Page 645 - A Little Life: A Novel

deterrent to his trying again, although he knew that if he were to do it again,
it wouldn’t be an attempt: this time, he would really do it. He knew how
he’d do it; he knew it would work. Since Willem had died, he had thought

about it almost daily. He knew the timeline he’d need to follow, he knew
how he would arrange to be found. Two months ago, in a very bad week, he
had even rewritten his will so that it now read as the document of someone
who had died with apologies to make, whose bequests would be attempts to
ask for forgiveness. And although he isn’t intending to honor this will—as
he reminds himself—he hasn’t changed it, either.
He hopes for infection, something swift and fatal, something that will kill

him and leave him blameless. But there is no infection. Since his
amputations, there have been no wounds. He is still in pain, but no more—
less, actually—than he had been in before. He is cured, or at least as cured
as he will ever be.
So there is no real reason for him to see Andy once a week, but he does
anyway, because he knows Andy is worried he will kill himself. He is

worried he will kill himself. And so every Friday he goes uptown. Most of
these Fridays are just dinner dates, except for the second Friday of the
month, when their dinner is preceded by an appointment. Here, everything
is the same: only his missing feet, his missing calves, are proof that things
have changed. In other ways, he has reverted to the person he was decades
before. He is self-conscious again. He is scared to be touched. Three years
before Willem died he had finally been able to ask him to massage the

cream into the scars on his back, and Willem had done so, and for a while,
he had felt different, like a snake who had grown a new skin. But now, of
course, there is no one to help him and the scars are once again tight and
bulky, webbing his back in a series of elastic restraints.
He knows now: People don’t change. He cannot change. Willem had
thought himself transformed by the experience of helping him through his

recovery; he had been surprised by his own reserves, by his own
forebearance. But he—he and everyone else—had always known that
Willem had possessed those characteristics already. Those months may
have clarified Willem to himself, but the qualities he had discovered had
been a surprise to nobody but Willem. And in the same way, his losing
Willem has been clarifying as well. In his years with Willem, he had been
able to convince himself that he was someone else, someone happier,