Nuri had three questions left.
She was sixty-seven and had three questions remaining of the original hundred that each person was allocated at birth, or rather at first documented asking, which for most people occurred between ages two and four. Nuri's first question had been recorded at age three, according to the Halvorsen family ledger: what is that bird.
She had spent the sixty-four years since with varying degrees of deliberateness. The first thirty had been careless. She had used forty-one questions between ages three and thirty-three. Between thirty-three and sixty-five she had used fifty-six more, most of them in the decade she had spent as a linguist at the university, when curiosity was professional and the cost seemed absorbable. She had been wrong about this, or at least she thought she had been. She was not willing to spend a question on certainty.
Three questions. She had written them in the ledger on the page after entry ninety-seven: Is this the right thing? And two blank lines.
Her granddaughter, who was seven, was kneeling in the garden asking about worms. What do they eat. Where do they sleep. Why are they that color.
Nuri watched her.
She knew the answers. That was the problem: she had spent her professional life learning answers so that she would not need to spend questions. But her granddaughter was not asking her. Her granddaughter was asking the garden, asking the worm, asking the general category of questions-about-worms that seven-year-olds ask.
What Nuri wanted to ask was: what made you curious about worms specifically. She had been holding it for two weeks since the first worm conversation, turning it over, deciding whether it was worth a question. It was the kind of thing she would have spent easily at thirty-two.
Her granddaughter looked up. Is it bad to pick them up?
Nuri said: no.
She had learned, across sixty-four years, to rephrase declaratively. Most answers could be delivered without the question form. What she could not rephrase were the ones that were genuinely open, genuinely curious, genuinely questions and not answers in question-shaped containers.
What made you curious about worms. She did not know the answer. She was sixty-seven with three questions left and she did not know whether she was saving them for the right things.