by Yiyun Li
Who are you, I said. It sounds intrusive, does it not?
How are you—is it less intrusive? If someone does want to know the answer it’s intrusive too.
Who are you? I went over the question in my head. I suppose people would have a harder time saying who they are, truly, I said. Or there are so many possibilities it’s hard to give one and neglect the other twenty.
When you see a tree, do you say, How are you today? Mediocre, the tree may think, because it’s a windy day. But it’s obliged to reply, I’m good, thank you, and you? No, when you see a tree you think, Here is a tree.
People are more complex than trees, I said.
We think we are, he said. So, who are you today?
I’m your mother.
See, you don’t have a problem answering it right away.
But I wouldn’t give the same reply if someone else asked me, I thought.
What if someone else did ask, Nikolai said. Say you go to a coffee shop and the guy at the counter says, Who are you?
I would say—I’m nobody.
How very imaginative.
But that’s the problem, I said. Who are you is a question already asked and answered for us by a poet.
Dare we not make up a new and better answer?
Who are you? I said.
I’m somebody, he said, like nobody’s business.
And nobody’s fool, I said.
I’m somebody who’s nobody’s fault.
I wondered what the difference was between somebody and nobody. Any person with a solid physical form could not avoid having some body, which would make the statement I’m nobody a misclaimer.
Misclaimer for everyone but me. I can certainly claim that disclaimer. I’m nobody, he said. But I won’t.
It was seven weeks since Nikolai had died. In Buddhist tradition, a soul leaves this world for the next after forty-nine days. I did not believe in this or the other world, the soulful or the soulless, the forty-nine-day gap where the departed retained their senses with an intensity that no living body could achieve. Still, what if he would not be here tomorrow? What if when I speak tomorrow, nobody replies?
That’s silly, he said. Whether I’m here or anywhere is not decided by some tradition you don’t even believe in.
Fear doesn’t speak reason or logic, I said.
Phobia is irrational, he said. You can be reasonable and logical in your fears.
I counted my fears. Perhaps I should make a list of them and write the ways to be reasonable and logical next to each one.
What are days for me in any case? he said. Have you thought it may very well now be today and today and today and today?
I had thought about that. That, too, was my fear. Would one, plucked out of a timeline of yesterday and today and tomorrow, become a fish out of water?
A fish out of water, Nikolai said. Really, Mommy, the clichés you use these days, and not even to the point.
I would rather, I thought, have all the clichés in the world to make a tepid pond for myself.
So you could swim around like a sluggish koi fish? he said.
I protested at his unkind imagination.
A fish has only three seconds of memory, he said.
So you told me many times, I said.
Now that’s called living in the moment.
I shuddered.
I know, he said. People say that all the time: You should live in the moment. Why, I used to want to ask, to live like a koi fish?
I must have been among the people who had said that to him, I thought.
Yes, you are, and I bet you ten dollars you don’t even understand it yourself.
Five dollars? I asked. We used to bet on many things. Nikolai had collected a stack of IOUs from me.
Seven?
Okay, I said. You won. I don’t understand it, and I don’t believe it, either.
Are all parents expert equivocators?
I suppose the best among them are, I said. I’m not.
Why not? You’re a good mother.
Not good enough to make you stay, I thought.
Well, I live in the moment now, he said.
In the moment: a life made of today and today and today and today. If that’s all he has now, is it all I have, too?
If you don’t mind my saying, what I have has nothing to do with what you have. Why put a bet on a nobody? You should make up your mind about what you want.
My mind is made up, I thought. It has always been. I want yesterday and today and tomorrow, all with Nikolai in it.
You often complain I want too much, he said.
Any parent would want what I want, I said.
Not necessarily.
Any reasonable parent.
Your argument doesn’t stand, he said. A reasonable person can still want too much.
But a little more time, how can that be called too much? I said, though I knew I risked losing the argument. Are five years considered a little more in a lifetime? Ten?
Time is like money. Don’t get into debt by spending what you don’t have, he said.
I thought about the class he was to take in the spring, personal finance, which he had been looking forward to. What circumstance permits one to ask for tomorrow on trust?
None, he said. Time is a difficult debt to pay off. Impossible.
How do you know?
Because I’ve done that.
Did he mean that he had overdrafted his tomorrows? I remembered, when he was little, I had flinched whenever people called him precocious.
You kept saying, Be patient, he said. Many times I thought, Okay, let me believe you this once and wait, and things may change, and I may feel differently.
Most people do that, I said.
I suppose most people don’t want to admit failure so they keep taking more credits from more tomorrows and get into deeper debt.
What if that is what people call patience? I said.
I wasn’t a patient person. Neither was Nikolai. The root of patience comes from Latin, to suffer or suffering. What are other words that link pain to time, time to pain?
Nostalgia? Nikolai asked.
Nostalgia: home plus pain. Does he ever feel nostalgic, I thought.
I didn’t leave home, Mommy, he said.
Still, I wish I had taught you how to postpone suffering.
If you haven’t learned it yourself you can’t teach me, he said.
A parent’s folly, I thought, is to want to give a child what she does not have. A parent has to be quixotic. The word reminded me what I had forgotten all these weeks, that on the day Nikolai had died, when I had not known it would happen, I had been listening to Don Quixote on a long drive. I had been laughing to myself in the car. I had laughed at times since then, but that laughter in the car—quixotic—would never be mine again.
Are you not speaking because you’ve lost another argument? Nikolai asked. It was an odd relief that he would not see my tears. He had seen me cry only three times in his life.
No, just feeling sad, I said.
Still?
Still? I said. Sometimes I’m so sad I feel like a freak.
That sounds like self-pity unrestrained, he said.
I thought about my language. Indeed he was right. Not only was it immoderate but it was imprecise. How do you compare sadness that takes over like an erupted volcano to sadness that stays inside one, still as a stillborn baby? People talk about grief coming and going like waves, but I am not a breakwater, I am not a boat, I am not a statue left on a rocky shore, tested for its endurance.
Let me revise, I said. Sometimes sadness makes me unable to write.
Why write, he said, if you can feel?
What do you mean?
I always imagine writing is for peopl
e who don’t want to feel or don’t know how to.
And reading? I asked. Nikolai was a good reader.
For those who do.
For weeks I had not read well. I picked up books and put them down after a page or two, finding little to sustain me. I was writing, though, making up stories to talk with Nikolai. (Where else can we meet but in stories now?)
See my point? he said. You cannot not write. You don’t even mind writing badly.
Because I don’t want to feel sad or I don’t know how to feel sad?
What’s the difference? he said. Does a person commit suicide because he doesn’t want to live, or doesn’t know how to live?
I could say nothing.
I can always win an argument against you—do you notice that? he said.
Had I argued better, would he have stayed longer in this world? I didn’t ask him the question. Like sadness, it was there all the time.
Instead I read him a poem I had translated from Chinese, one I had memorized when I turned twelve but only began to understand now.
When young, I knew not the taste of sorrow
But loved to climb the storied towers
I loved to climb the storied towers
To compose a new poem, faking sorrow
Now I have known the taste of sorrow
and want to talk about it, but I refrain
I want to talk about it, but refrain
And say merely: a chilly day, what a fine autumn
Is it a fine autumn? he asked.
Yes, I said. And a chilly day.
7
So Many Windows, So Many Flowers
I wonder if I should start keeping a dream diary, I said.
The night before I had not slept well. When I woke up in the morning I knew Nikolai had been in my dream, but other than a mood, not a glimpse of time or place or his face remained.
If you want to, he said.
Did you like doing that? I asked. Nikolai had experimented with keeping a dream diary for a while. In a computer file, among many files that we had decided not to retrieve.
Marginally, he said. Why do you want to do it?
Why, I thought, isn’t it obvious?
Not so to me, he said.
I told him that I wanted to remember the dreams in which he appeared.
Why do you want to remember them when you can talk with me? he said. Anyway your dreams are wishy-washy.
I had no doubt that what we had was realer than dreams. Still, it was only words we shared. We could not see each other. If a dream was kind it would grant what one wanted to see.
Dream on, he said.
In the past weeks I had seen him clearly only once—the other dreams, all like last night’s, had fallen into the caprice of the human brain. A few days after he had died, in my dream we went to a hospital to pick him up. We waited where there was a compass on the floor, pointing to all four branches of the building, and we were there for a long time before we spotted him among people, many pushed around in wheelchairs. He was walking toward us, with an unhurried elegance that I often associated with a gray heron. But before he reached us I blinked and he vanished.
Oh gosh, Nikolai said.
What?
It’s too neat, he said. A neat dream is all about self-indulgence.
Nikolai had been an early riser like me. Come here, Mommy, he used to call when he heard me up, in the same tone that had not changed between ages three and sixteen. I need my coffee, I often said, and I need my morning reading before I can talk. But he would insist, Come here, so I would sit on his bed, and he would wrap his comforter around, making himself into an eggroll. I had a dream last night, he would start. His dreams were about running, flying, teleporting, metamorphosing, but a few dreams had delighted or saddened me so much that I had recorded our conversations verbatim.
Here’s one, from middle school:
I had an exhausting dream, he said the moment I sat down by him one morning. I dreamed that I was a negative number, and I couldn’t figure out my square root.
It’s possible, I said. Wait until you learn the imaginary number.
Mommy, I’m not stupid, he said. I know imaginary numbers, but I don’t like to deal with that troublesome i.
(I had borrowed the dream to open a talk once. Nikolai had been proud of it, but his little brother, J., disapproved, saying the metaphor was too neat.)
Here’s an earlier one. Nikolai was five, and one day he told me a dream not from the night before, but from a few weeks earlier. It had taken him weeks to think about it before he could tell me:
I dreamed that you were driving the minivan uphill and you parked near Mari’s house. Then you died, just sitting there. Many flowers fell onto the minivan and covered it. Then the whole thing became not so real-life, but like an oil painting. I woke up and cried for a long time and couldn’t sleep.
Here’s a recent one, less than two months before he died:
I dreamed last night we were traveling. We were going through security and a TSA agent said to J. and me: I’ll be grading your conveying. And you snapped: Don’t dandelize the dandelion.
What does that mean? I said.
I don’t know, he said. In my dream I thought you made up the phrase on the spot to fight and you were pretty clever.
Don’t dandelize the dandelion, I said now. I almost snapped at a student yesterday using the line.
Don’t plagiarize my dream, Nikolai said.
I didn’t. I gave her a stern lecture instead.
What snappable error did she make?
She said she didn’t want to be serious, and she wanted to write fluffy stories so she could laugh at her characters.
What fluffy delusions a young person can afford, Nikolai said.
You’re young, too, I said.
Not the way your student is young, he said.
What are your delusions like?
Does everyone have to have some delusion to live? he asked.
Does one have to have some delusion so as to be willing to die, I thought.
There’s a fundamental difference, he said. You only die once.
So that’s the end of the delusion?
Not in the sense that it disappears, he said, no. You still have it. Only it’s no longer delusion but reality.
Is it not the case for the living? You treat the delusion as reality?
You don’t meet your delusions when you’re alive.
Like somewhere over the rainbow? I said.
Oh gosh, I thought, how I do think with words that are not mine these days.
It’s okay, he said. You’re forgiven.
I remembered an early spring day five years ago. I took Nikolai and his brother to a seaside town, and after lunch we linked arms and sang all the way down the block, We’re off to see the Wizard, The wonderful Wizard of Oz.
I remember that, Nikolai said. We must have looked so silly.
We looked happy, I said. It was off-season, and even adding up our ages, we still came below the average age of the local population. In the street, people smiled at our linked arms and choreographed steps, yet I was far from what they imagined. It was the year of my disintegration, and I could find few delusions to live for.
At least you make a point of appearing happy to everyone, he said.
You do, too.
I’m not as good at that as you are, he said.
His friends had written after, saying what a warm, cheerful, and happy person he had been in their eyes. A few had asked how they had missed his pain, what they could have done to save him. For some people a façade is necessary even with friends—especially so with those closest—but this I couldn’t explain to the young, bruised hearts.
To live you have to propagate delusions, Nikolai said. One is not eno
ugh. A few are not.
How many are enough?
Are you asking me? You’re the one living.
It’s like asking the blind for directions, isn’t it, I said, translating a Chinese saying for him.
Which, if you think about it, is nonsense. Who can say a blind person doesn’t know the directions better?
Where should I go from here?
Oh you know you’re doing fine.
I didn’t know it. I wasn’t feeling fine. I had but one delusion, which I held on to with all my willpower: We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I’m doing it over again, this time by words.
A good tactic is to diversify your delusions, he said. Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket kind of thing.
I couldn’t refrain from pointing out that he had used a cliché.
Whatever, he said.
Sorry, I said. Still, please enlighten me.
Oh, do what the squirrels do. Dig a hole and store a handful of delusions there, and dig another one and store more. Some delusions are for today. Some are for tomorrow. Some take a few months to ripen. Keep them dry so they don’t get moldy. Keep them private so others don’t step on them by accident or dig them up and steal them. Be patient. Delayed gratification is the key to a successful life of delusions. And if you’re lucky, some delusions become self-seeded. Some even go wild like dandelions.
Are you making fun of me?
Indeed I am, he said. Nobody needs to be taught how to live under delusions. It’s like sleeping.
There is a condition called insomnia, I said.
Insomniacs still sleep, he said.
Not efficiently, I said. Isn’t it what insomniacs suffer, not having sleep of good quality? Barely hanging on?
As you’ve often discouraged me from pursuing perfection, I would say, Mommy, just do your best and stay contented with being a middling delusionist.
I wondered whether it was possible for anyone to be a middling delusionist. Seems to me, I said, a delusionist cannot take an adjective. You are one, or you are not.
Any noun can take an adjective if you know your grammar.
I tried to come up with examples to challenge his faith in adjectives. A procrastinating tree, a lofty shadow, an estival trance, a burdensome coda.