Page 638 - A Little Life: A Novel

on pulleys, and he realized that they were painting over the ad, that they
were erasing Willem’s face. Suddenly, his breath left him, and he had
almost asked the driver to stop, but he wouldn’t have been able to—they

were on a loop of a road, one with no exits or places to pull over, and so
he’d had to sit very still, his heart erupting within him, counting the beats it
took to reach the hotel, thank the driver, get out, walk through the lobby,
ride the elevator, walk down the hallway, and enter his room, where before
he could think, he was throwing himself against the cold marble wall of the
shower, his mouth open and his eyes shut, tossing and tossing himself until
he was in so much pain that his every vertebrae felt as if it had been jolted

out of its sockets.
That night he cut himself wildly, uncontrollably, and when he was
shaking too badly to continue, he waited, and cleaned the floor, and drank
some juice to give himself energy, and then started again. After three rounds
of this he crept to the corner of the shower stall and wept, folding his arms
over his head, making his hair tacky with blood, and that night he slept

there, covered with a towel instead of a blanket. He had done this
sometimes when he was a child and had felt like he was exploding,
separating from himself like a dying star, and would feel the need to tuck
himself into the smallest space he could find so his very bones would stay
knit together. Then, he would carefully work himself out from beneath
Brother Luke and ball himself on the filthy motel carpet under the bed,
which was prickly with burrs and dropped thumbtacks and slimy with used

condoms and strange damp spots, or he would sleep in the bathtub or in the
closet, beetled up as tight as he was able. “My poor potato bug,” Brother
Luke would say when he found him like this. “Why are you doing this,
Jude?” He had been gentle, and worried, but he had never been able to
explain it.
Somehow he made it through that trip; somehow he had made it through

a year. The night of Willem’s death he dreamed of glass vases imploding, of
Willem’s body being projected through the air, of his face shattering against
the tree. He woke missing Willem so profoundly that he felt he was going
blind. The day after he returned home, he saw the first of the posters for The
Happy Years, which had reverted to its original title: The Dancer and the
Stage. Some of these posters were of Willem’s face, his hair longish like
Nureyev’s and his top scooped low on his chest, his neck long and

powerful. And some were of just monumental images of a foot—Willem’s