Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

He thought he was doing well, or well enough anyway. One day Harold called and asked what he wanted to do for Thanksgiving, and for a moment he couldn’t understand what Harold was talking about, what the very word — Thanksgiving — meant. “I don’t know,” he said.

“It’s next week,” Harold said, in the new quiet voice everyone now used around him. “Do you want to come here, or we can come over, or we can go somewhere else?”

“I don’t think I can,” he said. “I have too much work, Harold.”

But Harold had insisted. “Anywhere, Jude,” he’d said. “With whomever you want. Or no one. But we need to see you.”

“You’re not going to have a good time with me,” he finally said.

“We won’t have a good time without you,” Harold said. “Or any kind of time. Please, Jude. Anywhere.”

So they went to London. They stayed in the flat. He was relieved to be out of the country, where there would have been scenes of families on the television, and his colleagues happily grousing about their children and wives and husbands and in-laws. In London, the day was just another day. They took walks, the three of them. Harold cooked ambitious, disastrous meals, which he ate. He slept and slept. Then they went home.

And then one Sunday in December he had woken and had known: Willem was gone. He was gone from him forever. He was never coming back. He would never see him again. He would never hear Willem’s voice again, he would never smell him again, he would never feel Willem’s arms around him. He would never again be able to unburden himself of one of his memories, sobbing with shame as he did, would never again jerk awake from one of his dreams, blind with terror, to feel Willem’s hand on his face, to hear Willem’s voice above him: “You’re safe, Judy, you’re safe. It’s over; it’s over; it’s over.” And then he had cried, really cried, cried for the first time since the accident. He had cried for Willem, for how frightened he must have been, for how he must have suffered, for his poor short life. But mostly he had cried for himself. How was he going to keep living without Willem? His entire life — his life after Brother Luke, his life after Dr. Traylor, his life after the monastery and the motel rooms and the home and the trucks, which was the only part of his life that counted — had had Willem in it. There had not been a day since he was sixteen and met Willem in their room at Hood Hall in which he had not communicated with Willem in some way. Even when they were fighting, they spoke. “Jude,” Harold had said, “it will get better. I swear. I swear. It won’t seem like it now, but it will.” They all said this: Richard and JB and Andy; the people who wrote him cards. Kit. Emil. All they told him was that it would get better. But although he knew enough to never say so aloud, privately he thought: It won’t. Harold had had Jacob for five years. He had had Willem for thirty-four. There was no comparison. Willem had been the first person who loved him, the first person who had seen him not as an object to be used or pitied but as something else, as a friend; he had been the second person who had always, always been kind to him. If he hadn’t had Willem, he wouldn’t have had any of them — he would never have been able to trust Harold if he hadn’t trusted Willem first. He was unable to conceive of life without him, because Willem had so defined what his life was and could be.

The next day he did what he never did: he called Sanjay and told him he wasn’t coming in for the next two days. And then he had lain in bed and cried, screaming into the pillows until he lost his voice completely.

But from those two days he had found another solution. Now he stays very late at work, so late that he has seen the sun rise from his office. He does this every weekday, and on Saturdays as well. But on Sundays he sleeps as late as he can, and when he wakes, he takes a pill, one that not only makes him fall asleep again but bludgeons into obsolescence all glimmers of wakefulness. He sleeps until the pill wears off, and then he takes a shower and gets back into bed and takes a different pill, one that makes sleep shallow and glassy, and sleeps until Monday morning. By Monday, he has not eaten in twenty-four hours, sometimes more, and he is trembly and thoughtless. He swims, he goes to work. If he is lucky, he has spent Sunday dreaming of Willem, for at least a little while. He has bought a long, fat pillow, as long as a man is tall, one meant to be pressed against by pregnant women or by people with back problems, and he drapes one of Willem’s shirts over it and holds it as he sleeps, even though in life, it was Willem who held him. He hates himself for this, but he cannot stop.

He is aware, dimly, that his friends are watching him, that they are worried about him. At some point it had emerged that one of the reasons he remembers so little from the days after the accident was because he had been in the hospital, on a suicide watch. Now he stumbles through his days and wonders why he isn’t, in fact, killing himself. This is, after all, the time to do it. No one would blame him. And yet he doesn’t.

At least no one tells him that he should move on. He doesn’t want to move on, he doesn’t want to move into something else: he wants to remain exactly at this stage, forever. At least no one tells him he’s in denial. Denial is what sustains him, and he is dreading the day when his delusions will lose their power to convince him. For the first time in decades, he isn’t cutting himself at all. If he doesn’t cut himself, he remains numb, and he needs to remain numb; he needs the world to not come too close to him. He has finally managed to achieve what Willem had always hoped for him; all it took was Willem being taken from him.

In January he had a dream that he and Willem were in the house upstate making dinner and talking: something they’d done hundreds of times. But in the dream, although he could hear his own voice, he couldn’t hear Willem’s — he could see his mouth moving, but he couldn’t hear anything he was saying. He had woken, then, and had thrown himself into his wheelchair and moved as quickly as he could into his study, where he scrolled through all of his old e-mails, searching and searching until he found a few voice messages from Willem that he had forgotten to delete. The messages were brief, and unrevealing, but he played them over and over, weeping, bent double with grief, the messages’ very banality—“Hey. Judy. I’m going to the farmers’ market to pick up those ramps. But do you want anything else? Let me know”—something precious, because it was proof of their life together.

“Willem,” he said aloud to the apartment, because sometimes, when it was very bad, he spoke to him. “Come back to me. Come back.”

He feels no sense of survivor’s guilt but rather survivor’s incomprehension: he had always, always known he would predecease Willem. They all knew it. Willem, Andy, Harold, JB, Malcolm, Julia, Richard: he would die before all of them. The only question was how he would die — it would be by his own hand, or it would be by infection. But none of them had ever thought that Willem, of all people, would die before he did. There had been no plans made for that, no contingencies. Had he known this was a possibility, had it been less absurd a concept, he would have stockpiled. He would have made recordings of Willem’s voice talking to him and kept them. He would have taken more pictures. He would have tried to distill Willem’s very body chemistry. He would have taken him, just-woken, to the perfumer in Florence. “Here,” he would’ve said. “This. This scent. I want you to bottle this.” Jane had once told him that as a girl she had been terrified her father would die, and she had secretly made digital copies of her father’s dictation (he had been a doctor as well) and stored them on flash drives. And when her father finally did die, four years ago, she had rediscovered them, and had sat in a room playing them, listening to her father dictating orders in his calm, patient voice. How he envied Jane this; how he wished he had thought to do the same.