Page 622 - A Little Life: A Novel

the trucks, which was the only part of his life that counted—had had
Willem in it. There had not been a day since he was sixteen and met Willem
in their room at Hood Hall in which he had not communicated with Willem

in some way. Even when they were fighting, they spoke. “Jude,” Harold
had said, “it will get better. I swear. I swear. It won’t seem like it now, but it
will.” They all said this: Richard and JB and Andy; the people who wrote
him cards. Kit. Emil. All they told him was that it would get better. But
although he knew enough to never say so aloud, privately he thought: It
won’t. Harold had had Jacob for five years. He had had Willem for thirty-
four. There was no comparison. Willem had been the first person who loved

him, the first person who had seen him not as an object to be used or pitied
but as something else, as a friend; he had been the second person who had
always, always been kind to him. If he hadn’t had Willem, he wouldn’t have
had any of them—he would never have been able to trust Harold if he
hadn’t trusted Willem first. He was unable to conceive of life without him,
because Willem had so defined what his life was and could be.

The next day he did what he never did: he called Sanjay and told him he
wasn’t coming in for the next two days. And then he had lain in bed and
cried, screaming into the pillows until he lost his voice completely.
But from those two days he had found another solution. Now he stays
very late at work, so late that he has seen the sun rise from his office. He
does this every weekday, and on Saturdays as well. But on Sundays he
sleeps as late as he can, and when he wakes, he takes a pill, one that not

only makes him fall asleep again but bludgeons into obsolescence all
glimmers of wakefulness. He sleeps until the pill wears off, and then he
takes a shower and gets back into bed and takes a different pill, one that
makes sleep shallow and glassy, and sleeps until Monday morning. By
Monday, he has not eaten in twenty-four hours, sometimes more, and he is
trembly and thoughtless. He swims, he goes to work. If he is lucky, he has

spent Sunday dreaming of Willem, for at least a little while. He has bought
a long, fat pillow, as long as a man is tall, one meant to be pressed against
by pregnant women or by people with back problems, and he drapes one of
Willem’s shirts over it and holds it as he sleeps, even though in life, it was
Willem who held him. He hates himself for this, but he cannot stop.
He is aware, dimly, that his friends are watching him, that they are
worried about him. At some point it had emerged that one of the reasons he

remembers so little from the days after the accident was because he had