Page 692 - A Little Life: A Novel

good mood, to keep us both aloft. “Here we are at the site of all my
nightmares: The Worst Apartment in the World,” and he laughed, and we
veered right off of Church and walked half a block down Lispenard Street

until we were standing in front of your old building. For a while I ranted on
and on about the place, about how horrible it was, exaggerating and
embroidering for effect, to hear him laugh and protest. “I was always afraid
a fire was going to go ripping through that place and you’d both end up
dead,” I said. “I had dreams of getting phoned by the emergency technicians
that they’d found you both gnawed to death by a swarm of rats.”
“It wasn’t that bad, Harold,” he smiled. “I have very fond memories of

this place, actually.” And then the mood turned again, and we both stood
there staring at the building and thinking of you, and him, and all the years
between this moment and the one in which I had met him, so young, so
terribly young, and at that time just another student, terrifically smart and
intellectually nimble, but nothing more, not the person I could have ever
imagined him becoming for me.

And then he said—he was trying to make me feel better, too; we were
each performing for the other—“Did I ever tell you about the time we
jumped off the roof to the fire escape outside our bedroom?”
“What?” I asked, genuinely appalled. “No, you never did. I think I would
have remembered that.”
But although I could never have imagined the person he would become
for me, I knew how he would leave me: despite all my hopes, and pleas,

and insinuations, and threats, and magical thoughts, I knew. And five
months later—June twelfth, a day with no significant anniversaries
associated with it, a nothing day—he did. My phone rang, and although it
wasn’t a sinister time of night, and although nothing had happened that I
would later see as foreshadowing, I knew, I knew. And on the other end was
JB, and he was breathing oddly, in rapid bursts, and even before he spoke, I

knew. He was fifty-three, fifty-three for not even two months. He had
injected an artery with air, and had given himself a stroke, and although
Andy had told me his death would have been quick, and painless, I later
looked it up online and found he had lied to me: it would have meant
sticking himself at least twice, with a needle whose gauge was as thick as a
hummingbird’s beak; it would have been agonizing.
When I went to his apartment, finally, it was so neat, with his office

boxed up and the refrigerator emptied and everything—his will, letters—