Page 663 - A Little Life: A Novel

months, because now he knows how to recall Willem; now he knows his
ability to summon Willem is within his control.
He cancels his appointment with Andy so he can stay home and

experiment. This is the third consecutive Friday he hasn’t seen Andy. Since
that night at the restaurant, the two of them have been polite with each
other, and Andy hasn’t mentioned Linus, or any other doctor, again,
although he has said he’ll raise the subject anew in six months. “It’s not a
matter of wanting to get rid of you, Jude,” he said. “And I’m sorry, I really
am, if that’s how it sounded. I’m just worried. I just want to make sure we
find someone you like, someone I know you’ll be comfortable with.”

“I know, Andy,” he said. “And I appreciate it; I do. I’ve been behaving
badly, and I took it out on you.” But he knows now that he has to be careful:
he has tasted anger, and he knows he has to control it. He can feel it,
waiting to burst from his mouth in a swarm of stinging black flies. Where
has this rage been hiding? he wonders. How can he make it disappear?
Lately his dreams have been of violence, of terrible things befalling the

people he hates, the people he loves: he sees Brother Luke being stuffed
into a sack full of squealing, starved rats; he sees JB’s head being slammed
against a wall, his brain splashing out in a gray slurry. In the dreams he is
always there, dispassionate and watchful, and after witnessing their
destruction, he turns and walks away. He wakes with his nose bleeding the
way it had when he was a child and was suppressing a tantrum, with his
hands shaking, with his face contorted into a snarl.

That Friday Willem doesn’t come to him after all. But the next evening,
as he is leaving the office to meet JB for dinner, he turns his head to the
right and sees, sitting next to him in the car, Willem. This time, he fancies,
Willem is a little harder-edged, a little more solid, and he stares and stares
until he blinks and Willem once again dissolves.
After these episodes he is depleted, and the world around him dims as if

all its power and electricity has gone toward creating Willem. He instructs
Mr. Ahmed to take him home instead of to the restaurant; as he is driven
south, he texts JB to tell him he’s feeling sick and can’t make it. He is doing
this more and more: canceling plans with people, shoddily and usually
unforgivably late—an hour before a hard-to-secure dinner reservation,
minutes after a scheduled meeting time at a gallery, seconds before the
curtain rises above a stage. Richard, JB, Andy, Harold and Julia: these are

the final people who still contact him, persistently, week after week. He