Where Reasons End

• 热可可加盐

  2021-04-16
  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. Why pompous nonsense, he said. I hate it when you try to sound smart. Well, we’re starting the momery book in any case....
• 热可可加盐

  2021-04-16
  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.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, and adjective is a window. I laughed. What’s ...
• 热可可加盐

  2021-04-16
  To live you have to propagate delusions, Nikolai said. One is not enough. 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 cl...
• 热可可加盐

  2021-04-16
  I remembered an early spring 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, cheerf...
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  2021-04-16
  Nikolai had been an early riser like me, come here, Mommy, he used to call when he heard me up, in the same town that had not changed between age 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 conversation 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 s...
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  2021-04-16
  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 inprecise. 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 people who don’t want to feel or don’t know how to.And reading? I asked. Nikolai was a good reader....
• 热可可加盐

  2021-04-16
  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...
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  2021-04-16
  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?
• 热可可加盐

  2021-04-16
  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 a...
• 热可可加盐

  2021-04-16
  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 our 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 d...
• 热可可加盐

  2021-04-16
  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.
• 热可可加盐

  2021-04-16
  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.
• 热可可加盐

  2021-04-16
  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 se...
• 热可可加盐

  2021-04-16
  If memory were a fetter, he said, many people would envy me.Why?Each day they live makes the fetter more unbreakable than the day before.What if, I thought, that is life’s necessity?Still, I said, aren’t you able to know the poem even if you can’t remember?It doesn’t work the way you imagined. Why not?Something in the past, he said, and so specific. No, knowing is not about that. In other words, I said, omniscience does not apply retrospectively. I kept having to refrain from saying: where you are. Dilemmas are ubiquitous, he said, wherever you are. Di-lemmas: two assumptions. Omniscience and memory: both questionable.If one has to choose? I asked. Memory is like eye color, he said. You always have it.Yet one can choose to shut one’s eyes, I thought. That doesn’...
• 热可可加盐

  2021-04-16
  Days are not the only place where we live, Nikolai said. Time is not the only place where we live, I said. Days are. I don’t have to have days to live now. And yet I have to live in days, I said. I’m sorry, he said. Days: the easiest possession, requiring only automatic participation. The days he had refused would come, one at a time. Neither my allies nor my enemies, they would wait, every daybreak, with their boundless patience and indifference, seeing if they could turn me into a friend or an enemy to myself.Never apologize, I said, for what you have let go.
• 热可可加盐

  2021-04-16
  Poor you, he said. Waylaid by time. Waylay, I said. I’ve never used it in my writing. No offense, but you don’t have an expansive vocabulary. Luckily my mind is not limited by my vocabulary, I said. (In my head I used the same tone that I had used when Nikolai had introduced me to his kindergarten class: My mom is an immigrant so she speaks English with an accent. Thank you my dear, I had said then, but I still make a living by writing in English.)
• 热可可加盐

  2021-04-16
  Rules are set to be broken, he said. Deadlines are set to be missed, I said. Deadline as a word used to fascinate me, a word that connects time and space and death with such absoluteness.Promises are made not to be kept, he said. Love is made not to last, I said. A contestable statement, though he chose not to argue. Love was the word we had used at his leave-taking, he knowing it was final, I sensing it was the case. But between sensing and knowing there were seven hours and four states. Only today did I register that people often in their condolence letters called the loss unfathomable. The distance at the moment of loss could but calculated: 189,200 fathoms. (What does it matter that fathom is no longer used to measure from here to there? To obsolete is to let age, from which deat...
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  2021-04-16
  I suppose you’re right, I said. Still, I wish you knew how much you are missed by many people. Mommy, Nikolai said, and the way he said it almost made me weep. Mommy, you know that’s a cliché. What if life could be saved by clichés? What if life must be lived by clichés? Somewhere tomorrow and somewhere yesterday—never somewhere today but cliché-land. You promised that you would understand, Nikolai said. Understanding I had promised him. And other things, too: a house in the woods, a kitchen with sunlight, many new recipes, rights to my books—after you die I want the rights to the books you’ve written, but only the good ones, he had said to me at nine. Yet all these promises were as inadequate as love, promise and love being to anchors of cliché-land. That doesn’t change how sad ...
• 热可可加盐

  2021-04-16
  I don’t like making friends with older people. Besides, one can’t really be friends with one’s mother.Can one not?No. The essence of growing up is to play hide-and-seek with one’s mother successfully, Nikolai said. All children win, I said. Mothers are bad at seeking. You did find me. Not as your mother, I said. Don’t you notice the sign there (though I knew he couldn’t have—I had hung it up while talking with him): Do not let mother dear find us.