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robot,” I told the trembling, wispy human resources clerk at the Ministry of Work and Culture, sliding the brittle manila envelope back across the seafoam Formica surface of the help desk.
    “It’s as close as we could come, given your circumstances.”
“Tooth model?”
    “You have very straight teeth.”
    “Where’s the robot in all of this?”
    The clerk sat back in his chair reflectively. Behind him was a framed photograph of a group of shirtless men climbing a sheer cliff at sundown, with the inscription T.E.A.M. TOGETHER EVERYONE ACHIEVES MORE. “Geoffrey,” he said, “we wouldn’t want to mislead you about how endearing we find your crusade. We’re actually trying to help you, though it may not seem that way. You’re well aware that robots are for boys. Take the tooth model position. Like it.”
    “I ought to stab you all in the neck,” I said. But I took the job anyway, and countless others like it. Finally, I ended up at the Center for Post-Corporate Education, where I taught people how to eat with their whole body.
    The problem is that I am a boyish mulatto — I pass for a child, but not for long enough to get a decent job. There is a marker in the grand lobby of the Division of Gradated Employment Services, a red plastic arrow, and like at a child’s amusement park ride, nobody even gets to interview for the good jobs unless she can pass safely underneath. I’ve often fooled them with my height, but something in the way I carry myself has always given away my age, even when I’ve tried to disguise my behavior with binding nylon tunics and head vests. To put it in the only way it matters, I’m old.
    At the center my colleagues and I taught people different techniques of coaching food, getting the best performance out of a meal. This type of eating was called “Eating,” and it involved an intricate set of stances that are illegal now. Our goal, stressed in the grueling two-hour instruction tape, was to teach people how to work in the table, the whole room. It was a lifestyle. “When you think about eating,” the trainer on the tape said, strolling past a series of staggered food murals, “think about the part of yourself that has to leave to make room for the food coming in. Where does it go? That is the central question. That is when we turn eating into Eating.”
    The training program was for people who’d reached their Terminal Age Potential, and had been subsequently let go. They were given a voucher by their former employers for a two-month stay at the center. It was a way of burying the rejection, of walking it off, something that people often did after the first part of their life was over.
    Our Greeters led the candidates out onto the floor of the loud gymnasium and paired them up with one of us. I was dealt a slight, sooty girl whose nameplate said “Marian: 19 yrs.” She was not pretty, but I felt a deep, immediate attraction. Her face was wide and flat, flanged at the ends like a clothes hanger, something familiar you could file yourself away on. She smiled politely as I led her over to our foam practice mat and I saw that a piece of her left front tooth was missing — it was the sort of imperfection that holds all of one’s other features hostage. The sudden, panicked manner with which she shut down the expression, before it had fully bloomed, revealed that the defect had marked her for good.
    I stood behind her, arms crossed over her abdomen, pressing my palms upward just below her ribs, demonstrating rapid breath technique. I only came up to her shoulders, which made positions such as Filtering the Pool and Attending the Korean Audio Science Museum more challenging than they should have been. Gradually, though, her body yielded to my embrace.
    “You’ve got strong legs,” she whispered, unable, in my grasp, to fully enunciate.
    “Shhh. No talking,” I hissed, irritated and confused that she should comment on the condition of my legs when it was my arms, after all,