A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

  Forgive me, Willem, he tells Willem in his head. Forgive me, but I have to leave you now. Forgive me, but I have to go.

  “Jude,” JB says. The elevator doors are closing, but JB reaches his arm out to him.

  But he ignores it, works himself to his feet, leans into the corner of the elevator car. The people are very close now. Everyone moves so much faster than he does. “Stay away from me,” he says to JB, but he is quiet. “Leave me alone. Please leave me alone.”

  “Jude,” JB says again. “I’m sorry.”

  And he begins to say something else, but as he does, the elevator doors close—and he is left alone at last.

  3

  HE DIDN’T BEGIN it consciously, he really didn’t, and yet when he comprehends what he is doing, he doesn’t stop it, either. It is the middle of November, and he is getting out of the pool after his morning swim, and as he’s lifting himself up on the metal bars that Richard had had installed around the pool to help him get in and out of his wheelchair, the world disappears.

  When he wakes again, it’s only ten minutes later. One moment it was six forty-five a.m., and he was pulling himself up; the next it is six fifty-five a.m., and he is prone on the black rubber floor, his arms reaching forward for the chair, his torso leaving a wet splotch on the ground. He groans, moving into a sitting position, and waits until the room rights itself again, before attempting—and this time, succeeding—to hoist himself up.

  The second time comes a few days later. He has just gotten home from the office, and it is late. Increasingly, he has begun to feel as if Rosen Pritchard supplies him with his very energy, and once he leaves its premises, so too does his strength: the moment Mr. Ahmed shuts the back door of the car, he is asleep, and he doesn’t wake until he is delivered to Greene Street. But as he walks into the dark, quiet apartment that night, he is overcome by a sense of displacement, one so debilitating that for a moment he stops, blinking and confused, before he moves to the sofa in the living room and lies down. He means to just rest, just for a few minutes, just until he can stand again, but when he opens his eyes next it is day, and the living room is gray with light.

  The third time is Monday morning. He wakes before his alarm, and although he is lying down, he feels everything around and within him roiling, as if he is a bottle half filled with water set adrift on an ocean of clouds. In recent weeks, he hasn’t had to drug himself at all on Sundays: he gets home from dinner with JB on Saturday, and climbs into bed, and only wakes when Richard comes to find him the next day. When Richard doesn’t come—as he hadn’t this Sunday; he and India are visiting her parents in New Mexico—he sleeps through the entire day, through the entire night. He dreams of nothing, and nothing wakes him.

  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 months, because now he knows how to recall Willem; now he knows his ability to summon Willem is within his control.

  He cancels his appointment with Andy so he can stay home and experiment. This is the third consecutive Friday he hasn’t seen Andy. Since that night at the restaurant, the two of them have been polite with each other, and Andy hasn’t mentioned Linus, or any other doctor, again, although he has said he’ll raise the subject anew in six months. “It’s not a matter of wanting to get rid of you, Jude,” he said. “And I’m sorry, I really am, if that’s how it sounded. I’m just worried. I just want to make sure we find someone you like, someone I know you’ll be comfortable with.”

  “I know, Andy,” he said. “And I appreciate it; I do. I’ve been behaving badly, and I took it out on you.” But he knows now that he has to be careful: he has tasted anger, and he knows he has to control it. He can feel it, waiting to burst from his mouth in a swarm of stinging black flies. Where has this rage been hiding? he wonders. How can he make it disappear? Lately his dreams have been of violence, of terrible things befalling the people he hates, the people he loves: he sees Brother Luke being stuffed into a sack full of squealing, starved rats; he sees JB’s head being slammed against a wall, his brain splashing out in a gray slurry. In the dreams he is always there, dispassionate and watchful, and after witnessing their destruction, he turns and walks away. He wakes with his nose bleeding the way it had when he was a child and was suppressing a tantrum, with his hands shaking, with his face contorted into a snarl.

  That Friday Willem doesn’t come to him after all. But the next evening, as he is leaving the office to meet JB for dinner, he turns his head to the right and sees, sitting next to him in the car, Willem. This time, he fancies, Willem is a little harder-edged, a little more solid, and he stares and stares until he blinks and Willem once again dissolves.

  After these episodes he is depleted, and the world around him dims as if all its power and electricity has gone toward creating Willem. He instructs Mr. Ahmed to take him home instead of to the restaurant; as he is driven south, he texts JB to tell him he’s feeling sick and can’t make it. He is doing this more and more: canceling plans with people, shoddily and usually unforgivably late—an hour before a hard-to-secure dinner reservation, minutes after a scheduled meeting time at a gallery, seconds before the curtain rises above a stage. Richard, JB, Andy, Harold and Julia: these are the final people who still contact him, persistently, week after week. He can’t remember when he last heard from Citizen or Rhodes or the Henry Youngs or Elijah or Phaedra—it has been weeks, at least. And although he knows he should care, he doesn’t. His hope, his energy are no longer replenishable resources; his reserves are limited, and he wants to spend them trying to find Willem, even if the hunt is elusive, even if he is likely to fail.

  And so home he goes, an
d he waits and waits for Willem to appear to him. But he doesn’t, and finally he sleeps.

  The next day he waits in bed, trying to suspend himself between alertness and dazedness, for that (he thinks) is the state in which he is most likely to summon Willem.

  On Monday he wakes, feeling foolish. This has got to stop, he tells himself. You have got to rejoin the living. You’re acting like an insane person. Visions? Do you know what you sound like?

  He thinks of the monastery, where Brother Pavel liked to tell him the story of an eleventh-century nun named Hildegard. Hildegard had visions; she closed her eyes and illuminated objects appeared before her; her days were aswim with light. But Brother Pavel was less interested in Hildegard than in Hildegard’s instructor, Jutta, who had forsaken the material world to live as an ascetic in a small cell, dead to the concerns of the living, alive but not alive. “That’s what will happen to you if you don’t obey,” Pavel would say, and he would be terrified. There was a small toolshed on the monastery’s grounds, dark and chilly and jumbled with malevolent-looking iron objects, each of them ending in a spike, a spear, a scythe, and when the brother told him of Jutta, he imagined he would be forced into the toolshed, fed just enough to survive, and on and on and on he would live, almost forgotten but not completely, almost dead but not completely. But even Jutta had had Hildegard for company. He would have no one. How frightened he had been; how certain he was that this, someday, would come to pass.

  Now, as he lies in bed, he hears the old lied murmur to him. “I have become lost to the world,” he sings, quietly, “in which I otherwise wasted so much time.”

  But although he knows how foolish he is being, he still cannot bring himself to eat. The very act of it now repels him. He wishes he were above want, above need. He has a vision of his life as a sliver of soap, worn and used and smoothed into a slender, blunt-ended arrowhead, a little more of it disintegrating with every day.

  And then there is what he doesn’t like to admit to himself but is conscious of thinking. He cannot break his promise to Harold—he won’t. But if he stops eating, if he stops trying, the end will be the same anyway.

  Usually he knows how melodramatic, how narcissistic, how unrealistic he is being, and at least once a day he scolds himself. The fact is, he finds himself less and less able to summon Willem’s specifics without depending on props: He cannot remember what Willem’s voice sounds like without first playing one of the saved voice messages. He can no longer remember Willem’s scent without first smelling one of his shirts. And so he fears he is grieving not so much for Willem but for his own life: its smallness, its worthlessness.

  He has never been concerned with his legacy, or never thought he had been. And it is a helpful thing that he isn’t, for he will leave nothing behind: not buildings or paintings or films or sculptures. Not books. Not papers. Not people: not a spouse, not children, probably not parents, and, if he keeps behaving the way he is, not friends. Not even new law. He has created nothing. He has made nothing, nothing but money: the money he has earned; the money given to him to compensate for Willem being taken from him. His apartment will revert to Richard. The other properties will be given away or sold and their proceeds donated to charities. His art will go to museums, his books to libraries, his furniture to whoever wants it. It will be as if he has never existed. He has the feeling, unhappy as it is, that he was at his most valuable in those motel rooms, where he was at least something singular and meaningful to someone, although what he had to offer was being taken from him, not given willingly. But there he had at least been real to another person; what they saw him as was actually what he was. There, he was at his least deceptive.

  He had never been able to truly believe Willem’s interpretation of him, as someone who was brave, and resourceful, and admirable. Willem would say those things and he would feel ashamed, as if he’d been swindling him: Who was this person Willem was describing? Even his confession hadn’t changed Willem’s perception of him—in fact, Willem seemed to respect him more, not less, because of it, which he had never understood but in which he had allowed himself to find solace. But although he hadn’t been convinced, it was somehow sustaining that someone else had seen him as a worthwhile person, that someone had seen his as a meaningful life.

  The spring before Willem died, they’d had some people over for dinner—just the four of them and Richard and Asian Henry Young—and Malcolm, in one of the occasional spikes of regret he had been experiencing over his and Sophie’s decision not to have children, even though, as they all reminded him, they hadn’t wanted children to begin with, had asked, “Without them, I just wonder: What’s been the point of it all? Don’t you guys ever worry about this? How do any of us know our lives are meaningful?”

  “Excuse me, Mal,” Richard had said, pouring him the last of the wine from one bottle as Willem uncorked another, “but I find that offensive. Are you saying our lives are less meaningful because we don’t have kids?”

  “No,” Malcolm said. Then he thought. “Well, maybe.”

  “I know my life’s meaningful,” Willem had said, suddenly, and Richard had smiled at him.

  “Of course your life’s meaningful,” JB had said. “You make things people actually want to see, unlike me and Malcolm and Richard and Henry here.”

  “People want to see our stuff,” said Asian Henry Young, sounding wounded.

  “I meant people outside of New York and London and Tokyo and Berlin.”

  “Oh, them. But who cares about those people?”

  “No,” Willem said, after they’d all stopped laughing. “I know my life’s meaningful because”—and here he stopped, and looked shy, and was silent for a moment before he continued—“because I’m a good friend. I love my friends, and I care about them, and I think I make them happy.”

  The room became quiet, and for a few seconds, he and Willem had looked at each other across the table, and the rest of the people, the apartment itself, fell away: they were two people on two chairs, and around them was nothingness. “To Willem,” he finally said, and raised his glass, and so did everyone else. “To Willem!” they all echoed, and Willem smiled back at him.

  Later that evening, when everyone had left and they were in bed, he had told Willem that he was right. “I’m glad you know your life has meaning,” he told him. “I’m glad it’s not something I have to convince you of. I’m glad you know how wonderful you are.”

  “But your life has just as much meaning as mine,” Willem had said. “You’re wonderful, too. Don’t you know that, Jude?”

  At the time, he had muttered something, something that Willem might interpret as an agreement, but as Willem slept, he lay awake. It had always seemed to him a very plush kind of problem, a privilege, really, to consider whether life was meaningful or not. He didn’t think his was. But this didn’t bother him so much.

  And although he hadn’t fretted over whether his life was worthwhile, he had always wondered why he, why so many others, went on living at all; it had been difficult to convince himself at times, and yet so many people, so many millions, billions of people, lived in misery he couldn’t fathom, with deprivations and illnesses that were obscene in their extremity. And yet on and on and on they went. So was the determination to keep living not a choice at all, but an evolutionary implementation? Was there something in the mind itself, a constellation of neurons as toughened and scarred as tendon, that prevented humans from doing what logic so often argued they should? And yet that instinct wasn’t infallible—he had overcome it once. But what had happened to it after? Had it weakened, or become more resilient? Was his life even his to choose to live any longer?

  He had known, ever since the hospital, that it was impossible to convince someone to live for his own sake. But he often thought it would be a more effective treatment to make people feel more urgently the necessity of living for others: that, to him, was always the most compelling argument. The fact was, he did owe Harold. He did owe Willem. And if they wanted him to stay a
live, then he would. At the time, as he slogged through day after day, his motivations had been murky to him, but now he could recognize that he had done it for them, and that rare selflessness had been something he could be proud of after all. He hadn’t understood why they wanted him to stay alive, only that they had, and so he had done it. Eventually, he had learned how to rediscover contentment, joy, even. But it hadn’t begun that way.

  And now he is once again finding life more and more difficult, each day a little less possible than the last. In his every day stands a tree, black and dying, with a single branch jutting to its right, a scarecrow’s sole prosthetic, and it is from this branch that he hangs. Above him a rain is always misting, which makes the branch slippery. But he clings to it, as tired as he is, because beneath him is a hole bored into the earth so deep that he cannot see where it ends. He is petrified to let go because he will fall into the hole, but eventually he knows he will, he knows he must: he is so tired. His grasp weakens a bit, just a little bit, with every week.

  So it is with guilt and regret, but also with a sense of inevitability, that he cheats on his promise to Harold. He cheats when he tells Harold he is being sent away to Jakarta for business and will miss Thanksgiving. He cheats when he begins growing a beard, which he hopes will disguise the gauntness in his face. He cheats when he tells Sanjay he’s fine, he’s just had an intestinal flu. He cheats when he tells his secretary she doesn’t need to get him lunch because he picked something up on the way into the office. He cheats when he cancels the next month’s worth of dates with Richard and JB and Andy, telling them he has too much work. He cheats every time he lets the voice whisper to him, unbidden, It won’t be long now, it won’t be long. He isn’t so deluded that he thinks he will be able to literally starve himself to death—but he does think that there will be a day, closer now than ever before, in which he will be so weak that he will stumble and fall and crash his head against the Greene Street lobby’s cement floors, in which he will contract a virus and not have the resources to make it retreat.