Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

“I’ll sue you,” he’d said, absurdly, and Andy had yelled back at him, “Go right ahead! Do you know how fucked up this is, Jude? Do you have any idea what kind of position you’re putting me in?”

“Don’t worry,” he’d said, sarcastically, “I don’t have any family. No one’s going to sue you for wrongful death.”

Andy had stepped back, then, as if he had tried to hit him. “How dare you,” he’d said, slowly. “You know that’s not what I mean.”

And of course he did. But “Whatever,” he said. “I’m leaving.” And he slid off the table (fortunately, he hadn’t changed out of his clothes; Andy had started lecturing him before he’d had a chance) and tried to leave the room, although leaving the room at his pace was hardly dramatic, and Andy scooted over to stand in the doorway.

“Jude,” he said, in one of his sudden mood changes, “I know you don’t want to go. But this is getting scary.” He took a breath. “Have you ever even talked to anyone about what happened when you were a kid?”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with anything,” he’d said, feeling cold. Andy had never alluded to what he’d told him, and he found himself feeling betrayed that he should do so now.

“Like hell it doesn’t,” Andy had said, and the self-conscious theatricality of the phrase — did anyone really say that outside of the movies? — made him smile despite himself, and Andy, mistaking his smile for mockery, changed directions again. “There’s something incredibly arrogant about your stubbornness, Jude,” he continued. “Your utter refusal to listen to anyone about anything that concerns your health or well-being is either a pathological case of self-destructiveness or it’s a huge fuck-you to the rest of us.”

He was hurt by this. “And there’s something incredibly manipulative about you threatening to commit me whenever I disagree with you, and especially in this case, when I’ve told you it was a stupid accident,” he hurled back at Andy. “Andy, I appreciate you, I really do. I don’t know what I’d do without you. But I’m an adult and you can’t dictate what I do or don’t do.”

“You know what, Jude?” Andy had asked (now he was yelling again). “You’re right. I can’t dictate your decisions. But I don’t have to accept them, either. Go find some other asshole to be your doctor. I’m not going to do it any longer.”

“Fine,” he’d snapped, and left.

He couldn’t remember when he had been angrier on his own behalf. Lots of things made him angry — general injustice, incompetence, directors who didn’t give Willem a part he wanted — but he rarely got angry about things that happened or had happened to him: his pains, past and present, were things he tried not to brood about, were not questions to which he spent his days searching for meaning. He already knew why they had happened: they had happened because he had deserved them.

But he knew too that his anger was unjustified. And as much as he resented his dependence upon Andy, he was grateful for him as well, and he knew Andy found his behavior illogical. But Andy’s job was to make people better: Andy saw him the way he saw a mangled tax law, as something to be untangled and repaired — whether he thought he could be repaired was almost incidental. The thing he was trying to fix — the scars that raised his back into an awful, unnatural topography, the skin stretched as glossy and taut as a roasted duck’s: the reason he was trying to save money — was not, he knew, something Andy would approve of. “Jude,” Andy would say if he ever heard what he was planning, “I promise you it’s not going to work, and you’re going to have wasted all that money. Don’t do it.”

“But they’re hideous,” he would mumble.

“They’re not, Jude,” Andy would say. “I swear to god they’re not.”

(But he wasn’t going to tell Andy anyway, so he would never have to have that particular conversation.)

The days passed and he didn’t call Andy and Andy didn’t call him. As if in punishment, his wrist throbbed at night when he was trying to sleep, and at work he forgot and banged it rhythmically against the side of his desk as he read, a longtime bad tic he’d not managed to erase. The stitches had seeped blood then, and he’d had to clean them, clumsily, in the bathroom sink.

“What’s wrong?” Willem asked him one night.

“Nothing,” he said. He could tell Willem, of course, who would listen and say “Hmm” in his Willem-ish way, but he knew he would agree with Andy.

A week after their fight, he came home to Lispenard Street — it was a Sunday, and he had been walking through west Chelsea — and Andy was waiting on the steps before their front door.

He was surprised to see him. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” Andy had replied. They stood there. “I wasn’t sure if you’d take my call.”

“Of course I would’ve.”

“Listen,” Andy said. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too. I’m sorry, Andy.”

“But I really do think you should see someone.”

“I know you do.”

And somehow they managed to leave it at that: a fragile and mutually unsatisfying cease-fire, with the question of the therapist the vast gray demilitarized zone between them. The compromise (though how this had been agreed upon as such was unclear to him now) was that at the end of every visit, he had to show Andy his arms, and Andy would examine them for new cuts. Whenever he found one, he would log it in his chart. He was never sure what might provoke another outburst from Andy: sometimes there were many new cuts, and Andy would merely groan and write them down, and sometimes there were only a few new cuts and Andy would get agitated anyway. “You’ve fucking ruined your arms, you know that, right?” he would ask him. But he would say nothing, and let Andy’s lecture wash over him. Part of him understood that by not letting Andy do his job — which was, after all, to heal him — he was being disrespectful, and was to some degree making Andy into a joke in his own office. Andy’s tallies — sometimes he wanted to ask Andy if he would get a prize once he reached a certain number, but he knew it would make him angry — were a way for him to at least pretend he could manage the situation, even if he couldn’t: it was the accrual of data as a small compensation for actual treatment.

And then, two years later, another wound had opened on his left leg, which had always been the more troublesome one, and his cuttings were set aside for the more urgent matter of his leg. He had first developed one of these wounds less than a year after the injury, and it had healed quickly. “But it won’t be the last,” the Philadelphia surgeon had said. “With an injury like yours, everything — the vascular system, the dermal system — has been so compromised that you should expect you might get these now and again.”

This was the eleventh he’d had, so although he was prepared for the sensation of it, he was never to know its cause (An insect bite? A brush against the edge of a metal filing cabinet? It was always something so gallingly small, but still capable of tearing his skin as easily as if it had been made of paper), and he was never to cease being disgusted by it: the suppuration, the sick, fishy scent, the little gash, like a fetus’s mouth, that would appear, burbling viscous, unidentifiable fluids. It was unnatural, the stuff of monster movies and myths, to walk about with an opening that wouldn’t, couldn’t be closed. He began seeing Andy every Friday night so he could debride the wound, cleaning it and removing the dead tissue and examining the area around it, looking for new skin growth, as he held his breath and gripped the side of the table and tried not to scream.