Page 583 - A Little Life: A Novel

“Yasmin’s coming in a couple of hours,” he wants to cry. “Right,” he says,
to the floor. “Well. I’m going to take a nap, then. I’ll wake up for Yasmin.”
That night, after Yasmin has left, he cuts himself for the first time in a

long time; he watches the blood weep across the marble and into the drain.
He knows how irrational it seems, his desire to keep his legs, his legs that
have caused him so many problems, that have cost him how many hours,
how much money, how much pain to maintain? But still: They are his. They
are his legs. They are him. How can he willingly cut away a part of
himself? He knows that he has already cut away so much of himself over
the years: flesh, skin, scars. But somehow this is different. If he sacrifices

his legs, he will be admitting to Dr. Traylor that he has won; he will be
surrendering to him, to that night in the field with the car.
And it is also different because he knows that once he loses them, he will
no longer be able to pretend. He will no longer be able to pretend that
someday he will walk again, that someday he will be better. He will no
longer be able to pretend that he isn’t disabled. Up, once more, will go his

freak-show factor. He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by
what he is missing.
And he is tired. He doesn’t want to have to learn how to walk again. He
doesn’t want to work at regaining weight he knows he will lose, weight on
top of the weight he has struggled to replace from the first bone infection,
weight that he has re-lost with the second. He doesn’t want to go back into
the hospital, he doesn’t want to wake disoriented and confused, he doesn’t

want to be visited by night terrors, he doesn’t want to explain to his
colleagues that he is sick yet again, he doesn’t want the months and months
of being weak, of fighting to regain his equilibrium. He doesn’t want
Willem to see him without his legs, he doesn’t want to give him one more
challenge, one more grotesquerie to overcome. He wants to be normal, he
has only ever wanted to be normal, and yet with each year, he moves further

and further from normalcy. He knows it is fallacious to think of the mind
and the body as two separate, competing entities, but he cannot help it. He
doesn’t want his body to win one more battle, to make the decision for him,
to make him feel so helpless. He doesn’t want to be dependent on Willem,
to have to ask him to lift him in and out of bed because his arms will be too
useless and watery, to help him use the bathroom, to see the remains of his
legs rounded into stumps. He had always assumed that there would be some

sort of warning before this point, that his body would alert him before it