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

by Jonathan Strahan

  Hours pass this way. The light through the window turns pale grey as the sun rises in Beijing’s smoggy sky. You roll over to face the shade and lie still again.

  I slip from the bed and head to the bathroom where I examine myself. I look very much the same as I did the day before.

  I take the elevator down to the dining room. It’s 8:36 a.m. Breakfast time. I serve myself from the buffet, selecting the sort of things I think a Westerner is supposed to eat at breakfast: bread, mostly, with coffee, tea, and a glass of milk. I sit alone at a little table with this meal before me and let its steam warm my face. I wait for the aroma to awaken a sense of hunger in me. It doesn’t.

  I eat it anyway so as not to cause suspicion. I can’t taste any of it, as usual.

  You’re still asleep when I get back. It has only been about five hours since you flopped onto my bed. In the bathroom, I empty Thomas Majors’s stomach and turn on the shower. Even though the door is locked, I do not remove the yellow scarf. I tape a plastic bag around it to keep it dry.

  The grime of last night’s drinking and duck neck slides off, along with a few hairs I’ll have to replace later.

  The water hits me with a muffled impact. I don’t feel wet. Thomas’s skin keeps me dry like a raincoat. It isn’t my flesh.

  I wonder if the state you invoke in me can accurately be called love. I know only that I am happier in your presence than out of it, and that I care desperately what you think of me. If that is love, then I suppose it can be said that I love you, with all the shapeless mass I have instead of a heart.

  I don’t believe that you love me, but I know that you love Thomas Majors, and that’s close enough.

  I’ve heard stories like this, hundreds of them, in languages I’ve long forgotten. The ending is always the same. Galatea’s form softens and turns to flesh. The Velveteen Rabbit sprouts fur and whiskers. But I am still myself, whatever that is, and my puppet Thomas Majors has not become a real boy.

  I don’t know what I am, but at least now I know something I am not: I am not a creature of fairy tales.

  YOUR CELL PHONE wakes you a little after 10 a.m. It’s your wife. I’m dressed by then in a navy-blue suit and working on my cell phone in one of the easy chairs. You finish the conversation before you’re quite conscious.

  “Do you remember last night?” I ask.

  You scratch your head. “No,” you groan.

  “Do you have a hangover?” I ask.

  I take your miserable grunt as a yes.

  YOUR DAUGHTER IS born seven months later. You leave Beijing for a while to tend to your wife. After a few weeks of your unbearable absence, a student invites me to dinner with her family. “I can’t,” I tell her. “I’m taking a trip this weekend.”

  “Are you going to see your giiiirlfriend?” she asks in a singsong voice. She’s in high school, too busy from fifteen-hour school days seven days a week to have a boyfriend of her own, but she has immense interest in the love lives of her more attractive teachers.

  “No,” I tell her. The expats know that Thomas Majors is gay but his students and colleagues do not. “I’m going to visit my boss, Mr. Liu. I can have dinner with you next week.”

  I take the bullet train to Shenzhen. As the countryside blurs past my window, I notice that Thomas’s fingernails have become brittle. It’s too soon. I blame the cold, dry air of Beijing and resolve to buy a bottle of clear nail polish and apply it at the first opportunity.

  You’re not home when I come to your door. Your mother-in-law thanks me for the gift I have brought (a canister of imported milk powder), invites me in, and explains that you’re on a shopping trip in Hong Kong and will be back soon. In the meantime, I sit in the living room and sip warm water.

  Your wife isn’t finished with her post-partum month of confinement. She does not invite me to her room. It’s probably because she’s in pajamas and hasn’t washed her hair, or she’s simply tired, but the suspicion that she knows something unsavory about me crawls on my back.

  There’s a dog in the apartment, a shaggy little thing that doesn’t go up to my knee. It doesn’t quite know what to make of me. It barks and skitters around in circles. It can smell me—not Thomas, but me—and it knows that something is slightly off.

  But dogs are not terribly bright. I sneak to the kitchen, find a piece of bacon, and put it in my pocket. The dog likes me well enough after that.

  You return home that afternoon, laden with bags. You weren’t expecting me, but you’re happy to see me.

  “I bought something for you,” you tell me. “A gift.”

  “You didn’t have to,” I insist.

  “I already had to buy gifts for my whole extended family,” you say, “so one more doesn’t matter. Here.”

  You pull a small box out of a suitcase.

  “Can I open it?” I ask.

  You nod.

  I peel off the tape. The paper does not tear at all as I remove it. The box shimmers. I open it and can’t help but cry out.

  “A new scarf!” I hold it up. It’s beautiful, gleaming yellow silk with brocade serpents. I try on an expression of overwhelming gratitude. Until now, I haven’t had a chance to use it. “Snakes.”

  “That’s your birth year,” you say.

  “You remembered,” I say. “This is wonderful. Thank you so much.”

  “Put it on,” you tell me.

  “In a little while.”

  “Come on, baby. Don’t be shy,” you say. You couch your demand in humor and a smile. “Go ahead.”

  I try to think of an excuse not to. A scar on my neck. A skin condition. It’s cold. None of them will work.

  Your baby saves me. She starts screaming in the bedroom, and neither your wife nor her mother can calm her down. Your wife soon starts crying, too, and your mother-in-law starts shouting at her.

  “I think maybe you should get in there and say hello,” I tell you.

  You groan, but you comply.

  I dash to the lavatory. Quickly, I unwind the counterfeit Liu Viuttor scarf from around my neck. It sticks to Thomas’s flesh like a bandage. I peel it off slowly but the damage is done. The skin of Thomas Majors’s neck has gone ragged, like moth-eaten cloth. I wrap the new scarf around it snugly. Then I unwrap it. The damage is still there. Somehow, I thought this new totem would fix me.

  I tie my new scarf around Thomas’s neck and return to the living room.

  To spare your wife further agitation, her mother banishes the baby from the bedroom. You carry her out with you. She’s a fat little thing, all lumpy pink pajamas and chubby cheeks gone red from crying. When she sees me, she quiets herself and stares. She’s had limited experience of the world, but even she knows that this creature before her is different.

  “She’s never seen a foreigner before,” you say with a smile. “Do you want to hold her?”

  You thrust her into my arms before I can resist. She does not cry anymore, just looks at me with big, dark eyes. Her little body is warm and surprisingly heavy.

  “Chinese babies like to stare at handsome faces,” you say.

  I smile at her. She doesn’t smile back. She hasn’t learned yet that she’s supposed to. Everything about her is unpracticed and new and utterly authentic. I find it unnerving.

  “You made this,” I said. “You made a person. A real person.”

  “Yeah,” you say, probably filing my remark under foreigners say strange things. “Do you think you’ll have children?” you ask me.

  “Probably not,” I say.

  Your daughter clutches at my new scarf.

  A FEW DAYS later, we take the bullet train back to Beijing together. You nap most of the way with your head on my shoulder. When you wake up, you tell me, “You should sleep more. You look tired.”

  “So do you,” I reply.

  “I have a baby,” you say. “You don’t.”

  The only reply I have for him is a nervous Colin Firth smile. Underneath it, I am panicking.

  “You look a little grey. Ma
ybe it’s the air,” you say. “Do you use a mask?”

  “Of course,” I say.

  “You need to drink more water,” you tell me. I know by now that nagging is an expression of love in China, but the advice still irritates me. It’s useless.

  Our train plunges deeper and deeper into miasma as we approach the city. The sky darkens even as the sun rises. It’s late autumn and the coal plants are blazing in preparation for winter.

  Maybe it is the air. Maybe it’s bad enough to affect even me. Maybe the new skin wasn’t ready when I put it on. Maybe it’s just the standard decay that conquers every Westerner who spends too much time in China. Whatever the reason, Thomas Majors is beginning to come apart.

  We don air filters as we leave the train station. Outside, we pass people in suits, women in brightly colored minidresses, children in school uniforms, all covering their faces. Those of us who can afford it wear enormous, clunky breathing masks. Those who can’t, or who don’t understand the risk, wear thin surgical masks made of paper, or little cloth masks with cartoon characters on them, or they just tie a bandana around their mouths and noses. A short, stocky man squats on the pavement, removing his mask every so often to suck on a cigarette.

  We take separate taxis. I don’t go home, though. I visit a beauty shop, pharmacy, and apothecary, and I buy every skincare product I can find. Expensive moisturizer from France. A mud-mask treatment from Korea. Cocoa butter from South America. Jade rollers. Pearl powder. Caterpillar fungus. Back in my apartment, I slather them on Thomas Majors to see if they will make him tight and bright again. They don’t.

  The skin is looser, thinner, and when that happens the center cannot hold. I feel around for muscles that have slipped out of place, joints that have shifted, limbs trying to lengthen or widen. I have not lost my shape just yet, but I know it is only a matter of time.

  I unravel the scarf you gave me and look again. The skin underneath is even worse. There’s an open gash along it that threatens to creep even wider. I can see bits of myself through it, brackish and horrible. Sewing it shut won’t do anything; the flesh is too fragile. So I tape it up and wrap the scarf around it even tighter. Silk is strong. Silk will hold it, at least for a while.

  I make phone calls to forgers, to chemists, to printers, to tanners, to all the sorts of people who can help me make someone new. This time, at least, I have money to spend and privacy in which to work. I can do it right. I can make somebody who will last longer and fit better and maybe won’t come apart again.

  The smog provides a convenient excuse for my absence over the next few weeks. It traps most of us in our homes with our air purifiers. But at times a strong wind comes to blow it away, at least for a while, and there you are again inviting me out to KTV bars and business lunches and badminton. I can’t go. I want to go, but Thomas Majors is fragile and thin, liable to split apart at any moment. His hair is coming out. His gums are getting soft. Speaking is difficult; I feel the gash in Thomas’s throat grow wider and wider under the scarf.

  I cite my health as a reason not to renew my contract, but you refuse to accept it. You won’t let Thomas Majors go. I remind you of my unnamed medical condition. I tell you that I’ve been to dozens of doctors and even some traditional Chinese healers. I promise to see another specialist.

  I promise I’ll keep in touch. I promise I’ll come back again once I’m better.

  Then I sequester myself in my apartment. I don’t know what my next form will be. I’d like to build myself another Thomas Majors, one that will last forever, but I feel my body pulling in different directions. It wants to shift in a dozen different ways, all of them horrible: too squat, or insect-thin, or with limbs at angles that don’t make sense in human physiology.

  MY HUMAN COSTUME is slipping off me too quickly. I don’t go outside anymore. I only wait for the men to come with the documents and the materials. There’s a knock at the door. It’s you.

  I know I shouldn’t open it, but I also know that you can hear me moving around in my apartment, and that you’ll be hurt if I don’t let you in, and even though I don’t want you to see me as I am, I still want to see you. I adjust Thomas’s face and throw a heavy robe on over the blue suit.

  The expression of horror in your eyes is remarkable. I memorize it to use in a future incarnation.

  “Ni shenti bu hao,” you say, in that blunt Chinese way. Your body is not good. You take off your breathing mask and come inside.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  You try to give me a hug.

  “Don’t,” I say. “I could be contagious.” The truth is I’m terrified you might feel me moving around underneath Thomas Majors, or you’ll squeeze tight enough to leave a dent.

  You sit down without invitation.

  “What is it?” you ask.

  “I think I caught food poisoning, on top of everything else. Probably shouldn’t have eaten shaokao.”

  “Are you going to be healthy enough for the ride home?” you ask.

  “I’ll be all right,” I say. “I just need rest is all.”

  “Have you been to the hospital?”

  “Of course,” I tell you. “The doctor gave me a ton of antibiotics and said to avoid cold water.”

  “Which hospital was it? Which doctor? Maybe he wasn’t a good one. My friend knows one of the best doctors for stomach problems. I can take you to him. They have very good equipment. A big laboratory.”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  You head to the kitchen to boil water. “Wait a moment,” you instruct me over the sound of the electric kettle. Then you return with a steaming mug of something dark and greenish. “Drink this,” you tell me. “Chinese medicine. For your stomach.”

  “I can’t,” I insist.

  “Come on,” you say. “You look really bad.”

  “It’s too hot,” I complain. I feel the steam softening the insides of Thomas’s nasal passages.

  You return to the kitchen to retrieve some ice from the freezer. I never use ice, but I always make sure to have some in my home because I am a Westerner for the time being.

  You drop a few cubes of ice into my mug. “There,” you say. “Drink it.”

  “I’m sick to my stomach,” I complain. “I might vomit.”

  “This will fix it,” you insist.

  I know I shouldn’t listen to you, but I want to make you happy, and some part of me still half-believes that stupid fairy-tale fantasy that your love will make me real somehow. So I put the mug to my lips and slurp down some of its contents, and soon I feel the artificial stomach lining thinning and turning to fizz inside me.

  “Excuse me,” I rasp. The vocal cords feel loose. I bolt to the bathroom to vomit.

  Thomas’s stomach lining makes its way up and out. It hangs from my mouth, still attached somewhere around my chest. Your medicine has burned holes into it. I don’t blame you. I’m sure it works properly on real human stomachs. I bite through the fake esophagus to free myself from the ruined organ, losing a tooth in the process. Then I flush the mess down the squat toilet.

  Evidently, the noise is alarming. “I’m calling you an ambulance!” you shout from the living room.

  It takes me much too long to cram the esophagus back in so I can say, “Don’t. I’m quite all right. I just needed to vomit. I’m feeling better now. Really.” But the vocal cords are so loose by this point that the words come out slurred and gravelly.

  The call is quick; the arrival of the ambulance less so. I lie on the bathroom floor in a fetal position, contemplating my options. My strength is gone. I can’t make it to the front door without you tackling me. I could get to a window and throw myself out, perhaps; I could drop through twenty stories of pollution and crawl away from Thomas Majors after he hits the ground. But I can’t do something so horrible in front of you.

  You punch through the bathroom door, undo the lock, and put your arms around my shoulders. I can feel your hands shake. You tell me over and over again that I’m going to be all right, a
nd you’re going to help me. I want to believe you.

  The ambulance finally arrives. You pay the driver and help carry me out. “You’re so light,” you say.

  I don’t try to fight you.

  You should have called a taxi, or maybe flagged down an e-bike instead, because the bulky ambulance gets stuck in traffic. You slap the insides of it as if trying to beat Beijing into submission. You curse the other cars, the ambulance driver, the civil engineers who planned the roadways, the population density, the asphalt for not being wide enough.

  You curse the EMTs for the deplorable condition of the ambulance and the black soot on the gauze they’ve applied to my face, unaware that the filth is coming from the man you’re trying to save. Thomas has sprung a leak; now I am pouring out.

  They put a respirator of some sort over Thomas Majors’s face. They attach devices to him to monitor a heart and lungs that do not exist. You notice the way the technician fiddles with the wires and pokes the electronic box, unable to get a proper reading from the patient, and you curse the defective equipment. You see the other technician jab me over and over again, unable to find a vein in which to stick an IV, and you curse his incompetence.

  They get out their scissors. They open the robe and cut through its sleeves. Then they start cutting through my blue suit. I make little sounds of protest. I can’t speak anymore.

  “I’ll buy you a new one,” you say.

  I try to crawl away, but you hold one arm and a technician grabs the other. Soon you can see what has happened to Thomas’s torso—misshapen, discolored, with thick scars where I’ve had to stich darts as the skin became too loose.

  Your hand moves to your mouth. “You were sick how long?” you ask. Your English is slipping.

  I know what’s coming. There is nothing I can do to stop it but lie here like a damsel tied to the railroad tracks and wait for it to hit me.

  It’s time to remove the scarf.

  I’ve tied it too tight to slip the scissors underneath it, so they have to cut through the knots. Frustrated by how slowly the technicians work, you lean in and grab the silk.