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.