Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

I had meant what I told him that weekend: whatever he had done didn’t matter to me. I knew him. Who he had become was the person who mattered to me. I told him that who he was before made no difference to me. But of course, this was naïve: I adopted the person he was, but along with that came the person he had been, and I didn’t know who that person was. Later, I would regret that I hadn’t made it clearer to him that that person, whoever he was, was someone I wanted as well. Later, I would wonder, incessantly, what it would have been like for him if I had found him twenty years before I did, when he was a baby. Or if not twenty, then ten, or even five. Who would he have been, and who would I have been?

Laurence’s search turned up nothing, and I was relieved and disappointed. The adoption happened; it was a wonderful day, one of the best. I never regretted it. But being his parent was never easy. He had all sorts of rules he’d constructed for himself over the decades, based on lessons someone must have taught him — what he wasn’t entitled to; what he mustn’t enjoy; what he mustn’t hope or wish for; what he mustn’t covet — and it took some years to figure out what these rules were, and longer still to figure out how to try to convince him of their falsehood. But this was very difficult: they were rules by which he had survived his life, they were rules that made the world explicable to him. He was terrifically disciplined — he was in everything — and discipline, like vigilance, is a near-impossible quality to get someone to abandon.

Equally difficult was my (and your) attempts to get him to abandon certain ideas about himself: about how he looked, and what he deserved, and what he was worth, and who he was. I have still never met anyone as neatly or severely bifurcated as he: someone who could be so utterly confident in some realms and so utterly despondent in others. I remember watching him in court once and feeling both awed and chilled. He was defending one of those pharmaceutical companies in whose care and protection he had made his name in a federal whistle-blower suit. It was a big suit, a major suit — it is on dozens of syllabi now — but he was very, very calm; I have rarely seen a litigator so calm. On the stand was the whistle-blower in question, a middle-aged woman, and he was so relentless, so dogged, so pointed, that the courtroom was silent, watching him. He never raised his voice, he was never sarcastic, but I could see that he relished it, that this very act, catching that witness in her inconsistencies — which were slight, very slight, so slight another lawyer might have missed them — was nourishing to him, that he found pleasure in it. He was a gentle person (though not to himself), gentle in manners and voice, and yet in the courtroom that gentleness burned itself away and left behind something brutal and cold. This was about seven months after the incident with Caleb, five months before the incident to follow, and as I watched him reciting the witness’s own statements back to her, never glancing down at the notepad before him, his face still and handsome and self-assured, I kept seeing him in the car that terrible night, when he had turned from me and had protected his head with his hands when I reached out to touch the side of his face, as if I were another person who would try to hurt him. His very existence was twinned: there was who he was at work and who he was outside of it; there was who he was then and who he had been; there was who he was in court and who he had been in the car, so alone with himself that I had been frightened.

That night, uptown, I had paced in circles, thinking about what I had learned about him, what I had seen, how hard I had fought to keep from howling when I heard him say the things he had — worse than Caleb, worse than what Caleb had said, was hearing that he believed it, that he was so wrong about himself. I suppose I had always known he felt this way, but hearing him say it so baldly was even worse than I could have imagined. I will never forget him saying “when you look like I do, you have to take what you can get.” I will never forget the despair and anger and hopelessness I felt when I heard him say that. I will never forget his face when he saw Caleb, when Caleb sat down next to him, and I was too slow to understand what was happening. How can you call yourself a parent if your child feels this way about himself? That was something I would never be able to recalibrate. I suppose — having never parented an adult myself — that I had never known how much was actually involved. I didn’t resent having to do it: I felt only stupid and inadequate that I hadn’t realized it earlier. After all, I had been an adult with a parent, and I had turned to my father constantly.

I called Julia, who was in Santa Fe at a conference about new diseases, and told her what had happened, and she gave a long, sad sigh. “Harold,” she began, and then stopped. We’d had conversations about what his life had been before us, and although both of us were wrong, her guesses would turn out to be more accurate than mine, although at the time I had thought them ridiculous, impossible.

“I know,” I said.

“You have to call him.”

But I had been. I called and called and the phone rang and rang.

That night I lay awake alternately worrying and having the kinds of fantasies men have: guns, hit men, vengeance. I had waking dreams in which I called Gillian’s cousin, who was a detective in New York, and had Caleb Porter arrested. I had dreams in which I called you, and you and Andy and I staked out his apartment and killed him.

The next morning I left early, before eight, and bought bagels and orange juice and went down to Greene Street. It was a gray day, soggy and humid, and I rang the buzzer three times, each for several seconds, before stepping back toward the curb, squinting up at the sixth floor.

I was about to buzz again when I heard his voice coming over the speaker: “Hello?”

“It’s me,” I said. “Can I come up?” There was no response. “I want to apologize,” I said. “I need to see you. I brought bagels.”

There was another silence. “Hello?” I asked.

“Harold,” he said, and I noticed his voice sounded funny. Muffled, as if his mouth had grown an extra set of teeth and he was speaking around them. “If I let you up, do you promise you won’t get angry and start yelling?”

I was quiet then, myself. I didn’t know what this meant. “Yes,” I said, and after a second or two, the door clicked open.

I stepped off the elevator, and for a minute, I saw nothing, just that lovely apartment with its walls of light. And then I heard my name and looked down and saw him.

I nearly dropped the bagels. I felt my limbs turn to stone. He was sitting on the ground, but leaning on his right hand for support, and as I knelt beside him, he turned his head away and held his left hand before his face as if to shield himself.

“He took the spare set of keys,” he said, and his face was so swollen that his lips barely had room to move. “I came home last night and he was here.” He turned toward me then, and his face was an animal skinned and turned inside out and left in the heat, its organs melting together into a pudding of flesh: all I could see of his eyes were their long line of lashes, a smudge of black against his cheeks, which were a horrible blue, the blue of decay, of mold. I thought he might have been crying then, but he didn’t cry. “I’m sorry, Harold, I’m so sorry.”

I made sure I wasn’t going to start shouting — not at him, just shouting to express something I couldn’t say — before I spoke to him. “We’re going to get you better,” I said. “We’re going to call the police, and then—”

“No,” he said. “Not the police.”