by Tiffany Tsao
An An watched Mama’s hand tuck a stray ringlet behind her reflection’s right ear. “But your mama’s still the happiest mama in the world. You know why? Because the prettiest girl in the world is still mine.”
That was where the dream ended, or rather, the scene. The backstage, the boxes, her mother, even her younger self all dissolved into blackness, leaving only the mirror, with her younger self’s reflection staring back at her, frozen and unsmiling, like a bad headshot. Ann’s gaze had the clarity of hindsight. She saw her nose was no more or less sharp or delicate than most little girls’ noses. She saw her hair was indeed beautiful and thick, but hardly enough to turn heads. And she saw that her eyes were nice looking, with very dark, expressive pupils, but not particularly big and nowhere near as round as the eyes of many of the girls on the pageant circuit. In short, she saw that her six-year-old self was cute, “pretty” even, as her mother had always insisted, but not any prettier or cuter than the girls she’d competed against, especially once everyone had gotten their hair and makeup done.
No. She had never been the prettiest girl in the world, and despite what her mother kept telling her, she’d strongly suspected it back then too. How could she not have, after eighty-eight straight losses, some of them when she was too young to remember? Eighty-eight pageants of pure defeat, of not even winning any of the minor titles meant to console those who had failed—Miss Talent, Miss Sportswear, Best Smile, Best Poise, Miss Charm Runner-Up, Best Hair: Bronze Medal. It was impossible not to win some prize; she’d figured that out even before pageant thirty-three, when a green-eyed blonde girl had scornfully told her so anyway. “No one wins nothing,” the girl had said, thrusting out her chest to better display her pink sash: “Miss Congeniality Fourth Runner-Up, division: 4–6 years.” Then the girl had looked An An up and down and smiled wickedly. “You must be no one.”
As Ann kept gazing into her six-year-old face, she could see the fatigue already, germinating in the pupils, weighing down the corners of her lips. And that eighty-eighth pageant wasn’t even the end. The ensuing four years would continue to be a lesson in humility: forty-eight more months of losses, with never so much as a tiara or trophy to show for all the money her mother poured into costumes and lessons, registration fees and travel expenses. Forty-eight months of never so much as a sash or certificate to reward An An for the gruelling hours spent with her singing and dancing and gymnastics coaches and her shifu at the martial-arts gym, for the late-night and early-morning drills under her mother’s stern direction, for the shattering sensation in her chest every time the winners were announced and none of them were her.
There was much she wanted to say to her younger self.
Stop hoping, for one. Because she remembered that she did still hold out hope of winning, even then. “Maybe this is it,” the tiny voice would whisper. “You’ve been practicing so hard. And your new dress is designer. Maybe this time, you’ll win!” It almost seemed like the smaller hope got, the harder it was to crush. Like a tiny pebble. Like a speck of sand.
Stop trying to make Mama happy. That’s another thing she wanted to tell six-year-old An An. Only now, from the More Known World, on the cusp of turning thirty, could she see that her mother had been insatiable. That even when something finally shifted inside An An, when the hard shell of her oddfittingness finally—after ten years of Known World existence—began to exhibit hairline cracks, Mama would only want more. The sash she would finally receive for Talent Division: Third Place, Junior Miss Peaches and Crème 1986 wouldn’t be enough. In fact, it would only make Mama worse.
It’s not your fault. This was perhaps the thing she longed most to impress on the little girl that was once her. Can’t you see? If you were anyone else, if you were “normal,” you’d win. Everything. Hands down. But you’re not normal. You’re extraordinary. You’re an Oddfit.
Oddfittingness was an unpredictable thing. You could never tell how it would manifest itself. Beyond general symptoms—acute loneliness, constant inexplicable homesickness, and an aura that something about you was somehow “off”—its effects varied considerably.
Some Oddfits had loving families but no friends, some Oddfits were popular with peers and suffered at home, and some Oddfits endured abuse in all areas of their life. Some Oddfits were perceived as talking funny, some as walking funny, and others as looking funny. Some Oddfits could do a few things right, others could get things mostly right, and others nothing right at all.
The length of time it took for the Known World to adapt an Oddfit ranged widely as well. For some, oddfittingness vanished early, at the age of four or five, so that its unpleasantness left no conscious impression. For others, oddfittingness might hold steady into the early teens before declining sharply just in time to avoid compounding the traumatic experience of puberty. For still others, oddfittingness might plummet at age eight or nine but hang around in trace amounts, little bits clinging to the ears and nostrils like tiny wisps of cotton wool, or trailing from one’s shoe or buttocks like an errant scrap of toilet paper. And though adaptation was usually complete by the age of seventeen, there were exceptions nonetheless. Murgatroyd’s was the most inexplicable case thus far—astoundingly oddfitting at twenty-five. The late Yusuf had retained sufficient levels into his late teens to help found the Quest. And two other individuals in the Quest’s history had been oddfitting enough—barely—to join as explorers at the advanced ages of nineteen and twenty.
In short, oddfittingness came in a myriad of forms, and An An’s case was not unusual: everyone whom she came into contact with secretly felt there was something not quite right about her. Something that made them feel uncomfortable. And vaguely queasy. And, if they were honest, a little angry. Everyone felt this way towards An An, except for two people: her mother and father. And her father had died when she was six months old.
If An An’s mother had simply contented herself with loving her daughter and ignored other people’s opinions, then An An might have had an easier time of it. But it was perhaps to An An’s misfortune that her mother genuinely believed two things: First, that her An An was the loveliest, most talented, most wonderful girl in the entire world. And second, that these attributes of her daughter’s must be acknowledged by all.
It had taken a long time for Ann—grown Ann—to piece together the nature of her childhood oddfittingness and the circumstances it had produced, to get to the point where she could conduct this postmortem examination of her past. She’d spent the first few years after her escape from the Known World trying to forget. And it was only when she came to the conclusion that forgetting was impossible that she’d set to work detaching herself, cutting her soul free from the corpse of her prior life so that she could study the cadaver with objectivity and dispassion. Or at least, with minimal emotion. Even now, she couldn’t help but feel for the child into whose face she gazed.
It’s not your fault.
But what was the point of talking to a self that didn’t exist anymore? A whole self. A two-eyed self.
Mercifully the face faded, leaving her alone in a darkness she hoped would last until she awoke.
The man opened his eyes and sat bolt upright in bed, grinning madly. Then he realized it had been nothing but a dream. He broke into a cold sweat.
Good dreams were awful. Worse than bad ones, ten times over. Waking up from a nightmare was salvation, but being wrenched out of the nice ones, which were always about the other world, was like being punched in the tummy. Or having a hammer dropped on your toe, except your toe was your heart.
Once, he had sought to maintain the illusion that it was this life that was the nightmare and his good dreams were the true state of affairs. That had been many years ago, at his lowest point, when he’d taken to sleeping almost all the time in an effort to make the Known World—the proper world—his reality. He called this his “depressive period.” (He knew all about depression. His collection of scavenged books and brochures, magazines and newspapers had made him very knowledgeable
indeed.) But he had pulled himself out of it. It had taken superhuman effort. Even now, he marvelled at how he had managed to shake his head clear enough to construct his masterful plan and set its great wheels in motion.
He was really awake now. Even if he could manage to fall asleep again, he knew there was no hope of picking up the dream where he’d left off, with the red-and-white-checked picnic blanket, and the floating balloons, and his pet dog, a genuine dog, licking his face, and his mother loading up his plate with french fries cooked in an actual deep fryer, and his father and big brother wearing baseball caps, saying they’d toss around the ol’ pigskin after lunch.
He sighed, rolled out of bed (it helped that his bed was slightly lopsided), and poured himself a cup of Earl Grey tea, making sure to hold both teapot and cup over a basin because the spout of the teapot leaked. Then he took a sip and, as usual, spat it out, because though he called it Earl Grey, it was actually made from steeping random dried leaves collected from outside.
Then a thought popped into his head: he would read his autobiography. Yes, what a good idea. It was the next best thing to dreaming.
He padded over to the bookshelf and spent several minutes squinting in the moonlight at the forty-two slim spines that represented his magnum opus in progress. (What grand words those were! He thought them again: Magnum opus.) At last, he made his selection and pulled the slim volume towards him very carefully so as to prevent the bookshelf from toppling over, as was its wont.
He gazed lovingly at the notebook cover. My Proper Life, Volume 5. And then, because it was the proper place to sit and read, he squeezed himself into his armchair, despite the fact that it was too narrow and low to the ground, with a backrest that inclined forward and gave him shooting pains in his thighs and hips if he stayed in it for too long.
He knew exactly which chapter he wanted to read. The dog in his dream had inspired him. He knew it wouldn’t be well written—none of volume five was. It was only around volume twelve that one noted significant improvements in style and language. It was the content he was after. He turned to the correct page, placed his finger under the first word of the title, cleared his throat, and in a low voice, began to read aloud.
Going to the Pet Shop with Dad
There were all kinds of animals in the pet shop. The pet shop owner showed Dad and me all of them. There was a hamster with white and orange fur and a black cat and orange cat with black stripes that looked like a small tiger. There were many puppy dogs, some with pointy ears and some with long floppy ones. All of them had their tongues sticking out, because dogs like to stick tongues out. There was also a goldfish swimming around in a glass bowl and a rabbit eating carrots, which are orange and shaped like long triangles and crunchy.
Dad told me I could choose any animal I wanted. I asked him if we could get a dog and he said of course you can, son. That’s a good choice. What more perfect pair could there be than a boy and his dog?
So I got a dog with yellow fur and noncompound eyes and a tail that wagged because as everyone knows, dogs wag their tails when they are happy and this dog was happy that a boy like me wanted to buy him.
Dad asked me what I wanted to name him. I said I would call him Spot. Dad laughed at me and mussed my hair with his big strong hand because that was a silly name since the dog did not have any spots. And I said yeah I know but I am being ironic. Then Dad laughed again. His big strong teeth glinted in the electric lights of the pet shop and he said I was sure smart and it was fine if I wanted to call the dog Spot because I could have anything I wanted because he loved me so much. We paid five dollars for Spot and took him home and gave him all the bones he could eat.
He stopped there to flick the tears from his eyes. Yes, the writing really wasn’t any good, but it still touched him, this scene from his imaginary childhood, this memory that he knew was false and yet felt to him far more true than the shabby excuse for a life he was living now. These were the chronicles of his proper self—his life as it should have been.
The chapter wasn’t over yet. There was still one more sentence to go—a good sentence too. And though he knew it by heart, he still searched with his finger for where he had left off. He resumed reading:
And the most amazing thing about the pet shop was that there wasn’t a single mosquito to be found.
CHAPTER 10
Garamond was right. The mosquitoes at the lake really were enormous: broad backed and burly, with bulging femurs and thick bushy palps. Each one was the size of a soccer ball and had a proboscis as thick as a sewing needle. The sight of them droning low and slow across the surface of the dark red waters made Murgatroyd shift uneasily from foot to foot, especially when he recalled that he had neglected to buy a new jar of Tally Ho Miracle Cream.
“Do they bite?” he asked nervously.
Ann shrugged. “This is all new to me.”
By this, Ann meant everything around them: the lake on whose rocky shores they stood, so vast that they only had Garamond’s word to go on to prevent them from thinking it might be an ocean; the dense forest of vine-covered trees they had trekked through to reach this spot; the gigantic mosquitoes and the turtlelike creature gliding beneath the lake’s surface, propelled by the powerful strokes of its six flippers and four transparent dorsal fins.
“And we thought the entry for Cambodia-Abscond was finally finished.” Ann chuckled softly. “Wait till Christian finds out.”
“S-Say again?” stammered Murgatroyd, distracted by a mosquito moving menacingly towards them. It appeared to be doing the aerial equivalent of a swagger.
“Getting the Compendium cards in shape for this Territory has always been an uphill battle. It was only last year that Christian in cataloguing made it his pet project to compile all the ambient information floating around about Cambodia-Abscond that no one had ever bothered to write down.”
To Murgatroyd’s relief, the mosquito did an about-face and began swaggering away. “Why hadn’t anyone bothered?”
Ann shrugged a second time. “No one got around to it, I guess. And it’s not like Fleetowners encourage the documentation of their Territory. Anyway, Christian was pleased as punch about finally having complete data on Cambodia-Abscond, and now, look.” She gestured at the lake with a sweeping motion of her hand.
“Should we take notes, then?” asked Murgatroyd.
“Maybe later.”
Ann seated herself cross-legged on the stones beneath them and gazed at the horizon.
It became apparent after a while that Ann intended to stay in this position and not say anything for some time.
“Erh, should we start looking for clues?” asked Murgatroyd.
Ann merely gave an abstracted grunt, and he was left with little choice but to follow her example.
Thankfully the mosquitoes seemed wholly uninterested in him and Ann. Feeling more at ease, he let his mind drift back to his first encounter with the animal life of the More Known World: Ivan Ho’s pet mosquitoes, which he had been tasked with feeding from his own arm. They had looked pretty much identical to the mosquitoes of the Known World, the ones in Singapore at least. But he remembered the strange bond he’d developed with Ivan’s pets as they had fed, the loving and trusting way they had sunk their mouthparts into his flesh, like children burying their faces in a parent’s shoulder or chest. There had, of course, been the intense itching afterwards, but thanks to Ivan’s miraculous lotion, it had been short lived, leaving nothing in its wake but warmth and affection for the little creatures.
He hadn’t suspected back then how many more mosquito-based life forms he would go on to encounter during his travels through the More Known World: mosquitoes identical in appearance to ones in the Known World, like Ivan’s pets, but also ones florescent and ones phosphorescent, ones translucent and ones tumescent. Mosquitoes so tiny and transparent they looked like darting specks of dust, and mosquitoes like the ones around him, beefy and stout—not to mention the numerous animals that had diverged considerably from their ancestral
mosquito form: the moskotter of Canada-Samba, for example, whose wings had evolved into veined, webbed paws that propelled it supine through the water as its compound-eyed antennae kept watch for plump half-shelled quito-qlams nestled in the riverbeds. Or the choss pashe of Persia-Aperture, which fogged anything it regarded as a potential mate in a pheromone-heavy gas that smelled of old cheese, decaying pine needles, and squid excrement. Or the Whirling Badass Helicopter of Doom of Antarctica-Blitz—named, obviously, by the Other—which was carnivorous, belligerent, and fed primarily on the hapless rat-sized Fodder of the Whirling Badass Helicopter of Doom, whose title also bore all the hallmarks of the Other’s naming style.
Suddenly these ruminations made Murgatroyd dizzy and out of breath. He leaned forward and pressed his face into his hands. It overwhelmed him to think about it, the vastness of the Worlds and the infinite variety and number of beings, animate and inanimate, mosquito related and otherwise, that populated them. Even if there were a thousand Quests, each powered by a thousand individuals, it would never be enough. There is too much, he thought in awe.
“There is too much.”
To his surprise, it wasn’t he who said this, but Ann. The reason she had gone quiet all of a sudden was because, moments earlier, she too had been visited by the same sense of mystery and wonder—how unfathomable it all was, the height and depth and breadth of the universe and everything in it. The feeling certainly wasn’t new, but even though it came upon her often enough to be a familiar sensation, it came infrequently enough for her to be startled afresh each time.
Ann did not usually yield so conspicuously to these moments. Certainly she’d experienced them alongside Murgatroyd in the past without needing to sit down and flap her gums about it. But the dreams had paid visits several nights in a row, leaving her more exhausted that even she knew. Before she realized it, she found herself not only saying that there was too much, but uttering the words that came to mind whenever she felt this way—words that gave partial expression to a second feeling, which always welled up in the wake of that first swell of awe, and which could best be described as a deep yearning for an explanation. Not a reason, mind you, or a solution, or a one-word answer or a several-word answer, or even a several-paragraph answer, but an intricate and elaborate explanation as boundless and infinite as the universe itself apparently was—no, more infinite still.
