Page 662 - A Little Life: A Novel

He knows what is happening, of course: he isn’t eating enough. He hasn’t
been for months. Some days he eats very little—a piece of fruit; a piece of
bread—and some days he eats nothing at all. It isn’t as if he has decided to

stop eating—it is simply that he is no longer interested, that he no longer
can. He isn’t hungry, so he doesn’t eat.
That Monday, though, he does. He gets up, he totters downstairs. He
swims, but poorly, slowly. And then he comes back upstairs, he makes
himself breakfast. He sits and eats it, staring into the apartment, the
newspapers folded on the table beside him. He opens his mouth, he inserts a
forkful of food, he chews, he swallows. He keeps his movements

mechanical, but suddenly he thinks of how grotesque a process it is, putting
something into his mouth, moving it around with his tongue, swallowing
down the saliva-clotted plug of it, and he stops. Still, he promises himself: I
will eat, even if I don’t want to, because I am alive and this is what I am to
do. But he forgets, and forgets again.
And then, two days later, something happens. He has just come home, so

exhausted that he feels soluble, as if he is evaporating into the air, so
insubstantial that he feels made not of blood and bone but of vapor and fog,
when he sees Willem standing before him. He opens his mouth to speak to
him, but then he blinks and Willem is gone, and he is teetering, his arms
stretched before him.
“Willem,” he says aloud into the empty apartment. “Willem.” He closes
his eyes, as if he might conjure him that way, but Willem doesn’t reappear.

The next day, however, he does. He is once again at home. It is once
again night. He has once again not eaten anything. He is lying in bed, he is
staring into the dark of the room. And there, abruptly, is Willem, shimmery
as a hologram, the edges of him blurring with light, and although Willem
isn’t looking at him—he is looking elsewhere, looking toward the doorway,
looking so intently that he wants to follow Willem’s sightline, to see what

Willem sees, but he knows he mustn’t blink, he mustn’t turn away, or
Willem will leave him—it is enough to see him, to feel that he in some way
still exists, that his disappearance might not be a permanent state after all.
But finally, he has to blink, and Willem vanishes once more.
However, he isn’t too upset, because now he knows: if he doesn’t eat, if
he can last to the point just before collapse, he will begin having
hallucinations, and his hallucinations might be of Willem. That night he

falls asleep contented, the first time he has felt contentment in nearly fifteen