A Little Life (46 page)

The moment passed and he opened his eyes again. He turned his head to the left, where an ugly blue curtain blocked his view of the door. And then he turned his head to the right, toward the early-morning light, and saw Jude, asleep in the chair next to his bed. The chair was too small for him to sleep in, and he had folded himself into a terrible-looking position: his knees drawn up to his chest, his cheek resting atop them, his arms wrapped around his calves.

You know you shouldn’t sleep like that, Jude
, he told him in his head.
Your back is going to hurt when you wake up
. But even if he could have reached his arm over to wake him, he wouldn’t have.

Oh god, he thought. Oh god. What have I done?

I’m sorry, Jude
, he said in his head, and this time he was able to
cry properly, the tears running into his mouth, the mucus that he was unable to clean away bubbling over as well. But he was silent; he didn’t make any noise.
I’m sorry, Jude, I’m so sorry
, he repeated to himself, and then he whispered the words aloud, but quietly, so quietly that he could hear only his lips opening and closing, nothing more.
Forgive me, Jude. Forgive me
.

Forgive me
.

Forgive me
.

Forgive me
.

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE
he leaves for Boston for their friend Lionel’s wedding, he gets a message from Dr. Li telling him that Dr. Kashen has died. “It was a heart attack; very fast,” Dr. Li writes. The funeral is Friday afternoon.

The next morning he drives directly to the cemetery, and from the cemetery to Dr. Kashen’s house, a two-story wooden structure in Newton where the professor used to host a year-end dinner for all of his current graduate students. It was understood that you weren’t to discuss math at these parties. “You can talk about anything else,” he’d tell them. “But we’re not talking about math.” Only at Dr. Kashen’s parties would he be the least socially inept person in the room (he was also, not coincidentally, the least brilliant), and the professor would always make him start the conversation. “So, Jude,” he’d say. “What are you interested in these days?” At least two of his fellow graduate students—both of them PhD candidates—had mild forms of autism, and he could see how hard they worked at making conversation, how hard they worked at their table manners, and prior to these dinners, he did some research into what was new in the worlds of online gaming (which one of them loved) and tennis (which the other loved), so he’d be able to ask them questions they could answer. Dr. Kashen wanted his students to someday be able to find jobs, and along with teaching them math, he also thought it his responsibility to socialize them, to teach them how to behave among others.

Sometimes Dr. Kashen’s son, Leo, who was five or six years older
than he, would be at dinner at well. He too had autism, but unlike Donald’s and Mikhail’s, his was instantly noticeable, and severe enough so that although he’d completed high school, he hadn’t been able to attend more than a semester of college, and had only been able to get a job as a programmer for the phone company, where he sat in a small room day after day fixing screen after screen of code. He was Dr. Kashen’s only child, and he still lived at home, along with Dr. Kashen’s sister, who had moved in after his wife had died, years ago.

At the house, he speaks to Leo, who seems glazed, and mumbles, looking away from him as he does, and then to Dr. Kashen’s sister, who was a math professor at Northeastern.

“Jude,” she says, “it’s lovely to see you. Thank you for coming.” She holds his hand. “My brother always talked about you, you know.”

“He was a wonderful teacher,” he tells her. “He gave me so much. I’m so sorry.”

“Yes,” she says. “It was very sudden. And poor Leo”—they look at Leo, who is gazing at nothing—“I don’t know how he’s going to deal with this.” She kisses him goodbye. “Thank you again.”

Outside, it is fiercely cold, and the windshield is sticky with ice. He drives slowly to Harold and Julia’s, letting himself in and calling their names.

“And here he is!” says Harold, materializing from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a dish towel. Harold hugs him, which he had begun doing at some point, and as uncomfortable as it makes him, he thinks it’ll be more uncomfortable to try to explain why he’d like Harold to stop. “I’m so sorry about Kashen, Jude. I was shocked to hear it—I ran into him on the courts about two months back and he looked like he was in great shape.”

“He was,” he says, unwinding his scarf, as Harold takes his coat. “And not that old, either: seventy-four.”

“Jesus,” says Harold, who has just turned sixty-five. “There’s a cheery thought. Go put your stuff in your room and come into the kitchen. Julia’s tied up in a meeting but she’ll be home in an hour or so.”

He drops his bag in the guest room—“Jude’s room,” Harold and Julia call it; “your room”—and changes out of his suit and heads toward the kitchen, where Harold is peering into a pot on the stove, as if down a well. “I’m trying to make a bolognese,” he says, without turning around, “but something’s happening; it keeps separating, see?”

He looks. “How much olive oil did you use?”

“A lot.”

“What’s a lot?”

“A
lot
. Too much, obviously.”

He smiles. “I’ll fix it.”

“Thank god,” says Harold, stepping away from the stove. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

Over dinner, they speak of Julia’s favorite researcher, who she thinks might be trying to jump to another lab, and of the latest gossip circulating through the law school, and of the anthology of essays about
Brown versus Board of Education
that Harold is editing, and of one of Laurence’s twin daughters, who is getting married, and then Harold says, grinning, “So, Jude, the big birthday’s coming up.”

“Three months away!” Julia chirps, and he groans. “What are you going to do?”

“Probably nothing,” he says. He hasn’t planned anything, and he has forbidden Willem from planning anything, either. Two years ago, he threw Willem a big party for his fortieth at Greene Street, and although the four of them had always said they’d go somewhere for each of their fortieth birthdays, it hasn’t worked out that way. Willem had been in L.A. filming on his actual birthday, but after he had finished, they’d gone to Botswana on a safari. But it had been just the two of them: Malcolm had been working on a project in Beijing, and JB—well, Willem hadn’t mentioned inviting JB, and he hadn’t, either.

“You have to do
something
,” says Harold. “We could have a dinner for you here, or in the city.”

He smiles but shakes his head. “Forty’s forty,” he says. “It’s just another year.” As a child, though, he never thought he’d make it to forty: in the months after the injury, he would sometimes have dreams of himself as an adult, and although the dreams were very vague—he was never quite certain where he was living or what he was doing, though in those dreams he was usually walking, sometimes running—he was always young in them; his imagination refused to let him advance into middle age.

To change the subject, he tells them about Dr. Kashen’s funeral, where Dr. Li gave a eulogy. “People who don’t love math always accuse mathematicians of trying to make math complicated,” Dr. Li had said. “But anyone who
does
love math knows it’s really the opposite: math
rewards simplicity, and mathematicians value it above all else. So it’s no surprise that Walter’s favorite axiom was also the most simple in the realm of mathematics: the axiom of the empty set.

“The axiom of the empty set is the axiom of zero. It states that there must be a concept of nothingness, that there must be the concept of zero: zero value, zero items. Math assumes there’s a concept of nothingness, but is it proven? No. But it
must
exist.

“And if we are being philosophical—which we today are—we can say that life itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero. We know that both states exist, but we will not be conscious of either experience: they are states that are necessary parts of life, even as they cannot be experienced
as
life. We
assume
the concept of nothingness, but we cannot prove it. But it
must
exist. So I prefer to think that Walter has not died but has instead proven for himself the axiom of the empty set, that he has proven the concept of zero. I know nothing else would have made him happier. An elegant mind wants elegant endings, and Walter had the most elegant mind. So I wish him goodbye; I wish him the answer to the axiom he so loved.”

They are all quiet for a while, contemplating this. “Please tell me that isn’t
your
favorite axiom,” Harold says suddenly, and he laughs. “No,” he says. “It’s not.”

He sleeps in the next day, and that night he goes to the wedding, where because both of the grooms lived in Hood, he knows almost everyone. The non-Hood guests—Lionel’s colleagues from Wellesley, and Sinclair’s from Harvard, where he teaches European history—stand near one another as if for protection, looking bored and bemused. The wedding is loose-limbed and slightly chaotic—Lionel starts assigning his guests tasks as soon as they arrive, which most of them neglect: he is supposed to be making sure everyone signs the guest book; Willem is supposed to be helping people find their tables—and people walk around saying how, thanks to Lionel and Sinclair, thanks to this wedding, they won’t have to go to their twentieth reunion this year. They are all here: Willem and his girlfriend, Robin; Malcolm and Sophie; and JB and his new boyfriend, whom he hasn’t met, and he knows, even before checking their place cards, that they will all be assigned to the same table. “Jude!” people he hasn’t seen in years say to him. “How are you? Where’s JB? I just spoke to Willem! I just saw Malcolm!” And then, “Are you four all still as close as you were?”

“We all still talk,” he says, “and they’re doing great,” which is the answer he and Willem had decided they’d give. He wonders what JB is saying, whether he is skimming over the truth, as he and Willem are, or whether he is lying outright, or whether, in a fit of JBish forthrightness, he is telling the truth: “No. We hardly ever speak anymore. I only really talk to Malcolm these days.”

He hasn’t seen JB in months and months. He hears of him, of course: through Malcolm, through Richard, through Black Henry Young. But he doesn’t see him any longer, because even nearly three years later, he is unable to forgive him. He has tried and tried. He knows how intractable, how mean, how uncharitable he is being. But he can’t. When he sees JB, he sees him doing his imitation of him, sees him confirming in that moment everything he has feared and thought he looks like, everything he has feared and thought other people think about him. But he had never thought his friends saw him like that; or at least, he never thought they would tell him. The accuracy of the imitation tears at him, but the fact that it was JB doing it devastates him. Late at night, when he can’t sleep, the image he sometimes sees is JB dragging himself in a half-moon, his mouth agape and drooling, his hands held before him in claws:
I’m Jude. I’m Jude St. Francis
.

That night, after they had taken JB to the hospital and admitted him—JB had been stuporous and dribbling when they took him in, but then had recovered and become angry, violent, screaming wordlessly at them all, thrashing against the orderlies, wresting his body out of their arms until they had sedated him and dragged him, lolling, down the hallway—Malcolm had left in one taxi and he and Willem had gone home to Perry Street in another.

He hadn’t been able to look at Willem in the cab, and without anything to distract him—no forms to fill out, no doctors to talk to—he had felt himself grow cold despite the hot, muggy night, and his hands begin to shake, and Willem had reached over and taken his right hand and held it in his left for the rest of the long, silent ride downtown.

He was there for JB’s recovery. He decided he’d stay until he got better; he couldn’t abandon JB then, not after all their time together. The three of them took shifts, and after work he’d sit by JB’s hospital bed and read. Sometimes JB was awake, but most of the time he wasn’t. He was detoxing, but the doctor had also discovered that JB had a kidney infection, and so he stayed on in the hospital’s main ward, liquids
dripping into his arm, his face slowly losing its bloat. When he was awake, JB would beg him for forgiveness, sometimes dramatically and pleadingly, and sometimes—when he was more lucid—quietly. These were the conversations he found most difficult.

“Jude, I’m so sorry,” he’d say. “I was so messed up. Please tell me you forgive me. I was so awful. I love you, you know that. I would never want to hurt you, never.”

“I know you were messed up, JB,” he’d say. “I know.”

“Then tell me you forgive me. Please, Jude.”

He’d be silent. “It’s going to be okay, JB,” he’d say, but he couldn’t make the words—
I forgive you
—leave his mouth. At night, alone, he would say them again and again:
I forgive you, I forgive you
. It would be so simple, he’d admonish himself. It would make JB feel better.
Say it
, he’d command himself as JB looked at him, the whites of his eyes smeary and yellowed.
Say it
. But he couldn’t. He knew he was making JB feel worse; he knew it and was still unable to say it. The words were stones, held just under his tongue. He couldn’t release them, he just couldn’t.

Later, when JB called him nightly from rehab, strident and pedantic, he’d sat silently through his monologues on what a better person he’d become, and how he had realized he had no one to depend on but himself, and how he, Jude, needed to realize that there was more in life than just work, and to live every day in the moment and learn to love himself. He listened and breathed and said nothing. And then JB had come home and had had to readjust, and none of them heard very much from him at all for a few months. He had lost the lease on his apartment, and had moved back in with his mother while he reestablished his life.