Июнь Ли - Where Reasons End

Message-in-a-bottle fish

Rubber-ducky fish

Rubber-ducky fish

You know it meant nothing, right? Nikolai said. I made it up to amuse ourselves because you never got us out of the bathtub in time.

How would I know it meant nothing, I thought, when something and nothing seem to be walking hand in hand now, identical twins dressed in each other’s outfits. The song, having circled in my head long enough, had acquired an indecipherability. All things indecipherable felt as though they possessed an inner logic.

Even if it means something, why not make that something into nothing? he said.

How?

Oh, I thought grownups are good at it. If someone asks you, Is there something wrong?, to be a good-mannered and considerate person you should answer, Thank you for asking but nothing is wrong. You don’t say, Thank you for asking but nothing is right. People would freak out if you said that, and if they freaked out, what would you say? Oh, please don’t worry, even though nothing is right, nothing is left, either.

You make my head swim, I complained. I have to write your words down to understand their meaning.

You’re being silly, like English teachers always asking us to look for metaphors in the text, Nikolai said.

Life is not lived by metaphors, we said together. He had heard that first when he had to sit through my teaching for five hours. He was four, and lay under a long table, slowly but persistently rolling from one end to the other and then back. The next day he said I had been mean when I said, Sometimes nothing is wrong with a story but that it’s boring.

When you made up that song, did you have a rubber duck or a rubber fish in the bathtub? I asked. Or both?

Neither, he said. How can you let your imagination be so limited?

Not imagination, I said, but one wants to make certain that the detail is right.

Why does it matter?

True, I thought. Right or wrong, the song had kept me awake but dreading to rise and meet the day.

Remember what you used to say to me? Nikolai said. Proportion, proportion, proportion.

I had also said to him, Patience, patience, patience; perspective, perspective, perspective.

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, he said.

I laughed. I was always in awe that he could say anything as fast as humanly possible.

As fast as inhumanly possible, that’s what you should rather use in your thinking now, he said.

Of course not.

Why not, if you make so much ado about precision? A misused adverb is worse than an adverb, he said.

I used to edit adverbs out of his writing. I had expected our arguments to continue, but to argue about adverbs? Oh, please, I said.

Fine, he said.

I only meant that we have so much to say to each other, I said, rather than quibbling.

Do we really?

Am I presumptuous to think that our conversation has not been interrupted despite life’s finickiness? What we have is finickier than life. Any disturbance would disperse this—and what is this, in any case? Not dreaming, not hallucinating, not running away together, not running away separately, but running into each other constantly. Finding a way to be when it is difficult, and impossible, to be—is it for him, too?

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shut you off, I said.

He remained quiet. I had made a mistake. Even arguing for the sake of arguing was better than dead silence.

What’s disproportional about me now? I said, trying to regain his attention, but he didn’t speak. Is that how a mother loses a child? Is that how any person loses any person, by not understanding the treachery of words, or worse, by thinking one can conquer that with precision? Silence is the best defense and the best offense. What happens when one counters silence with silence, like the ironsmith in the Chinese fable who brags about having cast the strongest armor that would shield against the fiercest spear, and the fiercest spear that would pierce the strongest armor? We would both be quiet ever after.

See how you let your mind be carried away to the wrong place, he said.

I was relieved. How so?

Would you have found me had I decided to remain lost to you? Would you have received a word from me had I decided that not speaking suited me well?

True, I said.

But you decide to remain wimpy.

A mother like me, I wanted to protest, is far from wimpy. But all I could think about was the newest release of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which he would never read now. Nikolai was way past the age but he had once commented that growing up on a series of books meant the obligation to always read the next installment.

See what I mean? he said. Never again. Every time you think, you end a thought on that phrase. What’s the big deal if it’s never again?

Nothing can be called a big deal now, I thought. If every moment is the curtain call to the previous moment, yes, we can throw up our hands and say, What’s the big deal? Where is the climax of this play? But big deals and climaxes only form a vacuum cleaner of time. It’s the small deals and the nothing deals that shatter time into ragged pieces. Days, strewn with expected and unexpected moments, did not offer a shortcut by saying, What’s the big deal? The day before, I was packing his clothes for a move to a new house. Among them was an oversize white shirt with the Wimpy Kid book title in Norwegian, which I had brought back from a publisher in Oslo. For a few years he had worn that as a pajama shirt. I had not paid attention to it while packing because there were other shirts, more meaningful, with better stories to tell, but now it had regained its place to tell its own story. Every afternoon I waited in the middle of a block, where I used to wait for Nikolai and his brother to come from two directions. On some rare days I was disciplined enough to face only one direction. Other days I turned around. Turning around was not a mistake, because no lesson could be learned. Turning around always brought a moment of haziness to my thought: There was no reason that the tree-lined street would not bring Nikolai back again, unhurried as a gray heron.

See, now you think like everyone else: How can anyone…

How can anyone—I said—what?

How can anyone believe that one day he was here and the next day he was gone?

Yet how can one, I thought. How can one know a fact without accepting it? How can one accept a person’s choice without questioning it? How can one question without reaching a dead end? How much reaching does one have to do before one finds another end beyond the dead end? And if there is another end beyond the dead end, it cannot be called dead, can it?

How good you are, Nikolai said, at befuddling yourself.

Fuddled, muddled, befuddled, I said. Every time you say something I have to turn to the dictionary. Every word has ten more definitions I have missed.

Nobody says you have to know all the definitions.

What if one could only make sense with those missing definitions.

Most people won’t bother themselves with that, you know.

Most—I said, and then, to be less generalizing, I revised myself—many people don’t have to go to this extreme as I do so as not to lose someone. I thought about what people said, that there are ways to keep the dead alive, that it’s our love and memory that carry them with us. But was that enough for Nikolai? Any lesser way would only make him vanish again. He had outwitted many people. There was no reason he would not do it again.

Sounds like trespassing to me, Nikolai said.

My trespassing in your life? I said. Just the day before I had decorated a room in the new house, which we called Nikolai’s room, with a sign he had made for his bedroom in our old house in California. STAY OUT.

And the part of your mind where you shouldn’t enter, he said.