“You too,” he says. “Congratulations.”
Andy leaves them to talk, and they do, a little awkwardly, joking about how this meeting seems like a blind date. Linus has been told only about his amputations, and they discuss them briefly, and the osteomyelitis that had preceded them. “Those treatments can be a killer,” Linus says, but he doesn’t offer his sympathy for his lost legs, which he appreciates. Linus had been a doctor at a group practice that he’d heard Andy mention before; he seems genuinely admiring of Andy and excited to be working with him.
There is nothing wrong with Linus. He can tell, by the questions he asks, and the respect with which he asks them, that he is indeed a good doctor, and probably a good person. But he also knows he will never be able to undress in front of Linus. He can’t imagine having the discussions he has with Andy with anyone else. He can’t imagine allowing anyone else such access to his body, to his fears. When he thinks of someone seeing his body anew he quails: ever since the amputation, he has only looked at himself once. He watches Linus’s face, his unsettlingly Willem-like smile, and although he is only five years older than Linus, he feels centuries older, something broken and desiccated, something that anyone would look at and quickly throw the tarpaulin over once more. “Take this one away,” they’d say. “It’s junked.”
He thinks of the conversations he will need to have, the explanations he will need to give: about his back, his arms, his legs, his diseases. He is so sick of his own fears, his own trepidations, but as tired as he is of them, he also cannot stop himself from indulging them. He thinks of Linus paging slowly through his chart, of seeing the years, the decades, of notes Andy has made about him: lists of his cuts, of his wounds, of the medications he has been on, of the flare-ups of his infections. Notes on his suicide attempt, on Andy’s pleas to get him to see Dr. Loehmann. He knows Andy has chronicled all of this; he knows how meticulous he is.
“You have to tell someone,” Ana used to say, and as he had grown older, he had decided to interpret this sentence literally: Some One. Someday, he thought, somehow, he would find a way to tell some one, one person. And then he had, someone he had trusted, and that person had died, and he didn’t have the fortitude to tell his story ever again. But then, didn’t everyone only tell their lives—truly tell their lives—to one person? How often could he really be expected to repeat himself, when with each telling he was stripping the clothes from his skin and the flesh from his bones, until he was as vulnerable as a small pink mouse? He knows, then, that he will never be able to go to another doctor. He will go to Andy for as long as he can, for as long as Andy will let him. And after that, he doesn’t know—he will figure out what to do then. For now, his privacy, his life, is still his. For now, no one else needs to know. His thoughts are so occupied with Willem—trying to re-create him, to hold his face and voice in his head, to keep him present—that his past is as far away as it has ever been: he is in the middle of a lake, trying to stay afloat; he can’t think of returning to shore and having to live among his memories again.
He doesn’t want to go to dinner with Andy that night, but they do, telling Linus goodbye as they leave. They walk to the sushi restaurant in silence, sit in silence, order, and wait in silence.
“What’d you think?” Andy finally asks.
“He kind of looks like Willem,” he says.
“Does he?” Andy says, and he shrugs.
“A little,” he says. “The smile.”
“Ah,” Andy says. “I guess. I can see that.” There’s another silence. “But what did you think? I know it’s sometimes hard to tell from one meeting, but does he seem like someone you might be able to get along with?”
“I don’t think so, Andy,” he says at last, and can feel Andy’s disappointment.
“Really, Jude? What didn’t you like about him?” But he doesn’t answer, and finally Andy sighs. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I hoped you might feel comfortable enough around him to at least consider it. Will you think about it anyway? Maybe you’ll give him another chance? And in the meantime, there’s this other guy, Stephan Wu, who I think you should maybe meet. He’s not an orthopod, but I actually think that might be better; he’s certainly the best internist I’ve ever worked with. Or there’s this guy named—”
“Jesus, Andy, stop,” he says, and he can hear the anger in his voice, anger he hasn’t known he had. “Stop.” He looks up, sees Andy’s stricken face. “Are you so eager to get rid of me? Can’t you give me a break? Can’t you let me take this in for a while? Don’t you understand how hard this is for me?” He knows how selfish, how unreasonable, how self-absorbed he is being, and he is miserable but unable to stop himself, and he stands, bumping against the table. “Leave me alone,” he tells Andy. “If you’re not going to be here for me, then leave me alone.”