2

Waylaid by Days

Now we have our own rules, I said. A step toward somewhere, isn’t it?

I didn’t say how it had made breathing possible. Life, if not lived, is carried by automatic actions, breathing an inevitable one among them. Once at a party someone asked what were the qualities in other people that set one off. I said imprecision.

As though we haven’t always lived by our own rules, Nikolai said. His tone, I imagined, would be the same as when he had once said—after I questioned what other mothers would think of his outfit, unsuitable for a concert he was going to—you don’t even care what others think of you.

Have we always lived by our own rules? But more than the question, I was confused by the tense we used. Queries had been made, and advice given, regarding in what tense I spoke about Nikolai. Yet what makes was different from is, has been from will be? Timeless is this world we are making, tenseless its language.

Rules are set to be broken, he said.

Deadlines are set to be missed, I said. Deadline as a word used to fascinate me, a word that connects time and space and death with such absoluteness.

Promises are made not to be kept, he said.

Love is made not to last, I said. A contestable statement, though he chose not to argue. Love was the word we had used at his leave-taking, he knowing it was final, I sensing it was the case. But between sensing and knowing there were seven hours and four states. Only today did I register that people often in their condolence letters called the loss unfathomable. The distance at the moment of loss could be calculated: 189,200 fathoms. (What does it matter that fathom is no longer used to measure from here to there? To obsolete is to let age, from which death is exempted.)

Not clear, though, is how to fathom time: from a moment to…Can forever be the other end point?

But why does it bother you if you insist time does not apply to us anymore? Nikolai said. Omniscience was taken for granted in this world where we met now, but omniscience I let only him claim. You’re breaking your own rules, he said.

Because time still confines and confuses me, I said.

Poor you, he said. Waylaid by time.

Waylay, I said. I’ve never used it in my writing.

No offense, but you don’t have an expansive vocabulary.

Luckily my mind is not limited by my vocabulary, I said. (In my head I used the same tone that I had used when Nikolai had introduced me to his kindergarten class: My mom is an immigrant so she speaks English with an accent. Thank you my dear, I had said then, but I still make a living by writing in English.)

He turned quiet. I understood. Who wants to hear a mother boast about herself?

I turned quiet, too. I was in a subway car. Only a few weeks ago, Nikolai had asked me if it was always this loud underground. We had been on the way to meet my friend, as I was doing today. I can’t live in New York, he had said then. I can’t afford to lose my hearing.

It occurred to me, when I remembered his words now, that I had never paid attention to the noise. I had known I was not sensitive to colors, but to sounds also?

How have I lived so blindly and deafly? I said. Perhaps he had gained knowledge to explain that to me.

He did not reply. He was eavesdropping on a man and a woman standing next to me. I was late to their story. They were talking about a boy who had killed himself the week before, the son of a mutual acquaintance.

Seventeen, the man said. Can you believe it?

Oh my god, the woman said. I read it in the papers. I thought to myself, Someone’s grandson.

Imagine being woken up by that phone call, the man said. How can anyone believe it’s real?

I waited for Nikolai to say something. He would not defend the other boy, I knew that. They each had their own reasons to make a decision that looked similar only to those wanting an explanation. But I wondered if he would say something clever, that people’s sympathy and callousness are like two hands wringing over someone else’s disaster. Or, would he poke fun at them on my behalf? Of course you knew it was real right away, did you not? he would say. How can anyone ask a question starting with that silly phrase How can anyone.

But he did not say anything.

Isn’t it strange that her first thought was someone’s grandson, I said after the man and the woman exited the car.

She just met her first grandchild, Nikolai said.

I had missed that part. We went into the tunnel. I wondered if the noise still bothered him.

I can hear you fine, he said.

Oh, I said. There is one thing that troubles me. I can’t find all those poems you wrote.

Or those I will write.

Touché, I said. I then explained that someone had asked if I had enough of his poetry to make a chapbook.

Chap, ChapStick, chapman, chapbook, he said. All sound small to me. Like you’re going to make—what did they call it in the old time—a miniature of my mind.

How I loved that his ambition and conceit would remain as young as he was. They would be handmade, like what you did in bookbinding, I said.

Those notebooks have blank pages.

Not all books have to be blank, I said. Everyone agrees you are a beautiful poet.

Ha, from reading those doodlings I sent you when I was a kid? he said. You don’t understand poetry.

You as me, your mother, or you as the world?

You as my mommy, he said. Nikolai might be the only sixteen-year-old to still call his mother Mommy. No offense, but your taste is not to be trusted, he said.

I laughed. He had said the same thing when we had been in a shop in Edinburgh, choosing woolen and cashmere scarves for him.

Those scarves are mine now, I said.

Like pass-me-ups?

You don’t mind my wearing them?

I haven’t worn them so they’re not mine yet. But I do mind, he said, you or anyone reading my poetry.

I told him about an exhibition of Philip Larkin I had seen in England. There were covers of Larkin’s journals, the insides taken out and burned in a fireplace the day after his death.

I applaud that as much as you do, Nikolai said.

The key is to have someone you trust agree to live longer, I said.

But I can’t entrust my poetry to anyone, he said.

I thought about the people in the world who would all live longer than he. Would I trust any of them? Would I trust myself?

It’s not your fault, he said.

If you use fault in the sense of wrongdoing, I said, no, it’s not. But the root of the word fault came from to disappoint, to deceive.

Nikolai waited for me to go on. He was not often this patient in hearing me out.

Who can say to love doesn’t also mean to disappoint and to deceive? I said.

Those who disappoint or deceive don’t always do so from love, he said.

That, my child, doesn’t help a parent. If the job description of parenting, I thought, had come with the requirement to disappoint and to deceive, how many of us would have set out with guiltless hope in the first place?

Or hopeless guilt? he said. But you’ve decided that in this world we don’t abide by the rules that bind a child and a parent.

The line between self-deception and willpower is often blurred, I said.

I inherited both from you, didn’t I? he said. It’s not your fault, though.

Willpower was among his qualities I would remember. When he was in fifth grade, he had had trouble sleeping. Later he told me, when we were arguing, that whatever we had suggested had been of little help. I went to bed at nine and willed my body to stay still and my brain to stop thinking, he had said. That was how I solved my insomnia and that will always be the way I solve my problems. I can’t rely on anyone but my own willpower.

The line between willpower and arrogance is blurred, too, I said.

That, unfortunately, cannot be changed, he said. Give will some power and it turns blind. Just as people with power become so full of themselves they can’t see their own toes.

But then when does willpower see?

Willpower doesn’t have eyes to see, he said. Wishy-washiness has eyes, though. Too many. Like Argos.

Nikolai used to call me wishy-washy because he had liked the sound of it.

We can’t then let willpower lead us, I said.

You can’t, he said.

But how else does one live if not by willpower, when day after day after day after day a child hides himself? I read him a stanza from a Larkin poem:

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us.

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?

Days are not the only place where we live, Nikolai said.

Time is not the only place where we live, I said. Days are.

I don’t have to have days to live now.

And yet I have to live in days, I said.

I’m sorry, he said.

Days: the easiest possession, requiring only automatic participation. The days he had refused would come, one at a time. Neither my allies nor my enemies, they would wait, every daybreak, with their boundless patience and indifference, seeing if they could turn me into a friend or an enemy to myself.

Never apologize, I said, for what you have let go.