Page 664 - A Little Life: A Novel

can’t remember when he last heard from Citizen or Rhodes or the Henry
Youngs or Elijah or Phaedra—it has been weeks, at least. And although he
knows he should care, he doesn’t. His hope, his energy are no longer

replenishable resources; his reserves are limited, and he wants to spend
them trying to find Willem, even if the hunt is elusive, even if he is likely to
fail.
And so home he goes, and he waits and waits for Willem to appear to
him. But he doesn’t, and finally he sleeps.
The next day he waits in bed, trying to suspend himself between alertness
and dazedness, for that (he thinks) is the state in which he is most likely to

summon Willem.
On Monday he wakes, feeling foolish. This has got to stop, he tells
himself. You have got to rejoin the living. You’re acting like an insane
person. Visions? Do you know what you sound like?
He thinks of the monastery, where Brother Pavel liked to tell him the
story of an eleventh-century nun named Hildegard. Hildegard had visions;

she closed her eyes and illuminated objects appeared before her; her days
were aswim with light. But Brother Pavel was less interested in Hildegard
than in Hildegard’s instructor, Jutta, who had forsaken the material world to
live as an ascetic in a small cell, dead to the concerns of the living, alive but
not alive. “That’s what will happen to you if you don’t obey,” Pavel would
say, and he would be terrified. There was a small toolshed on the
monastery’s grounds, dark and chilly and jumbled with malevolent-looking

iron objects, each of them ending in a spike, a spear, a scythe, and when the
brother told him of Jutta, he imagined he would be forced into the toolshed,
fed just enough to survive, and on and on and on he would live, almost
forgotten but not completely, almost dead but not completely. But even
Jutta had had Hildegard for company. He would have no one. How
frightened he had been; how certain he was that this, someday, would come

to pass.
Now, as he lies in bed, he hears the old lied murmur to him. “I have
become lost to the world,” he sings, quietly, “in which I otherwise wasted
so much time.”
But although he knows how foolish he is being, he still cannot bring
himself to eat. The very act of it now repels him. He wishes he were above
want, above need. He has a vision of his life as a sliver of soap, worn and