Page 189 - A Little Life: A Novel

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.

He was back to seeing Andy every six weeks, and had delayed his most
recent visit twice, because he dreaded what Andy might say. But finally, a
little less than four weeks before the court date, he went uptown and sat in
one of the examining rooms until Andy peered in to say he was running
late.
“Take your time,” he said.
Andy studied him, squinting a bit. “I won’t be long,” he said, finally, and

then was gone.