A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

  He had been thrilled by Harold’s speech, and in the coming weeks, by how differently Harold thought, by how he would stand at the front of the room like a conductor, stretching out a student’s argument into strange and unimaginable formations. Once, a fairly benign discussion about the right to privacy—both the most cherished and the foggiest of constitutional rights, according to Harold, whose definition of contracts often ignored conventional boundaries and bounded happily into other fields of law—had led to an argument between the two of them about abortion, which he felt was indefensible on moral grounds but necessary on social ones. “Aha!” Harold had said; he was one of the few professors who would entertain not just legal arguments but moral ones. “And, Mr. St. Francis, what happens when we forsake morals in law for social governance? What is the point at which a country, and its people, should start valuing social control over its sense of morality? Is there such a point? I’m not convinced there is.” But he had hung in, and the class had stilled around them, watching the two of them debate back and forth.

  Harold was the author of three books, but it was his last, The American Handshake: The Promises and Failures of the Declaration of Independence, that had made him famous. The book, which he had read even before he met Harold, was a legal interpretation of the Declaration of Independence: Which of its promises had been kept and which had not, and were it written today, would it be able to withstand trends in contemporary jurisprudence? (“Short answer: No,” read the Times review.) Now he was researching his fourth book, a sequel of sorts to The American Handshake, about the Constitution, from a similar perspective.

  “But only the Bill of Rights, and the sexier amendments,” Harold told him when he was interviewing him for the research assistant position.

  “I didn’t know some were sexier than others,” he said.

  “Of course some are sexier than others,” said Harold. “Only the eleventh, twelfth, fourteenth, and sixteenth are sexy. The rest are basically the dross of politics past.”

  “The thirteenth is garbage?” he asked, enjoying himself.

  “I didn’t say it was garbage,” Harold said, “just not sexy.”

  “But I think that’s what dross means.”

  Harold sighed dramatically, grabbed the dictionary off his desk, flipped it open, and studied it for a moment. “Okay, fine,” he said, tossing it back onto a heap of papers, which slid toward the edge of the surface. “The third definition. But I meant the first definition: the leftovers, the detritus—the remains of politics past. Happy?”

  “Yes,” he said, trying not to smile.

  He began working for Harold on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons and evenings, when his course load was lightest—on Tuedays and Thursdays he had afternoon seminars at MIT, where he was getting his master’s, and worked in the law library at night, and on Saturdays he worked in the library in the morning and in the afternoons at a bakery called Batter, which was near the medical college, where he had worked since he was an undergraduate and where he fulfilled specialty orders: decorating cookies and making hundreds of sugar-paste flower petals for cakes and experimenting with different recipes, one of which, a ten-nut cake, had become the bakery’s best seller. He worked at Batter on Sundays as well, and one day Allison, the bakery’s owner, who entrusted him with many of the more complicated projects, handed him an order form for three dozen sugar cookies decorated to look like various kinds of bacteria. “I thought you of all people might be able to figure this out,” she said. “The customer’s wife’s a microbiologist and he wants to surprise her and her lab.”

  “I’ll do some research,” he said, taking the page from her, and noting the customer’s name: Harold Stein. So he had, asking CM and Janusz for their advice, and had made cookies shaped like paisleys, like mace balls, like cucumbers, using different-colored frosting to draw their cytoplasms and plasma membranes and ribosomes and fashioning flagella from strands of licorice. He typed up a list identifying each and folded it into the box before closing it and tying it with twine; he didn’t know Harold very well then, but he liked the idea of making something for him, of impressing him, even if anonymously. And he liked wondering what the cookies were meant to celebrate: A publication? An anniversary? Or was it simple uxoriousness? Was Harold Stein the sort of person who showed up at his wife’s lab with cookies for no reason? He suspected he perhaps was.

  The following week, Harold told him about the amazing cookies he’d gotten at Batter. His enthusiasm, which just a few hours ago in class had been directed at the Uniform Commercial Code, had found a new subject in the cookies. He sat, biting the inside of his cheek so he wouldn’t smile, listening to Harold talk about how genius they’d been and how Julia’s lab had been struck speechless by their detail and verisimilitude, and how he had been, briefly, the hero of the lab: “Not an easy thing to be with those people, by the way, who secretly think everyone involved in the humanities is something of a moron.”

  “Sounds like those cookies were made by a real obsessive,” he said. He hadn’t told Harold he worked at Batter, and didn’t plan on doing so, either.

  “Then that’s an obsessive I’d like to meet,” said Harold. “They were delicious, too.”

  “Mmm,” he said, and thought of a question to ask Harold so he wouldn’t keep talking about the cookies.

  Harold had other research assistants, of course—two second-years and a third-year he knew only by sight—but their schedules were such that they never overlapped. Sometimes they communicated with one another by notes or e-mail, explaining where they’d left off in their research so the next person could pick it up and carry it forward. But by the second semester of his first year, Harold had assigned him to work exclusively on the fifth amendment. “That’s a good one,” he said. “Incredibly sexy.” The two second-year assistants were assigned the ninth amendment, and the third-year, the tenth, and as much as he knew it was ridiculous, he couldn’t help but feel triumphant, as if he had been favored with something the others hadn’t.

  The first invitation to dinner at Harold’s house had been spontaneous, at the end of one cold and dark March afternoon. “Are you sure?” he asked, tentative.

  Harold had looked at him, curiously. “Of course,” he said. “It’s just dinner. You have to eat, right?”

  Harold lived in a three-story house in Cambridge, at the edge of the undergraduate campus. “I didn’t know you lived here,” he said, as Harold pulled into the driveway. “This is one of my favorite streets. I used to walk down it every day as a shortcut to the other side of campus.”

  “You and everybody else,” Harold replied. “When I bought it just before I got divorced, all these houses were occupied by grad students; all the shutters were falling off. The smell of pot was so thick you could get stoned just driving by.”

  It was snowing, just lightly, but he was grateful that there were only two steps leading up to the door, and that he wouldn’t have to worry about slipping or needing Harold’s help. Inside, the house smelled of butter and pepper and starch: pasta, he thought. Harold dropped his briefcase on the floor and gave him a vague tour—“Living room; study behind it; kitchen and dining room to your left”—and he met Julia, who was tall like Harold, with short brown hair, and whom he liked instantly.

  “Jude!” she said. “Finally! I’ve heard so much about you; I’m so happy to be meeting you at last.” It sounded, he thought, like she really was.

  Over dinner, they talked. Julia was from an academic family from Oxford and had lived in America since graduate school at Stanford; she and Harold had met five years ago through a friend. Her lab studied a new virus that appeared to be a variant of H5N1 and they were trying to map its genetic code.

  “Isn’t one of the concerns in microbiology the potential weaponization of these genomes?” he asked, and felt, rather than saw, Harold turn toward him.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Julia said, and as she explained to him the controversies surrounding her and her colleagues’ work, h
e glanced over at Harold, who was watching him, and who raised an eyebrow at him in a gesture that he couldn’t interpret.

  But then the conversation shifted, and he could almost watch as the discussion moved steadily away from Julia’s lab and inexorably toward him, could see how good a litigator Harold would be if he wanted to, could see his skill in redirecting and repositioning, almost as if their conversation were something liquid, and he was guiding it through a series of troughs and chutes, eliminating any options for its escape, until it reached its inevitable end.

  “So, Jude,” Julia asked, “where did you grow up?”

  “South Dakota and Montana, mostly,” he said, and he could feel the creature inside of him sit up, aware of danger but unable to escape it.

  “So are your parents ranchers?” asked Harold.

  He had learned over the years to anticipate this sequence of questioning, and how to deflect it as well. “No,” he said, “but a lot of people were, obviously. It’s beautiful countryside out there; have you spent any time in the West?”

  Usually, this was enough, but it wasn’t for Harold. “Ha!” he said. “That’s the silkiest pivot I’ve heard in a long time.” Harold looked at him, closely enough so that he eventually looked down at his plate. “I suppose that’s your way of saying you’re not going to tell us what they do?”

  “Oh, Harold, leave him alone,” said Julia, but he could feel Harold staring at him, and was relieved when dinner ended.

  After that first night at Harold’s, their relationship became both deeper and more difficult. He felt he had awakened Harold’s curiosity, which he imagined as a perked, bright-eyed dog—a terrier, something relentless and keen—and wasn’t sure that was such a good thing. He wanted to know Harold better, but over dinner he had been reminded that that process—getting to know someone—was always so much more challenging than he remembered. He always forgot; he was always made to remember. He wished, as he often did, that the entire sequence—the divulging of intimacies, the exploring of pasts—could be sped past, and that he could simply be teleported to the next stage, where the relationship was something soft and pliable and comfortable, where both parties’ limits were understood and respected.

  Other people might have made a few more attempts at questioning him and then left him alone—other people had left him alone: his friends, his classmates, his other professors—but Harold was not as easily dissuaded. Even his usual strategies—among them, telling his interlocutors that he wanted to hear about their lives, not talk about his: a tactic that had the benefit of being true as well as effective—didn’t work with Harold. He never knew when Harold would pounce next, but whenever he did, he was unprepared, and he felt himself becoming more self-conscious, not less, the more time they spent with each other.

  They would be in Harold’s office, talking about something—the University of Virginia affirmative action case going before the Supreme Court, say—and Harold would ask, “What’s your ethnic background, Jude?”

  “A lot of things,” he would answer, and then would try to change the subject, even if it meant dropping a stack of books to cause a distraction.

  But sometimes the questions were contextless and random, and these were impossible to anticipate, as they came without preamble. One night he and Harold were in his office, working late, and Harold ordered them dinner. For dessert, he’d gotten cookies and brownies, and he pushed the paper bags toward him.

  “No, thanks,” he said.

  “Really?” Harold asked, raising his eyebrows. “My son used to love these. We tried to bake them for him at home, but we never got the recipe quite right.” He broke a brownie in half. “Did your parents bake for you a lot when you were a kid?” He would ask these questions with a deliberate casualness that he found almost unbearable.

  “No,” he said, pretending to review the notes he’d been taking.

  He listened to Harold chewing and, he knew, considering whether to retreat or to continue his line of questioning.

  “Do you see your parents often?” Harold asked him, abruptly, on a different night.

  “They’re dead,” he said, keeping his eyes on the page.

  “I’m sorry, Jude,” Harold said after a silence, and the sincerity in his voice made him look up. “Mine are, too. Relatively recently. Of course, I’m much older than you.”

  “I’m sorry, Harold,” he said. And then, guessing, “You were close to them.”

  “I was,” said Harold. “Very. Were you close to yours?”

  He shook his head. “No, not really.”

  Harold was quiet. “But I’ll bet they were proud of you,” he said, finally.

  Whenever Harold asked him questions about himself, he always felt something cold move across him, as if he were being iced from the inside, his organs and nerves being protected by a sheath of frost. In that moment, though, he thought he might break, that if he said anything the ice would shatter and he would splinter and crack. So he waited until he knew he would sound normal before he asked Harold if he needed him to find the rest of the articles now or if he should do it in the morning. He didn’t look at Harold, though, and spoke only to his notebook.

  Harold took a long time to reply. “Tomorrow,” Harold said, quietly, and he nodded, and gathered his things to go home for the night, aware of Harold’s eyes following his lurching progress to the door.

  Harold wanted to know how he had been raised, and if he had any siblings, and who his friends were, and what he did with them: he was greedy for information. At least he could answer the last questions, and he told him about his friends, and how they had met, and where they were: Malcolm in graduate school at Columbia, JB and Willem at Yale. He liked answering Harold’s questions about them, liked talking about them, liked hearing Harold laugh when he told him stories about them. He told him about CM, and how Santosh and Federico were in some sort of fight with the engineering undergrads who lived in the frat house next door, and how he had awoken one morning to a fleet of motorized dirigibles handmade from condoms floating noisily up past his window, up toward the fourth floor, each dangling signs that read SANTOSH JAIN AND FEDERICO DE LUCA HAVE MICRO-PENISES.

  But when Harold was asking the other questions, he felt smothered by their weight and frequency and inevitability. And sometimes the air grew so hot with the questions Harold wasn’t asking him that it was as oppressive as if he actually had. People wanted to know so much, they wanted so many answers. And he understood it, he did—he wanted answers, too; he too wanted to know everything. He was grateful, then, for his friends, and for how relatively little they had mined from him, how they had left him to himself, a blank, faceless prairie under whose yellow surface earthworms and beetles wriggled through the black soil, and chips of bone calcified slowly into stone.

  “You’re really interested in this,” he snapped at Harold once, frustrated, when Harold had asked him whether he was dating anyone, and then, hearing his tone, stopped and apologized. They had known each other for almost a year by then.

  “This?” said Harold, ignoring the apology. “I’m interested in you. I don’t see what’s strange about that. This is the kind of stuff friends talk about with each other.”

  And yet despite his discomfort, he kept coming back to Harold, kept accepting his dinner invitations, even though at some point in every encounter there would be a moment in which he wished he could disappear, or in which he worried he might have disappointed.

  One night he went to dinner at Harold’s and was introduced to Harold’s best friend, Laurence, whom he had met in law school and who was now an appellate court judge in Boston, and his wife, Gillian, who taught English at Simmons. “Jude,” said Laurence, whose voice was even lower than Harold’s, “Harold tells me you’re also getting your master’s at MIT. What in?”

  “Pure math,” he replied.

  “How is that different from”—she laughed—“regular math?” Gillian asked.

  “Well, regular math, or applied math, is what I suppose
you could call practical math,” he said. “It’s used to solve problems, to provide solutions, whether it’s in the realm of economics, or engineering, or accounting, or what have you. But pure math doesn’t exist to provide immediate, or necessarily obvious, practical applications. It’s purely an expression of form, if you will—the only thing it proves is the almost infinite elasticity of mathematics itself, within the accepted set of assumptions by which we define it, of course.”

  “Do you mean imaginary geometries, stuff like that?” Laurence asked.

  “It can be, sure. But it’s not just that. Often, it’s merely proof of—of the impossible yet consistent internal logic of math itself. There’s all kinds of specialties within pure math: geometric pure math, like you said, but also algebraic math, algorithmic math, cryptography, information theory, and pure logic, which is what I study.”

  “Which is what?” Laurence asked.

  He thought. “Mathematical logic, or pure logic, is essentially a conversation between truths and falsehoods. So for example, I might say to you ‘All positive numbers are real. Two is a positive number. Therefore, two must be real.’ But this isn’t actually true, right? It’s a derivation, a supposition of truth. I haven’t actually proven that two is a real number, but it must logically be true. So you’d write a proof to, in essence, prove that the logic of those two statements is in fact real, and infinitely applicable.” He stopped. “Does that make sense?”

  “Video, ergo est,” said Laurence, suddenly. I see it, therefore it is.

  He smiled. “And that’s exactly what applied math is. But pure math is more”—he thought again—“Imaginor, ergo est.”

  Laurence smiled back at him and nodded. “Very good,” he said.

  “Well, I have a question,” said Harold, who’d been quiet, listening to them. “How and why on earth did you end up in law school?”

  Everyone laughed, and he did, too. He had been asked that question often (by Dr. Li, despairingly; by his master’s adviser, Dr. Kashen, perplexedly), and he always changed the answer to suit the audience, for the real answer—that he wanted to have the means to protect himself; that he wanted to make sure no one could ever reach him again—seemed too selfish and shallow and tiny a reason to say aloud (and would invite a slew of subsequent questions anyway). Besides, he knew enough now to know that the law was a flimsy form of protection: if he really wanted to be safe, he should have become a marksman squinting through an eyepiece, or a chemist in a lab with his pipettes and poisons.