And then there was Andy, who had abruptly reinitiated his nightly phone calls. Now he called at one a.m. every night, and during their appointments—which Andy had increased to every other week—he was un-Andyish, quiet and polite, which made him anxious. He examined his legs, he counted his cuts, he asked all the questions he always did, he checked his reflexes. And every time he got home, when he was emptying his pockets of change, he found that Andy had slipped in a card for a doctor, a psychologist named Sam Loehmann, and on it had written FIRST VISIT’S ON ME. There was always one of these cards, each time with a different note: DO IT FOR ME, JUDE, or ONE TIME. THAT’S IT. They were like annoying fortune cookies, and he always threw them away. He was touched by the gesture but also weary of it, of its pointlessness; it was the same feeling he had whenever he had to replace the bag under the sink after Harold’s visits. He’d go to the corner of his closet where he kept a box filled with hundreds of alcohol wipes and bandages, stacks and stacks of gauze, and dozens of packets of razors, and make a new bag, and tape it back in its proper place. People had always decided how his body would be used, and although he knew that Harold and Andy were trying to help him, the childish, obdurate part of him resisted: he would decide. He had such little control of his body anyway—how could they begrudge him this?
He told himself he was fine, that he had recovered, that he had regained his equilibrium, but really, he knew something was wrong, that he had been changed, that he was slipping. Willem was home, and even though he hadn’t been there to witness what had happened, even though he didn’t know about Caleb, about his humiliation—he had made certain of this, telling Harold and Julia and Andy that he’d never speak to them again if they said anything to anyone—he was still somehow ashamed to be seen by him. “Jude, I’m so sorry,” Willem had said when he had returned and seen his cast. “Are you sure you’re okay?” But the cast was nothing, the cast was the least shameful part, and for a minute, he had been tempted to tell Willem the truth, to collapse against him the way he never had and start crying, to confess everything to Willem and ask him to make him feel better, to tell him that he still loved him in spite of who he was. But he didn’t, of course. He had already written Willem a long e-mail full of elaborate lies detailing his car accident, and the first night they were reunited, they had stayed up so late talking about everything but that e-mail that Willem had slept over, the two of them falling asleep on the living-room sofa.
But he kept his life moving along. He got up, he went to work. He simultaneously craved company, so he wouldn’t think of Caleb, and dreaded it, because Caleb had reminded him how inhuman he was, how deficient, how disgusting, and he was too embarrassed to be around other people, normal people. He thought of his days the way he thought of taking steps when he was experiencing the pain and numbness in his feet: he would get through one, and then the next, and then the next, and eventually things would get better. Eventually he would learn how to fold those months into his life and accept them and keep going. He always had.
The court case came, and he won. It was a huge win, Lucien kept telling him, and he knew it was, but mostly he felt panic: Now what was he going to do? He had a new client, a bank, but the work there was of the long, tedious, fact-gathering sort, not the kind of frantic work that required twenty-hour days. He would be at home, by himself, with nothing but the Caleb incident to occupy his mind. Tremain congratulated him, and he knew he should be happy, but when he asked the chairman for more work, Tremain had laughed. “No, St. Francis,” he said. “You’re going on vacation. That’s an order.”
He didn’t go on vacation. He promised first Lucien, and then Tremain, he would, but that he couldn’t at the moment. But it was as he had feared: he would be at home, making himself dinner, or at a movie with Willem, and suddenly a scene from his months with Caleb would appear. And then there would be a scene from the home, and a scene from his years with Brother Luke, and then a scene from his months with Dr. Traylor, and then a scene from the injury, the headlights’ white glare, his head jerking to the side. And then his mind would fill with images, banshees demanding his attention, snatching and tearing at him with their long, needley fingers. Caleb had unleashed something within him, and he was unable to coax the beasts back into their dungeon—he was made aware of how much time he actually spent controlling his memories, how much concentration it took, how fragile his command over them had been all along.
“Are you all right?” Willem asked him one night. They had seen a play, which he had barely registered, and then had gone out to dinner, where he had half listened to Willem, hoping he was making the correct responses as he moved his food around his plate and tried to act normal.
“Yes,” he said.
Things were getting worse; he knew it and didn’t know how to make it better. It was eight months after the incident, and every day he thought about it more, not less. He felt sometimes as if his months with Caleb were a pack of hyenas, and every day they chased him, and every day he spent all his energy running from them, trying to escape being devoured by their snapping, foaming jaws. All the things that had helped in the past—the concentrating; the cutting—weren’t helping now. He cut himself more and more, but the memories wouldn’t disappear. Every morning he swam, and every night he swam again, for miles, until he had energy enough only to shower and climb into bed. As he swam, he chanted to himself: he conjugated Latin verbs, he recited proofs, he quoted back to himself decisions that he had studied in law school. His mind was his, he told himself. He would control this; he wouldn’t be controlled.
“I have an idea,” Willem said at the end of another meal in which he had failed to say much of anything. He had responded a second or two too late to everything Willem had said, and after a while, they were both quiet. “We should take a vacation together. We should go on that trip to Morocco we were supposed to take two years ago. We can do it as soon as I get back. What do you think, Jude? It’ll be fall, then—it’ll be beautiful.” It was late June: nine months after the incident. Willem was leaving again at the beginning of August for a shoot in Sri Lanka; he wouldn’t be back until the beginning of October.
As Willem spoke, he was thinking of how Caleb had called him deformed, and only Willem’s silence had reminded him it was his turn to respond. “Sure, Willem,” he said. “That sounds great.”
The restaurant was in the Flatiron District, and after they paid, they walked for a while, neither of them saying anything, when suddenly, he saw Caleb coming toward them, and in his panic, he grabbed Willem and yanked him into the doorway of a building, startling them both with his strength and swiftness.
“Jude,” Willem said, alarmed, “what are you doing?”