Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

Was there ever a pure relationship between two people? Moran wished she could tell Boyang about the chemical Ruyu had taken from his mother’s lab, but the right moment of telling — if there had been one — had passed. “Let’s go back,” Moran said, feeling a sickness in her stomach.

A door opened, and Uncle, stepping out of the house, looked up at the moon for a long moment before trying to discern the figures in the shadow of the grape trellis. “Is that you two?” he asked. “Hurry before the Tang turns cold.”

The next morning Moran woke up with a high fever. “Must be an early flu,” she overheard Boyang’s grandmother saying when her mother told Boyang and Ruyu to go to school without Moran.

She spent the day in bed, sleeping on and off, welcoming the physical illness because she was now exempted from thinking. Her mother had moved the radio from the living room to a chair next to her bed, and had left a kettle of hot water underneath the chair. She would ask Boyang’s grandmother to check on Moran at lunchtime, her mother said, but Moran said she had better not; if she did have the flu she would rather not have anyone come near her, she said.

Ever so sluggishly time moved forward. Moran had forgotten to wind her wristwatch the night before, so it had stopped sometime before daybreak. She watched the slanting angle of the sunlight entering the window, leaving a path of floating particles in midair. In her Chinese textbook there was the poem about a lifetime passing like a white horse leaping across the narrowest crevice; the ancients had not been wrong if a thousand years had passed easily between their writing and her reading the poem, but had they also felt the weight of a never-ending movement when they had written those lines?

The radio, kept on at a low volume, proceeded from the morning news to the weather forecast and later the preschool children’s sing-along program, though they all sounded unreal in her feverish half dreams. Moran thought about the people who would be listening to the radio on a morning like this: pensioners, shop owners sitting behind counters and waiting for the first customer of the day, a bicycle repairman at a roadside shed pulling out a punctured inner tube, someone outside the system like Shaoai, having no place to be.

Toward the end of the day Moran heard people come back from work. Her fever had not broken, which gave her the excuse to stay isolated. Later, Moran heard Boyang’s voice from the living room, and her mother explaining to him that he had better stay away. Could he just say hi, he asked, and Moran’s mother said she would check to see if Moran was awake. Moran closed her eyes, and when she heard Boyang leave, she wept quietly.

It took Moran a week to recover, and except for the weekend when Boyang went to his parents’ apartment, he came over every evening to chat with her, and once Ruyu came with him, too. When Moran was feeling less sick, she would prop herself up with a pillow, and he would sit astride a chair placed at the entrance of the bedroom. They had been polite with each other at first, but soon Boyang returned to his usual self. Several other classmates had caught the flu, too, he said, but he and Ruyu had been lucky not to have it; the midterm was in two weeks, but there was no need for Moran to worry about the missed classes, as he would go over everything with her once she felt well enough; in biology lab the next day they would be dissecting frogs, which he knew she would not like to do, so she might as well stay sick and skip it; and, by the way, did she know that Sister Shaoai was also sick, so when everybody was at work or at school she and Shaoai could keep each other company.

“What happened to Sister Shaoai?” Moran said, surprised that her parents had not told her about it.

Boyang said it was probably the same virus. Remember when they had the measles together, he asked, and she said of course she did. In third grade Moran and Boyang had been caught by a measles epidemic, and his grandmother had set up her house for the two to be quarantined from the rest of the quadrangle; every morning and evening she would feed them dark, bitter liquid brewed from herbs, but otherwise they had been left alone with a chess set and a radio. Moran was a terrible chess player. Every time she was about to lose Boyang would switch sides with her, and it amazed her that however badly she opened her game he was able to change it for the better; sometimes they would switch sides several times in a game, until she would lose almost all the pieces for both red and black, and there was nothing to do but to call it a draw.

Those had been the happiest days, she thought, but did not say so to Boyang, for whom happier days were to come.

Unlike Moran, who was recovering by day, Shaoai deteriorated. By the time Moran was allowed to go back to school, little was on her mind but Shaoai’s illness — she had gone into a coma a few days before. The doctors were baffled, as the flu-like symptoms had quickly given way to other, more serious problems: hair loss, vomiting, seizures, and loss of much of her brain functions; all the tests run had offered few clues.

Before Boyang left for his parents’ home for the weekend, he told Moran to call him if there was any news about Shaoai. Every day Aunt and Uncle took turns being at the ICU with Shaoai; neighbors had offered to take a few shifts so the couple could rest, but they had declined, saying it was best if they could be there before the doctors could give a definite diagnosis.

After lunch on Sunday, Moran went to Shaoai’s house and looked for Ruyu. Earlier in the morning they had studied for midterms together. Uncle was taking a nap, and Ruyu was feeding Grandpa some rice mush. These days Ruyu spent much of her free time taking care of Grandpa, who alone was spared the worries that had shrouded the quadrangle like a dark fog. For each day Shaoai stayed in coma, it seemed one more person started to lose heart. At breakfast that day, Moran’s mother had wondered aloud if they should hope now for a different scenario: “For sure Shaoai cannot recover as a normal healthy person again — sometimes you don’t know if it’d be easier for everyone if her parents let her go.”

In the small cube of Grandpa’s bedroom Ruyu looked pensive. After she fed Grandpa and cleaned his face and neck with a towel, she told Moran in a low voice that she would be sitting here with Grandpa until he fell asleep. I’ll sit with you, Moran whispered back. Ruyu glanced at Moran, and she knew that Ruyu did not welcome her company. Still, Moran could not help but feel less uneasy if she could keep an eye on Ruyu; during the weekdays Boyang was always around, but on a Sunday like this, when everyone’s attention was elsewhere, Moran was particularly unwilling to leave Ruyu alone.

Neither spoke. Grandpa looked exhausted, and dozed off soon. The only window high on the wall was open, and Moran watched the blue sky beyond, and listened to a few sparrows pecking on the roof. Autumn would soon be over, and when winter came the peddlers would set oil drums aflame on the street corners and later roast sweet yams and chestnuts in the hot ashes. In the past winters, Moran and Boyang used to stop by one of the oil drums and pick up the biggest yam, its purple or brown skin charred and wrinkled. Easily she could see, in her mind’s eye, Ruyu and Boyang divide a yam into halves, smiling at each other through the steam rising from the golden inside of the yam.

Moran stopped herself from pursuing the thought, ashamed that she was so selfish as to dwell upon her minor pain while Shaoai’s life was in danger. Moran did not believe Shaoai would die, and these days before her recovery reminded Moran of the time when she had fainted in a municipal bathhouse as a child. The air, hot with thick steam, had been oppressive, and grownups, comfortable in their nakedness, gossiped loudly; their voices, mixed with the running of showers and the splashing of the bathwater, had sounded as though they had come from far away; when Moran’s legs turned cottony, the last thought on her mind had been to hold on tight to the bath soap because fragrant soap was not cheap.