Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

Why not come back now, you two deserters? One life has ended because of you and you — and yet, Boyang knew, he himself could not be exempted. One life had ended, and none of them was innocent. That must be something, no? How many people by the waterfront had murderous thoughts now and then, dark ghosts casting shadows on their minds, from which they had to look away? How many had succeeded in a murder?

Boyang walked for an extra few minutes to calm himself and turn his attention to his upcoming date. When he finally approached Sizhuo from the unlit side of the street, he could see that she had already locked up the shop. Standing right outside a pool of orange light from a nearby street lamp, she was not sending text messages on her cell phone; nor was she impatiently looking left and right for his late arrival. From her posture — straight backed, still as a statue, her eyes looking ahead although they must be seeing little in the darkness — he could not tell if she was used to waiting for others, or if she had never been in that position, waiting not having worn out her patience.

“Please know that every day I live for when I come to you. Please let the strangers around me remain strangers. They don’t know you, and they pity me because they don’t know you.”

Ruyu stopped, sensing something had gone awry. She used to love this last moment of her day, when nothing stood between God — her future — and herself: even her grandaunts, who had retreated behind the curtain to have their private conversation with him, did not matter for the time being. Ruyu did not know, however, that believing was the only way for her grandaunts to maintain their dignity in a life that had taken too much from them: the death, too early, of a weak-willed mother, the disappearance of a brother for whom they had exhausted their love and hope, properties confiscated, privilege of belonging to the Church deprived. The world was a bleak stopover for the sisters, in which they, armed against it with a religion that had become more of their own making as time passed, were either unaware of the shadow they had cast in an orphan’s life or else regarded it as irrelevant; she, in turn, her pupils adjusted to a perennial dusk, deemed what she perceived in their formidable shadow the only life worth living, sterility mistaken for purity, aloofness for devoutness.

Since Ruyu had come to Beijing, however, the calm brought by her conversation with God had vanished. Could it be that he was keeping himself distant just as a test? Or was it possible that he had stayed behind, leaving her among strangers? Pleas made to him, love and loyalty expressed repeatedly and desperately — these, unacknowledged, were strewn around her, corpses of unwanted words like those dead flies when summer ended. How odd, Ruyu thought now, that other insects would disappear when winter came, but flies would drop dead on windowsills or at the corners of a room, not allowed to escape, even in death, their ugliness displayed publicly.

Perhaps there’s a reason for that, as there’s a reason for anything; her grandaunts would say God alone knows what it is. But if God could forsake the flies and deprive them of private deaths, how could she know if she was different in his eyes from those flies? Her grandaunts had never had doubts in God, but what if they had made a mistake — what if he, like her parents, found little merit in her to keep her?

A panic hit Ruyu with such violence that she felt as though she were being attacked by a physical force, her breath taken away by an acute pain. She opened her eyes and unclasped her hands, yet nothing had changed in her surroundings: the lamp on the desk was shining steadily; the gloved hands of Mickey Mouse on the clock face moved forward by even leaps. She was alone in the bedroom she shared with Shaoai, her back to the entrance, the curtain undisturbed. Uncle and Aunt had already gone to bed. Grandpa had been fed the sleeping pill that would keep him quiet through the night. Shaoai and a friend of hers from college were in the living room watching TV with the volume turned low. From the open window, Ruyu heard the startled cry of a cicada, with desperate urgency, before it went silent. The first autumn crickets chirped in the grass, their night song melancholy.

Ruyu ordered herself to focus. Any minute now, Shaoai and her friend Yening might turn off the television and come into the bedroom. Yening had returned from her hometown on a late-afternoon train for the new semester at the university, and she was going to spend the night with them before moving back into her dorm. It had seemed natural to all that the bed Ruyu shared with Shaoai — a double bed — would be just fine for the three girls.

“Please forgive me, and please give me courage to be worthy of your love,” Ruyu started again, though her fear that she was a nuisance to him was growing more intense. She remained in the same position without opening her eyes, waiting for the fierce pain she was experiencing to pass, all the while knowing that the pain could be nothing but his punishment. He had seen all there was to see, and he would be seeing to it that all would be well for her. Why, then, was she still asking him every day for strength, which she should have had by now? Wouldn’t he be irritated by her failure to live up to his standards; wouldn’t he be burdened by her neediness; by her love, which she did not have a way to show; by her constantly asking more from him, always asking, always?

Soundlessly someone entered the room, but only when she dropped a pillow on the bed did Ruyu sense her presence. Ruyu turned around abruptly to face Yening, who was sitting on the bed, her eyes fixed on Ruyu yet unfocused, perhaps seeing nothing but phantoms in her own mind. At dinner, Ruyu had noticed that Yening, a tall and wispy girl, had been courteous toward everyone but had not eaten or talked much. Aunt had not bombarded her with questions, nor had she pushed more food onto the guest; though, nervous, with her incessant chattering, Aunt had been stupider than ever. Ruyu had noticed — and having a visitor among them confirmed her observation — that Aunt seemed superstitiously fearful of quiet, as though any moment not filled with some kind of back-and-forth indicated a failure on her part, or worse, some sort of impending disaster.

“I thought you were watching TV with Shaoai,” Ruyu said when the older girl did not speak or avert her stare. There was something in Yening that Ruyu found unsettling, but she was too young to know the reason: the older girl occupied the same impertinent role in life as Ruyu did; the hardest loss is to be defeated by one’s own strategy in others’ hands.

Yening shrugged. From the living room they could hear Shaoai change channels. “What were you doing when I came in?” Yening asked.

“Nothing.”

“You can’t be doing nothing.”

“I was only sitting here and thinking.”

“Thinking of what? Or whom?”

Ruyu shrugged, then realized that she had just learned the distasteful gesture from Yening.

“Were you, by any chance, talking to your god? Shaoai said you conversed with your god more than you conversed with us mortals,” Yening said, choosing her words with a malicious care.

Ruyu stared back. Yening waited, and when no reply came, she pointed to the accordion case in the corner of the room with her chin. “Is that your accordion?”

“Yes.”

“I heard no one around here could make you condescend to play.”

Ruyu wondered if Shaoai had sent her friend in to humiliate her. Why else would Shaoai even talk to her friend about Ruyu? Shaoai did not like Ruyu, that much was clear: she seldom talked to Ruyu, which was, in fact, fine because Shaoai rarely talked to anyone these days without making sharp comments. But at night she never seemed to tire of putting on a show of hostility and disgust. She waited until Ruyu went to bed and then would turn off the light while continuing to read with a handheld lamp, furiously turning pages and sometimes ending her reading by throwing the book out of the mosquito netting so that it dropped on the floor with a thud. Ruyu, who got up as early as possible — fortunately, Shaoai never woke up early enough to trap Ruyu with another round of confrontational displays — sometimes stole a glance at the book on the floor if the cover was facing up. For several days in a row it was a book called The Second Sex by someone named de Beauvoir; the book’s title made Ruyu uncomfortable, and once she knew its yellow spine and dog-eared look, she avoided looking at the title even if it was staring back at her from the floor. There were other books too, thinner, all with disagreeable titles: Nausea, The Flies, The Plague . One book, though, had caught Ruyu’s attention— The Confessions of a Child of the Century ; she would like to know what the book was about, but she dared not move a page for fear that Shaoai would wake up and catch her.