A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

  Once there had been a man who had smelled so terribly and had been so sweatily large that he had almost changed his mind, but although the sex had been horrific, the man had been gentle with him afterward, had bought him a sandwich and a soda and had asked him real questions about himself and had listened carefully to his made-up answers. He had stayed with the man for two nights, and as he drove, the man had listened to bluegrass music and had sung along: he had had a lovely voice, low and clear, and he had taught him the words, and he had found himself singing along with this man, the road smooth beneath them. “God, you have a nice voice, Joey,” the man had said, and he had—how weak he was, how pathetic!—allowed himself to be warmed by this comment, had gobbled up this affection as a rat would a piece of molding bread. On the second day, the man had asked him if he wanted to stay with him; they were in Ohio, and unfortunately he wasn’t going any farther east, he was headed south now, but if he wanted to stay with him, he would be delighted, he would make sure he was taken care of. He had declined the man’s offer, and the man had nodded, as if he had expected he would, and given him a fold of money and kissed him, the first of them who had. “Good luck to you, Joey,” he said, and later, after the man had left, he had counted the money and realized it was more than he thought, it was more than he’d made in his previous ten days altogether. Later, when the next man was brutish, when he was violent and rough, he had wished he had gone with the other man: suddenly, Boston seemed less important than tenderness, than someone who would protect him and be good to him. He lamented his poor choices, how he seemed unable to appreciate the people who were actually decent to him: he thought again of Brother Luke, how Luke had never hit him or yelled at him; how he had never called him names.

  Somewhere he had gotten sick, but he didn’t know if it was from his time on the road or from the home. He made the men use condoms, but a few of them had said they would and then hadn’t, and he had struggled and shouted but there had been nothing he could do. He knew, from past experience, that he would need a doctor. He stank; he was in so much pain he could barely walk. On the outskirts of Philadelphia he decided he’d take a break—he had to. He had torn a small hole in the sleeve of Colin’s jacket and had rolled his money into a tube and shoved it inside and then closed the hole with a safety pin he had found in one of the motel rooms. He climbed out of the last truck, although at the time he hadn’t known it would be the last truck; at the time he had thought: one more. One more and I’ll make it to Boston. He hated that he had to stop now when he was so close, but he knew he needed help; he had waited as long as he could.

  The driver had stopped at a filling station near Philadelphia—he didn’t want to drive into the city. There, he made his slow way to the bathroom; he tried to clean himself. The illness made him tired; he had a fever. The last thing he remembered from that day—it had been late January, he thought; still cold, and now with a wet, stinging wind that seemed to slap against him—was walking to the edge of the gas station, where there had been a small tree, barren and unloved and alone, and sitting down against it, resting his back in Colin’s now-filthy jacket against its spindly, unconvincing trunk, and shutting his eyes, hoping that if he slept for a while, he might feel at least a little stronger.

  When he woke he knew he was in the backseat of a car, and the car was moving, and there was Schubert playing, and he allowed himself to be comforted by that, because it was something he knew, something familiar in such unfamiliarity, in a strange car being driven by a stranger, a stranger he was too weak to sit up and examine, through a strange landscape to an unknown destination. When he woke again he was in a room, a living room, and he looked around him: at the sofa he was on, the coffee table in front of it, two armchairs, a stone fireplace, all in shades of brown. He stood, still dizzy but less dizzy, and as he did, he noticed there was a man standing in a doorway, watching him, a man a little shorter than he, and thin, but with a sloping stomach and fertile, swelling hips. He had glasses that had black plastic bracketing their top half but were clear glass beneath, and a tonsure of hair trimmed very short and soft, like a mink’s coat.

  “Come to the kitchen and have something to eat,” the man said in a quiet toneless voice, and he did, walking slowly after him and into a kitchen that, except for its tiles and walls, was also brown: brown table, brown cupboards, brown chairs. He sat in the chair at the foot of the table, and the man put a plate before him with a hamburger and a slide of fries, a glass filled with milk. “I normally don’t get fast food,” the man said, and looked at him.

  He wasn’t sure what to say. “Thank you,” he said, and the man nodded. “Eat,” he said, and he did, and the man sat at the head of the table and watched him. Normally this would have made him self-conscious, but he was too hungry to care this time.

  When he was finished he sat back and thanked the man again, and the man nodded again, and there was a silence.

  “You’re a prostitute,” the man said, and he flushed, and looked down at the table, at its shined brown wood.

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  The man made a little noise, a little snuffle. “How long have you been a prostitute?” he asked, but he couldn’t answer him and was silent. “Well?” the man asked. “Two years? Five years? Ten years? Your whole life?” He was impatient, or almost impatient, but his voice was soft, and he wasn’t yelling.

  “Five years,” he said, and the man made the same small noise again.

  “You have a venereal disease,” the man said, “I can smell it on you,” and he cringed, and bent his head, and nodded.

  The man sighed. “Well,” he said, “you’re in luck, because I’m a doctor, and I happen to have some antibiotics in the house.” He got up and padded over to one of the cupboards, and came back with an orange plastic bottle, and took out a pill. “Take this,” he said, and he did. “Finish your milk,” the man said, and he did, and then the man left the room and he waited until he came back. “Well?” the man said. “Follow me.”

  He did, his legs stringy beneath him, and followed the man to a door across from the living room, which the man unlocked and held open for him. He hesitated, and the man made an impatient clucking noise. “Go on,” he said. “It’s a bedroom,” and he shut his eyes, weary, and then opened them again. He began preparing himself for the man to be cruel; the quiet ones always were.

  When he reached the doorway, he saw that it led to a basement, and there was a set of wooden steps, steep like a ladder, that he would have to descend, and he paused once more, wary, and the man made his strange insect-like sound again and shoved him, not hard, against the small of his back, and he stumbled down the stairs.

  He had been expecting a dungeon, slippery and leaking and dank, but it really was a bedroom, with a mattress made up with a blanket and sheets, and a blue circular rug beneath it, and lining the left-hand wall, bookcases of the same unfinished wood the staircase had been made from, with books on them. The space was bright-lit in that aggressive, relentless way he remembered from hospitals and police stations, and there was a small window, about the size of a dictionary, cut high into the far wall.

  “I put out some clothes for you,” the man said, and he saw that folded on the mattress was a shirt and a pair of sweatpants, and a towel and toothbrush as well. “The bathroom’s there,” the man said, pointing to the far right-hand corner of the room.

  And then he began to leave. “Wait,” he called after the man, and the man stopped his climb and looked at him, and he began, under the man’s gaze, to unbutton his shirt. Something changed in the man’s face, then, and he climbed another few steps. “You’re sick,” he said. “You have to get better first,” and then he left the room, the door clicking shut after him.

  He slept that night, both from lack of anything else to do and from exhaustion. The next morning he woke and smelled food, and he groaned to his feet and walked slowly up the stairs, where he found a plastic tray with a plate of eggs, poached, and two lengths of bacon, a roll, a glass of mil
k, a banana, and another of the white pills. He was too wobbly to bring it down without falling, so he sat there, on one of the unfinished wooden steps, and ate the food and swallowed the pill. After resting, he stood to open the door and take the tray to the kitchen, but the knob wouldn’t turn because the door was locked. There was a small square cut into the bottom of the door, a cat door, he assumed, although he hadn’t seen a cat, and he held back its curtain of rubber and poked his head out. “Hello?” he called. He realized he didn’t know the man’s name, which wasn’t unusual—he never knew their names. “Sir? Hello?” But there was no answer, and he could tell from the way the house was silent that he was alone.

  He should have felt panic, he should have felt fear, but he felt neither, only a crush of tiredness, and he left the tray at the top of the stairs and worked his way slowly down again, and then into bed, where he slept once more.

  He dozed for that entire day, and when he woke, the man was standing above him again, watching him, and he sat up, abruptly. “Dinner,” the man said, and he followed him upstairs, still in his borrowed clothes, which were too wide in the waist and too short in the sleeves and legs, because when he had looked for his own clothes, they were missing. My money, he thought, but he was too addled to think beyond that.

  Once again he sat in the brown kitchen, and the man brought him his pill, and a plate with brown meat loaf, and a slop of mashed potatoes, and broccoli, and another plate for himself, and they began to eat in silence. Silence didn’t make him nervous—usually, he was grateful for it—but this man’s silence was closer to inwardness, the way a cat will be silent and watching, watching, watching so fixedly that you don’t know what it sees, and then suddenly it will jump, and trap something beneath its paw.

  “What kind of doctor are you?” he asked, tentatively, and the man looked at him.

  “A psychiatrist,” the doctor said. “Do you know what that is?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  The man made his noise again. “Do you like being a prostitute?” he asked, and he felt, unaccountably, tears in his eyes, but then he blinked and they were gone.

  “No,” he said.

  “Then why do you do it?” the man asked, and he shook his head. “Speak,” the man said.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and the man made a huffing noise. “It’s what I know how to do,” he said at last.

  “Are you good at it?” the man asked, and once again, he felt that sting, and he was quiet for a long time.

  “Yes,” he said, and it was the worst admission he had ever made, the hardest word for him to say.

  After they were done, the doctor escorted him once again to the door, and gave him the same little shove inside. “Wait,” he said to the man, as he was closing the door. “My name’s Joey,” and when the man said nothing, only stared at him, “what’s yours?”

  The man kept looking at him, but now he was, he thought, almost smiling, or at least he was about to make some sort of expression. But then he didn’t. “Dr. Traylor,” the man said, and then pulled the door quickly shut behind him, as if that very information was a bird that might fly away if it too were not trapped inside with him.

  The next day he felt less sore, less febrile. When he stood, though, he realized he was still weak, and he swayed and grabbed at the air and in the end, he didn’t fall. He moved toward the bookshelves, examining the books, which were paperbacks, swollen and buckling from heat and moisture and smelling sweetly of mildew. He found a copy of Emma, which he had been reading in class at the college before he ran away, and carried the book slowly up the stairs with him, where he found the place he’d left off and read as he ate his breakfast and took his pill. This time there was a sandwich as well, wrapped in a paper towel, with the word “Lunch” written on the towel in small letters. After he had eaten, he went downstairs with the book and sandwich and lay in bed, and he was reminded of how much he had missed reading, of how grateful he was for this opportunity to leave behind his life.

  He slept again; woke again. By evening, he was very tired, and some of the pain had returned, and when Dr. Traylor held open the door for him, it took him a long time to mount the stairs. At dinner, he didn’t say anything, and neither did Dr. Traylor, but when he offered to help Dr. Traylor with the dishes or the cooking, Dr. Traylor had looked at him. “You’re sick,” he said.

  “I’m better,” he said. “I can help you in the kitchen if you want.”

  “No, I mean—you’re sick,” Dr. Traylor said. “You’re diseased. I can’t have a diseased person touching my food,” and he had looked down, humiliated.

  There was a silence. “Where are your parents?” Dr. Traylor asked, and he shook his head again. “Speak,” Dr. Traylor said, and this time he was impatient, although he still hadn’t raised his voice.

  “I don’t know,” he stammered, “I never had any.”

  “How did you become a prostitute?” Dr. Traylor asked. “Did you start yourself, or did someone help you do it?”

  He swallowed, feeling the food in his stomach turning to paste. “Someone helped me,” he whispered.

  There was a silence. “You don’t like it when I call you a prostitute,” the man said, and he managed, this time, to raise his head and look at him. “No,” he said. “I understand,” the man said. “But that is what you are, isn’t it? Although I could call you something else, if you like: a whore, maybe.” He was quiet again. “Is that better?”

  “No,” he whispered again.

  “So,” the man said, “a prostitute it is, then, right?” and looked at him, and finally, he nodded.

  That night in the bedroom, he looked for something to cut himself with, but there was nothing sharp in the room, nothing at all; even the books had only soft bloated pages. So he pressed his fingernails into his calves as hard as he could, bent over and wincing from the effort and discomfort, and finally he was able to puncture the skin, and then work his nail back and forth in the cut to make it wider. He was only able to make three incisions in his right leg, and then he was too tired, and he fell asleep again.

  The third morning he felt demonstrably better: stronger, more alert. He ate his breakfast and read his book, and then he moved the tray aside and stuck his head through the flapped cutout and tried and tried to fit his shoulders through it. But no matter what angle he tried, he was simply too large and the opening too small and at last he had to stop.

  After he had rested, he poked his head through the hole again. He had a direct view of the living room to his left, and the kitchen area to his right, and he looked and looked as if for clues. The house was very tidy; he could tell from how tidy it was that Dr. Traylor lived alone. If he craned his neck, he could see, on the far left, a staircase leading to a second story, and just beyond that, the front door, but he couldn’t see how many locks it had. Mainly, though, the house was defined by its silence: there was no ticking of clocks, no sound of cars or people outside. It could have been a house zooming through space, so quiet was it. The only noise was the refrigerator, purring its intermittent whir, but when it stopped, the silence was absolute.

  But as featureless as the house was, he was also fascinated by it: it was only the third house he had ever been in. The second had been the Learys’. The first house had been a client’s, a very important client, Brother Luke had told him, outside Salt Lake City, who had paid extra because he didn’t want to come to the motel room. That house had been enormous, all sandstone and glass, and Brother Luke had come with him, and had secreted himself in the bathroom—a bathroom as big as one of their motel rooms—off the bedroom where he and the client had had sex. Later, as an adult, he would fetishize houses, especially his own house, although even before he had Greene Street, or Lantern House, or the flat in London, he would treat himself every few months to a magazine about homes, about people who spent their lives making pretty places even prettier, and he would turn the pages slowly, studying every picture. His friends laughed at him for this, but he didn’t care: he dream
ed of the day he’d have someplace of his own, with things that were absolutely his.

  That night Dr. Traylor let him out again, and again it was the kitchen, and the meal, and the two of them eating in silence. “I feel better now,” he ventured, and then, when Dr. Traylor didn’t say anything, “if you want to do something.” He was realistic enough to know that he wasn’t going to be allowed to leave without repaying Dr. Traylor in some way; he was hopeful enough to think that he might be allowed to leave at all.

  But Dr. Traylor shook his head. “You may feel better, but you’re still diseased,” he said. “The antibiotics take ten days to eliminate the infection.” He took a fish bone, so fine it was transluscent, out of his mouth, placed it on the edge of his plate. “Don’t tell me this is the first venereal disease you’ve ever had,” he said, looking up at him, and he flushed again.

  That night he thought about what to do. He was almost strong enough to run, he thought. At the next dinner, he would follow Dr. Traylor, and then when his back was turned, he would run to the door and outside and look for help. There were some problems with this plan—he still didn’t have his clothes; he didn’t have any shoes—but he knew that there was something wrong with this house, that there was something wrong with Dr. Traylor, that he had to get out.

  He tried to conserve his energy the next day. He was too twitchy to read, and he had to keep himself from pacing the floor. He saved that day’s sandwich and stuffed it into the pocket of the borrowed sweatpants so he would have something to eat if he had to hide for a long period. In the other pocket he shoved the plastic bag that lined the trash can in the bathroom—he thought he could tear it in half and make shoes for himself once he was safely out of Dr. Traylor’s reach. And then he waited.