Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

Any day now, any moment, Aunt or Uncle would come back with some good news — a diagnosis, or better, a retreat of the virus, and Moran would breathe freely again, as she had found herself awake in the cold air of the locker room, though the soap had slipped away, and had never been recovered. One day the neighbors in the quadrangle would refer to this time as the days when Shaoai had been mysteriously sick, as they would speak of the May afternoon when an army tank was overthrown and burned down at a nearby crossroads, or the day in June when Teacher Pang’s cousin pedaled three bodies on his flatbed tricycle from the Square to the hospital. Perhaps Moran would even think of these days as the beginning of a love story between Boyang and Ruyu. Life, in retrospect, can be as simple as a collection of anecdotes, and anecdotally we live on, trading our youthful belief in happiness — and at that age happiness almost always means being good, being right, and being loved — for the belief in feeling less, suffering little.

The gate to the courtyard opened, and it was clear from the neighbors’ gathering that Aunt had come back. Moran looked at her wristwatch — it was two o’clock, not yet time for Uncle to change shifts with Aunt. At once Moran felt hope arising — for sure by now the doctors would have found out how to treat Shaoai, though that hope was dashed when she heard Aunt’s voice.

“No, she’s the same,” Aunt said to the querying neighbors. “But one doctor asked me if she had been in contact with any chemicals recently. I told him that she was an international trades and relations major, but he said her symptoms more and more reminded him of a poisoning case he had seen in the seventies.”

“Poisoning?” several neighbors gasped. “But how could it be?”

“I don’t know,” Aunt said. “We don’t know how she’s been spending her time these days, or what kind of people she has met. I was coming back earlier because I thought we might find the phone numbers of her old classmates and ask them.”

Moran turned to look at Ruyu. The latter was watching Grandpa’s shallow breathing as though she found it mesmerizing. Moran hesitated and then grabbed Ruyu’s elbow. “Come,” Moran said. “I need to talk to you.”

Ruyu did not resist, and led the way to her bedroom. She sat down on the bedside and looked up, her eyes lucid. Moran pulled over the chair and sat down, feeling as though she herself had committed a crime and had to enlist Ruyu in a cover-up. “Where is the chemical you took from the lab?” Moran asked.

“Gone.”

“Gone where?”

“I don’t know,” Ruyu said. “I put the test tube in my drawer, but it was gone.”

“Since when?”

“I’m not sure. A few days now,” Ruyu said, and looked irritated. “I’m not like you, Moran, and this is not my home. Nothing I have really belongs to me. If someone takes something from me, what can I do but shrug and say, suit yourself?”

Taken aback, Moran did not know what to say.

“You think I poisoned Sister Shaoai?” Ruyu said, looking into Moran’s eyes with a taunting half smile. “Are you interrogating me now?”

“No! But did you hear what Aunt just said? The doctors thought it might be some chemical poison.”

“The doctors said it was meningitis earlier. And they may say something else tomorrow.”

“But why didn’t you say anything when Sister Shaoai got sick?”

“About what? Everyone got the flu last week. And then they were talking about bacterial infection.”

“Do you think it was Shaoai who took the chemical?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did she ask you about it?”

“You think people will ask your permission when they take something from you?”

Moran felt an urge to shake Ruyu. There was a life they had to save before it was too late. “What did you take from the lab, do you remember?”

Ruyu shook her head. “I never did say I took anything.”

“Do you understand that this is a serious matter? Can you come with me to tell Aunt and Uncle what happened? We need to call Boyang and his mother.”

“Do you think,” Ruyu said, raising her eyes, “that Sister Shaoai would like it if indeed it was her intention to commit suicide?”

“But we can’t sit here, doing nothing.”

“Why? What’s wrong with doing nothing? The world would be a much better place if people did less,” Ruyu said. “Why do you all think you have the right to change someone’s life only because you want to?”

Ruyu’s anger baffled Moran. It was useless to go on arguing. Moran stood up, and realized that her legs were shaking.

“Where are you going?” Ruyu asked.

“I’m going to talk to the grownups,” Moran said. “Are you coming with me?”

There was something unreadable in Ruyu’s eyes, a mixture of pity, derision, and curiosity. In the years to come Moran would return to this moment to study Ruyu’s face, searching for panic or guilt or remorse or fear — anything that would make Ruyu comprehensible — yet once and again Moran would see none of those, only a chilling tranquility, as though Ruyu had foreseen all that would come. But how could she have? To grant that prescience to a fifteen-year-old was to give her a mystic power beyond her capacity. Still, in every revisiting of the moment, that look had again manifested itself as Ruyu’s tepid effort to save Moran from taking a wrong turn; unseeing, unthinking, Moran had not heeded Ruyu’s admonition. Don’t tell, that look had said, warning more than pleading; stay still, that look had said; rehearse your lines before you put yourself on stage; those who have not the words for themselves will be the only ones found guilty.

Over the years Moran never stopped imagining that alternative of not speaking . It comforted her at times to think how things would have turned out: without the belated injection of the antidote — Prussian blue, a name belonging more to a painter’s easel than to a doctor’s cabinet — Shaoai would have died young, a heroine whose death could be explained only by fate, which was both unjust (letting a senseless tragedy befall a young woman already wronged) and merciful (it could’ve been worse, dragging on and making everyone suffer unduly, people would console themselves). A secret would have stayed alive between Ruyu and Moran for some time, though like other adolescent episodes, it would be put aside one day, presumed to be buried, and never let out to light again. Perhaps something good would eventually have come out of the love between Boyang and Ruyu, or else it would have taken the natural course as all first loves do, blossoming and fading and leaving no permanent damage. Either way, Moran herself and Boyang would have remained friends, and one day, when things stopped mattering so much, she would tell him the secret. They would shake their heads then, baffled or resigned, but too removed from the tragedy to feel perturbed. Life had been kind to them, they would tell each other, even with its mysteries unsolved and unsolvable.

“Go ahead,” Ruyu said. “It’s your decision to talk, not mine.”

The moments and hours and days that followed became an elongated tunnel, in which Moran was the lone traveler, carried forward not by her own will but by the unforgiving current of time; if that tunnel had ever ended she would not have noticed it. One day, when she arrived in America, she would see a commercial for a local support group for autistic children, in which a girl in a lilac-colored dress sang and acted out a story about the futile battle of an itsy-bitsy spider against the rain. Moran was not the only person in the living room of Westlawn then; her housemates were around, waiting for the opening game of the football season between the Badgers and a visiting team. None of them would notice Moran’s tears, and she would never again sit among them to watch television. She was not the only one trapped by life. She was afraid of meeting another person like her, but more than that she was afraid of never meeting another person like her, who, however briefly, would look into her eyes so that she knew she was not alone in her loneliness.