Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

By Monday, he knows it will become infected. At lunchtime he changes the bandage he had applied the night before, and as he eases it off, his skin tears as well, and he stuffs his pocket square into his mouth so he won’t scream out loud. But things are falling out of his arm, clots with the consistency of blood but the color of coal, and he sits on the floor of his bathroom, rocking himself back and forth, his stomach heaving forth old food and acids, his arm heaving forth its own disease, its own excretia.

The next day the pain is worse, and he leaves work early to go see Andy. “My god,” Andy says, seeing the wound, and for once, he is silent, utterly, which terrifies him.

“Can you fix it?” he whispers, because until that point, he had never thought himself capable of hurting himself in a way that couldn’t be fixed. He has, suddenly, a vision of Andy telling him he will lose the arm altogether, and the next thing he thinks is: What will I tell Willem?

But “Yes,” Andy says. “I’ll do what I can, and then you need to go to the hospital. Lie back.” He does, and lets Andy irrigate the wound and clean and dress it, lets Andy apologize to him when he cries out.

He is there for an hour, and when he is finally able to sit — Andy has given him a shot to numb the area — the two of them are silent.

“Are you going to tell me how you got a third-degree burn in such a perfect circle?” Andy asks him at last, and he ignores Andy’s chilly sarcasm, and instead recites to him his prepared story: the plantains, the grease fire.

Then there is another silence, this one different in a way he cannot explain but does not like. And then Andy says, very quietly, “You’re lying, Jude.”

“What do you mean?” he asks, his throat suddenly dry despite the orange juice he has been drinking.

“You’re lying,” Andy repeats, still in that same quiet voice, and he slides off the examining table, the bottle of juice slipping from his grasp and shattering on the floor, and moves for the door.

“Stop,” Andy says, and he is cold, and furious. “Jude, you fucking tell me now. What did you do? ”

“I told you,” he says, “I told you.”

“No,” Andy says. “You tell me what you did, Jude. You say the words. Say them . I want to hear you say them.”

“ I told you ,” he shouts, and he feels so terrible, his brain thumping against his skull, his feet thrust full of smoldering iron ingots, his arm with its simmering cauldron burned into it. “Let me go, Andy. Let me go .”

“No,” Andy says, and he too is shouting. “Jude, you — you—” He stops, and he stops as well, and they both wait to hear what Andy will say. “You’re sick, Jude,” he says, in a low, frantic voice. “You’re crazy. This is crazy behavior. This is behavior that could and should get you locked away for years. You’re sick, you’re sick and you’re crazy and you need help.”

“Don’t you dare call me crazy,” he yells, “don’t you dare . I’m not, I’m not .”

But Andy ignores him. “Willem gets back on Friday, right?” he asks, although he knows the answer already. “You have one week from tonight to tell him, Jude. One week. And after that, I’m telling him myself.”

“You can’t legally do that, Andy,” he shouts, and everything spins before him. “I’ll sue you for so much that you won’t even—”

“Better check your recent case law, counselor ,” Andy hisses back at him. “ Rodriguez versus Mehta . Two years ago. If a patient who’s been involuntarily committed attempts serious self-injury again, the patient’s doctor has the right — no, the obligation —to inform the patient’s partner or next of kin, whether that patient has fucking given consent or not.”

He is struck silent then, reeling from pain and fear and the shock of what Andy has just told him. The two of them are still standing in the examining room, that room he has visited so many, so many times, but he can feel his legs pleating beneath him, can feel the misery overtake him, can feel his anger ebb. “Andy,” he says, and he can hear the beg in his voice, “please don’t tell him. Please don’t. If you tell him, he’ll leave me.” As he says it, he knows it is true. He doesn’t know why Willem will leave him — whether it will be because of what he has done or because he has lied about it — but he knows he is correct. Willem will leave him, even though he has done what he has done so he can keep having sex, because if he stops having sex, he knows Willem will leave him anyway.

“Not this time, Jude,” says Andy, and although he isn’t yelling any longer, his voice is grim and determined. “I’m not covering for you this time. You have one week.”

“It’s not his business, though,” he says, desperately. “It’s my own.”

“That’s the thing, though, Jude,” Andy says. “It is his business. That’s what being in a goddamned relationship is — don’t you understand that yet? Don’t you get that you just can’t do what you want? Don’t you get that when you hurt yourself, you’re hurting him as well?”

“No,” he says, shaking his head, gripping the side of the examining table with his right hand to try to remain upright. “No. I do this to myself so I won’t hurt him. I’m doing it to spare him.”

“No,” Andy says. “If you ruin this, Jude — if you keep lying to someone who loves you, who really loves you, who has only ever wanted to see you exactly as you are — then you will only have yourself to blame. It will be your fault. And it’ll be your fault not because of who you are or what’s been done to you or the diseases you have or what you think you look like, but because of how you behave, because you won’t trust Willem enough to talk to him honestly, to extend to him the same sort of generosity and faith that he has always, always extended to you. I know you think you’re sparing him, but you’re not. You’re selfish. You’re selfish and you’re stubborn and you’re proud and you’re going to ruin the best thing that has happened to you. Don’t you understand that?”

He is speechless for the second time that evening, and it is only when he begins, finally, to fall, so tired is he, that Andy reaches out and grabs him around his waist and the conversation ends.

He spends the next three nights in the hospital, at Andy’s insistence. During the day, he goes to work, and then he comes back in the evening and Andy readmits him. There are two plastic bags dangling above him, one for each arm. One, he knows, has only glucose in it. The second has something else, something that makes the pain furry and gentle and that makes sleep something inky and still, like the dark blue skies in a Japanese woodblock print of winter, all snow and a silent traveler wearing a woven-straw hat beneath.

It is Friday. He returns home. Willem will be arriving at around ten that night, and although Mrs. Zhou has already cleaned, he wants to make certain there is no evidence, that he has hidden every clue, although without context, the clues — salt, matches, olive oil, paper towels — are not clues at all, they are symbols of their life together, they are things they both reach for daily.

He still hasn’t decided what he will do. He has until the following Sunday — he has begged nine extra days from Andy, has convinced him that because of the holidays, because they are driving to Boston next Wednesday for Thanksgiving, that he needs the time — to either tell Willem, or (although he doesn’t say this) to convince Andy to change his mind. Both scenarios seem equally impossible. But he will try anyway. One of the problems with having slept so much these past few nights is that he has had very little time to think about how he can negotiate this situation. He feels he has become a spectacle to himself, with all the beings who inhabit him — the ferret-like creature; the hyenas; the voices — watching to see what he will do, so they can judge him and scoff at him and tell him he’s wrong.