by Tiffany Tsao
As An An circled the exhibits, she wondered how it was possible for the world to be so wilfully cruel—to bring people into existence only to blight them so, to allow them to go so awfully, terribly wrong. As she gazed, a second feeling, besides horror, began to take root as well—an affinity with the freakish objects around her that drew her into the cases even as she remained outside them, staring expressionlessly into their depths, which were her depths as well.
“We don’t belong, you and us,” they whispered from their spotlighted platforms, shelves, and pickling jars. “You’ve known it all along.”
They were right: it did seem to An An that she had always known. And it seemed also that all the toil and heartache that she had been enduring for as long as she could remember, and longer still, was useless. She would never belong anywhere except in some place like this, a place devoted to documenting and showcasing nature’s gross mistakes. The defect inside her could never be fixed, only concealed—with ruffles and sequins and lace; with lipstick and mascara and curled hair; with backflips and high kicks and sassy answers designed to make judges laugh; with endless drilling and practice; with unrelenting discipline and self-control.
Yesterday’s success at the pageant should have confirmed the exact opposite: that she, An An, was finally cured. That the defect had been fixed, and she and Mama could stop. No more pageants. No more lessons to enhance her performances. No more practicing routines until two in the morning. No more weekends spent on the road. Mama could pay off debts and start saving money. An An would have time to do homework and make friends. Maybe they could get a dog. An An had worked so hard for so long to win a prize, any prize. She had sprinted as a runner for the finish line, not for seconds, but for years, muscles straining, legs pumping, heart pounding at the promise of the glorious end. And yesterday, she had made it—made it at last—only to discover that the finish line had vanished, had removed itself somewhere halfway around the globe, no, clear across the solar system, and the sprinting would never cease.
Next year you’ll win the crown.
In her mother’s absence, the words filled the air, blanketing An An in a toxic fog. Mama had said them not five minutes ago, and she’d said them yesterday too, right after An An had descended the stage into her arms, “Talent Division: Third Place” draped diagonally across her chest, tears of happiness streaming down her face.
“I’m so proud of you, An An.” That’s what Mama had said first, clutching An An to her and pressing her own wet face into An An’s ear. “I’m so proud of you.”
It’s all over, An An had thought in a daze. Finally, it’s all over. And she had begun to cry with even more force than before—with such energy that it felt almost as if her joy and relief would split her in two.
Then those chilling words: “They see your worth, An An. They finally see what I see. There’s no stopping us now. Next year you’ll win the crown.”
Next year. The phrase rang in An An’s ears like forever or eternity. How many “next years” would she have to work for and how many crowns would she have to win until Mama was satisfied? She had pulled away at that moment, distanced herself from her mother just enough to meet her gaze, teary eye to teary eye, and find out the truth. The corners of Mama’s lips had turned upwards into a dreamy smile—far-off, rapturous, bone-chillingly hopeful. “Next year you’ll win the crown, my darling,” she had repeated. “You can do it. I can see it in your eyes.”
It would never end. She knew that now. Worse still, it seemed to her that the amount of effort she had put into concealing and compensating for her defect thus far was no longer sufficient. With her mother’s mounting ambitions for her, she would have to work harder. Doubly hard to win Talent Division: First Place, and ten times as hard to be Junior Miss Peaches and Crème proper. And five hundred times as hard to place third runner-up as Princess Liberty USA and five hundred thousand times as hard to be Miss America Junior Preteen. Yet at the same time, it also seemed that her defect would only worsen as time passed, like the defects of the specimens around her. It would swell her abdomen like a balloon or burst through the top of her skull. It would grow a second person out of her liver or calcify her from the inside out.
Anyone else in An An’s position would have screamed her lungs out. Would have clawed and kicked at the walls. Would have torn down the draperies and smashed all the cabinets. But she didn’t. She wasn’t even angry. She had forgotten how to experience and vent that most primal of emotions long ago, evolving beyond it as other human beings outgrow suckling at a breast or crawling on all fours. Instead, before it could even be called anger, she converted it, as always, into something else: a dark energy that not only prevented her from screaming and clawing and smashing, but that gave her, An An, in this unjust universe where so much was utterly beyond her power to determine, the illusion of control.
This was the energy that An An poured into performing for the pageants she had long wearied of. And it was not to be confused with the heart and soul other contestants poured into their performances, for if it could be given tangible form, it would have been black and cold. It was this energy that now possessed her as she stood among the anatomical oddities that bore collective testimony to the cruelty of the cosmos. Her vision clouded. Her breath quickened. Suddenly it seemed to her that she was standing on yesterday’s stage, her back to the audience, waiting for the musical cue for her dance routine. She was even in costume: a knee-length red satin dress, part kimono, part boxing robe, with a gold sash and a sequined peacock embroidered across the back in purple, blue, and green.
This was all she had control over in this world: this stage, this song, her movements. And as the opening strains of “Kung Fu Fighting” by Carl Douglas wafted through the loudspeakers, she began to dance.
Her dance coach had picked the song—“to highlight Ann’s exotic qualities.” And though Mama had been doubtful at first, she had eventually agreed: it was impossible to downplay the fact that An An was “Oriental,” as people called it, so they might as well play it up. The initial moves were simple hip gyrations: slow to match the languorous tempo of the intro, and in the words of her dance coach, “Sleepy. And a little sexy. Like you’re waking up and having a good stretch.”
She counted in her head. Five, six, seven, spin!
Whirling around she punched the air, then grapevined to the left and punched again. As she repeated the moves, objects began to materialize around her: the chestnut exhibition cases of the Mütter, the megacolon and the skeletons of a giant and a dwarf. Behind her, the preserved corpse of a lady coated in a fatty substance like soap, and before her the wall of deformed babies floating in jars of formaldehyde. She kept her focus.
The first high kick, followed by a back kick and a roundhouse: perfectly executed, though the shifu who taught her gong fu would have disagreed, as always. She could never do anything right—not in his eyes, not in anyone’s but her mother’s. The final kick and punch in the sequence touched the glass pane of the skeleton case lightly, gently, with no more force than the legs of a tiny moth. She turned and did three consecutive cartwheels across the stage—flawless as well, if only to herself and Mama. She heard her gymnastics coach’s pitying voice: “Just do your best, hon. Not everyone has what it takes.” Focus, she told herself, blocking the voice from her consciousness, just in time to execute the roundoff back handspring the coach had refused to teach her because An An “was nowhere near ready.” Her feet landed an inch shy of the Soap Lady’s remains, and she pirouetted back to centre stage before jumping straight into the air and splaying her legs in a perfect side split.
And then, there she was, in the last third of the routine before the fade-out. The voices came faster and thicker than before, addressing not her, but her mother, in half whispers. In Mandarin: “There’s something not quite right with your daughter. She’ll never go beyond blue belt.” In Russian-accented English: “Her dancing is wrong. I don’t know how to fix it.” In a southern drawl: “I’ll do my best, but s
he’s obviously not a born gymnast.” She was facing the wall of pickled fetuses now. A chop and a palm strike grazed two jars—a child with no lungs and another with two heads—sending ripples through the preserving fluid. A flurry of front kicks, the toes of a slippered foot darting in and out of the narrow spaces between the specimens with the speed of a striking snake.
She wasn’t on the pageant stage anymore. In the course of the song, the space around her had completed its transformation into the here and now, the main gallery of the Mütter. But her act wasn’t done. She whirled and ran towards the megacolon at full speed. This wasn’t how she usually ended her routine, but then again, she’d never had a vault to work with before. Focus, she repeated to herself, and she heard her mother’s voice, as if cheering her on: “Don’t listen to them, An An. I know the truth. It’s in your eyes.”
Several feet shy of the case, she pitched her body into a roundoff and did a back handspring off the megacolon case. This was what she had control over. This. Now. And nobody could take it away from her. An aerial twist. A second one. And then the landing, sudden and hard, planting her feet back onto carpet. She straightened, half expecting to hear yesterday’s applause: the smattering of semi-enthusiastic claps, which had been more than she had ever gotten in her entire history of pageant participation, which had made her eyes well up with tears of gratitude and surprise. But she heard nothing. She looked around. The gallery was empty, and she sighed, mostly out of relief.
Then, out of nowhere: “Remarkable.”
An An jumped and looked up at the balcony, where the voice was coming from. It belonged to a thin dark woman in an oversized grey coat who was leaning so far over the railings to peer at An An that it looked as if she were on the verge of toppling over.
“I didn’t break anything,” said An An quickly.
“I can see that,” said the woman. “Stay right there. Let me look at you.”
With surprising speed, the woman descended the stairs and stood in front of An An. She extended a hand, as if An An were grown-up. “My name is Francesca. But they call me the One.”
Uncertainly An An shook the hand. Mama had told her never to speak to strangers. She introduced herself anyway: “My name is An An. An An Hsu. Most people call me Ann.”
The woman seemed to be only half listening. She leaned in and examined An An even more closely, as if checking her for flaws, and An An’s heart sank because she knew the woman would find them. Everyone did. An An flinched as the woman opened her mouth to speak, but to her great surprise, what came tumbling from the woman’s lips was “Remarkable. Truly remarkable.”
An An’s eyes opened wide, and the woman knelt in front of her, closer than anyone except her mother ever had. She felt nervous. Was this what happened when people got kidnapped? Should she scream? Should she call out for Mama? But before she could say anything, the woman spoke again. “It goes away eventually, you know—this feeling that something is wrong with you. That you don’t belong. It may not seem that way, but it will.”
An An stared at her. The question burst out of her, hoarse and timid: “H-How do you know?”
“I felt as you do when I was a little girl.”
“Really?”
The woman nodded. “All Oddfits do.”
An An blinked. “Oddfits?”
“Yes, Oddfits.”
“What are Oddfits?”
The woman smiled. Not warmly; her manner had a matter-of-factness about it, a certain detachment. But An An basked in it as if it were sunshine on a cold day.
“We are,” the woman said simply. “You, me, and many of the others on the Quest.”
“What’s the Quest?” asked An An. It seemed the obvious next question.
“The organization I helped found. Our mission is to explore the More Known World.”
“What’s the More Known World?”
“I’ll show you if you like.”
An An recalled herself. “I shouldn’t go anywhere with strangers,” she said, drawing back hastily.
The woman advanced. “We don’t have to go anywhere. We can stay right here.”
An An looked puzzled. “I don’t understand.”
The woman looked at her sharply. “Of course you don’t,” she snapped.
An An shrank back, stunned at this sudden change in attitude.
The woman continued. “You don’t understand anything, do you? Let’s be honest. Everyone else does, but you don’t. Not really. It’s like something’s always missing, isn’t it? A piece of a puzzle everyone else can see that you can’t. Or an instruction everyone else is following that you didn’t catch. You’re always out of place, but you don’t know why or which place you’re supposed to be. You belong somewhere else, but you don’t know where . . .”
As the woman spoke, An An’s heart began to pound—faster and faster. It seemed to her as if the room they were in was stretching and multiplying, segmenting into angular facets, which would expand and divide again into more facets, and more facets still. The woman, whom she had been standing next to just seconds before, was moving farther and farther away as if she were on a high-speed conveyor belt. Yet to all appearances both she and the woman were standing completely still.
“What’s happening?” cried An An, reaching out to steady herself against a nearby exhibition case. But it had receded into the distance like the woman, who by now was nothing but a tiny speck on the horizon.
Then, with a jolt, everything contracted. The room was back to normal, everything was in its proper place, and the woman’s face was, once again, mere inches away.
“That,” said the woman.
“What?” asked An An.
The woman’s face assumed a puzzled expression. “You asked what the More Known World was, didn’t you? That was it. Partly. Apologies for saying such awful things earlier. It’s easier for novices to access the More Known World when they feel unhappy and out of place.”
A shiver ran up little An An’s spine. Not a bad sort—the kind you get when you step into a warm bath. Then the shiver spread, melting into her flesh, radiating outwards towards her extremities. Then she knew—this was what it felt like to be home.
Suddenly the woman glanced at her watch. “We don’t have enough time,” she declared.
“Time for what?” asked An An.
“I’ll come back,” said the woman, instead of answering the question. “Quick, tell me. Where will you be next Saturday?”
Ann tried to think. And as she did, the woman cast her eyes around the room as if steeling herself for an ambush. “Hurry,” she urged quietly. “I can’t stay long.”
“Kentucky,” blurted An An. “In Louisville. The Miss All-Star America Pageant.”
The woman nodded. “I’ll come back,” she said again.
And then she vanished.
“Wait!” cried An An, reaching out, stepping forward. But as she did, she gasped. It was as if all the air in the spot where the woman had stood had been sucked away. She fell backwards onto the floor and found she could breathe again.
“An An!” she heard her mother scream from somewhere behind her. And in a flash, her mother was cradling her in her arms. “Are you hurt? What happened?”
“I’m okay,” An An answered, still in a daze. “I was just . . . talking to someone, that’s all. Then she disappeared.”
This only exacerbated Mama’s alarm. “Who? I told you not to talk to strangers! What did she do to you? Where is she?”
An An shook her head weakly. “She didn’t do anything. I fell by myself. That’s all. I lost my balance and fell.”
“You have to be careful, An An!” her mother said frantically. “There are bad people in this world, and crazy people too. She could have kidnapped you. Or worse. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to you!”
“I’m sorry, Ma. But nothing happened. I feel fine.”
Mama frowned. “What did she say to you anyway?”
An An recalled what the woman had told her about
Oddfits and the More Known World, and in her mind’s eye she seemed to glimpse again that vision—that magical, multiplying, expanding room.
An An answered her mother’s question. “She thought I was lost.”
There. It was done. He set down his pencil stub and let it roll off the table onto the floorboards with a clatter. Then, with a quivering hand, he placed his right index finger beneath the first word of the scene he had just written so he could read the whole thing from the start.
His nervousness made him feel silly and melodramatic—especially since he had written this latest instalment of his autobiography in the third person precisely so he could avoid being overwhelmed with feeling. Nevertheless, he could feel his heart racing and sweat dewing his forehead.
He wet his lips with his tongue, cleared his throat, and began to read:
The big day was finally here, and he could scarcely believe it. How long had he dreamed about this very moment? How many hours had he spent imagining what it would be like? He didn’t have to imagine anymore. It was happening. It was real.
He looked down the aisle, between the guests seated on either side in the wooden pews. Out of the corner of his eye he could see his parents and older brother smiling at him from the front row. He could also see his future mother-in-law beaming at him as well. Every now and then, people would shift in their seats and turn around to look at the doors behind them where she would appear, any moment now, radiant as a sunset and gorgeous as a rainbow after the rain.
He felt a nudge in his side. It was his best friend and best man, Rory.
“Nervous?” Rory asked.
“I’ll say,” he said. “But happy. I feel like the luckiest man in the world.”
Suddenly the pipe organ began to play, and the doors at the back of the church swung open. There she was. The love of his life. Penelope.
“‘Feel,’ my foot,” whispered Rory. “You are the luckiest man in the world.”