Page 569 - A Little Life: A Novel

he should have been able to keep Willem despite his inabilities is a miracle,
and he tries, in every other way he can, to always communicate to Willem
how thankful he is.

He wakes one night sweating so profusely that the sheets beneath him
feel as if they’ve been dragged through a puddle, and in his haze, he stands
before he realizes he can’t, and falls. Willem wakes, then, and fetches him
the thermometer, standing over him as he holds it under his tongue. “One
hundred and two,” he says, examining it, and places his palm on his
forehead. “But you’re freezing.” He looks at him, worried. “I’m going to
call Andy.”

“Don’t call Andy,” he says, and despite the fever, the chills, the sweating,
he feels normal; he doesn’t feel sick. “I just need some aspirin.” So Willem
gets it, brings him a shirt, strips and remakes the bed, and they fall asleep
again, Willem wrapped around him.
The next night he wakes again with a fever, again with chills, again with
sweating. “There’s something going around the office,” he tells Willem this

time. “Some forty-eight-hour bug. I must’ve caught it.” Again he takes
aspirin; again it helps; again he goes back to sleep.
The day after that is a Friday and he goes to Andy to have his wounds
cleaned, but he doesn’t mention the fever, which disappears by daylight.
That night Willem is away, having dinner with Roman, and he goes to bed
early, swallowing some aspirin before he does. He sleeps so deeply that he
doesn’t even hear Willem come in, but when he wakes the following

morning, he is so sweaty that it looks as if he’s been standing under the
shower, and his limbs are numb and shaky. Beside him, Willem gently
snores, and he sits, slowly, running his hands through his wet hair.
He really is better that Saturday. He goes to work. Willem goes to meet a
director for lunch. Before he leaves the offices for the evening, he texts
Willem and tells him to ask Richard and India if they want to meet for sushi

on the Upper East Side, at a little restaurant he and Andy sometimes go to
after their appointments. He and Willem have two favorite sushi places near
Greene Street, but both of them have flights of descending stairs, and so
they have been unable to go for months because the steps are too difficult
for him. That night he eats well, and even as the fatigue punches him
midway through the meal, he is conscious that he is enjoying himself, that
he is grateful to be in this small, warm place, with its yellow-lit lanterns

above him and the wooden geta-like slab atop which are laid tongues of