Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

“You may need someone,” Moran said, though she knew that the role of caretaker could easily be filled by another person: Rachel, for instance, or his other children; down the line, it would probably be a hired nurse, or else he would be moved from the condo to a facility. Many stories of his generation would end that way, and he would argue that there was no point in being different.

“You’re being stubborn,” Josef said.

She exited the car and opened the passenger door. “Come,” she said, bending down and reaching for his hand. “I’ll walk you up after all.”

Moran had not been in Josef’s condo before, but a place, like the person who inhabits it, can become close to one at the first encounter. Of course there were the things from the old house: the framed pictures of the children and Alena; the oil painting of a lone, whitewashed farmhouse dwarfed by the rolling green hills behind it, which used to hang in the family room; the sofa and the coffee table, both of which, Moran had once calculated, must be about her age, if not older. But more than these objects, it was the unclutteredness that reminded her of her own house. One could easily trace a life lived in solitude. The footprints, though invisible, were not hard for her to see: the steps to the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom, all taken out of necessity.

Moran asked Josef if he would like to lie down, and he said it would be better that he sit on the sofa. On the coffee table, five pills of three different colors lined up on a coaster, next to a glass of water. She asked if he needed to take the medicine now, and he said yes, and thanked her when she handed the water and the pills to him.

She imagined he had picked them out of different bottles — he must do this every time he left for the hospital, lest he forget or feel too sick to do it afterward. Perhaps there is a line in everyone’s life that, once crossed, imparts a certain truth that one has not been able to see before, transforming solitude from a choice into the only possible state of existence. Moran had always thought she had crossed that line long ago — but when, she asked herself, and she could not come up with an answer. It could have been when she extricated herself from Josef’s life, or earlier, when she had sat in that dingy apartment in Beijing, paralyzed and ashamed by the sight of Shaoai’s oversized body and mindless giggling. But she would have been too young for that crossing to count as real experience, and her solitude, which had not chosen her but had been chosen by her, was different from Josef’s solitude: hers was a protest, his a surrender.

Josef dozed off on the sofa, his mouth slightly open, his breathing shallow. She picked up an old blanket from the sofa and laid it softly on him. His eyelids, too pale — as though they were a naked part of a body that should be kept out of sight — made her look away. If she left now, he would wake up to the empty room, thinking she was only a phantom in a dream. If she stayed, he would open his eyes and be momentarily disoriented; but however meager her offer was, it must be better than a dream.

Moran walked to the window, which overlooked the parking lot. A man, the manager of the building judging by his looks, was unloading bags of rock salt from his pickup truck. Earlier, at the café, two or three tables of people had been discussing the coming snowstorm, which the forecast said would hit the area hard by the end of the week; would it affect holiday traveling, the people at the café had wondered, worries about their children’s homecoming lining the old women’s faces. The nurse, too, when saying farewell to Josef, had said glumly that they were going into another long winter, as though, in her tired eyes, last year’s stale snow was still sitting in gray piles by the roadside, never melting with time.

Moran remembered the delight in the eyes of the Thai couple and the Indian students from years ago upon seeing their first snowfall; back in their home countries, the news must have left ripples of marvel in many hearts. She herself had not shared their relish. One can always go back to another moment in history to negate the present; only the impressionable and the inexperienced — in that case, the people from the snowless tropics — are liable to christen a moment memory . The snow-covered hills west of the Back Sea; her bicycle tires skidding on rutted, hard-pressed snow before crashing into Boyang’s; a squad of snowmen they had lined up in the courtyard during one of the biggest snowstorms — if she wanted, she could always assign more meaning to those memories, diminishing others.

Yet her connection to the Midwest had begun with snow. Before she met Josef, she had been in Madison for two and a half months, but those days, like the time since she had left Josef, had been willfully turned into the footprints of seabirds on wet sand, existing only between the flow and ebb of the tide. Is it possible for one to develop an attachment to a place or a time without another person being involved? If so, the place and the time must make a most barren habitat. Beijing in her memory had remained two cities, the one before Shaoai’s poisoning and the one after, yet in both places she had not been alone. Guangzhou, where she had gone to college for four years, had been marked by the absence of any communication between her and her old friends in Beijing, but even that lack had been meaningful: people, absent, could claim more space. The Massachusetts town Moran had lived in for the past eleven years, however, did not offer a memorable emptiness; in shunning people, she had turned the place, with its abundant sunny days in the summer and its beautiful autumn colors, into a mere spot on the map, the time she’d spent there collapsed into one long day of not feeling. No, solitude she did not have; what she had was a never-ending quarantine.

The snow on the day when Moran had first met Josef had been light and flaky, and in the parking lot he had swept a layer of it off the windshield with his gloved hands. He had offered to drive her back to the Westlawn House, and she had not known how to decline, even though she would have preferred a long walk in the snowy dusk.

It was time to get a new scraper, he said, and when he saw her puzzled look, he asked if things were all right.

She said everything was all right, though he looked concerned still, and wanted to know if her headache was bothering her and if she needed some medicine. She would not have said anything more, but she knew that if she did not tell the truth, she would make a good-hearted man worry unnecessarily. She reassured him that she was perfectly fine; except that she did not know what he meant when he talked about a scraper.

Their relationship — a friendship before it evolved into love or companionship — had begun where little common ground could be found between them. It was a matter of paying attention that had brought them together. For Josef, the objects and sights that had been familiar to him had become less so. For Moran, it was making an effort to find new things — and there were plenty in a new country — so that she could stop looking inward for an explanation that could make her recent history less puzzling.

Sitting in Josef’s car that day, for the first time Moran had looked at the world from the passenger’s seat. The traffic signs and lane dividers lit by the headlights as though they were taking turns becoming visible; the rushing and swirling of snowflakes toward the windshield at an angle and speed she had never thought possible; the dashboard, with its circles and numbers in pale neon green — all these made her look at the world more closely, as she had not done for a long time. At Westlawn, several of her housemates had cars, but Moran preferred walking, and had arranged her life within a walking distance radius and occasionally a bus ride: she walked to school and to a nearby grocery store for food, and on weekends she rode the bus to town to look at the shop windows and the people who shopped behind the windows. Once she had taken a more adventurous route, climbing up a hill and then trekking down a long, grassy slope, stirring up insects, which had reminded her of her intrepid younger days, hunting for crickets and katydids with Boyang. To stop herself from reminiscing, she ran downhill, and when she reached the edge of the state highway, she waited for over five minutes, until no car was in sight in both directions, before sprinting across the six lanes to the other side, where a spreading Wal-Mart had amazed her with its abundance of everything one needed — or would never have imagined one would need — for a life in America.