It isn’t enough to wait, I’m thinking. In the meantime, I need something to do.
Okay, I say, and I hear a little clink, a nail, or a penny, dropped into my glass, a signal that time no longer stands still. I’m interested. Count me in. What’s the first step, then? Interviews?
Ground rules, he says. Forget you ever knew me before last week. You’re a freelance journalist working on a story about black entrepreneurship, okay? Something long, a think piece. For The New Yorker. You know what I mean. Act a little naïve, but you still have to know your basic shit.
And how did we meet up?
Through a friend of a friend of a friend. Facebook. LinkedIn. How it always happens these days. First step is you’re going to shadow me for a few days. A little tour of my world. Can you take the time off?
I think about Barbara and her silver braids, her enormous, antiquated Dell monitor, and the outrageous numbers scrolling across it.
I’ll manage something.
Look, he says, there’s something else. I never said anything about what happened to your family.
I’d rather you didn’t, if it doesn’t come naturally.
No, I was holding back. It wasn’t appropriate. But I just have to ask. How are you even standing up? How do you make it through the day?
I don’t know, I say, which is, of course, the exact truth. There’s no other option, is there? I did all the steps. I saw a therapist. I took medication for a while. You don’t just roll up and die, no matter how bad it is. Happiness, you know, it’s fragile. Whatever you care about, it’s fragile. That’s about all I can say. I’m no hero.
Well, now, he says. Welcome to the rest of your life. O brave new world, that has such people in’t! You know that line?
Of course, I say, startled, everybody knows that line, and then I remember: we read it in high school, junior year, in Mr. Fotheringill’s class, “Utopias, Dystopias, and Fantasy Worlds.” Jesus Christ, I say, it came true.
Yeah. Without taking the Lord’s name in vain and all.
Right. Sorry.
We look at each other and laugh, and I feel tears, fat tears, swelling out of the corners of both eyes: something like terror, and something like joy, for the moment indistinguishable.
6
As a child I was famous for my lungs: I could swim a length and a half of an Olympic-sized pool holding my breath. On the swim team, in middle school, I won sprints that way, on a single gulp of air, swimming blind, my field of vision turning orange, then black, clamping my teeth around the balloon of air swelling in my mouth. But my favorite trick of all was to pinch my nose and sink slowly to the bottom of the pool, dribbling bubbles like a scuba diver, till I rested, face-up, on the bottom, looking at the surface’s glassy underside, the world in reverse. I could stay down there for seven or eight seconds, which in underwater time is forever.
Now, an adult again, I heave myself out of the water, checking to make sure my Downtown Athletic Club guest pass is still attached to my swimsuit, and the bored attendant — a short Latina in a black track suit, who looks too young even to have graduated from high school — leaves off texting long enough to hand me a thick, fleecy towel. I’ve finished as many laps as I can stand; swimming for exercise — really, any kind of repetitive exercise — bores me to death. What I love about water is being able to slip into it and cut the world off, sealing that membrane of silence. Maybe I was one of those babies who never wanted to leave the womb.
Is it always this quiet in the middle of the day? I ask her.
Nah. Not always. Sometimes there’s conventions. But otherwise, I don’t know, I guess people have to work.
I dry my face, my neck, and work downward, scrubbing my flaccid, untoned arms, my knobby chest with its spray of moles, its odd patches of hair. I haven’t been in a pool — haven’t been in public, in a bathing suit — in the seven months since August. And like all people of my complexion, who live in northern climes, whose skin barely sees the sun eight months of the year, I’ve turned the color of white wax or lake ice, the color of an eye clouded by glaucoma.
Martin, in the next lane, hasn’t stopped once in twenty minutes. He alternates between freestyle and breaststroke, dipping and ducking his head like an efficient waterbird. I wouldn’t call him a natural swimmer — he scissor kicks, and doesn’t keep his line straight, veering across into the left side of the lane — but he compensates with stamina. You can see it in his exaggerated shoulders, his fistlike calves. If you weren’t here, he told me, I’d go for an hour without a break. It’s the only way I can think.
In my bag is the manila folder he handed me as we walked in. Some notes I started taking about a year ago, he said. Thought I’d write a book. Anyway, it might be a place to start. Or it might be pure bullshit.
I dry my hands carefully and open the folder. Ten pages, stapled, like a high school term paper, with his name in the upper left-hand corner.
ON RACIAL IDENTITY DYSPHORIA SYNDROME (RIDS): A SELF-DIAGNOSIS
This paper is offered as an attempt to open up dialogue about one of the major overlooked mental phenomena of our time. I offer it as a personal reflection and an appeal for scientific and pharmaceutical research into this urgent issue.
I have the physical appearance of an African American male. In seven years of living with this appearance, it has never been questioned or found unusual by any of my friends or my intimate partners, including my wife of four years, who is also African American. However, this appearance is based on a carefully created medical procedure that was carried out in Bangkok, Thailand, in 2001–2, by Dr. Binpheloung Silpasuvan and his medical associates. Specifically, Dr. Silpasuvan carried out a series of facial surgeries, scalp surgeries, body-sculpting procedures, and pigmentation treatments, transforming me from my original appearance as a Caucasian-Jewish “white” male into a convincing African American. I returned to the United States with an altered passport and have since presented myself as the child of adoptive white parents, now dead, with no information about my biological roots. This is the story that everyone around me — my wife, my intimate friends, my pastor — takes at face value.
Those are the scientific facts, shocking as they may be. What is even more shocking is the syndrome that drove me to this extreme, costly, and risky decision. I discovered, in my early adulthood (I was twenty-eight at the time of the procedure), that my long history of psychological problems, including depression, agoraphobia, and involvement in illegal activities, was the result of being born in the wrong physical body. I term this “racial identity dysphoria” because I believe it is in many ways similar to the gender dysphoria that is so commonly reported in the news.
What justifies my belief that I was in fact born in the wrong race, as transsexuals claim to be born in the wrong sex? Some will surely believe that this is nothing more than a publicity stunt, or perhaps a perverse expression of “white guilt.” The first charge, I believe, is answered by the fact that I have kept my true identity a secret for so long, and that until now I have made no effort to “go public.”
Guilt just did not enter into it. Not then, not now. I never felt that it was “bad” or “wrong” to be a white person or a Jew. Of course, I was aware of the history of slavery, the civil rights movement, apartheid, job discrimination, and so on; but I was never led to feel a sense of responsibility or even involvement in the history of black people in America. My father, my only surviving family member (my mother died when I was an infant; he is now also deceased, as of 1995), was a profoundly self-absorbed person, a historian, an archivist, who had very little interest in contemporary society at all. I grew up around black people and have had black friends for as long as I could remember, but I was not, to any great degree, ever made fun of, isolated, mocked, or bullied for being white. In other words, my dysphoria cannot be associated with some trauma, some discreet, explicable, psychological cause, at least not one I can identify. Transsexuals are usually given a battery of tests before they undergo sex-change procedures. Were there to be such a test for racial reassignment surgery, I believe I would pass it.