by Yiyun Li
It must go at a price then? I asked. Well spent, I thought. Misspent. If we don’t have to earn our time, how easily we squander it.
Who’s the judgmental one here? Nikolai said. Time you spend reading is as equally squandered as someone else’s time spent playing Angry Birds.
In kindergarten he had once said that he wouldn’t mind having a mother like his friend’s mother, who sat at the kitchen counter playing Angry Birds.
And has it ever occurred to you that well-spent time is overrated? he asked. Well spent according to whom?
My time spent according to my own standard, I said.
How do you know your standard is not problematic?
I don’t, I said. In fact, I think it may very well be problematic.
In what way?
I thought for a moment. When I was your age…
The worst way for a parent to start a topic, he said. As though people at the same age by default belong to the same species.
We do belong to the same species.
Don’t be so literary, he said.
When I was sixteen, I said, I copied a saying from a Ming Dynasty book in my diary. The translation from Chinese goes like this, approximately: If not for the frivolous, how does one manage to reach the other shore of life?
In other words, if not for my famous frosting, how was I able to make a hundred and four dollars at the bake sale?
I laughed. His frosting had been an ongoing disagreement between us. The amount of sugar he had used had often made me cringe.
I made a resolution then that I should follow the advice from the old book, I said.
How did you lose your taste for the frivolous?
I didn’t. What I thought of as frivolous turned out to be life, I said. My life.
Which is?
Reading.
Oh, that, Nikolai said.
In my time…I said. On second thought, I stopped.
I hope you’re not going to speak like many parents. In our time, as though time bothers to make itself different for each generation.
Touché, I said. A purposeful life, when I grew up, had no place for poetry or fiction or philosophy or daydreams. Perhaps it’s still the case. So you’re right. How can I say my time is better spent reading than playing Angry Birds?
At least you’re better at reading than at playing games, Nikolai said. And you’re lucky.
How so?
Things you’re good at may not treat you well in return, he said.
They didn’t treat you well, did they, I said. Nikolai had been good at many things.
Being good is different from being perfect, he said.
Over and again we came to that adjective: perfect. Was there not one way out of its trap? Was there not anything—even something frivolous—that would have helped him reach the other shore safely?
I’m already at the other shore, he said.
People may look at it differently, I said.
They think of me as a shipwreck, don’t they?
I did not speak.
They can think what they want, Nikolai said. People are afraid of death, people are afraid of the dead, and people are afraid of unusual decisions.
I wonder if fear is what keeps people going in life, I said.
Most people would say hope is a more suitable noun there, he said.
Who can tell the difference between hope and fear?
That’s a good, muddleheaded question.
Oh, I remember another toy from my childhood, I said.
How nostalgic mothers can be, Nikolai said.
Though I didn’t own it, I said. It was a spinning top that the big kids used to whip around in the courtyard. But even if you don’t know what it looks like…
I do, Mommy. I’m not stupid. And I know you’re going to use it as a bad analogy. You’re going to say: We are the spinning tops, and fear whips us, and hope whips us, so fear and hope must be the same thing.
I thought for a moment. No, that’s not what I meant to say.
Or you’re going to say, Hope is the spinning top and fear whips it.
No, I said.
Fear is the spinning top and hope whips it.
No!
Then you’re going to say the most refreshing thing—Fate, O Fate, O Fate, it’s you who’s whipping us! Nikolai said.
Stop putting words in my mouth! It doesn’t matter who or what is whipping us, I said. Whatever it is, it’s not doing that all the time. So my question is, What keeps us going then, fear or hope?
Scientifically speaking, it’s rotational inertia, he said.
So hope is a kind of inertia? Fear too? I said.
Oh Mommy, you’re getting so muddleheaded.
I’m muddleheaded, I thought, because I could go on thinking but would not reach any clarity: Which, between hope and fear, had made life unlivable for him?
I’ve never called life unlivable, he said. I’ve never lived a single day without something that matters to me, something that I live for.
But not a single day with just the frivolous?
What in my life would belong only to the frivolous?
Not music, I thought. Nor literature, nor sport, nor friendship. Baking? Cooking? Knitting? Gardening? Shopping for kitchenware, yarn, scarves, colorful socks? Choosing gifts for friends? Intensity makes frivolousness unattainable. Yet all those that have meanings have weight, too. Can a ship sail when it is loaded with what it is not equipped to carry?
I have sailed, he said, in my way.
Had there been a time when I should have known that what he called his way bode ill? When he, after watching the movie Les Misérables at twelve, had read the novel three times over the summer? Or even earlier, when his fourth grade teacher had sent me poems he had written, speaking of inconsolable bleakness?
Gosh, boding ill? I was only being me, he said.
Is it a fatal condition, I thought, for some people just being themselves?
And Les Misérables, he said. It makes me feel young again.
The novel was on his shelf now, with a small metal bust of Victor Hugo nearby. There was a collection of George Herbert’s poetry, which he had picked out from my shelf around the same time as Les Misérables, yet to be studied. There were rolls of unknit yarn, volumes of untried recipes, years of unlived life.
Don’t dwell upon the prefix, he said.
What?
You can add “un” to many words and undo yourself.
Undo, I thought. Undone. They were among the words that I did not say aloud, yet I had heard them used in connection to Nikolai. Even if people could refrain from saying them, these words were still not far, hovering with patience. Words are falcons, our minds the trainers.
No, our minds are the targets, he said, the prey.
Who trains the words then?
I don’t know, he said.
I couldn’t decide if the answer was an indication that he was losing interest, or he felt defeated. Perhaps the former, I thought. He had never given up an argument from defeat.
Undo is an overused word in any case, he said. You might as well say unfollow or unfriend.
Different, I said. You can easily unfollow or unfriend someone. You cannot undo many things in life. Most of life.
What can be unfollowed or unfriended doesn’t matter, he said. These words, heaven knows they are really made-up words. They seemingly give you an option, but that option is not available when it comes to what you truly need to unfollow or unfriend.
Like what?
Death, he said.
If death cannot be unfriended or unfollowed, I said, shouldn’t life be the same way?
I did not unfriend or unfollow life, Mommy. Had I done that you would not have found me. We would not have been talking.
What is it then you unfollowed and unfriended? I asked. If not life. If not death.
Time.
Time? I said.
Yes, time, which does not come at a price.
Unfriending it, unfollowing it, does it come at a price?
I don’t know, Mommy. It’s not for me to say.
13
Aftertime
I didn’t get you presents for Christmas, I said.
It goes without saying, don’t you think? Nikolai asked.
If it truly goes without saying, I said, I wouldn’t have said it. It goes without saying—certain words are put together to say what they don’t mean, or to mean what they don’t say.
Trust me, he said. Every time someone says, Trust me, I want to ask, Why should I?
To be honest with you, I said.
With all due respect, he said.
I don’t want to dismiss or diminish your struggle, I said.
How words waste space, he said.
Yes. And if I want I can go on and on.
A grownup is better at that than a child, no?
Yes, I said.
So, back to what requires saying. No present for me from Santa this year?
You’ve never believed in Santa.
I almost believed when I was little, he said.
When Nikolai was in preschool, he had once grilled me about how Santa could possibly visit all the children in one night.
I remember that, he said. You told me as long as I believed it, Santa would bring presents.
Did you believe then?
Not really, but I got my presents so I knew it was all made up, he said. I was worried for a few days. I worried that I would not get presents because I did not believe in Santa.
I didn’t know these thoughts were going on in your head, I said.
It would be the end of a child’s life had his parents known everything going on in his head, Nikolai said.
The next year I had received emails from several parents of his kindergarten classmates, alerting me that he had been spreading the news that there was no Santa. In our household we still follow the tradition, one mother wrote, and added that her daughter had come home with so many questions, including who eats the cookies and drinks the milk in the middle of the night, if not Santa.
So you enlightened me on the importance of keeping my friends in the dark, he said.
There’s nothing wrong with parents wanting to prolong the childhood of their children, I said.
When I was in fourth grade I thought something must be wrong with my childhood, he said. It was too happy, never like what you read in literature.
I remember you saying that, I said. Is it parents’ failure, I thought, if they’ve given their children a happy childhood that does not last?
A childhood ends, he said. Even the best parents can’t change that. Sooner or later receiving Christmas presents is just for the sake of opening boxes. Inevitable is your favorite word for such things.
Sometimes you want inevitabilities to happen later rather than sooner, I said.
A mother we had met recently, who had lost a teenage son to suicide, had told us that every Christmas she would bring out his stocking with years of gifts, and she would add something new each year.
Don’t do it, Nikolai said.
I’m not going to, I said.
I was not an organized person. The other day I realized I couldn’t find Nikolai’s stocking. Many things slipped away like sand or water, but did it matter?
Sand and water, Nikolai said.
I know, I said. Sometimes you can’t avoid thinking in clichés.
They are clichés if you use them to describe time, he said. You’re using it to describe a concrete object, which does not move itself.
Okay, I said, okay.
I’m sure the stocking is somewhere, he said. It can’t be nowhere.
If you don’t know the precise location of that somewhere, does it become nowhere? I asked.
It’s still somewhere.
What do you call a place between somewhere and nowhere? I asked.
Between somewhere and nowhere—on some days that place feels more abysmal than on other days.
Anywhere between somewhere and nowhere would still be somewhere, he said.
Are you somewhere too?
Of course, he said. Nowhere is like infinity and beyond. It’s possible to be closer if you try. It’s impossible to arrive nowhere.
But it must be a somewhere different from this somewhere, I said. I mean, where I am. Here and now.
I was sitting in a room with books, and I was facing the window. On the windowsill was a vase of hydrangeas. A few minutes ago a woodpecker had been pecking a tree trunk nearby. And now a squirrel was digging with a frenzy, never pausing at a spot for more than two seconds. The weather for the next day, which was winter solstice, was forecasted as sunny. The year would end in ten days.
If it comforts you, I can make up something about my somewhere, he said. Here’s a pond, yonder is the sky.
Just like the painting you did.
Which one?
When I was unpacking Nikolai’s paintings, I had found one that I had not seen before. It had been done when he was much younger, as he had confidently misspelled his own name in capital letters on the canvas. There was the golden sky streaked with green, the red-golden field with an inset of an emerald-green pond, three brownish-golden barns towered by a golden and green tree twice the height of the barns. A child, taller than the tree, stood with a startled look on his face, his body the shape of a Christmas tree and decorated with golden ornaments, and on top of his head, instead of hair, he wore a bow tie the size of his entire body, purple with golden polka dots. Such an audacious and disturbed boy.
I remember the painting, Nikolai said. I hid it in my closet because I spelled my name wrong.
Everyone seeing it would wonder where that boy in the painting came from, I said. Or where that boy is now, I thought.
Somewhere, he said, but really, don’t muddle your poor brain with riddles.
I told him the story of a dear friend of mine, who had been part of a lengthy program at a local music festival. By the time she was to play, it was late at night, and the music-saturated patrons had already crowded into the bar for reinforcement. When you play the piano to an empty room, does it still count as music? She and I had laughed on the phone about that question.
If you write poetry read by no one, does it still count as poetry, Nikolai said.
My heart ached. He had saved the music he had loved on my phone, all the way back to when he was six. It was a hodgepodge of classical music, Broadway musicals, lyrical arias, irreverent parodies of lyrical arias found on the Internet, soundtracks for videogames, and a folder of songs under “Edith Pilaf” (how we had laughed about his mistake). I was lucky to have every single piece of music he had listened to, yet luck in this story was purer and blinder than one could endure. Every time I turned on the music I thought of his poetry, written and yet to be written, unknown to me.
She herself heard the music, Nikolai said. That’s the apotheosis of a musician’s career, don’t you agree?
Apotheosis, I said. I forgot you liked the word.
A noun too posh for your taste, he said.
A few years ago, when a friend had published the first two books of a trilogy, The Apothecary and The Apprentices, Nikolai had asked me to query the title of the third book. If she hasn’t settled on one, he had said, I have a perfect title, The Apotheosis.
I still like that as a book title, he said.
I was going to give it to my children’s book.
Oh that, he said. None of your characters would understand the word.
When Nikolai had turned five, I had promised him that I would write a children�
�s book for him. Each year the promise extended to the next year. A few months before his death, I showed him the first two chapters, which he vehemently hated.
But Mommy, admit it, you can’t write a children’s book, he said now. You’re bad at it. Dreadfully, frightfully, ghastly, hair-raisingly bad.
The adverbs you’re addicted to, I said. I rather like the concept of the book.
The book, or what I had imagined it, was to be in part an autobiography of a rag doll that belonged to a little girl whose suffragette mother had been taken away to prison, and in part about the most impossible reader of the autobiography, a teenage girl living in the age of Snapchat and Instagram.
You could still write it, like your friend could play to the empty room.
No reason to write it ever again, I thought, if I had put it off year after year as though there were infinite time.
I thought you always prided yourself as a non-procrastinator, he said.
I’ve only procrastinated with that one project, I said. Many things, looked at from this side of death, gained bone-crushing weight. When Nikolai was in second grade, I had suggested that we eat out on the first day of spring break. Spring break is so short and I have so many things to do I cannot waste my life eating out, he had said. Oh, but a life is long, we have the time for a good meal, I had said. No, he had replied, there is never enough time in a life.
You can’t do that, Nikolai said. Everything looks different if you look at it from aftertime.
Most things, I corrected him automatically.
If you insist on being so annoyingly precise.
Is aftertime a word? I asked.
I think so, he said, if there is noon and there is afternoon.
Word and afterword, I said.
Math and aftermath, he said.
Life and afterlife, I said.
None of them sounds as appealing as aftertime, don’t you think?
But are you sure you are using it correctly?
Oh what does it matter, Mommy? Any moment that comes after time is aftertime.
Are we in aftertime then? I asked.
I am, but not you, he said.
Why not me?
You’ve said you live in days, so you are still in time. You can’t live in aftertime.