Page 567 - A Little Life: A Novel

wounds was so strange and remote that it didn’t even seem to belong to
him, but to somebody else.) When he was younger, it might take a few
weeks for one to heal. But now it took months. Of all the things that were

wrong with him, he was the most dispassionate about these sores; and yet
he was never able to accustom himself to their very appearance. And
although of course he wasn’t scared of blood, the sight of pus, of rot, of his
body’s desperate attempt to heal itself by trying to kill part of itself still
unsettled him even all these years later.
By the time Willem came home for good, he wasn’t better. There were
now four wounds on his calves, the most he had ever had at one time, and

although he was still trying to walk daily, it was sometimes difficult enough
to simply stand, and he was vigilant about parsing his efforts, about
determining when he was trying to walk because he thought he could, and
when he was trying to walk to prove to himself that he was still capable of
it. He could feel he had lost weight, he could feel he had gotten weaker—he
could no longer even swim every morning—but he knew it for sure once he

saw Willem’s face. “Judy,” Willem had said, quietly, and had knelt next to
him on the sofa. “I wish you had told me.” But in a funny way, there had
been nothing to tell: this was who he was. And besides his legs, his feet, his
back, he felt fine. He felt—though he hesitated to say this about himself: it
seemed so bold a statement—mentally healthy. He was back to cutting
himself only once a week. He heard himself whistling as he removed his
pants at night, examining the area around the bandages to make sure none

of them were leaking fluids. People got used to anything their bodies gave
them; he was no exception. If your body was well, you expected it to
perform for you, excellently, consistently. If your body was not, your
expectations were different. Or this, at least, was what he was trying to
accept.
Shortly after he returned at the end of July, Willem gave him permission

to terminate his mostly silent relationship with Dr. Loehmann—but only
because he genuinely didn’t have the time any longer. Four hours of his
week were now spent at doctors’ offices—two with Andy, two with
Loehmann—and he needed to reclaim two of those hours so he could go
twice a week to the hospital, where he took off his pants and flipped his tie
over his shoulder and was slid into a hyperbaric chamber, a glass coffin
where he lay and did work and hoped that the concentrated oxygen that was

being piped in all around him might help hasten his healing. He had felt