by Yiyun Li
The ineffable miasma of incompetent words, he said. What do you call an aneurysm of a mind that’s clotted by words?
As long as I stay clear of adjectives I remain uncluttered, I said.
Why such dislike of adjectives?
I oppose anything judgmental, I said, and adjectives are opinionated words. Happy, sad. Long, short. Live, dead. Young, old. Even the simplest adjective claims such entitlement to judge. Not to mention they come with those abusive forms of the comparative and the superlative.
I beg to differ, he said. A noun is a wall, an adjective is a window.
I laughed.
What’s so funny?
There is no adjective in your astute and definitive statement, I said.
Fine. How about this: A noun is a self-defeating wall, an adjective is a tenacious window.
Self-defeating how? Tenacious how? I said. I was sitting next to a window, in the room that was called Nikolai’s room. Outside were the procrastinating trees that had not shed their leaves as ordained by the season, which had made the gutter cleaners scratch their heads. In our old house in California we had large windows surrounded by trees that remained green all year round, and there Nikolai used to listen to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons at night. In this new house there were definable seasons outside, but he would only have memories of the four seasons from music, not from experience.
Self-defeating as your mind is self-defeating, he said. Tenacious as my mind is tenacious.
Such immodesty, I said. My mind is not a closed room.
Mine has more windows, he said.
What is outside your windows?
All the good things you can’t see.
Like what?
A garden of superlative adjectives. A path paved with lively adverbs. Poems without themes. Songs without names. There are ways to live not as a noun, or inside a noun, or among other nouns.
Yet it’s all the nouns in the world that make room for the living, I thought. The living need the space within four walls.
What is outside your room? Nikolai asked.
I looked out of the window. Just the evening before, while cooking dinner, it had occurred to me that I could not open the window to pick a few bay leaves as I used to. Bay leaves came now in a little glass jar, sold on a shelf in a grocery store.
Flowers, I said, once the winter is over.
Well done, Mommy, he said. Flowers make a middling delusionist.
8
The Perfect Enemy
We baked a pumpkin pie yesterday, I said. Nikolai didn’t speak right away, but I was certain he was listening. It wasn’t as pretty as yours but it tasted good, I said.
It was the day after Thanksgiving. We as a family had never been good at celebrating. When Nikolai was in kindergarten, his teacher had had a conversation with me. We interviewed the kids, she said, and Nikolai said you celebrate many things but nothing seriously. Family tradition, she emphasized, is important for children.
Are some days more special than others, or are we giving them names and granting them meaning because days are indifferent, and we try to wrangle a little love out of them as we tend to do with uncaring people? These questions were not profound but they led to my halfheartedness about birthdays and major holidays. The others—anniversaries, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, a parade of holidays on the Chinese lunar calendar—were just that: days where we live.
Even so I had dreaded the first holiday without Nikolai. He used to bake around holidays. This time, I decided, we must make a pie ourselves.
He used to bake on weekends and on the days when he did not have much homework. He used to bake all the time, and how could we reproduce all the time? Butter and cream and honey and cinnamon and vanilla and nutmeg and clove and all the jars and bottles on his baking shelf: No one’s words, Proust’s included, could bring back to life their warm fragrance mixed with the scents of the winter rain of California and the wet eucalyptus leaves. You owe us an invention to immortalize scents, Mr. Edison. Without that our memory is incomplete.
At least the world is not inundated even more, Nikolai said. All the photographs and homemade videos. Imagine the Internet with smells and tastes.
The dead have the advantage of the leavers; those left behind have to have something to hold on to. But this I did not say. I should be the last one to make that argument. While unpacking after the move, I realized what a bad memory-keeper I was. School pictures from some years surfaced but not from other years. An oversize album had only one page filled in, an ultrasound image of Nikolai when I was twenty-two weeks pregnant. The books in a complete set of Tintin, which had been Nikolai’s favorite series in preschool, were scattered and not all recovered, as were those from the set of Peanuts that had accompanied us for years. The volumes I had found from the Peanuts collection were the ones he had been reading in the last days of his life.
There is never an end to what people want, I said.
If you want to be greedy, he said, make sure you’re discerningly greedy.
We are who we are, I said. It was a hollow line, used often these days as though it could mitigate the pain in a hollowed-out heart.
Whatever that means, he said.
Nothing, I said. Saying something that means nothing is a skill you have yet to learn.
I’m glad I don’t have to learn that, he said.
Saying something that meant nothing had become a new way for me to delude myself, as though something had changed. Nothing changed. Time stood still, for him and for us.
So you’ve settled in? he said.
Settled into what, I thought, days without him?
I mean the house.
We’re like three little peas in a giant pod, I said.
The week before, I had explained to a friend that Nikolai could fill a space better than the rest of us combined. We had imagined a life in the house together, his cookies and cakes baking in the oven, his flowers blossoming in the garden, his music filling the house, his leaving and homecoming both cherished because what we had wanted most for him was the liberty to depart and the freedom to return. Mommy, I’m going to live with you until I turn seventy-three, he had said when he was three. No, no, I had said, you’ll change your mind. Soon after, not yet four, he had changed his mind. I’m ready to move out, he had told me. No, no, I had said, you’re still young.
There is no rule against anything, including settling into too empty a space, he said. Makes you feel organized.
Emptiness is different from unclutteredness, I said.
Clutter up then, he said. Clutter, clatter, clot, cluster.
None of the words, I thought, would release me from the void left by him.
You’ll settle in sooner or later, even if it’s against your wish, he said.
It occurred to me that I had never looked up the etymology of the word settle, so I did. I read it to him: from Old English, setlan, from setl, seat—to seat, bring to rest, come to rest. Can parents’ hearts find repose after the death of a child?
Perhaps I’m the one to ask the question, I said. Do you feel settled?
If you mean something sinking to the bottom, he said, yes, I feel quite settled. Sedimented.
What is it that’s sedimented? I asked.
Everything about me that used to disturb me, he said. I’m all clear now, pure and perfect, just the way I want.
Nothing will come to disturb the sediments again?
What probability do you think there is for that to happen?
I did not know if I was sad or relieved, or sadder because I was relieved.
You see, this is your problem. When you don’t have an expert command of adjectives, you don’t know how you feel.
Perhaps I don’t want to know, I said.
Why, then, are we talking?
I don
’t talk with you to figure out how I feel.
Why else? You’re not going to say it’s to keep me alive, that kind of nonsense?
I thought about a book called This Real Night by Rebecca West. For days and weeks after Nikolai’s death I had often thought of the title. Since the moment I had learned of the news I had not had a moment of doubt about the coldest and darkest truth befalling us: This real night is and will be a permanent part of our life.
Fortunately for you and fortunately for me, I said, I don’t believe in that nonsense.
Good, he said.
But J. and I are starting a memory book for you, I said.
Good grief, he said.
His psychologist recommended it, I said. I do think she has a point. Memories fade.
Why not allow the fadable to fade? he said.
Why not let the erasable be erased? I said.
Why not indeed? Everything in life fades or gets erased in any case.
I suppose you’re right, I said.
Of course I’m right, he said. I’m so right I’m infallible.
For a moment I almost believed he was alive again, and I could hear him, his voice and his tone when he used to laugh at us, the fallible grownups.
Perhaps human history is driven by the desire to fight against our fadable and erasable fate, I said.
What pompous nonsense, he said. I hate it when you try to sound smart.
Well, we’re starting the memory book in any case.
I can’t stop you? he asked.
Just as I can’t stop you from doing what you want to do.
Fine.
Not to make you more annoyed, I said, we have a perfect notebook for the project.
While I was unpacking I had found an old journal he had started at five, with a title “Sixty Years of Nikolai” written on the inside cover. He had kept it for less than two weeks, and had resumed with two entries when he was eleven, one starting with “Sorry it’s been a long time!” and the second, four days after New Year’s, “Sorry to be late! Happy new year!”
Oh gosh, he said. I remember that. Back then I thought a book had to have a title of some number of years of something, he said. All because of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.
Sixty years of Nikolai, I thought. We only had sixteen of those sixty years. I was feeling sentimental. Numbers made me sentimental. Calendars made me sentimental. Things made me sentimental: a pair of sprinting spikes, a tennis racquet, sheet music on the music stand, a small acrylic painting of California golden poppies, a stuffed baby giraffe that had lost all its filling—I had sewn the tear back together but the giraffe remained skinny and floppy—a handmade print of a purple penguin with a bowler hat. Time made me sentimental: days and nights, minutes and hours, moments that threaten to become eternity.
What happens to sentimental when you take time out of it? Nikolai asked.
What?
You are left with gibberish.
What? I said. I was dense. Once Nikolai told me that J. had made an insulting joke about me: Mommy, you’re dense. You’re so dense if we put you next to a black hole, the black hole wouldn’t suck you in but would be sucked in by you.
The word, Nikolai said. Did you notice time is in the middle of sentimental?
I looked up both words. Etymologically it means nothing, I said.
What an inelastic mind you have, he said. Do you really have to make this memory book? I can already see its quality. Embarrassing. Humiliating. Mortifying.
You could’ve written that book so much better, but I did not say it. There were many could’ves at this moment. I could go down any one of them like a path that led to nowhere, only to end up somewhere between doubt and regret. It was the maze I had decided not to set foot in. I would rather be here, hovering at the entrance, feeling and resisting the temptation of self-indulgence.
How I hate that word, self-indulgence, Nikolai said.
But I don’t mean you. I’ve never called anyone self-indulgent but myself.
Isn’t that a kind of self-indulgence, too?
Finding a self by negative traits is better than not having a solid self.
Even if the negative traits are imaginary?
Imagination is a kite flown by reality, I said. Imagination doesn’t stand a chance if you cut the line held by reality.
Lofty, he said. Is that your secret?
My secret of what?
Of being you?
Do you mean being me as your mother, or being me, myself?
So there is a difference, he said. I often wondered.
One can stop being a parent or a child, a friend or an enemy, one can stop being alive, but one’s self does not stop being itself. Even death cannot change that. Death takes so many things away from us, but not that. Death is not invincible.
Are we not taking this self too seriously? Nikolai asked.
Of course we are, I said. We take it so seriously that even death, facing that self, pales.
How I hate this self, he said.
But you have a self that is…what is the adjective I should use? I said. Anything I could say would be a cliché.
Now is the time we have to be exact with verb tenses. Do I have a self? Did I? Will I?
A self is timeless, I said. Tenseless.
But it’s flawed.
Tell me one person whose self is not flawed.
It doesn’t work that way, Mommy. You know it doesn’t.
You cannot demand that everyone be perfect.
I can forgive everyone, he said, for being imperfect.
But not yourself.
I tried, Mommy, I did try. Can’t you see I’m perfect in only one way?
Perfect. Imperfect. A pair of adjectives that come over and again, in all seasons, day in and day out, taunting us, judging us, isolating us, turning our isolation into illness. Is there a more accomplished adjective than perfect? Perfect is free from comparison, perfect rejects superlative. We can always be good, do better, try our best, but how perfect can we be before we can love ourselves and let others love us? And who, my dear child, has taken the word lovable out of your dictionary and mine, and replaced it with perfect?
I wish you had made me an enemy, I said, rather than yourself. Mothers, I thought, would be perfect for that role.
You can’t be that for me, Mommy, Nikolai said. I’ve found a perfect enemy in myself.
9
Forever
I went to the car dealer today.
Did you say something? Nikolai said.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon, the most difficult time of the day. I was waiting for Nikolai’s brother to come out of school. It took willpower not to turn around and look in the direction from which Nikolai would have walked toward me. I had willpower, but not enough at three o’clock in the afternoon. I waited in the middle of the block as though they would still have walked equal distances to reach me.
No, I didn’t say anything, I replied. I was aware that I had been thinking of telling him about the car dealer. I had stopped right before the words had slipped out. It would have been small talk in another life but would not be the right conversation now. I did not want to become the kind of person recounting trifles to the dead.
We solved a mystery today, I said instead. Ever since we had moved into the house I had noticed a noise, rhythmic, seemingly coming from inside the house. I had thought it was a broken part of the heater. It turned out that a cardinal made a game of knocking on the basement window, knock knock, knock knock, with a tenacity. I’ve also seen it on the porch, I said. It’s mesmerized by windows.
All birds are, he said.
But this one is persistent, I said. I wonder why.
I was still talking about trifles, but a befuddled and befuddling cardinal was more interesting than the
car dealer.
It’s just a bird, he said.
And a window, and a house, and a season, I said.
For sure you’re not a connoisseur of nouns, he said.
A life’s story can be told by the simplest nouns, I said. When I had first arrived in America, I would only buy white bread that was nineteen cents a bag. The next year, we upgraded the bread to twenty-nine cents a bag, and then forty-nine, sixty-nine, eighty-nine, until we had Nikolai and started to buy white bread at a dollar forty-nine a bag. I had never told him about the bread, or so many other stories. I had been cautious with the past, and wanted my children to live in a world where their parents’ stories were boxed up and, if possible, sealed permanently.
Give me one example, he said.
Blueberries, I said. The first time we bought a six-ounce carton of blueberries, when you were three, it felt prodigal.
It’s the adjective prodigal that tells the story, he said, not blueberries.
But prodigal wouldn’t give me back memories of Nikolai as blueberries would. The summer before he had turned four, we had moved across the country to California, into a Spanish-style house on a college campus, with whitewashed walls, red roof, and a path in front of its picture windows, lined with eucalyptus trees. One day Nikolai and his babysitter took a walk and encountered a blueberry bush near the house. He picked some unripe blueberries, ate them, and ran all the way home, screaming and calling the blueberries ferocious.
I remember that, he said. I remember feeling smug because I knew the babysitter, what’s her name, was impressed.
She also told me you called a tree theatrical, I said. How you do love your adjectives.
Yes, more than my blueberries, he said.
Is that possible? I asked. I had often joked that what other children his age spent on smartphones and games and outfits he had spent on blueberries. We used to store cartons of blueberries in the refrigerator and, when they were out of season, bags of frozen blueberries in the freezer. He ate his blueberries in a Little Prince mug I had bought for him in Paris, with a tiny silver spoon. No adjective could describe the mug, the spoon, and the last bag of frozen blueberries that we could not touch now. How long does it take for the frozen to become fossil?