Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

He called JB, listened to him complain about Fredrik; he cut some melon for dessert. By this time they really were late, and he called Willem’s phone but it only rang, emptily. Then he was irritated: Where could they have been?

And then it was later still. He was pacing. He called Malcolm’s phone, Sophie’s phone: nothing. He called Willem again. He called JB: Had they called him? Had he heard from them? But JB hadn’t. “Don’t worry, Judy,” he said. “I’m sure they just went for ice cream or something. Or maybe they all ran off together.”

“Ha,” he said, but he knew something was wrong. “Okay. I’ll call you later, JB.”

And just as he had hung up with JB, the doorbell chimed, and he stopped, terrified, because no one ever rang their doorbell. The house was difficult to find; you had to really look for it, and then you had to walk up from the main road — a long, long walk — if no one buzzed you in, and he hadn’t heard the front gate buzzer sound. Oh god, he thought. Oh, no. No. But then it rang again, and he found himself moving toward the door, and as he opened it, he registered not so much the policemen’s expressions but that they were removing their caps, and then he knew.

He lost himself after that. He was conscious only in flashes, and the people’s faces he saw — Harold’s, JB’s, Richard’s, Andy’s, Julia’s — were the same faces he remembered from when he had tried to kill himself: the same people, the same tears. They had cried then, and they cried now, and at moments he was bewildered; he thought that the past decade — his years with Willem, the loss of his legs — might have been a dream after all, that he might still be in the psychiatric ward. He remembers learning things during those days, but he doesn’t remember how he learned them, because he doesn’t remember having any conversations. But he must have. He learned that he had identified Willem’s body, but that they hadn’t let him see Willem’s face — he had been tossed from the car and had landed, headfirst, against an elm thirty feet across the road and his face had been destroyed, its every bone broken. So he had identified him from a birthmark on his left calf, from a mole on his right shoulder. He learned that Sophie’s body had been crushed—“obliterated” was the word he remembered someone saying — and that Malcolm had been declared brain dead and had lived on a ventilator for four days until his parents had had his organs donated. He learned that they had all been wearing their seat belts; that the rental car — that stupid, fucking rental car — had had defective air bags; that the driver of the truck, a beer company truck, had been wildly drunk and had run through a red light.

Most of the time, he was drugged. He was drugged when he went to Sophie’s service, which he couldn’t remember at all, not one detail; he was drugged when he went to Malcolm’s. From Malcolm’s, he remembers Mr. Irvine grabbing him and shaking him and then hugging him so tightly he was smothered, hugging him and sobbing against him, until someone — Harold, presumably — said something and he was released.

He knew there had been some sort of service for Willem, something small; he knew Willem had been cremated. But he doesn’t remember anything from it. He doesn’t know who organized it. He doesn’t even know if he attended it, and he is too frightened to ask. He remembers Harold telling him at one point that it was okay that he wasn’t giving a eulogy, that he could have a memorial for Willem later, whenever he was ready. He remembers nodding, remembers thinking: But I won’t ever be ready.

At some point he went back to work: the end of September, he thought. By this point, he knew what had happened. He did. But he was trying not to, and back then, it was still easy. He didn’t read the papers; he didn’t watch the news. Two weeks after Willem died, he and Harold had been walking down the street and they had passed a newspaper kiosk and there, before him, was a magazine with Willem’s face on it, and two dates, and he realized that the first date was the year Willem had been born, and the second was the year he had died. He had stood there, staring, and Harold had taken his arm. “Come on, Jude,” he’d said, gently. “Don’t look. Come with me,” and he had followed, obediently.

Before he returned to the office, he had instructed Sanjay: “I don’t want anyone offering me their condolences. I don’t want anyone mentioning it. I don’t want anyone saying his name, ever.”

“Okay, Jude,” Sanjay had said, quietly, looking scared. “I understand.”

And they had obeyed him. No one said they were sorry. No one said Willem’s name. No one ever says Willem’s name. And now he wishes they would say it. He cannot say it himself. But he wishes someone would. Sometimes, on the street, he hears someone say something that sounds like his name—“William!”: a mother, calling to her son — and he turns, greedily, in the direction of her voice.

In those first months, there were practicalities, which gave him something to do, which gave his days anger, which in turn gave them shape. He sued the car manufacturer, the seat-belt manufacturer, the air-bag manufacturer, the rental-car company. He sued the truck driver, the company the driver worked for. The driver, he heard through the driver’s lawyer, had a chronically ill child; a lawsuit would ruin the family. But he didn’t care. Once he would have; not now. He felt raw and merciless. Let him be destroyed, he thought. Let him be ruined. Let him feel what I feel. Let him lose everything, the only things, that matter. He wanted to siphon every dollar from all of them, all the companies, all the people working for them. He wanted to leave them hopeless. He wanted to leave them empty. He wanted them to live in squalor. He wanted them to feel lost in their own lives.

They were being sued, each of them, for everything Willem would have earned had he been allowed to live a normal lifespan, and it was a ridiculous number, an astonishing number, and he couldn’t look at it without despair: not because of the figure itself but because of the years that figure represented.

They would settle with him, said his lawyer, a notoriously aggressive and venal torts expert named Todd with whom he had been on the law review, and the settlements would be generous.

Generous; not generous. He didn’t care. He only cared if it made them suffer. “Obliterate them,” he commanded Todd, his voice croaky with hatred, and Todd had looked startled.

“I will, Jude,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

He didn’t need the money, of course. He had his own. And except for monetary gifts to his assistant and his godson, and sums that he wanted distributed to various charities — the same charities Willem gave to every year, along with an additional one: a foundation that helped exploited children — everything that Willem had he had left to him: it was a photo negative of his own will. Earlier that year, he and Willem had set up two scholarships at their college for Harold’s and Julia’s seventy-fifth birthdays: one at the law school under Harold’s name; one at the medical school under Julia’s. They had funded them together, and Willem had left enough in a trust so that they always would be. He disbursed the rest of Willem’s bequests: he signed the checks to the charities and foundations and museums and organizations that Willem had designated his beneficiaries. He gave to Willem’s friends — Harold and Julia; Richard; JB; Roman; Cressy; Susannah; Miguel; Kit; Emil; Andy; but not Malcolm, not anymore — the items (books, pictures, mementoes from films and plays, pieces of art) that he had left them. There were no surprises in Willem’s will, although sometimes he wished there would have been — how grateful he would have been for a secret child whom he’d get to meet and would have Willem’s smile; how scared and yet how excited he would have been for a secret letter containing a long-held confession. How thankful he would have been for an excuse to hate Willem, to resent him, for a mystery to solve that might occupy years of his life. But there was nothing. Willem’s life was over. He was as clean in death as he had been in life.