Page 496 - A Little Life: A Novel

doesn’t sleep so much as move in and out of consciousness, the pain
sloshing through him like a tide, sometimes receding enough to let him
wake, sometimes consuming him beneath a grayed, filthy wave. Late that

night he rouses himself enough to look at his arm, where there is a large
crisped circle, black and venomous, as if it is a piece of land where he has
been practicing a terrifying occult ritual: witch-burning, perhaps. Animal
sacrifice. A summoning of spirits. It looks not like skin at all (and indeed, it
no longer is) but like something that never was skin: like wood, like paper,
like tarmac, all burned to ash.
By Monday, he knows it will become infected. At lunchtime he changes

the bandage he had applied the night before, and as he eases it off, his skin
tears as well, and he stuffs his pocket square into his mouth so he won’t
scream out loud. But things are falling out of his arm, clots with the
consistency of blood but the color of coal, and he sits on the floor of his
bathroom, rocking himself back and forth, his stomach heaving forth old
food and acids, his arm heaving forth its own disease, its own excretia.

The next day the pain is worse, and he leaves work early to go see Andy.
“My god,” Andy says, seeing the wound, and for once, he is silent, utterly,
which terrifies him.
“Can you fix it?” he whispers, because until that point, he had never
thought himself capable of hurting himself in a way that couldn’t be fixed.
He has, suddenly, a vision of Andy telling him he will lose the arm
altogether, and the next thing he thinks is: What will I tell Willem?

But “Yes,” Andy says. “I’ll do what I can, and then you need to go to the
hospital. Lie back.” He does, and lets Andy irrigate the wound and clean
and dress it, lets Andy apologize to him when he cries out.
He is there for an hour, and when he is finally able to sit—Andy has
given him a shot to numb the area—the two of them are silent.
“Are you going to tell me how you got a third-degree burn in such a

perfect circle?” Andy asks him at last, and he ignores Andy’s chilly
sarcasm, and instead recites to him his prepared story: the plantains, the
grease fire.
Then there is another silence, this one different in a way he cannot
explain but does not like. And then Andy says, very quietly, “You’re lying,
Jude.”
“What do you mean?” he asks, his throat suddenly dry despite the orange

juice he has been drinking.