Page 272 - A Little Life: A Novel

early evening, and he’d know it was because he had gotten high, too high to
keep taking pictures. And there were other things in those photographs that
he didn’t like, either: he didn’t want to include Jackson in a documentation

of his life, and yet Jackson was always there. He didn’t like the goofy smile
he saw on his face when he was on drugs, he didn’t like seeing how his face
changed from fat and hopeful to fat and avaricious as the day sank into
night. This wasn’t the version of himself he wanted to paint. But
increasingly, he had begun to think this was the version of himself he
should paint: this was, after all, his life. This was who he now was.
Sometimes he would wake and it would be dark and he wouldn’t know

where he was or what time it was or what day it was. Days: even the very
concept of a day had become a mockery. He could no longer accurately
measure when one began or ended. Help me, he’d say aloud, in those
moments. Help me. But he didn’t know to whom he was addressing his
plea, or what he expected to happen.
And now he was tired. He had tried. It was one thirty p.m. on Friday, the

Friday of July Fourth weekend. He put on his clothes. He closed his studio’s
windows and locked the door and walked down the stairs of the silent
building. “Chen,” he said, his voice loud in the stairwell, pretending he was
broadcasting a warning to his fellow artists, that he was communicating to
someone who might need his help. “Chen, Chen, Chen.” He was going
home, he was going to smoke.
He woke to a horrible noise, the noise of machinery, of metal grinding

against metal, and started screaming into his pillow to drown it out until he
realized it was the buzzer, and then slowly brought himself to his feet, and
slouched over to the door. “Jackson?” he asked, holding down the intercom
button, and he heard how frightened he sounded, how tentative.
There was a pause. “No, it’s us,” said Malcolm. “Let us in.” He did.
And then there they all were, Malcolm and Jude and Willem, as if they

had come to see him perform a show. “Willem,” he said. “You’re supposed
to be in Cappadocia.”
“I just got back yesterday.”
“But you’re supposed to be gone until”—he knew this—“July sixth.
That’s when you said you’d be back.”
“It’s July seventh,” Willem said, quietly.
He started to cry, then, but he was dehydrated and he didn’t have any

tears, just the sounds. July seventh: he had lost so many days. He couldn’t