The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12

by Jonathan Strahan

  The question is repeated several times over the next ten days, by your mother, your father, your grandfather, and your aunt.

  The only person who doesn’t denounce your bachelordom is your grandmother. She likes me. When she sees me, she smiles and says, “Cao didi.”

  “Grass brother?” I ask.

  “It’s a nickname for an actor she really likes,” you explain. “American.”

  She asks me another question, but Tingting is too far gone. I’m a Westerner now. “Ting bu dong,” I say politely. I hear you, but I don’t understand.

  I ask her to repeat herself, but something the old woman said has embarrassed your mother, for she escorts Nainai up to her room.

  “She’s old,” you tell me.

  Your mother and grandfather and aunt are not as accustomed to the sight of foreigners as you are. They, too, marvel at my chopstick ability as though I am a cat that has learned to play the piano. At all times I am a walking exhibition. In most places, I’m the waiguoren, the foreigner. In expat bars, I’m That Bloke with the Scarf, famed for his habit of always appearing well groomed. And around you, I’m Thomas Majors, though for some reason I don’t mind it when you look at me.

  I have no trouble with chopsticks. But putting food in my mouth, chewing it, and swallowing it are not actions that come naturally to me. This tongue of mine does not have working taste buds. My teeth are not especially secure in their gums, having been inserted one by one with a few taps of a hammer. This stomach of mine is only a synthetic sack that dangles in the recesses of my body. It has no exit. It leads nowhere.

  Eating, for me, is purely a ritual to convince others that I am in fact human. I take no pleasure in it and personally find the act distasteful, especially when observing the oil lingering on others’ lips, the squelching sounds of food being slurped and smacked between moist mucous membranes in the folds of fleshy human mouths.

  I’m not entirely sure how I gain sustenance. I have found certain habits are necessary to keep me intact. As to each one’s precise physiological function, I am unclear.

  Your mother thinks I don’t eat enough. “My stomach is a little weak,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  “Is that why you’re not fat like most foreigners?” your aunt asks. Her English is surprisingly good.

  “I guess so,” I tell her.

  “My mother is from Hunan,” you tell me. “Her food is a little spicy for you, maybe.”

  “It’s good,” I say.

  “I’ll tell her less spicy next time,” you promise.

  “You don’t have to,” I say. I hate making the woman inconvenience herself to please an artificial stomach.

  After the feast, we watch the annual pageant on television. There’s Dashan the Canadian smiling and laughing as the other presenters tease him about the length of his nose. Your relatives point at my face and make unflattering comparisons.

  At midnight, we watch the sky light up with fireworks.

  Then it’s time for bed. I sleep in the guest room with your flatulent uncle. I suspect your mother placed me with him as some form of punishment.

  I hadn’t anticipated sharing a room. I hadn’t even brought nightclothes. I don’t own any.

  “I usually sleep naked,” is my excuse when I sheepishly ask you for a spare set of pajamas.

  I wonder what it’s like to sleep. It strikes me as a strange way to pass the time.

  I pull the covers up to my chin, ignoring your uncle when he scolds me for wearing a scarf to bed. I shut my eyes. I practice breathing slowly and loudly as I’ve seen real people do. Eventually, your uncle falls asleep. He snores like a chainsaw but sleeps like a stone. The hourly bursts of fireworks don’t waken him. Neither does the light from my smartphone when I turn it on to look up Cao Didi. That’s only his nickname in the Chinese press, of course. His English name is Maxwell Stone, but that’s not his real name, either. In his nation of origin, he was called Maksimilian Petrovsky.

  Here is Maxwell Stone’s biography: born in Russia in 1920, he moved to the United States in the late ’30s, where he began working as an extra for Hammerhead Studios. He worked as a stuntman in adventure films, but he got his first speaking role as a torch-wielding villager in 1941’s The Jigsaw Man, a low-budget knock-off of Frankenstein made without the permission of Mary Shelley’s estate. Maxwell Stone never attained fame in the United States or in his native Russia, but his only starring role in 1948’s The White Witch of the Amazon somehow gained him a cult following in China, where audiences dubbed him ‘Cao Didi’ (Grass Brother) after an iconic scene in which Stone evades a tribe of headhunters by hiding in the underbrush. The McCarthy era killed Stone’s career in Hollywood. In 1951, he left Los Angeles and never returned.

  Thomas Majors does not resemble Maxwell Stone. Maxwell was dark and muscular with a moustache and a square jaw, the perfect early twentieth-century man: rugged yet refined.

  I don’t know how your grandmother recognizes Maxwell Stone in Thomas Majors. I have mostly forgotten Stone. There’s hardly any of him left in me, just a few acting lessons and a couple of tips on grooming and posing for photographs.

  I spend the next few days and nights dredging up Tingting’s Changshahua. When I speak Chinese at the table, your mother blanches. She didn’t realize I could understand the things she has been saying about me.

  I don’t get the opportunity to talk to your grandmother privately until the fifth day of the lunar New Year. It’s late at night, and I hear her hobble down to the living room by herself and turn on the television. There’s a burst of fireworks outside, but everyone is too full of baijiu and jiaozi to wake up. The only two people in the house still conscious are me and Nainai.

  I turn off the telly and kneel in front of her. In Tingting’s old Changshahua I ask, “How did you know I was Cao Didi?”

  She smiles blankly and says, in accented English, “How did you recognize me under all these feathers?”

  It takes a moment for the memory to percolate. It’s 1947, on a cheap jungle set in a sound studio in Los Angeles. Maxwell Stone is wearing a khaki costume and a Panama hat and I’m wearing Maxwell Stone. Maxwell is a craftsman, not an artist: dependable and humble. He always remembers his lines. Now I remember them, too.

  Your grandmother is reciting dialog from one of Stone’s movies. She’s playing the lost heiress whom Stone’s character was sent to rescue. I can’t quite recall the original actress’s name. Margot or something like that.

  Lights. Camera. Action. “Feathers or no feathers,” I recite. “A dame’s a dame. Now it’s time to go home.” Thomas’s mouth tries on a mid-Atlantic accent.

  “But I can’t go back.” Your grandmother touches her forehead with the back of her hand. “I won’t. This is where I belong now.”

  “Knock it off with this nonsense, will you?” says an American adventurer played by a Russian actor played by an entity as-of-yet unclassified. “Your family’s paying me big money to bring you back to civilization.”

  “Tell them I died! Tell them Catherine DuBlanc was killed.” A melodramatic pause, just like in the film. “... Killed by the White Witch of the Amazon.”

  Then your grandmother goes quiet again, like a toy whose batteries have run out. She says nothing more.

  I thought she knew me. But she only knows Maxwell. The performance was all she wanted.

  I HAVE WORN so many people. I don’t know how many. I don’t remember most of them. I ought to keep a record of some kind, but most of them strike me as dull or loathsome in retrospect.

  I played a scientist once or twice, but I could not figure myself out. In the 1960s I was a graduate student; I sought myself out in folklore and found vague references to creatures called changelings, shapeshifters, but the descriptions don’t quite fit me. I do not have a name.

  I do not know how old I am or where I came from or what made me or why I came to be. I try on one person after another, hoping that someday I’ll find one that fits and I’ll settle into it and some biologica
l process or act of magic will turn me into that person.

  I have considered leaving civilization, but the wilds are smaller than they used to be. Someone would stumble across me and see me undisguised. It has happened before.

  I will not submit to scientific examination. Though the tools have advanced considerably over the course of my many lifetimes, the human method of inquiry remains the same: tear something apart until it confesses its secrets, whether it’s a heretic or a frog’s nervous system or the atom.

  I do experience something akin to pain, and I prefer to avoid it.

  I LIKE BEING Thomas Majors. I enjoy making money, getting promoted, living as a minor celebrity. I appreciate the admiration others heap upon my creation.

  And I confess I like your admiration most of all. It’s honest and schoolboyish and sweet.

  Wearing Thomas grants me the pleasure of your company, which I treasure, though it probably doesn’t show. I am fond of so many things about you, such as that little nod you give when you try to look serious, or the way your entire face immediately turns red when you drink. At first, I studied these traits in the hopes of replicating them someday in a future incarnation. I memorized them. I practiced them at home until they were perfect. But even after I’ve perfected them, I still can’t stop watching you.

  I would like to be closer to you. I know you want the same thing. I know the real reason you insist on bringing me with you every time you open a new branch in a new city. I know the real reason you always invite me when you go out to dine with new school administrators and government officials and investors.

  But I am a creature that falls to pieces terribly often, and you can’t hold on to a thing like that. Every instance of physical touch invites potential damage to my artificial skin and the risk of being discovered.

  It is difficult to maintain a safe distance in an overcrowded country where schoolboys sit on each other’s laps without embarrassment and ayis press their shopping baskets into your legs when you queue up at a market.

  When you or anyone else stands too near or puts an arm around my shoulders, I step back and say, “Westerners like to keep other people at arm’s length.”

  You have your own reasons not to get too close. You have familial obligations, filial piety. You must make your parents happy. They paid for your education, your clothes, your food, your new apartment. They gave you your job. You owe them a marriage and a child. You have no reason to be a bachelor at the age of twenty-eight.

  Your mother and father choose a woman for you. She’s pretty and kind. You can think of no adequate excuses to chase her away. You can tolerate a life with her, you decide. You’re a businessman. You will travel a lot. She doesn’t mind.

  You announce your impending marriage less than a year later. The two of you look perfect in your engagement photos, and at your wedding you beam so handsomely that even I am fooled. I’m not jealous. I’m relieved that she has taken your focus from me, and I do love to see you smile.

  A FEW MONTHS later, we travel to Beijing. New Teach is opening a training center there, so we have another series of banquets and gan bei and KTV with our new business partners.

  By the end of the night, you’re staggering drunk, too drunk to walk straight, so I stoop low to let you put your arm across Thomas Majors’s shoulders in order to save you from tipping onto the pavement. I hope that you’re too drunk to notice there’s something not quite right with Thomas’s limbs, or at least too drunk to remember it afterward.

  I help you into a cab. The driver asks me the standard waiguoren questions (Where are you from? How long have you lived in China? Do you like it here? What is your job? Do you eat hamburgers?) but I ignore him. I only want to listen to you.

  You rub your stomach as the taxi speeds madly back to our hotel. “Are you going to vomit?” I ask.

  You’re quiet for a moment. I try to roll down the window nearest you, but it’s broken. Finally, you mutter, “I’m getting fat. Too much beer.”

  “You look fine,” I say.

  “I’m gaining weight,” you insist.

  “You sound like a woman,” I tease you.

  “Why don’t you get fat?” you say. “You’re a Westerner. How are you so slim?”

  “Just lucky, I guess,” I say.

  I pay the cab fare and drag you out, back up to your hotel suite. I give you water to drink and an ibuprofen to swallow so you won’t get a hangover. You take your medicine like a good boy, but you refuse to go to sleep.

  I sit at the edge of your bed. You lean forward and grab my scarf. “You always wear this,” you say.

  “Always,” I agree.

  “What would happen if you took it off?” you ask.

  “I can’t tell you,” I reply.

  “Come on,” you say, adding a line from a song: “Come on, baby, don’t be shy.” Then you laugh until tears flow down your red cheeks, until you fall backward onto the bed, and when you fall you drag me by the scarf down with you.

  “Be careful!” I tell you. “Ah, xiao xin!”

  But instead you pull on the scarf as though reeling in a fish.

  “You never take it off,” you say, holding one end of the scarf before your eyes. “I have never seen your neck.”

  I know I’m supposed to say something witty but I can’t think of it, so I smile bashfully instead. It’s a gesture I stole from Hugh Grant films.

  “What would happen if I take it off?” you ask. You try to unwrap it, but fortunately you’re too clumsy with drink.

  “My head would fall off,” I say.

  Then you laugh, and I laugh. Looming over you is awkward, so I lie beside you and prop my head up on Thomas Majors’s shoulder. You turn onto your left side to face me.

  “Da Huang,” you say, still playing with the scarf. “That’s your Chinese name.”

  “What’s your Chinese name?” I ask. “Your real name, I mean? You never told me.”

  “Chengwei,” you say.

  “Chengwei,” I repeat, imperfectly.

  “No,” you say. “Not Chéngwéi.” You raise your hand, then make a dipping motion to indicate the second and third tones. “Chéngwěi.”

  “Chéngwěi,” I say, drawing the tones in the air with Thomas’s graceful fingers.

  “Hen hao,” you say. Very good.

  “Nali,” I say, a modest denial.

  You smile. I notice for the first time that one of your front teeth is slightly crooked. It’s endearing, though, one of those little flaws which, through some sort of alchemy I have yet to learn to replicate, only serve to flatter the rest of the picture rather than mar it.

  “Da Huang is not a good name,” you say.

  “What should I be called?” I ask.

  You study Thomas Majors’s face carefully, yet somehow fail to find its glaring faults.

  “Shuai,” you say. You don’t translate the word, but I know what it means. Handsome.

  You touch Thomas’s cheek. I can feel your warmth through the false skin.

  Again, I don’t know what to say. This hasn’t come up in the etiquette books I studied.

  I realize that you’re waiting for me to be the brash Westerner who shoves his way forward and does what he wants. This hunger of yours presses on Thomas Majors, pinches and pulls at him to resculpt his personality.

  I want to be the man who can give you these things. But I’m terrified. When you run your fingers through Thomas’s hair, I worry that the scalp might come loose, or that your hand will skate across a bump that should not be there.

  You grab me by the scarf again and pull me closer to you. I shut my eyes. I don’t want you to see them at this distance; you might find something wrong in them. But that’s not what you’re looking for.

  Then you kiss me, a clumsy, drunk kiss. You cling to me like one of Harlow’s monkeys to a cloth mother.

  I can’t remember the last time I was kissed.

  I vaguely remember engaging in the act of coitus in some previous incarnation. It did not go wel
l.

  The mechanics of sexuality, of blood redistributing itself and tissue contracting and flesh reddening and appendages hardening and fluids secreting, are marvelously difficult to imitate with any verisimilitude.

  This is the climax of every story. In romance novels, the lovers kiss in the rain, and it’s all over. In fairy tales, the kiss breaks the spell: the princess awakens, the frog becomes a man. But that doesn’t happen, not now, not the last time I was kissed, and not the next time I will be kissed.

  But I enjoy it all the same. Your body is warm and right and real: self-heating skin, hair that grows in on its own, a mouth that lubricates itself.

  I study your body and memorize it for future reference. At the moment there is little I can learn and so much that I want to know. I wish I could taste you.

  You remove yourself from my lips and drunkenly smear your mouth against my cheek, my jaw, what little of my neck is not covered by the scarf. You press your nose against me and try vainly to smell Thomas Majors under the cologne I have chosen for him. You rest your head on my arm for a moment. I stroke your hair—not because it seems appropriate, but because I want to.

  Then you close your eyes. They stay closed. Soon I hear the slow, loud breathing of a man asleep.

  That’s as far as it goes between you and Thomas Majors.

  My arms don’t fall asleep so I can let you use Thomas Majors as your pillow for as long as you like. I watch your eyelashes flutter as you fall into REM sleep. I wonder what you’re dreaming about. I press my fingers against your neck to feel your pulse.

  Without waking you, I move my head down and lay it upon your chest. I shut my eyes. I listen to your heartbeat and the slow rhythm of your breath. Your stomach gurgles. The sounds are at once recognizably natural and alien to me, like deep-sea creatures. I find them endlessly fascinating.

  I try very hard to fall asleep, but I have no idea how to go about it. Still, I wait, and I imitate your breathing and hope that I’ll begin to lose track of each individual thump of your heart, and that I’ll slip out of consciousness and maybe even dream, and that I’ll wake up next to you.