Page 616 - A Little Life: A Novel

eventually he learned it was better to simply pause on a certain image,
Willem’s face trapped and staring at him, and he would look and look at it
until his eyes burned. After a month of this, he realized that he had to be

more vigilant about parsing out these movies, so they wouldn’t lose their
potency. And so he had begun in order, with Willem’s very first film—The
Girl with the Silver Hands—which he had watched obsessively, every
night, stopping and starting the movie, freezing on certain images. On
weekends he would watch it for hours, from when the sky was changing
from night to day until long after it had turned black again. And then he
realized that it was dangerous to watch these movies chronologically,

because with each film, it would mean he was getting closer to Willem’s
death. And so he now chose the month’s film at random, and that had
proven safer.
But the biggest, the most sustaining fiction he has devised for himself is
pretending that Willem is simply away filming. The shoot is very long, and
very taxing, but it is finite, and eventually he will return. This had been a

difficult delusion, because there had never been a shoot through which he
and Willem didn’t speak, or e-mail, or text (or all three) every day. He is
grateful that he has saved so many of Willem’s e-mails, and for a period, he
was able to read these old messages at night and pretend he had just
received them: even when he wanted to binge on them, he hadn’t, and he
was careful to read just one in a sitting. But he knew that wouldn’t satisfy
him forever—he would need to be more judicious about how he doled these

e-mails out to himself. Now he reads one, just one, every week. He can read
messages he’s read in previous weeks, but not messages he hasn’t. That is
another rule.
But it didn’t solve the larger issue of Willem’s silence: What
circumstances, he puzzled to himself as he swam in the morning, as he
stood, unseeingly, over the stove at night, waiting for the teakettle to shriek,

would prevent Willem from communicating with him while on a shoot?
Finally, he was able to invent a scenario. Willem would be shooting a film
about a crew of Russian cosmonauts during the Cold War, and in this
fantasy movie, they would actually be in space, because the film was being
funded by a perhaps-crazy Russian industrialist billionaire. So away Willem
would be, circling miles above him all day and all night, wanting to come
home and unable to communicate with him. He was embarrassed by this

imaginary movie as well, by his desperation, but it also seemed just