The Book of Goose

by Yiyun Li

All ghosts claim their phantom skills: to shape-shift, to haunt, to see things we don’t see, to determine how the lives of the living people turn out.

People are oftentimes hideous or tedious. Sometimes they are both. So is the world. We would have no use for myths if the world were neither hideous nor tedious.

Happiness, I would tell her, is to spend every day without craning one’s neck to look forward to tomorrow, next month, next year, and without holding out one’s hands to stop every day from becoming yesterday.

Life is most difficult for those who know what they want and also know what makes it impossible for them to get what they want. Life is still difficult, but less so, for those who know what they want but have not realized that they will never get it. It is the least difficult for people who do not know what they want.

Perhaps it would not be an exaggeration to say that most of my life I have benefited from not knowing. Some people have to figure out what they want from a life before they commit to that life. Some, like me, can commit to anything, which is like committing to nothing.

Often I imagine that living is a game of rock-paper-scissors: fate beats hope, hope beats ignorance, and ignorance beats fate. Or, in a version that has preoccupied me: the fatalistic attracts the hopeful, the hopeful attracts the ignorant, and the ignorant, the fatalistic.

When you are used to the sharpness of a knife, you can safely run your finger along the edge or press your palm onto it with just the right pressure. You can even keep the blade between your teeth without cutting your lips or tongue. But what if you touched the blade and felt the soft silkiness of a rabbit pelt?

Lies easily told could just as easily come true—how had I not understood this before?

I felt like the country rat in the La Fontaine fable we had read at school. How immense the world is, the rat exclaims when he sets out for an adventure, congratulating himself that he is no longer a country rat but a creature of sophistication. And when he sees an oyster on the beach, he tells himself that a worldly eater will enjoy an oyster, so he sticks his head between the open shells. Like the rat, I was caught. I was doomed.

OF ALL THE PEOPLE in the world, how many of them, looking into their own conscience, can say with unwavering certainty that they have never betrayed someone in their lives—ten, five, none? If so, why do we often make a fuss about betrayal? So many movies and books, so many broken marriages and torn friendships. The knives we stick into one another’s backs—perhaps those knives have their own wills. They take a grand tour, finding a hand here and a back there. We cannot blame the hands, just as we cannot sympathize with the backs. They are equally recruited for the knives’ entertainment. The world is never short of knives.

You cannot cut an apple with an apple. You cannot cut an orange with an orange. All those years we had made ourselves believe that we were two apples hanging next to each other on the same branch, or that we were two oranges nestled in a crate, or, even, that we were born with joined selves, like one of those oddly shaped radishes or potatoes, two bodies in one. But that was only our make-believe. The truth was, Fabienne and I were two separate beings. I was a whetstone to Fabienne’s blade. There was no point asking which one of us was made of harder material.

Imagination of happiness, after all, is more fragile than most other imaginations.