Where Reasons End 03 The Trespassers -2

You're being silly, like English teachers always asking us to look for metaphors in the text, Nikolai said.
Life is not lived by metaphors, we said together. He had heard that first when he had to sit through my teaching for five hours. He was four, and lay under a long table, slowly but persistently rolling from one end to the other and then back. The next day he said I had been mean when I said, Sometimes nothing is wrong with a story but that it's boring.
When you made up that song, did you have a rubber duck or a rubber fish in the bathtub? I asked. Or both?
Neither, he said. How can you let your imagination be so limited?
Not imagination, I said, but one wants to make certain that the detail is right.
Why does it matter?
True, I thought. Right or wrong, the song had kept me awake but dreading to rise and meet the day.
Remember what you used to say to me? Nikolai said.
Proportion, proportion, proportion.
I had also said to him, Patience, patience, patience; perspective, perspective, perspective.
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, he said.
I laughed. I was always in awe that he could say anything as fast as humanly possible.
As fast as inhumanly possible, that's what you should rather use in your thinking now, he said.
Of course not.
Why not, if you make so much ado about precision? A misused adverb is worse than an adverb, he said.
I used to edit adverbs out of his writing. I had expected our arguments to continue, but to argue about adverbs? Oh, please, I said.
Fine, he said.
I only meant that we have so much to say to each other, I said, rather than quibbling.
Do we really?
Am I presumptuous to think that our conversation has not been interrupted despite life's finickiness? What we have is finickier than life. Any disturbance would disperse this- and what is this, in any case? Not dreaming, not hallucinating, not running away together, not running away separately, but running into each other constantly.
Finding a way to be when it is difficult, and impossible, to be-is it for him, too?
I'm sorry. I didn't mean to shut you off, I said.
He remained quiet. I had made a mistake. Even arguing for the sake of arguing was better than dead silence.
What's disproportional about me now? I said, trying to regain his attention, but he didn't speak. Is that how a mother loses a child?
Is that how any person loses any person, by not understanding the treachery of words, or worse, by thinking one can conquer that with precision? Silence is the best defense and the best offense. What happens when one counters silence with silence, like the ironsmith in the Chinese fable who brags about having cast the strongest armor that would shield against the fiercest spear, and the fiercest spear that would pierce the strongest armor? We would both be quiet ever after.
See how you let your mind be carried away to the wrong place, he said.
I was relieved. How so?
Would you have found me had I decided to remain lost to you?
Would you have received a word from me had I decided that not speaking suited me well?
True, I said.
But you decide to remain wimpy.
A mother like me, I wanted to protest, is far from wimpy. But all I could think about was the newest release of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which he would never read now. Nikolai was way past the age but he had once commented that growing up on a series of books meant the obligation to always read the next installment.
See what I mean? he said. Never again. Every time you think, you end a thought on that phrase. What's the big deal if it's never again?