Page 478 - A Little Life: A Novel

were somehow less satisfying; he liked to see the cuts as he made them
without twisting his neck), but now he made long, careful cuts down his left
tricep, counting the seconds it took to make each one—one, two, three—

against his breaths.
Down he cut, four times on his left, and three times on his right, and as
he was making the fourth, his hands fluttery from that delicious weakness,
he had looked up and had seen Willem in the doorway, watching him. In all
his decades of cutting himself, he had never been witnessed in the act itself,
and he stopped, abruptly, the violation as shocking as if he had been
slugged.

Willem didn’t say anything, but as he walked toward him, he cowered,
pressing himself against the shower wall, mortified and terrified, waiting
for what might happen. He watched Willem crouch, and gently remove the
razor from his hand, and for a moment they remained in those positions,
both of them staring at the razor. And then Willem stood and, without
preamble or warning, sliced the razor across his own chest.

He snapped alive, then. “No!” he shouted, and tried to get up, but he
didn’t have the strength, and he fell back. “Willem, no!”
“Fuck!” Willem yelled. “Fuck!” But he made a second cut anyway, right
under the first.
“Stop it, Willem!” he shouted, almost in tears. “Willem, stop it! You’re
hurting yourself!”
“Oh, yeah?” asked Willem, and he could tell by how bright Willem’s

eyes were that he was almost crying himself. “You see what it feels like,
Jude?” And he made a third cut, cursing again.
“Willem,” he moaned, and lunged for his feet, but Willem stepped out of
his way. “Please stop. Please, Willem.”
He had begged and begged, but it was only after the sixth cut that Willem
stopped, slumping down against the opposite wall. “Fuck,” he said, quietly,

bending over at the waist and wrapping his arms around himself. “Fuck,
that hurts.” He scooted over to Willem with his bag to help clean him up,
but Willem moved away from him. “Leave me alone, Jude,” he said.
“But you need to bandage them,” he said.
“Bandage your own goddamn arms,” Willem said, still not looking at
him. “This isn’t some fucked-up ritual we’re going to share, you know:
bandaging each other’s self-inflicted cuts.”