Page 402 - A Little Life: A Novel

him as well, the same old ones, but new ones too, and he was made much
more sharply aware of how severely he had inconvenienced everyone, of
how much he had asked from people, of how he had taken what he would

never, ever be able to repay. And then there was the voice, which whispered
to him at odd moments, You can try again, you can try again, and he tried
to ignore it, because at some point—in the same, undefinable way that he
had decided to kill himself in the first place—he had decided he would
work on getting better, and he didn’t want to be reminded that he could try
again, that being alive, as ignominious and absurd as it often was, wasn’t
his only option.

Thanksgiving came, which they once again had at Harold and Julia’s
apartment on West End Avenue, and which was once again a small group:
Laurence and Gillian (their daughters had gone to their husbands’ families’
houses for the holiday), him, Willem, Richard and India, Malcolm and
Sophie. At the meal, he could feel everyone trying not to pay too much
attention to him, and when Willem mentioned the trip they were taking to

Morocco in the middle of December, Harold was so relaxed, so incurious,
that he knew that he must have already thoroughly discussed it with Willem
(and, probably, Andy) in advance, and given his permission.
“When do you go back to Rosen Pritchard?” asked Laurence, as if he’d
been away on holiday.
“January third,” he said.
“So soon!” said Gillian.

He smiled back at her. “Not soon enough,” he said. He meant it; he was
ready to try to be normal again, to make another attempt at being alive.
He and Willem left early, and that evening he cut himself for the second
time since he was released from the hospital. This was another thing the
drugs had dampened: his need to cut, to feel that bright, startling slap of
pain. The first time he did it, he was shocked by how much it hurt, and had

actually wondered why he had been doing this to himself for so long—what
had he been thinking? But then he felt everything within him slow, felt
himself relax, felt his memories dim, and had remembered how it helped
him, remembered why he had begun doing it at all. The scars from his
attempt were three vertical lines on both arms, from the base of his palm to
just below the inside of his elbow, and they hadn’t healed well; it looked as
if he had shoved pencils just beneath the skin. They had a strange, pearly