Page 265 - A Little Life: A Novel

had called Jude one day. It was five in the afternoon, and he’d just woken
up, and he felt so awful, so incredibly old and exhausted and just done—his
skin slimy, his teeth furry, his eyes dry as wood—that he had wanted, for

the first time, to be dead, to simply not have to keep going on and on and
on. Something has to change, he told himself. I have to stop hanging
around with Jackson. I have to stop. Everything has to stop. He missed his
friends, he missed how innocent and clean they were, he missed being the
most interesting among them, he missed never having to try around them.
So he had called Jude (naturally, Willem wasn’t fucking in town, and
Malcolm couldn’t be trusted not to freak out) and asked him, begged him,

to come over after work. He told him where, exactly, the rest of the crystal
was (under the loose half-plank of wood under the right side of the bed),
and where his pipe was, and asked him to flush it down the toilet, to get rid
of it all.
“JB,” Jude had said. “Listen to me. Go to that café on Clinton, okay?
Take your sketch pad. Get yourself something to eat. I’m coming down as

soon as I can, as soon as this meeting’s over. And then I’ll text you when
I’m done and you can come home, all right?”
“Okay,” he’d said. And he’d stood up, and taken a very long shower,
hardly scrubbing himself, just standing under the water, and then had done
exactly what Jude had instructed: He picked up his sketch pad and pencils.
He went to the café. He ate some of a chicken club sandwich and drank
some coffee. And he waited.

And while he was waiting, he saw, passing the window like a bipedal
mongoose, with his dirty hair and delicate chin, Jackson. He watched
Jackson walk by, his self-satisfied, rich-boy lope, that pleased half smile on
his face that made JB want to hit him, as detached as if Jackson was just
someone ugly he saw on the street, not someone ugly he saw almost every
day. And then, just before he passed out of sight, Jackson turned, and

looked in the window, directly at him, and smiled his ugly smile, and
reversed direction and walked back toward the café and through the door, as
if he had known all along that JB was there, as if he had materialized only
to remind JB that JB was his now, that there would be no escaping from
him, that JB was there to do what Jackson wanted him to do when Jackson
wanted him to do it, and that his life would never be his own again. For the
first time, he had been scared of Jackson, and panicked. What has

happened? he wondered. He was Jean-Baptiste Marion, he made the plans,