Page 648 - A Little Life: A Novel

introduces them and they shake hands. “I’ve heard so much about you,
Jude,” Linus says. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, finally.”
“You too,” he says. “Congratulations.”

Andy leaves them to talk, and they do, a little awkwardly, joking about
how this meeting seems like a blind date. Linus has been told only about his
amputations, and they discuss them briefly, and the osteomyelitis that had
preceded them. “Those treatments can be a killer,” Linus says, but he
doesn’t offer his sympathy for his lost legs, which he appreciates. Linus had
been a doctor at a group practice that he’d heard Andy mention before; he
seems genuinely admiring of Andy and excited to be working with him.

There is nothing wrong with Linus. He can tell, by the questions he asks,
and the respect with which he asks them, that he is indeed a good doctor,
and probably a good person. But he also knows he will never be able to
undress in front of Linus. He can’t imagine having the discussions he has
with Andy with anyone else. He can’t imagine allowing anyone else such
access to his body, to his fears. When he thinks of someone seeing his body

anew he quails: ever since the amputation, he has only looked at himself
once. He watches Linus’s face, his unsettlingly Willem-like smile, and
although he is only five years older than Linus, he feels centuries older,
something broken and desiccated, something that anyone would look at and
quickly throw the tarpaulin over once more. “Take this one away,” they’d
say. “It’s junked.”
He thinks of the conversations he will need to have, the explanations he

will need to give: about his back, his arms, his legs, his diseases. He is so
sick of his own fears, his own trepidations, but as tired as he is of them, he
also cannot stop himself from indulging them. He thinks of Linus paging
slowly through his chart, of seeing the years, the decades, of notes Andy
has made about him: lists of his cuts, of his wounds, of the medications he
has been on, of the flare-ups of his infections. Notes on his suicide attempt,

on Andy’s pleas to get him to see Dr. Loehmann. He knows Andy has
chronicled all of this; he knows how meticulous he is.
“You have to tell someone,” Ana used to say, and as he had grown older,
he had decided to interpret this sentence literally: Some One. Someday, he
thought, somehow, he would find a way to tell some one, one person. And
then he had, someone he had trusted, and that person had died, and he
didn’t have the fortitude to tell his story ever again. But then, didn’t

everyone only tell their lives—truly tell their lives—to one person? How