There are five more steps and then he is at their front door, where he can’t fit the key into the lock because his hands are shaking, and he curses, nearly dropping it. And then he is in the apartment, and there are only fifteen steps from the front door to his bed, but he still has to stop halfway and bring himself down slowly to the ground, and pull himself the final feet to his room on his elbows. For a while he lies there, everything shifting around him, until he is strong enough to pull the blanket down over him. He will lie there until the sun leaves the sky and the apartment grows dark, and then, finally, he will hoist himself onto his bed with his arms, where he will fall asleep without eating or washing his face or changing, his teeth clacking against themselves from the pain. He will be alone, because Willem will go out with his girlfriend after the show, and by the time he gets home, it will be very late.
When he wakes, it will be very early, and he will feel better, but his wound will have wept during the night, and pus will have soaked through the gauze he had applied on Sunday morning before he left for his walk, his disastrous walk, and his pants will be stuck to his skin with its ooze. He will send a message to Andy, and then leave another with his exchange, and then he will shower, carefully removing the bandage, which will bring scraps of rotten flesh and clots of blackened mucus-thick blood with it. He will pant and gasp to keep from shouting. He will remember the conversation he had with Andy the last time this happened, when Andy suggested he get a wheelchair to keep on reserve, and although he hates the thought of using a wheelchair again, he will wish he had one now. He will think that Andy is right, that his walks are a sign of his inexcusable hubris, that his pretending that everything is fine, that he is not in fact disabled, is selfish, for the consequences it means for other people, people who have been inexplicably, unreasonably generous and good to him for years, for almost decades now.
He will turn off the shower and lower himself into the tub and lean his cheek against the tile and wait to feel better. He will be reminded of how trapped he is, trapped in a body he hates, with a past he hates, and how he will never be able to change either. He will want to cry, from frustration and hatred and pain, but he hasn’t cried since what happened with Brother Luke, after which he told himself he would never cry again. He will be reminded that he is a nothing, a scooped-out husk in which the fruit has long since mummified and shrunk, and now rattles uselessly. He will experience that prickle, that shiver of disgust that afflicts him in both his happiest and his most wretched moments, the one that asks him who he thinks he is to inconvenience so many people, to think he has the right to keep going when even his own body tells him he should stop.
He will sit and wait and breathe and he will be grateful that it is so early, that there is no chance of Willem discovering him and having to save him once again. He will (though he won’t be able to remember how later) somehow work himself into a standing position, get himself out of the tub, take some aspirin, go to work. At work, the words will blur and dance on the page, and by the time Andy calls, it will only be seven a.m., and he will tell Marshall he’s sick, refuse Marshall’s offer of a car, but let him—this is how bad he feels—help him into a cab. He will make the ride uptown that he had stupidly walked just the previous day. And when Andy opens the door, he will try to remain composed.
“Judy,” Andy will say, and he will be in his gentle mode, there will be no lectures from him today, and he will allow Andy to lead him past his empty waiting room, his office not yet open for the day, and help him onto the table where he has spent hours, days of hours, will let Andy help undress him even, as he closes his eyes and waits for the small bright hurt of Andy easing the tape off his leg, and pulling away from the raw skin the sodden gauze beneath.
My life, he will think, my life. But he won’t be able to think beyond this, and he will keep repeating the words to himself—part chant, part curse, part reassurance—as he slips into that other world that he visits when he is in such pain, that world he knows is never far from his own but that he can never remember after: My life.
2
YOU ASKED ME once when I knew that he was for me, and I told you that I had always known. But that wasn’t true, and I knew it even as I said it—I said it because it sounded pretty, like something someone might say in a book or a movie, and because we were both feeling so wretched, and helpless, and because I thought if I said it, we both might feel better about the situation before us, the situation that we perhaps had been capable of preventing—perhaps not—but at any rate hadn’t. This was in the hospital: the first time, I should say. I know you remember: you had flown in from Colombo that morning, hopscotching across cities and countries and hours, so that you landed a full day before you left.
But I want to be accurate now. I want to be accurate both because there is no reason not to be, and because I should be—I have always tried to be, I always try to be.
I’m not sure where to begin.
Maybe with some nice words, although they are also true words: I liked you right away. You were twenty-four when we met, which would have made me forty-seven. (Jesus.) I thought you were unusual: later, he’d speak of your goodness, but he never needed to explain it to me, for I already knew you were. It was the first summer the group of you came up to the house, and it was such a strange weekend for me, and for him as well—for me because in you four I saw who and what Jacob might have been, and for him because he had only known me as his teacher, and he was suddenly seeing me in my shorts and wearing my apron as I scooped clams off the grill, and arguing with you three about everything. Once I stopped seeing Jacob’s face in all of yours, though, I was able to enjoy the weekend, in large part because you three seemed to enjoy it so much. You saw nothing strange in the situation: you were boys who assumed that people would like you, not from arrogance but because people always had, and you had no reason to think that, if you were polite and friendly, then that politeness and friendliness might not be reciprocated.