Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

The next time he woke, the man was gone, but Harold was in his place. “Harold,” he said, in his strange new voice, and Harold, who had been sitting with his elbows on his thighs and his face in his hands, looked up as suddenly as if he’d shouted.

“Jude,” he said, and sat next to him on the bed. He took the ball out of his right hand and replaced it with his own hand.

He thought that Harold looked terrible. “I’m sorry, Harold,” he said, and Harold began to cry. “Don’t cry,” he told him, “please don’t cry,” and Harold got up and went to the bathroom and he could hear him blowing his nose.

That night, once he was alone, he cried as well: not because of what he had done but because he hadn’t been successful, because he had lived after all.

His mind grew a little clearer with every day. Every day, he was awake a little longer. Mostly, he felt nothing. People came to see him and cried and he looked at them and could register only the strangeness of their faces, the way everyone looked the same when they cried, their noses hoggy, rarely used muscles pulling their mouths in unnatural directions, into unnatural shapes.

He thought of nothing, his mind was a clean sheet of paper. He learned little pieces of what had happened: how Richard’s studio manager had thought the plumber was coming at nine that night, not nine the following morning (even in his haze, he wondered how anyone could think a plumber would come at nine in the evening); how Richard had found him and called an ambulance and had ridden with him to the hospital; how Richard had called Andy and Harold and Willem; how Willem had flown back from Colombo to be with him. He did feel sorry that it had been Richard who’d had to discover him — that was always the part of the plan that had made him uncomfortable, although at the time he had remembered thinking that Richard had a high tolerance for blood, having once made sculptures with it, and so was the least likely among his friends to be traumatized — and had apologized to Richard, who had stroked the back of his hand and told him it was fine, it was okay.

Dr. Solomon came every day and tried to talk to him, but he didn’t have much to say. Most of the time, people didn’t talk to him at all. They came and sat and did work of their own, or spoke to him without seeming to expect a reply, which he appreciated. Lucien came often, usually with a gift, once with a large card that everyone in the office had signed—“I’m sure this is just the thing to make you feel better,” he’d said, dryly, “but here it is, anyway”—and Malcolm made him one of his imaginary houses, its windows crisp vellum, which he placed on his bedside table. Willem called him every morning and every night. Harold read The Hobbit to him, which he had never read, and when Harold couldn’t come, Julia came, and picked up where Harold had left off: those were his favorite visits. Andy arrived every evening, after visiting hours had ended, and had dinner with him; he was concerned that he wasn’t eating enough, and brought him a serving of whatever he was having. He brought him a container of beef barley soup, but his hands were still too weak to hold the spoon, and Andy had to feed him, one slow spoonful after the next. Once, this would have embarrassed him, but now he simply didn’t care: he opened his mouth and accepted the food, which was flavorless, and chewed and swallowed.

“I want to go home,” he told Andy one evening, as he watched Andy eat his turkey club sandwich.

Andy finished his bite and looked at him. “Oh, do you?”

“Yes,” he said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. “I want to leave.” He thought Andy would say something sarcastic, but he only nodded, slowly. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’ll talk to Solomon.” He grimaced. “Eat your sandwich.”

The next day Dr. Solomon said, “I hear you want to go home.”

“I feel like I’ve been here a long time,” he said.

Dr. Solomon was quiet. “You have been here a little while,” he said. “But given your history of self-injury and the seriousness of your attempt, your doctor — Andy — and parents thought it was for the best.”

He thought about this. “So if my attempt had been less serious, I could have gone home earlier?” It seemed too logical to be an effective policy.

The doctor smiled. “Probably,” he said. “But I’m not completely opposed to letting you go home, Jude, although I think we have to put some protective measures in place.” He stopped. “It troubles me, however, that you’ve been so unwilling to discuss why you made the attempt in the first place. Dr. Contractor — I’m sorry: Andy — tells me that you’ve always resisted therapy, can you tell me why?” He said nothing, and neither did the doctor. “Your father tells me that you were in an abusive relationship last year, and that it’s had long-term reverberations,” said the doctor, and he felt himself go cold. But he willed himself not to answer, and closed his eyes, and finally he could hear Dr. Solomon get up to leave. “I’ll be back tomorrow, Jude,” he said as he left.

Eventually, once it was clear that he wasn’t going to speak to any of them and that he was in no state to hurt himself again, they let him go, with stipulations: He was to be released into Julia and Harold’s care. It was strongly recommended that he remain on a milder course of the drugs that he’d been given in the hospital. It was very strongly recommended that he see a therapist twice a week. He was to see Andy once a week. He was to take a sabbatical from work, which had already been arranged. He agreed to everything. He signed his name — the pen wobbly in his grip — on the discharge papers, under Andy’s and Dr. Solomon’s and Harold’s.

Harold and Julia took him to Truro, where Willem was already waiting for him. Every night he slept, extravagantly, and during the day he and Willem walked slowly down the hill to the ocean. It was early October and too cold to get into the water, but they would sit on the sand and look out at the horizon line, and sometimes Willem would talk to him and sometimes he wouldn’t. He dreamed that the sea had turned into a solid block of ice, its waves frozen in mid-crest, and that Willem was at a far shore, beckoning to him, and he was making his way slowly across its wide expanse to him, his hands and face numb from the wind.

They ate dinner early, because he went to bed so early. The meals were always something simple, easy to digest, and if there was meat, one of the three of them would cut it up for him in advance so he wouldn’t have to try to wield a knife. Harold poured him a glass of milk every dinner, as if he was a child, and he drank it. He wasn’t allowed to leave the table until he had eaten at least half of what was on his plate, and he wasn’t allowed to serve himself, either. He was too tired to fight this; he did the best he could.

He was always cold, and sometimes he woke in the middle of the night, shivering despite the covers heaped on top of him, and he would lie there, watching Willem, who was sharing his room, breathing on the couch opposite him, watching clouds drift across the slice of moon he could see between the edge of the window frame and the blind, until he was able to sleep again.

Sometimes he thought about what he had done and felt that same sorrow he had felt in the hospital: the sorrow that he had failed, that he was still alive. And sometimes he thought about it and felt dread: now everyone really would treat him differently. Now he really was a freak, a bigger freak than he’d been before. Now he would have to begin anew in his attempts to convince people he was normal. He thought of the office, the one place where what he had been hadn’t mattered. But now there would always be another, competing story about him. Now he wouldn’t just be the youngest equity partner in the firm’s history (as Tremain sometimes introduced him); now he would be the partner who had tried to kill himself. They must be furious with him, he thought. He thought of his work there, and wondered who was handling it. They probably didn’t even need him to come back. Who would want to work with him again? Who would trust him again?