by Yiyun Li
I know, he said. Many piano students have to play it, so that prospect, let’s hope, will discourage you from piano.
Maybe I can go back to my accordion.
That’s a good thought, he said. You can even go to a pub to play. Loud and cheery. With some rouge and a bohemian flair.
How you make a point to oppose every pursuit of mine.
I’m only being realistic and responsible, he said, so you don’t fail by January tenth.
I bought a dictionary for myself, I said. And it’s my resolution to study it every day.
Because you need to brush up on your vocabulary to be on par with me?
A Dictionary of the English Language, I read to him, by Samuel Johnson.
Okay.
You said okay because you don’t know who Dr. Johnson was, I said.
Dr. Who? he said. Oh fine, I don’t know.
There was no joy, however, in having scored a small point. There were so many things I wished he could get to know and love someday. A week before his death he had told me he was looking forward to studying Macbeth in English. Once in a while I had asked him to give War and Peace another try—he had read a hundred pages in seventh grade, and had reported having understood nothing. Later I realized that he had been unaware of the fact that the dialogues in French had English translations in the footnotes. Who reads the footnotes when the book is already so thick? he had protested. A friend had read a Wallace Stevens poem at Nikolai’s memorial, but it was not a single Stevens poem, but all his poems, the work of a lifetime, that reminded me once and again of Nikolai. A mind that sees no path or direction to flee despair can be expanded nevertheless. Who can say if expansion may not one day make despair sufferable? I wished I could still leave some books on his desk, a Wallace Stevens collection among them.
Oh don’t wish, he said. Wishing only wounds the heart.
What’s the harm of spending a few minutes lost in wishing, I thought, when the deepest wound would remain open, day and night.
Then find some distractions, he said. Wishing is not a good way to distract yourself.
I read him a quote from Marianne Moore. “If nothing charms us or sustains us (and we are getting food and fresh air) it is for us to say, ‘If not now, later,’ and not mope.” Often I had gone back to the quote, saying to myself, If not now, later.
I never mope, Nikolai said, if you haven’t noticed.
Of course I have, I said.
His joy and his suffering, neither in minor key, precluded moping. Yet what if, I thought, moping is a bridge to reach Moore’s later?
There is no later, he said. For some people it’s now and now and now and now.
Tell me about it, I thought. It was exactly three months since his death. Seasons have changed. All lives in nature have changed themselves, as ordained by the seasons. It’s later and later and later and later for them, helpless as they are to want to make permanent any kind of now. A dear friend says we only count days and weeks and months with this intensity for two reasons: after a baby’s birth, and after a loved one’s death. Three months feel as long as forever, yet as short as a single moment when it’s now and now and now and now, so I must tell my friend that there is a difference between life and death. A newborn grows by hour, by day, by week. The death of a child does not grow a minute older.
Does this count as moping? Nikolai asked.
What?
Your going over useless thoughts.
Useless according to whom? I snapped.
Sometimes you sound like me, he said. Very un-Mommy-like.
Sometimes you sound like me, I said.
What a terror, he said. No child likes to detect any trace of his parents in himself.
Not even the good things? I asked.
When bad things have to come along, too? he said.
A few times Nikolai had commented that he had got the mathematics and science genes from his father, talent with language and good work ethic from his mother, music and sport and a sense of humor from himself, admiration from his little brother—yet it was so rare that he could look at himself that way. Contentment was never a word in his dictionary.
Sometimes, I said, only sometimes, I do think you have a point in questioning why parents give children lives.
Why do they in any case?
Blind hope, I said, or wishful thinking.
See, you’re moping now.
No, this is not moping. I don’t mope, either, if you haven’t noticed.
Okay, I’ll give you that, he said.
Yet what if moping is the exact thing that is needed for those who don’t mope, I thought. One doesn’t kill oneself while moping.
I would say stick with any virtue or vice that you can’t change, he said. If you’re a migrant bird you can’t be flightless. If you’re a flightless bird you can’t leave New Zealand.
Or Australia? I said.
Any island, he said.
We never did visit Australia together, I said. Remember Rosie?
Rosie had grown up on an Australian farm, and had visited us when she was five. J. was six, and Nikolai was nine. The day she left, walking up the driveway of our old house, she had turned around with tears in her eyes and waved at the boys. Come visit me soon, she had shouted at them. Don’t wait till we’re old.
You can’t go back to every little memory and cry, Mommy.
How do you know I’m crying?
Because Rosie represents the quintessential never-lastingness of good old time.
Quintessential, I said. Do you know it shares a root with Quintus?
Quintus had joined the household when he had been nine weeks old. Nikolai had been the one to name the dog The Fifth in Latin, after the four human beings in the family.
Nikolai did not speak. Did he miss Quintus?
You can’t step into the same river twice, he said.
Sometimes once is hard enough, I said. I admire you for having done that, and you have done more beautifully than many people I know.
Oh Mommy, don’t make it sound like an elegy.
No, it’s not an elegy, I thought. No parent should write a child’s elegy.
Don’t be so sad, he said. Don’t mope.
Can I read you a poem? I said.
If that makes you feel better.
So I read him a poem by Wallace Stevens.
This Solitude of Cataracts
He never felt twice the same about the flecked river,
Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing
Through many places, as if it stood still in one,
Fixed like a lake on which the wild ducks fluttered,
Ruffling its common reflections, thought-like Monadnocks.
There seemed to be an apostrophe that was not spoken.
There was so much that was real that was not real at all.
He wanted to feel the same way over and over.
He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way,
To keep on flowing. He wanted to walk beside it,
Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast.
He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest
In a permanent realization, without any wild ducks
Or mountains that were not mountains, just to know how it would be,
Just to know how it would feel, released from destruction,
To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis,
Without the oscillations of planetary pass-pass,
Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury centre of time.
16
Answers Do Not Fly Around
I’ve gone back to Shakespeare, I said.
I didn’t know you stopped, Nikolai said.
He wouldn’t have k
nown. A little over a year ago, the day after the presidential election, I told him that every morning, I would read Shakespeare’s work before I made breakfast for them, and I would read his plays in chronological order, once, twice, however many rounds allowed by four years. I had stopped the morning after Nikolai died. The last morning we had had—I still remembered the giant volume opened on the dining table when he had come out of his bedroom. I remembered every single word we had exchanged until he exited my car near school.
Every single word? he asked.
Yes.
How can you be certain?
Because there had been eight hours of uncertainty, during which I had re-lived that morning, moment by moment, but this I didn’t say. Remember when we were in Ireland, you chastised me because I ordered the food in the same accent the waitress used? I said. You thought it sounded like I was mocking her?
That’s a non sequitur, Nikolai said. I would believe it if you said you remembered some of the things we said to each other, but everything? Every word?
When I turned ten, I said, I made a resolution to memorize more poems than anyone in my life would have read. I kept the habit until I was in my twenties.
Now we’re in parallel conversations, he said.
What I’m trying to explain is this: Some people live by images, some by sounds. It’s words for me. Words said to me. Words not meant for me but picked up by me in any case. Words in their written form. Words that make sense and words that make nonsense.
So your brain is like a flypaper for words.
Gosh, I wish you could unsay it, I said. Now I’ll always feel a little disturbed by my brain.
LOL, he said.
I did not speak. As far as we were separated, I could still hear him. When he had first begun to adopt Internet slang, for a long time I had thought LOL meant “Lots of Love” and had cherished it when he said that to me. The misunderstanding, once cleared, had given Nikolai and J. a good time laughing at my gormlessness.
Remember the flypapers we saw in the Summer Palace? Nikolai asked.
It was on a smoggy morning a little over a year ago when we had gone to the Summer Palace. The sun had been an orange, metallic disc next to a high-rise when we left the hotel. From there I could retrace the course of the day, of boating and walking and playing word games and counting the flypapers around the lake all the way to a conversation with a cabdriver, who explained to me at length what it must mean for me to live in America and how I must parent my children with their Chinese roots. Too many people ready to offer expertise on things they knew nothing about, I had thought then, like too many cars congesting the traffic.
I remember that, Nikolai said. I was eavesdropping on your conversation. I was feeling bad for you.
Nikolai was a good eavesdropper. Eavesdropping used to be a crime, I said.
I know, he said. I’ve been to your talk on eavesdropping more than once. Writing fiction is to eavesdrop on your characters’ hearts.
It occurred to me, when he said that, that I would not give another talk on eavesdropping again.
Why not?
You can’t carry everything from one life to the next, I said.
But why leave the good things behind? he said. I rather liked listening to you talk about eavesdropping.
More of a reason to leave it with you, I thought, just as I had sent him off with a silk scarf of mine, intense with blue and yellow, of Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night. The scarf had been my favorite, and his, too.
Steal-listening, he said. An act of theft. Do you realize if I want I can do that even better now?
No doubt it’s the case, I thought. When was the last time you performed the act? I said.
At that lunch with your friend, remember?
I did not have to ask him the question to know that was the last time. On that day he had had a copy of Great Expectations open in front of him, but when my friend and I began a disagreement, he could not contain his smile. What were we arguing about? I said.
She asked you, in your imagination, what you wanted your novel to be. You said the main character outlived everyone so it was a book about the kindest revenge. She said that sounded cruel, and you said there was no cruelty, as the character had done nothing hurtful but to live on.
At that moment we had both turned to Nikolai, knowing he had been listening. What is your opinion, asked my friend, showing him the definition of the word revenge: to avenge by retaliating, to inflict injury in return for. And he had confirmed that yes, any revenge would be cruel.
You remember things well, I said.
If you can brag about your memory, why can’t I?
Things we remembered together, things we remembered differently, and things we remembered separately. Later that day I had taken him and his friend to the Empire State Building in a storm. They had run around the observation deck in the whipping rain. I had taken a picture of the city before the evening lights lit the streets, the sky heavy with grayness, the city gray with concrete buildings, except for the golden pyramid on top of the New York Life Building. Shall we change the subject? I said. I could remember and remember and cry and remember.
You started this whole catching-every-word-with-sticky-memory-paper conversation, he said.
I did, didn’t I? Will the memory paper catch words yet to be said?
Like this year’s flypapers catching next year’s flies before they are born? Like the White Queen saying memory works both ways?
Oh, I forgot the White Queen’s claim, I said.
If you and I can talk, he said, nothing is impossible.
Yet someday, I thought, people would question these conversations between him and me. Insanity or religiosity, some may say, or both.
Is that really your worry? he asked.
No.
Then why would you even spend a second thinking about it?
Oh, a mind catches a thought here and there too like flypaper, I said. Besides…
Besides what?
Nothing.
You can’t stop a sentence in the middle, he said. At least keep thinking to the end so I know.
Besides, I thought, someday I may have to face the question of protectiveness.
Protective of yourself?
No, I said.
Me?
Yes.
Me? he said. Me? Mommy, you know that should be the last of your concerns. Me, needing anyone’s protection now? No, no, no. People say that about the dead, that they need to be protected, only because people need an excuse for their own timidity.
How so?
Because they don’t know what the dead want. And they’re afraid of knowing, Nikolai said.
They’re afraid of not knowing, too, I said.
Are you?
Of knowing or not knowing? I’m not afraid of knowing.
Then you’re afraid of not knowing?
Yes, I said. Sometimes. A little.
You can ask me.
That, I thought, was my fear. Whatever questions I asked I had to answer for him. The world we shared was limited, even if our words were not.
What if I surprise you with an answer you wouldn’t have thought of? he asked.
Shall we try?
Only do not ask stupid questions, he said.
Like, What did you have for breakfast?
Or, Do you regret what you did? he said. Do you miss being alive?
I remembered the science fair when he had been in third grade. A parent had hailed us across the room. What are you doing there, Nikolai? He, standing next to his poster, had looked perplexed. I’m…uh…living, he had replied.
I forgot about that, he said. But it proves my point. Don’t ask self-evident questions.
Is there regret in his world now? Nostalgia? If they were self-evident I did not know th
e answers. I had not thought of asking him. Should it have occurred to me that these were legitimate questions?
Thank goodness you’ve spared both of us those questions, he said. What do you want to ask then?
I told him about a meeting we had had with another mother, who had lost her son six years ago to suicide. She was a woman with strong convictions, one being that her son and Nikolai had already met in heaven, and they had meant for her and us to meet in this life.
Oh my, he said. Is that what you wanted to ask, if I’ve been to heaven and made a few friends with backgrounds that are similar—not culturally, not ethnically, not socioeconomically—what’s the right modifier here?
Please be serious and respect where other people come from, I said.
Yes, yes, yes, he said. As long as you don’t imagine a heaven for me.
One of Nikolai’s friends had read a poem for him at his memorial, ending with a stanza: I am an atheist / but if one person can change that / it is you, Nikolai. I told him about the poem.
I don’t want to change anyone, he said. I don’t want anyone to change because of me.
That, I’m afraid, is not for you to decide.
Fine. But you have to know she was only writing a poem. Just as you’re writing stories here.
Yes, I said, but poems and stories are trying to speak what can’t be spoken.
You always say words fall short, he said.
Words fall short, yes, but sometimes their shadows can reach the unspeakable.
Words don’t have shadows, Mommy. They live on the page, in a two-dimensional world.
Still, we look for some depth in words when we can’t find it in the three-dimensional world, no?
You look for it, do you mean? I don’t look for anything now, he said.
Yet he had indulged me in this world of ours, made by words.
What I wanted to ask you, I said, is this: How long can our conversation last?
Can? I thought it was for you to decide. I didn’t make this happen. You did.
I did, didn’t I?
So the question is for yourself, he said. How long do you mean for the conversation to last?