Page 671 - A Little Life: A Novel

he needs is one answer. All he needs is to be convinced once. The proof
needn’t be elegant; it need only be explicable.
The trial arrives. He does well. At home that Friday, he wheels himself

into the bedroom, into bed. He spends the entire weekend in a sleep that is
unfamiliar and eerie, less a sleep than a glide, weightlessly moving between
the realms of memory and fantasy, unconsciousness and wakefulness,
anxiety and hopefulness. This is not the world of dreams, he thinks, but
someplace else, and although he is aware at moments of waking—he sees
the chandelier above him, the sheets around him, the sofa with its wood-
fern print across from him—he is unable to distinguish when things have

happened in his visions from when they have actually happened. He sees
himself lifting a blade to his arm and slicing it down through his flesh, but
what springs from the slit are coils of metal and stuffing and horsehair, and
he realizes that he has undergone a mutation, that he is no longer even
human, and he feels relief: he won’t have to break his promise to Harold
after all; he has been enchanted; his culpability has vanished with his

humanity.
Is this real? the voice asks him, tiny and hopeful. Are we inanimate now?
But he can’t answer himself.
Again and again he sees Brother Luke, Dr. Traylor. As he has gotten
weaker, as he has drifted from himself, he sees them more and more
frequently, and although Willem and Malcolm have dimmed for him,
Brother Luke and Dr. Traylor have not. He feels his past is a cancer, one he

should have treated long ago but instead ignored. And now Brother Luke
and Dr. Traylor have metastasized, now they are too large and too
overwhelming for him to eliminate. Now when they appear, they are
wordless: they stand before him, they sit, side by side, on the sofa in his
bedroom, staring at him, and this is worse than if they spoke, because he
knows they are trying to decide what to do with him, and he knows that

whatever they decide will be worse than he can imagine, worse than what
had happened before. At one point he sees them whispering to each other,
and he knows they are talking about him. “Stop,” he yells at them, “stop,
stop,” but they ignore him, and when he tries to get up to make them leave,
he is unable to do so. “Willem,” he hears himself call, “protect me, help me;
make them leave, make them go away.” But Willem doesn’t come, and he
realizes he is alone and becomes afraid, concealing himself under the

blanket and remaining as still as he can, certain that time has doubled back