Best of All Possible Worlds

This week, we bring you John Chu’s marvelous story about music, multiverses, and scallion pancakes. Originally published in Asimov’s, Feb. 2013, it is only available online here.

~ Julian and Fran, February 9, 2025

For February, The Sunday Morning Transport features stories by Jennifer Hudak, John Chu, Carrie Vaughn, and Marie Brennan. As always, the first story of the month is free to read.

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Best of All Possible Worlds

By John Chu

A trumpet fanfare blasts inside my head. Intricate violin runs assault me. I nearly drop my spatula in surprise. Since no orchestra is actually performing the overture to Candide in my kitchen, Declan must be bounding up the stairs to my apartment. I flip over the scallion pancake sizzling in my frying pan before it can burn.

Scraps of dough litter the glass bowl, cookie sheet, and rolling pin stacked in my sink. Flour dusts the counter. Oil has splattered all over the range. The rest of the apartment, just one room aside from the bathroom, isn’t much better. The light through the one window highlights the stacks of books on the floor and the mess of papers burying my laptop on the coffee table. Declan has seen the apartment look worse than this. I don’t even consider cleaning up, not that there’s time before Declan shows up. The door into the apartment rattles just as I slide that last pancake onto the stack with the rest.

By now, voices are singing inside my head. They alternate verses about war and peace in Westphalia. I recognize the tune as that of the opening number, but I only know of this version of the lyrics. It’d only been performed in public once, at a concert held at New York City’s Philharmonic Hall in 1968. A bootleg undoubtedly exists, but I doubt it sounds this good.

I shut off the range and open the door. Declan smiles down at me.

“Can I have some?” Declan’s voice only has one volume, booming. He looks exactly the way he sounds.

“Hi, Declan.” The music in my head gets softer.

He looks over me into the kitchen. “I can smell them from home.”

Declan lives across town. If anyone else had said that, I’d say that they were being hyperbolic. With Declan, I’m not sure. Over the past several years of grad school, we seem to have made an implicit deal: I don’t let on that he’s not human and he . . . I hear complete, historically important performances of American musicals when he’s around. Honestly, he could actually be human—I’d feel like an idiot asking—except that wouldn’t explain the high-fidelity surround sound inside my head right now.

He deploys his gaze. Anyone who looks like he spent his glory days on the offensive line of his high school football team a decade ago should not have eyes that pleading. Then again, I like the smell of toasted sesame oil, too, and the pancakes are better hot.

I step aside and he blurs past the worn, ashen couch into the kitchen. The top pancake is still greasy with hot oil, but neither his hands nor his mouth seems to notice. If he were this careless around anyone else, they wouldn’t think he was human, either. However, he’s like this only around me.

Maybe I’m not one to talk about fitting in. My parents weren’t born in this country, but at least my ancestors stretching back to time immemorial were all born on this planet.