Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

He is still for a moment, staring at the page until the words rearrange themselves into an abstraction of gray before his eyes, and then he hobbles as fast as he can to the bathroom near the kitchen, where he vomits up everything he’s just eaten, gagging over the toilet until he’s coughing up long strands of saliva. He lowers the toilet seat and sits, resting his face in his hands, until he feels better. He wishes, desperately, for his razors, but he has always been careful not to cut himself during the day, partly because it feels wrong and partly because he knows he has to impose limits upon himself, however artificial, or he’d be cutting himself all day. Lately, he has been trying very hard not to cut himself at all. But tonight, he thinks, he will grant himself an exception. It is seven a.m. In around fifteen hours, he’ll be home again. All he has to do is make it through the day.

He puts his plate in the dishwasher and walks quietly through the bedroom and into the bathroom, where he showers and shaves and then gets dressed in the closet, first making sure that the door between the closet and the bedroom is completely closed. At this point, he has added a new step to his morning routine: now, if he were to do what he has been for the past month, he would open the door and walk over to the bed, where he’d perch on its left side and put his hand on Willem’s arm, and Willem would open his eyes and smile at him.

“I’m off,” he’d say, smiling back, and Willem would shake his head. “Don’t go,” Willem would say, and he’d say, “I have to,” and Willem would say, “Five minutes,” and he’d say, “Five.” And then Willem would lift his end of the blanket and he’d crawl beneath it, with Willem pressed against his back, and he would close his eyes and wait for Willem to wrap his arms around him and wish he could stay forever. And then, ten or fifteen minutes later, he would at last, reluctantly, get up, and kiss Willem somewhere near, but not on, his mouth — he is still having trouble with this, even four months later — and leave for the day.

This morning, however, he skips this step. He instead pauses at the dining-room table to write Willem a note explaining that he had to leave early and didn’t want to wake him, and then, as he’s walking to the door, he comes back and grabs the Times off the table and takes it with him. He knows how irrational it is, but he doesn’t want Willem to see Caleb’s name, or picture, or any evidence of him. Willem still doesn’t know about what Caleb did to him, and he doesn’t want him to. He doesn’t even want him to be aware of Caleb’s very existence — or, he realizes, his once-existence, for Caleb no longer exists. Beneath his arm, the paper feels almost alive with heat, Caleb’s name a dark knot of poison cradled inside its pages.

He decides to drive to work so he’ll be able to be alone for a little while, but before he leaves the garage, he takes out the paper and reads the article one more time before folding it up again and shoving it into his briefcase. And then suddenly, he is crying, frantic, breathy sobs, the kind that come from his diaphragm, and as he leans his head on the steering wheel, trying to regain control, he is finally able to admit to himself how plainly, profoundly relieved he is, and how frightened he has been for the past three years, and how humiliated and ashamed he is still. He retrieves the paper, hating himself, and reads the obituary again, stopping at “and by his partner, Nicholas Lane, also a fashion executive.” He wonders: Did Caleb do to Nicholas Lane what he did to him, or is Nicholas — as he must be — someone undeserving of such treatment? He hopes that Nicholas never experienced what he had, but he’s also certain he hasn’t, and the knowledge of that makes him cry harder. That had been one of Harold’s arguments when he was trying to get him to report the attack; that Caleb was dangerous, and that by reporting him, by having him arrested, he would be protecting other people from him. But he had known that wasn’t true: Caleb wouldn’t do to other people what he did to him. He hadn’t hit and hated him because he hit and hated other people; he had hit and hated him because of who he was, not because of who Caleb was.

Finally, he’s able to compose himself, and he wipes his eyes and blows his nose. The crying: another leftover from his time with Caleb. For years and years he was able to control it, and now — ever since that night — it seems he is always crying, or on the verge of it, or actively trying to stop himself from doing it. It’s as if all his progress from the past few decades has been erased, and he is again that boy in Brother Luke’s care, so teary and helpless and vulnerable.

He’s about to start the car when his hands begin shaking. Now he knows he can do nothing but wait, and he folds them in his lap and tries to make his breaths deep and regular, which sometimes helps. By the time his phone rings a few minutes later, they’ve slowed somewhat, and he hopes he sounds normal as he answers. “Hi, Harold,” he says.

“Jude,” says Harold. His voice is flattened, somehow. “Have you read the Times today?”

Immediately, the shaking intensifies. “Yes,” he says.

“Pancreatic cancer is a terrible way to go,” says Harold. He sounds grimly satisfied. “Good. I’m glad.” There’s a pause. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he says, “yes, I’m fine.”

“The connection keeps cutting out,” says Harold, but he knows it’s not: it’s because he’s shaking so badly that he can’t hold the phone steady.

“Sorry,” he says. “I’m in the garage. Look, Harold, I’d better get up to work. Thanks for calling.”

“Okay.” Harold sighs. “You’ll call me if you want to talk, right?”

“Yes,” he says. “Thanks.”

It’s a busy day, for which he’s grateful, and he tries to give himself no time to think about anything but work. Late in the morning, he gets a text from Andy— Assume you’ve seen that the asshole is dead. Pancreatic cancer = major suffering. You okay? — and writes back to assure him he’s fine, and over lunch he reads the obituary one last time before stuffing the entire paper into the shredder and turning back to his computer.

In the afternoon he gets a text from Willem saying that the director he’s meeting with about his next project has pushed back their dinner, so he doesn’t think he’ll be home before eleven, and he is relieved. At nine, he tells his associates he’s leaving early, and then drives home and goes directly to the bathroom, shucking his jacket and rolling up his sleeves and unstrapping his watch as he goes; he’s almost hyperventilating with desire by the time he makes the first cut. It has been nearly two months since he’s made more than two cuts in a single sitting, but now he abandons his self-discipline and cuts and cuts and cuts, until finally his breathing slows and he feels the old, comforting emptiness settle inside him. After he’s done, he cleans up and washes his face and goes to the kitchen, where he reheats some soup he’d made the weekend before and has his first real meal of the day, and then brushes his teeth and collapses into bed. He is weak from the cutting, but he knows if he rests for a few minutes, he’ll be fine. The goal is to be normal by the time Willem comes home, to not give him anything to worry about, to not do anything else to upset this impossible and delirious dream he’s been living in for the past eighteen weeks.

When Willem had told him of his feelings, he had been so discomfited, so disbelieving, that it was only the fact that it was Willem saying it that convinced him it wasn’t some terrible joke: his faith in Willem was more powerful than the absurdity of what Willem was suggesting.