A Little Life (81 page)

He was in his first year of law school when his life began appearing to him as memories. He would be doing something everyday—cooking dinner, filing books at the library, frosting a cake at Batter, looking up an article for Harold—and suddenly, a scene would appear before him,
a dumb show meant only for him. In those years, the memories were tableaux, not narratives, and he would see a single one repeatedly for days: a diorama of Brother Luke on top of him, or one of the counselors from the home, who used to grab him as he walked by, or a client emptying his change from his pants pockets and setting it in the dish on the nightstand that Brother Luke had placed there for that purpose. And sometimes the memories were briefer and vaguer still: a client’s blue sock patterned with horse heads that he had worn even in bed; the first meal in Philadelphia that Dr. Traylor had ever given him (a burger; a paper sleeve of French fries); a peachy woolen pillow in his room at Dr. Traylor’s house that he could never look at without thinking of torn flesh. When these memories announced themselves, he would find himself disoriented: it always took him a moment to remember that these scenes were not only from his life, but his life itself. In those days, he would let them interrupt him, and there would be times in which he would come out of his spell and would find his hand still wrapped around the plastic cone of frosting poised over the cookie before him, or still holding the book half on, half off the shelf. It was then that he began comprehending how much of his life he had learned to simply erase, even days after it had happened, and also that somehow, somewhere, he had lost that ability. He knew it was the price of enjoying life, that if he was to be alert to the things he now found pleasure in, he would have to accept its cost as well. Because as assaultive as his memories were, his life coming back to him in pieces, he knew he would endure them if it meant he could also have friends, if he kept being granted the ability to take comfort in others.

He thought of it as a slight parting of worlds, in which something buried wisped up from the loamy, turned earth and hovered before him, waiting for him to recognize it and claim it as his own. Their very reappearance was defiant:
Here we are
, they seemed to say to him.
Did you really think we would let you abandon us? Did you really think we wouldn’t come back?
Eventually, he was also made to recognize how much he had edited—edited and reconfigured, refashioned into something easier to accept—from even the past few years: the film he had seen his junior year of two detectives coming to tell a student at college that the man who had hurt him had died in prison hadn’t been a film at all—it had been his life, and he had been the student, and he had stood there in the Quad outside of Hood, and the two detectives were
the people who had found him and arrested Dr. Traylor in the field that night, and they had taken him to the hospital and had made sure Dr. Traylor had gone to prison, and they had come to find him to tell him in person that he had nothing to fear again. “Pretty fancy stuff,” one of the detectives had said, looking around him at the beautiful campus, at its old brick buildings where you could go and be absolutely safe. “We’re proud of you, Jude.” But he had fuzzed this memory, he had changed it to the detective simply saying “We’re proud of you,” and had left off his name, just as he had left out the panic he now remembered he had vividly felt despite their news, the dread that later someone would ask him who those people were that he had been talking to, the almost nauseous wrongness of his past life intruding so physically on his present.

Eventually he had learned how to manage the memories. He couldn’t stop them—after they had begun, they had never ended—but he had grown more adept at anticipating their arrival. He became able to diagnose it, that moment or day in which he could tell that something was going to visit him, and he would have to figure out how it wanted to be addressed: Did it want confrontation, or soothing, or simply attention? He would determine what sort of hospitality it wanted, and then he would determine how to make it leave, to retreat back to that other place.

A small memory he could contain, but as the days go by and he waits for Willem, he recognizes that this is a long eel of a memory, slippery and uncatchable, and it whipsaws its way through him, its tail slapping against his organs so that he feels the memory as something alive and wounding, feels its meaty, powerful smack against his intestines, his heart, his lungs. Sometimes they were like this, and these were the hardest to lasso and corral, and with every day it seems to grow inside him, until he feels himself stuffed not with blood and muscle and water and bone but with the memory itself, expanding balloon-like to inflate his very fingertips. After Caleb, he had realized that there were some memories he was simply not going to be able to control, and so his only recourse was to wait until they had tired themselves out, until they swam back into the dark of his subconscious and left him alone again.

And so he waits, letting the memory—the nearly two weeks he had spent in trucks, trying to get from Montana to Boston—occupy him, as if his very mind, his body, is a motel, and this memory his sole guest. His challenge in this period is to fulfill his promise to Willem, to not
cut himself, and so he creates a strict and consuming schedule for the hours between midnight and four a.m., which are the most dangerous. On Saturday he makes a list of what he will do each night for the next few weeks, rotating swimming with cooking and piano-playing and baking and work at Richard’s and sorting through all of his and Willem’s old clothes and pruning the bookcases and resewing the loose buttons on Willem’s shirt that he was going to have Mrs. Zhou do but is perfectly capable of doing himself and cleaning out the detritus that has accumulated in the drawer near the stove: twist ties and sticky rubber bands and safety pins and matchbooks. He makes pints of chicken stock and ground-lamb meatballs for Willem’s return and freezes them, and bakes loaves of bread for Richard to take to the food kitchen where they are both on the board and whose finances he helps administer. After feeding the starter, he sits at the table and reads novels, old favorites of his, the words and plots and characters comforting and lived-in and unchanged. He wishes he had a pet—a dumb, grateful dog, panting and smiling; a frigid cat, glaring judgmentally at him through her slitted orange eyes—some other breathing thing in the apartment that he could speak to, the sound of whose soft padding footsteps would bring him back to himself. He works all night, and just before he drops off to sleep, he cuts himself—once on the left arm, once on the right—and when he wakes, he is tired but proud of himself for making it through intact.

But then it is two weeks before Willem is to come home, and just as the memory is fading, checking out of him until the next time it comes to visit, the hyenas return. Or perhaps return is the wrong word, because once Caleb introduced them into his life, they have never left. Now, however, they don’t chase him, because they know they don’t need to: his life is a vast savanna, and he is surrounded by them. They lie splayed in the yellow grass, drape themselves lazily over the baobab trees’ low branches that spread from their trunks like tentacles, and stare at him with their keen yellow eyes. They are always there, and after he and Willem began having sex, they multiplied, and on bad days, or on days when he was particularly dreading it, they multiply further. On those days, he can feel their whiskers twitch as he moves slowly through their territory, he can feel their careless derision: he knows he is theirs, and they know it, too.

And although he craves the vacations from sex that Willem’s work
provides him, he knows too that he ought not to, for the reentry into that world is always difficult; it had been that way when he was a child, too, when the only thing worse than the rhythms of sex had been readjusting to the rhythms of sex. “I can’t wait to come home and see you,” Willem says when they next speak, and although there is nothing leering in his tone, although he hasn’t mentioned sex at all, he knows from past experience that Willem will want to have it the night of his return, and that he will want to have it more times than usual for the remainder of his first week back home, and that he will especially want to have it because both of them had taken turns being sick on his two furloughs and so nothing had happened either time.

“Me too,” he says.

“How’s the cutting?” Willem asks, lightly, as if he’s asking about how Julia’s maple trees are faring, or how the weather is. He always asks this at the end of their conversations, as if the subject is something he’s only mildly interested in and is inquiring about to be polite.

“Fine,” he says, as he always does. “Only twice this week,” he adds, and this is true.

“Good, Judy,” Willem says. “Thank god. I know it’s hard. But I’m proud of you.” He always sounds so relieved in these moments, as if he is expecting to hear—which he probably is—some other answer entirely:
Not well, Willem. I cut myself so much last night that my arm fell off entirely. I don’t want you to be surprised when you see me
. He feels a mix of genuine pride, then, both that Willem should trust him so much and that he is actually getting to tell him the truth, and an enervating, bone-deep sorrow, that Willem should have to ask him at all, that this should be something that they are actually proud of. Other people are proud of their boyfriends’ talents or looks or athleticism; Willem, however, gets to be proud that his boyfriend has managed to pass another night without slicing himself with a razor.

And then, finally, there comes an evening in which he knows that his efforts will not satisfy him any longer: he needs to cut himself, extensively and severely. The hyenas are beginning to make little howls, sharp yelps that seem to come from some other creature within them, and he knows that they will be quieted only by his pain. He considers what to do: Willem will be home in a week. If he cuts himself now, the cuts won’t heal properly before he returns, and Willem will be
angry. But if he
doesn’t
do something—then he doesn’t know. He has to, he has to. He has waited too long, he realizes; he has thought he could see himself through; he has been unrealistic.

He gets up from bed and walks through the empty apartment, into the quiet kitchen. The night’s schedule—cookies for Harold; organize Willem’s sweaters; Richard’s studio—glows whitely from the counter, ignored but beckoning, pleading to be heeded, the salvation it offers as flimsy as the paper it’s printed on. For a moment he stands, unable to move, and then slowly, reluctantly, he walks to the door above the staircase and unbolts it, and then, after another moment’s pause, swings it open.

He hasn’t opened this door since the night with Caleb, and now he leans into its mouth, looking down into its black, clutching its frame as he had on that night, wondering if he can bring himself to do it. He knows this will appease the hyenas. But there is something so degrading about it, so extreme, so sick, that he knows that if he were to do it, he will have crossed some line, that he will, in fact, have become someone who needs to be hospitalized. Finally, finally, he unsticks himself from the frame, his hands shaking, and slams the door shut, slams the bolt back into its slot, and stumps away from it.

At work the next day, he goes downstairs with another of the partners, Sanjay, and a client so the client can smoke. They have a few clients who smoke, and when they go downstairs, he goes with them, and they continue their meeting on the sidewalk. Lucien had a theory that smokers are most comfortable, and relaxed, while smoking, and therefore easier to manipulate in the moment, and although he had laughed when Lucien had told him that, he knows he’s probably correct.

He is in his wheelchair that day because his feet are throbbing, although he hates to have the clients see him so impaired. “Believe me, Jude,” Lucien had said when he had worried aloud about this to him years ago, “the clients think you’re the same ball-crushing asshole whether you’re sitting down or standing up, so for god’s sake, stay in your chair.” Outside it is cold and dry, which makes his feet hurt a little less for some reason, and as the three of them talk, he finds himself staring, hypnotized, at the small orange flame at the tip of the client’s cigarette, which winks at him, growing duller and brighter, as the client exhales and inhales. Suddenly, he knows what he is going to do, but
that revelation is followed almost instantly by a blunt punch to his abdomen, because he knows that he is going to betray Willem, and not only is he going to betray him but he is going to lie to him as well.

That day is a Friday, and as he drives to Andy’s, he works out his plan, excited and relieved to have a solution. Andy is in one of his cheerful, combative moods, and he allows himself to be distracted by him, by his brisk energy. Somewhere along the way, he and Andy have begun speaking of his legs the way one would of a troublesome and wayward relative who is nonetheless impossible to abandon and in need of constant care. “The old bastards,” Andy calls them, and the first time he did, he had begun laughing at the accuracy of the nickname, with its suggestion of exasperation that always threatened to overshadow the underlying and reluctant fondness.

“How’re the old bastards?” Andy asks him now, and he smiles and says, “Lazy and sucking up all my resources, as usual.”

But his mind is also full of what he is about to do, and when Andy asks him, “And what does your better half have to say for himself these days?” he snaps at him: “What do you mean by that?” and Andy stops and looks at him, curiously. “Nothing,” he says. “I just wanted to know how Willem’s doing.”

Willem
, he thinks, and simply hearing his name said aloud fills him with anguish. “He’s great,” he says, quietly.

At the end of the appointment, as always, Andy examines his arms, and this time, as he has for the last few times, grunts his approval. “You’ve really cut back,” he says. “No pun intended.”

“You know me—always trying to better myself,” he says, keeping his tone jocular, but Andy looks him in the eyes. “I know,” he says, softly. “I know it must be hard, Jude. But I’m glad, I really am.”