Page 669 - A Little Life: A Novel

He waits in this conference room, which has no windows and is the most
private, and when Andy comes in, he sees his mouth tighten, but they shake
hands like strangers, and it’s not until his secretary leaves that Andy gets up

and walks over to him.
“Stand up,” he commands.
“I can’t,” he says.
“Why not?”
“My legs hurt,” he says, but this isn’t true. He cannot stand because his
prostheses no longer fit. “The good thing about these prostheses is that
they’re very sensitive and lightweight,” the prosthetist had told him when

he was fitted for them. “The bad thing is that the sockets don’t allow you
very much give. You lose or gain more than ten percent of your body
weight—so for you, that’s plus or minus fourteen, fifteen pounds—and
you’re either going to need to adjust your weight or have a new set made.
So it’s important you stay at weight.” For the past three weeks, he has been
in his wheelchair, and although he continues to wear his legs, they are only

for show, something to fill his pants with; they are too ill-fitting for him to
actually use, and he is too weary to see the prosthetist, too weary to have
the conversation he knows he’ll need to have with him, too weary to
conjure explanations.
“I think you’re lying,” Andy says. “I think you’ve lost so much weight
that your prostheses are sliding off of you, am I right?” But he doesn’t
answer. “How much weight have you lost, Jude?” Andy asks. “When I last

saw you, you were already twelve pounds down. How much is it now?
Twenty? More?” There’s another silence. “What the hell are you doing?”
Andy asks, lowering his voice further. “What’re you doing to yourself,
Jude?
“You look like hell,” Andy continues. “You look terrible. You look sick.”
He stops. “Say something,” he says. “Say something, goddammit, Jude.”

He knows how this interaction is meant to go: Andy yells at him. He
yells back at Andy. A détente, one that ultimately changes nothing, one that
is a piece of pantomime, is reached: he will submit to something that isn’t a
solution but that makes Andy feel better. And then something worse will
happen, and the pantomime will be revealed to be just that, and he will be
coerced into a treatment he doesn’t want. Harold will be called. He will be
lectured and lectured and lectured and he will lie and lie and lie. The same

cycle, the same circle, again and again and again, a churn as predictable as