Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

Clammy, cold, Ruyu did not remember falling back to sleep, though when, again, she woke up with a start, she realized that she had dozed off. Shaoai was next to her; still? Ruyu thought with dismay, but then, why not? There was no place for either of them to go, now, or ever.

“If you’re waiting for me to give you an explanation,” Shaoai said, “I can tell you that you’re hoping in vain.”

Ruyu wondered if Shaoai had been waiting for her to wake up, to beg for an explanation that Shaoai alone would have the power to deny. “Nor will I apologize,” she continued.

Is this what people do after any sort of unnatural happening — prattle, so that all will become normal after a while? Time, refusing to become memory, demands one’s attention with a suffocating grip, yet one can do nothing about time, nor can one do away with time.

“Someday you’ll be grateful to me,” Shaoai said. “I know you may not believe me now. If you’re angry, you can stay angry for as long as you’re able, but this is what I think you should know: you have a brain, which you are responsible for filling with meaningful thoughts; you have a life ahead of you, which you should live for yourself. You have not been taught to think or to question by your grandaunts. For heaven’s sake, you have not even been taught to have human feelings. Since they haven’t done that for you, someone else must.”

Do murderers expect gratitude from the murdered souls for setting them free from their earthly burdens? If Ruyu went to Grandpa’s room now, could she put her hands gently on his brittle neck and liberate him from the humiliation of being half-dead?

“You are the most unbending girl I’ve ever met,” Shaoai said, all of a sudden possessed by an anger that Ruyu did not understand. “Why do you think you have the right to be like that?”

“I don’t understand what you are asking,” Ruyu said. “I don’t see how the kind of person I am has anything to do with what happened.”

“Of course it doesn’t in your mind, but that’s what I’m talking about. Live like a real human being. Bring yourself down from the clouds. Open your eyes.”

Yet there was nothing to see, Ruyu thought, but could she be wrong? Suppose ugliness is worth seeing, too?

“Just so you know: I don’t want you to think too much of what happened. As a matter of fact, nothing much has happened between you and me. Someday, you may even shrug it off and laugh at it,” Shaoai said, and after a moment she added bitterly, “If you don’t believe me, go ask Yening. She may have wisdom to share with you.”

Ruyu wondered if Shaoai had said that out of the hope of being contradicted. Perhaps Shaoai wanted to know how permanently she had marked Ruyu’s life because she had failed to make Yening her possession. Ruyu shifted her body and felt the mosquito netting brush her face. Aunt had said earlier that day that the netting would be kept up until the end of the week. All the mosquitoes would be gone by the second week of October, she had said with cheerful assurance. One nuisance out of one’s life, Ruyu thought, feeling a dull ache behind her eyes. Was this how people felt when they wanted to cry? Ruyu could not remember the last time she had cried.

“Why don’t you say something?” Shaoai asked.

“Do you do that to Moran, too? Do you want to do that to her, too?”

Shaoai seemed taken aback. “Of course not.”

“Why of course? Why not?” Ruyu asked. Though she knew the answer already. Shaoai’s desire would never bring her to Moran, because Moran, with her idolization of the older girl, held no meaning for Shaoai, just as Ruyu herself, and her grandaunts also, meant nothing to God. Bad things happen — wars, plagues, parents abandoning their children, the heartless preying on those with hearts — and no one, not a human nor a god, will ever intervene.

Shaoai seemed baffled. “Moran, she’s only a child,” she said after a moment.

Moran did not sleep well that night, perhaps because of the day’s excitement. When she woke up at daybreak, she could no longer stay still. She got out of bed and washed quietly at the washstand, and through the window she could see Shaoai, who’d risen early also, lingering under the grape trellis. Had Shaoai stayed outside overnight? Moran wondered; but having few words of comfort for her, Moran found herself unwilling to go into the yard, as she would have done on any other morning.

On their second date — five days after their dinner on Sunday — Sizhuo asked Boyang his age, and whether Boyang was his real name. Why, he said with amusement, and placed his citizen’s ID on the table. They were in a teahouse near his parents’ place, which he’d planned to stop by afterward, hoping it would seem to his parents as though they were on his mind often enough to warrant an unplanned visit. But the thought of seeking their approval, however unconsciously, made him decide at once to skip seeing them after all. On the most fundamental level, they were the best parents he could ask for: they caused him no conflict, either internal or external, while with each day’s passing he was made more aware, by his guilty glances at the calendar, that he had not visited Aunt since the day of Shaoai’s cremation. It was more Aunt’s fault than his own, he insisted to himself, turning defiant as people do when their limits are shown in unsparing light: unlike his parents, she reminded him of all the complications he was incapable of dealing with in life. Who had granted her the right to do that to him?

He had told his secretary that he was taking the afternoon off — Sizhuo worked five and a half days a week, Friday afternoon and Saturday being her time off. Other things he had gathered on their first date: she’d grown up in a village in the northeast, near the border of Russia; her father was the only teacher in the village school, teaching six grades in one room; her mother ran a seamstress’ stall; she had a younger brother at a provincial university with two more years of study; his major was marketing, and Sizhuo hoped she could help her brother come to Beijing after graduation.

“You’re older than I thought,” Sizhuo said after studying the ID.

“What does that even mean?”

Sizhuo pushed the ID back across the table. “My friend said if you were over thirty-five I should not see you again.”

“Wait a minute, who’s this friend, and how old is she?” Boyang said, feigning indignity. From Sizhuo’s background — and she had not shied away from giving details when he had asked the previous time — he had calculated that she was twenty-two or twenty-three, more or less Coco’s age.

Sizhuo shook her head, as if to say the questions were not important.

“And what makes her so prejudiced against men my age?”

“She said men that old”—Sizhuo stopped, but there was neither apology nor coyness in her pause—“men at your age want different things than I do.”

The friend might not be wrong, Boyang thought, but what did he want from this girl whom he knew he should have left alone altogether? There were plenty of people in his life to cater to his sentiments, and his sentiments had a reliable pattern — reliable enough — so that he did not worry about unpleasant surprises, nor did he wait for joyful ones. For mindless pleasures, he could go to Coco, with whom there was a cleaner contract, less befuddlement. For intellectual intrigue, he could talk with his parents — his mother more than his father, who had started to show early signs of dementia; or even with his sister, to whom over the years he had grown closer than when they’d been children, but perhaps it was more accurate to say that in adulthood they found each other, as she had been launched into the world not as a child but as a mind of genius that had to dwell in a child’s body for some time. If ever he wanted to develop affection for the young there were his two nieces for him to dote on from afar. If he wanted to play games with people — did he ever want that? no, not really — there were plenty of opportunities, challenging rivals, and profitable gains if he wanted to make scheming more a part of his life. In thus looking at his life, Boyang could not find a place to fit the girl. She’s miscellaneous, he thought; others belonged to that category, too, the unsettled and the unsettling: Moran, Ruyu, Shaoai — she had been the center of that category for so long that it was impossible to think of her as absent now — perhaps even Aunt; and of course he himself, too, at listless moments, when people in his life failed to entertain or distract him. But to put Sizhuo into that space that he rarely allowed himself to visit — was it an alarming sign?