Page 378 - A Little Life: A Novel

—and he could feel that Willem was surprised, but then he increased his
pressure as well, and the two of them stood there, wrapped around each
other, for a long time. He remembered thinking that he wasn’t wearing

enough layers to really let Willem hug him this closely, that Willem would
be able to feel the scars on his back through his shirt, but in the moment it
was more important to simply be near him; he had the sense that this was
the last time this would happen, the last time he would see Willem. He had
this fear every time Willem went away, but it was keener this time, less
theoretical; it felt more like a real departure.
After Willem left, things were fine for a few days. But then they got bad

again. The hyenas returned, more numerous and famished than before, more
vigilant in their hunt. And then everything else returned as well: years and
years and years of memories he had thought he had controlled and
defanged, all crowding him once again, yelping and leaping before his face,
unignorable in their sounds, indefatigable in their clamor for his attention.
He woke gasping for air: he woke with the names of people he had sworn

he would never think of again on his tongue. He replayed the night with
Caleb again and again, obsessively, the memory slowing so that the seconds
he was standing naked in the rain on Greene Street stretched into hours, so
that his flight down the stairs took days, so that Caleb’s raping him in the
shower, in the elevator, took weeks. He had visions of taking an ice pick
and jamming it through his ear, into his brain, to stop the memories. He
dreamed of slamming his head against the wall until it split and cracked and

the gray meat tumbled out with a wet, bloody thunk. He had fantasies of
emptying a container of gasoline over himself and then striking a match, of
his mind being gobbled by fire. He bought a set of X-ACTO blades and held
three of them in his palm and made a fist around them and watched the
blood drip from his hand into the sink as he screamed into the quiet
apartment.

He asked Lucien for more work and was given it, but it wasn’t enough.
He tried to volunteer for more hours at the artists’ nonprofit, but they didn’t
have any additional shifts to give him. He tried to volunteer at a place
where Rhodes had once done some pro bono work, an immigrants’ rights
organization, but they said they were really looking for Mandarin and
Arabic speakers at the moment and didn’t want to waste his time. He cut
himself more and more; he began cutting around the scars themselves, so

that he could actually remove wedges of flesh, each piece topped with a