Everyone I Know Is a Terrible Person

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fiction

R. S. Powers

Everyone I Know Is a Terrible Person

 

 

I’d been at Dreamboat English for maybe a half-year on a really bad two-year contract when I was named King Teacher. This was in Beijing, a few summers before the 2008 Olympics, when it was easier for a nobody to find their way into the country. They’d already named Mr. Clean as the new King, but then something apparently went wrong with the business license and police started doing visa checks, and Mr. Clean left and panic spread since all foreign teachers lived in the same high-rise. When the air was good, I could see out my window from some twenty stories up, the new subway line being built all day and night. The tourist-visa hires pulled runners to avoid deportation. Threats were made to keep the passports of all work-visa hires in a safe so we too wouldn’t leave, then our monthly pay was cut (to help fix the apparent license problem), so everyone else fled except for Mr. Lies, Ms. Porn, and me—Mr. Loser. Rumor was the police were looking for someone. Meanwhile, I thought I was in love.
   I was also still religiously googling my new legal name and was no longer in touch with anyone back home, and starting to think my few years away from undergrad would become a decade. When I could find sleep I’d get stuck in sci-fi dreams about a bright orange sandstorm that would slowly bury me along with the capital’s fifteen-plus million people.
  

 

I was thrilled about my sudden coronation.
   Mrs. Many-Audis, Dreamboat’s founder, who dressed like she ran a Fortune 500 company, with a bouffant like a lion’s mane, had her two young overworked assistants, Mr. Overly-Fluent and Ms. Overly-Qualified, bring me down one floor to her smoky office at midnight, six hours before I had to catch a charter bus for my newest teaching assignment on a far-flung campus that during the seventies had been a cement brickmaking commune.
   From behind her faux-marble desk she told me, through Mr. Overly-Fluent, why Mr. Serious-Anger-Issues, Dreamboat’s first hire and original King Teacher (a title I’d learn was his idea), was returning to Arizona. Something about how the ear acupuncture he’d been doing to treat his increasingly morbid weight problem wasn’t working. In the resignation email they showed me, he’d also provided a more typical lie: a mess of relatives back home had “stage-five” brain cancer.
   She saw my smirk and assured me, through Mr. Overly-Fluent: His exodus lacks relevance to our constabulary entanglement. Don’t worry, be happy. The show must go on.
   In a few days, I’d run an orientation for at least a dozen new tourist-visa hires, giving the same spiel that had promised me flexible hours, airfare reimbursement, and more. And I’d cover Mr. Serious-Anger-Issues’s section at the far-flung dusty campus the next morning, meaning another twenty high schoolers would be in my sunny classroom with a broken AC unit. I’d get a new business card and have my photo featured on a website they were building. Did I know anything about web design? Could I complete a website someone else started?
   No no, no-no-no, I said about the website.
   Are you excited? Mrs. Many-Audis beamed in sudden English.
   I don’t know what to say, I said.
   Congratulations, Mr. Overly-Fluent said, standing to shake my hand.
   You’ll do very well, Ms. Overly-Qualified said, giving me a thumbs up.
   Xiè-xiè, I said, in my awful Chinese. Thank you. But why me?
   I didn’t mean to ask that. It just came out.
   I mean I’m glad, I said, honored. You won’t regret it.
   Mr. Overly-Fluent translated, and everyone returned to their smiling.
   You are not our primary choice, Mrs. Many-Audis said, through Mr. Overly-Fluent, but you are the most incomparable choice. She ended the meeting by reciting Dreamboat’s slogan: Are you ready to revolutionize education?
   Yes, I said. Yes.
  

 

They knew I was a terrible teacher. I didn’t plan. I overslept. Nothing would’ve made Mr. Lies happier than being made a King of something. I knew he’d flip out about not getting the job.
   Ms. Porn should’ve gotten it. Before I left my room for my coronation, she was half looking online for a new teaching gig she said would take us to a new part of China, and half composing her version of a resignation email—Are you Catholic? she said. She was on her laptop in my bed.
   No, I said, washing my face.
   So it would be weird, she said, if I wrote we’re taking a sabbatical to go on the Way of Saint James pilgrimage?
   They were lucky to have her. She grew up in a not-nice (her words) trailer park, in a part of Michigan indistinguishable from Siberia (also her words), to parents that threw plates at one another even after signing divorce papers in the parking lot of her high school graduation. She told me it was always left to her to change the diapers of her big and simple (her words again) half-brother ten years her senior, and still she won a full ride to a big state school, finishing with degrees in literature and Spanish with a minor in philosophy. I told her I’d never heard her speak Spanish so she threw off the comforter, model-walked to the desk, downloaded her twenty-page honors thesis (written in Spanish!), and read from it as she paced my room in the nude.
   When I returned after my coronation, the lights were out and she was asleep. The air was particularly bad, so my view toward the heart of Beijing was an ashen void punctuated by the dull-orange specters of nearby streetlights. I undressed and slipped into bed.
   They fire you before you could quit? she mumbled into her pillow.
   They told me why Anger-Issues left, I said. They made me King.
   You won the booby prize? she said, her eyes still closed.
   It’s going to be a lot of work, I said, but I think I’m ready.
   I wanted her to be proud of me.
   Aye aye, Mr. King-Loser-Booby-Prize, she said, turned over, and fell asleep again.
  

 

It was her idea to give everyone at Dreamboat nicknames only we knew. I was her Mr. Lovable-Loser after drunkenly proclaiming at an expat bar that only losers end up in China teaching English, which became Mr. Loser after I kept losing my passport whenever the police showed up to do their check. While the two bored-looking young female cops watched me rifle through piles of clothes and messy drawers, she’d stand in my doorframe and barely contain her laughter. She was already almost fluent so I could only guess at what she was telling them.
  

 

The next morning on the charter bus it was still dark. Everyone, even the driver, seemed asleep. I texted Ms. Porn: Zoo to celebrate new job after I teach?
   We’d been talking about going for ages. We could go and I could tell her what happened to me back home. I wanted to start talking to her about spending our lives together.
   What Mr. Clean might’ve done as head teacher was also on my mind. He’d always received glowing feedback from his students, which we’d get to read in the mass evaluation emails. The best scores meant a cash bonus, so no one liked him. He’d come up when we were in my apartment drinking after teaching. Mr. Thinks-He’s-Hemingway said he had the creepiest smile in the universe. Ms. Divorced-Florida-Cheats-On-Racist-Welsh-Boif said she observed his class and he was terrible. Ms. Montenegro-Pretending-To-Be-Canadian said she was allergic to his rancid cologne. Mr. Racist-Welsh-Cuckold said he’d put money on him sleeping with his students. Ms. Porn said to put a gun in her mouth if she ever ended up like him.
   I knew Mr. Clean as misunderstood. He was the only one I ever told that I’d changed my name. He was almost fifty, tanned-white, clean-shaven, and completely bald—exactly the chemical company mascot you’re picturing. He had a dull stud in his left ear, wore tight black jeans, red leather shoes with no socks, monocolor T-shirts that emphasized his flabby biceps. He was always smiling and told people he spent decades bouncing around Southeast Asia. He and I taught next-door to one another on my first teaching assignment—four sessions at a summer camp for middle schoolers: eight days on from seven a.m. to seven p.m. with an hour-long packed, city bus trip to and from the camp’s secluded leafy grounds, then two days off spent sleeping or outside day-drinking at the cheap Sichuan restaurant across the street from our high-rise.
   You ever try to kill yourself? was how he got the conversation started.
   I was trying to feed the stray yellow Pekinese we called “mă-ma-hū-hū” (Chinese for “so-so”) bits of my mapo tofu from a broad spoon. He was pouring me my third or fourth Tsingtao tall boy. What kinda fucked up . . . ? I said, scrunching my face.
   Hey, he said, holding up his hands, still lightly smiling, I’ve been watching you. You don’t seem happy. He asked me where I was from. What my parents were like. Where I went to school. What goals I had. What brought me to China. About me and Ms. Porn.
   You want the truth? I said, adding: I shouldn’t say this.
   My lips are sealed, he said.
   She has this middle school friend, I said, a guy with a potbelly, who’s twice now mailed her care packages, like she’s at summer camp.
   So? he said. That’s quite sweet.
   I said this guy included handwritten letters about visiting her dad and mom and half-brother, and sent things like small boxes of sugary cereal, Midwestern cheese things, and dozens of burned DVDs of porn with labels like “quicksand” and “lesbian party hat” and “dorm rooms.” I made sure no one we knew was nearby. She won’t let me watch them, I said. She sends him things like Chinese coins and her own handwritten letters she won’t let me read.
   Yeah, you shouldn’t have told me that, he said.
   We kept drinking.
   But everyone has secrets, he said. Stuff they’re running away from.
   He looked at me like he wanted to tell me something.
   What really brought you here? he said, still smiling. And don’t give me any of that seeking adventure or transformative new experiences bullshit. He laughed and clapped me on the back: You’re not really from Maine, are you?
  

 

I got as far as it being my parents’ idea to legally change my first and last names. They’d read an article about how “the dark web never forgets” and the asshole lawyer they hired wholeheartedly agreed and I went along with everything.
   I’d become infamous on campus when an article about the lawsuit my ex’s parents filed against me, written by an aspiring journalist on my dorm floor, appeared on the student newspaper’s website and was shared and shared and shared online.
   My business ethics professor was the first to pull me aside to ask if it was me in the article after his several-hundred-student lecture. A few national papers picked up the story and one used my name. Out of the blue, the student newspaper editor called me on my dorm phone to apologize for printing my name, but that didn’t stop the emails and voice mails. My dormmate, my best friend at school, put in for a room transfer. He said I was a monster. I stopped going to class and moved back home. My therapist told me to stop googling myself, that my life wasn’t over. The lawsuit was tossed and the plan was I’d transfer to another school. My parents kept asking if I’d have to register as a sex offender and the asshole lawyer kept assuring them I didn’t. Future employers, my parents kept saying, your future wife, they won’t know.
   And then I didn’t get into another Ivy. My parents said no to teaching abroad before saying I’d make a great teacher. I’d reapply for school when I was ready.
  

 

But I doubt Mr. Clean could even follow what had come out of me. He also probably thought I was hung up on something that was actually nothing. It wasn’t like I committed a crime, right? Everyone’s unlucky, he said, biting into a roast sparrow on a skewer.
   Not everyone, I said.
   You’re young, he said, chewing. Be who you need to be.
  

 

While my students worked on speeches for an upcoming competition, I sat at the teacher’s computer looking through new-hire resumes and headshots—young and middle-aged white Americans; none from where I was from. An email from Ms. Porn arrived.
   She was being put on a train early the next morning to teach at a four-week summer camp in Inner Mongolia. Never-ending grasslands, she wrote, fermented mare’s milk, the angry ghosts of Genghis Khan. . . . It’ll be beautiful. They’re giving me a bonus to go.
   She’d asked if I could come, but the word was no: You’ll be oh so busy as reigning King.
   Zoo? I wrote back.
   Let’s zoo it up, came the quick reply. Btw have ridic gossip about Mr. Clean.
   Not many wanted to practice their speeches when they were finished writing. One was a strident young woman who considered the death of her mother from brain cancer to be an opportunity to overcome adversity. One was a quiet young man who laid out a fairly researched case for why Osama bin Laden should be considered a folk hero. One was a confident young man who spoke with extraordinary eloquence on the need for radical reform in the Chinese public education system. I found myself standing to applaud when he finished only to find everyone looking at me strangely. When no one else wanted to speak, I opened up the class for questions about America, but instead most wanted to know about my work contract. I was giggling, trying to explain my new job title, when a thickly bespectacled and heavily pimpled new student who came to class with his own name tag (“Peter!”) raised his hand.
   Teacher, he said with obvious sympathy, they are clearly cheating you.
   I let everyone go at least fifteen minutes early.
   Waiting for the return bus, I spent lunch and the rest of the early hot afternoon under a weeping willow overlooking an opaquely green man-made lake full of hungry koi. Students eventually would show me the photos they took of me sleeping in the shade. One used Photoshop to add rainbow text of something I once said in class: Be who you need to be.
   Boarding the bus, I texted Ms. Porn: We don’t belong anywhere, but we have each other.
   Halfway back, she hadn’t replied. I added: I won’t stop missing you.
  

 

She and I sat in the shade of a gift shop looking out at a zebra family lazing in mild sunshine. The crowds were preposterous, and every so often a mother would approach and position their young child on the bench beside us so they could take photos of them meeting foreigners. Most of the kids tried to ask us questions in English. The few who cried and called for their mothers aiming cameras, Ms. Porn explained, thought they were being given away.
   You’re lying, I said.
   I swear to Cthulhu themself, she said.
   I told her my parents in their last email mentioned visiting. Maybe they’ll be here when you get back? They’ll think you’re hilarious. My mom speaks a little Spanish.
   You’re so lucky, she said, to have parents who love you.
   You don’t actually think that? I said.
   Did you tell them we’re together?
   No, I said.
   All she wanted to talk about was what she’d heard at brunch about Mr. Clean. After getting her Inner Mongolia assignment she met up with a gaggle of tourist-visa hires who’d fled Dreamboat. All already had found better-paying jobs at other teaching companies.
   Mr. Clean’s literally a pedophile, Ms. Porn said.
   She said Mr. Thinks-He’s-Hemingway ran into Mr. Clean at an interview for a kindergarten job. Mr. Thinks-He’s-Hendrix saw him in a swanky part of the central business district. But it was Ms. Covert-Mormon-Missionary who said she heard from Mr. Lies that the police started snooping around Dreamboat because Mr. Clean kept giving out his cell phone number to the kids he was teaching. He was texting them about sex, Ms. Porn said, and he was showing people their texts. He was bragging about it! He did this while teaching kids!
   This is from Mr. Lies? I said.
   I know, but Ms. Missionary said it was the only sense he’d ever made, Ms. Porn said. Didn’t you work with him at a summer camp?
   Mr. Lies? I said.
   No, Mr. Clean, she said. Now maybe Mr. Toucher?
   Yeah, on my first job.
   Did he ever show you any of the texts?
   I guess not, I said.
  

 

I gave out my cell phone number on my first job. All the other teachers warned me: They’ll ask you, but don’t do it. They’ll text. I went to write my name on the board and the two dozen eight- to thirteen-year-olds got up and swarmed me. Please, they kept saying in English. We’ll sit when you give us your number. I relented and they whipped out their phones. That morning, I taught them the words to John Lennon’s “Imagine” and we sang along. During lunch, a number texted me: Teacher do you know what is fuck? I showed the text to my Chinese co-teacher, the director of the camp, and I told Mr. Overly-Fluent. I never gave out my number again.
   But I didn’t tell her any of this.
   I should’ve gotten us out of the ticket line and found a spot where we wouldn’t be bothered so I could tell her that the last time I was on my own in the shabby law offices of the asshole lawyer my parents wouldn’t fire, he told me I should write a memoir.
   Those things sell, he said with apparent cheer. You still have tuition bills.
   She’d been so open to me about her abusive exes, and I hadn’t told her I was a shy virgin hideously out of my element when I started college, that there was this girl at the end of my dorm floor also out of her element. She was a sophomore, a newly decided art design major, a brain cancer survivor since middle school, and a recent sorority exile. She wore a Rachel-from-Friends blond wig since she couldn’t grow a lot of hair and she wanted to hide the shunt running down her neck under the skin that continued to drain fluid from her brain into her stomach.
   She and I bonded over a mutual disdain for one of her three roommates, a gothy music major who wouldn’t stop joking about having a threesome with us. I keep finding her bloody lipstick, she said, on everything in our fridge! It was noon the first time we got naked, so we closed all the blinds in her dorm room and put the dead bolt on. She asked me to help her look inside herself with a mirror. She told me she’d never seen. We started saying we loved one another and I have no idea why. She wanted to video the role-play she liked, which I didn’t want to do, but she told me she’d never seen herself having sex. She was very loud, and given what we were saying to one another, I don’t know why one of us didn’t think about a hotel.
   What happened over the next few months was a bit of a dumb blur.
   The RA on my floor, a psychology master’s student, got to me first about the noise complaints, and I let loose in her room about the many video files on my girlfriend’s laptop. She asked if I wanted to file a complaint and I said yes and my girlfriend wound up before a review board that told her she might have to live off-campus, that she could end up with a criminal record. She found me in my dorm room afterward. I told her it was a mistake, that I still loved her. I’d find out she then told her roommates I liked to beat her and one filed a complaint and I was brought in before a review board. We were both told to stay away from one another. And I still don’t know how the one video ended up online. My parents wanted me to say it was her who did it. I was walking to class one morning when two muscly frat pledges pointed at me: It’s rape face! Rape face! In the video, she’s on top of me and I’m half-choking her and she’s saying: Show me your rape face. She attempted suicide in one of the showers on our floor and one of her roommates said it was my fault. Her parents sued me and the school. At one of the depositions, her parents and mine were in the room when I was asked to describe her and my sexual fantasies.
   Before I left the country—and I’ve never told anyone this—I was in the habit of searching for the video on porn sites and emailing their admins to take it down.
  

 

We were still in line and all I managed to say was something about an ex’s suicide attempt. Ms. Porn told me how one of her best friends from high school went out into the tundra, without telling anyone, to kill himself with a shotgun after four straight years of not making the jazz band. His fingers, she said, holding my hands, were too stubby for the sax.
   Why did you come to China? I said weakly.
   Fucking adventure, she said. New experiences. I had to make sure the world wasn’t flat.
   She must’ve known I’d fallen for her. She knew me.
   But there was no way she could’ve known I thought she’d saved my life.
   Later, on the elevator ride up to my floor, she sang a slow waltzing version of “It’s a Small World” while hugging me and I felt my heart exploding into her chest. At my window, the air crystal clear, I pointed and said we could see the shadowy outlines of distant mountains. No, we can’t, she said, looking up at me. She had big milk-blue eyes, like ancient glaciers. She took my left hand and put it on her left breast. She’d taken off her bra. I told her to take off her T-shirt and she did. I told her to take off her jean shorts and she slid everything to the cold tile. She kept on her neon-yellow socks. She pushed me backward onto the bed and undid my belt and ripped my teaching pants and boxers to my knees. Just like in the video with my ex, when she was on top of me, eyes closed, hips grinding, she had to hold her mouth with both hands.
   Before falling asleep late, we tried imagining out loud what our futures in China might look like. Whatever awful things you’ve done, she said, her head on my chest hair, Dreamboat doesn’t deserve you. Whatever you think you’re doing, get out before it’s too late.
   I can’t for the life of me remember what she said her plans were.
  

 

We woke after a few hours to her cell phone ringing. My phone was on silent and Mr. Overly-Fluent was looking for me. Mr. Lies was a mess and I needed to help.
   Stay, Ms. Porn said, reaching for me.
   I’m King, I said.
   Mr. Lies’s first-floor door was wide open. His face leaking blood, he was on the floor slurring incoherently. Ms. Overly-Qualified and several new male hires I didn’t know were wrestling with his limbs. The goal was to get him in a taxi and to a hospital. Something about pills and booze. Ms. Porn’s original nickname for Mr. Lies went something like Mr. Son-of-a-Bowling-Ball-and-a-Bridge-Troll, but eventually she had to agree the name was too much. When I first met him, I was in the main office waiting to do a demo lesson. He made a beeline through the door and around the conference table to sit across from me. He was at least middle-aged, squat, round, and brooding. He had blotchy skin and white flakes throughout his thin M of red hair, in his sideburns, and on his tweed sport coat. You the judge, sport? he said, glaring.
   Mr. Overly-Fluent was in the kitchen slowly smoking a cigarette. This consultancy lifestyle is a bit Sisyphean, he said. Don’t you think?
   What happened? I said.
   This Don Quixote came to the Middle Kingdom to escape inescapable demons.
   Outside, I helped flag a taxi. Limp Mr. Lies was maneuvered into the front seat. The car sped off with everyone inside except me and Mr. Overly-Fluent.
   You go sleep, he said, hailing another. Tomorrow is the big show.
   I couldn’t help but think he was testing me.
   What happens when he gets fired? I said.
   Fired? Mr. Overly-Fluent laughed. We are commodities. He has use when sober.
   He wants my job, I said.
   No shit, he said.
   He lies about me, I said. Big evil lies. What should I do?
   Mr. Overly-Fluent stomped out his dying cigarette.
   Everyone you know is a terrible person, he said. Be who you need to be.
   Ms. Porn was dead asleep when I returned to my room. When I woke the next morning, she was gone. Everything outside, as far out into the city as I could see, was coated in a thin layer of bright-orange powder. A quick sandstorm had swept in around dawn.
  

 

To prepare for the new-teacher orientation, I wrote down a list of the fake perks the company sold me on. I also wrote new-hire nicknames I’d send Ms. Porn: Mr. Stolen-Valor (or Mr. Alien-vs-Predator-Neck-Tattoo), Mrs. Tinkerbell (a middle-aged woman whose Hotmail email was glitterkitty69), and Mr. Quasimodo (a six-foot-six former prison guard).
   You’re my Queen, I wrote. All hail us!
   After a week, she emailed me about her new boyfriend, a tall albino Irish guy, another teacher at the camp. She wrote he could play every Britney Spears song on his acoustic guitar, and she attached a video of them singing an upbeat duet of “I’m a Slave 4 U” to a packed auditorium, at least a thousand kids clapping along as best they could.
   In her last email, the camp had been over for weeks and she and Mr. Britney-Spears were touring a part of China bordering North Korea. She attached photos of them at the remains of a train bridge bombed by the US in the 1950s. She said she hoped to see me whenever she got back to Beijing. She had a bottle of North Korean wine with my name on it.
   I never saw her again.
  

 

To be honest, I don’t tell anyone who really knows me this story.
   I threw myself into the job, became quite good at it, convinced Mrs. Many-Audis to make new business cards that read “Head Teacher.” When they were delivered, Mr. Overly-Fluent burst out laughing: The guillotined educator! Mr. Lies demanded to be named Chief Teacher and stayed on as long as I did. Dreamboat shuttered when Mrs. Many-Audis’s husband was jailed over an illegal real estate project he spearheaded. The website stayed up for years before disappearing. I last saw Mr. Clean from afar in a thrumming dance club.
   He was wearing a glittering black T-shirt and black pants. He was dancing up in the middle of the main stage. His eyes were closed, arms held aloft, hands writhing. Surrounded by young male expats, he looked like the happiest person in existence.
   I’m married, and you don’t need to know anything about my wife. Mr. Overly-Fluent and I started a teaching company. He was a tank driver in the army and is an amazing manager. We’ve garnered major connections—I was recently flown back to Beijing by the Ministry of Health to do a crash course on cocktail conversation for high-ranking doctors headed overseas. Many worked in big hospitals during SARS. They have stories they can’t tell anyone. . . .
  

 

I lied, just now.
   Before I left Beijing for a teaching job in Gansu Province, off toward Central Asia, she was in all these subway ads for one of the best business English schools in China. In the ad, she was in a blue power suit, her posture bolt-straight. She looked like a politician but she hated politicians. She was smiling wider than I’d ever seen her smile, standing next to a young Chinese man in a black suit, the two of them against a blue background, each of them holding up one wrist, a thick rope binding their wrists together. The slogan at the bottom read “hand in hand we grow.” I saw the exact same ad maybe thousands of times. I kept waiting to run into her.
   I still google her, but nothing comes up.
   Her name is Angelika, but she preferred Leeka, said she was never meant to be an angel. Can’t pick who we were, she once told me over beers, but we can pick who we will be.
   If you need to know: my name is Peter.