Page 139 - A Little Life: A Novel

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.
“You have to tell me when it’s painful, Jude,” Andy had said, as he

breathed and sweated and counted in his head. “It’s a good thing if you can
feel this, not a bad thing. It means the nerves are still alive and still doing
what they’re supposed to.”
“It’s painful,” he managed to choke out.
“Scale of one to ten?”
“Seven. Eight.”
“I’m sorry,” Andy replied. “I’m almost done, I promise. Five more

minutes.”
He shut his eyes and counted to three hundred, making himself go
slowly.
When it was over, he would sit, and Andy would sit with him and give
him something to drink: a soda, something sugary, and he’d feel the room
begin to clarify itself around him, bit by blurry bit. “Slowly,” Andy would

say, “or you’ll be sick.” He would watch as Andy dressed the wound—he
was always at his calmest when he was stitching or sewing or wrapping—
and in those moments, he would feel so vulnerable and weak that he would
have agreed to anything Andy might have suggested.
“You’re not going to cut yourself on your legs,” Andy would say, more a
statement than a question.
“No, I won’t.”

“Because that would be too insane, even for you.”