The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid

One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown. This dawned upon him gradually, and then suddenly, first as a sense as he reached for his phone that the early light was doing something strange to the color of his forearm, subsequently, and with a start, as a momentary conviction that there was somebody else in bed with him, male, darker, but this, terrifying though it was, was surely impossible, and he was reassured that the other moved as he moved, was in fact not a person, not a separate person, but was just him, Anders, causing a wave of relief, for if the idea that someone else was there was only imagined, then of course the notion that he had changed color was a trick too, an optical illusion, or a mental artifact, born in the slippery halfway place between dreams and wakefulness, except that by now he had his phone in his hands and he had reversed the camera, and he saw that the face looking back at him was not his at all.

Anders scrambled out of his bed and began to rush to his bathroom, but, calming himself, he forced his gait to slow, to become more deliberate, measured, and whether he did this to assert his control over the situation, to compel reality to return through sheer strength of mind, or because running would have frightened him more, made him forever into prey being pursued, he did not know.

The bathroom was shabbily but comfortingly familiar, the cracks in the tiles, the dirt in the grouting, the streak of dried toothpaste drip on the outside of the sink. The interior of the medicine cabinet was visible, the mirror door askew, and Anders raised his hand and swung his reflection into place before his eyes. It was not that of an Anders he recognized.

He was overtaken by emotion, not so much shock, or sorrow, though those things were there too, but above all the face replacing his filled him with anger, or rather, more than anger, an unexpected, murderous rage. He wanted to kill the colored man who confronted him here in his home, to extinguish the life animating this other’s body, to leave nothing standing but himself, as he was before, and he slammed the side of his fist into the face, cracking it slightly, and causing the whole fitting, cabinet, mirror, and all, to skew, like a painting after an earthquake has passed.

Anders stood, the pain in his hand muted by the intensity that had seized him, and he felt himself trembling, a vibration so faint as barely to be perceptible, but then stronger, like a dangerous winter chill, like freezing outdoors, unsheltered, and it drove him back to his bed, and under his sheets, and he lay there for a long while, hiding, willing this day, just begun, please, please, not to begin.

Anders waited for an undoing, an undoing that did not come, and the hours passed, and he realized that he had been robbed, that he was the victim of a crime, the horror of which only grew, a crime that had taken everything from him, that had taken him from him, for how could he say he was Anders now, be Anders now, with this other man staring him down, on his phone, in the mirror, and he tried not to keep checking, but every so often he would check again, and see the theft again, and when he was not checking there was no escaping the sight of his arms and his hands, dark, moreover frightening, for while they were under his control, there was no guarantee they would remain so, and he did not know if the idea of being throttled, which kept popping into his head like a bad memory, was something he feared or what he most wanted to do.

He attempted, with no appetite, to eat a sandwich, to be calmer, steadier, and he told himself that it would be all right, although he was unconvinced. He wanted to believe that somehow he would change back, or be fixed, but already he doubted, and did not believe, and when he questioned whether it was entirely in his imagination, and tested this by taking a picture and placing it in a digital album, the algorithm that had, in the past, unfailingly suggested his name, so sure, so reliable, could not identify him.

Anders did not normally mind being alone, but as he was just then, it was as if he was not alone, was, rather, in tense and hostile company, trapped indoors because he did not dare to step outside, and he went from his computer to his refrigerator to his bed to his sofa, moving on in his small space when he could not stand to remain a minute longer where he was, but there was no escaping Anders, for Anders, that day. The discomfort only followed.

He began, he could not help it, to investigate himself, the texture of the hair on his scalp, the stubble on his face, the grain of the skin on his hands, dry, the reduced visibility of the blood vessels there, the color of his toenails, the muscles of his calves, and, stripping, frantic, his penis, unremarkable in size and in heft, unremarkable except in not being his, and therefore bizarre, beyond acceptance, like a sea creature that should not exist.

Anders messaged in sick the first day. On the second he messaged to say he was more sick than he thought, and probably out for the week, upon which his boss called him, and when Anders did not answer, his boss messaged saying you better be dying, but he left Anders alone after that, other than, an hour later, sending a brief coda, you don’t work, you don’t get paid.

Anders had not yet seen anyone since he had changed, and he was not keen to see anyone, but he was out of milk and chicken breast and canned tuna, and there was only so much protein powder a man could reasonably be expected to consume, which meant he had to go out and face the world, or at least the clerk at the grocery store. He put on a cap and wedged it low.

His car, which had been his mother’s car, was about half as old as he was, the workers who assembled it long retired, or made redundant, or replaced by robots, and it swayed a bit when it changed speed, and even more when it changed direction, like a dancer with a supple waist, or a drunk, but there was a pleasing responsiveness to its rebuilt engine, an eagerness to impress, and Anders’s mother had been a fan of classical music, so his father had made certain the sound system was pure, with clear highs and an honest midrange, and what to Anders was, especially these days, a kind of understated, confident lack of boom in the bass.

In the parking lot of the grocery store he saw someone look at him, then look away, and it happened again in the dairy aisle. He did not know what they were thinking, if they were thinking anything, and he suspected it was only in his imagination that he saw flickers of hostility or distaste. He recognized the clerk who scanned his purchases but the clerk did not recognize him, and Anders had a moment of panic after he handed over his credit card, but the clerk did not glance at it, not at his name, not at his signature, and he did not acknowledge Anders’s mumbled thanks and goodbye, did not budge or even blink, as though Anders had not spoken at all.

When Anders got back in his car it occurred to him that the three people he had seen were all white, and that he was perhaps being paranoid, inventing meaning out of details that might not matter, and at a traffic light he confronted his gaze in the rearview mirror, looked for the whiteness there, for it must be somewhere, maybe in his expression, but he could not see it, and the more he looked the less white he seemed, as though looking for his whiteness was the opposite of whiteness, was driving it further away, making him seem desperate, or uncertain, or like he did not belong, he who had been born here, damn it, and then he heard the loud continuous horn of the car to his rear, and he started to move past a signal that had some seconds ago turned green, and the woman behind him swerved to overtake, and rolled down her window, and cursed him, furious, cursed good and hard and sped off, and he did nothing, nothing, not shout back, not smile to disarm her, nothing, like he was mentally deficient, and she was pretty, really pretty, or had been before she shouted, and when he got home he wondered how he would have reacted, how he could have reacted, if there had only been some way for her to know he was white, or for him to know it, because suddenly, and there was no hiding from the full weight of this, he did not.

Anders took a hit of pot, held it tight in his lungs, but maybe this was a mistake, because by the time he had made himself lunch he was no longer hungry, instead he had a kind of strumming anxiety, which he knew from experience he had better smoke through, so as not to get stuck in it, and he smoked more, and stared at his phone, wandering around the internet, and in the end he had his lunch as his dinner.

Anders would have liked to speak to his mother, if there was one person in the world he could have talked to just then, it would have been her, but she was some years departed, from the water, they knew, the water that smelled wrong and tasted wrong, but then eventually got better, and so when the cancer came that ate her up from inside, like it ate up so many people, it was hard to prove there was a particular cause, hard to prove in court, anyway, and in her last months she could not talk, she could only rasp, and she wanted it to be over, so the ending was a blessing.

But before she had been sick she had listened, and she had boundless faith in her son, she had long conversations with him when he was late to speak, and she read to him in bed when he was late to read, and when he was in her classroom at the age of seven he loved it, so much so that the next year he refused to leave for the subsequent one, and stayed in her classroom for two weeks before he could be persuaded to agree, most reluctantly, to move on, and it was she who made him a reader, and fought for him to have extra time on his exams, and wanted him to attend college, though she had gone before he could go, and in the end life happened, and he had not gone, though he still, for her, but also for himself, hoped he might one day, or one night, as evening classes seemed more doable.

In high school people had always said that his best feature was his smile, an easy with myself and easy with you smile, a let’s do this smile, generous, inviting, which had come to him from his mother, from her face to his, and now it was missing, the feeling that made it possible missing, and Anders did not know if it would ever return