He pointed to his own Adam’s apple and moved a thumbnail down it for a quarter of an inch. “She was a natural really, hardly much of a bulge at all. I left her with the teeniest, weeniest concealable scar-she wore necklaces at first to cover it up, but it really did fit with the natural creases when it healed. I don’t think anyone would necessarily notice, or know what it was even if they did see it. But that didn’t deal with the voice, of course, only the cosmetics of the anterior neck. For the voice you need therapy, perhaps combined with a rather tricky little technique called ‘indirect cricothyroid approximation.’ Basically, you tighten up the vocal cords to produce a slightly higher range.”
A pause while Dr. Surichai seemed to examine my neck. “It’s a misperception that a woman’s voice needs to be higher than a man’s to sound womanly, however. Some women have very deep voices and manage to sound wonderfully female. Gender identification through voice is something we start to do from an early age, there are a million subliminal instructions we absorb. It’s the voice which really tells the world who and what we are, far more than genitals or even dress. Your voice, for example, Detective, is exactly modified for the purposes of your profession. You are polite and firm, you can intimidate without raising your pitch, I bet you know how to terrify merely by introducing a certain ice into your speech, no? Teaching someone to project the opposite sex through speech without sounding phony or like a drag queen is the most difficult task. Fortunately, it’s not a surgical problem.”
“Fatima speaks exactly like a woman, there’s nothing male about her voice at all.”
“Correct. You really have to admire Bradley for that above all things. Frankly, on the surgical front he was a pain in the neck. He got exactly the tits he wanted, but it took about twenty hours of discussions, drawings, diagrams, e-mails of nipple details-would you believe? To do a really good breast job you have to follow the natural contours of the torso-it’s really an aesthetic problem, so you need an artist’s eye. Bradley thought he was the only one who understood the laws of beauty, I was just a glorified butcher. He got on my nerves, frankly, although I have to admit he knew what he was talking about. With the voice, though, that was different. He put in a lot of work himself, used a tape recorder and sent her to a voice therapist after we tightened her vocal cords a notch. I think that’s where she learned such good English, the therapist was an American. Mainly, though, either the therapist or Bradley, or probably both, understood the aural contours of the female identity and transmitted it to Fatima. That’s her real secret, which people don’t usually spot. They’re fixated on her long legs, perfect tits and Afro-Modigliani face-they don’t realize that the full force of her sexuality doesn’t hit until she opens her mouth. That’s the trigger and the reinforcement, the signal which says: ‘This is a real woman.’ It still gives me a thrill when she speaks, that Negroid texture, and very, very female.”
“Please think about this question, Doctor. Did you ever have the impression that someone apart from Bradley was helping in Fatima’s design?”
I watched his brow furrow while he cocked his head to one side and stared at me. “Really, that is a possibility? I never thought of that, but I did wonder where the marine was getting some of his ideas from. Sometimes he spoke more like an art dealer than a soldier.”
“Any idea where the name Fatima came from?”
A bright look. “Curious, isn’t it? I was present when they decided on her new name. Bradley said: ‘What you gonna call yourself, honey?’ And she said: ‘Fatima, daughter of the Prophet.’ She took us both by surprise, as you would imagine. I realized afterwards that as a Karen she would have been subjected to all sorts of missionaries, Muslims as well as Christians. Bradley said: ‘You sure?’ And she said yes. It was the only thing she was ever uncompromising about.”
He stood up. He was unexpectedly short, no more than five-six; sitting down, he projected power and authority with a fashionably sleazy touch; standing up, he was a small guy with something to prove. “Look, if this is relevant you can have copies.”
On the other side of the room Dr. Surichai kept his computer, a tower on a desk next to a twenty-inch flat screen. I caught a glimpse of a diagram of a penis while the doctor moved the mouse and made keystrokes. He went to a file manager program and called up a file named Fatima. He ran quickly through some graphics of sexual organs, Adam’s apples, then stopped at a diagram of a breast.
“This is the sort of thing I mean.” He nodded at the screen.
Someone had used a computer program to map out the contour of a breast against a green matrix of crisscross lines which seemed to represent a torso. “This is breast diagram number seventy-six. I’m not kidding, he numbered them and sent them to me via e-mail. They’re large graphic files and clogged up my system before I got broadband. You see, this is merely the outline. If I click on the nipple, like so, I get nipple detail.”
The image changed to something which might have been a broken tower from an ancient monument. The dimensions could be measured by reference to the green matrix grid. “You see, he even worked out what size nipple he wanted, how long it should be, the size of the areola. See?” Now the screen was filled with what was recognizably a giant nipple with black areola. “One thing you have to say for the guy, he wasn’t hung up about being black. He was proud of his African roots, which was one thing I rather liked about him.”
“The only thing?”
The doctor shrugged. “As you can imagine, I get all sorts. The fanatically involved lover is a standard character in my line of work, although he’s rarely as intelligent or persistent as Bradley was. What I couldn’t quite get used to, though, was a layman looking on the surgery with such a cold eye. Surgeons have to be like that, but if the patient was my lover, or someone close to me, I don’t think I’d be quite so obsessed with the aesthetics-I’d just want to make sure they achieved the gender identity they craved, on their own terms, to give them psychological relief. After all, that’s what the operation is supposed to be all about. Now look.”
The image changed to a full breast outline, with arrows and incision marks. “He’s even working out exactly how he wants the saline bags to be placed. You see, in breast enlargement you put the saline inserts behind the mammary gland, lay them on the chest cage itself. They’re kept in place by the breast, but they move a little, which gives the realism, which is why everyone these days prefers saline to those ridiculous silicone inserts which set like concrete and actually echo when you tap them!” The doctor made a face of professional revulsion.
“But Bradley here is going one stage further. He wants to measure the precise position of the saline bag, down to the tenth of a millimeter, as if he’s positioning a gun emplacement or something, to achieve precisely the breast contour he’s aiming for. I’ve never come across anything like it. Frankly, when it comes to breasts, there’s a certain leeway-most patients realize that real breasts change shape all the time, depending on whether the woman is standing, sitting, lying down, et cetera, and they’re happy if an enlargement more or less follows nature. But Bradley was aiming for something specific-I suppose a personal erotic image, the tit of his fantasies. Now, you see?” The image changed to a representation of a full torso against the grid, seen from side and front. “He’s actually very good. This is the effect, as he explained to me many times. The breast has to be just slightly large for the torso, but only slightly, giving the appearance of a full, firm bosom, but not something too flappy-that was his word, ‘flappy.’ A lot of men have their own idea about tits, but I’ve never known anyone to analyze it in such detail. Firm, but not unnaturally so, friendly, in other words soft and yielding, large but not so as to make her look top-heavy or overblown-another of his words. I told him he was seeking the impossible-if you want soft and yielding, you have to give up on firm. If you want large and soft, you’re not going to get a constant shape at all, it will change all the time. He would say, ‘I know, Doctor, I know, you have to aim for the perfect balance, that’s all.’ We spent hours, days on her breasts. He really drove me to extremes of detail I’ve never gone to before. In the end we got his perfect tits, and they are rather nice, don’t you think?”