Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

“I think you’re lying,” Andy says. “I think you’ve lost so much weight that your prostheses are sliding off of you, am I right?” But he doesn’t answer. “How much weight have you lost, Jude?” Andy asks. “When I last saw you, you were already twelve pounds down. How much is it now? Twenty? More?” There’s another silence. “What the hell are you doing?” Andy asks, lowering his voice further. “What’re you doing to yourself, Jude?

“You look like hell,” Andy continues. “You look terrible. You look sick.” He stops. “Say something,” he says. “ Say something , goddammit, Jude.”

He knows how this interaction is meant to go: Andy yells at him. He yells back at Andy. A détente, one that ultimately changes nothing, one that is a piece of pantomime, is reached: he will submit to something that isn’t a solution but that makes Andy feel better. And then something worse will happen, and the pantomime will be revealed to be just that, and he will be coerced into a treatment he doesn’t want. Harold will be called. He will be lectured and lectured and lectured and he will lie and lie and lie. The same cycle, the same circle, again and again and again, a churn as predictable as the men in the motel rooms coming in, fitting their sheets over the bed, having sex with him, leaving. And then the next one, and the next one. And the next day: the same. His life is a series of dreary patterns: sex, cutting, this, that. Visits to Andy, visits to the hospital. Not this time, he thinks. This is when he does something different; this is when he escapes.

“You’re right, Andy,” he says, in as calm and unemotive a voice as he can summon, the voice he uses in the courtroom. “I’ve lost weight. And I’m sorry I haven’t come in earlier. I didn’t because I knew you’d get upset. But I’ve had a really bad intestinal flu, one I just can’t shake, but it’s ended. I’m eating, I promise. I know I look terrible. But I promise I’m working on it.” Ironically, he has been eating more in the past two weeks; he needs to get through the trial. He doesn’t want to faint while he’s in court.

And after that, what can Andy say? He is suspicious, still. But there is nothing for him to do. “If you don’t come see me next week, I’m coming back,” Andy tells him before his secretary sees him out.

“Fine,” he says, still pleasantly. “The Tuesday after next. The trial’ll be over by then.”

After Andy leaves, he feels momentarily triumphant, as if he is a hero in a fairy tale and has just vanquished a dangerous enemy. But of course Andy isn’t his enemy, and he is being ridiculous, and his sense of victory is followed by despair. He feels, as he increasingly does, that his life is something that has happened to him, rather than something he has had any role in creating. He has never been able to imagine what his life might be; even as a child, even as he dreamed of other places, of other lives, he wasn’t able to visualize what those other places and lives would be; he had believed everything he had been taught about who he was and what he would become. But his friends, Ana, Lucien, Harold and Julia: They had imagined his life for him. They had seen him as something different than he had ever seen himself as; they had allowed him to believe in possibilities that he would never have conceived. He saw his life as the axiom of equality, but they saw it as another riddle, one with no name —Jude = x —and they had filled in the x in ways Brother Luke, the counselors at the home, Dr. Traylor had never written for him or encouraged him to write for himself. He wishes he could believe their proofs the way they do; he wishes they had shown him how they had arrived at their solutions. If he knew how they had solved the proof, he thinks, he would know why to keep living. All he needs is one answer. All he needs is to be convinced once. The proof needn’t be elegant; it need only be explicable.

The trial arrives. He does well. At home that Friday, he wheels himself into the bedroom, into bed. He spends the entire weekend in a sleep that is unfamiliar and eerie, less a sleep than a glide, weightlessly moving between the realms of memory and fantasy, unconsciousness and wakefulness, anxiety and hopefulness. This is not the world of dreams, he thinks, but someplace else, and although he is aware at moments of waking — he sees the chandelier above him, the sheets around him, the sofa with its wood-fern print across from him — he is unable to distinguish when things have happened in his visions from when they have actually happened. He sees himself lifting a blade to his arm and slicing it down through his flesh, but what springs from the slit are coils of metal and stuffing and horsehair, and he realizes that he has undergone a mutation, that he is no longer even human, and he feels relief: he won’t have to break his promise to Harold after all; he has been enchanted; his culpability has vanished with his humanity.

Is this real? the voice asks him, tiny and hopeful. Are we inanimate now?

But he can’t answer himself.

Again and again he sees Brother Luke, Dr. Traylor. As he has gotten weaker, as he has drifted from himself, he sees them more and more frequently, and although Willem and Malcolm have dimmed for him, Brother Luke and Dr. Traylor have not. He feels his past is a cancer, one he should have treated long ago but instead ignored. And now Brother Luke and Dr. Traylor have metastasized, now they are too large and too overwhelming for him to eliminate. Now when they appear, they are wordless: they stand before him, they sit, side by side, on the sofa in his bedroom, staring at him, and this is worse than if they spoke, because he knows they are trying to decide what to do with him, and he knows that whatever they decide will be worse than he can imagine, worse than what had happened before. At one point he sees them whispering to each other, and he knows they are talking about him. “Stop,” he yells at them, “stop, stop,” but they ignore him, and when he tries to get up to make them leave, he is unable to do so. “Willem,” he hears himself call, “protect me, help me; make them leave, make them go away.” But Willem doesn’t come, and he realizes he is alone and becomes afraid, concealing himself under the blanket and remaining as still as he can, certain that time has doubled back upon itself and he will be made to relive his life in sequence. It’ll get better eventually , he promises himself. Remember, good years followed the bad . But he can’t do it again; he can’t live once more through those fifteen years, those fifteen years whose half-life have been so long and so resonant, that have determined everything he has become and done.

By the time he finally, fully wakes on Monday morning, he knows he has crossed some sort of threshold. He knows he is close, that he is moving from one world to another. He blacks out twice while simply trying to get into his wheelchair. He faints on his way to the bathroom. And yet somehow he remains uninjured; somehow he is still alive. He gets dressed, the suit and shirts he’d had recut for him a month ago already loose, and slides his stumps into the prostheses, and goes downstairs to meet Mr. Ahmed.

At work, everything is the same. It is the new year; people are returning from their vacations. During the management committee meeting, he jabs his fingers into his thigh to keep himself alert. He feels his grip loosen around the branch.

Sanjay leaves early that evening; he leaves early, too. Today is Harold and Julia’s move-in day, and he has promised to go uptown to visit them. He hasn’t seen them in more than a month, and although he feels himself no longer able to gauge what he looks like, he has dressed in extra layers today — an undershirt, his shirt, a sweater, a cardigan, his suit jacket, his coat — so that he’ll appear a little bulkier. At Harold’s, he is waved in by the doorman, and up he goes, trying not to blink because blinking makes the dizziness worse. Outside their door, he stops and puts his head in his hands until he feels strong enough, and then he turns the knob and rolls inside and stares.