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

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.