Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

He did, tightened something, changed something else, and then, as he was emerging from the cabinet, handed something to me. “This was taped under the basin,” he said.

“What is it?” I asked, taking the package from him.

He shrugged. “Dunno. But it was stuck there pretty good, with duct tape.” He repacked his things as I stood there dumbly, staring at the bag, and gave me a wave and left; I heard him say goodbye to Jude as he walked out, whistling.

I looked at the bag. It was a regular, pint-size clear plastic bag, and inside it was a stack of ten razor blades, and individually packaged alcohol wipes, and pieces of gauze, folded into springy squares, and bandages. I stood there, holding this bag, and I knew what it was for, even though I had never seen proof of it, and had indeed never seen anything like it. But I knew.

I went to the kitchen, and there he was, washing off a bowlful of fingerlings, still happy. He was even humming something, very softly, which he did only when he was very contented, like how a cat purrs to itself when it’s alone in the sun. “You should’ve told me you needed help installing the toilet,” he said, not looking up. “I could have done it for you and saved you a bill.” He knew how to do all those things: plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, gardening. We once went to Laurence’s so he could explain to Laurence how, exactly, he could safely unearth the young crabapple tree from one corner of his backyard and successfully move it to another, one that got more sun.

For a while I stood there watching him. I felt so many things at once that together, they combined to make nothing, a numbness, an absence of feeling caused by a surplus of feeling. Finally I said his name, and he looked up. “What’s this?” I asked him, and held the bag in front of him.

He went very still, one hand suspended above the bowl, and I remember watching how little droplets of water beaded and dripped off the ends of his fingertips, as if he had slashed himself with a knife and was bleeding water. He opened his mouth, and shut it.

“I’m sorry, Harold,” he said, very softly. He lowered his hand, and dried it, slowly, on the dish towel.

That made me angry. “I’m not asking you to apologize, Jude,” I told him. “I’m asking you what this is. And don’t say ‘It’s a bag with razors in it.’ What is this? Why did you tape it beneath your sink?”

He stared at me for a long time with that look he had — I know you know the one — where you can see him receding even as he looks at you, where you can see the gates within him closing and locking themselves, the bridges being cranked above the moat. “You know what it’s for,” he finally said, still very quietly.

“I want to hear you say it,” I told him.

“I just need it,” he said.

“Tell me what you do with these,” I said, and watched him.

He looked down into the bowl of potatoes. “Sometimes I need to cut myself,” he said, finally. “I’m sorry, Harold.”

And suddenly I was panicked, and my panic made me irrational. “What the fuck does that mean?” I asked him — I may have even shouted it.

He was moving backward now, toward the sink, as if I might lunge at him and he wanted some distance. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry, Harold.”

“How often is sometimes?” I asked.

He too was panicking now, I could see. “I don’t know,” he said. “It varies.”

“Well, estimate. Give me a ballpark.”

“I don’t know,” he said, desperate, “I don’t know. A few times a week, I guess.”

“A few times a week !” I said, and then stopped. Suddenly I had to get out of there. I took my coat from the chair and crammed the bag into its inside pocket. “You’d better be here when I get back,” I told him, and left. (He was a bolter: whenever he thought Julia or I were displeased with him, he would try as quickly as he could to get out of our sight, as if he were an offending object that needed to be removed.)

I walked downstairs, toward the beach, and then through the dunes, feeling the sort of rage that comes with the realization of one’s gross inadequacy, of knowing for certain that you are at fault. It was the first time I realized that as much as he was two people around us, so were we two people around him: we saw of him what we wanted, and allowed ourselves not to see anything else. We were so ill-equipped. Most people are easy: their unhappinesses are our unhappinesses, their sorrows are understandable, their bouts of self-loathing are fast-moving and negotiable. But his were not. We didn’t know how to help him because we lacked the imagination needed to diagnose the problems. But this is making excuses.

By the time I returned to the house it was almost dark, and I could see, through the window, his outline moving about in the kitchen. I sat on a chair on the porch and wished Julia were there, that she wasn’t in England with her father.

The back door opened. “Dinner,” he said, quietly, and I got up to go inside.

He’d made one of my favorite meals: the sea bass I had bought the day before, poached, and potatoes roasted the way he knew I liked them, with lots of thyme and carrots, and a cabbage salad that I knew would have the mustard-seed dressing I liked. But I didn’t have an appetite for any of it. He served me, and then himself, and sat.

“This looks wonderful,” I told him. “Thank you for making it.” He nodded. We both looked at our plates, at his lovely meal that neither of us would eat.

“Jude,” I said, “I have to apologize. I’m really sorry — I never should have run out on you like that.”

“It’s all right,” he said, “I understand.”

“No,” I told him. “It was wrong of me. I was just so upset.”

He looked back down. “Do you know why I was upset?” I asked him.

“Because,” he began, “because I brought that into your house.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not why. Jude, this house isn’t just my house, or Julia’s: it’s yours, too. I want you to feel you can bring anything you’d have at home here.

“I’m upset because you’re doing this terrible thing to yourself.” He didn’t look up. “Do your friends know you do this? Does Andy?”

He nodded, slightly. “Willem knows,” he said, in a low voice. “And Andy.”

“And what does Andy say about this?” I asked, thinking, Goddammit, Andy.

“He says — he says I should see a therapist.”

“And have you?” He shook his head, and I felt rage build up in me again. “Why not?” I asked him, but he didn’t say anything. “Is there a bag like this in Cambridge?” I said, and after a silence, he looked up at me and nodded again.

“Jude,” I said, “why do you do this to yourself?”

For a long time, he was quiet, and I was quiet too. I listened to the sea. Finally, he said, “A few reasons.”

“Like what?”

“Sometimes it’s because I feel so awful, or ashamed, and I need to make physical what I feel,” he began, and glanced at me before looking down again. “And sometimes it’s because I feel so many things and I need to feel nothing at all — it helps clear them away. And sometimes it’s because I feel happy, and I have to remind myself that I shouldn’t.”

“Why?” I asked him once I could speak again, but he only shook his head and didn’t answer, and I too went silent.

He took a breath. “Look,” he said, suddenly, decisively, looking at me directly, “if you want to dissolve the adoption, I’ll understand.”

I was so stunned that I was angry — that hadn’t even occurred to me. I was about to bark something back when I looked at him, at how he was trying to be brave, and saw that he was terrified: He really did think this was something I might want to do. He really would understand if I said I did. He was expecting it. Later, I realized that in those years just after the adoption, he was always wondering how permanent it was, always wondering what he would eventually do that would make me disown him.