When We Were Infinite

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  “What are you guys writing about?” Sunny asked.

  “I have nothing to write about,” Brandon said. “I’m boring. My life is boring. I would’ve thought by now I’d have, like, done something for the world.”

  “That’s because you lowkey have hero syndrome,” Sunny said.

  “What? I don’t have hero syndrome.”

  “Okay, then would you rather date someone you didn’t like or someone who didn’t need you even a little bit?”

  “Someone who didn’t need me.”

  “Really? There would be nothing at all to fix in them? They wouldn’t be even the tiniest bit better off being with you?”

  “She’s got a point there,” Jason said to him, amused, and Brandon flicked Sunny lightly in the shoulder. “Okay, fine, touché.”

  “I kind of thought about writing about that article on moral luck,” Jason said. “I forget who posted it. Did you guys read it?” We hadn’t. “It was about how maybe whether you’re a good person or not comes down to luck. Like if you hit someone with a car and it was an accident, you aren’t guilty, just morally unlucky. Or, like—maybe you would’ve been a decent person if you grew up in, I don’t know, California today, but instead you were born during like, the Roman Empire, and so you became some bloodthirsty soldier instead.”

  “Isn’t that basically the Just Following Orders excuse?” Sunny said. “Anyway, plenty of people are born in California today and aren’t decent people.”

  “Right, sure,” Jason said. “I mean, you read the comments section of basically anything and you’re like, cool, half the people here are fascists. But I think the part that gets me is more the opposite. Like what if you tell yourself you’re a good person but then when it comes down to it, if you’d been born into slightly different circumstances you’d also go around crucifying people or whatever? So then you were never really good, you’ve just been morally lucky all along.”

  “Nah, I think you’d hold out,” Brandon said. “You would’ve been a blacksmith or something. A doctor.”

  “A Roman Empire–era doctor sounds basically as bad as a soldier,” Grace said.

  “You would’ve been a soldier, definitely, Sun,” Brandon said, and Sunny laughed.

  Nestled in the car there with all of them that day, I thought I’d write about them, maybe, and what they meant to me. They were the truest thing I could think to tell anyone about my life and about who I was.

  My phone was still quiet when we got to the theater, and I checked my email again, just in case. Three nights ago I’d been up past two in the morning working on an email to my father. He almost always stayed up late gaming, or at least he used to, and so while I was writing I imagined him awake too, twenty miles away. Usually I didn’t invite him to things, because even if he did come, which I doubted he would, it would be unbearable if he didn’t have a good time. But this was our last Fall Showcase and my first show as the second-chair violinist, and so I’d thought—why not?

  We got there at the same time as Lauren Chang and Susan Day, the third and fifth violins. When they said hi, Jason switched on a smile, what I always thought of as his public mode, and reached to hold the door open. They were midconversation, and Susan was saying, “Actually, it’s pretty impressive what you can accomplish just to trick yourself into having self-esteem,” and Jason laughed.

  “That’s the most inspiring thing I’ve ever heard,” he said, and Susan blushed, pleased. When they went ahead of him inside, though, he was serious again. He caught my sleeve just before I went through the door.

  “Hey,” he said quietly, “did you hear from your dad?”

  I shook my head, and Jason winced. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I mean—it’s not.”

  It was loud when we arrived backstage, everyone spread across the risers. Jason and I took our seats at the front. Tonight’s was just a brief solo to introduce himself as the concertmaster—his more important one was later in the year—but earlier that week I’d noticed he’d bought gold rosin for his strings, something he’d always scorned as a waste of money.

  “Did your parents come, Jason?” I asked, and then immediately regretted it. We all knew better than to ask about his parents.

  He took a moment to answer, arranging the music on his stand. “They might’ve,” he said, politely. “I’m not really sure.”

  “I’m nervous,” I said quickly, to change the subject. “Especially about the Maderna. Are you?”

  “Nah, it’s so self-indulgent to be nervous.” Then he winced. “That, ah, came out wrong. I didn’t mean you.”

  “No, it’s all right.”

  Mr. Irving was making his way to the front of the risers, his shock of frizzy white hair tamed slightly for the occasion. Jason studied me for a moment, then offered me a smile—his real one, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “You let people get away with too much.”

  When we filed onstage, it was immediately warm under the lights, and bright enough that you couldn’t make out individuals in the audience. And even though it was stupid, I let myself hope. But of course my father wasn’t out there watching. It was a weeknight, and in San Francisco, after all.

  Mr. Irving held his arms up, waiting. Then he lifted them and the music began, like a thunderclap, and we were inside it.

  We played our full set: a Handel, a Maderna, a Chopin. When it was time for Jason’s solo, the violins lowered our instruments. As I watched him, my heart thudded. He took a deep breath, then he straightened and drew his bow forcefully across his strings.

  His style was so different from mine; I always thought of myself as slipping into a piece. Jason broke in like he was shattering glass. But then, right before the coda, I heard him start to falter—just slightly, on that run of grace notes—and I looked, alarmed, at Mr. Irving. In an orchestra, you learn to hear that point when things escape the conductor’s control, like an old cup you can fill without watching because you know the pitch change just before it overflows. I held my violin in my lap and watched Jason, willing him to stay with Mr. Irving. He held on. I smiled at him, relieved, but he was absorbed, and didn’t see me.

  When we came back in, it took a beat for us to meld cleanly together again, and I couldn’t quite hear myself. Sometimes, on a piece that was especially comfortable to me, I would lift my bow slightly above my strings so that just for a few seconds my motions produced only silence, so that when I started playing again I recognized the tiny change in sound.

  I was tempted to fall into that indulgence that night, to hear whatever difference I made, but I knew I couldn’t. There was, after all, an audience, and in music you could be a lot of things, but selfish wasn’t one of them.

  * * *

  I woke exhausted on Monday. I was desperate to sleep more, like every morning, but instead I dragged myself out of bed to shower and do my makeup and hair and brows. I could hear my mother getting ready for work, the pipes groaning when she turned on the shower. We lived in one of the older houses in Congress Springs, a dark two-story with reddish carpet and no air-conditioning, built seventy years ago back before the family diners and the feed shop and the Olan Mills studio gave way to tutoring centers and Asian markets, before white parents started holding town forums to discuss how the schools had gotten too competitive. Most adults here worked in tech, but my mother, who had gone to Lowell and then Berkeley and probably expected a brighter future, worked at a bank near downtown for what seemed like, based on how much she worried about bills, not very much money.

  While I waited for my mother to be done with her shower—there’d be no hot water if I turned mine on at the same time—I checked my phone, and there was an email from doug.claire: my father. I opened it, my heart stuttering.

  Sorry to miss the show, he’d written. I’ll come next time if I’m free.

  You can read so much into so few words; you can conjure whole universes. And I let myself, my mind wandering, until my phone buzzed. It was Sunny, a messag
e to me and Brandon and Grace: okay, who’s seen the review?

  When I went downstairs, my mother had arranged a place setting for me: a bowl of jook carefully covered in tinfoil, a glass of milk, and a section of the newspaper, folded open. There was a note next to my bowl in her neat, small handwriting: Dear Beth, drink ALL the milk. Here is an article about your show.

  Maderna’s Liriche Greche was an ambitious piece for sixty teenagers to attempt, even under the direction of celebrated veteran Joseph Irving. When the Bay Area Youth Symphony gave its anticipated Fall Showcase, the program offered a promising and impressive selection.

  While the music was technically proficient—the young musicians have clearly been hard at work—at times the sound tended toward the deconstructive, occasionally to the music’s detriment. The most technically demanding section of Chopin’s Prelude 28, No. 4 was played nearly exactly as it was written on the page, with little to offer by means of interpretation or emotion. It was a surprising showing from Irving, who usually favors emotional movement over structure and rigor.

  Principal violinist Jason Tsou, a senior at Las Colinas High School in Congress Springs, delivered a skillful if emotionally stunted solo. The evening’s one high point came with Tsou’s mastery of the spiccato. In Tsou’s case, perhaps the attractive glow of future potential excuses last night’s performance.

  ——RICH AMERY

  By the time my mother dropped me off at school, Sunny, Grace, Brandon, and I had already been messaging about the review for nearly an hour. It was a cool, clear morning, mist still clinging to the foothills rising out past the track and baseball fields. The trees by the parking lot had littered layers of red and gold and orange leaves everywhere, small sunsets that crackled under your footfall.

  Sunny was waiting for me by the math portables, eating her daily breakfast of almonds and dried cranberries out of a Stasher bag, which she held out to offer me. “You think Jason’s seen it yet?”

  I ate an almond with exactly three cranberries so I wouldn’t mess up Sunny’s almond-to-cranberry ratio. “My guess is yes, by now. He probably went looking.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me if he was expecting it to be bad.” She glanced behind her as we started across the rally court to our lockers. “After we dropped him off last night, Brandon said last week, he and Jason were at the gym and something happened, like Jason messed up or couldn’t finish his—what do you call them? Reps?” Sunny hated the gym. “And he got mad and threw his weights across the floor. I think Brandon’s kind of worried. He said he feels like one of these days Jason’s just going to snap.”

  “Snap in what way?”

  “He didn’t say. And then Grace, naturally, laughed it off and told Brandon he worries too much.” Sunny rolled her eyes. “I know Grace doesn’t physically believe in things going wrong, but—”

  “What are we talking about?” Grace said, smiling, materializing in front of us as we approached our lockers. Brandon was with her, drinking coffee from his Hydro Flask.

  “Your relentless and extremely unfounded optimism,” Sunny said, reaching for a sip of Brandon’s coffee.

  “Are you still talking about the review?” Grace said. “He said he could tell we’d been working hard, didn’t he? I think he was trying to be nice.”

  “Trying to be nice? Okay, I mean, would you rather sleep through the SAT or have to tell Jason to his face that he sounded emotionally stunted?”

  “Did he say anything to you about it, Brandon?” I said.

  Brandon raised his eyebrows. “What about any of your interactions with Jason makes you think he would see it and, what, call me? Text me emojis about it?”

  “It’s better than if he just doesn’t talk about it with anyone.”

  He laughed at me. “You really didn’t grow up in a real Asian home, huh? Gotta work on that repression.”

  “Brandon,” Grace scolded. She knew about that twinge in my chest I always got whenever someone commented how Asian I wasn’t. It marked my lack of wholeness, how visibly I never quite belonged. My mother had grown up in the Sunset District in San Francisco, the daughter of parents who’d run a laundry service and preferred not to talk about their difficult pasts, and she spoke Cantonese but had never taught me or sent me to Chinese school. She’d married a white man—my father was a fourth-generation Idahoan before he moved here—and our last name was Claire. Sunny and Brandon and Jason’s families were all from Taiwan—Sunny and Brandon were both born there—and sometimes it seemed like everyone but me knew the same places to eat in the night markets in Taipei, the same apps you used for group chats with your cousins overseas. Grace’s family had been here for four generations, and every year her huge extended family went on cruises together and all wore matching jerseys with NAKAMURA on the back. My mother was an only child and the daughter of only children, and so I didn’t belong to any family in that same way in any country. I belonged, instead, to my friends.

  “So you think Jason’s upset?” I said.

  “I think it’s going to really fuck him up,” Brandon said.

  “Do you think there’s any chance at all he’ll think it wasn’t that bad?”

  Brandon snorted. “None.”

  We found Jason by the poster wall outside the cafeteria with Katie Perez, the senior class president. They were hanging a sign among all the others advertising service club activities: a used graphing calculator drive, a gun violence walkout, a climate change march. He looked pleasant and nonchalant, although he always did in front of other people. Sometimes when I saw him, the angular lines of his face that were always both familiar and elusive to me, something inside me went off like a camera flash.

  “DIY pumpkin porg making, huh?” Brandon said, reading Katie’s poster.

  Grace squinted. “What’s porg? Is that like a health food?”

  “From Star Wars,” Katie said. “That was the fundraiser we all voted on, remember?”

  Jason laughed, handing back her masking tape. “The representation the people demand.”

  “Yes, the people don’t realize how much work it’s going to be to get a million, like, pumpkins and googly eyes,” Katie said. “Okay, I’m off to copy more flyers. Thanks, Jason.”

  And then it was just us. I knew Brandon was probably right, but if Jason brought up the review, it would mean it was okay. We could pick it apart and strip it of its power; we could drown it out with all our voices instead.

  We waited to see what Jason would say, trying to pretend we weren’t.

  “I’ll be honest,” he said. “Porgs are the only part of Star Wars I would expect you to know about, Grace.” So he wouldn’t say anything, then, which meant neither would we.

  AT THE END OF rehearsal the Wednesday before SAT IIs, Mr. Irving asked if any of us seniors were planning to audition for music programs. My heart skittered, the way it did just before flipping over a test sheet to start an exam, and I willed Jason to raise his hand.

  He didn’t. I knew the rough sketch of the future he’d methodically planned for (Berkeley, med school, a cardiac fellowship), and I’d always known none of my friends would continue musical careers after BAYS, but still I’d always hoped somehow it would be different for Jason. He was easily the most talented of the five of us, and it felt extravagantly wasteful to abandon that. We’d never once had a principal violinist who considered BAYS the end.

  After rehearsal, Mr. Irving asked me to stay. When the room had emptied and he was still perched on his stool, he smiled at me and said, “You know, I’ve been thinking it would be well worth your time to apply at places like Curtis or Jacobs. Maybe Berklee or something like the New England Conservatory as backups.”

  I was startled. I hadn’t raised my hand during rehearsal to say I was auditioning; Mrs. Nguyen, the private teacher I saw once a week, had asked whether she should save room in her schedule for extra lessons to prepare for auditions, and I’d said no and assumed the matter was settled. I knew it would be something of a stretch, but I was hoping for B
erkeley—my father had always wanted me to go there like he and my mother had, and it would mean, most likely, being with Jason. “Oh—well—”

  “You’ll probably have to go out of state to land anywhere worthwhile.”

  “Right, of course. I just hadn’t—I hadn’t really thought—”

  “You aren’t considering it? There’s not a single school of music that would tempt you?”

  He was watching me closely. The lights were hitting too brightly on me, and I started to answer, then stopped. I could’ve told him the truth, which was that no, it wasn’t something that had ever felt like a real option. Or I could’ve told him the other truth, which was that I fantasized about it in the same way I fantasized about, say, being with Jason, or my father moving back home. I could tell him that if I thought too hard about the future I could get lost in the grimness of a world without violin, where my life would just be some exhausting job that made billionaires richer while people starved and the planet spun toward immolation, but that for as long as I could remember I’d kept a framed picture on my desk of my father and me from when I was a year old, where he was sitting at his computer with me on his lap, Call of Duty on his screen, and we were wearing matching Berkeley shirts and both of us were beaming.

  But those things would disappoint him, and I never liked to give people the answer they didn’t want from me. “Maybe if it were, like, Juilliard—not that I’d get—”

  “Juilliard’s prescreen deadline is coming up,” he said eagerly. He and his husband had both gone there; he spoke of it often. “Have you given any thought to a possible audition repertoire? I don’t know if you’ve looked at Juilliard’s requirements yet—for the Paganini, I think you might consider the Twenty-First. And for the concertos—do you know Zwilich?” He got up from the stool and pulled a folder of sheet music from his bag. “Why don’t you take this home and see what you think of it. I thought it would be perfect for you.”