Page 595 - A Little Life: A Novel

in retrospect that they had been able to recognize it as a sort of fulcrum, as
the period in which there were first days, and then weeks, and then an entire
month in which nothing got worse, in which they regained the trick of

waking each day with not dread but with purpose, in which they were
finally, cautiously, able to talk about the future, to worry not just about
making it successfully through the day but into days they couldn’t yet
imagine. It was only then that they were able to talk about what needed to
be done, only then that Andy began making serious schedules—schedules
with goals set one month, two months, six months away—that tracked how
much weight he wanted Jude to gain, and when he would be fitted with his

permanent prostheses, and when he wanted him to take his first steps, and
when he wanted to see him walking again. Once again, they rejoined the
slipstream of life; once again, they learned to obey the calendar. By
February Willem was reading scripts again. By April, and his forty-ninth
birthday, Jude was walking again—slowly, inelegantly, but walking—and
looking once again like a normal person. By Willem’s birthday that August,

almost a year after his surgery, his walk was, as Andy had predicted, better
—silkier, more confident—than it had been with his own legs, and he
looked, once again, better than a normal person: he looked like himself
again.
“We still haven’t had your fiftieth birthday blowout,” Jude had reminded
him over his fifty-first birthday dinner—his birthday dinner that Jude had
made, standing by himself at the stove for hours, displaying no apparent

signs of fatigue—and Willem had smiled.
“This is all I want,” he’d said, and he meant it. It felt silly to compare his
experience of such a depleting, brutal two years to Jude’s own experience,
and yet he felt transformed by them. It was as if his despair had given rise
to a sense of invincibility; he felt that everything extraneous and soft had
been burned off of him and he was left as an exposed steel core,

indestructible and yet pliant, able to withstand anything.
They spent his birthday in Garrison, just the two of them, and that night,
after dinner, they went down to the lake, and he took off his clothes and
jumped off the dock into the water, which smelled and looked like a great
pool of tea. “Come in,” he told Jude, and then, when he hesitated, “As the
birthday boy, I command it.” And Jude had slowly undressed, and taken off
his prostheses, and then had finally pushed off the edge of the dock with his

hands, and Willem had caught him. As Jude had gotten physically healthier,