I sealed off a small life from the larger world, and we lived there, as glad as any people could be.
You can never have such a thing, said Joo. Not and keep it.
One day, I said, one day it happened that we had changed countries for the third or fourth time. We were living in a large city in the country of my birth and I was teaching to earn our living. It was not what I wanted; still, I did it, so we could live and eat, and so our daughter could go to school.
One day, my wife stopped speaking. She was in the bathroom, staring into a mirror, and she found something. Something was there, of some sort. I don’t know what it was, but she found it, and from then on she no longer wanted to tell me anything. She would speak, to say things, here is the door key, or, shall we go to dinner, but to say an actual thing, to tell me something, anything, the desire for it was gone entirely. We would sit and she would stare into space. I would ask what she was looking at, what she was thinking. Nothing. Nothing in particular, she would say. I loved her beyond all measure. I would do anything I could think of, everything, to cheer her up, to surprise her. I banished all dark, all difficult things, from the house. I searched out all kinds of cheerful laughter and fellowship and offered them to her, one, then another, then another, then another. I found bright places in the city where we lived, and took her there, hoping. But her mood grew only blacker. She took to lying in bed and staring up at the ceiling. My dear, I would say, my dear. She would say nothing.
Our daughter was beginning to turn out into the world. She was of that age. She was seeking new things, things only for herself, and discovering the duplicity of other children. In the summers she would return to her home country, and so we sent her off as usual that June.
My wife was in such a grief, her father was passing, and I thought that was the whole of it, but it was beyond that. She had gone into herself in search of a whole new enterprise and she began intricate new dialogues with imagined speakers. She was a magnificent writer, one of the finest I had ever met, and she lacked for no form of invention. Suddenly, she began to invent a new way of living entirely in her imagination. From this she shut me out completely. She was now speaking solely with the ones she had imagined. And one day it came that she sought their advice: this life she was leading with me, should she escape it?
Int. Note
I was as in love as I had ever been. Constantly at her service, I came up with a dozen new ways each day to try to divert her, to make her smile and forget her grief. But it happened that a day came when I needed to travel to another city. I was to do a reading in San Francisco, and I went there. When I left that day, I felt that there was nothing truly wrong — that our troubles were small and together we would conquer them. I felt that her grief for her father was right. It seemed to me that the girl I loved would find her way through it.
But when I came back some days later, I found her things gone from the house. She was gone from the house. On the bed was a note. I am beginning a new life.
I went to the airport and bought a ticket. I flew for hours, got on another plane, flew for hours. It was a great distance. When I arrived in her country, I found a bus to the city, and I took it. I found myself the next morning, walking through foreign streets to the house where I guessed she would be staying. It was a place I had never been to before.
I rang the doorbell, then. The person who came out bore only a small resemblance to the girl I knew, so much had she changed. Though it had been only three days, four days — so much had she changed.
Joo adjusted her skirt, staring at me in the dim room, and I realized I had stopped speaking. I had not been speaking for some time.
You see, I said.
She nodded.
A moment passed, and noise filtered up from the street. Someone dragging something along the pavement. The noise grew and then faded away. And all the while, Joo stared at me, waiting.
Since that day, I continued, I have learned nothing more about it. I have tried to find it in her, going there to speak to her, again and again, but she no longer knows, if she ever did, and I have sought it in myself. I do not know it either. My life has been in immense confusion. I make no choices with any sense of the consequences involved. I found myself here. I saw this poem, and it struck me that there are things you know. Maybe they are not the things I need, but they are things, and they are near perhaps to what I need. Will you say them to me? Anything anyone knows about silence. Anything you know.
Come back in two weeks, said Jito Joo.
She stood up.
Can you find this house?
I can, I said.
Then come and find it in two weeks and I will see what I can say to you.
I started to leave and Joo called me back.
You know, she said, nothing is for any reason.
She shut the door.
I went down the stairs past three broken lights and one that flickered. The door to the ground floor apartment was partly open and I could hear people laughing. Someone was singing and there was the smell of cooking.
This is what we bear, I thought, the nearness of other lives.
But out in the street there was a man selling batteries and he smiled at me. I couldn’t understand him. He was saying something, but I could understand none of it. When he saw that, he held up a handful of the batteries as if in victory. He smiled again.
I shook my head at him. No, I won’t have any batteries. This actual good smile, the smile of an actual good person, fell over me. But after a moment he was gone, or I was — the street was empty and none of it remained.
Int. Note
I wanted to explain myself better to Joo. I felt that what I would receive from her depended entirely on what I could give to her, on how clearly I could explain what had happened to me. I felt I had not explained myself at all. I was sure I had done it badly. I could scarcely remember what I had said.
I wrote a letter to her, and as I was beginning it, I fell asleep at my desk.
That night, I dreamed again of Joo’s lake, but now there were chattering birds flying over it. They were shrieking and chattering, but no sound came. I could feel their cries on the surface of the lake, and I wept to feel it, but try as I might, I could hear nothing.
When I woke the next day, I worked at the letter. I worked at it all day, and in the evening I went and dropped it at the building where Joo lived. There was a little box with her apartment number in it, right there in the foyer of the building. I put the letter there. A kid with a stick was leaning against a wall. He was hitting the stick against his leg and looking at me.
No one lives there, he said.
I know someone does, I said. I saw her there yesterday.
Then I’m wrong, he said. I don’t know who you’re looking for.
Don’t touch this letter, I said. If it goes missing …
I started to leave, and he left too. We went out into the nighttime street at the same time. He went right and I went left. When he got outside, he broke into a trot and was soon invisible. I looked up at Joo’s window, but, of course, her window was only at the back of the building. In the front apartment a light was on and people were moving back and forth, their inaccessible lives casting off something like the light that settled on them.