Page 602 - A Little Life: A Novel

him too upset. And so he tried not to consider it. But it was always there,
running through their friendship, their lives, like a vein of turquoise forking
through stone.

In the meantime, though, there was normalcy, routine, both of which
were better than sex or excitement. There was the realization that Jude had
walked—slowly, but assuredly—for almost three straight hours that night.
There was, back in New York, their lives, the things they used to do,
resuming because Jude now had the energy to do so, because he could now
stay awake through a play or an opera or a dinner, because he could climb
the stairs to reach Malcolm’s front door in Cobble Hill, could walk down

the pitched sidewalk to reach JB’s building in Vinegar Hill. There was the
comfort of hearing Jude’s alarm blip at five thirty, of hearing him set off for
his morning swim, the relief of looking into a box on the kitchen counter
and seeing it was full of medical supplies—extra packets of catheter tubing
and sterile gauze patches and leftover high-calorie protein drinks that Andy
had only recently said Jude could stop ingesting—that Jude would return to

Andy, who would donate them to the hospital. In moments he would
remember how two years ago from this very date, he would come home
from the theater to find Jude in bed asleep, so fragile that it seemed at times
that the catheter under his shirt was actually an artery, that he was being
steadily and irreversibly whittled down to only nerves and vessels and bone.
Sometimes he would think of those moments and feel a sort of
disorientation: Was that them, really, those people back then? Where had

those people gone? Would they reappear? Or were they now other people
entirely? And then he would imagine that those people weren’t so much
gone as they were within them, waiting to bob back up to the surface, to
reclaim their bodies and minds; they were identities now in remission, but
they would always be with them.
Sickness had visited them recently enough so that they still remembered

to be grateful for every day that passed so uneventfully, even as they grew
to expect them. The first time Willem saw Jude in his wheelchair in months,
saw him leave the sofa when they were watching a movie because he was
having an episode and wanted to be alone, he had been disquieted, and he’d
had to make himself remember that this, too, was who Jude was: he was
someone whose body betrayed him, and he always would be. The surgery
hadn’t changed this after all—it had changed Willem’s reaction to it. And

when he realized that Jude was cutting himself again—not frequently, but