Page 623 - A Little Life: A Novel

been in the hospital, on a suicide watch. Now he stumbles through his days
and wonders why he isn’t, in fact, killing himself. This is, after all, the time
to do it. No one would blame him. And yet he doesn’t.

At least no one tells him that he should move on. He doesn’t want to
move on, he doesn’t want to move into something else: he wants to remain
exactly at this stage, forever. At least no one tells him he’s in denial. Denial
is what sustains him, and he is dreading the day when his delusions will
lose their power to convince him. For the first time in decades, he isn’t
cutting himself at all. If he doesn’t cut himself, he remains numb, and he
needs to remain numb; he needs the world to not come too close to him. He

has finally managed to achieve what Willem had always hoped for him; all
it took was Willem being taken from him.
In January he had a dream that he and Willem were in the house upstate
making dinner and talking: something they’d done hundreds of times. But
in the dream, although he could hear his own voice, he couldn’t hear
Willem’s—he could see his mouth moving, but he couldn’t hear anything

he was saying. He had woken, then, and had thrown himself into his
wheelchair and moved as quickly as he could into his study, where he
scrolled through all of his old e-mails, searching and searching until he
found a few voice messages from Willem that he had forgotten to delete.
The messages were brief, and unrevealing, but he played them over and
over, weeping, bent double with grief, the messages’ very banality—“Hey.
Judy. I’m going to the farmers’ market to pick up those ramps. But do you

want anything else? Let me know”—something precious, because it was
proof of their life together.
“Willem,” he said aloud to the apartment, because sometimes, when it
was very bad, he spoke to him. “Come back to me. Come back.”
He feels no sense of survivor’s guilt but rather survivor’s
incomprehension: he had always, always known he would predecease

Willem. They all knew it. Willem, Andy, Harold, JB, Malcolm, Julia,
Richard: he would die before all of them. The only question was how he
would die—it would be by his own hand, or it would be by infection. But
none of them had ever thought that Willem, of all people, would die before
he did. There had been no plans made for that, no contingencies. Had he
known this was a possibility, had it been less absurd a concept, he would
have stockpiled. He would have made recordings of Willem’s voice talking

to him and kept them. He would have taken more pictures. He would have