Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

The dead did not fade when they remained unacknowledged. For the first time, Boyang considered the necessity of a funeral. He had been to a few, all of them arranged in the most extravagant manner, and he had laughed then at the gesture of glorifying the mortal. But funerals are not for the vanity of the dead, he realized now. The dead are gone, and the living need witnesses — more so at funerals than at weddings. Happiness and grief on these occasions both explode like fireworks: happiness, if not on display, retains some value for later; grief turned inward only becomes toxic.

Neither Moran nor Ruyu replied to Boyang’s email, and the void in which he was left, waiting, despite his reluctance to admit it, threatened to give Shaoai’s death more weight. Where’s your good sense, Boyang asked himself; do you need to put up a wanted poster, and how large does the reward money have to be? But laughing at himself did not, as he had hoped, ease his agitation. Endured alone, a death becomes a chronic illness one has to hide from others.

A week passed, and Boyang did not visit Aunt as he had promised. If she asked about Moran and Ruyu, he would not have anything new to tell her; but would she? Perhaps rather than avoiding the question, he was only dreading the silence in place of the question: if Aunt did not bring up Moran and Ruyu, he would feel lonelier and angrier. His own mother, after their one conversation, seemed to have dropped her curiosity, and it would be unwise if he talked to her again about the case. Certainly she would not mind watching him return to the topic like a hesitant fish circling back to the bait; perhaps she was waiting for that, with a fisherman’s astuteness.

Why was it, Boyang thought one evening, that with so many people crowded into his life, the only ones he could not stop thinking about were those two who had kept to their vows of absence? Their silence granted them a power over him, but people, unless forced into silence, must have chosen it for the exact reason of possessing that power. A vanishing act is an old trick; nevertheless it works on hearts of all ages: could it be that we will never be rid of that child in us, who, panicking about never seeing a beloved face again, is still screaming to this day?

Listless, Boyang looked through the contact list on his cell phone and toyed with a new app, which assigned icons to different contacts. To the men with whom he could have a drink and exchange lewd jokes, he gave an icon of a wineglass or a curvy female body; to the women he wouldn’t mind touching with subtle affection in a dark karaoke room, that of a lipstick. When he reached Coco’s name, he hesitated and looked up at her; she was leaning on the armrest of a chair and watching him, tight lipped. Didn’t he remember, she had said earlier, that they were going to meet her friends at a karaoke bar to celebrate her birthday? Boyang had said he was not in the mood to go out, adding that it was ridiculous to start celebrating a birthday a week in advance; who did she think she was, he asked, Jesus Christ or the Queen of England?

“Aren’t you going to be late for your friends?” he said now. He knew he had agreed to spend the night with her, thinking that a group of mindless girls in a noisy place would be the perfect antidote to the silence. But there was no point apologizing: a man unable to extricate himself from the mercy of others has to find some balance in those who put their lives at his mercy.

In a dry voice, Coco asked him if everything was all right with his business. Would he like her to make a cup of tea for him, or would he like her to give him a massage?

What he needed most, he said, was some space to breathe and think — and please, no tears, no questions, he added, sinking heavily into the depths of the sofa.

He was not a good actor, and the boorish role he had taken on was no more convincing than the part of the obedient son he played for his mother, whose interest in Boyang, far from maternal, was dissecting. Had Coco had his mother’s wisdom, she would have easily sabotaged his role with mocking incredulity, but Coco did not dare to stray from her script, in which she was a young and pretty woman from a provincial city who could not afford to look for love in this big city but, with her cunning, could get many other things. She slid off the armchair like a melancholy cat. “Would you like me to call tomorrow, then?”

The question, Boyang knew, was asked in the hope that he would want her to spend the night with him. Coco shared a two-bedroom apartment in a decrepit building with three other girls her age. She’d been the first one to find a lover with a good apartment in the city; two of the other girls had followed, though the three had continued to rent, as none of their invitations to the second nests was permanent. The one roommate who had not succeeded in the way the others had, Coco said, was pretty enough but not so smart: she was dating a boy their age who did not have anything to his name but an entry-level job at an advertising agency. Generously, the three other girls allowed the boy to spend a night in the apartment now and then. Boyang wondered if today would be one of those days. He had not been to Coco’s apartment, but he did not have any trouble imagining the place, where the girls, when necessary, withdrew behind their curtained corners and nurtured alone their wounds of being used by the world; inevitably they would regain their spirits and venture out afresh, as that was what their roles required of them. Life is a battle that the lesser ones do not have the luxury of quitting midway.

“Sure, call me tomorrow,” he said, and wished Coco a good night of fun.

Coco struggled with her boots and then her gloves at the door, and Boyang, from where he was sitting, unchivalrously enjoyed her fumbling, feeling too spiteful to offer help. To send Coco back to the cramped apartment where a young couple in love, without any future in the city, clung to each other for a night of meager pleasure, was to teach her a lesson about life, even though it was a lesson she had time and again refused to learn. A week short of turning twenty-two, Coco was already showing signs of fatigue, deeper than could be released by restful sleep or hidden by makeup.

Boyang had met Coco two years earlier at a party. She’d been enrolled in cosmetics school, she had told Boyang; her goal was to find a position as a makeup assistant at a wedding photography studio, and once she had enough experience, to work in the film or TV industry. Do you know any producers, she had asked Boyang, and when he said he might, she stayed at his side for the rest of the party. Who’s paying for your training, he had asked, and she had said her parents, but she had been lying to them, telling them she was enrolled in a nursing program. “Who wants to take care of the old and the sick when she grows up?” she had said to him, wrinkling her nose in a childlike way.

What do you want to be when you grow up, Boyang sometimes wanted to ask Coco, but the line did not belong to that of a sugar daddy: he should feel no responsibility for her misspent youth. Shoo, Boyang said in his mind now, shoo, shoo, while waving at Coco, who, even in her resentment, did not forget to blow him a kiss — a kiss which, sadly, unbeknownst to her, landed nowhere in this indifferent world.

Boyang was glad that no child had been produced in his failed marriage. He would not have been able to protect his child from the harm of the world unless he raised him or her to be the first to inflict pain; he would also have had to become more successful at his business, so that his child could have a chance to at least become a decent person without being trampled by others. But imagining a child — his child — being a good person was as upsetting to Boyang as imagining that child being evil. Of course there was a wide range between good and evil, but could one be both callous and kind — callous enough to be immune to worldly hurt, yet with enough kindness to be spared the possible divine repercussions for that callousness?