Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, ever after, forever, but none of these, I thought, is the right answer. There would be the time when he would have turned seventeen, eighteen, twenty, twenty-six, thirty, thirty-six. Days where he ought to have lived but will never again. It would be an error to keep him forever at sixteen. Now, later, then, and then.
You write fiction, Nikolai said.
Yes.
Then you can make up whatever you want.
One never makes up things in fiction, I said. One has to live there as one has to live here.
Here is where you are, not where I am. I am in fiction, he said. I am fiction now.
Then where you are is there, which is also where I live.
Wouldn’t that be confusing? he said.
Did I tell you I returned to the novel? I said.
The one you talked about at that lunch?
Yes, I said.
Another world you have to live in.
Yes.
That’s one book I won’t be able to read, he said.
That’s one book you don’t have to read, I said.
In the novel a woman lost her child to suicide when she was forty-four. I had not known the same thing would happen to me when I was forty-four. There were many other things I had not known when I had been working on the novel.
Agh, now people will blame me, Nikolai said. When you publish the novel people will think you’ve given the woman that story because of me.
People can think what they want, I said.
Maybe you’ve been writing the novel to prepare yourself, he said.
I have been writing to prepare myself my entire career, I thought.
Where do you think this conversation is going? I said.
You ask how long it goes, and where it goes, he said. The questions you ask are the ones you should have answers to.
Time points only in one direction. A mind goes in many directions. How far digressed are we allowed to be on a one-way road before we are called lost? And if one is not lost, can one be found again?
Answers don’t fly around like words, I said.
Questions do, right? he said.
For Dapeng and James
and in memory of Vincent Kean Li (2001–2017)
BY YIYUN LI
Where Reasons End
Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
Kinder Than Solitude
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
The Vagrants
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
YIYUN LI is the author of four works of fiction—Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Hemingway Award and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the “20 Under 40” fiction writers to watch. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
yiyunli.com
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