Battle by Weike Wang

He is better at words. She is better at sentences. Games they like to play involve the former, and he wins the vast majority of them the vast majority of the time. Debates they find themselves in involve the latter, and there hasn’t been an occasion (on record) of him winning one for many, many years.

Crosswords, Scrabble, that new game with green and yellow squares, he excels at. Given six tries to guess a five-letter word, he is quicker to recall words without real vowels (she doesn’t support the idea that “Y” is a vowel), and he has the nerve to guess words with triple letters, like “fluff,” on the second try. Of course, she knows what fluff is. It’s either bullshit or the stuffing that comes out of cheap toys. But it’s not a word she would have guessed.

In defense of “Y” ’s vowelness, he asks, What about “lynx”?

Lynx? she replies, incredulous. When have you ever used that aloud? Oh, look, over there, that lynx is about to pounce and rip out my heart! She is certain that any person in such a scenario would use the word “bobcat.”

What most infuriates her is the presumption that she must be a whiz at words given her vocation as a writer of books. She is gifted calendar crossword puzzles (yes, three hundred and sixty-five tiny crosswords, one sheet for each day) every December, and is often dragged into long bouts of Words with Friends. In one game, he scores more than seventy points with a well-placed “Q.” She loses that game soon enough and texts him, You’re always doing stuff like that, calculating the value of each word. But that’s how you play—those are the rules, he replies. She calls into question these rules: is the point system for letters really based on frequency, or is it some larger institutional metric of mind control? He repeats, But those are the rules. On her darkest of writing days, she takes the last sentence she wrote and tallies it up for points. She is immensely disappointed. Then she stares at those crossword calendars, and they stare back. The five she was gifted this holiday season, plus several from last year. They sit all over her desk like blind cats. Hundreds if not thousands of empty squares.

She wonders why she is so bad at word games and has convinced herself that it’s because she knows too many words. Also, writers don’t like to be told what to write. A four-letter word for sleeveless garment, today’s crossword demands. But why is it “tank” and not “vest”?

His vocation is probably important: a computer scientist, a programmer, a coder. His work involves numbers and really simple words like “input,” “print,” or “run.” Coding also involves punctuation, which she is terrible at. An English teacher once asked her if she’d ever met a comma in her life. A comma after every fourth word is how she does it, regardless of what the word is (the answer to her teacher’s question being no), and thank God for copy editors. He is skilled with commas, semicolons, dashes, and slashes, and spends most of the workweek combing through code for a misplaced parenthesis that has misfired an array. Arrays are built into other arrays. Macros built into other macros.

I don’t think I can write a sentence like that, she thinks. A sentence nestled into another, like whatever that turducken dish is, or, more simply, like an onion, the five-letter word she did not guess on the day it was the word to guess. Being the same on either side, the word “onion” is an onion, the “i” bisecting it like a core. She texts him this amazing realization, only to thereby reveal the answer to the word game before he has had a chance to play. He texts back, Thanks, what unexpected luck.

He is also better at phrases, especially at guessing them when they are hidden behind white cubes. He was raised on “Wheel of Fortune,” and, whenever they watch that program together, he shouts at the people inside the television, Why are you buying vowels? His favorite category is Before and After, or, to her, the category of nonsensical phrases. “New baby buggy,” for instance. She keeps getting stuck on the chronology. Isn’t a baby by default new? And buggy, an outdated term for the first motorized vehicles with open tops? The Model T was a buggy, wasn’t it? So, on the time line of existence, an old car should come before a new baby. That’s not how any of this works, he replies. But, now that they’ve touched on the chicken-and-egg problem, they have to persist. She accepts that words came before the sentence, but argues that, in the same way calculus was invented to serve physics, words were created to construct sentences. The selection and sequence of words constitute meaning. The sentence is the final boss. After thinking that over, he says, But I like calculus, and she says, Which is fine. Great, even! There’s nothing wrong with calculus. She pats him on the arm.

It’s called having “the last word,” not “the last sentence.” So we can’t end there, with her patting him on the arm and going on and on about sentences. A piece of trivia dislodges in his brain: “calculus” comes from the Latin for small pebble. Pebbles as used on an abacus, to count out money, votes, and distances. In medicine, the word is still used for a solid mass made from mineral salts that can form in organs or ducts. A kidney stone is a calculus. A kidney stone can cause great pain. In high school, everyone sat in metal chairs and had sore backs. Everyone groaned about calculus homework; everyone complained to the teacher, including him. But how he loved the look of the integral sign, like the curve of a beautiful neck or a musical staff.