Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

he was . . . so familiar to me, like an entire language, a world, I had forgotten.

Then, quiet (qù) became another person living inside our house.

Kai, she thought, you are as lost as I am. You have no idea where this beauty comes from and you know better than to think that such clarity could come from your own heart.

She was a performer, a transparent glass giving shape to water, nothing more than a glass.

I learned a great deal about the tenacity of love and also the terrible pain of letting it go.

We swore never to leave one another because the worst fate would be to feel abandoned in this frozen and beautiful world. It is one thing to suffer, another thing to be forgotten.

An insignificant soul like hers could break the world but never remake it.

If they want to come for you, they will come, and it doesn’t matter what you read or what you failed to read. The books on your shelves, the music you cherish, the past lives you’ve lived, all these details are just an excuse.

They had never been targeted and so, deep in their bones, did not believe they could be. They were free because, in their minds, they persisted in believing they were. Maybe

And I thought, how strange it is that I am the one running, because they are the ones afraid of a world they can’t control.

They’d had no choice but, still, they had performed disturbingly well, as if words and music were only ever about repetition, as if one could just as easily play Bach as repeat the words of Chairman Mao.

But was a miracle still a miracle if it came too late?

‘Because music is nothing. It is nothing and yet it belongs to me. Despite everything that’s happened, it’s myself that I believe in.’

In surviving the present, did they sacrifice the future?

How did a person know, he wondered, what was love and what was a facsimile of it? Did it matter? Was the thing that mattered most the action that one took — or failed to take — in the name of that feeling?

Many lives and many selves might exist, but that doesn’t render each variation false.