Page 495 - A Little Life: A Novel

careful,” Andy is always telling him. “You’ve gotten so inured to it that
you’ve lost the ability to recognize when it’s a sign of something worse. So
even if it’s only a five or a six, if it looks like this”—they had been speaking

about one of the wounds on his legs around which he had noticed that the
skin was turning a poisonous blackish gray, the color of rot—“then you
have to imagine that for most people it would be a nine or a ten, and you
have to, have to come see me. Okay?”
But this pain is a pain he has not felt in decades, and he screams and
screams. Voices, faces, scraps of memories, odd associations whir through
his mind: the smell of smoking olive oil leads him to a memory of a meal of

roasted funghi he and Willem had had in Perugia, which leads him to a
Tintoretto exhibit that he and Malcolm had seen in their twenties at the
Frick, which leads him to a boy in the home everyone called Frick, but he
never knew why, as the boy’s name was Jed, which leads him to the nights
in the barn, which leads him to a bale of hay in an empty, fog-smeared
meadow outside Sonoma against which he and Brother Luke had once had

sex, which leads him to, and to, and to, and to, and to. He smells burning
meat, and he breaks out of his trance and looks wildly at the stove, as if he
has left something there, a slab of steak seething to itself in a pan, but there
is nothing, and he realizes he is smelling himself, his own arm cooking
beneath him, and this makes him turn on the faucet at last and the water
splashing against the burn, the oily smoke rising from it, makes him scream
again. And then he is reaching, again wildly, with his right arm, his left still

lying useless in the sink, an amputation in a kidney-shaped metal bowl, and
he is grabbing the container of sea salt from the cupboard above the stove,
and he is sobbing, rubbing a handful of the sharp-edged crystals into the
burn, which reactivates the pain into something whiter than white, and it is
as if he is staring into the sun and he is blinded.
When he wakes, he is on the floor, his head against the cupboard beneath

the sink. His limbs are jerking; he is feverish, but he is cold, and he presses
himself against the cupboard as if it is something soft, as if it will consume
him. Behind his closed eyelids he sees the hyenas, licking their snouts as if
they have literally fed upon him. Happy? he asks them. Are you happy?
They cannot answer, of course, but they are dazed and satiated; he can see
their vigilance waning, their large eyes shutting contentedly.
The next day he has a fever. It takes him an hour to get from the kitchen

to his bed; his feet are too sore, and he cannot pull himself on his arms. He