Page 588 - A Little Life: A Novel

Finally, they are able to calm Willem down, who apologizes and wipes at
his eyes. “I’m sorry,” Willem says, but he shakes his head, and pulls on
Willem’s hand until he brings his face to his own, kisses him goodbye.

“Don’t be,” he tells him.
Outside the operating room, Andy brings his head down to his, and kisses
him again, this time on his cheek. “I’m not going to be able to touch you
after this,” he says. “I’ll be sterile.” The two of them grin, suddenly, and
Andy shakes his head. “Aren’t you getting a little old for this kind of
puerile humor?” he asks.
“Aren’t you?” he asks. “You’re almost sixty.”

“Never.”
Then they are in the operating room, and he is gazing at the bright white
disk of light above him. “Hello, Jude,” says a voice behind him, and he sees
it’s the anesthesiologist, a friend of Andy’s named Ignatius Mba, whom he’s
met before at one of Andy and Jane’s dinner parties.
“Hi, Ignatius,” he says.

“Count backward from ten for me,” says Ignatius, and he begins to, but
after seven, he is unable to count any further; the last thing he feels is a
tingling in his right toes.
Three months later. It is Thanksgiving again, and they are having it at
Greene Street. Willem and Richard have cooked everything, arranged
everything, while he slept. His recovery has been harder and more
complicated than anticipated, and he has contracted infections, twice. For a

while he was on a feeding tube. But Andy was right: he has kept both
knees. In the hospital, he would wake, telling Harold and Julia, telling
Willem, that it felt like there was an elephant sitting on his feet, rocking
back and forth on its rump until his bones turned into cracker dust, into
something finer than ash. But they never told him that he was imagining
this; they only told him that the nurse had just added a painkiller to his IV

drip for this very purpose, and that he would be feeling better soon. Now he
has these phantom pains less and less frequently, but they haven’t
disappeared entirely. And he is still very tired, he is still very weak, and so
Richard has placed a mauve velvet wingback chair on casters—one that
India sometimes uses for sittings—for him at the head of the table, so he
can lean his head against its wings when he feels depleted.
That dinner is Richard and India, Harold and Julia, Malcolm and Sophie,

JB and his mother, and Andy and Jane, whose children are visiting Andy’s