Page 494 - A Little Life: A Novel

“Several times,” he says, smiling to himself. He had met this new reviled
boyfriend of Beckett’s—a sweet, jovial aspiring landscape architect—at a
dinner party at Andy’s three months ago. “But Andy—I thought he was

nice. And he loves Beckett. And anyway, are you really going to sit around
having conversations about Proust with him?”
Andy sighs. “You sound like Jane,” he says, grouchily.
“Well,” he says, smiling again. “Maybe you should listen to Jane.” He
laughs, then, feeling lighter than he has in weeks, and not just because of
Andy’s sulky expression. “There are worse crimes than not being fully
conversant with Swann’s Way, you know.”

As he drives home, he thinks of his plan, but then realizes he will have to
wait, because he is going to claim that he has burned himself in a cooking
accident, and if something goes wrong and he has to see Andy, Andy will
ask him why he was cooking on the same night they were eating dinner.
Tomorrow, then, he thinks; I’ll do it tomorrow. That way, he can write an e-
mail to Willem tonight in which he’ll mention that he’s going to try to make

the fried plantains JB likes: a semi-spontaneous decision that will go
terribly wrong.
You do know that this is how mentally ill people make their plans, says
the dry and belittling voice inside him. You do know that this planning is
something only a sick person would do.
Stop it, he tells it. Stop it. The fact that I know this is sick means I’m not.
At that, the voice hoots with laughter: at his defensiveness, at his six-year-

old’s illogic, at his revulsion for the word “sick,” his fear that it might
attach itself to him. But even the voice, its mocking, swaggering distaste for
him, isn’t enough to stop him.
The next evening he changes into a short-sleeve T-shirt, one of Willem’s,
and goes to the kitchen. He arranges everything he needs: the olive oil; a
long wooden match. He places his left forearm in the sink, as if it’s a bird to

be plucked, and chooses an area a few inches above where his palm begins,
before taking the paper towel he’s wet with oil and rubbing it onto his skin
in an apricot-sized circle. He stares for a few seconds at the gleaming
grease stain, and then he takes a breath and strikes the match against the
side of its box and holds the flame to his skin until he catches on fire.
The pain is—what is the pain? Ever since the injury, there has not been a
single day in which he is not in some sort of pain. Sometimes the pain is

infrequent, or mild, or intermittent. But it is always there. “You have to be