The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction

My English Name R. S. BENEDICT

R. S. Benedict spent three years teaching English to rich kids in China before returning to her native New York to become a bureaucrat. Her work can be found in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Upper Rubber Boot’s upcoming anthology Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up to No Good.

Here’s a creepy yet ultimately quite moving story about a man with a secret so deeply buried that even he no longer knows what it is….

I want you to know that you are not crazy.

What you saw in the back of the ambulance was real.

What wasn’t real was Thomas Majors.

You have probably figured out by now that I wasn’t born in London like I told you I was, and that I did not graduate from Oxford, and that I wasn’t baptized in the Church of England, as far as I know.

Here is the truth: Thomas Majors was born in room 414 of the Huayuan Binguan, a cheap hotel which in defiance of its name contained neither flowers nor any sort of garden.

If the black domes in the ceiling of the fourth-floor corridor had actually contained working cameras the way they were supposed to, a security guard might have noticed Tingting, a dowdy maid from a coal village in Hunan, enter room 414 without her cleaning cart. The guard would have seen Thomas Majors emerge a few days later dressed in a blue suit and a yellow scarf.

A search of the room would have returned no remnant of Tingting.

Hunan Province has no springtime, just alternating winter and summer days. When Tingting enters room 414 it’s winter, gray and rainy. The guest room has a heater, at least, unlike the sleeping quarters Tingting shares with three other maids.

Tingting puts a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door and locks it. She shuts the curtains. She covers the mirrors. She takes off her maid uniform. Her skin is still new. She was supposed to be invisible: she has small eyes and the sort of dumpy figure you find in a peasant who had too little to eat as a child and too much to eat as an adult. But prying hands found their way to her anyway, simply because she was there. Still, I know it won’t be hard for a girl like her to disappear. No one will look for her.

I pull Tingting off, wriggling out of her like a snake. I consider keeping her in case of emergency, but once she’s empty I feel myself shift and stretch. She won’t fit anymore. She has to go.

I will spare you the details of how that task is accomplished.

It takes a while to make my limbs the right length. I’ve narrowed considerably. I check the proportions with a measuring tape; all the ratios are appropriate.

But Thomas Majors is not ready. The room’s illumination, fluorescent from the lamps, haze-strangled from the sky, isn’t strong enough to tan this new flesh the way it is meant to be.

You thought I was handsome when you met me. I wish you could have seen what I was supposed to be. In my plans, Thomas was perfect. He had golden hair and a complexion like toast. But the light is too weak, and instead I end up with flesh that’s not quite finished.

I can’t wait anymore. I only have room 414 for one week. It’s all Tingting can afford.

So I put on Thomas as carefully as I can, and only when I’m certain that not a single centimeter of what lies beneath him can be seen, I uncover the mirrors.

He’s tight. Unfinished skin usually is. I smooth him down and let him soften. I’m impatient, nervous, so I turn around to check for lumps on Thomas’s back. When I do, the flesh at his neck rips. I practice a look of pain in the mirror.

Then I stitch the gash together as well as I can. It fuses but leaves an ugly ridge across Thomas’s throat. I cover it with a scarf Tingting bought from a street vendor. It’s yellow, imitation silk with a recurring pattern that reads Liu Viuttor.

The next week I spend in study and practice: how to speak proper English, how to stand and sit like a man, how to drink without slurping, how to hold a fork, how to bring my brows together in an expression of concern, how to laugh, how to blink at semi-regular intervals.

It’s extraordinary how much one can learn when one doesn’t have to eat or sleep.

I check out on time carrying all of Thomas Majors’s possessions in a small bag: a fake passport, a hairbrush, a hand mirror, a wallet, a cell phone, and a single change of clothes.

It takes me under twenty-four hours to find a job. A woman approaches me on the sidewalk. She just opened an English school, she says. Would I like to teach there?

The school consists of an unmarked apartment in a gray complex. The students are between ten and twelve years of age, small and rowdy. I’m paid in cash. They don’t notice that my vowels are a bit off; Thomas’s new tongue can’t quite wrap itself around English diphthongs just yet.

On weekday mornings I take more rent-a-whitey gigs. A shipping company pays me to wear a suit, sit at board meetings, nod authoritatively, and pretend to be an executive. A restaurant pays me to don a chef’s hat and toss pizza dough in the air on its opening day. Another English training center, unable to legally hire foreigners in its first year of operation, pays me 6,000 RMB per month to wander through the halls and pretend to work there.

I model, too: for a travel brochure, for a boutique, for a university’s foreign language department. The photographer tells his clients that I was a finalist on America’s Next Top Model. They don’t question it.

China is a perfect place for an imitation human like myself. Everything is fake here. The clothes are designer knock-offs. The DVDs are bootlegs. The temples are replicas of sites destroyed during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The markets sell rice made from plastic bags, milk made from melamine, and lamb skewers made from rat meat. Even the internet is fake, a slow, stuttering, pornless thing whose search engines are programmed not to look in politically sensitive directions.

It was harder in the West. Westerners demand authenticity even though they don’t really want it. They cry out for meat without cruelty, war without casualties, thinness without hunger. But the Chinese don’t mind artifice.

I make friends in China quickly and easily. Many are thrilled to have a tall, blond Westerner to wave around as a status symbol.

I wait a few weeks before I associate with other waiguoren, terrified they’ll pick up on my fake accent or ask me a question about London that I can’t answer.

But none of that turns out to be a problem. Very few expats in China ask questions about what one did back home, likely because so few of them want to answer that question themselves. Generally, they are not successful, well-adjusted members of their native countries. But if they have fair skin and a marginal grasp of English, they can find an ESL job to pay for beer and a lost girl to tell them how clever and handsome they are.

I learn quickly that my Englishman costume is not lifelike. Most of the Brits I meet in China are fat and bald, with the same scraggly stubble growing on their faces, their necks, and the sides of their heads. They wear hoodies and jeans and ratty trainers. Thomas wears a suit every day. He’s thin, too thin for a Westerner. His accent is too aristocratic, nothing at all like the working-class mumbles coming from the real Brits’ mouths. And the scarf only highlights his strangeness.

I think for sure I will be exposed, until one day at a bar a real Englishman jabs a sausage-like finger into my chest and says, “You’re gay, aren’t you, mate?”

When I only stutter in reply, he says, “Ah, it’s all right. Don’t worry about it. You might want to tone it down, though. The scarf’s a bit much.”

And so Thomas Majors’s sexuality is decided. It proves useful. It hides me from the expats the way Thomas’s whiteness hides me from the Chinese.

It’s in a waiguoren bar that New Teach English finds me. A tiny woman not even five feet tall swims through a sea of beery pink bodies to find me sitting quietly in a corner, pretending to sip a gin and tonic. She offers me a job.

“I don’t have a TOEFL certification,” I tell her.

“We’ll get you one. No problem,” she says. And it’s true; a friend of hers owns a printshop that can produce such a document with ease.

“I’m not sure I’ll pass the medical exam required for a foreign expert certificate,” I tell her.

“My brother-in-law works at the hospital,” she says. “If you give him a bottle of cognac, you’ll pass the health exam.”

And that’s how I get my residence permit.

You arrive in my second year at New Teach in Changsha with your eyes downcast and your mouth shut. I recognize you. You’re a fellow impostor, but a more mundane sort than myself. Though hired as an ESL teacher, you can hardly say “Hello, how are you?”

We introduce ourselves by our English names. I am Thomas Majors and you are Daniel Liu. “Liu. Like my scarf,” I joke. I give you a smile copied from Pierce Brosnan.

I lie to you and tell you that I’m from London and my name is Thomas. Your lies are those of omission: you do not mention that you are the son of New Teach’s owner, and that you had the opportunity to study in the United States but flunked out immediately.

Somehow being the only child of rich parents hasn’t made you too spoiled. In your first year at New Teach you sit close to me, studying my counterfeit English as I talk to my students. Meanwhile, I sit close to Sarah, a heavyset Canadian girl, trying to glean real English from her as best I can.

Somehow, my waiguoren status doesn’t spoil me, either. Unlike most Western men in China, I bathe regularly and dress well and arrive to work on time without a hangover every morning, and I don’t try to sleep with my students. My humanity requires work to maintain. I don’t take it for granted.

For these reasons, I am declared the star foreign instructor at New Teach English. I stand out like a gleaming cubic zirconium in a rubbish heap. The students adore me. Parents request me for private lessons with their children. They dub me Da Huang (Big Yellow).

Every six to twelve months, the other foreign teachers leave and a new set takes their place. Only I remain with you. You stay close to me, seeking me out for grammar help and conversation practice. There’s more you want, I know, but you are too timid to ask for it outright, and I am unable to offer it.

We slowly create each other like a pair of half-rate Pygmalions. I fix the holes in your English, teach you how to look others in the eye, how to shake hands authoritatively, how to approach Western women, how to pose in photographs, how to project confidence (“fake it till you make it”), how to be the sort of man you see in movies.

Your questions prod me to quilt Thomas Majors together from little scraps stolen from overheard conversations in expat bars. Thomas Majors traveled a lot as a child, which is why his accent is a bit odd. (That came from an American girl who wore red-framed glasses.) Thomas Majors has an annoying younger brother and an eccentric older sister. (This I took from old television sitcoms.) His father owned a stationery shop (based on an ESL listening test), but his sister is set to inherit the business (from a BBC period piece), so Thomas moved to China to learn about calligraphy (that came from you, when I saw you carrying your ink brush).

Your questions and comments nudge me into playing the ideal Englishman: polite, a little silly at times, but sophisticated and cool. Somehow I become the sort of man that other men look up to. They ask Thomas for advice on dating and fashion and fitness and education. They tell him he’s tall and handsome and clever. I say “thank you” and smile, just as I practiced in the mirror.

I liked Thomas. I wish I could have kept on being him a little longer.

In Shenzhen, I nearly tell you the truth about myself. New Teach has just opened a center there and sends you out to manage it. You want to bring me to work there and help keep the foreign teachers in line.

“I don’t know if I can pass the medical examination,” I tell you.

“You look healthy,” you reply.

I choose my words carefully. “I have a medical condition. I manage it just fine, but I’m afraid the doctors will think I am too sick.”

“What condition? Is it di…” You struggle with the pronunciation.

“It’s not diabetes. The truth is”—and what follows is at least partially true—“I don’t know what it is, exactly.”

“You should see a doctor,” you tell me.

“I have,” I say. “They did a lot of tests on me for a long time but they still couldn’t figure it out. I got sick of it. Lots of needles in my arms and painful surgeries.” I mime nurses and doctors jabbing and cutting me. “So now I don’t go to doctors anymore.”

“You should still have an examination,” you tell me.

“No,” I say.

Physicians are not difficult to fool, especially in China, overworked and sleep-deprived as they are. But their machines, their scanners, and their blood tests are things I cannot deceive. I do not want to know what they might find beneath Thomas Majors’s skin.

I tell you I won’t go with you if I have to submit to a medical exam, knowing full well how badly you want me to come. And so phone calls are made, red envelopes are stuffed, favors are cashed in, and banquets are arranged.

We feast with Shenzhen hospital administrators. They stare at me as I eat with chopsticks. “You’re very good with… ah…” The hospital director points at the utensils in my hand, unable to dig up the English word.

“Kuaizi,” I say. They applaud.

We go out to KTV afterward. The KTV bar has one David Bowie song and two dozen from the Backstreet Boys. The men like the way I sing. They order further snacks, more beer, and a pretty girl to sit on our laps and flirt with us. “So handsome,” she says, stroking my chin. By then I have mastered the art of blushing.

You present a bottle of liquor: “It’s very good baijiu,” you say, and everyone nods in agreement. We toast. They fill my glass with liquor over and over again. Each time they clink it and say, “Gan bei!” And to me they add, “For England!” Now I have no choice but to drain my glass to make my fake mother country proud.

For most foreigners, baijiu is a form of torture. I’ve heard them say it’s foul-tasting, that it gives monstrous hangovers, that you’ll find yourself burping it up two days later. But for me, it’s no more noxious than any other fluid. So I throw down enough liquor to show our guests that I am healthy and strong. We finish the bottle, then a second, and when I realize that the other men are putting themselves in agony to keep up with me I cover my mouth, run to the nearby lavatory, and loudly empty my stomach. Our guests love it. They cheer.

The winner of the drinking contest is a short, fat, toad-like man with a wide mouth. He’s the director of the hospital, which is easy to guess by his appearance; powerful men in Hunan often look a bit like toads. You tell me later that I made him very happy by drinking with him, and that he was extremely pleased to have defeated a Westerner.

And that is how I pass my health examination in Shenzhen.

Your grandmother recognizes me during the following Spring Festival.

Going home with you is a bad idea. I should spend those two weeks enjoying the relative quiet of the empty city, drinking myself into oblivion with the leftover handful of expats.

The idea starts as a lark, a jocular suggestion on your part, but once it seizes me it will not let me go. I can’t remember the last time I was in a home, with a family. I want to know what it’s like.

You are too embarrassed to try to talk me out of it, so home we go.

Your mother is surprised to see me. She takes you aside and scolds you. Tingting’s Changshahua has faded. Now my new English brain is still struggling to learn proper Mandarin, so I only get the gist of the conversation. I know meiyou (without) and nü pengyou (girlfriend), and my understanding of the culture fills in the rest. You’re supposed to have brought home a woman. You’re not getting any younger; you’re just a few years shy of turning thirty unmarried, a bare-branch man. Your parents can’t bear it. They don’t understand. You’re tall, rich, and handsome. Why don’t you have a girlfriend?

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 biological 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 serves 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 well.

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.

Hours pass this way. The light through the window turns pale gray 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 gray. Maybe 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 bandanas 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, and 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.

Your hands shake harder and harder as you unwind the fabric. I watch the silk growing darker the closer you get to me. I’m sorry I ruined such a beautiful thing.

I can’t see what’s beneath. I don’t want to. There’s a reason I keep the mirrors covered when I go through a shift. But I can see the reaction on your face and on the technicians’ faces, too. They’ve doubtless encountered horrible things in their line of work, and yet this still alarms them.

Thomas Majors’s larynx comes apart. My neck is exposed. I feel cold.

You can’t speak anymore either. You only make a strange panting sound and stare. Terror has stolen your voice. What’s left is something primitive, an instinct going back millions of years. It must be wonderful to know who your ancestors were and that they were something as benign as apes.

One of the technicians is on his cell phone with the hospital, explaining the situation as best he can. I hear the doctor’s voice telling them to bring me in through the basement entrance so the other patients won’t see me.

I know what he wants. Physicians here are required to publish research on top of their grueling schedules and the doctor realizes that he has found an extraordinary case study. He’s already thinking of fame, research grants, possibly another Nobel Prize for China. He won’t have any trouble keeping me in a lab. There are no human rights standards to stop scientific progress here, and my fake UK citizenship will not protect me.

With nothing left to hold him together, Thomas Majors comes undone. The skin of his head shrinks from the skin of his shoulders. His face is loose. A seam opens at his armpit and runs down his torso.

You grab his hand. You can feel me underneath it, squirming. Your wrist jerks but you don’t let go. Thomas’s hand slips off me like a glove. It takes you a moment to understand what just happened, what you’re holding, and when the realization hits, you scream and scream and scream.

The technicians can’t pin me down anymore. They don’t want to. It’s impossible to tell what they can grab on to and whether or not it’s safe to touch. So now they’re trying to get away, pressing themselves against the walls of the ambulance, trying to clamber up to the front. The driver has already fled.

You’re paralyzed. You’ve wedged yourself into a corner. Your eyes whirl about the ambulance, skipping upon me, upon what’s left of Thomas Majors, upon the rear-door latch that’s not quite close enough for you to open, upon the ceiling and the machines and all these things that don’t make sense anymore.

I stand up. The last scraps of the man I wanted so badly to be fall to the floor. You shrink down, down, trying to disappear, but you don’t have as much practice as I do.

You cover your eyes, uncover them, look at me, shut them again. I grab the door latch, averting my gaze from the sight of my own hand.

You’re muttering something over and over again like a Buddhist chant. I listen carefully. My hearing is not what it was just a few minutes ago, but I can recognize the words, “Ni shi shenme?” What are you?

I don’t have a larynx anymore and my tongue can no longer accommodate human language, so even though I want to, I can’t answer “wo bu zhidao” or “ouk oida” or “nga nu-zu” or “I don’t know.”

I get the door open. The outside world is an endless polluted twilight. The driver behind us doesn’t look up from his cell phone to glance in my direction. Two car-lengths away, all I can see are vague shapes and headlights. The smog will hide me well.

I climb out of the ambulance and into the haze. I don’t look back.

I saw you once after that. It wasn’t long ago, I think. I was wearing someone new, a girl with black hair and a melon-seed face. Pretty girls are easy for me. I can slather on makeup if the skin isn’t right, and I don’t have to bother with a backstory or a personality. No one really wants it.

It was at an auto show in Shanghai. I was draped across a green Ferrari, wearing a bikini that matched the paint. I hadn’t expected to see you, but there you were with a group of businessmen smoking Marlboros and ogling the models.

You were older. I’m not sure by how much. Time passes differently for me, and maybe time alone was not responsible for how much you had aged.

I would like to say I will never forget you, but I can’t promise you that. This shapeless matter inside my head shifts and dies and regenerates, and as it does so, memories fade and old incarnations of myself are discarded. Maxwell Stone had lovers, most likely, but I can’t recall their faces, and someday I will lose yours as well.

Your group strolled by my Ferrari, making the obligatory lewd remarks, flashing their brown teeth in leery grins. I wore my generic smile and offered up a vacant titter. I told them about the car.

You stood a little ways behind the other men with your hands in your pockets. I knew that look: you were too tired to pretend to be having a good time.

I smiled at you as hard as I could. Finally, you looked up. I thought maybe you would recognize me somehow. Maybe you would cry out, “It’s you!” and take me in your arms. Or maybe, at the very least, you’d let your gaze linger on me a little longer than normal.

But you didn’t. You made that nervous grimace you do whenever a woman pays too much attention to you. Then you ambled off to look at a Lexus—a four-door with lots of cabin space. Good for families.

I watched you move. Your shoulders were slumped as though you carried something very heavy.

Then more bodies flowed between us, wealthy men and their school-aged mistresses, nouveau riche wives and their spoiled bachelor sons searching for a car to attract a pretty bride, broke students in designer knock-offs come to take selfies in front of BMWs so they can pretend to be rich on Weixin.

I lost you among them. I did not find you again.