Page 453 - A Little Life: A Novel

arms, his legs, his back, feeling the texture of the skin change from rough to
glossy, marveling at all the permutations flesh could take, at all the ways the
body healed itself, even when attempts had been made to destroy it. He had

once shot a film on the Big Island of Hawaii, and on their day off, he and
the rest of the cast had trekked across the lava fields, watching the land
change from rock as porous and dry as petrified bone into a gleaming black
landscape, the lava frozen into exuberant swirls of frosting. Jude’s skin was
as diverse, as wondrous, and in places so unlike skin as he had felt or
understood it that it too seemed something otherworldly and futuristic, a
prototype of what flesh might look like ten thousand years from now.

“You’re repulsed,” Jude had said, quietly, the second time he had taken
his clothes off, and he had shaken his head. And he hadn’t been: Jude had
always been so secretive, so protective of his body that to see it for real was
somehow anticlimactic; it was so normal, finally, so less dramatic than what
he had imagined. But the scars were difficult for him to see not because
they were aesthetically offensive, but because each one was evidence of

something withstood or inflicted. Jude’s arms were for that reason the part
of his body that upset him the most. At nights, as Jude slept, he would turn
them over in his hands, counting the cuts, trying to imagine himself in a
state in which he would willingly inflict pain on himself, in which he would
actively try to erode his own being. Sometimes there were new cuts—he
always knew when Jude had cut himself, because he slept in his shirt on
those nights, and he would have to push up his sleeves as he slept and feel

for the bandages—and he would wonder when Jude had made them, and
why he hadn’t noticed. When he had moved in with Jude after the suicide
attempt, Harold had told him where Jude hid his bag of razors, and he, like
Harold, had begun throwing them away. But then they had disappeared
entirely, and he couldn’t figure out where Jude was keeping them.
Other times, he would feel not curiosity, but awe: he was so much more

damaged than Willem had comprehended. How could I have not known
this? he would ask himself. How could I not have seen this?
And then there was the matter of sex. He knew Andy had warned him
about sex, but Jude’s fear of and antipathy toward it disturbed and
occasionally frightened him. One night toward the end of November, after
they’d been together six months, he had reached his hands down Jude’s
underwear and Jude had made a strange, strangled noise, the kind of noise

an animal makes when it’s being caught in another animal’s jaws, and had