Page 481 - A Little Life: A Novel

eyes, he apologizes to him. But Willem shakes his head, and then moves on
top of him, and holds him so tightly that he finds it difficult to breathe.
“You hold me back,” Willem tells him. “Pretend we’re falling and we’re

clinging together from fear.”
He holds Willem so close that he can feel muscles from his back to his
fingertips come alive, so close that he can feel Willem’s heart beating
against his, can feel his rib cage against his, and his stomach deflating and
inflating with air. “Harder,” Willem tells him, and he does until his arms
grow first fatigued and then numb, until his body is sagging with tiredness,
until he feels that he really is falling: first through the mattress, and then the

bed frame, and then the floor itself, until he is sinking in slow motion
through all the floors of the building, which yield and swallow him like
jelly. Down he goes through the fifth floor, where Richard’s family is now
storing stacks of Moroccan tiles, down through the fourth floor, which is
empty, down through Richard and India’s apartment, and Richard’s studio,
and then to the ground floor, and into the pool, and then down and down,

farther and farther, past the subway tunnels, past bedrock and silt, through
underground lakes and oceans of oil, through layers of fossils and shale,
until he is drifting into the fire at the earth’s core. And the entire time,
Willem is wrapped around him, and as they enter the fire, they aren’t
burned but melted into one being, their legs and chests and arms and heads
fusing into one. When he wakes the next morning, Willem is no longer on
top of him but beside him, but they are still intertwined, and he feels

slightly drugged, and relieved, for he has not only not cut himself but he has
slept, deeply, two things he hasn’t done in months. That morning he feels
fresh-scrubbed and cleansed, as if he is being given yet another opportunity
to live his life correctly.
But of course he can’t wake Willem up whenever he feels he needs him;
he limits himself to once every ten days. The other six or seven bad nights

in those ten-day periods he gets through on his own: swimming, baking,
cooking. He needs physical work to stave off the craving—Richard has
given him a key to his studio, and some nights he heads downstairs in his
pajamas, where Richard has left him a task that is both helpfully, mindlessly
repetitive and at the same time utterly mysterious: he sorts bird vertebrae by
sizes one week, and separates a stack of gleaming and faintly greasy ferret
pelts by color another. These tasks remind him of how, years ago, the four

of them would spend their weekends untangling hair for JB, and he wishes