Page 140 - A Little Life: A Novel

“I know.”
“Your anatomy is so degraded that it’d get really infected.”
“Andy. I know.”

He had, at various points, suspected that Andy was talking to his friends
behind his back, and there were times when they would use Andy-like
language and turns of phrase, and even four years after “The Incident,” as
Andy had begun calling it, he suspected that Willem was going through the
bathroom trash in the morning, and he’d had to take extra cautions
disposing of his razors, bundling them in tissue and duct tape and throwing
them into garbage cans on the way to work. “Your crew,” Andy called

them: “What’ve you and your crew been up to these days?” (when he was
in a good mood) and “I’m going to tell your fucking crew they’ve got to
keep their eyes on you” (when he wasn’t).
“Don’t you dare, Andy,” he’d say. “And anyway, it’s not their
responsibility.”
“Of course it is,” Andy would retort. As with other issues, they couldn’t

agree on this one.
But now it was twenty months after the appearance of this most recent
wound and it still hadn’t healed. Or rather, it had healed and then broken
again and then healed again, and then he had woken on Friday and felt
something damp and gummy on his leg—the lower calf, right above the
ankle—and had known it had split. He hadn’t called Andy yet—he would
do so on Monday—but it had been important to him to take this walk,

which he feared would be his last for some time, maybe months.
He was on Madison and Seventy-fifth now, very near Andy’s office, and
his leg was hurting him so much that he crossed to Fifth and sat on one of
the benches near the wall that bordered the park. As soon as he sat, he
experienced that familiar dizziness, that stomach-lifting nausea, and he bent
over and waited until the cement became cement again and he would be

able to stand. He felt in those minutes his body’s treason, how sometimes
the central, tedious struggle in his life was his unwillingness to accept that
he would be betrayed by it again and again, that he could expect nothing
from it and yet had to keep maintaining it. So much time, his and Andy’s,
was spent trying to repair something unfixable, something that should have
wound up in charred bits on a slag heap years ago. And for what? His mind,
he supposed. But there was—as Andy might have said—something