Page 558 - A Little Life: A Novel

The last time in his life he would walk on his own—really walk: not just
edging along the wall from one room to the next; not shuffling down the
hallways of Rosen Pritchard; not inching his way through the lobby to the

garage, sinking into the car seat with a groan of relief—had been their
Christmas vacation. He was forty-six. They were in Bhutan: a good choice,
he would later realize, for his final sustained spell of walking (although of
course he hadn’t known that at the time), because it was a country in which
everyone walked. The people they met there, including an old acquaintance
of theirs from college, Karma, who was now the minister of forestry, spoke
of walking not in terms of kilometers but in terms of hours. “Oh yes,”

Karma had said, “when my father was growing up, he used to walk four
hours to visit his aunt on the weekends. And then he would walk four hours
back home.” He and Willem had marveled at this, although later, they had
also agreed: the countryside was so pretty, a series of swooping, treed
parabolas, the sky above a thin clear blue, that time spent walking here must
move more quickly and pleasantly than time spent walking anywhere else.

He hadn’t felt at his best on that trip, although at least he was mobile. In
the months before, he had been feeling weaker, but not in any truly
specifiable way, not in any way that seemed to suggest some greater
problem. He simply lost energy faster; he was achey instead of sore, a dull,
constant thud of pain that followed him into sleep and was there to greet
him when he woke. It was the difference, he told Andy, between a month
speckled by thundershowers and a month in which it rained daily: not

heavily but ceaselessly, a kind of dreary, enervating discomfort. In October,
he’d had to use his wheelchair every day, which had been the most
consecutive days he had ever been dependent on it. In November, although
he had been well enough to make Thanksgiving dinner at Harold’s, he had
been in too much pain to actually sit at the table to eat it, and he had spent
the evening in his bedroom, lying as still as he could, semi-aware of Harold

and Willem and Julia coming in to check on him, semi-aware of his
apologizing for ruining the holiday for them, semi-aware of the muted
conversation among the three of them and Laurence and Gillian, James and
Carey, that he half heard coming from the dining room. After that, Willem
had wanted to cancel their trip, but he had insisted, and he was glad he had
—for he felt there was something restorative about the beauty of the
landscape, about the cleanliness and quiet of the mountains, about getting to