Page 52 - A Little Life: A Novel

them, working through the problems as quickly as if he were running
arpeggios. Their first year, Willem had genuinely wanted to understand it,
and Jude had sat with him for a string of nights, explaining again and again,

but he had never been able to comprehend it.
“I’m just too stupid to get this,” he’d said after what felt like an hours-
long session, at the end of which he had wanted to go outside and run for
miles, he was so prickly with impatience and frustration.
Jude had looked down. “You’re not stupid,” he said, quietly. “I’m just not
explaining it well enough.” Jude took seminars in pure math that you had to
be invited to enroll in; the rest of them couldn’t even begin to fathom what,

exactly, he did in it.
In retrospect, he was surprised only by his own surprise when his mother
called three months later to tell him that Hemming was on life support. This
was in late May, and he was halfway through his final exams. “Don’t come
back,” she’d told him, commanded him, almost. “Don’t, Willem.” He spoke
with his parents in Swedish, and it wasn’t until many years later, when a

Swedish director he was working with pointed out how affectless his voice
became when he switched into the language, that he recognized that he had
unconsciously learned to adopt a certain tone when he talked to his parents,
one emotionless and blunt, that was meant to echo their own.
Over the next few days he fretted, did poorly in his exams: French,
comparative literature, Jacobean drama, the Icelandic sagas, the hated
calculus all slurring into one. He picked a fight with his girlfriend, who was

a senior and graduating. She cried; he felt guilty but also unable to repair
the situation. He thought of Wyoming, of a machine coughing life into
Hemming’s lungs. Shouldn’t he go back? He had to go back. He wouldn’t
be able to stay for long: on June fifteenth, he and Jude were moving into a
sublet off-campus for the summer—they’d both found jobs in the city, Jude
working on weekdays as a classics professor’s amanuensis and on

weekends at the bakery he worked at during the school year, Willem as a
teacher’s assistant at a program for disabled children—but before then, the
four of them were going to stay at Malcolm’s parents’ house in Aquinnah,
on Martha’s Vineyard, after which Malcolm and JB would drive back to
New York. At nights, he called Hemming at the hospital, made his parents
or one of the nurses hold the phone up to his ear, and spoke to his brother,
even though he knew he probably couldn’t hear him. But how could he not

have tried?