Page 477 - A Little Life: A Novel

One night a month after he had promised Willem he would try harder, he
had known that he was in trouble, that there would be nothing he could do
to quell his desires. It had been an unexpectedly, peculiarly memory-rich

day, one in which the curtain that separated his past from his present had
been oddly gauzy. All evening he had seen, as if in peripheral vision,
fragments of scenes drifting before him, and over dinner he had fought to
stay rooted, to not let himself wander into that frightening, familiar shadow
world of memories. That night was the first night he had almost told Willem
he didn’t want to have sex, but in the end he had managed not to, and they
had.

Afterward, he was exhausted. He always struggled to remain present
when they were having sex, to not let himself float away. When he was a
child and had learned that he could leave himself, the clients had
complained to Brother Luke. “His eyes look dead,” they had said; they
hadn’t liked it. Caleb had said the same thing to him. “Wake up,” he’d once
said, tapping him on the side of his face. “Where are you?” And so he

worked to stay engaged, even though it made the experience more vivid.
That night he lay there, watching Willem asleep on his stomach, his arms
tucked under his pillow, his face more severe in sleep than it was in
wakefulness. He waited, counting to three hundred, and then three hundred
again, until an hour had passed. He snapped on the light next to his side of
the bed and tried to read, but all he could see was the razor, and all he could
feel was his arms tingling with need, as if he had not veins but circuitry,

fizzing and blipping with electricity.
“Willem,” he whispered, and when Willem didn’t answer, he placed his
hand on Willem’s neck, and when Willem didn’t move, he finally got out of
bed and walked as softly as he could into their closet, where he retrieved his
bag, which he had learned to store in the interior pocket of one of his winter
coats, and then out of the room and across the apartment to the bathroom at

the opposite end, where he closed the door. Here too there was a large
shower, and he sat down inside of it and took off his shirt and leaned his
back against the cool stone. His forearms were now so thickened from scar
tissue that from a distance, they appeared to have been dipped in plaster,
and you could barely distinguish where he had made the cuts in his suicide
attempt: he had cut between and around each stripe, layering the cuts,
camouflaging the scars. Lately he had begun concentrating more on his

upper arms (not the biceps, which were also scarred, but the triceps, which