by Yiyun Li
Still, I said, here’s eight hours, something you know and I don’t.
I wouldn’t know what happens to your days most of the time, either, he said.
Mine, this, I said, is a different kind of not knowing.
Not knowing is not knowing, he said.
And not knowing must be close to what people call a wound. Along with wound are words like healing and scars. They are all bad analogies, the foundation of wishful thinking. Can one live, I thought, with a conclusion so fatally inconclusive?
The question should be, Does one want to? Nikolai said.
I remembered a story he had worked on in middle school, about a five-year-old boy named Nikolai. Uprooted by the 1917 Revolution, he and his mother fled St. Petersburg, accompanied by his nanny. They dressed him in a new coat, but neither woman talked while waiting for the train to leave the station.
He used to show me a page or two as he had finished them. I had not known what had led him to write the story. Nikolai—the boy in his story, the boy journeying to the unknown—sat in the train car and kept fingering a shiny brass button on his coat. His nanny told him not to do it, while the mother remained silent.
“Then the button came undone, and the coat was no longer new.”
I remembered the chill when I had read the line. I remembered telling him a sentence like that would take him a long way if he decided to become a writer. He was twelve then, not quite trusting my words. He could never write as perfect a sentence as he wanted, he had replied, my admiration making him more dejected.
But it’s true, he said now. Perfection is my only way of living.
Then the button came undone, and the coat was no longer new.
Nikolai—I said—I mean that boy in the story, he’d turn a hundred and five this year.
He’s dead, he said. If that’s not obvious enough.
When did he die? I asked. I had never seen the end of the story.
I didn’t finish it, he said. But I suppose he didn’t live past twelve or thirteen.
It was not the first time a boy had died in his stories. In fourth grade, a school project had led to a note of concern from the teacher, and queries from a few parents I had been friendly with.
They’re only stories, he said. You write stories. You’re making things up even at this moment.
Sometimes what you make up is realer than the real, I thought.
The dictionary would disagree with your statement, he said.
I looked up the word. Real, coming from res, fact, thing, and realis, relating to things.
What you make up is always unreality, he said. Relating to nothings.
Okay, I said.
Don’t be crestfallen because you lost an argument, Nikolai said. Did you see any change there?
Where?
The corner that makes you sad.
A lot more leaves have fallen, I said.
There were already a lot of fallen leaves then.
I did not need him to remind me of that. I had seen them, the leaves on the ground, on a morning that was not yet autumn, and I had seen him hop over a pile, walking away. Since that day I had watched the trees shed their leaves for weeks but it never seemed to come to an end. Only in an O. Henry story does the last leaf take on an existential significance. Only in an O. Henry story does everything come with a poetic and tragic twist. The truth is, leaves are always falling. After a while they all look the same, the ones shuddering in the wind and the ones hurled around before they are cleaned up by blowers and mowers.
Blowers and mowers, Nikolai said. You need to try harder if you want to learn rhyming.
It occurred to me that he was indeed unable to see the physical world where I was. The leaves and the leaf-clearing rituals were abstract to him—he had not lived, since age three, in a place where leaves fell so profusely in one season. What else, which would have been merely new, became otherworldly to him? Snow and snow days, icicles under the eaves, crocuses that we had planned to plant together blooming in February, a cardinal knocking on the window with his head and beak—was it fondness or animosity toward its own reflection that made the red bird persist? Nikolai had only seen Steller’s jays near our old house. They were confident birds, loud, territorial, always at war with the squirrels.
Since when have you begun to talk about nature? Nikolai asked. And all those small things.
Where else can one turn to but nature if one needs endless details to sustain oneself, I thought. Nature is not small, I said.
You weren’t that interested in it.
I knew he had a point. The land I had traveled: The more intangible it is, the less hindered one feels, and the more invisible.
Still, I said, I’ve paid attention.
Attention out of disinterest or indifference, he said, is worse than inattention.
Touché, I said.
You’re bad at looking and seeing, he said.
Looking, yes, I said. But seeing? There must be a difference between those two. Some people can look and look and look and look without seeing anything.
But you’re claiming the opposite: seeing without having to look.
I thought about it. Just the day before I had seen a flock of birds take off from an open field to an overcast northern sky. Had I seen the scene before? Multiple times. I even had a photo, a silver gelatin print, given to me by a photographer. I had her book, too, with the same image on the cover, a flock of starlings transfixed in flight. I had seen them all, the birds, the sky, the field, the clouds, the utility poles, but I had not made any effort looking.
Seeing is by intuition. It doesn’t take as much time as looking, I said.
How preposterous.
I’m only stating a fact about myself.
You can’t understand poetry if you don’t know how to look, he said.
That I agree with you, I said. I’m reading poetry these days. Isn’t it interesting that I’ve begun to understand poetry now that I’ve begun to learn how to look?
Only you would find it interesting, he said. It’s like someone saying, I only realize today eating is not a chore.
I laughed. Once upon a time I had been a careless cook. When Nikolai began to bake I gave up abstract-mindedness when making food. I used to think eating was a chore, he said to me after. Now you cook so well I understand why people like eating.
I’m rather dense, I said. Gormless, you know.
Dense and gormless were the favorite adjectives Nikolai and his brother used to describe me.
Do you really believe that?
Why not, I said.
How I always hate your hypocrisy, he said.
Oh, I said. I was taken aback. I was surprised that I had forgotten this: He had often called me a hypocrite when angry with me. I had never asked him what he meant by it.
You put on such an annoying act, he said.
Oh, what kind of act? I said.
Being dense and gormless.
What if I am? I said. I’ve told you, have I, that the character who resembles me the best is Winnie-the-Pooh.
That’s called wishful thinking, he said.
What’s wrong, I thought, with acting slow and dull if that makes people look away, or even, if they look, they can’t see me, or only see me as a hapless bear with very little brain?
What’s wrong with being sharp and bright? Nikolai said.
The world never tires of dimming the bright and blunting the sharp, I said. It’s good to avoid suffering when one can.
So you play a dumb version of yourself, he said. Are you suffering any less?
Suffering, I thought, was a word that no longer held a definition in my dictionary.
But you, I said, you suffer more because you insist on being bright and sharp.
I suffer more because you want to do
what the world does, to dim the bright and to blunt the sharp.
Why, Nikolai said after a long pause, you’re quiet again.
Anything I say would sound defensive, I said.
Say it in any case, he said.
Had I been your age and had I been your friend I would have been bright and sharp with you. And I truly wish we had been friends. I love you so much but I can only love you as your mother. Sometimes a mother becomes the worst enemy because she can’t be the best friend.
I love you so so much too, he said. I wish I didn’t hurt you.
Oh, I said. I wouldn’t say that at all. What’s hurtful is life.
And it doesn’t work when you act dense or gormless with life, does it?
No, I said. It blunts the sharp and the dull equally; it dims the bright but only makes the dim dimmer.
No need to act then? Nikolai asked.
Not anymore, I said.
5
Catchers in the Rain
Today’s weather, I said, you would really like it.
Was there still weather for him, did he still feel it? It didn’t matter. We used to often talk about weather, not as a substitute for real conversation, as weather was easily abused. Anything we had would continue to be ours.
Rainy? Nikolai said.
And gray and cold. Gloomy.
Precisely the weather I love, he said. I wish I could bake something.
A pumpkin pie would be perfect, I said. I didn’t want to pause in case he and I both noticed that he had chosen the word wish. “To wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect”—I had once shown him the line Jane Austen used to describe the folly of two women.
Pumpkin pie? Too prosaic, he said. I would rather make pumpkin mochi.
Sounds like haiku, I said. I had forgotten the pumpkin mochi, which some of his friends, I now remembered him telling me, had looked at with suspicion at first but had relished after all. Baking had been a triumph of Nikolai’s life when the results had been shared with friends. No matter how many batches of cookies and brownies and how many pies and cakes had been baked, someone would ask for more. Many of his friends had written to me, all of them mentioning his baking. Children are hungry on school days, I thought.
How patronizing, he said.
Oh, only because I just taught a story and I liked its title, “Children Are Bored on Sundays.”
Children hate to be called children, he said. Besides, it’s not about feeling hungry. The joy of baking and the joy of being baked for, you’ll never understand.
I had long ago banished a few words from my dictionary: never, always, forever, words that equate one day to another, one moment to another. Time is capricious. To say never or always or forever is a childish way to reason with caprice.
Fine, Nikolai said. You don’t care to understand—how about that? Good enough for you?
I used to get nervous on the days when he baked. Rarely was perfection achieved. A few times I had suggested that perhaps cooking would serve as a better—more forgiving—hobby. He had pointed out rightly that he couldn’t possibly bring a platter of something that had had to sit overnight to the English class where they read Wilfred Owen or W. S. Merwin together.
Someone just sent a Merwin poem to me, I said. Since Nikolai’s death I had asked people to send poems. They came like birds from different lands, each carrying its own mourning notes.
So?
I wondered if he still liked poetry.
Grownups make the same mistake over and over, he said. You like W. S. Merwin? What a coincidence—I just read a poem by him. You went to China this past summer? I did too, in 1987. Do you play any instrument? Oboe, how interesting, is that the instrument that looks like the other? Ah yes, clarinet! How wonderful you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Nikolai had a dislike for people who mistook the oboe for the clarinet. Not knowing is okay, he had once said, but pretending to know is not. How about I talk back and say, How interesting, sir, you must be Jones or Smith because you also have a head and four limbs.
I laughed. Critical as ever, I said.
I used to have this fear that when I grew up I would be like you, he said. I vowed to myself that I would never forget what it felt like to be a child.
You as me, your mother, or you as us, grownups?
Grownups as a species, he said. You’re better than most.
Thank you.
That doesn’t make you fundamentally different.
Disappointing all the same?
No offense, but yes.
I remembered my mother used to say: The salt a parent has eaten weighs more than the rice a child has eaten. Having lived longer…I said, not knowing where my thought was going.
Means little in the big scheme of things, Nikolai said.
I concur, I said. I had been listening to a song the day before—he had saved all his music on my phone, enough to last me days. And don’t you see I want my life to be something more than long, I sang.
Sometimes you do make sense, he said.
It was silly how it made me happy, that little praise. We moved, I said, bringing up the topic I had not known how to broach with him. A week earlier we had moved out of the place we had rented temporarily and into a house with which Nikolai had fallen in love. Everything is good, except we miss you dearly, I said.
He became quiet. I realized that our exchange, however willfully sustained, was mere words. If he shed tears for us I would not have known. Tears we shed would be like weather to him, intelligible because they were concrete memories.
The kitchen is all set up and running, I said. It’s warm and bright. It has the kind of oven you like. Perhaps I should start learning to bake.
That’s nice, he said.
I couldn’t tell if he was annoyed or bored or sad or angry. Tones were what we were missing now, and without tones words were floating, gravity-less, missing one another or, worse, clashing without a warning.
I wish I could show you the house, I said. I was treading dangerous water, but wasn’t that what a mother should be doing, dreading the worst and hoping things would turn out better?
I have seen the house, he said.
With someone else’s furniture staging someone else’s life, I thought. Yet I shouldn’t have had that thought. Nikolai had not relied on other people’s furniture as placeholders. He had made plans for the kitchen and the garden and his bedroom.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you lived in the house with us, too? I said, so softly that it was almost only a passing thought.
It doesn’t matter, he said.
Why not?
It’s still our house.
Ours, yes, but it was also a house of chutes and ladders, with empty walls and yet unpacked boxes making up the grids. Each box I opened let out memory that no space could contain. Each box that remained sealed retained its power to trip and trap. To throw or not to throw the dice: It makes little difference. In a game of luck, luck is already determined.
Since when have you become an avid consumer of inane analogies and inept metaphors? Nikolai said.
The adjectives you indulge yourself with, I complained.
At least I’m consistent. I’ve never said anything negative about adjectives. But you, you’ve been dismissive of analogies and metaphors.
I’ve started to understand the point of them, I said. They take up space, they distract, they make the difficult less difficult, they even fluff things up a little. And they can be a shortcut, too, the ladders, you know.
You’re becoming a bad writer.
Does it matter? I said. I want a game with more ladders than chutes.
If you’re protesting by becoming a bad writer, I would say it’s highly unnecessary.
Dying is highly unnecessary too, I said.
Oh, people always
die, sooner or later.
Always, ever, never, forever—had he lived to my age, would he have abolished these words, too?
There are plenty of bad writers, I said. What’s so terrible about being one of them?
You sound like a child throwing a tantrum, he said. I don’t get a chocolate. Why am I not getting a chocolate? It’s so unfair I don’t know how to button my coat anymore. It’s so unfair I have to put my left shoe on my right foot and my right shoe on my left foot. And I have to stamp my feet until my toes hurt. And I have to punch the wall until my knuckles are bruised. And I have to shut my eyes so I will stumble and fall.
When I was a child, it was grownups who had the liberty to throw a tantrum, but this I did not tell Nikolai.
Still you don’t get the chocolate, he said. Oh, poor, poor you.
You are not a mere piece of chocolate, I protested.
Why can’t I be as daft as you and toss around metaphors and analogies?
By all means, please do, I said.
Then what? he asked.
I gave up. I was slow when we argued.
Then we become catchers in the rain.
Cold, wet, soles of our shoes slippery, our fingers numb, what could we catch? Any seasoned parent was an expert at catching: toppling babies, somersaulting spoons, half-eaten bananas and apples, half-ripe blood berries. Everything breakable and unbreakable belonged to a parent’s field, but what could I catch on this gray, wet morning? Not the smile on your face, not the light in your eyes, not a blue cat, not a purple penguin, not dust in the wind, not a thought whispering in your ears, so loud that it had drowned out all the music of the world. What, my child, can I catch now, when all has become invisible?
Words, mother dear, Nikolai said. We will be catching each other’s words, don’t you see?
6
What a Fine Autumn
How are you today? I said. It was an inane question but I was too sad to look for a better opening.
Why don’t people start a conversation by saying, Who are you today? Nikolai said. How anyone is matters less than who he is, don’t you think?