Smoke and Mirrors (16 page)

She had been born in London. Told me ominous tales

from time to time to time

of her childhood. Of the children who ran into her father’s shop

shouting
Shonky shonky sheeny,
running away;

she would not let me wear a black shirt because,

she said, she remembered the marches through the East End.

Moseley’s blackshirts. Her sister got an eye blackened.

The conjurer took a kitchen knife,

pushed it slowly through the red hatbox.

And then the singing stopped.

He put the boxes back together,

pulled out the knives and swords, one by one by one.

He opened the compartment in the top: my grandmother smiled,

embarrassed, at us, displaying her own old teeth.

He closed the compartment, hiding her from view.

Pulled out the last knife.

Opened the main door again,

and she was gone.

A gesture, and the red box vanished, too.

It’s up his sleeve,
my grandfather explained, but seemed unsure.

The conjurer made two doves fly from a burning plate.

A puff of smoke, and he was gone as well.

She’ll be under the stage now, or backstage,

said my grandfather,

having a cup of tea. She’ll come back to us with

flowers, or with chocolates.
I hoped for chocolates.

The dancing girls again.

The comedian, for the last time.

And all of them came on together at the end.

The grand finale,
said my grandfather.
Look sharp,

perhaps she’ll be back on now.

But no. They sang

when you’re riding along

on the crest of the wave

and the sun is in the sky.

The curtain went down, and we shuffled out into the lobby.

We loitered for a while.

Then we went down to the stage door

and waited for my grandmother to come out.

The conjurer came out in street clothes;

the glitter woman looked so different in a mac.

My grandfather went to speak to him. He shrugged,

told us he spoke no English and produced

a half-a-crown from behind my ear,

and vanished off into the dark and rain.

I never saw my grandmother again.

We went back to their house, and carried on.

My grandfather now had to cook for us.

And so for breakfast, dinner, lunch, and tea,

we had golden toast and silver marmalade

and cups of tea.

’Till I went home.

He got so old after that night

as if the years took him all in a rush.

Daisy, Daisy,
he’d sing,
give me your answer, do.

If you were the only girl in the world and I were the only boy.

My old man said follow the van.

My grandfather had the voice in the family,

they said he could have been a cantor,

but there were snapshots to develop,

radios and razors to repair . . .

his brothers were a singing duo: the Nightingales,

had been on television in the early days.

He bore it well. Although, quite late one night,

I woke, remembering the licorice sticks in the pantry,

I walked downstairs.

My grandfather stood there in his bare feet.

And, in the kitchen, all alone,

I saw him stab a knife into a box.

You made me love you.

I didn’t want to do it.

C HANGES

L
ater, they would point to his sister’s death, the cancer that ate her twelve-year-old life, tumors the size of duck eggs in her brain, and him a boy of seven, snot-nosed and crew-cut, watching her die in the white hospital with his wide brown eyes, and they would say, “That was the start of it all,” and perhaps it was.

In
Reboot
(dir. Robert Zemeckis, 2018), the biopic, they jump-cut to his teens, and he’s watching his science teacher die of AIDS, following their argument over dissecting a large pale-stomached frog.

“Why should we take it apart?” says the young Rajit as the music swells. “Instead, should we not give it life?” His teacher, played by the late James Earl Jones, looks shamed and then inspired, and he lifts his hand from his hospital bed to the boy’s bony shoulder. “Well, if anyone can do it, Rajit, you can,” he says in a deep bass rumble.

The boy nods and stares at us with a dedication in his eyes that borders upon fanaticism.

This never happened.

It is a gray November day, and Rajit is now a tall man in his forties with dark-rimmed spectacles, which he is not currently wearing. The lack of spectacles emphasizes his nudity. He is sitting in the bath as the water gets cold, practicing the conclusion to his speech. He stoops a little in everyday life, although he is not stooping now, and he considered his words before he speaks. He is not a good public speaker.

The apartment in Brooklyn, which he shares with another research scientist and a librarian, is empty today. His penis is shrunken and nutlike in the tepid water. “What this means,” he says loudly and slowly, “is that the war against cancer has been won.”

Then he pauses, takes a question from an imaginary reporter on the other side of the bathroom.

“Side effects?” he replies to himself in an echoing bathroom voice. “Yes, there are some side effects. But as far as we have been able to ascertain, nothing that will create any permanent changes.”

He climbs out of the battered porcelain bathtub and walks, naked, to the toilet bowl, into which he throws up, violently, the stage fright pushing through him like a gutting knife. When there is nothing more to throw up and the dry heaves have subsided, Rajit rinses his mouth with Listerine, gets dressed, and takes the subway into central Manhattan.

It is, as
Time
magazine will point out, a discovery that would ‘change the nature of medicine every bit as fundamentally and as importantly as the discovery of penicillin.’

“What if,” says Jeff Goldblum, playing the adult Rajit in the biopic, “just—what if—you could reset the body’s genetic code? So many ills come because the body has forgotten what it should be doing. The code has become scrambled. The program has become corrupted. What if . . . what if you could fix it?”

“You’re crazy,” retorts his lovely blonde girlfriend, in the movie. In real life he has no girlfriend; in real life Rajit’s sex life is a fitful series of commercial transactions between Rajit and the young men of the AAA-Ajax Escort Agency.

“Hey,” says Jeff Goldblum, putting it better than Rajit ever did, “it’s like a computer. Instead of trying to fix the glitches caused by a corrupted program one by one, symptom by symptom, you can just reinstall the program. All the information’s there all along. We just have to tell our bodies to go and recheck the RNA and the DNA—reread the program if you will. And then reboot.”

The blonde actress smiles, and stops his words with a kiss, amused and impressed and passionate.

The woman has cancer of the spleen and of the lymph nodes and abdomen: non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She also has pneumonia. She has agreed to Rajit’s request to use an experimental treatment on her. She also knows that claiming to cure cancer is illegal in America. She was a fat woman until recently. The weight has fallen from her, and she reminds Rajit of a snowman in the sun: each day she melts, each day she is, he feels, less defined.

“It is not a drug as you understand it,” he tells her. “It is a set of chemical instructions.” She looks blank. He injects two ampules of a clear liquid into her veins.

Soon she sleeps.

When she awakes, she is free of cancer. The pneumonia kills her soon after that.

Rajit has spent the two days before her death wondering how he will explain the fact that, as the autopsy demonstrates beyond a doubt, the patient now has a penis and is, in every respect, functionally and chromosomally male.

It is twenty years later in a tiny apartment in New Orleans (although it might as well be in Moscow, or Manchester, or Paris, or Berlin). Tonight is going to be a big night, and Jo/e is going to stun.

The choice is between a Polonaise crinoline-style eighteenth-century French court dress (fiberglass bustle, underwired decolletage setting off lace-embroidered crimson bodice) and a reproduction of Sir Phillip Sydney’s court dress in black velvet and silver thread, complete with ruff and codpiece. Eventually, and after weighing all the options, Jo/e plumps for cleavage over cock. Twelve hours to go: Jo/e opens the bottle with the red pills, each little red pill marked with an X, and pops two of them. It’s 10
A
.
M
., and Jo/e goes to bed, begins to masturbate, penis semihard, but falls asleep before coming.

The room is very small. Clothes hang from every surface. An empty pizza box sits on the floor. Jo/e snores loudly, normally, but when freebooting Jo/e makes no sound at all, and might as well be in some kind of coma.

Jo/e wakes at 10
P
.
M
., feeling tender and new. Back when Jo/e first started on the party scene, each change would prompt a severe self-examination, peering at moles and nipples, foreskin or clit, finding out which scars had vanished and which ones had remained. But Jo/e’s now an old hand at this and puts on the bustle, the petticoat, the bodice and the gown, new breasts (high and conical) pushed together, petticoat trailing the floor, which means Jo/e can wear the forty-year-old pair of Doctor Martens boots underneath (you never know when you’ll need to run, or to walk or to kick, and silk slippers do no one any favors).

High, powder-look wig completes the look. And a spray of cologne. Then Jo/e’s hand fumbles at the petticoat, a finger pushes between the legs (Jo/e wears no knickers, claiming a desire for authenticity to which the Doc Martens give the lie) and then dabs it behind the ears, for luck, perhaps, or to help pull. The taxi rings the door at 11:05, and Jo/e goes downstairs. Jo/e goes to the ball.

Tomorrow night Jo/e will take another dose; Jo/e’s job identity during the week is strictly male.

Rajit never viewed the gender-rewriting action of Reboot as anything more than a side effect. The Nobel prize was for anti-cancer work (rebooting worked for most cancers, it was discovered, but not all of them).

For a clever man, Rajit was remarkably shortsighted. There were a few things he failed to foresee. For example:

That there would be people who, dying of cancer, would rather die than experience a change in gender.

That the Catholic Church would come out against Rajit’s chemical trigger, marketed by this point under the brand name Reboot, chiefly because the gender change caused a female body to reabsorb into itself the flesh of a fetus as it rebooted itself: males cannot be pregnant. A number of other religious sects would come out against Reboot, most of them citing Genesis I: 27, “Male and female created He them,” as their reason.

Sects that came out against Reboot included; Islam; Christian Science; the Russian Orthodox Church; the Roman Catholic Church (with a number of dissenting voices); the Unification Church; Orthodox Trek Fandom; Orthodox Judaism; the Fundamentalist Alliance of the U.S.A.

Sects that came out in favor of Reboot use where deemed the appropriate treatment by a qualified medical doctor included: most Buddhists; the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; the Greek Orthodox Church; the Church of Scientology; the Anglican Church (with a number of dissenting voices); New Trek Fandom; Liberal and Reform Judaism; the New Age Coalition of America.

Sects that initially came out in favor of using Reboot recreationally: None.

While Rajit realized that Reboot would make gender-reassignment surgery obsolete, it never occurred to him that anyone might wish to take it for reasons of desire or curiosity or escape. Thus, he never foresaw the black market in Reboot and similar chemical triggers; nor that, within fifteen years of Reboot’s commercial release and FDA approval, illegal sales of the designer Reboot knock-offs (
bootlegs,
as they were soon known) would outsell heroin and cocaine, gram for gram, more than ten times over.

In several of the New Communist States of Eastern Europe possession of bootlegs carried a mandatory death sentence.

In Thailand and Mongolia it was reported that boys were being forcibly rebooted into girls to increase their worth as prostitutes.

In China newborn girls were rebooted to boys: families would save all they had for a single dose. The old people died of cancer as before. The subsequent birthrate crisis was not perceived as a problem until it was too late, the proposed drastic solutions proved difficult to implement and led, in their own way, to the final revolution.

Amnesty International reported that in several of the Pan-Arabic countries men who could not easily demonstrate that they had been born male and were not, in fact, women escaping the veil were being imprisoned and, in many cases, raped and killed. Most Arab leaders denied that either phenomenon was occurring or had ever occurred.

Rajit is in his sixties when he reads in
The New Yorker
that the word
change
is gathering to itself connotations of deep indecency and taboo.

Schoolchildren giggle embarrassedly when they encounter phrases like ‘I needed a change’ or ‘Time for change’ or ‘The Winds of Change’ in their studies of pre-twenty-first-century literature. In an English class in Norwich horrified smutty sniggers greet a fourteen-year old’s discovery of “A change is as good as a rest.”