Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

“Well,” he began, and was aware of all of their perked silences, even Willem’s. “It’s not very interesting.” He kept his eyes closed, both because it made it easier to tell the story when he didn’t have to look at them, and also because he simply didn’t think he could stand it at the moment. “It was a car injury. I was fifteen. It was the year before I came here.”

“Oh,” said JB. There was a pause; he could feel something in the room deflate, could feel how his revelation had shifted the others back into a sort of somber sobriety. “I’m sorry, bro. That sucks.”

“You could walk before?” asked Malcolm, as if he could not walk now. And this made him sad and embarrassed: what he considered walking, they apparently did not.

“Yes,” he said, and then, because it was true, even if not the way they’d interpret it, he added, “I used to run cross-country.”

“Oh, wow,” said Malcolm. JB made a sympathetic grunting noise.

Only Willem, he noticed, said nothing. But he didn’t dare open his eyes to look at his expression.

Eventually the word got out, as he knew it would. (Perhaps people really did wonder about his legs. Tricia Park later came up to him and told him she’d always assumed he had cerebral palsy. What was he supposed to say to that ?) Somehow, though, over the tellings and retellings, the explanation was changed to a car accident, and then to a drunken driving accident.

“The easiest explanations are often the right ones,” his math professor, Dr. Li, always said, and maybe the same principle applied here. Except he knew it didn’t. Math was one thing. Nothing else was that reductive.

But the odd thing was this: by his story morphing into one about a car accident, he was being given an opportunity for reinvention; all he had to do was claim it. But he never could. He could never call it an accident, because it wasn’t. And so was it pride or stupidity to not take the escape route he’d been offered? He didn’t know.

And then he noticed something else. He was in the middle of another episode — a highly humiliating one, it had taken place just as he was coming off of his shift at the library, and Willem had just happened to be there a few minutes early, about to start his own shift — when he heard the librarian, a kind, well-read woman whom he liked, ask why he had these. They had moved him, Mrs. Eakeley and Willem, to the break room in the back, and he could smell the burned-sugar tang of old coffee, a scent he despised anyway, so sharp and assaultive that he almost vomited.

“A car injury,” he heard Willem’s reply, as from across a great black lake.

But it wasn’t until that night that he registered what Willem had said, and the word he had used: injury, not accident. Was it deliberate, he wondered? What did Willem know? He was so addled that he might have actually asked him, had Willem been around, but he wasn’t — he was at his girlfriend’s.

No one was there, he realized. The room was his. He felt the creature inside him — which he pictured as slight and raggedy and lemurlike, quick-reflexed and ready to sprint, its dark wet eyes forever scanning the landscape for future dangers — relax and sag to the ground. It was at these moments that he found college most enjoyable: he was in a warm room, and the next day he would have three meals and eat as much as he wanted, and in between he would go to classes, and no one would try to hurt him or make him do anything he didn’t want to do. Somewhere nearby were his roommates — his friends — and he had survived another day without divulging any of his secrets, and placed another day between the person he once was and the person he was now. It seemed, always, an accomplishment worthy of sleep, and so he did, closing his eyes and readying himself for another day in the world.

It had been Ana, his first and only social worker, and the first person who had never betrayed him, who had talked to him seriously about college — the college he ended up attending — and who was convinced that he would get in. She hadn’t been the first person to suggest this, but she had been the most insistent.

“I don’t see why not,” she said. It was a favorite phrase of hers. The two of them were sitting on Ana’s porch, in Ana’s backyard, eating banana bread that Ana’s girlfriend had made. Ana didn’t care for nature (too buggy, too squirmy , she always said), but when he made the suggestion that they go outdoors — tentatively, because at the time he was still unsure where the boundaries of her tolerance for him lay — she’d slapped the edges of her armchair and heaved herself up. “I don’t see why not. Leslie!” she called into the kitchen, where Leslie was making lemonade. “You can bring it outside!”

Hers was the first face he saw when he had at last opened his eyes in the hospital. For a long moment, he couldn’t remember where he was, or who he was, or what had happened, and then, suddenly, her face was above his, looking at him. “Well, well,” she said. “He awakes.”

She was always there, it seemed, no matter what time he woke. Sometimes it was day, and he heard the sounds of the hospital — the mouse squeak of the nurses’ shoes, and the clatter of a cart, and the drone of the intercom announcements — in the hazy, half-formed moments he had before shifting into full consciousness. But sometimes it was night, when everything was silent around him, and it took him longer to figure out where he was, and why he was there, although it came back to him, it always did, and unlike some realizations, it never grew easier or fuzzier with each remembrance. And sometimes it was neither day nor night but somewhere in between, and there would be something strange and dusty about the light that made him imagine for a moment that there might after all be such a thing as heaven, and that he might after all have made it there. And then he would hear Ana’s voice, and remember again why he was there, and want to close his eyes all over again.

They talked of nothing in those moments. She would ask him if he was hungry, and no matter his answer, she would have a sandwich for him to eat. She would ask him if he was in pain, and if he was, how intense it was. It was in her presence that he’d had the first of his episodes, and the pain had been so awful — unbearable, almost, as if someone had reached in and grabbed his spine like a snake and was trying to loose it from its bundles of nerves by shaking it — that later, when the surgeon told him that an injury like his was an “insult” to the body, and one the body would never recover from completely, he had understood what the word meant and realized how correct and well-chosen it was.

“You mean he’s going to have these all his life?” Ana had asked, and he had been grateful for her outrage, especially because he was too tired and frightened to summon forth any of his own.

“I wish I could say no,” said the surgeon. And then, to him, “But they may not be this severe in the future. You’re young now. The spine has wonderful reparative qualities.”

“Jude,” she’d said to him when the next one came, two days after the first. He could hear her voice, but as if from far away, and then, suddenly, awfully close, filling his mind like explosions. “Hold on to my hand,” she’d said, and again, her voice swelled and receded, but she seized his hand and he held it so tightly he could feel her index finger slide oddly over her ring finger, could almost feel every small bone in her palm reposition themselves in his grip, which had the effect of making her seem like something delicate and intricate, although there was nothing delicate about her in either appearance or manner. “Count,” she commanded him the third time it happened, and he did, counting up to a hundred again and again, parsing the pain into negotiable increments. In those days, before he learned it was better to be still, he would flop on his bed like a fish on a boat deck, his free hand scrabbling for a halyard line to cling to for safety, the hospital mattress unyielding and uncaring, searching for a position in which the discomfort might lessen. He tried to be quiet, but he could hear himself making strange animal noises, so that at times a forest appeared beneath his eyelids, populated with screech owls and deer and bears, and he would imagine he was one of them, and that the sounds he was making were normal, part of the woods’ unceasing soundtrack.