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.
At least one of his lies is true: he does have too much work. He has an appellate argument in a month, and he is relieved to be able to spend so much time at Rosen Pritchard, where nothing bad has ever befallen him, where even Willem knows not to disturb him with one of his unpredictable appearances. One night he hears Sanjay muttering to himself as he hurries past his office—“Fuck, she’s going to kill me”—and looks up and sees it is no longer night, but day, and the Hudson is turning a smeary orange. He notes this, but he feels nothing. Here, his life suspends itself; here, he might be anyone, anywhere. He can stay as late as he likes. No one is waiting for him, no one will be disappointed if he doesn’t call, no one will be angry if he doesn’t go home.
The Friday before the trial, he is working late when one of his secretaries looks in to tell him he has a visitor in the lobby, a Dr. Contractor, and would he like him sent up? He pauses, unsure of what to do; Andy has been calling him, but he hasn’t been returning his calls, and he knows he won’t simply leave.
“Yes,” he tells her. “Bring him to the southeastern conference room.”
He waits in this conference room, which has no windows and is the most private, and when Andy comes in, he sees his mouth tighten, but they shake hands like strangers, and it’s not until his secretary leaves that Andy gets up and walks over to him.
“Stand up,” he commands.
“I can’t,” he says.
“Why not?”
“My legs hurt,” he says, but this isn’t true. He cannot stand because his prostheses no longer fit. “The good thing about these prostheses is that they’re very sensitive and lightweight,” the prosthetist had told him when he was fitted for them. “The bad thing is that the sockets don’t allow you very much give. You lose or gain more than ten percent of your body weight—so for you, that’s plus or minus fourteen, fifteen pounds—and you’re either going to need to adjust your weight or have a new set made. So it’s important you stay at weight.” For the past three weeks, he has been in his wheelchair, and although he continues to wear his legs, they are only for show, something to fill his pants with; they are too ill-fitting for him to actually use, and he is too weary to see the prosthetist, too weary to have the conversation he knows he’ll need to have with him, too weary to conjure explanations.
“I think you’re lying,” Andy says. “I think you’ve lost so much weight that your prostheses are sliding off of you, am I right?” But he doesn’t answer. “How much weight have you lost, Jude?” Andy asks. “When I last saw you, you were already twelve pounds down. How much is it now? Twenty? More?” There’s another silence. “What the hell are you doing?” Andy asks, lowering his voice further. “What’re you doing to yourself, Jude?
“You look like hell,” Andy continues. “You look terrible. You look sick.” He stops. “Say something,” he says. “Say something, goddammit, Jude.”
He knows how this interaction is meant to go: Andy yells at him. He yells back at Andy. A détente, one that ultimately changes nothing, one that is a piece of pantomime, is reached: he will submit to something that isn’t a solution but that makes Andy feel better. And then something worse will happen, and the pantomime will be revealed to be just that, and he will be coerced into a treatment he doesn’t want. Harold will be called. He will be lectured and lectured and lectured and he will lie and lie and lie. The same cycle, the same circle, again and again and again, a churn as predictable as the men in the motel rooms coming in, fitting their sheets over the bed, having sex with him, leaving. And then the next one, and the next one. And the next day: the same. His life is a series of dreary patterns: sex, cutting, this, that. Visits to Andy, visits to the hospital. Not this time, he thinks. This is when he does something different; this is when he escapes.
“You’re right, Andy,” he says, in as calm and unemotive a voice as he can summon, the voice he uses in the courtroom. “I’ve lost weight. And I’m sorry I haven’t come in earlier. I didn’t because I knew you’d get upset. But I’ve had a really bad intestinal flu, one I just can’t shake, but it’s ended. I’m eating, I promise. I know I look terrible. But I promise I’m working on it.” Ironically, he has been eating more in the past two weeks; he needs to get through the trial. He doesn’t want to faint while he’s in court.
And after that, what can Andy say? He is suspicious, still. But there is nothing for him to do. “If you don’t come see me next week, I’m coming back,” Andy tells him before his secretary sees him out.