Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

So he was surprised — as surprised as the counselors — when he learned that night that he was one of the children chosen by a couple: the Learys. Had he noticed a woman and man looking at him, maybe even smiling at him? Maybe. But the afternoon had passed, as most did, in a haze, and even on the bus ride home, he had begun the work of forgetting it.

He would spend a probationary weekend — the weekend before Thanksgiving — with the Learys, so they could see how they liked each other. That Thursday he was driven to their house by a counselor named Boyd, who taught shop and plumbing and whom he didn’t know very well. He knew Boyd knew what some of the other counselors did to him, and although he never stopped them, he never participated, either.

But as he was getting out of the car in the Learys’ driveway — a one-story brick house, surrounded on all sides by fallow, dark fields — Boyd snatched his forearm and pulled him close, startling him into alertness.

“Don’t fuck this up, St. Francis,” he said. “This is your chance, do you hear me?”

“Yes, sir,” he’d said.

“Go on, then,” said Boyd, and released him, and he walked toward Mrs. Leary, who was standing in the doorway.

Mrs. Leary was fat, but her husband was simply big, with large red hands that looked like weaponry. They had two daughters, both in their twenties and both married, and they thought it might be nice to have a boy in the house, someone who could help Mr. Leary — who repaired large-scale farm machinery and also farmed himself — with the field work. They chose him, they said, because he seemed quiet, and polite, and they didn’t want someone rowdy; they wanted someone hardworking, someone who would appreciate what having a home and a house meant. They had read in the binder that he knew how to work, and how to clean, and that he did well on the home’s farm.

“Now, your name, that’s an unusual name,” Mrs. Leary said.

He had never thought it unusual, but “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“What would you think of maybe going by a different name?” Mrs. Leary asked. “Like, Cody, maybe? I’ve always liked the name Cody. It’s a little less — well, it’s a little more us, really.”

“I like Cody,” he said, although he didn’t really have an opinion about it: Jude, Cody, it didn’t matter to him what he was called.

“Well, good,” said Mrs. Leary.

That night, alone, he said the name aloud to himself: Cody Leary. Cody Leary. Could it be possible that he was entering this house as one person and then, as if the place were enchanted, transformed into another? Was it that simple, that fast? Gone would be Jude St. Francis, and with him, Brother Luke, and Brother Peter, and Father Gabriel, and the monastery and the counselors at the home and his shame and fears and filth, and in his place would be Cody Leary, who would have parents, and a room of his own, and would be able to make himself into whomever he chose.

The rest of the weekend passed uneventfully, so uneventfully that with each day, with each hour, he could feel pieces of himself awaken, could feel the clouds that he gathered around himself separate and vanish, could feel himself seeing into the future, and imagining the place in it he might have. He tried his hardest to be polite, and hardworking, and it wasn’t difficult: he got up early in the morning and made breakfast for the Learys (Mrs. Leary praising him so loudly and extravagantly that he had smiled, embarrassed, at the floor), and cleaned dishes, and helped Mr. Leary degrease his tools and rewire a lamp, and although there were events he didn’t care for — the boring church service they attended on Sunday; the prayers they supervised before he was allowed to go to bed — they were hardly worse than the things he didn’t like about the home, they were things he knew he could do without appearing resentful or ungrateful. The Learys, he could sense, would not be the sort of people who would behave the way that parents in books would, the way the parents he yearned for might, but he knew how to be industrious, he knew how to keep them satisfied. He was still frightened of Mr. Leary’s large red hands, and when he was left alone with him in the barn, he was shivery and watchful, but at least there was only Mr. Leary to fear, not a whole group of Mr. Learys, as there had been before, or there were at the home.

When Boyd picked him up Sunday evening, he was pleased with how he’d done, confident, even. “How’d it go?” Boyd asked him, and he was able to answer, honestly, “Good.”

He was certain, from Mrs. Leary’s last words to him—“I have a feeling we’ll be seeing much more of you very soon, Cody”—that they would call on Monday, and that soon, maybe even by Friday, he would be Cody Leary, and the home would be one more place he’d put behind him. But then Monday passed, and then Tuesday, and Wednesday, and then it was the following week, and he wasn’t called to the headmaster’s office, and his letter to the Learys had gone unanswered, and every day the driveway to the dormitory remained a long, blank stretch, and no one came to get him.

Finally, two weeks after the visit, he went to see Boyd at his workshop, where he knew he stayed late on Thursday nights. He waited through dinner out in the cold, the snow crunching under his feet, until he finally saw Boyd walking out the door.

“Christ,” Boyd said when he saw him, nearly stepping on him as he turned. “Shouldn’t you be back in the dorms, St. Francis?”

“Please,” he begged. “Please tell me — are the Learys coming to get me?” But he knew what the answer was even before he saw Boyd’s face.

“They changed their minds,” said Boyd, and although he wasn’t known, by the counselors or the boys, for his gentleness, he was almost gentle then. “It’s over, St. Francis. It’s not going to happen.” He reached out a hand toward him, but he ducked, and Boyd shook his head and began walking off.

“Wait,” he called, recovering himself and running as well as he could through the snow after Boyd. “Let me try again,” he said. “Tell me what I did wrong, and I’ll try again.” He could feel the old hysteria descending upon him, could feel inside him the vestiges of the boy who would throw fits and shout, who could still a room with his screams.

But Boyd shook his head again. “It doesn’t work like that, St. Francis,” he said, and then he stopped and looked directly at him. “Look,” he said, “in a few years you’ll be out of here. I know it seems like a long time, but it’s not. And then you’ll be an adult and you’ll be able to do whatever you want. You just have to get through these years.” And then he turned again, definitively, and stalked away from him.

“How?” he yelled after Boyd. “Boyd, tell me how! How, Boyd, how?” forgetting that he was to call him “sir,” and not “Boyd.”

That night he had his first tantrum in years, and although the punishment here was the same, more or less, as it had been at the monastery, the release, the sense of flight it had once given him, was not: now he was someone who knew better, whose screams would change nothing, and all his shouting did was bring him back to himself, so that everything, every hurt, every insult, felt sharper and brighter and stickier and more resonant than ever before.

He would never, never know what he had done wrong that weekend at the Learys’. He would never know if it had been something he could control, or something he couldn’t. And of all the things from the monastery, from the home, that he worked to scrub over, he worked hardest at forgetting that weekend, at forgetting the special shame of allowing himself to believe that he might be someone he knew he wasn’t.

But now, of course, with the court date six weeks, five weeks, four weeks away, he thought of it constantly. With Willem gone, and no one to monitor his hours and activities, he stayed up until the sun began lightening the sky, cleaning, scrubbing with a toothbrush the space beneath the refrigerator, bleaching each skinny grout-canal between the bathtub wall tiles. He cleaned so he wouldn’t cut himself, because he was cutting himself so much that even he knew how crazy, how destructive he was being; even he was scared of himself, as much by what he was doing as by his inability to control it. He had begun a new method of balancing the edge of the blade on his skin and then pressing down, as deep as he could, so that when he withdrew the razor — stuck like an ax head into a tree stump — there was half a second in which he could pull apart the two sides of flesh and see only a clean white gouge, like a side of fatted bacon, before the blood began rushing in to pool within the cut. He felt dizzy, as if his body was pumped with helium; food tasted like rot to him, and he stopped eating unless he had to. He stayed at the office until the night shift of cleaners began moving through the hallways, noisy as mice, and then stayed awake at home; he woke with his heart thudding so fast that he had to gulp air to calm himself. It was only work, and Willem’s calls, that forced him into normalcy, or he’d have never left the house, would have cut himself until he could have loosed whole pyramids of flesh from his arms and flushed them down the drain. He had a vision in which he carved away at himself — first arms, then legs, then chest and neck and face — until he was only bones, a skeleton who moved and sighed and breathed and tottered through life on its porous, brittle stalks.