Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

Rosen Pritchard had always been important to him, but after Caleb it had become essential. In his life at the firm, he was assessed only by the business he secured, by the work he did: there, he had no past, he had no deficiencies. His life there began with where he had gone to law school and what he had done there; it ended with each day’s accomplishments, with each year’s tallies of billable hours, with each new client he could attract. At Rosen Pritchard, there was no room for Brother Luke, or Caleb, or Dr. Traylor, or the monastery, or the home; they were irrelevant, they were extraneous details, they had nothing to do with the person he had created for himself. There, he wasn’t someone who cowered in the bathroom, cutting himself, but instead a series of numbers: one number to signify how much money he brought in, and another for the number of hours he billed; a third representing how many people he oversaw, a fourth for how much he rewarded them. It was something he had never been able to explain to his friends, who marveled at and pitied him for how much he worked; he could never tell them that it was at that office, surrounded by work and people he knew they found almost stultifyingly dull, that he felt at his most human, his most dignified and invulnerable.

Willem comes home twice during the course of the shoot for long weekends; but one weekend he is sick with a stomach flu, and the next Willem is sick with bronchitis. But both times — as he feels every time he hears Willem walk into the apartment, calling his name — he must remind himself that this is his life, and that in this life, Willem is coming home to him. In those moments, he feels that his dislike of sex is miserly, that he must be misremembering how bad it is, and that even if he isn’t, he has simply to try harder, that he has to pity himself less. Toughen up , he scolds himself as he kisses Willem goodbye at the end of these weekends. Don’t you dare ruin this. Don’t you dare complain about what you don’t even deserve .

And then one night, less than a month before Willem is due to come home for good, he wakes and believes he is in the trailer of a massive semitruck, and that the bed beneath him is a dirtied blue quilt folded in half, and that his every bone is being jounced as the truck trundles its way down the highway. Oh no, he thinks, oh no, and he gets up and hurries to the piano and begins playing as many Bach partitas as he can remember, out of sequence and too loud and too fast. He is reminded of a fable Brother Luke had once told him during one of their piano lessons of an old woman in a house who played her lute faster and faster so the imps outside her door would dance themselves into a sludge. Brother Luke had told him this story to illustrate a point — he needed to pick up his tempo — but he had always liked the image, and sometimes, when he feels a memory encroaching, just a single one, easy to control and dismiss, he sings or plays until it goes away, the music a shield between him and it.

He was in his first year of law school when his life began appearing to him as memories. He would be doing something everyday — cooking dinner, filing books at the library, frosting a cake at Batter, looking up an article for Harold — and suddenly, a scene would appear before him, a dumb show meant only for him. In those years, the memories were tableaux, not narratives, and he would see a single one repeatedly for days: a diorama of Brother Luke on top of him, or one of the counselors from the home, who used to grab him as he walked by, or a client emptying his change from his pants pockets and setting it in the dish on the nightstand that Brother Luke had placed there for that purpose. And sometimes the memories were briefer and vaguer still: a client’s blue sock patterned with horse heads that he had worn even in bed; the first meal in Philadelphia that Dr. Traylor had ever given him (a burger; a paper sleeve of French fries); a peachy woolen pillow in his room at Dr. Traylor’s house that he could never look at without thinking of torn flesh. When these memories announced themselves, he would find himself disoriented: it always took him a moment to remember that these scenes were not only from his life, but his life itself. In those days, he would let them interrupt him, and there would be times in which he would come out of his spell and would find his hand still wrapped around the plastic cone of frosting poised over the cookie before him, or still holding the book half on, half off the shelf. It was then that he began comprehending how much of his life he had learned to simply erase, even days after it had happened, and also that somehow, somewhere, he had lost that ability. He knew it was the price of enjoying life, that if he was to be alert to the things he now found pleasure in, he would have to accept its cost as well. Because as assaultive as his memories were, his life coming back to him in pieces, he knew he would endure them if it meant he could also have friends, if he kept being granted the ability to take comfort in others.

He thought of it as a slight parting of worlds, in which something buried wisped up from the loamy, turned earth and hovered before him, waiting for him to recognize it and claim it as his own. Their very reappearance was defiant: Here we are , they seemed to say to him. Did you really think we would let you abandon us? Did you really think we wouldn’t come back? Eventually, he was also made to recognize how much he had edited — edited and reconfigured, refashioned into something easier to accept — from even the past few years: the film he had seen his junior year of two detectives coming to tell a student at college that the man who had hurt him had died in prison hadn’t been a film at all — it had been his life, and he had been the student, and he had stood there in the Quad outside of Hood, and the two detectives were the people who had found him and arrested Dr. Traylor in the field that night, and they had taken him to the hospital and had made sure Dr. Traylor had gone to prison, and they had come to find him to tell him in person that he had nothing to fear again. “Pretty fancy stuff,” one of the detectives had said, looking around him at the beautiful campus, at its old brick buildings where you could go and be absolutely safe. “We’re proud of you, Jude.” But he had fuzzed this memory, he had changed it to the detective simply saying “We’re proud of you,” and had left off his name, just as he had left out the panic he now remembered he had vividly felt despite their news, the dread that later someone would ask him who those people were that he had been talking to, the almost nauseous wrongness of his past life intruding so physically on his present.

Eventually he had learned how to manage the memories. He couldn’t stop them — after they had begun, they had never ended — but he had grown more adept at anticipating their arrival. He became able to diagnose it, that moment or day in which he could tell that something was going to visit him, and he would have to figure out how it wanted to be addressed: Did it want confrontation, or soothing, or simply attention? He would determine what sort of hospitality it wanted, and then he would determine how to make it leave, to retreat back to that other place.

A small memory he could contain, but as the days go by and he waits for Willem, he recognizes that this is a long eel of a memory, slippery and uncatchable, and it whipsaws its way through him, its tail slapping against his organs so that he feels the memory as something alive and wounding, feels its meaty, powerful smack against his intestines, his heart, his lungs. Sometimes they were like this, and these were the hardest to lasso and corral, and with every day it seems to grow inside him, until he feels himself stuffed not with blood and muscle and water and bone but with the memory itself, expanding balloon-like to inflate his very fingertips. After Caleb, he had realized that there were some memories he was simply not going to be able to control, and so his only recourse was to wait until they had tired themselves out, until they swam back into the dark of his subconscious and left him alone again.