Элинор Арнасон - The Very Best of the Best - 35 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction

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?”