Page 510 - A Little Life: A Novel

Jude, everything he has never wanted to confront, comes surging out at last?
They sit there for a long time, the car filling with their shaky breaths. He
can feel his fingertips turning numb. “Let’s go,” he finally says.

“Where?” Jude asks, and Willem looks at him.
“We only have an hour to Boston,” he says. “And they’re expecting us,”
and Jude nods, and wipes his face with his handkerchief, and takes the keys
from him, and drives them slowly out of the gas station.
As they move down the highway, he has a sudden vision of what it really
means to set yourself on fire. He thinks of the campfires he had built as a
Boy Scout, the tepee of twigs you’d arrange around a knot of newspaper,

the way the shimmering flames made the air around them wobbly, their
awful beauty. And then he thinks of Jude doing that to his own skin,
imagines orange chewing through his flesh, and he is sick. “Pull over,” he
gasps to Jude, and Jude screeches off the road and he leans out of the car
and vomits until he has nothing more to expel.
“Willem,” he hears Jude saying, and the sound of his voice enrages him

and devastates him, both.
They are silent for the rest of the drive, and when Jude pulls the car
bumpily into Harold and Julia’s driveway, there is a brief moment in which
they look at each other, and it is as if he is looking at someone he has never
seen before. He looks at Jude and sees a handsome man with long hands
and legs and a beautiful face, the kind of face you look at and keep looking
at, and if he were meeting this man at a party or at a restaurant, he would

talk to him, because it would be an excuse to keep looking at him, and he
would never think that this man would be someone who cut himself so
much that the skin on his arms no longer felt like skin, but cartilage, or that
he once dated someone who beat him so hard he could have died, or that
one night he rubbed his skin with oil so that the flame he touched to his
own body would burn brighter and faster, and that he had gotten this idea

from someone who had once done this very thing to him, years ago, when
he was a child and had done nothing worse than take something shiny and
irresistible from a loathed and loathsome guardian’s desk.
He opens his mouth to say something when they hear Harold and Julia
calling out their welcomes to them, and they both blink and turn and get out
of the car, fixing their mouths into smiles as they do. As he kisses Julia, he
can hear Harold, behind him, saying to Jude, “Are you okay? Are you sure?

You look a little off,” and then Jude’s murmured assent.