Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li

Author:Yiyun Li
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-02-04T16:00:00+00:00

10

Waylaid by Facts

Your friend Martha wrote, I said.

She’s in college now, Nikolai said. How is she?

I don’t know. She didn’t say in the letter. She talked only about you.

Oh.

I didn’t recognize her name, but when she wrote that she was the bassoonist I remembered her, I said.

Poor Martha. I hope she has more time to practice now.

The girl had been in a chamber group with Nikolai the year before, and had been warned by the music teacher several times. Yet how could she have found time, trying to be everything she could and applying to colleges? At the concert last winter, she and Nikolai and a clarinetist played a trio piece by Bach. Halfway through she had slipped off and couldn’t get back. She sat there, elegant in her long black dress and smiling at Nikolai and the clarinetist. Could you tell she missed the second part of the piece, Nikolai had asked, and when I said I couldn’t he had been pleased. She played a few notes toward the end, he said, so it all looked as though that was what it should be like.

I had never talked with the girl but I was fond of that memory.

I wonder who else wrote you, Nikolai said.

Your friends, our friends, your teachers, parents of your classmates, people you don’t know, I said. Oh, Lemony Snicket.

One thing I can’t brag about now, he said. Which of my friends wrote?

Let me just make the turn first, I said. I was waiting for the green light, and I couldn’t see much of the road. I had thirty minutes before teaching, and I did not know how my tears had begun between one block and the next. Something had ambushed me.

I still like waylay better, Nikolai said. Less seasonal than ambush.

What? I said.

Think, Mommy. It’s winter. You’re less likely to be ambushed.

I looked at the bushes along the road, bare and unable to hide anything. Try as I might, I still couldn’t see many things seen by him.

Waylay is more inevitable, he said, unless you can avoid roads altogether.

The light changed and I turned into a street with old houses on both sides but no bushes. If you have a sudden possession of something you don’t understand, I said, is there a way to discard it promptly without understanding it?

What is it?

Words provided to me—loss, grief, sorrow, bereavement, trauma—never seemed to be able to speak precisely of what was plaguing me. One can and must live with loss and grief and sorrow and bereavement. Together they frame this life, as solid as the ceiling and the floor and the walls and the doors. But there is something else, like a bird that flies away at the first sign of one’s attention, or a cricket chirping in the dark, never settling close enough for one to tell from which corner the song comes.

If I could say what it is, I said, wouldn’t that mean at least I have some understanding?

Do you understand a tree and how it feels when you know its name?

There are encyclopedias, I said.

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