Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

He slept again; woke again. By evening, he was very tired, and some of the pain had returned, and when Dr. Traylor held open the door for him, it took him a long time to mount the stairs. At dinner, he didn’t say anything, and neither did Dr. Traylor, but when he offered to help Dr. Traylor with the dishes or the cooking, Dr. Traylor had looked at him. “You’re sick,” he said.

“I’m better,” he said. “I can help you in the kitchen if you want.”

“No, I mean — you’re sick,” Dr. Traylor said. “You’re diseased. I can’t have a diseased person touching my food,” and he had looked down, humiliated.

There was a silence. “Where are your parents?” Dr. Traylor asked, and he shook his head again. “Speak,” Dr. Traylor said, and this time he was impatient, although he still hadn’t raised his voice.

“I don’t know,” he stammered, “I never had any.”

“How did you become a prostitute?” Dr. Traylor asked. “Did you start yourself, or did someone help you do it?”

He swallowed, feeling the food in his stomach turning to paste. “Someone helped me,” he whispered.

There was a silence. “You don’t like it when I call you a prostitute,” the man said, and he managed, this time, to raise his head and look at him. “No,” he said. “I understand,” the man said. “But that is what you are, isn’t it? Although I could call you something else, if you like: a whore, maybe.” He was quiet again. “Is that better?”

“No,” he whispered again.

“So,” the man said, “a prostitute it is, then, right?” and looked at him, and finally, he nodded.

That night in the bedroom, he looked for something to cut himself with, but there was nothing sharp in the room, nothing at all; even the books had only soft bloated pages. So he pressed his fingernails into his calves as hard as he could, bent over and wincing from the effort and discomfort, and finally he was able to puncture the skin, and then work his nail back and forth in the cut to make it wider. He was only able to make three incisions in his right leg, and then he was too tired, and he fell asleep again.

The third morning he felt demonstrably better: stronger, more alert. He ate his breakfast and read his book, and then he moved the tray aside and stuck his head through the flapped cutout and tried and tried to fit his shoulders through it. But no matter what angle he tried, he was simply too large and the opening too small and at last he had to stop.

After he had rested, he poked his head through the hole again. He had a direct view of the living room to his left, and the kitchen area to his right, and he looked and looked as if for clues. The house was very tidy; he could tell from how tidy it was that Dr. Traylor lived alone. If he craned his neck, he could see, on the far left, a staircase leading to a second story, and just beyond that, the front door, but he couldn’t see how many locks it had. Mainly, though, the house was defined by its silence: there was no ticking of clocks, no sound of cars or people outside. It could have been a house zooming through space, so quiet was it. The only noise was the refrigerator, purring its intermittent whir, but when it stopped, the silence was absolute.

But as featureless as the house was, he was also fascinated by it: it was only the third house he had ever been in. The second had been the Learys’. The first house had been a client’s, a very important client, Brother Luke had told him, outside Salt Lake City, who had paid extra because he didn’t want to come to the motel room. That house had been enormous, all sandstone and glass, and Brother Luke had come with him, and had secreted himself in the bathroom — a bathroom as big as one of their motel rooms — off the bedroom where he and the client had had sex. Later, as an adult, he would fetishize houses, especially his own house, although even before he had Greene Street, or Lantern House, or the flat in London, he would treat himself every few months to a magazine about homes, about people who spent their lives making pretty places even prettier, and he would turn the pages slowly, studying every picture. His friends laughed at him for this, but he didn’t care: he dreamed of the day he’d have someplace of his own, with things that were absolutely his.

That night Dr. Traylor let him out again, and again it was the kitchen, and the meal, and the two of them eating in silence. “I feel better now,” he ventured, and then, when Dr. Traylor didn’t say anything, “if you want to do something.” He was realistic enough to know that he wasn’t going to be allowed to leave without repaying Dr. Traylor in some way; he was hopeful enough to think that he might be allowed to leave at all.

But Dr. Traylor shook his head. “You may feel better, but you’re still diseased,” he said. “The antibiotics take ten days to eliminate the infection.” He took a fish bone, so fine it was transluscent, out of his mouth, placed it on the edge of his plate. “Don’t tell me this is the first venereal disease you’ve ever had,” he said, looking up at him, and he flushed again.

That night he thought about what to do. He was almost strong enough to run, he thought. At the next dinner, he would follow Dr. Traylor, and then when his back was turned, he would run to the door and outside and look for help. There were some problems with this plan — he still didn’t have his clothes; he didn’t have any shoes — but he knew that there was something wrong with this house, that there was something wrong with Dr. Traylor, that he had to get out.

He tried to conserve his energy the next day. He was too twitchy to read, and he had to keep himself from pacing the floor. He saved that day’s sandwich and stuffed it into the pocket of the borrowed sweatpants so he would have something to eat if he had to hide for a long period. In the other pocket he shoved the plastic bag that lined the trash can in the bathroom — he thought he could tear it in half and make shoes for himself once he was safely out of Dr. Traylor’s reach. And then he waited.

But that night he wasn’t let out of the room at all. From his perch near the flap, he could see the living room lights turning on, he could smell food cooking. “Dr. Traylor?” he called. “Hello?” But there was silence except for the sound of meat frying in a pan, the evening’s news on the television. “Dr. Traylor!” he called. “Please, please!” But nothing happened, and after calling and calling, he was spent, and slumped back down the stairs.

That night he had a dream that on the upper floor of the house was a series of other bedrooms, all with low beds and round tufted rugs beneath them, and that each bed held a boy: some of the boys were older, because they had been in the house for a long time, and some were younger. None of them knew that the others existed; none of them could hear one another. He realized that he didn’t know the physical dimensions of the house, and in the dream the house became a skyscraper, filled with hundreds of rooms, of cells, each containing a different boy, each waiting for Dr. Traylor to let him out. He woke, then, gasping, and ran to the top of the stairs, but when he pushed against the flap, it didn’t move. He lifted it up and saw that the hole had been closed with a piece of gray plastic, and as hard as he pushed against it, it wouldn’t budge.

He didn’t know what to do. He tried to stay up the rest of the night, but he fell asleep, and when he woke, there was the tray with his breakfast and his lunch and two pills: one for the morning, one for evening. He pinched the pills between his fingers and considered them — if he didn’t take them, he wouldn’t get better, and Dr. Traylor wouldn’t touch him unless he was well. But if he didn’t take them, then he wouldn’t get better, and he knew from prior experience how awful he would feel, how almost unimaginably filthy he would be, as if his entire self, inside and out, had been sprayed with excrement. He began to rock himself, then. What do I do , he asked, what do I do? He thought of the fat truck driver, the one who had been kind to him. Help me , he begged him, help me .