Page 684 - A Little Life: A Novel

into the skies. And down below, there was a knot of us trying to pull the
balloon back to the ground, back to safety. And so I was always frightened
for him, and I was always frightened of him, as well.

Can you have a real relationship with someone you are frightened of? Of
course you can. But he still scared me, because he was the powerful one
and I was not: if he killed himself, if he took himself away from me, I knew
I would survive, but I knew as well that survival would be a chore; I knew
that forever after I would be hunting for explanations, sifting through the
past to examine my mistakes. And of course I knew how badly I would
miss him, because although there had been trial runs for his eventual

departure, I had never been able to get any better at dealing with them, and I
was never able to get used to them.
But then we came home, and everything was the same: Mr. Ahmed met
us at the airport and drove us back to the apartment, and waiting for us with
the doorman were bags of food so we wouldn’t have to go to the grocery
store. The next day was a Thursday and he came over and we had dinner,

and he asked what we had seen and done and we told him. That night we
were washing the dishes, and as he was handing me a bowl to put in the
dishwasher, it slipped through his fingers and broke against the floor.
“Goddammit,” he shouted. “I’m so sorry, Harold. I’m so stupid, I’m so
clumsy,” and although we told him it wasn’t a problem, that it was fine, he
only grew more and more upset, so upset that his hands started to shake,
that his nose started to bleed. “Jude,” I told him, “it’s okay. It happens,” but

he shook his head. “No,” he said, “it’s me. I mess up everything. Everything
I touch I ruin.” Julia and I had looked at each other over his head as he was
picking up the pieces, unsure what to say or do: the reaction was so out of
proportion to what had happened. But there had been a few incidents in the
preceding months, ever since he had thrown that plate across the room, that
made me realize, for the first time in my life with him, how truly angry he

was, how hard he must work every day at controlling it.
After that first incident with the plate there had been another, a few
weeks later. This was up at Lantern House, where he hadn’t been in months.
It was morning, just after breakfast, and Julia and I were leaving to go to the
store, and I went to find him to ask what he wanted. He was in his bedroom,
and the door was slightly ajar, and when I saw what he was doing, I for
some reason didn’t call his name, didn’t walk away, but stood just outside

the frame, silent and watching. He had one prosthesis on and was putting on