Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

And then Brother Luke looked at him, suddenly serious. He had been thinking about it a lot, he said, and he thought it was time for them to build their cabin; it was time that they go away together. But he, Luke, wouldn’t do it alone: Was Jude going to come with him? Did he give him his word? Did he want to be with Brother Luke the way Brother Luke wanted to be with him, just the two of them in their small and perfect world? And of course he did — of course he did.

So there was a plan. They would leave in two months, before Easter; he would celebrate his ninth birthday in their cabin. Brother Luke would take care of everything — all he needed to do was be a good boy, and study hard, and not cause any problems. And, most important, say nothing. If they found out what they were doing, Brother Luke said, then he would be sent away, away from the monastery, to make his way on his own, and Brother Luke wouldn’t be able to help him then. He promised.

The next two months were terrible and wonderful at the same time. Terrible because they passed so slowly. Wonderful because he had a secret, one that made his life better, because it meant his life in the monastery had an end. Every day he woke up eager, because it meant he was one day closer to being with Brother Luke. Every time one of the brothers was with him, he would remember that soon he would be far away from them, and it would be a little less bad. Every time he was beaten or yelled at, he would imagine himself in the cabin, and it would give him the fortitude — a word Brother Luke had taught him — to withstand it.

He had begged Brother Luke to let him help with the preparations, and Brother Luke had told him to gather a sample of every flower and leaf from all the different kinds of plants on the monastery grounds. And so in the afternoons he prowled the property with his Bible, pressing leaves and petals between its pages. He spent less time in the greenhouse, but whenever he saw Luke, the brother would give him one of his somber winks, and he would smile to himself, their secret something warm and delicious.

The night finally arrived, and he was nervous. Brother Matthew was with him in the early evening, right after dinner, but eventually he left, and he was alone. And then there was Brother Luke, holding his finger pressed to his lips, and he nodded. He helped Luke load his books and underwear into the paper bag he held open, and then they were tiptoeing down the hallway, and down the stairs, and then through the darkened building and into the night.

“There’s just a short walk to the car,” Luke whispered to him, and then, when he stopped, “Jude, what’s wrong?”

“My bag,” he said, “my bag from the greenhouse.”

And then Luke smiled his kind smile, and put his hand on his head. “I put it in the car already,” he said, and he smiled back, so grateful to Luke for remembering.

The air was cold, but he hardly noticed. On and on they walked, down the monastery’s long graveled driveway, and past the wooden gates, and up the hill that led to the main road, and then down the main road itself, the night so silent it hummed. As they walked, Brother Luke pointed out different constellations and he named them, he got them all right, and Luke murmured in admiration and stroked the back of his head. “You’re so smart,” he said. “I’m so glad I picked you, Jude.”

Now they were on the road, which he had only been on a few times in his life — to go to the doctor, or to the dentist — although now it was empty, and little animals, muskrats and possums, gamboled before them. Then they were at the car, a long maroon station wagon piebald with rust, its backseat filled with boxes and black trash bags and some of Luke’s favorite plants — the Cattleya schilleriana , with its ugly speckled petals; the Hylocereus undatus , with its sleepy drooping head of a blossom — in their dark-green plastic nests.

It was strange to see Brother Luke in a car, stranger than being in the car itself. But stranger than that was the feeling he had, that everything had been worth it, that all his miseries were going to end, that he was going to a life that would be as good as, perhaps better than, anything he had read about in books.

“Are you ready to go?” Brother Luke whispered to him, and grinned.

“I am,” he whispered back. And Brother Luke turned the key in the ignition.

There were two ways of forgetting. For many years, he had envisioned (unimaginatively) a vault, and at the end of the day, he would gather the images and sequences and words that he didn’t want to think about again and open the heavy steel door only enough to hurry them inside, closing it quickly and tightly. But this method wasn’t effective: the memories seeped out anyway. The important thing, he came to realize, was to eliminate them, not just to store them.

So he had invented some solutions. For small memories — little slights, insults — you relived them again and again until they were neutralized, until they became near meaningless with repetition, or until you could believe that they were something that had happened to someone else and you had just heard about it. For larger memories, you held the scene in your head like a film strip, and then you began to erase it, frame by frame. Neither method was easy: you couldn’t stop in the middle of your erasing and examine what you were looking at, for example; you couldn’t start scrolling through parts of it and hope you wouldn’t get ensnared in the details of what had happened, because you of course would. You had to work at it every night, until it was completely gone.

Though they never disappeared completely, of course. But they were at least more distant — they weren’t things that followed you, wraithlike, tugging at you for attention, jumping in front of you when you ignored them, demanding so much of your time and effort that it became impossible to think of anything else. In fallow periods — the moments before you fell asleep; the minutes before you were landing after an overnight flight, when you weren’t awake enough to do work and weren’t tired enough to sleep — they would reassert themselves, and so it was best to imagine, then, a screen of white, huge and light-lit and still, and hold it in your mind like a shield.

In the weeks following the beating, he worked on forgetting Caleb. Before going to bed, he went to the door of his apartment and, feeling foolish, tried forcing his old set of keys into the locks to assure himself that they didn’t fit, that he really was once again safe. He set, and reset, the alarm system he’d had installed, which was so sensitive that even passing shadows triggered a flurry of beeps. And then he lay awake, his eyes open in the dark room, concentrating on forgetting. But it was so difficult — there were so many memories from those months that stabbed him that he was overwhelmed. He heard Caleb’s voice saying things to him, he saw the expression on Caleb’s face as he had stared at his unclothed body, he felt the horrid blank airlessness of his fall down the staircase, and he crunched himself into a knot and put his hands over his ears and closed his eyes. Finally he would get up and go to his office at the other end of the apartment and work. He had a big case coming up, and he was grateful for it; his days were so occupied that he had little time to think of anything else. For a while he was hardly going home at all, just two hours to sleep and an hour to shower and change, until one evening he’d had an episode at work, a bad one, the first time he ever had. The night janitor had found him on the floor, and had called the building’s security department, who had called the firm’s chairman, a man named Peterson Tremain, who had called Lucien, who was the only one he had told what to do in case something like this should happen: Lucien had called Andy, and then both he and the chairman had come into the office and waited with him for Andy to arrive. He had seen them, seen their feet, and even as he had gasped and writhed on the ground, he had tried to find the energy to beg them to leave, to reassure them that he was fine, that he just needed to be left alone. But they hadn’t left, and Lucien had wiped the vomit from his mouth, tenderly, and then sat on the floor near his head and held his hand and he had been so embarrassed he had almost cried. Later, he had told them again and again that it was nothing, that this happened all the time, but they had made him take the rest of the week off, and the following Monday, Lucien had told him that they were making him go home at a reasonable hour: midnight on the weekdays, nine p.m. on the weekends.