Page 293 - A Little Life: A Novel

There is a long, long silence. They are standing in front of a Korean
barbeque restaurant, and the air is dense and fragrant with steam and smoke
and roasting meat. “Can I go?” he asks finally, and Willem nods. He goes to

the curb and raises his arm, and a cab glides to his side.
Willem opens the door for him and then, as he’s getting in, puts his arms
around him and holds him, and he finally does the same. “I’m going to miss
you,” Willem says into the back of his neck. “Are you going to take care of
yourself while I’m gone?”
“Yes,” he says. “I promise.” He steps back and looks at him. “Until
November, then.”

Willem makes a face that’s not quite a smile. “November,” he echoes.
In the cab, he finds he really is tired, and he leans his forehead against the
greased window and closes his eyes. By the time he reaches home, he feels
as leaden as a corpse, and in the apartment, he starts taking off his clothes—
shoes, sweater, shirt, undershirt, pants—as soon as he’s locked the door
behind him, leaving them littering the floor in a trail as he makes his way to

the bathroom. His hands tremor as he unsticks the bag from beneath the
sink, and although he hadn’t thought he’d need to cut himself that night—
nothing that day or early evening had indicated he might—he is almost
ravenous for it now. He has long ago run out of blank skin on his forearms,
and he now recuts over old cuts, using the edge of the razor to saw through
the tough, webby scar tissue: when the new cuts heal, they do so in warty
furrows, and he is disgusted and dismayed and fascinated all at once by

how severely he has deformed himself. Lately he has begun using the cream
that Andy gave him for his back on his arms, and he thinks it helps, a bit:
the skin feels looser, the scars a little softer and more supple.
The shower area Malcolm has created in this bathroom is enormous, so
large he now sits within it when he’s cutting, his legs stretched out before
him, and after he’s done, he’s careful to wash away the blood because the

floor is a great plain of marble, and as Malcolm has told him again and
again, once you stain marble, there’s nothing that can be done. And then he
is in bed, light-headed but not quite sleepy, staring at the dark, mercury-like
gleam the chandelier makes in the shadowy room.
“I’m lonely,” he says aloud, and the silence of the apartment absorbs the
words like blood soaking into cotton.
This loneliness is a recent discovery, and is different from the other

lonelinesses he has experienced: it is not the childhood loneliness of not