Where Reasons End 04 Then the Button Came Undone -1

Why, you've been quiet, Nikolai said.
I had been. I couldn't find words just yet.
Bad day? he said.
I realized then that not all rules of this world were clear to me.
Did he go everywhere I went, see everything I saw?
Not really, he said. Not always.
Even omniscience is limited, I thought. So your ability to read my thoughts doesn't extend to the ability to see the physical world I traverse, I said.
It depends.
On what?
My mood.
Where are you when you're not in the mood to be here? I asked.
Here, which here?
I mean when you're not in the mood to talk with me, I said.
But that was not precise, either.
That's not for you to know, he said.
I had just driven past the corner of F-- and M—-, where I used to drop him off in the morning. I told him that. By accident, I said. There was a detour I didn't expect.
Where I last saw you, he said.
That line should be mine, I thought.
Mine, too, he said.
Why, you're quiet again, he said after a long pause.
Some things are still harder for me than for you, I said.
Like what?
I thought about the eight hours between when I had dropped him off at the intersection and when he had died. Eight hours was a long time. What had happened would always be unknown to me.
Perhaps it's the least important thing to know? he said.
How many eight hours can be fit into a life? I had known Nikolai for sixteen years and twenty-two days. I had loved him longer. When he was an infant, I had worked in a hospital, and for the duration of the workday, longer than eight hours, he would refuse to take a drop from a bottle, and then would nurse every hour after I got off work, all night long. A six-week-old baby or a sixteen-year-old boy, unyielding to the point of extravagant intrepidity.
Still, I said, here's eight hours, something you know and I don't.
I wouldn't know what happens to your days most of the time, either, he said.
Mine, this, I said, is a different kind of not knowing.
Not knowing is not knowing, he said.
And not knowing must be close to what people call a wound.
Along with wound are words like healing and sears. They are all bad analogies, the foundation of wishful thinking. Can one live, I thought, with a conclusion so fatally inconclusive?
The question should be, Does one want to? Nikolai said.
I remembered a story he had worked on in middle school, about a five-year-old boy named Nikolai. Uprooted by the 1917 Revolution, he and his mother fled St. Petersburg, accompanied by his nanny.
They dressed him in a new coat, but neither woman talked while waiting for the train to leave the station.
He used to show me a page or two as he had finished them. I had not known what had led him to write the story. Nikolai-the boy in his story, the boy journeying to the unknown-sat in the train car and kept fingering a shiny brass button on his coat. His nanny told him not to do it, while the mother remained silent.
Then the button came undone, and the coat was no longer new. I remembered the chill when I had read the line. I remembered telling him a sentence like that would take him a long way if he decided to become a writer. He was twelve then, not quite trusting my words. He could never write as perfect a sentence as he wanted, he had replied, my admiration making him more dejected.
But it's true, he said now. Perfection is my only way of living.
Then the button came undone, and the coat was no longer new.