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

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.