Patchwork dolls, p.9
Patchwork Dolls, page 9
* * *
THE NEXT TIME I saw Mahika, I was four weeks into my medication, two weeks from the last facial reconstruction Doctor Wong performed, and five days out from the other surgeries. My body was refusing to settle, but my attempts to placate it with a grotesque amount of drugs seemed to be working. Occasionally something in my veins bleated, my flesh curled, but then I took another pill and it went dead, silent. We met up at a small Egyptian café in the West Village and had pastries. I didn’t bring up my ordeal, and she didn’t ask. When she saw the medication in my bag, I just told her they were all necessary for recovery.
“I went out for lunch with her,” Mahika said.
“Who?”
“The woman who has my old eyes. The one we saw in Chelsea Market.”
I was quiet.
“I went back there a week later at the same time, around lunchtime. She was there again. She works in the area as a gallery assistant.”
“Is that allowed?”
“I don’t see why not,” Mahika said. “There’s nothing in our contracts that says we can’t interact with them if we happen to run into one of them in public.”
“Did she confirm she’s a PD?”
Mahika paused. “No,” she said.
“Did she recognize you?”
She sighed. “No. I just sat there like an idiot, hoping she would bring it up or notice that I had her old eyes, but she just kept talking about work and her boyfriend. I tried to look at her name when she handed over her credit card, but then I remembered that clients aren’t obligated to include PD in their names. Only donors.”
My mouth was moving faster than my brain. “There’s something weird about you meeting up with her,” I said. “It doesn’t feel right.”
“You’re really questioning the ethics of this?”
“I don’t know. It just feels wrong.” I felt the wind on my skin, turning cold.
“I mean, what would you do? If you saw someone with your old face?”
The truth was that I did not like thinking about the woman on the other end of the transaction. I did not want to confront why she had chosen to appropriate my face, out of all the others in the dozens of binders at Doctor Wong’s clinic. The image haunted me, and I pushed it away every time.
But Mahika didn’t push anything away. I had seen her get into fights at school with girls who cut her hair and stuck used sanitary towels onto her backpack. I liked when she stood up for us, admired her directness, but not when her accusations were pointed at me. I knew she was calling me weak, that I was a hypocrite, I could hear it in her voice. This was our friendship: a tug here, a tug there, trying not to unravel what was in the weave.
“Why did you get the surgery?” she asked.
“The money.” I answered this so immediately I surprised myself.
“That’s it? So practical.”
“What do you want me to say? I’m fighting the system?”
“I think we owe it to ourselves to figure out how we play a role in all of this.”
“I’m not sure if that’s our responsibility,” I countered. “I’m just someone who made a choice, and maybe it was a bad one, but I can live with that.” I knew I sounded defensive, that Mahika didn’t even know about all the other surgeries, but I needed to protect myself, to tell my body that this was the path I had taken.
“I hope you don’t really think that,” Mahika said. “I hope you’re thinking about your purpose more seriously. You know there’s more we can do.”
“More?”
“We’re icons, Sophia.”
She plucked a yellow poster out of her bag. It contained instructions to bring comfortable shoes, bottles of water, and picket signs. The destination was Doctor Wong’s clinic.
“One of the girls at the nail salon gave it to me. It’s a rally for women of color to fight for the rights of Patchwork Dolls. They’re targeting all the PD clinics, including ours, and they’re going to demand client transparency. Why shouldn’t we know the white women who have our faces, the people benefiting from what we had to grow up with, what we endured to get here? Don’t you sometimes feel like we’re just being used in this giant, abstract plan? Don’t you want to at least try and fight against all that?”
“Mahika,” I said. “I’m really tired. The medication? It’s expensive. And it makes me sleep fourteen, fifteen hours. Then I have to work. I don’t think I have time for this.”
“Rui and Jumana are coming,” she said. “I already told them about it.”
I repeated myself, although I knew we had eased back into a familiar, uncomfortable dynamic: “I don’t think I can make time for this.”
“It’s on a Saturday—surely you don’t have to work then? And maybe we can come over to make some posters the night before. You have a giant apartment. You should use it for something.”
Mahika had always been very good at this: making you feel bad about certain privileges you earned, the money you made, the things you tried to protect for yourself. I knew it had something to do with Hattie and all the therapy she had been to as a consequence—all the squares on social media telling her to demand more, to practice wellness for oneself, to be selfish. I understood all this. It was one of the only reasons I had any sympathy for her still.
“My apartment is big because my mother died and it was passed down to me, her only child,” I said. “I don’t know what you want to me say.”
“That you’ll come.”
“I can’t. No.”
I saw Mahika working something out in her mind.
“All right. You can come to the next one then.”
Our tiny espressos arrived, with cookies wedged in the cup handles. We swirled them around in the dark liquid, the crumbs sugary and gold. Mahika paid the bill, then gave me a look that I still can’t figure out, no matter how many times I’ve gone over that interaction in my mind. I thought of the wire hanger she so meticulously untangled, how she knew exactly how to angle it in the keyhole of the cupboard. Mahika and I measuring ourselves on the wall of Jumana’s old house, our heights never too far from each other, a comfort and a threat. It scared me, her precision, how she knew exactly what to do, what our paths should be. She would often remind us of how she saved me, and how we were all, now, connected through these surgeries. But I could no longer follow her; I had already come apart and needed to find my own way out. She got up to leave.
“Get some rest, Sophia. You look awful.”
* * *
IN THE YEAR AFTER they vanished from my life, I would see them on the television, my old friends with their new faces. Over time, the small rallies became a larger movement, and violent factions formed. They smashed and robbed clinics, some even selling body parts to the black market so that they could raise more funds for their cause. I knew this was a toxic cycle. I wanted no part of it.
My body, as I had hoped, learned to assimilate and live with the trauma. Once or twice a week I woke at night and felt myself separating, as if my flesh was radiating a homing signal to the other parts of me that were gone, but the phantom loss was easily squashed with a few more pills. When I showered, my newer parts felt chunkier, heavier, although overall I had lost a few pounds. At first, I panicked that somewhere there was a stitch undone, a patch loose, and moisture was getting in. But after I dried off, I would usually forget those anxieties when I looked at myself in the mirror, the boiling temperature of the water temporarily revealing the hairline fissures on my body, the swath of skin that was pinker and puckered with white, the two new, pale moons on my chest.
When I was outside, there was little pain. Acquaintances remarked on my appearance with a slightly strained, yet encouraging tone one might use to register an unsettling change: Wow, is your—did you—change your hair?
I went to Barcelona and ate octopus every day, a dozen different ways: fried, stuffed, in olive oil, smothered in paprika, inky and dark. I drank wine alone in bars; I wrote postcards to myself. I bought fruit from the market, pretending I was a local, although the men looked at me strangely—as if they couldn’t decide what kind of thing I was: a person, or an approximation of a person. I visited Gaudí’s Casa Batlló, the house of bones. Wherever I turned, there were curvilinear walls, windows like translucent cells, uneven floors that made you seasick. I read that Gaudí had designed the house to be devoid of any straight lines. It felt like the lining of a soft organ—not like bones at all, the only things, perhaps, in my body that I couldn’t ever change.
When I returned to New York, I tried to be kinder to myself. I painted the walls of my apartment seafoam green in the spring. I put up photographs of my dead mother. I took calcium pills.
The movement was still going strong. The last I heard, Mahika, Rui, and Jumana were moving around the country but mainly stayed close to Seattle, where every year there was a giant global medical conference. I followed the news, and sometimes when I saw one of my friends, I would gaze at them passively, like how I used to read all those articles that were about me but also not about me. I saw that Mahika had changed her name; people were calling her a doctor of some sort, and she dropped the PD.
I kept my name because it cost money to change it, and because I wanted a concrete reminder of that time. I needed a marker to move on from. Whenever I was at the post office or the hospital and someone called out Sophia PD Leung, people would turn to look at me, but then their attention drifted away, as if disappointed by how ordinary I seemed. I wasn’t an activist or a feminist or an icon—I was just myself, with slightly more money than before and a history of bad choices.
Without my friends, I went to brunch. I went to happy hour. I booked trips to Kyoto, to Niagara Falls, to Paris, to my mother’s home city in China, and then back again. I listened to new music; I watched new films; I found ways to keep refreshing, like a browser window, in a world that was always changing.
Galatea
At the apartment, the man points to the sofa and you obey, taking off your shoes. In front of you is a knockoff Noguchi table and two identical candles. He asks what you think of his place, and you say, “It’s nice,” although you aren’t sure yet. You have been on four or five mediocre dates with him, but this is your first time at his apartment.
The man sits on the other end of the sofa, and you wonder when he will attempt to undress you, how the awkward lurch or fumble will begin, but he shows no movement at all, sitting as far away as possible. He pours you some wine and his hand hovers, for too long, over a candle flame. You realize it is artificial: a smokeless pillar with a wriggling tab.
“You have fake candles,” you say neutrally.
“Yes,” he replies. “Actually, I prefer them. Sometimes fake things are better than real, right? The light lasts forever and there’s no risk.”
As he says this, you notice there are two pianos in the room: a silent baby grand and a self-playing one, the keys moving on their own as if by the pressure of invisible fingertips. He pours more wine, the sound cantering with the music.
Before meeting this man, you had all but given up on dating. Now, he suggests rote companionship; you could spend dozens of evenings watching tastefully pornographic art house films, ordering omakase menus at tiny restaurants, booking the occasional long weekend in Tokyo or London. You are thirty-two years old, after all. Your colleagues remind you often of your limited options.
You excuse yourself to the bathroom and find more fake candles and an M. C. Escher print, a box of USB sticks by the sink. You pee sluggishly, exhausted already.
You return to the living room.
“Smoke?”
The man has opened the balcony doors, and a new smell enters the room, damp and fragrant and salt. You suck it into your lungs.
There is an artificial waterway near the man’s apartment. In the summer, people like to pull on their long-sleeved bathing suits and sit on beds of sand drinking cantaloupe juice. Sometimes, when it is very hot, blankets of sulphur float in from the plastic molding factory situated further upstream.
Early spring is when you like to visit the river. It is usually very cold, but with your body wrapped in wool you can walk for hours. When you return home, your toes, your eyes, your ears are singed with cold. And for a short while, as you warm up, your cheeks bloodred, it feels as if you are changing. But the next day arrives, and then the next, your walks by the water grow warmer, and soon it is sweltering again. You join a dating app, message a few people, have a few lackluster dinners, delete the app. You buy a new summer dress and hang it up alongside all of your other thin, long dresses. Time passes, but nobody seems to notice except you. You aren’t even sure you’re processing anything; you’re just observing. When you look back at photographs of yourself by the river, you even notice the same vendors in the background, the same dogs wearing glow rings on their necks. Everything you do feels copied and pasted, templated from another life.
* * *
OUTSIDE ON THE BALCONY at the man’s apartment, the air is colder than you expect. It is only then you realize that you’re drunk—how many glasses of wine have you had since you arrived? Three? Four?—and your face flushes against the bracing wind.
The man’s balcony is wide and new, just like everything inside the apartment. There are two deck chairs, a rattan sofa set with blankets and pillows, a small, circular table, a half-yellowed monstera plant. The man fumbles with some cords, switches on a heater and two garden lamps. Outside, he seems rougher, sharpened by the temperature drop. He lights a cigarette, puffs on it a little, asks if you’re cold. Without waiting for an answer, he pulls a blanket off the sofa, handing it to you. You take it and then notice that where the blanket was there is a large shape, hands, a face. You feel the blood leave your body.
“Don’t be alarmed,” he says quickly. “She’s not real.”
You let out two, four, six gasps, clutching the blanket to your chest. A metal-bitter taste in your throat. Immediately you can see that the woman isn’t real—she’s just a wax figure—but still there are spots behind your eyes, a clamoring in your belly. You laugh a little to relieve the tension. The man is watching you carefully.
To calm yourself, you begin to study the figure, just like when you were a child and you saw something in the dark. To see the shape of something, you realized, was to understand it better— a lamp bent strange in the shadows, a piece of paper wilted on the floor.
The figure before you has poreless, lucid skin and dark, very shiny hair that comes together in a low bun at the nape of her neck. Her eyes are soft and wet.
“A friend manufactures these dolls in Zhongshan,” the man explains, then hastily adds: “She’s not a sex toy, if that’s what you’re thinking. More for companionship.”
A CompanionDoll. The company that makes them is emerging but powerful in financial and public backing. They claim that their dolls not only appear lifelike, but are also capable of emotional maturity. You read recently in a newspaper that the CEO has plans to collaborate with the government. He mentions that his vision for restructuring labor forces would eliminate the need for migrant workers and caretakers, reducing costs and prioritizing efficiency. But for now, the CompanionDolls are still in test mode—a public beta. You see them milling around in pairs or threes at giant chain restaurants, hospitals, care facilities for the elderly, wearing blue uniforms and dead-eyed, glassy stares.
But the one in front of you is different. She is alone. She wears a standard charcoal gray sleeveless dress, a white gauze scarf at her throat. You catch pearls on her ears, slingbacks with inch-and-a-half heels. She does not look like the others. She looks, you realize, like a generic female office worker. She looks like you.
* * *
THE FINANCIAL SERVICES COMPANY you work for is large, extremely gossipy, and competitive. At five years in, you are always being overlooked for promotion; senior staff members often copy your work and pass it off as their own.
Some time ago, you heard about someone in the health-tech department who had requested three weeks off to process a psychological breakdown after her divorce. Your other colleagues didn’t call it that, though—they referred to it as a “vacation.”
On your first date, the man had provided enough basic information for you to figure out that his previous partner was this same woman, although you didn’t mention the connection. It seemed inappropriate to bring up your nonrelationship with her. You hadn’t ever spoken anyway, although you saw her often around the break room and the bathroom.
You feel a little strange holding this information, knowing that you shared the same space as his ex-wife, moved circuitously around the same desks, the same stairways, to reach the expenses department, where you both regularly cashed out for your client lunches. Perhaps you even saw the back of her head a few times as you queued, her thick hair glossy and black and pinned. When you looked at the backs of all the heads in that queue, it became unclear who was who. The boundary between you and them dissolved as you progressed, body by body, toward the desk to collect your money.
But you pretend that you’re different. When the man asked where you work, you told him you are a writer. “What kind?” he asked, genuinely interested. “Fiction? Nonfiction?”
You thought for a second, then said, “Fiction.” You surprised yourself by announcing you’ve been working on a novel for the last decade.
“I’m so glad we matched on the app,” he said. “I don’t think I know any other writers.”
He looked at you strangely then. You wondered if he was joking.
* * *
