The Very Best of the Best

by Gardner Dozois

  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 boyfrie
nd 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.