by Yiyun Li
Those notebooks have blank pages.
Not all books have to be blank, I said. Everyone agrees you are a beautiful poet.
Ha, from reading those doodlings I sent you when I was a kid? he said. You don’t understand poetry.
You as me, your mother, or you as the world?
You as my mommy, he said. Nikolai might be the only sixteen-year-old to still call his mother Mommy. No offense, but your taste is not to be trusted, he said.
I laughed. He had said the same thing when we had been in a shop in Edinburgh, choosing woolen and cashmere scarves for him.
Those scarves are mine now, I said.
Like pass-me-ups?
You don’t mind my wearing them?
I haven’t worn them so they’re not mine yet. But I do mind, he said, you or anyone reading my poetry.
I told him about an exhibition of Philip Larkin I had seen in England. There were covers of Larkin’s journals, the insides taken out and burned in a fireplace the day after his death.
I applaud that as much as you do, Nikolai said.
The key is to have someone you trust agree to live longer, I said.
But I can’t entrust my poetry to anyone, he said.
I thought about the people in the world who would all live longer than he. Would I trust any of them? Would I trust myself?
It’s not your fault, he said.
If you use fault in the sense of wrongdoing, I said, no, it’s not. But the root of the word fault came from to disappoint, to deceive.
Nikolai waited for me to go on. He was not often this patient in hearing me out.
Who can say to love doesn’t also mean to disappoint and to deceive? I said.
Those who disappoint or deceive don’t always do so from love, he said.
That, my child, doesn’t help a parent. If the job description of parenting, I thought, had come with the requirement to disappoint and to deceive, how many of us would have set out with guiltless hope in the first place?
Or hopeless guilt? he said. But you’ve decided that in this world we don’t abide by the rules that bind a child and a parent.
The line between self-deception and willpower is often blurred, I said.
I inherited both from you, didn’t I? he said. It’s not your fault, though.
Willpower was among his qualities I would remember. When he was in fifth grade, he had had trouble sleeping. Later he told me, when we were arguing, that whatever we had suggested had been of little help. I went to bed at nine and willed my body to stay still and my brain to stop thinking, he had said. That was how I solved my insomnia and that will always be the way I solve my problems. I can’t rely on anyone but my own willpower.
The line between willpower and arrogance is blurred, too, I said.
That, unfortunately, cannot be changed, he said. Give will some power and it turns blind. Just as people with power become so full of themselves they can’t see their own toes.
But then when does willpower see?
Willpower doesn’t have eyes to see, he said. Wishy-washiness has eyes, though. Too many. Like Argos.
Nikolai used to call me wishy-washy because he had liked the sound of it.
We can’t then let willpower lead us, I said.
You can’t, he said.
But how else does one live if not by willpower, when day after day after day after day a child hides himself? I read him a stanza from a Larkin poem:
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us.
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Days are not the only place where we live, Nikolai said.
Time is not the only place where we live, I said. Days are.
I don’t have to have days to live now.
And yet I have to live in days, I said.
I’m sorry, he said.
Days: the easiest possession, requiring only automatic participation. The days he had refused would come, one at a time. Neither my allies nor my enemies, they would wait, every daybreak, with their boundless patience and indifference, seeing if they could turn me into a friend or an enemy to myself.
Never apologize, I said, for what you have let go.
3
The Trespassers
I’ve been trying to find that poem by Elizabeth Bishop, I said. Remember, the one you wrote about?
I don’t, Nikolai said.
The first week of sixth grade, I said. You wrote how the poem made you realize memory turned the places we traveled to into different colors for you.
Purplish gray for Croatia, he said.
Yes!
Gold and silver for Paris.
Some odd choice for Berlin, I said. Some odder choice for Beijing. What colors were they?
I don’t remember.
Which poem is it?
I don’t remember that, either.
What are the rules of knowing and remembering for him now? For weeks I had been reading through Bishop’s poems, but none of them looked like the right one. Could he not name the poem, I thought, unfettered by memory?
Unfettered, he said. You chose the wrong word.
I looked up the word. He must have acquired a dictionary’s worth of knowledge.
If memory were a fetter, he said, many people would envy me.
Why?
Each day they live makes the fetter more unbreakable than the day before.
What if, I thought, that is life’s necessity?
Still, I said, aren’t you able to know the poem even if you can’t remember?
It doesn’t work the way you imagined.
Why not?
Something in the past, he said, and so specific. No, knowing is not about that.
In other words, I said, omniscience does not apply retrospectively. I kept having to refrain from saying: where you are.
Dilemmas are ubiquitous, he said, wherever you are.
Di-lemmas: two assumptions. Omniscience and memory: both questionable.
If one has to choose? I asked.
Memory is like eye color, he said. You always have it.
Yet one can choose to shut one’s eyes, I thought.
That doesn’t change your eye color, he said. Omniscience is like the ability to write poetry. Not all people are born with it.
Can one not acquire it? I asked.
Can you write poetry?
I thought about the question hard. No, I conceded. But I do like to use omniscient narrators in fiction.
Ha. That sounds like my friends who bring store-bought cookies to the bake sale.
I feel unfairly judged, I said.
There is a perfection in omniscience that you don’t have and don’t understand, he said.
Or I don’t believe in perfection?
It’s lazy-minded of you to say you don’t believe in something that you don’t understand.
I thought about the things I didn’t understand. These days they often came back to Nikolai. Before daybreak I had remembered a little song he had made up when he was six and his little brother, J., was three, which they sang in tandem when having a bath together:
Happy-go-lucky fish
Happy-go-lucky fish
Message-in-a-bottle fish
Message-in-a-bottle fish
Rubber-ducky fish
Rubber-ducky fish
You know it meant nothing, right? Nikolai said. I made it up to amuse ourselves because you never got us out of the bathtub in time.
How would I know it meant nothing, I thought, when something and nothing seem to be walking hand in hand now, identical twins dressed in each other’s outfits. The song, h
aving circled in my head long enough, had acquired an indecipherability. All things indecipherable felt as though they possessed an inner logic.
Even if it means something, why not make that something into nothing? he said.
How?
Oh, I thought grownups are good at it. If someone asks you, Is there something wrong?, to be a good-mannered and considerate person you should answer, Thank you for asking but nothing is wrong. You don’t say, Thank you for asking but nothing is right. People would freak out if you said that, and if they freaked out, what would you say? Oh, please don’t worry, even though nothing is right, nothing is left, either.
You make my head swim, I complained. I have to write your words down to understand their meaning.
You’re being silly, like English teachers always asking us to look for metaphors in the text, Nikolai said.
Life is not lived by metaphors, we said together. He had heard that first when he had to sit through my teaching for five hours. He was four, and lay under a long table, slowly but persistently rolling from one end to the other and then back. The next day he said I had been mean when I said, Sometimes nothing is wrong with a story but that it’s boring.
When you made up that song, did you have a rubber duck or a rubber fish in the bathtub? I asked. Or both?
Neither, he said. How can you let your imagination be so limited?
Not imagination, I said, but one wants to make certain that the detail is right.
Why does it matter?
True, I thought. Right or wrong, the song had kept me awake but dreading to rise and meet the day.
Remember what you used to say to me? Nikolai said. Proportion, proportion, proportion.
I had also said to him, Patience, patience, patience; perspective, perspective, perspective.
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, he said.
I laughed. I was always in awe that he could say anything as fast as humanly possible.
As fast as inhumanly possible, that’s what you should rather use in your thinking now, he said.
Of course not.
Why not, if you make so much ado about precision? A misused adverb is worse than an adverb, he said.
I used to edit adverbs out of his writing. I had expected our arguments to continue, but to argue about adverbs? Oh, please, I said.
Fine, he said.
I only meant that we have so much to say to each other, I said, rather than quibbling.
Do we really?
Am I presumptuous to think that our conversation has not been interrupted despite life’s finickiness? What we have is finickier than life. Any disturbance would disperse this—and what is this, in any case? Not dreaming, not hallucinating, not running away together, not running away separately, but running into each other constantly. Finding a way to be when it is difficult, and impossible, to be—is it for him, too?
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shut you off, I said.
He remained quiet. I had made a mistake. Even arguing for the sake of arguing was better than dead silence.
What’s disproportional about me now? I said, trying to regain his attention, but he didn’t speak. Is that how a mother loses a child? Is that how any person loses any person, by not understanding the treachery of words, or worse, by thinking one can conquer that with precision? Silence is the best defense and the best offense. What happens when one counters silence with silence, like the ironsmith in the Chinese fable who brags about having cast the strongest armor that would shield against the fiercest spear, and the fiercest spear that would pierce the strongest armor? We would both be quiet ever after.
See how you let your mind be carried away to the wrong place, he said.
I was relieved. How so?
Would you have found me had I decided to remain lost to you? Would you have received a word from me had I decided that not speaking suited me well?
True, I said.
But you decide to remain wimpy.
A mother like me, I wanted to protest, is far from wimpy. But all I could think about was the newest release of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which he would never read now. Nikolai was way past the age but he had once commented that growing up on a series of books meant the obligation to always read the next installment.
See what I mean? he said. Never again. Every time you think, you end a thought on that phrase. What’s the big deal if it’s never again?
Nothing can be called a big deal now, I thought. If every moment is the curtain call to the previous moment, yes, we can throw up our hands and say, What’s the big deal? Where is the climax of this play? But big deals and climaxes only form a vacuum cleaner of time. It’s the small deals and the nothing deals that shatter time into ragged pieces. Days, strewn with expected and unexpected moments, did not offer a shortcut by saying, What’s the big deal? The day before, I was packing his clothes for a move to a new house. Among them was an oversize white shirt with the Wimpy Kid book title in Norwegian, which I had brought back from a publisher in Oslo. For a few years he had worn that as a pajama shirt. I had not paid attention to it while packing because there were other shirts, more meaningful, with better stories to tell, but now it had regained its place to tell its own story. Every afternoon I waited in the middle of a block, where I used to wait for Nikolai and his brother to come from two directions. On some rare days I was disciplined enough to face only one direction. Other days I turned around. Turning around was not a mistake, because no lesson could be learned. Turning around always brought a moment of haziness to my thought: There was no reason that the tree-lined street would not bring Nikolai back again, unhurried as a gray heron.
See, now you think like everyone else: How can anyone…
How can anyone—I said—what?
How can anyone believe that one day he was here and the next day he was gone?
Yet how can one, I thought. How can one know a fact without accepting it? How can one accept a person’s choice without questioning it? How can one question without reaching a dead end? How much reaching does one have to do before one finds another end beyond the dead end? And if there is another end beyond the dead end, it cannot be called dead, can it?
How good you are, Nikolai said, at befuddling yourself.
Fuddled, muddled, befuddled, I said. Every time you say something I have to turn to the dictionary. Every word has ten more definitions I have missed.
Nobody says you have to know all the definitions.
What if one could only make sense with those missing definitions.
Most people won’t bother themselves with that, you know.
Most—I said, and then, to be less generalizing, I revised myself—many people don’t have to go to this extreme as I do so as not to lose someone. I thought about what people said, that there are ways to keep the dead alive, that it’s our love and memory that carry them with us. But was that enough for Nikolai? Any lesser way would only make him vanish again. He had outwitted many people. There was no reason he would not do it again.
Sounds like trespassing to me, Nikolai said.
My trespassing in your life? I said. Just the day before I had decorated a room in the new house, which we called Nikolai’s room, with a sign he had made for his bedroom in our old house in California. STAY OUT.
And the part of your mind where you shouldn’t enter, he said.
Does one have to stay out of part of one’s own mind? I asked.
If you don’t want to be out of your mind entirely, he said.
Do you stay clear from where you shouldn’t be in your mind?
Do you mean: Do I, or did I?
It makes no difference, I said.
If I’m the trespasser of my own mind I’ve acquitted myself, he said.
Then I shall acquit myself, too.
Don’t trespass in the first place, he s
aid.
Too late, I said. To love is to trespass.
To live, too, he said. How can anyone not see it that way?
4
Then the Button Came Undone
Why, you’ve been quiet, Nikolai said.
I had been. I couldn’t find words just yet.
Bad day? he said.
I realized then that not all rules of this world were clear to me. Did he go everywhere I went, see everything I saw?
Not really, he said. Not always.
Even omniscience is limited, I thought. So your ability to read my thoughts doesn’t extend to the ability to see the physical world I traverse, I said.
It depends.
On what?
My mood.
Where are you when you’re not in the mood to be here? I asked.
Here, which here?
I mean when you’re not in the mood to talk with me, I said.
But that was not precise, either.
That’s not for you to know, he said.
I had just driven past the corner of F—— and M——, where I used to drop him off in the morning. I told him that. By accident, I said. There was a detour I didn’t expect.
Where I last saw you, he said.
That line should be mine, I thought.
Mine, too, he said.
Why, you’re quiet again, he said after a long pause.
Some things are still harder for me than for you, I said.
Like what?
I thought about the eight hours between when I had dropped him off at the intersection and when he had died. Eight hours was a long time. What had happened would always be unknown to me.
Perhaps it’s the least important thing to know? he said.
How many eight hours can be fit into a life? I had known Nikolai for sixteen years and twenty-two days. I had loved him longer. When he was an infant, I had worked in a hospital, and for the duration of the workday, longer than eight hours, he would refuse to take a drop from a bottle, and then would nurse every hour after I got off work, all night long. A six-week-old baby or a sixteen-year-old boy, unyielding to the point of extravagant intrepidity.