Before being metallized, he’d lived with a facial disfigurement as severe as my own. He wouldn’t describe the exact nature of his problem, but once he told me, "Hey, Mom" — he always called me "Mom" because I’d introduced myself as Ma Youn Suu and "Ma" was the only syllable that stuck in Tut’s brain-"Hey, Mom, I decided I’d rather soak my face in molten metal than stay the way I was. Paint your own picture."

I doubted that Tut had truly immersed his face in liquid gold (melting point 1063°C), but I couldn’t rule it out. He was one of those rare individuals — always perfectly lucid, yet thoroughly out of his mind. If Tut had found himself in the same room as a vat of molten gold, he might well take one look at the bubbling metal, and think, "I could stick my face in that." Two seconds later, he’d be ears deep in yellow magma.

That was the way Tut’s brain worked. Odd notions struck him several times a minute, and he couldn’t judge whether those notions were merely unusual or utterly deranged. For example, he was obsessed with keeping the gold on his face "shiny-finey clean," so he constantly experimented with different kinds of polish — not just the usual oils and waxes, but also materials like ketchup, the ooze from my cheek, pureed mushrooms in hot chocolate, and his own semen. Once while we were talking in my cabin, he began going through my things, trying every garment I owned to see how well it buffed up his complexion… all while we were discussing a complicated technical bulletin on new procedures for taking alien soil samples. Every now and then, after he’d finished rubbing his metal forehead with my panties or the toe of my ballet shoe, he’d turn from the mirror and ask, "What do you think? Shiny-finey?" I’d say I couldn’t see any difference, he’d nod, and we’d go back to debating the niceties of separating extraterrestrial worms from extraterrestrial loam.