Page 476 - A Little Life: A Novel

“I can’t not,” he said, after a long silence. You don’t want to see me
without it, he wanted to tell Willem, as well as: I don’t know how I’d make
my way through life without it. But he didn’t. He was never able to explain

to Willem what the cutting did for him in a way he’d understand: how it
was a form of punishment and also of cleansing, how it allowed him to
drain everything toxic and spoiled from himself, how it kept him from
being irrationally angry at others, at everyone, how it kept him from
shouting, from violence, how it made him feel like his body, his life, was
truly his and no one else’s. Certainly he could never have sex without it.
Sometimes he wondered: If Brother Luke hadn’t given it to him as a

solution, who would he have become? Someone who hurt other people, he
thought; someone who tried to make everyone feel as terrible as he did;
someone even worse than the person he was.
Willem had been silent for even longer. “Try,” he said. “For me, Judy.
Try.”
And he did. For the next few weeks, when he woke in the night, or after

they’d had sex and he was waiting for Willem to fall asleep so he could go
to the bathroom, he instead made himself lie still, his hands in fists,
counting his breaths, the back of his neck perspiring, his mouth dry. He
pictured one of the motels’ stairwells, and throwing himself against it, the
thud he would make, how satisfyingly tiring it would be, how much it
would hurt. He both wished Willem knew how hard he was trying and was
grateful that he didn’t.

But sometimes this wasn’t enough, and on those nights, he would skulk
down to the ground floor, where he would swim, trying to exhaust himself.
In the mornings, Willem demanded to look at his arms, and they had fought
over that as well, but in the end it had been easier to just let Willem look.
“Happy?” he barked at him, jerking his arms back from Willem’s hands,
rolling his sleeves back down and buttoning the cuffs, unable to look at

him.
“Jude,” Willem said, after a pause, “come lie down next to me before you
go,” but he shook his head and left, and all day he had regretted it, and with
every passing day that Willem didn’t ask him again, he hated himself more.
Their new morning ritual was Willem examining his arms, and every time,
sitting next to Willem in bed as Willem looked for evidence of cuts, he felt
his frustration and humiliation increase.