bourgeois hippies in Marin County, the ones who refuse vaccinations and believe cancer comes from radiomagnetic fields, who buy shipped-in tanks of water, as if they lived in Haiti. How difficult it is for us, for the insulated ones, to understand what it means to risk anything at all. If I could I would run back through the hallway of time and tell my younger self, stop hedging your bets and learn what it means to have a catastrophe. But all I have now is the terrible present, the catastrophe over and accomplished, and myself, a squeezed-out rag, a rotten iceberg, and this impossible person staring at me and waiting for me to make up my mind.
Months after the accident, in a particularly courageous moment, I took out the manila envelope of condolence cards, and forced myself to read each one before tossing it into the recycling bin. At the bottom of the stack was a typed sheet of paper without an address or postmark. Or signature. It had been stuffed through the mail slot in the door: there was a rust mark on one crumpled edge. Emanuel Swedenborg, it read. Life goes on even if the vessels that receive life be broken. Life goes into new forms.