Page 420 - A Little Life: A Novel

In the first, raw weeks after Jude had gotten out of the hospital, Willem
used to go into his room at odd hours to give himself confirmation that Jude
was there, and alive. Back then, Jude slept constantly, and he would

sometimes sit on the end of his bed, staring at him and feeling a sort of
horrible wonder that he was still with them at all. He would think: If
Richard had found him just twenty minutes later, Jude would have been
dead. About a month after Jude had been released, Willem had been at the
drugstore and had seen a box cutter hanging on the rack—such a medieval,
cruel instrument, it seemed—and had almost burst into tears: Andy had told
him that the emergency room surgeon had said Jude’s had been the deepest,

most decisive self-inflicted incisions he had ever seen in his career. He had
always known that Jude was troubled, but he was awestruck, almost, by
how little he knew him, by the depths of his determination to harm himself.
He felt that he had in some ways learned more about Jude in the past year
than he had in the past twenty-six, and each new thing he learned was
awful: Jude’s stories were the kinds of stories that he was unequipped to

answer, because so many of them were unanswerable. The story of the scar
on the back of his hand—that had been the one that had begun it—had been
so terrible that Willem had stayed up that night, unable to sleep, and had
seriously contemplated calling Harold, just to be able to have someone else
share the story with him, to be speechless alongside him.
The next day he couldn’t stop himself from staring at Jude’s hand, and
Jude had finally drawn his sleeve over it. “You’re making me self-

conscious,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” he’d said.
Jude had sighed. “Willem, I’m not going to tell you these stories if you’re
going to react like this,” he said, finally. “It’s okay, it really is. It was a long
time ago. I never think about it.” He paused. “I don’t want you to look at
me differently if I tell you these things.”

He’d taken a deep breath. “No,” he said. “You’re right. You’re right.”
And so now when he listened to these stories of Jude’s, he was careful not
to say anything, to make small, nonjudgmental noises, as if all his friends
had been whipped with a belt soaked in vinegar until they had passed out or
been made to eat their own vomit off the floor, as if those were normal rites
of childhood. But despite these stories, he still knew nothing: He still didn’t
know who Brother Luke was. He still didn’t know anything except isolated

stories about the monastery, or the home. He still didn’t know how Jude had