A Little Life (82 page)

Over dinner, Andy complains about his brother’s new boyfriend, whom he hates. “Andy,” he tells him, “you can’t hate
all
of Beckett’s boyfriends.”

“I know, I know,” Andy says. “It’s just that he’s such a lightweight, and Beckett could do so much better. I did tell you he pronounced Proust as Prowst, right?”

“Several times,” he says, smiling to himself. He had met this new reviled boyfriend of Beckett’s—a sweet, jovial aspiring landscape architect—at a dinner party at Andy’s three months ago. “But Andy—I
thought he was nice. And he loves Beckett. And anyway, are you really going to sit around having conversations about Proust with him?”

Andy sighs. “You sound like Jane,” he says, grouchily.

“Well,” he says, smiling again. “Maybe you should listen to Jane.” He laughs, then, feeling lighter than he has in weeks, and not just because of Andy’s sulky expression. “There are worse crimes than not being fully conversant with
Swann’s Way
, you know.”

As he drives home, he thinks of his plan, but then realizes he will have to wait, because he is going to claim that he has burned himself in a cooking accident, and if something goes wrong and he has to see Andy, Andy will ask him why he was cooking on the same night they were eating dinner. Tomorrow, then, he thinks; I’ll do it tomorrow. That way, he can write an e-mail to Willem tonight in which he’ll mention that he’s going to try to make the fried plantains JB likes: a semi-spontaneous decision that will go terribly wrong.

You do know that this is how mentally ill people make their plans
, says the dry and belittling voice inside him.
You do know that this planning is something only a sick person would do
.

Stop it
, he tells it.
Stop it. The fact that I know this is sick means I’m not
. At that, the voice hoots with laughter: at his defensiveness, at his six-year-old’s illogic, at his revulsion for the word “sick,” his fear that it might attach itself to him. But even the voice, its mocking, swaggering distaste for him, isn’t enough to stop him.

The next evening he changes into a short-sleeve T-shirt, one of Willem’s, and goes to the kitchen. He arranges everything he needs: the olive oil; a long wooden match. He places his left forearm in the sink, as if it’s a bird to be plucked, and chooses an area a few inches above where his palm begins, before taking the paper towel he’s wet with oil and rubbing it onto his skin in an apricot-sized circle. He stares for a few seconds at the gleaming grease stain, and then he takes a breath and strikes the match against the side of its box and holds the flame to his skin until he catches on fire.

The pain is—what is the pain? Ever since the injury, there has not been a single day in which he is not in some sort of pain. Sometimes the pain is infrequent, or mild, or intermittent. But it is always there. “You have to be careful,” Andy is always telling him. “You’ve gotten so inured to it that you’ve lost the ability to recognize when it’s a sign of
something worse. So even if it’s only a five or a six, if it looks like
this
”—they had been speaking about one of the wounds on his legs around which he had noticed that the skin was turning a poisonous blackish gray, the color of rot—“then you have to imagine that for most people it would be a nine or a ten, and you have to,
have to
come see me. Okay?”

But this pain is a pain he has not felt in decades, and he screams and screams. Voices, faces, scraps of memories, odd associations whir through his mind: the smell of smoking olive oil leads him to a memory of a meal of roasted
funghi
he and Willem had had in Perugia, which leads him to a Tintoretto exhibit that he and Malcolm had seen in their twenties at the Frick, which leads him to a boy in the home everyone called Frick, but he never knew why, as the boy’s name was Jed, which leads him to the nights in the barn, which leads him to a bale of hay in an empty, fog-smeared meadow outside Sonoma against which he and Brother Luke had once had sex, which leads him to, and to, and to, and to, and to. He smells burning meat, and he breaks out of his trance and looks wildly at the stove, as if he has left something there, a slab of steak seething to itself in a pan, but there is nothing, and he realizes he is smelling himself, his own arm cooking beneath him, and this makes him turn on the faucet at last and the water splashing against the burn, the oily smoke rising from it, makes him scream again. And then he is reaching, again wildly, with his right arm, his left still lying useless in the sink, an amputation in a kidney-shaped metal bowl, and he is grabbing the container of sea salt from the cupboard above the stove, and he is sobbing, rubbing a handful of the sharp-edged crystals into the burn, which reactivates the pain into something whiter than white, and it is as if he is staring into the sun and he is blinded.

When he wakes, he is on the floor, his head against the cupboard beneath the sink. His limbs are jerking; he is feverish, but he is cold, and he presses himself against the cupboard as if it is something soft, as if it will consume him. Behind his closed eyelids he sees the hyenas, licking their snouts as if they have literally fed upon him.
Happy?
he asks them.
Are you happy?
They cannot answer, of course, but they are dazed and satiated; he can see their vigilance waning, their large eyes shutting contentedly.

The next day he has a fever. It takes him an hour to get from the kitchen to his bed; his feet are too sore, and he cannot pull himself on his arms. He doesn’t sleep so much as move in and out of consciousness,
the pain sloshing through him like a tide, sometimes receding enough to let him wake, sometimes consuming him beneath a grayed, filthy wave. Late that night he rouses himself enough to look at his arm, where there is a large crisped circle, black and venomous, as if it is a piece of land where he has been practicing a terrifying occult ritual: witch-burning, perhaps. Animal sacrifice. A summoning of spirits. It looks not like skin at all (and indeed, it no longer is) but like something that never was skin: like wood, like paper, like tarmac, all burned to ash.

By Monday, he knows it will become infected. At lunchtime he changes the bandage he had applied the night before, and as he eases it off, his skin tears as well, and he stuffs his pocket square into his mouth so he won’t scream out loud. But things are falling out of his arm, clots with the consistency of blood but the color of coal, and he sits on the floor of his bathroom, rocking himself back and forth, his stomach heaving forth old food and acids, his arm heaving forth its own disease, its own excretia.

The next day the pain is worse, and he leaves work early to go see Andy. “My god,” Andy says, seeing the wound, and for once, he is silent, utterly, which terrifies him.

“Can you fix it?” he whispers, because until that point, he had never thought himself capable of hurting himself in a way that couldn’t be fixed. He has, suddenly, a vision of Andy telling him he will lose the arm altogether, and the next thing he thinks is: What will I tell Willem?

But “Yes,” Andy says. “I’ll do what I can, and then you need to go to the hospital. Lie back.” He does, and lets Andy irrigate the wound and clean and dress it, lets Andy apologize to him when he cries out.

He is there for an hour, and when he is finally able to sit—Andy has given him a shot to numb the area—the two of them are silent.

“Are you going to tell me how you got a third-degree burn in such a perfect circle?” Andy asks him at last, and he ignores Andy’s chilly sarcasm, and instead recites to him his prepared story: the plantains, the grease fire.

Then there is another silence, this one different in a way he cannot explain but does not like. And then Andy says, very quietly, “You’re lying, Jude.”

“What do you mean?” he asks, his throat suddenly dry despite the orange juice he has been drinking.

“You’re lying,” Andy repeats, still in that same quiet voice, and he
slides off the examining table, the bottle of juice slipping from his grasp and shattering on the floor, and moves for the door.

“Stop,” Andy says, and he is cold, and furious. “Jude, you fucking tell me now.
What did you do?
”

“I told you,” he says, “I told you.”

“No,”
Andy says. “You tell me what you did, Jude. You say the words.
Say them
. I want to hear you say them.”

“
I told you
,” he shouts, and he feels so terrible, his brain thumping against his skull, his feet thrust full of smoldering iron ingots, his arm with its simmering cauldron burned into it. “Let me go, Andy.
Let me go
.”

“No,”
Andy says, and he too is shouting. “Jude, you—you—” He stops, and he stops as well, and they both wait to hear what Andy will say. “You’re sick, Jude,” he says, in a low, frantic voice. “You’re crazy. This is crazy behavior. This is behavior that could and should get you locked away for years. You’re sick, you’re sick and you’re crazy and you need help.”

“Don’t you
dare
call me crazy,” he yells, “don’t you
dare
. I’m not,
I’m not
.”

But Andy ignores him. “Willem gets back on Friday, right?” he asks, although he knows the answer already. “You have one week from tonight to tell him, Jude. One week. And after that, I’m telling him myself.”

“You can’t
legally
do that, Andy,” he shouts, and everything spins before him. “I’ll sue you for so much that you won’t even—”

“Better check your recent case law,
counselor
,” Andy hisses back at him. “
Rodriguez versus Mehta
. Two years ago. If a patient who’s been involuntarily committed attempts serious self-injury again, the patient’s doctor has the right—no, the
obligation
—to inform the patient’s partner or next of kin, whether that patient has fucking given consent or not.”

He is struck silent then, reeling from pain and fear and the shock of what Andy has just told him. The two of them are still standing in the examining room, that room he has visited so many, so many times, but he can feel his legs pleating beneath him, can feel the misery overtake him, can feel his anger ebb. “Andy,” he says, and he can hear the beg in his voice, “please don’t tell him. Please don’t. If you tell him, he’ll leave me.” As he says it, he knows it is true. He doesn’t know why Willem will leave him—whether it will be because of what he has done or because
he has lied about it—but he knows he is correct. Willem will leave him, even though he has done what he has done so he can keep having sex, because if he stops having sex, he knows Willem will leave him anyway.

“Not this time, Jude,” says Andy, and although he isn’t yelling any longer, his voice is grim and determined. “I’m not covering for you this time. You have one week.”

“It’s not his business, though,” he says, desperately. “It’s my own.”

“That’s the thing, though, Jude,” Andy says. “It
is
his business. That’s what being in a goddamned relationship is—don’t you understand that yet? Don’t you get that you just can’t do what you want? Don’t you get that when you hurt yourself, you’re hurting him as well?”

“No,” he says, shaking his head, gripping the side of the examining table with his right hand to try to remain upright. “No. I do this to myself so I
won’t
hurt him. I’m doing it to spare him.”

“No,” Andy says. “If you ruin this, Jude—if you keep lying to someone who loves you, who
really
loves you, who has only ever wanted to see you exactly as you are—then you
will
only have yourself to blame. It
will
be your fault. And it’ll be your fault not because of who you are or what’s been done to you or the diseases you have or what you think you look like, but because of how you behave, because you won’t trust Willem enough to talk to him honestly, to extend to him the same sort of generosity and faith that he has always,
always
extended to you. I know you think you’re sparing him, but you’re not. You’re selfish. You’re selfish and you’re stubborn and you’re proud and you’re going to ruin the best thing that has happened to you. Don’t you understand that?”

He is speechless for the second time that evening, and it is only when he begins, finally, to fall, so tired is he, that Andy reaches out and grabs him around his waist and the conversation ends.

He spends the next three nights in the hospital, at Andy’s insistence. During the day, he goes to work, and then he comes back in the evening and Andy readmits him. There are two plastic bags dangling above him, one for each arm. One, he knows, has only glucose in it. The second has something else, something that makes the pain furry and gentle and that makes sleep something inky and still, like the dark blue skies in a Japanese woodblock print of winter, all snow and a silent traveler wearing a woven-straw hat beneath.

It is Friday. He returns home. Willem will be arriving at around ten that night, and although Mrs. Zhou has already cleaned, he wants
to make certain there is no evidence, that he has hidden every clue, although without context, the clues—salt, matches, olive oil, paper towels—are not clues at all, they are symbols of their life together, they are things they both reach for daily.

He still hasn’t decided what he will do. He has until the following Sunday—he has begged nine extra days from Andy, has convinced him that because of the holidays, because they are driving to Boston next Wednesday for Thanksgiving, that he needs the time—to either tell Willem, or (although he doesn’t say this) to convince Andy to change his mind. Both scenarios seem equally impossible. But he will try anyway. One of the problems with having slept so much these past few nights is that he has had very little time to think about how he can negotiate this situation. He feels he has become a spectacle to himself, with all the beings who inhabit him—the ferret-like creature; the hyenas; the voices—watching to see what he will do, so they can judge him and scoff at him and tell him he’s wrong.

He sits down on the living-room sofa to wait, and when he opens his eyes, Willem is sitting next to him, smiling at him and saying his name, and he puts his arms around him, careful not to let his left arm exert any pressure, and for that one moment, everything seems both possible—and indescribably difficult.