The girl of her dream

Perhaps any day now, she’d send a message asking him to transfer money to a particular bank account. Perhaps—and this was the worst-case scenario, he unabashedly thought to himself—she might be just like him, and the person she least wanted to look at in the world was herself. Contemplating this point, he decided to either stop the affair or take it to the next level. It was already a mercy that reality hadn’t yet brought him crashing down, and it seemed pointless rushing forward off his own bat. Furthermore, he ruminated, for all he knew, that this petite, attractive girl had been put on earth just to love him. If some people could win the lottery and others survive after being struck by lightning, why shouldn’t they be visited by a miracle after suffering for so many years? ∗ Perhaps because of his long-standing habit of avoiding reflective surfaces, he was the last person to detect the mysterious transformation. The first to notice was a gaggle of girls from a secondary school. Every evening, they’d come into the fast-food restaurant to do their homework, covering a table or two with books and notepads. Yet their eyes, full of suppressed twinkles, were not on their schoolwork at all but clung to him as he worked the cash register or flipped a burger or mopped the floor. This made him feel thoroughly self-conscious, and he made even more mistakes than usual, but there was nothing to be done about it. Next, his colleagues began whispering behind his back, not bothering to conceal their chatter, which was also not loud enough to be overheard. He’d known they loved to exchange rumors about others but had no idea he’d one day become the object of their gossip. Then came the final straw—his mother. One morning, she suddenly thought of something or other she needed to discuss with him and rushed over to his place. When he opened the door, she stood there slack-jawed. “Sorry, I must have come to the wrong house.” “Ma? What are you talking about?” She was so shocked she forgot the purpose of her visit. After studying him a long while, she finally said, “How come you’re so skinny now?” That was the least of it. After his mother left, a dazed expression still on her face, he went to his bathroom and stayed staring at the mirror for a good half hour. He could still just about recognize himself but was suddenly fearful. This felt like that fairy tale, the shoemaker and the elves—he wondered if something was coming in the middle of the night and only leaving at dawn, working day after day on his sleeping body, filling in and carving out, turning him into a lean-torsoed, clean-featured hunk of a man. His skin emanated some kind of light, and he’d grown a full eight centimeters. Even the big black mole by his eyebrow had shriveled into a pale blemish that let you imagine he’d once been punched in that spot. No wonder his mother, after not seeing him for some months, was shocked into temporary amnesia. No wonder his colleagues murmured about his being on some kind of special diet, subjected to some kind of make-over. And as for those secondary school girls—of course, they who’d had no interest in his former self couldn’t now get enough of his new self. He knew it was all down to the girl. His world had changed the moment she appeared. Like Ye Gong who pretended to be fascinated by dragons but ran away terrified when confronted by an actual beast, he stayed at home panic-stricken for three days, before wandering out shakily to embrace this wondrous event, like a lottery-winner showing himself to society for the first time, still uncertain how to hold himself, having to re-appraise his appearance in each shop window he passed. Gradually, though, this began to feel good. He was now bold enough to accept the fashion tips passed on by salesgirls as they giggled, ignoring other customers, their voices so tender it seemed they were spilling their secrets. How disappointed he was with his looks. Yet each time a woman pushed aside the cinema tickets he was offering, or he noticed a waitress looking askance at him, or he simply caught sight of himself in a subway train’s window, he’d hear a small but forceful voice: If you could look like Keanu Reeves, who would choose to be Mr. Bean instead? This unfortunate situation inevitably shaped his personality—he lived a life of withdrawal, cocooning himself away. During high school biology classes, when he learned about Mendel planting beans and discovering genetics, he recognized himself in a flash of insight: he was the composite of his grandfather’s freakishly tiny mouth, his grandmother’s pointy ears, his other grandfather’s naturally curly hair and laziness, his other grandmother’s tendency to plumpness, his father’s drunkard’s nose and slow reflexes, his mother’s height—she was shorter than most primary school students—and droopy eyes, his uncle’s mole (he was particularly annoyed about this—whoever heard of a mole being hereditary?) and vast quantities of acne, not to mention the petty-bourgeois taint they all shared. Realizing he was the combination of every single one of his family’s defects, which seemed more ridiculous than tragic, he decided to stop resisting his fate. When they got to Darwin’s theory of evolution, he grew even more anxious and decided that the only way to avoid falling foul of natural selection was to keep an extremely low profile, the way parents name their children ‘Dog’ or ‘Cow’ so as not to attract the attention of evil spirits. ∗ And so, with the stubbornness of a dog or cow, he continued to exist. Aged thirty-one, he lived alone, was an overweight fast-food server with extraordinarily curly hair, ludicrously bad luck, acne scars (though at least he’d stopped sprouting pimples), immaturity caused by lack of social interaction, and personal hygiene so bad the restaurant manager had to frequently speak to him about it—but nothing could hurt him anymore. When he encountered a beautiful female customer, his hands would shake (when word of this got out, many of the ladies who worked nearby flocked to the restaurant to test if they were attractive enough to provoke a tremor). Each night his dreams centred on turning into a completely different person. He entered his details into a dating site but waited three hundred and five days before receiving his first message. The girl said she wasn’t writing to him for any particular reason. Something about his self-introduction (which was only a hundred words long) made her feel they’d get along. He trembled as he read this, then spent three hours composing a reply, deleting as much as he wrote. From here on, they began a rapid exchange of messages. Each morning, he’d wake to find an e-mail from her—neither long nor short, perhaps five hundred words, mostly responding to his queries from the night before and adding to whatever they’d been talking about, plus displaying an appropriate level of curiosity about him. There was nothing special about her word choices, and sometimes she’d make grammatical mistakes even he could detect, but she had a warm intelligence that wasn’t in the least threatening. All in all, she seemed a perfectly normal girl with an average education. He’d read each message three to five times before heading off to the restaurant, where he’d fumble over and over for all of his work hours because his mind was completely occupied with composing his letter to her. After his shift ended, he’d rush home to send off a thousand words that had cost him an entire day’s errors at work and then the long wait till the next morning. This wasn’t a pleasant sort of anticipation, but he had several hundred reasons for not suggesting other means of communication. As to why he should find himself so hooked on her after only a month, it wasn’t only because he didn’t know a single other woman outside his family; rather, to him, she represented absolute perfection. By ‘perfection,’ he didn’t mean anything like long hair or big eyes or a slender figure, though, of course, he did have his image of the ideal look: petite, pale-skinned, soft as vanilla ice cream. But the most important thing was the internal drama accumulated after so many years of loneliness. For instance, she mentioned she adored celery, red grapes, fish, and beans, but didn’t much care for meat or shrimp, which meant if they were to eat together they could clean each other’s plates; she enjoyed after-midnight browsing at 24-hour supermarkets, picking up each item to examine it carefully before putting it back; she’d rather watch a DVD at home than go to the cinema (though she’d never rent one of those art-house films that went straight to DVD); she was an only child, she’d hated handicraft classes as a little girl, she frequently looked up at the sky as she walked along the street, she spoke too much when she was nervous, she caught colds easily, she dealt with stress by nursing little jealousies, she tried a different soft drink on each visit to the convenience store… Her daily note might have consisted largely of idle chatter, but it also revealed more and more details like the ones above, things he could never have imagined but that immediately felt right—they conformed to the innermost secrets of his heart, yet he could never have put them into words. At the same time, his sleep was suddenly stripped of dreams. He used to dream all the time about the beauty and the happiness missing from his real life. There was nothing now—no hidden treasures, no symbolism, neither profanity nor grace, nothing but a black void. This was illogical in all kinds of ways, and he should have had his doubts, but he believed the beautiful dreams hadn’t gone away but had rather crystallized into this encounter with the woman he was destined to be with, soon to become even more real. And so, on his wordless commute to and from work each day, he thought about this girl he hadn’t met but was intimate with, living life in parallel to him, and he felt a kind of joy that was both full and empty at the same time. They never talked about meeting face to face, and because they had such an obvious chemistry, he wasn’t too worried about that. But after many days of sun and rain, after many moments of connection, after many sweet exchanges, she never even suggested he might phone her for a real chat. Which wasn’t to say that if the girl walked up to him, he’d dare speak to her in person.