by Tiffany Tsao
At the conclusion of this speech, which Ann delivered in stentorian fashion, everyone surrounding them stared silently in astonishment, except for one small group, who broke into a flurry of cheering and applause.
Murgatroyd felt himself redden even more. “Should we . . . should we sit down?”
“No. I prefer to stand.”
“Oh.”
They stood there for a little while, Ann persisting in staring down imperiously at him before breaking the silence.
“Well?” she asked in an expectant manner.
“Hah?”
“Well, Murgatroyd, why are we here?”
“Oh. Erh. Erh,” he felt flustered, embarrassed. “You know, what.”
“I know nothing. Why?”
“What?”
“What are we here for, Murgatroyd?”
Murgatroyd was bewildered. She was the one who started this whole thing! Was she joking? He decided, after studying the expression on her face, that she most certainly wasn’t joking. Where should he start?
“I th-thought,” he stammered. “I thought about—about what you said about me belonging here.”
“What about it?”
“I . . . I think maybe—I think maybe I don’t belong. At—at least sometimes I don’t feel like it.”
Ann arched one eyebrow. Or at least, that’s what Murgatroyd thought she did. With the sun shining in his eyes, and from his lesser height, it was difficult to see her eyebrows. “Let me get this straight. You think . . . maybe you feel you don’t belong sometimes?”
Murgatroyd was getting quite frustrated. “I don’t belong here,” he declared. “I DON’T belong.”
“Oh-ho! Now we’re getting somewhere!”
“Where?”
“Where what?”
“Where are we getting to?”
Ann sighed. “I was speaking metaphorically.”
Murgatroyd could only reply, “Oh,” and once again, they lapsed into silence. After a few seconds, Murgatroyd mustered up the courage to ask a question.
“Erh. I wanted to ask you something.”
“What?”
“Hah?”
“What did you want to ask me?”
“Oh. About the Quest.”
“What about the Quest?”
“What is it?”
“What, the Quest?”
“Yes, the Quest.”
“Ah yes. The Quest.” Her one green eye flashed and glistened with suppressed enthusiasm. “Murgatroyd,” she announced. “Let us sit down.”
“Can we go someplace more shaded? Like under a tree?” Murgatroyd examined his arms, which were looking ferociously pink.
“No. I prefer the sun.”
Promptly sitting down cross-legged on the ground, Ann immediately began uprooting blades of grass with her fingers and tearing them into tiny bits. Murgatroyd felt obliged to join her (in sitting, not in tearing).
Ann began with a question. Questions always made Murgatroyd rather nervous because most of the time when he answered questions, he answered them wrongly.
“Tell me, Murgatroyd,” asked Ann. “Would you say this field is crowded?”
Murgatroyd looked around. It certainly looked very crowded to him. So he nodded.
“What if I were to tell you it wasn’t?” Ann looked at him expectantly, waiting for a response.
“Erh. I guess some more could fit. But then it would be very cramped.”
“What if I were to tell you that this field was practically empty?”
Murgatroyd laughed uneasily.
Ann gave him a stern look. “It’s not a joke.”
He stopped laughing. Ann continued.
“There are currently four hundred people, perhaps a little more, occupying this field right now. What if I told you that four million people and their full-grown pet elephants could occupy this field comfortably with room to spare? What if I told you that it was the same way with all the space in all the world we know, or we think we know today?”
Murgatroyd shook his head. “Cannot be.”
“Ah, but it can!”
“Cannot!” He shook his head again. Murgatroyd rarely expressed open disagreement. He stared down at the ground and he lapsed into heavy Singlish, as he always did when he was nervous. “I know I not so smart one, but how to fit so many?”
Ann didn’t respond. He looked up to find her perfectly still and silent. With her legs crossed and her back so straight, she looked as if she were deep in meditation, except for the fact that her eyes weren’t closed. Or at least her visible eye wasn’t. It was wide open. And it seemed to Murgatroyd as if it were growing more blazingly brilliant and intensely green with each uneasy second that passed.
Then she began to speak. Her voice had changed in quality. It seemed almost as if a low growl was issuing forth from her lips, but it wasn’t husky or scratchy. On the contrary, her voice was devastatingly clear and her words perfectly articulated. And the words she spoke were a sharp knife slicing directly into his heart.
“Murgatroyd, do you remember your first day of school?”
She didn’t pause for an answer, but he found himself nodding anyway.
“You remember the day you went to Uncle Yusuf’s ice cream shop and found it empty?”
He started in amazement. “How did you—” he began, but she still didn’t pause. And her voice grew deeper and darker.
“Remember how you felt when you were running. Running to escape the pain and the humiliation. Running towards the one thing—the only thing—in the world that you knew to be good and true and safe and at home. Do you remember that moment? That moment when your legs felt sore and red and you felt as if you couldn’t breathe anymore and you finally spied Uncle Yusuf’s in the distance? It felt as if you were running home, didn’t it? And as you ran towards it, all the pain—the pain in your bleeding nose, in your aching chest, in the entirety of your puny little body—began to dissolve as it grew closer. All the taunts of those strange boys who hated you for no reason you knew, the sharp sting of your nose being bashed in, the smell of shoe leather and dirt, the metallic taste of your own blood running into your mouth, and more: the fear, the terror of being despised and alone. Utterly alone. All of that began to melt away as you got closer. Closer to Uncle Yusuf. Because in the back of your mind, you knew that he cared for you, and you loved him and you knew he loved you. And so you made your mad dash for the ice cream shop, crazed with pain and grief and misery. And you felt relief already—the foretaste of relief and rest and love washing over you. Sweet relief. And then it hit you. There was something wrong, wasn’t there? You could sense it even several metres away, before you peered into the darkened interior to find it empty. No Uncle Yusuf. No ice cream in the display case. No light. No music drifting from the radio, no glass bowls lined up on the shelves behind the counter, twinkling with cleanliness. Nothing except the unfamiliar packing cartons strewn around the empty floor, a stool in the corner overturned, piles of crumpled newspaper here and there, tools sitting ominously atop the ice cream display case, waiting to dismantle it forever. But most importantly of all, no Uncle Yusuf. He was gone. And you knew somehow, even then, that he was never coming back. Even though you would return periodically for years afterwards, harbouring the hollow hope that all would be restored, that Uncle Yusuf would be there behind the counter to greet you with a wide smile on his face, you knew that he was never coming back. And you felt pain, didn’t you? Pain and sorrow in your stomach, clawing at you from the inside out. You screamed and cried, but it wouldn’t go away. And when all the sound and motion you were capable of left you drained, you curled up into a ball, the shameful taste of tears and blood still under your tongue and in the crevices between your teeth. You knew how alone you were. How alone. You knew how alone . . .”
In the time Ann had been speaking, Murgatroyd had quietly clenched his teeth and closed his eyes, held powerless by his bewilderment at this insight into his innermost childhood thoughts and the soft, almost hypn
otic voice in which it was delivered. His eyes flew open and he opened his mouth with the vague notion of pleading with her to stop. But they weren’t sitting in the field anymore, and Ann wasn’t sitting beside him.
Where was he? Gradually, his mind reoriented himself. They were still in the field, but someone had exploded it. No, not exploded . . . unfolded it. There was no other way to describe it. It was as if someone had unfolded an origami crane, but instead of smoothing it out flat, had simply let it lie undone with all its intricate folds and creases bared. Great multifaceted structures of dirt and grass, almost crystalline in their angularity, protruded from the ground below. They seemed, inexplicably, to jut unmoored from the sides of the sky and from above. And on this massive three-dimensional structure, he himself was seated. There was nobody in sight. Most every facet of grassy field was bare, but every now and then he could make out a small speck on one of the facets. To his amazement, he realized that these specks were the Filipinas who had been sitting in the field all around him. Some were seated upside down or sideways, but if they were, they didn’t seem to notice. All the sound—the animated chatter and laughter surrounding them—hadn’t changed a bit. And if he concentrated hard enough, he could match the snatches and snippets of conversations to different individuals who were chatting to others over great distances as if only a few centimetres separated them from each other. On one facet, very far away, on the underside of a grassy trapezoidal arch, he could make out the miniscule figure of Ann. And from this miniscule figure came a surprisingly audible voice.
“There’s more than enough room after all. Don’t you think?”
Murgatroyd found himself again in the crowded flat field. Gravity had resumed. The Filipinas were once again seated together in small clusters, and seated next to him, staring at him solemnly but with a faint smile in her eye, was Ann.
Murgatroyd opened his mouth, and when he did, his voice came out in a very croaky whisper. “Who are you?”
Ann corrected him. “Who are we, Murgatroyd. Who are we?”
CHAPTER 9
Ann took something out of her bag and handed it to Murgatroyd. It was a ball of tightly crumpled aluminium foil, about the size of a small lime.
“I always carry this around with me. It’s a very useful way of explaining a potentially complicated concept. Now, Murgatroyd: think of that ball of foil as the world. Feel the surface.”
Murgatroyd rolled the ball between his palms and fingers. It was slightly rough and jagged.
“The surface of the ball—the part exposed and visible to us, is what we call the Known World. But you’ll notice too that there’s more to this ball than meets the eye.”
Ann took the ball from Murgatroyd and uncreased it ever so slightly so that instead of a compact, round ball, it was more of a loosely crumpled wad.
“See?” Ann said, pointing to the crannies and crevices that had been hidden in the ball’s interior, but were now exposed to the outside. “And if you undo all of the ball,”—Ann proceeded to do just that—“you can see that most of the ball consists not of what is on the surface, but what is crumpled and packed together to form the interior.”
Ann smoothed out all of the creases and lay the sheet of foil flat on the grass between them for Murgatroyd to behold. Even flattened out, the foil had a rugged texture to it, its surface crisscrossed in wrinkles and lines from where it had been crumpled.
Ann continued: “Remember how the surface of the ball represented the Known World? The rest of this foil—the parts you weren’t able to see when it was rolled up into a ball—all this represents the More Known World. Murgatroyd, look around you.”
Murgatroyd looked around.
“All of what you see around you now, and in fact, all that you’ve ever seen almost all your entire life, is the Known World—the surface of the ball. Now, tell me what you saw just a few minutes ago. You didn’t see this field the way it is now, did you?”
Murgatroyd shook his head. “It was like this, but . . .” he couldn’t think of any other word for it, “but unfolded.” He put two and two together. “Like the ball!”
Ann smiled. “Exactly. You caught a glimpse of the More Known World. Most people go through their entire lives perceiving only the Known World. That’s all they ever experience, all they ever know. But beyond the limits of their perception—or at least what they think are the limits of their perception—lies . . .” Ann gestured towards the flattened sheet of foil, “the More Known World.”
Murgatroyd’s eyes widened. “So that was the More Known World?”
“Just a small part of it. The More Known World is vast—unimaginably vast and intricate beyond conception. The name is a bit of a misnomer, actually, because there’s still a lot of it we don’t know about at all; we’re not even sure that it is possible to ever explore all of it, even if our numbers were tripled and we were given millions and millions of years. Just look!” Ann pointed to the sheet of foil. “It’s covered with creases. Make note of each crease where it was folded. Make note of every kink in each crease, every irregularity. Look even closer. The foil isn’t even completely flat: there are still tiny folds, tiny ridges, tiny valleys that can’t be smoothed out entirely. Now imagine that each one of these creases, kinks, irregularities, folds, ridges, valleys is a new portion of the More Known World—we call them Territories. They’re innumerable: in reality, more innumerable than what you see represented in this imperfect model before you.
“What you saw just now was a tiny—an infinitesimal—part of the More Known World. In fact, what you most likely saw just now was a fusion of the Known World and a Territory of the More Known World. You saw this portion of the Known World—this field—slightly uncrumpled; you saw the unseen facets of this world that most people never see and will never be aware of.”
It was clear that Ann had explained this many times before. Yet, as she explained, it seemed that even she herself couldn’t resist being awed anew by the amazing facts that she was uttering for perhaps the umpteenth time. Her face never altered, maintaining its steady expression of calm intensity and nonchalant seriousness, but the words spilled out of her mouth with increasing rapidity; her eye positively glowed with excitement and joy. “If they only knew that this field could unfold to produce a thousand different surfaces. If they only knew they could stroll through any of the wide, open spaces separating every blade of grass, and that each of those spaces possessed its own unique geological and climactic features—glacial plains, lush forests, swamplands, star canyons, gossamer stalactites, shimmering fields of terrafluffs; if only they knew they could perch on any one of the millions of layers in the sky, or eat their picnic lunches on any groove of any leaf in that single tree over there,” (Ann pointed to a small frangipani tree about twenty metres to her right), “and experience countries consisting entirely of waterfalls, or mountain ranges formed entirely out of yellow straw and sky.
“If they only knew how much of the world there is! If only they knew!” Abruptly, Ann re-crumpled the sheet into a compact ball. “But most people don’t know. And many don’t want to know. So many will always be perfectly content to experience only the surface of this tiny little ball.” She sighed, and as if repeating to herself something that had been told to her time and time again, said resignedly, “And if they’re content, then that’s fine. After all, the Known World itself is remarkable and holds many wondrous things.” She sighed again. “But there’s so much more.”
There was a brief pause as Ann seemed to contemplate this. Murgatroyd took the opportunity to venture a question.
“You keep saying most people can’t see the More Known World. How come I can?”
“Because,” she answered, placing the ball back inside her bag, “it just so happens that you don’t fall into the category of ‘most people.’ You, Murgatroyd, are what we call an Oddfit.”
“Come again?”
“An Oddfit. I’m one too. Most Questians are. About four-fifths of them, to be precise.”
&nb
sp; “What are Questians?”
“One thing at a time and first things first. Ask me what an Oddfit is.”
As both the terms “Oddfit” and “Questian” puzzled him equally, Murgatroyd was happy to oblige.
“Erh. What’s an Oddfit?”
“Excellent question.” With no ball of foil to keep her hands busy, Ann’s fingers turned back to shredding the blades of grass around her, this time methodically splitting them lengthwise and arranging the halves in a little heap. “All people in the Worlds fall into three different categories: Sumfits, Oddfits, and Stucks. All of them,” and here she paused briefly before continuing, “all of them have the ability to experience the Known World to its fullest, and with few exceptions, none of them will ever suspect that there is any more to the physical world besides the Known.
“Most people are Sumfits. In fact, about 99.5 percent of the world’s population are Sumfits. With proper training and willingness on their part, a Sumfit can learn to perceive, experience, and inhabit a certain number—a certain sum, if you will—of Territories in the More Known World in addition to the all of the Known World. But transferring between Worlds and Territories is an extremely draining process for a Sumfit. As a result, many Sumfits who are able to access the More Known World settle permanently there in a Territory of their choosing, or make transfers only once in a while.”
“People live in the More Known World?”
Ann nodded. “The number isn’t huge, but there are about four thousand Sumfits who’ve chosen to make some part of the More Known World their home. To continue, Sumfits make up most of the worlds’ population. However, every now and then, for reasons that still remain a mystery to us, someone ends up being born an Oddfit. Oddfits have no difficulty transferring between the Known World and the More Known World, or even among the different Territories of the More Known World. But even beyond that, Oddfits are blessed with a unique ability. A unique ability indeed.
