by Yiyun Li
Ever so sluggishly time moved forward. Moran had forgotten to wind her wristwatch the night before, so it had stopped sometime before daybreak. She watched the slanting angle of the sunlight entering the window, leaving a path of floating particles in midair. In her Chinese textbook there was the poem about a lifetime passing like a white horse leaping across the narrowest crevice; the ancients had not been wrong if a thousand years had passed easily between their writing and her reading the poem, but had they also felt the weight of a never-ending movement when they had written those lines?
The radio, kept on at a low volume, proceeded from the morning news to the weather forecast and later the preschool children’s sing-along program, though they all sounded unreal in her feverish half dreams. Moran thought about the people who would be listening to the radio on a morning like this: pensioners, shop owners sitting behind counters and waiting for the first customer of the day, a bicycle repairman at a roadside shed pulling out a punctured inner tube, someone outside the system like Shaoai, having no place to be.
Toward the end of the day Moran heard people come back from work. Her fever had not broken, which gave her the excuse to stay isolated. Later, Moran heard Boyang’s voice from the living room, and her mother explaining to him that he had better stay away. Could he just say hi, he asked, and Moran’s mother said she would check to see if Moran was awake. Moran closed her eyes, and when she heard Boyang leave, she wept quietly.
It took Moran a week to recover, and except for the weekend when Boyang went to his parents’ apartment, he came over every evening to chat with her, and once Ruyu came with him, too. When Moran was feeling less sick, she would prop herself up with a pillow, and he would sit astride a chair placed at the entrance of the bedroom. They had been polite with each other at first, but soon Boyang returned to his usual self. Several other classmates had caught the flu, too, he said, but he and Ruyu had been lucky not to have it; the midterm was in two weeks, but there was no need for Moran to worry about the missed classes, as he would go over everything with her once she felt well enough; in biology lab the next day they would be dissecting frogs, which he knew she would not like to do, so she might as well stay sick and skip it; and, by the way, did she know that Sister Shaoai was also sick, so when everybody was at work or at school she and Shaoai could keep each other company.
“What happened to Sister Shaoai?” Moran said, surprised that her parents had not told her about it.
Boyang said it was probably the same virus. Remember when they had the measles together, he asked, and she said of course she did. In third grade Moran and Boyang had been caught by a measles epidemic, and his grandmother had set up her house for the two to be quarantined from the rest of the quadrangle; every morning and evening she would feed them dark, bitter liquid brewed from herbs, but otherwise they had been left alone with a chess set and a radio. Moran was a terrible chess player. Every time she was about to lose Boyang would switch sides with her, and it amazed her that however badly she opened her game he was able to change it for the better; sometimes they would switch sides several times in a game, until she would lose almost all the pieces for both red and black, and there was nothing to do but to call it a draw.
Those had been the happiest days, she thought, but did not say so to Boyang, for whom happier days were to come.
Unlike Moran, who was recovering by day, Shaoai deteriorated. By the time Moran was allowed to go back to school, little was on her mind but Shaoai’s illness—she had gone into a coma a few days before. The doctors were baffled, as the flu-like symptoms had quickly given way to other, more serious problems: hair loss, vomiting, seizures, and loss of much of her brain functions; all the tests run had offered few clues.
Before Boyang left for his parents’ home for the weekend, he told Moran to call him if there was any news about Shaoai. Every day Aunt and Uncle took turns being at the ICU with Shaoai; neighbors had offered to take a few shifts so the couple could rest, but they had declined, saying it was best if they could be there before the doctors could give a definite diagnosis.
After lunch on Sunday, Moran went to Shaoai’s house and looked for Ruyu. Earlier in the morning they had studied for midterms together. Uncle was taking a nap, and Ruyu was feeding Grandpa some rice mush. These days Ruyu spent much of her free time taking care of Grandpa, who alone was spared the worries that had shrouded the quadrangle like a dark fog. For each day Shaoai stayed in coma, it seemed one more person started to lose heart. At breakfast that day, Moran’s mother had wondered aloud if they should hope now for a different scenario: “For sure Shaoai cannot recover as a normal healthy person again—sometimes you don’t know if it’d be easier for everyone if her parents let her go.”
In the small cube of Grandpa’s bedroom Ruyu looked pensive. After she fed Grandpa and cleaned his face and neck with a towel, she told Moran in a low voice that she would be sitting here with Grandpa until he fell asleep. I’ll sit with you, Moran whispered back. Ruyu glanced at Moran, and she knew that Ruyu did not welcome her company. Still, Moran could not help but feel less uneasy if she could keep an eye on Ruyu; during the weekdays Boyang was always around, but on a Sunday like this, when everyone’s attention was elsewhere, Moran was particularly unwilling to leave Ruyu alone.
Neither spoke. Grandpa looked exhausted, and dozed off soon. The only window high on the wall was open, and Moran watched the blue sky beyond, and listened to a few sparrows pecking on the roof. Autumn would soon be over, and when winter came the peddlers would set oil drums aflame on the street corners and later roast sweet yams and chestnuts in the hot ashes. In the past winters, Moran and Boyang used to stop by one of the oil drums and pick up the biggest yam, its purple or brown skin charred and wrinkled. Easily she could see, in her mind’s eye, Ruyu and Boyang divide a yam into halves, smiling at each other through the steam rising from the golden inside of the yam.
Moran stopped herself from pursuing the thought, ashamed that she was so selfish as to dwell upon her minor pain while Shaoai’s life was in danger. Moran did not believe Shaoai would die, and these days before her recovery reminded Moran of the time when she had fainted in a municipal bathhouse as a child. The air, hot with thick steam, had been oppressive, and grownups, comfortable in their nakedness, gossiped loudly; their voices, mixed with the running of showers and the splashing of the bathwater, had sounded as though they had come from far away; when Moran’s legs turned cottony, the last thought on her mind had been to hold on tight to the bath soap because fragrant soap was not cheap.
Any day now, any moment, Aunt or Uncle would come back with some good news—a diagnosis, or better, a retreat of the virus, and Moran would breathe freely again, as she had found herself awake in the cold air of the locker room, though the soap had slipped away, and had never been recovered. One day the neighbors in the quadrangle would refer to this time as the days when Shaoai had been mysteriously sick, as they would speak of the May afternoon when an army tank was overthrown and burned down at a nearby crossroads, or the day in June when Teacher Pang’s cousin pedaled three bodies on his flatbed tricycle from the Square to the hospital. Perhaps Moran would even think of these days as the beginning of a love story between Boyang and Ruyu. Life, in retrospect, can be as simple as a collection of anecdotes, and anecdotally we live on, trading our youthful belief in happiness—and at that age happiness almost always means being good, being right, and being loved—for the belief in feeling less, suffering little.
The gate to the courtyard opened, and it was clear from the neighbors’ gathering that Aunt had come back. Moran looked at her wristwatch—it was two o’clock, not yet time for Uncle to change shifts with Aunt. At once Moran felt hope arising—for sure by now the doctors would have found out how to treat Shaoai, though that hope was dashed when she heard Aunt’s voice.
“No, she’s the same,” Aunt said to the querying neighbors. “But one doctor asked me if she had been in contact with any chemicals recently. I told him that she was an internati
onal trades and relations major, but he said her symptoms more and more reminded him of a poisoning case he had seen in the seventies.”
“Poisoning?” several neighbors gasped. “But how could it be?”
“I don’t know,” Aunt said. “We don’t know how she’s been spending her time these days, or what kind of people she has met. I was coming back earlier because I thought we might find the phone numbers of her old classmates and ask them.”
Moran turned to look at Ruyu. The latter was watching Grandpa’s shallow breathing as though she found it mesmerizing. Moran hesitated and then grabbed Ruyu’s elbow. “Come,” Moran said. “I need to talk to you.”
Ruyu did not resist, and led the way to her bedroom. She sat down on the bedside and looked up, her eyes lucid. Moran pulled over the chair and sat down, feeling as though she herself had committed a crime and had to enlist Ruyu in a cover-up. “Where is the chemical you took from the lab?” Moran asked.
“Gone.”
“Gone where?”
“I don’t know,” Ruyu said. “I put the test tube in my drawer, but it was gone.”
“Since when?”
“I’m not sure. A few days now,” Ruyu said, and looked irritated. “I’m not like you, Moran, and this is not my home. Nothing I have really belongs to me. If someone takes something from me, what can I do but shrug and say, suit yourself?”
Taken aback, Moran did not know what to say.
“You think I poisoned Sister Shaoai?” Ruyu said, looking into Moran’s eyes with a taunting half smile. “Are you interrogating me now?”
“No! But did you hear what Aunt just said? The doctors thought it might be some chemical poison.”
“The doctors said it was meningitis earlier. And they may say something else tomorrow.”
“But why didn’t you say anything when Sister Shaoai got sick?”
“About what? Everyone got the flu last week. And then they were talking about bacterial infection.”
“Do you think it was Shaoai who took the chemical?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did she ask you about it?”
“You think people will ask your permission when they take something from you?”
Moran felt an urge to shake Ruyu. There was a life they had to save before it was too late. “What did you take from the lab, do you remember?”
Ruyu shook her head. “I never did say I took anything.”
“Do you understand that this is a serious matter? Can you come with me to tell Aunt and Uncle what happened? We need to call Boyang and his mother.”
“Do you think,” Ruyu said, raising her eyes, “that Sister Shaoai would like it if indeed it was her intention to commit suicide?”
“But we can’t sit here, doing nothing.”
“Why? What’s wrong with doing nothing? The world would be a much better place if people did less,” Ruyu said. “Why do you all think you have the right to change someone’s life only because you want to?”
Ruyu’s anger baffled Moran. It was useless to go on arguing. Moran stood up, and realized that her legs were shaking.
“Where are you going?” Ruyu asked.
“I’m going to talk to the grownups,” Moran said. “Are you coming with me?”
There was something unreadable in Ruyu’s eyes, a mixture of pity, derision, and curiosity. In the years to come Moran would return to this moment to study Ruyu’s face, searching for panic or guilt or remorse or fear—anything that would make Ruyu comprehensible—yet once and again Moran would see none of those, only a chilling tranquility, as though Ruyu had foreseen all that would come. But how could she have? To grant that prescience to a fifteen-year-old was to give her a mystic power beyond her capacity. Still, in every revisiting of the moment, that look had again manifested itself as Ruyu’s tepid effort to save Moran from taking a wrong turn; unseeing, unthinking, Moran had not heeded Ruyu’s admonition. Don’t tell, that look had said, warning more than pleading; stay still, that look had said; rehearse your lines before you put yourself on stage; those who have not the words for themselves will be the only ones found guilty.
Over the years Moran never stopped imagining that alternative of not speaking. It comforted her at times to think how things would have turned out: without the belated injection of the antidote—Prussian blue, a name belonging more to a painter’s easel than to a doctor’s cabinet—Shaoai would have died young, a heroine whose death could be explained only by fate, which was both unjust (letting a senseless tragedy befall a young woman already wronged) and merciful (it could’ve been worse, dragging on and making everyone suffer unduly, people would console themselves). A secret would have stayed alive between Ruyu and Moran for some time, though like other adolescent episodes, it would be put aside one day, presumed to be buried, and never let out to light again. Perhaps something good would eventually have come out of the love between Boyang and Ruyu, or else it would have taken the natural course as all first loves do, blossoming and fading and leaving no permanent damage. Either way, Moran herself and Boyang would have remained friends, and one day, when things stopped mattering so much, she would tell him the secret. They would shake their heads then, baffled or resigned, but too removed from the tragedy to feel perturbed. Life had been kind to them, they would tell each other, even with its mysteries unsolved and unsolvable.
“Go ahead,” Ruyu said. “It’s your decision to talk, not mine.”
The moments and hours and days that followed became an elongated tunnel, in which Moran was the lone traveler, carried forward not by her own will but by the unforgiving current of time; if that tunnel had ever ended she would not have noticed it. One day, when she arrived in America, she would see a commercial for a local support group for autistic children, in which a girl in a lilac-colored dress sang and acted out a story about the futile battle of an itsy-bitsy spider against the rain. Moran was not the only person in the living room of Westlawn then; her housemates were around, waiting for the opening game of the football season between the Badgers and a visiting team. None of them would notice Moran’s tears, and she would never again sit among them to watch television. She was not the only one trapped by life. She was afraid of meeting another person like her, but more than that she was afraid of never meeting another person like her, who, however briefly, would look into her eyes so that she knew she was not alone in her loneliness.
The blood tests confirmed Moran’s words and what had been taken from the laboratory, and Prussian blue saved Shaoai’s life but not her damaged brain. Ruyu must have stuck unwavering to her side of the story, which Moran could only piece together, over the years, by herself—she could not bring herself to ask others, and even if she had, no one would have told her anything: yes, Ruyu would say, she had stolen the chemical out of despair; no, there was not any concrete reason for her despair, but only a passing mood; no, she wouldn’t call herself unhappy, though she wouldn’t say she was happy, either; she had not felt she needed to worry when the tube of chemical was gone, as she had thought someone might have tossed it out while cleaning the room. Again and again she had to answer the questions, asked by grownups in the quadrangle, the high school officials, the university security committee, the police: no, she did not know who had taken the poison; no, she had not had a plan to kill Shaoai; no, Shaoai had never spoken of suicide with her; had she spoken of that with Shaoai? no, though she had talked about it briefly with Moran; perhaps Moran had told Shaoai; perhaps Moran had rummaged through Ruyu’s things and looked for the tube, or Shaoai had done that; had Moran ever spoken of suicide, no, of course not; would Moran want to kill Shaoai, no, she did not think so, though she could only speak from what she knew, and she did not know anyone well in this city; no, she had no reason to want to harm anyone; no, she did not do anything to harm anyone.
Moran did not know how much the world had trusted Ruyu’s words; though people must have trusted her enough, as eventually the investigation stopped, leaving too much space for everyone to com
e up with his own conjecture: could it be that there had been two suicidal souls under one roof? Or could it be that the thought of suicide was like a virus—it did not matter how it had started, but in the end it had caught both girls, and by mere chance one was spared? There had been reasons for Shaoai’s despair, and evidence: her being expelled from the university, her uncertain future, her dark mood, her one drunken episode that many had witnessed; quite a change from the ambitious and outgoing girl she used to be, people would agree. Less sense could be made out of Ruyu’s situation, though she was an orphan sent to live with strangers, and she was at an age when hormones could easily induce untrustworthy moods; who knows, the neighbors sometimes thought—there was no way to find out how her life had started: suppose there had been genes of madness to start with, in the parents’ lines? Their abandoning a baby girl could be more than being irresponsible; any orphan could be a host of dark secrets and unseemly history.
Ruyu’s grandaunts had been telegraphed and phoned; they, citing the inconvenience of travel at their age, did not come, though they did send a telegram, in which they said that they had raised Ruyu as a God-fearing child, and they believed that she would not lie. The telegram arrived in the middle of another crisis, when Grandpa was found unconscious; he was rushed to the emergency room, and never returned to the quadrangle.
Moran’s mother had signed for the telegram. Months later, when Moran found an excuse to stay home on a weekday—she felt sick, she told her mother, who let her skip school without further questioning—she looked around to see if her parents had saved anything related to the case, but the only thing she found was the telegram. Her mother must have conveyed the unkind message to Aunt and Uncle subtly, or did it matter even if she had not said anything? By then all was over: Boyang had been transferred to the high school affiliated with his parents’ university, and was allowed only to visit on weekends to see his grandmother; Ruyu, with Teacher Shu’s help, had become a boarder at school, and her stay in the quadrangle, barely four months, was never brought up by the neighbors afterward; Grandpa had passed away, and Shaoai’s family, having relocated to another district, had not come back for a visit again, though they were not forgotten: each year the neighbors pooled their money and sent a donation to Shaoai’s parents for her caretaking.