A Little Life

1

SATURDAYS WERE FOR work, but Sundays were for walking. The walks had begun out of necessity five years ago, when he had moved to the city and knew little about it: each week, he would choose a different neighborhood and walk from Lispenard Street to it, and then around it, covering its perimeter precisely, and then home again. He never skipped a Sunday, unless the weather made it near impossible, and even now, even though he had walked every neighborhood in Manhattan, and many in Brooklyn and Queens as well, he still left every Sunday morning at ten, and returned only when his route was complete. The walks had long ceased to be something he enjoyed, although he didn’t not enjoy them, either — it was simply something he did. For a period, he had also hopefully considered them something more than exercise, something perhaps restorative, like an amateur physical therapy session, despite the fact that Andy didn’t agree with him, and indeed disapproved of his walks. “I’m fine with your wanting to exercise your legs,” he’d said. “But in that case, you should really be swimming, not dragging yourself up and down pavement.” He wouldn’t have minded swimming, actually, but there was nowhere private enough for him to swim, and so he didn’t.

Willem had occasionally joined him on these walks, and now, if his route took him past the theater, he would time it so they could meet at the juice stand down the block after the matinee performance. They would have their drinks, and Willem would tell him how the show had gone and would buy a salad to eat before the evening performance, and he would continue south, toward home.

They still lived at Lispenard Street, although both of them could have moved into their own apartments: he, certainly; Willem, probably. But neither of them had ever mentioned leaving to the other, and so neither of them had. They had, however, annexed the left half of the living room to make a second bedroom, the group of them building a lumpy Sheetrocked wall one weekend, so now when you walked in, there was only the gray light from two windows, not four, to greet you. Willem had taken the new bedroom, and he had stayed in their old one.

Aside from their stage-door visits, it felt like he never saw Willem these days, and for all Willem talked about how lazy he was, it seemed he was constantly at work, or trying to work: three years ago, on his twenty-ninth birthday, he had sworn that he was going to quit Ortolan before he turned thirty, and two weeks before his thirtieth birthday, the two of them had been in the apartment, squashed into their newly partitioned living room, Willem worrying about whether he could actually afford to leave his job, when he got a call, the call he had been waiting for for years. The play that had resulted from that call had been enough of a success, and had gotten Willem enough attention, to allow him to quit Ortolan for good thirteen months later: just one year past his self-imposed deadline. He had gone to see Willem’s play — a family drama called The Malamud Theorem, about a literature professor in the early throes of dementia, and his estranged son, a physicist — five times, twice with Malcolm and JB, and once with Harold and Julia, who were in town for the weekend, and each time he managed to forget that it was his old friend, his roommate, onstage, and at curtain call, he had felt both proud and wistful, as if the stage’s very elevation announced Willem’s ascendancy to some other realm of life, one not easily accessible to him.

His own approach to thirty had triggered no latent panic, no fluster of activity, no need to rearrange the outlines of his life to more closely resemble what a thirty-year-old’s life ought to be. The same was not true for his friends, however, and he had spent the last three years of his twenties listening to their eulogies for the decade, and their detailing of what they had and hadn’t done, and the cataloging of their self-loathings and promises. Things had changed, then. The second bedroom, for example, was erected partly out of Willem’s fear of being twenty-eight and still sharing a room with his college roommate, and that same anxiety — the fear that, fairy-tale-like, the turn into their fourth decade would transform them into something else, something out of their control, unless they preempted it with their own radical announcements — inspired Malcolm’s hasty coming out to his parents, only to see him retreat back in the following year when he started dating a woman.

But despite his friends’ anxieties, he knew he would love being thirty, for the very reason that they hated it: because it was an age of undeniable adulthood. (He looked forward to being thirty-five, when he would be able to say he had been an adult for more than twice as long as he had been a child.) When he was growing up, thirty had been a far-off, unimaginable age. He clearly remembered being a very young boy — this was when he lived in the monastery — and asking Brother Michael, who liked to tell him of the travels he had taken in his other life, when he too might be able to travel.

“When you’re older,” Brother Michael had said.

“When?” he’d asked. “Next year?” Then, even a month had seemed as long as forever.

“Many years,” Brother Michael had said. “When you’re older. When you’re thirty.” And now, in just a few weeks, he would be.

On those Sundays, when he was readying to leave for his walk, he would sometimes stand, barefoot, in the kitchen, everything quiet around him, and the small, ugly apartment would feel like a sort of marvel. Here, time was his, and space was his, and every door could be shut, every window locked. He would stand before the tiny hallway closet — an alcove, really, over which they had strung a length of burlap — and admire the stores within it. At Lispenard Street, there were no late-night scrambles to the bodega on West Broadway for a roll of toilet paper, no squinching your nose above a container of long-spoiled milk found in the back corner of the refrigerator: here, there was always extra. Here, everything was replaced when it needed to be. He made sure of it. In their first year at Lispenard Street he had been self-conscious about his habits, which he knew belonged to someone much older and probably female, and had hidden his supplies of paper towels under his bed, had stuffed the fliers for coupons into his briefcase to look through later, when Willem wasn’t home, as if they were a particularly exotic form of pornography. But one day, Willem had discovered his stash while looking for a stray sock he’d kicked under the bed.

He had been embarrassed. “Why?” Willem had asked him. “I think it’s great. Thank god you’re looking out for this kind of stuff.” But it had still made him feel vulnerable, yet another piece of evidence added to the overstuffed file testifying to his pinched prissiness, his fundamental and irreparable inability to be the sort of person he tried to make people believe he was.

And yet — as with so much else — he couldn’t help himself. To whom could he explain that he found as much contentment and safety in unloved Lispenard Street, in his bomb-shelter stockpilings, as he did in the facts of his degrees and his job? Or that those moments alone in the kitchen were something akin to meditative, the only times he found himself truly relaxing, his mind ceasing to scrabble forward, planning in advance the thousands of little deflections and smudgings of truth, of fact, that necessitated his every interaction with the world and its inhabitants? To no one, he knew, not even to Willem. But he’d had years to learn how to keep his thoughts to himself; unlike his friends, he had learned not to share evidence of his oddities as a way to distinguish himself from others, although he was happy and proud that they shared theirs with him.

Today he would walk to the Upper East Side: up West Broadway to Washington Square Park, to University and through Union Square, and up Broadway to Fifth, which he’d stay on until Eighty-sixth Street, and then back down Madison to Twenty-fourth Street, where he’d cross east to Lexington before continuing south and east once more to Irving, where he’d meet Willem outside the theater. It had been months, almost a year, since he had done this circuit, both because it was very far and because he already spent every Saturday on the Upper East Side, in a town house not far from Malcolm’s parents’, where he tutored a twelve-year-old boy named Felix. But it was mid-March, spring break, and Felix and his family were on vacation in Utah, which meant he ran no risk of seeing them.

Felix’s father was a friend of friends of Malcolm’s parents, and it had been Malcolm’s father who had gotten him the job. “They’re really not paying you enough at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, are they?” Mr. Irvine had asked him. “I don’t know why you won’t just let me introduce you to Gavin.” Gavin was one of Mr. Irvine’s law school friends, who now presided over one of the city’s more powerful firms.

“Dad, he doesn’t want to work for some corporate firm,” Malcolm had begun, but his father continued talking as if Malcolm hadn’t even spoken, and Malcolm had hunched back into his chair. He had felt bad for Malcolm then, but also annoyed, as he had told Malcolm to discreetly inquire whether his parents knew anyone who might have a kid who needed tutoring, not to actually ask them.

“Really, though,” Malcolm’s father had said to him, “I think it’s terrific that you’re interested in making your way on your own.” (Malcolm slouched even lower in his seat.) “But do you really need the money that badly? I didn’t think the federal government paid that miserably, but it’s been a long time since I was in public service.” He grinned.

He smiled back. “No,” he said, “the salary’s fine.” (It was. It wouldn’t have been to Mr. Irvine, of course, nor to Malcolm, but it was more money than he had ever dreamed he would have, and every two weeks it arrived, a relentless accumulation of numbers.) “I’m just saving up for a down payment.” He saw Malcolm’s face swivel toward him, and he reminded himself to tell Willem the particular lie he had told Malcolm’s father before Malcolm told Willem himself.

“Oh, well, good for you,” said Mr. Irvine. This was a goal he could understand. “And as it happens, I know just the person.”

That person was Howard Baker, who had hired him after interviewing him for fifteen distracted minutes to tutor his son in Latin, math, German, and piano. (He wondered why Mr. Baker wasn’t hiring professionals for each subject — he could have afforded it — but didn’t ask.) He felt sorry for Felix, who was small and unappealing, and who had a habit of scratching the inside of one narrow nostril, his index finger tunneling upward until he remembered himself and quickly retracted it, rubbing it on the side of his jeans. Eight months later, it was still unclear to him just how capable Felix was. He wasn’t stupid, but he suffered from a lack of passion, as if, at twelve, he had already become resigned to the fact that life would be a disappointment, and he a disappointment to the people in it. He was always waiting, on time and with his assignments completed, every Saturday at one p.m., and he obediently answered every question — his answers always ending in an anxious, querying upper register, as if every one, even the simplest (“Salve, Felix, quid agis?” “Um … bene?”), were a desperate guess — but he never had any questions of his own, and when he asked Felix if there was any subject in particular he might want to try discussing in either language, Felix would shrug and mumble, his finger drifting toward his nose. He always had the impression, when waving goodbye to Felix at the end of the afternoon — Felix listlessly raising his own hand before slouching back into the recesses of the entryway — that he never left the house, never went out, never had friends over. Poor Felix: his very name was a taunt.

The previous month, Mr. Baker had asked to speak to him after their lessons were over, and he had said goodbye to Felix and followed the maid into the study. His limp had been very pronounced that day, and he had been self-conscious, feeling — as he often did — as if he were playing the role of an impoverished governess in a Dickensian drama.

He had expected impatience from Mr. Baker, perhaps anger, even though Felix was doing quantifiably better in school, and he was ready to defend himself if he needed — Mr. Baker paid far more than he had anticipated, and he had plans for the money he was earning there — but he was instead nodded toward the chair in front of the desk.

“What do you think’s wrong with Felix?” Mr. Baker had demanded.

He hadn’t been expecting the question, so he had to think before he answered. “I don’t think anything’s wrong with him, sir,” he’d said, carefully. “I just think he’s not—” Happy, he nearly said. But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate? He couldn’t remember being a child and being able to define happiness: there was only misery, or fear, and the absence of misery or fear, and the latter state was all he had needed or wanted. “I think he’s shy,” he finished.

Mr. Baker grunted (this was obviously not the answer he was looking for). “But you like him, right?” he’d asked him, with such an odd, vulnerable desperation that he experienced a sudden deep sadness, both for Felix and for Mr. Baker. Was this what being a parent was like? Was this what being a child with a parent was like? Such unhappinesses, such disappointments, such expectations that would go unexpressed and unmet!

“Of course,” he had said, and Mr. Baker had sighed and given him his check, which the maid usually handed to him on his way out.

The next week, Felix hadn’t wanted to play his assignment. He was more listless than usual. “Shall we play something else?” he’d asked. Felix had shrugged. He thought. “Do you want me to play something for you?” Felix had shrugged again. But he did anyway, because it was a beautiful piano and sometimes, as he watched Felix inch his fingers across its lovely smooth keys, he longed to be alone with the instrument and let his hands move over its surface as fast as he could.

He played Haydn, Sonata No. 50 in D Major, one of his favorite pieces and so bright and likable that he thought it might cheer them both up. But when he was finished, and there was only the quiet boy sitting next to him, he was ashamed, both of the braggy, emphatic optimism of the Haydn and of his own burst of self-indulgence.

“Felix,” he’d begun, and then stopped. Beside him, Felix waited. “What’s wrong?”

And then, to his astonishment, Felix had begun to cry, and he had tried to comfort him. “Felix,” he’d said, awkwardly putting his arm around him. He pretended he was Willem, who would have known exactly what to do and what to say without even thinking about it. “It’s going to be all right. I promise you, it will be.” But Felix had only cried harder.

“I don’t have any friends,” Felix had sobbed.

“Oh, Felix,” he’d said, and his sympathy, which until then had been of the remote, objective kind, clarified itself. “I’m sorry.” He felt then, keenly, the loneliness of Felix’s life, of a Saturday spent sitting with a crippled nearly thirty-year-old lawyer who was there only to earn money, and who would go out that night with people he loved and who, even, loved him, while Felix remained alone, his mother — Mr. Baker’s third wife — perpetually elsewhere, his father convinced there was something wrong with him, something that needed fixing. Later, on his walk home (if the weather was nice, he refused Mr. Baker’s car and walked), he would wonder at the unlikely unfairness of it all: Felix, who was by any definition a better kid than he had been, and who yet had no friends, and he, who was a nothing, who did.

“Felix, it’ll happen eventually,” he’d said, and Felix had wailed, “But when?” with such yearning that he had winced.

“Soon, soon,” he had told him, petting his skinny back, “I promise,” and Felix had nodded, although later, walking him to the door, his little geckoey face made even more reptilian from tears, he’d had the distinct sensation that Felix had known he was lying. Who could know if Felix would ever have friends? Friendship, companionship: it so often defied logic, so often eluded the deserving, so often settled itself on the odd, the bad, the peculiar, the damaged. He waved goodbye at Felix’s small back, retreating already into the house, and although he would never have said so to Felix, he somehow fancied that this was why Felix was so wan all the time: it was because Felix had already figured this out, long ago; it was because he already knew.

He knew French and German. He knew the periodic table. He knew — as much as he didn’t care to — large parts of the Bible almost by memory. He knew how to help birth a calf and rewire a lamp and unclog a drain and the most efficient way to harvest a walnut tree and which mushrooms were poisonous and which were not and how to bale hay and how to test a watermelon, an apple, a squash, a muskmelon for freshness by thunking it in the right spot. (And then he knew things he wished he didn’t, things he hoped never to have to use again, things that, when he thought of them or dreamed of them at night, made him curl into himself with hatred and shame.)

And yet it often seemed he knew nothing of any real value or use, not really. The languages and the math, fine. But daily he was reminded of how much he didn’t know. He had never heard of the sitcoms whose episodes were constantly referenced. He had never been to a movie. He had never gone on vacation. He had never been to summer camp. He had never had pizza or popsicles or macaroni and cheese (and he had certainly never had — as both Malcolm and JB had — foie gras or sushi or marrow). He had never owned a computer or a phone, he had rarely been allowed to go online. He had never owned anything, he realized, not really: the books he had that he was so proud of, the shirts that he repaired again and again, they were nothing, they were trash, the pride he took in them was more shameful than not owning anything at all. The classroom was the safest place, and the only place he felt fully confident: everywhere else was an unceasing avalanche of marvels, each more baffling than the next, each another reminder of his bottomless ignorance. He found himself keeping mental lists of new things he had heard and encountered. But he could never ask anyone for the answers. To do so would be an admission of extreme otherness, which would invite further questions and would leave him exposed, and which would inevitably lead to conversations he definitely was not prepared to have. He felt, often, not so much foreign — for even the foreign students (even Odval, from a village outside Ulaanbaatar) seemed to understand these references — as from another time altogether: his childhood might well have been spent in the nineteenth century, not the twenty-first, for all he had apparently missed, and for how obscure and merely decorative what he did know seemed to be. How was it that apparently all of his peers, whether they were born in Lagos or Los Angeles, had had more or less the same experience, with the same cultural landmarks? Surely there was someone who knew as little as he did? And if not, how was he ever to catch up?

In the evenings, when a group of them lay splayed in someone’s room (a candle burning, a joint burning as well), the conversation often turned to his classmates’ childhoods, which they had barely left but about which they were curiously nostalgic and certainly obsessed. They recounted what seemed like every detail of them, though he was never sure if the goal was to compare with one another their similarities or to boast of their differences, because they seemed to take equal pleasure in both. They spoke of curfews, and rebellions, and punishments (a few people’s parents had hit them, and they related these stories with something close to pride, which he also found curious) and pets and siblings, and what they had worn that had driven their parents crazy, and what groups they had hung out with in high school and to whom they had lost their virginity, and where, and how, and cars they had crashed and bones they had broken, and sports they had played and bands they had started. They spoke of disastrous family vacations and strange, colorful relatives and odd next-door neighbors and teachers, both beloved and loathed. He enjoyed these divulgences more than he expected — these were real teenagers who’d had the sorts of real, plain lives he had always wondered about — and he found it both relaxing and educational to sit there late at night and listen to them. His silence was both a necessity and a protection, and had the added benefit of making him appear more mysterious and more interesting than he knew he was. “What about you, Jude?” a few people had asked him, early in the term, and he knew enough by then — he was a fast learner — to simply shrug and say, with a smile, “It’s too boring to get into.” He was astonished but relieved by how easily they accepted that, and grateful too for their self-absorption. None of them really wanted to listen to someone else’s story anyway; they only wanted to tell their own.

And yet his silence did not go unnoticed by everyone, and it was his silence that had inspired his nickname. This was the year Malcolm discovered postmodernism, and JB had made such a fuss about how late Malcolm was to that particular ideology that he hadn’t admitted that he hadn’t heard of it either.

“You can’t just decide you’re post-black, Malcolm,” JB had said. “And also: you have to have actually been black to begin with in order to move beyond blackness.”

“You’re such a dick, JB,” Malcolm had said.

“Or,” JB had continued, “you have to be so genuinely uncategorizable that the normal terms of identity don’t even apply to you.” JB had turned toward him, then, and he had felt himself freeze with a momentary terror. “Like Judy here: we never see him with anyone, we don’t know what race he is, we don’t know anything about him. Post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past.” He smiled at him, presumably to show he was at least partly joking. “The post-man. Jude the Postman.”

“The Postman,” Malcolm had repeated: he was never above grabbing on to someone else’s discomfort as a way of deflecting attention from his own. And although the name didn’t stick — when Willem had returned to the room and heard it, he had only rolled his eyes in response, which seemed to remove some of its thrill for JB — he was reminded that as much as he had convinced himself he was fitting in, as much as he worked to conceal the spiky odd parts of himself, he was fooling no one. They knew he was strange, and now his foolishness extended to his having convinced himself that he had convinced them that he wasn’t. Still, he kept attending the late-night groups, kept joining his classmates in their rooms: he was pulled to them, even though he now knew he was putting himself in jeopardy by attending them.

Sometimes during these sessions (he had begun to think of them this way, as intensive tutorials in which he could correct his own cultural paucities) he would catch Willem watching him with an indecipherable expression on his face, and would wonder how much Willem might have guessed about him. Sometimes he had to stop himself from saying something to him. Maybe he was wrong, he sometimes thought. Maybe it would be nice to confess to someone that most of the time he could barely relate to what was being discussed, that he couldn’t participate in everyone else’s shared language of childhood pratfalls and frustrations. But then he would stop himself, for admitting ignorance of that language would mean having to explain the one he did speak.

Although if he were to tell anyone, he knew it would be Willem. He admired all three of his roommates, but Willem was the one he trusted. At the home, he had quickly learned there were three types of boys: The first type might cause the fight (this was JB). The second type wouldn’t join in, but wouldn’t run to get help, either (this was Malcolm). And the third type would actually try to help you out (this was the rarest type, and this was obviously Willem). Maybe it was the same with girls as well, but he hadn’t spent enough time around girls to know this for sure.

And increasingly he was certain Willem knew something. (Knows what? he’d argue with himself, in saner moments. You’re just looking for a reason to tell him, and then what will he think of you? Be smart. Say nothing. Have some self-control.) But this was of course illogical. He knew even before he got to college that his childhood had been atypical — you had only to read a few books to come to that conclusion — but it wasn’t until recently that he had realized how atypical it truly was. Its very strangeness both insulated and isolated him: it was near inconceivable that anyone would guess at its shape and specificities, which meant that if they did, it was because he had dropped clues like cow turds, great ugly unmissable pleas for attention.

Still. The suspicion persisted, sometimes with an uncomfortable intensity, as if it was inevitable that he should say something and was being sent messages that took more energy to ignore than they would have to obey.

One night it was just the four of them. This was early in their third year, and was unusual enough for them all to feel cozy and a little sentimental about the clique they had made. And they were a clique, and to his surprise, he was part of it: the building they lived in was called Hood Hall, and they were known around campus as the Boys in the Hood. All of them had other friends (JB and Willem had the most), but it was known (or at least assumed, which was just as good) that their first loyalties were to one another. None of them had ever discussed this explicitly, but they all knew they liked this assumption, that they liked this code of friendship that had been imposed upon them.

The food that night had been pizza, ordered by JB and paid for by Malcolm. There had been weed, procured by JB, and outside there had been rain and then hail, the sound of it cracking against the glass and the wind rattling the windows in their splintered wooden casements the final elements in their happiness. The joint went round and round, and although he didn’t take a puff — he never did; he was too worried about what he might do or say if he lost control over himself — he could feel the smoke filling his eyes, pressing upon his eyelids like a shaggy warm beast. He had been careful, as he always was when one of the others paid for food, to eat as little as possible, and although he was still hungry (there were two slices left over, and he stared at them, fixedly, before catching himself and turning away resolutely), he was also deeply content. I could fall asleep, he thought, and stretched out on the couch, pulling Malcolm’s blanket over him as he did. He was pleasantly exhausted, but then he was always exhausted those days: it was as if the daily effort it took to appear normal was so great that it left energy for little else. (He was aware, sometimes, of seeming wooden, icy, of being boring, which he recognized that here might have been considered the greater misfortune than being whatever it was he was.) In the background, as if far away, he could hear Malcolm and JB having a fight about evil.

“I’m just saying, we wouldn’t be having this argument if you’d read Plato.”

“Yeah, but what Plato?”

“Have you read Plato?”

“I don’t see—”

“Have you?”

“No, but—”

“See! See, see?!” That would be Malcolm, jumping up and down and pointing at JB, while Willem laughed. On weed, Malcolm grew both sillier and more pedantic, and the three of them liked getting into silly and pedantic philosophical arguments with him, the contents of which Malcolm could never recall in the morning.

Then there was an interlude of Willem and JB talking about something — he was too sleepy to really listen, just awake enough to distinguish their voices — and then JB’s voice, ringing through his fug: “Jude!”

“What?” he answered, his eyes still closed.

“I want to ask you a question.”

He could instantly feel something inside him come alert. When high, JB had the uncanny ability to ask questions or make observations that both devastated and discomfited. He didn’t think there was any malice behind it, but it made you wonder what went on in JB’s subconscious. Was this the real JB, the one who had asked their hallmate, Tricia Park, what it was like growing up as the ugly twin (poor Tricia had gotten up and run out of the room), or was it the one who, after JB had witnessed him in the grip of a terrible episode, one in which he could feel himself falling in and out of consciousness, the sensation as sickening as tumbling off a roller coaster in mid-incline, had snuck out that night with his stoner boyfriend and returned just before daybreak with a bundle of bud-furred magnolia branches, sawn off illegally from the quadrangle’s trees?

“What?” he asked again, warily.

“Well,” said JB, pausing and taking another inhalation, “we’ve all known each other a while now—”

“We have?” Willem asked in fake surprise.

“Shut up, Willem,” JB continued. “And all of us want to know why you’ve never told us what happened to your legs.”

“Oh, JB, we do not—” Willem began, but Malcolm, who had the habit of vociferously taking JB’s side when stoned, interrupted him: “It really hurts our feelings, Jude. Do you not trust us?”

“Jesus, Malcolm,” Willem said, and then, mimicking Malcolm in a shrieky falsetto, “ ‘It really hurts our feelings.’ You sound like a girl. It’s Jude’s business.”

And this was worse, somehow, having to have Willem, always Willem, defend him. Against Malcolm and JB! At that moment, he hated all of them, but of course he was in no position to hate them. They were his friends, his first friends, and he understood that friendship was a series of exchanges: of affections, of time, sometimes of money, always of information. And he had no money. He had nothing to give them, he had nothing to offer. He couldn’t loan Willem a sweater, the way Willem let him borrow his, or repay Malcolm the hundred dollars he’d pressed upon him once, or even help JB on move-out day, as JB helped him.

“Well,” he began, and was aware of all of their perked silences, even Willem’s. “It’s not very interesting.” He kept his eyes closed, both because it made it easier to tell the story when he didn’t have to look at them, and also because he simply didn’t think he could stand it at the moment. “It was a car injury. I was fifteen. It was the year before I came here.”

“Oh,” said JB. There was a pause; he could feel something in the room deflate, could feel how his revelation had shifted the others back into a sort of somber sobriety. “I’m sorry, bro. That sucks.”

“You could walk before?” asked Malcolm, as if he could not walk now. And this made him sad and embarrassed: what he considered walking, they apparently did not.

“Yes,” he said, and then, because it was true, even if not the way they’d interpret it, he added, “I used to run cross-country.”

“Oh, wow,” said Malcolm. JB made a sympathetic grunting noise.

Only Willem, he noticed, said nothing. But he didn’t dare open his eyes to look at his expression.

Eventually the word got out, as he knew it would. (Perhaps people really did wonder about his legs. Tricia Park later came up to him and told him she’d always assumed he had cerebral palsy. What was he supposed to say to that?) Somehow, though, over the tellings and retellings, the explanation was changed to a car accident, and then to a drunken driving accident.

“The easiest explanations are often the right ones,” his math professor, Dr. Li, always said, and maybe the same principle applied here. Except he knew it didn’t. Math was one thing. Nothing else was that reductive.

But the odd thing was this: by his story morphing into one about a car accident, he was being given an opportunity for reinvention; all he had to do was claim it. But he never could. He could never call it an accident, because it wasn’t. And so was it pride or stupidity to not take the escape route he’d been offered? He didn’t know.

And then he noticed something else. He was in the middle of another episode — a highly humiliating one, it had taken place just as he was coming off of his shift at the library, and Willem had just happened to be there a few minutes early, about to start his own shift — when he heard the librarian, a kind, well-read woman whom he liked, ask why he had these. They had moved him, Mrs. Eakeley and Willem, to the break room in the back, and he could smell the burned-sugar tang of old coffee, a scent he despised anyway, so sharp and assaultive that he almost vomited.

“A car injury,” he heard Willem’s reply, as from across a great black lake.

But it wasn’t until that night that he registered what Willem had said, and the word he had used: injury, not accident. Was it deliberate, he wondered? What did Willem know? He was so addled that he might have actually asked him, had Willem been around, but he wasn’t — he was at his girlfriend’s.

No one was there, he realized. The room was his. He felt the creature inside him — which he pictured as slight and raggedy and lemurlike, quick-reflexed and ready to sprint, its dark wet eyes forever scanning the landscape for future dangers — relax and sag to the ground. It was at these moments that he found college most enjoyable: he was in a warm room, and the next day he would have three meals and eat as much as he wanted, and in between he would go to classes, and no one would try to hurt him or make him do anything he didn’t want to do. Somewhere nearby were his roommates — his friends — and he had survived another day without divulging any of his secrets, and placed another day between the person he once was and the person he was now. It seemed, always, an accomplishment worthy of sleep, and so he did, closing his eyes and readying himself for another day in the world.

It had been Ana, his first and only social worker, and the first person who had never betrayed him, who had talked to him seriously about college — the college he ended up attending — and who was convinced that he would get in. She hadn’t been the first person to suggest this, but she had been the most insistent.

“I don’t see why not,” she said. It was a favorite phrase of hers. The two of them were sitting on Ana’s porch, in Ana’s backyard, eating banana bread that Ana’s girlfriend had made. Ana didn’t care for nature (too buggy, too squirmy, she always said), but when he made the suggestion that they go outdoors — tentatively, because at the time he was still unsure where the boundaries of her tolerance for him lay — she’d slapped the edges of her armchair and heaved herself up. “I don’t see why not. Leslie!” she called into the kitchen, where Leslie was making lemonade. “You can bring it outside!”

Hers was the first face he saw when he had at last opened his eyes in the hospital. For a long moment, he couldn’t remember where he was, or who he was, or what had happened, and then, suddenly, her face was above his, looking at him. “Well, well,” she said. “He awakes.”

She was always there, it seemed, no matter what time he woke. Sometimes it was day, and he heard the sounds of the hospital — the mouse squeak of the nurses’ shoes, and the clatter of a cart, and the drone of the intercom announcements — in the hazy, half-formed moments he had before shifting into full consciousness. But sometimes it was night, when everything was silent around him, and it took him longer to figure out where he was, and why he was there, although it came back to him, it always did, and unlike some realizations, it never grew easier or fuzzier with each remembrance. And sometimes it was neither day nor night but somewhere in between, and there would be something strange and dusty about the light that made him imagine for a moment that there might after all be such a thing as heaven, and that he might after all have made it there. And then he would hear Ana’s voice, and remember again why he was there, and want to close his eyes all over again.

They talked of nothing in those moments. She would ask him if he was hungry, and no matter his answer, she would have a sandwich for him to eat. She would ask him if he was in pain, and if he was, how intense it was. It was in her presence that he’d had the first of his episodes, and the pain had been so awful — unbearable, almost, as if someone had reached in and grabbed his spine like a snake and was trying to loose it from its bundles of nerves by shaking it — that later, when the surgeon told him that an injury like his was an “insult” to the body, and one the body would never recover from completely, he had understood what the word meant and realized how correct and well-chosen it was.

“You mean he’s going to have these all his life?” Ana had asked, and he had been grateful for her outrage, especially because he was too tired and frightened to summon forth any of his own.

“I wish I could say no,” said the surgeon. And then, to him, “But they may not be this severe in the future. You’re young now. The spine has wonderful reparative qualities.”

“Jude,” she’d said to him when the next one came, two days after the first. He could hear her voice, but as if from far away, and then, suddenly, awfully close, filling his mind like explosions. “Hold on to my hand,” she’d said, and again, her voice swelled and receded, but she seized his hand and he held it so tightly he could feel her index finger slide oddly over her ring finger, could almost feel every small bone in her palm reposition themselves in his grip, which had the effect of making her seem like something delicate and intricate, although there was nothing delicate about her in either appearance or manner. “Count,” she commanded him the third time it happened, and he did, counting up to a hundred again and again, parsing the pain into negotiable increments. In those days, before he learned it was better to be still, he would flop on his bed like a fish on a boat deck, his free hand scrabbling for a halyard line to cling to for safety, the hospital mattress unyielding and uncaring, searching for a position in which the discomfort might lessen. He tried to be quiet, but he could hear himself making strange animal noises, so that at times a forest appeared beneath his eyelids, populated with screech owls and deer and bears, and he would imagine he was one of them, and that the sounds he was making were normal, part of the woods’ unceasing soundtrack.

When it had ended, she would give him some water, a straw in the glass so he wouldn’t have to raise his head. Beneath him, the floor tilted and bucked, and he was often sick. He had never been in the ocean, but he imagined this was what it might feel like, imagined the swells of water forcing the linoleum floor into quavering hillocks. “Good boy,” she’d say as he drank. “Have a little more.”

“It’ll get better,” she’d say, and he’d nod, because he couldn’t begin to imagine his life if it didn’t get better. His days now were hours: hours without pain and hours with it, and the unpredictability of this schedule — and his body, although it was his in name only, for he could control nothing of it — exhausted him, and he slept and slept, the days slipping away from him uninhabited.

Later, it would be easier to simply tell people that it was his legs that hurt him, but that wasn’t really true: it was his back. Sometimes he could predict what would trigger the spasming, that pain that would extend down his spine into one leg or the other, like a wooden stake set aflame and thrust into him: a certain movement, lifting something too heavy or too high, simple tiredness. But sometimes he couldn’t. And sometimes the pain would be preceded by an interlude of numbness, or a twinging that was almost pleasurable, it was so light and zingy, just a sensation of electric prickles moving up and down his spine, and he would know to lie down and wait for it to finish its cycle, a penance he could never escape or avoid. But sometimes it barged in, and those were the worst: he grew fearful that it would arrive at some terribly inopportune time, and before each big meeting, each big interview, each court appearance, he would beg his own back to still itself, to carry him through the next few hours without incident. But all of this was in the future, and each lesson he learned he did so over hours and hours of these episodes, stretched out over days and months and years.

As the weeks passed, she brought him books, and told him to write down titles he was interested in and she would go to the library and get them — but he was too shy to do so. He knew she was his social worker, and that she had been assigned to him, but it wasn’t until more than a month had passed, and the doctors had begun to talk about his casts being removed in a matter of weeks, that she first asked him about what had happened.

“I don’t remember,” he said. It was his default answer for everything back then. It was a lie as well; in uninvited moments, he’d see the car’s headlights, twinned glares of white, rushing toward him, and recall how he’d shut his eyes and jerked his head to the side, as if that might have prevented the inevitable.

She waited. “It’s okay, Jude,” she said. “We basically know what happened. But I need you to tell me at some point, so we can talk about it.” She had interviewed him earlier, did he remember? There had apparently been a moment soon after he’d come out of the first surgery that he had woken, lucid, and answered all her questions, not only about what had happened that night but in the years before it as well — but he honestly didn’t remember this at all, and he fretted about what, exactly, he had said, and what Ana’s expression had been when he’d told her.

How much had he told her? he asked at one point.

“Enough,” she said, “to convince me that there’s a hell and those men need to be in it.” She didn’t sound angry, but her words were, and he closed his eyes, impressed and a little scared that the things that had happened to him — to him! — could inspire such passion, such vitriol.

She oversaw his transfer into his new home, his final home: the Douglasses’. They had two other fosters, both girls, both young — Rosie was eight and had Down syndrome, Agnes was nine and had spina bifida. The house was a maze of ramps, unlovely but sturdy and smooth, and unlike Agnes, he could wheel himself around without asking for assistance.

The Douglasses were evangelical Lutherans, but they didn’t make him attend church with them. “They’re good people,” Ana said. “They won’t bother you, and you’ll be safe here. You think you can manage grace at the table for a little privacy and guaranteed security?” She looked at him and smiled. He nodded. “Besides,” she continued, “you can always call me if you want to talk sin.”

And indeed, he was in Ana’s care more than in the Douglasses’. He slept in their house, and ate there, and when he was first learning how to move on his crutches, it was Mr. Douglass who sat on a chair outside the bathroom, ready to enter if he slipped and fell getting into or out of the bathtub (he still wasn’t able to balance well enough to take a shower, even with a walker). But it was Ana who took him to most of his doctor’s appointments, and Ana who waited at one end of her backyard, a cigarette in her mouth, as he took his first slow steps toward her, and Ana who finally got him to write down what had happened with Dr. Traylor, and kept him from having to testify in court. He had said he could do it, but she had told him he wasn’t ready yet, and that they had plenty of evidence to put Dr. Traylor away for years even without his testimony, and hearing that, he was able to admit his own relief: relief at not having to say aloud words he didn’t know how to say, and mostly, relief that he wouldn’t have to see Dr. Traylor again. When he at last gave her the statement — which he’d written as plainly as possible, and had imagined while writing it that he was in fact writing about someone else, someone he had known once but had never had to talk to again — she read it through once, impassive, before nodding at him. “Good,” she said briskly, and refolded it and placed it back in its envelope. “Good job,” she added, and then, suddenly, she began to cry, almost ferociously, unable to stop herself. She was saying something to him, but she was weeping so hard he couldn’t understand her, and she had finally left, though she had called him later that night to apologize.

“I’m sorry, Jude,” she said. “That was really unprofessional of me. I just read what you wrote and I just—” She was silent for a period, and then took a breath. “It won’t happen again.”

It was also Ana who, after the doctors determined he wouldn’t be strong enough to go to school, found him a tutor so he could finish high school, and it was she who made him discuss college. “You’re really smart, did you know that?” she asked him. “You could go anywhere, really. I talked to some of your teachers in Montana, and they think so as well. Have you thought about it? You have? Where would you want to go?” And when he told her, preparing himself for her to laugh, she instead only nodded: “I don’t see why not.”

“But,” he began, “do you think they’d take someone like me?”

Once again, she didn’t laugh. “It’s true, you haven’t had the most — traditional — of educations”—she smiled at him—“but your tests are terrific, and although you probably don’t think so, I promise you know more than most, if not all, kids your age.” She sighed. “You may have something to thank Brother Luke for after all.” She studied his face. “So I don’t see why not.”

She helped him with everything: she wrote one of his recommendations, she let him use her computer to type up his essay (he didn’t write about the past year; he wrote about Montana, and how he’d learned there to forage for mustard shoots and mushrooms), she even paid for his application fee.

When he was accepted — with a full scholarship, as Ana had predicted — he told her it was all because of her.

“Bullshit,” she said. She was so sick by that point that she could only whisper it. “You did it yourself.” Later he would scan through the previous months and see, as if spotlit, the signs of her illness, and how, in his stupidity and self-absorption, he had missed one after the next: her weight loss, her yellowing eyes, her fatigue, all of which he had attributed to — what? “You shouldn’t smoke,” he’d said to her just two months earlier, confident enough around her now to start issuing orders; the first adult he’d done so to. “You’re right,” she’d said, and squinted her eyes at him while inhaling deeply, grinning at him when he sighed at her.

Even then, she didn’t give up. “Jude, we should talk about it,” she’d say every few days, and when he shook his head, she’d be silent. “Tomorrow, then,” she’d say. “Do you promise me? Tomorrow we’ll talk about it.”

“I don’t see why I have to talk about it at all,” he muttered at her once. He knew she had read his records from Montana; he knew she knew what he was.

She was quiet. “One thing I’ve learned,” she said, “you have to talk about these things while they’re fresh. Or you’ll never talk about them. I’m going to teach you how to talk about them, because it’s going to get harder and harder the longer you wait, and it’s going to fester inside you, and you’re always going to think you’re to blame. You’ll be wrong, of course, but you’ll always think it.” He didn’t know how to respond to that, but the next day, when she brought it up again, he shook his head and turned away from her, even though she called after him. “Jude,” she said, once, “I’ve let you go on for too long without addressing this. This is my fault.”

“Do it for me, Jude,” she said at another point. But he couldn’t; he couldn’t find the language to talk about it, not even to her. Besides, he didn’t want to relive those years. He wanted to forget them, to pretend they belonged to someone else.

By June she was so weak she couldn’t sit. Fourteen months after they’d met, she was the one in bed, and he was the one next to her. Leslie worked the day shift at the hospital, and so often, it was just the two of them in the house. “Listen,” she said. Her throat was dry from one of her medications, and she winced as she spoke. He reached for the jug of water, but she waved her hand, impatiently. “Leslie’s going to take you shopping before you leave; I made a list for her of things you’ll need.” He started to protest, but she stopped him. “Don’t argue, Jude. I don’t have the energy.”

She swallowed. He waited. “You’re going to be great at college,” she said. She shut her eyes. “The other kids are going to ask you about how you grew up, have you thought about that?”

“Sort of,” he said. It was all he thought about.

“Mmph,” she grunted. She didn’t believe him either. “What are you going to tell them?” And then she opened her eyes and looked at him.

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“Ah, yes,” she said. They were quiet. “Jude,” she began, and then stopped. “You’ll find your own way to discuss what happened to you. You’ll have to, if you ever want to be close to anyone. But your life — no matter what you think, you have nothing to be ashamed of, and none of it has been your fault. Will you remember that?”

It was the closest they had ever gotten to discussing not only the previous year but the years that preceded it, too. “Yes,” he told her.

She glared at him. “Promise me.”

“I promise.”

But even then, he couldn’t believe her.

She sighed. “I should’ve made you talk more,” she said. It was the last thing she ever said to him. Two weeks later — July third — she was dead. Her service was the week after that. By this point he had a summer job at a local bakery, where he sat in the back room spackling cakes with fondant, and in the days following the funeral he sat until night at his workstation, plastering cake after cake with carnation-pink icing, trying not to think of her.

At the end of July, the Douglasses moved: Mr. Douglass had gotten a new job in San Jose, and they were taking Agnes with them; Rosie was being reassigned to a different family. He had liked the Douglasses, but when they told him to stay in touch, he knew he wouldn’t — he was so desperate to move away from the life he was in, the life he’d had; he wanted to be someone whom no one knew and who knew no one.

He was put into emergency shelter. That was what the state called it: emergency shelter. He’d argued that he was old enough to be left on his own (he imagined, also illogically, that he would sleep in the back room of the bakery), and that in less than two months he’d be gone anyway, out of the system entirely, but no one agreed with him. The shelter was a dormitory, a sagging gray honeycomb populated by other kids who — because of what they had done or what had been done to them or simply how old they were — the state couldn’t easily place.

When it was time for him to leave, they gave him some money to buy supplies for school. They were, he recognized, vaguely proud of him; he might not have been in the system for long, but he was going to college, and to a superior college at that — he would forever after be claimed as one of their successes. Leslie drove him to the Army Navy Store. He wondered, as he chose things he thought he might need — two sweaters, three long-sleeve shirts, pants, a gray blanket that resembled the clotty stuffing that vomited forth from the sofa in the shelter’s lobby — if he was getting the correct things, the things that might have been on Ana’s list. He couldn’t stop himself from thinking that there was something else on that list, something essential that Ana thought he needed that he would now never know. At nights, he craved that list, sometimes more than he craved her; he could picture it in his mind, the funny up-and-down capitalizations she inserted into a single word, the mechanical pencil she always used, the yellow legal pads, left over from her years as a lawyer, on which she made her notes. Sometimes the letters solidified into words, and in the dream life he’d feel triumphant; ah, he’d think, of course! Of course that’s what I need! Of course Ana would know! But in the mornings, he could never remember what those things were. In those moments he wished, perversely, that he had never met her, that it was surely worse to have had her for so brief a period than to never have had her at all.

They gave him a bus ticket north; Leslie came to the station to see him off. He had packed his things in a double-layered black garbage bag, and then inside the backpack he’d bought at the Army Navy Store: everything he owned in one neat package. On the bus he stared out the window and thought of nothing. He hoped his back wouldn’t betray him on the ride, and it didn’t.

He had been the first to arrive in their room, and when the second boy came in — it had been Malcolm — with his parents and suitcases and books and speakers and television and phones and computers and refrigerator and flotillas of digital gadgetry, he had felt the first sensations of sickening fear, and then anger, directed irrationally at Ana: How could she let him believe he might be equipped to do this? Who could he say he was? Why had she never told him exactly how poor, how ugly, what a scrap of bloodied, muddied cloth, his life really was? Why had she let him believe he might belong here?

As the months passed, this feeling dampened, but it never disappeared; it lived on him like a thin scum of mold. But as that knowledge became more acceptable, another piece became less so: he began to realize that she was the first and last person to whom he would never have to explain anything. She knew that he wore his life on his skin, that his biography was written in his flesh and on his bones. She would never ask him why he wouldn’t wear short sleeves, even in the steamiest of weather, or why he didn’t like to be touched, or, most important, what had happened to his legs or back: she knew already. Around her he had felt none of the constant anxiety, nor watchfulness, that he seemed condemned to feel around everyone else; the vigilance was exhausting, but it eventually became simply a part of life, a habit like good posture. Once, she had reached out to (he later realized) embrace him, but he had reflexively brought his hands up over his head to protect himself, and although he had been embarrassed, she hadn’t made him feel silly or overreactive. “I’m an idiot, Jude,” she’d said instead. “I’m sorry. No more sudden movements, I promise.”

But now she was gone, and no one knew him. His records were sealed. His first Christmas, Leslie had sent him a card, addressed to him through the student affairs office, and he had kept it for days, his last link to Ana, before finally throwing it away. He never wrote back, and he never heard from Leslie again. It was a new life. He was determined not to ruin it for himself.

Still, sometimes, he thought back to their final conversations, mouthing them aloud. This was at night, when his roommates — in various configurations, depending on who was in the room at the time — slept above and next to him. “Don’t let this silence become a habit,” she’d warned him shortly before she died. And: “It’s all right to be angry, Jude; you don’t have to hide it.” She had been wrong about him, he always thought; he wasn’t what she thought he was. “You’re destined for greatness, kid,” she’d said once, and he wanted to believe her, even though he couldn’t. But she was right about one thing: it did get harder and harder. He did blame himself. And although he tried every day to remember the promise he’d made to her, every day it became more and more remote, until it was just a memory, and so was she, a beloved character from a book he’d read long ago.

“The world has two kinds of people,” Judge Sullivan used to say. “Those who are inclined to believe, and those who aren’t. In my courtroom, we value belief. Belief in all things.”

He made this proclamation often, and after doing so, he would groan himself to his feet — he was very fat — and toddle out of the room. This was usually at the end of the day — Sullivan’s day, at least — when he left his chambers and came over to speak to his law clerks, sitting on the edge of one of their desks and delivering often opaque lectures that were interspersed with frequent pauses, as if his clerks were not lawyers but scriveners, and should be writing down his words. But no one did, not even Kerrigan, who was a true believer and the most conservative of the three of them.

After the judge left, he would grin across the room at Thomas, who would raise his eyes upward in a gesture of helplessness and apology. Thomas was a conservative, too, but “a thinking conservative,” he’d remind him, “and the fact that I even have to make that distinction is fucking depressing.”

He and Thomas had started clerking for the judge the same year, and when he had been approached by the judge’s informal search committee — really, his Business Associations professor, with whom the judge was old friends — the spring of his second year of law school, it had been Harold who had encouraged him to apply. Sullivan was known among his fellow circuit court judges for always hiring one clerk whose political views diverged from his own, the more wildly, the better. (His last liberal law clerk had gone on to work for a Hawaiian rights sovereignty group that advocated for the islands’ secession from the United States, a career move that had sent the judge into a fit of apoplectic self-satisfaction.)

“Sullivan hates me,” Harold had told him then, sounding pleased. “He’ll hire you just to spite me.” He smiled, savoring the thought. “And because you’re the most brilliant student I’ve ever had,” he added.

The compliment made him look at the ground: Harold’s praise tended to be conveyed to him by others, and was rarely handed to him directly. “I’m not sure I’m liberal enough for him,” he’d replied. Certainly he wasn’t liberal enough for Harold; it was one of the things — his opinions; the way he read the law; how he applied it to life — that they argued about.

Harold snorted. “Trust me,” he said. “You are.”

But when he went to Washington for his interview the following year, Sullivan had talked about the law — and political philosophy — with much less vigor and specificity than he had anticipated. “I hear that you sing,” Sullivan said instead after an hour of conversation about what he had studied (the judge had attended the same law school), and his position as the articles editor on the law review (the same position the judge himself had held), and his thoughts on recent cases.

“I do,” he replied, wondering how the judge had learned that. Singing was his comfort, but he rarely did it in front of others. Had he been singing in Harold’s office and been overheard? Or sometimes he sang in the law library, when he was re-shelving books late at night and the space was as quiet and still as a church — had someone overheard him there?

“Sing me something,” said the judge.

“What would you like to hear, sir?” he asked. Normally, he would have been much more nervous, but he had heard that the judge would make him do a performance of some sort (legend had it that he’d made a previous applicant juggle), and Sullivan was a known opera lover.

The judge put his fat fingers to his fat lips and thought. “Hmm,” he said. “Sing me something that tells me something about you.”

He thought, and then sang. He was surprised to hear what he chose — Mahler’s “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”—both because he didn’t even really like Mahler that much and because the lied was a difficult one to perform, slow and mournful and subtle and not meant for a tenor. And yet he liked the poem itself, which his voice teacher in college had dismissed as “second-rate romanticism,” but which he had always thought suffered unfairly from a poor translation. The standard interpretation of the first line was “I am lost to the world,” but he read it as “I have become lost to the world,” which, he believed, was less self-pitying, less melodramatic, and more resigned, more confused. I have become lost to the world / In which I otherwise wasted so much time. The lied was about the life of an artist, which he was definitely not. But he understood, primally almost, the concept of losing, of loosing oneself from the world, of disappearing into a different place, one of retreat and safety, of the twinned yearnings of escape and discovery. It means nothing to me / Whether the world believes me dead / I can hardly say anything to refute it / For truly, I am no longer a part of the world.

When he finished, he opened his eyes to the judge clapping and laughing. “Bravo,” he said. “Bravo! But I think you might be in the wrong profession altogether, you know.” He laughed again. “Where’d you learn to sing like that?”

“The brothers, sir,” he’d replied.

“Ah, a Catholic boy?” asked the judge, sitting up fatly in his chair and looking ready to be pleased.

“I was raised Catholic,” he began.

“But you’re not now?” the judge asked, frowning.

“No,” he said. He had worked for years to keep the apology out of his voice when he said this.

Sullivan made a noncommittal grunting noise. “Well, whatever they gave you should have offered at least some sort of protection against whatever Harold Stein’s been filling your head with for the past few years,” he said. He looked at his résumé. “You’re his research assistant?”

“Yes,” he said. “For more than two years.”

“A good mind, wasted,” Sullivan declared (it was unclear whether he meant his or Harold’s). “Thanks for coming down, we’ll be in touch. And thanks for the lied; you have one of the most beautiful tenors I’ve heard in a long time. Are you sure you’re in the right field?” At this, he smiled, the last time he would ever see Sullivan smile with such pleasure and sincerity.

Back in Cambridge, he told Harold about his meeting (“You sing?” Harold asked him, as if he’d just told him he flew), but that he was certain he wouldn’t get the clerkship. A week later, Sullivan called: the job was his. He was surprised, but Harold wasn’t. “I told you so,” he said.

The next day, he went to Harold’s office as usual, but Harold had his coat on. “Normal work is suspended today,” he announced. “I need you to run some errands with me.” This was unusual, but Harold was unusual. At the curb, he held out the keys: “Do you want to drive?”

“Sure,” he said, and went to the driver’s side. This was the car he’d learned to drive in, just a year ago, while Harold sat next to him, far more patient outside the classroom than he was in it. “Good,” he’d said. “Let go of the clutch a little more — good. Good, Jude, good.”

Harold had to pick up some shirts he’d had altered, and they drove to the small, expensive men’s store on the edge of the square where Willem had worked his senior year. “Come in with me,” Harold instructed him, “I’m going to need some help carrying these out.”

“My god, Harold, how many shirts did you buy?” he asked. Harold had an unvarying wardrobe of blue shirts, white shirts, brown corduroys (for winter), linen pants (for spring and summer), and sweaters in various shades of greens and blues.

“Quiet, you,” said Harold.

Inside, Harold went off to find a salesperson, and he waited, running his fingers over the ties in their display cases, rolled and shiny as pastries. Malcolm had given him two of his old cotton suits, which he’d had tailored and had worn throughout both of his summer internships, but he’d had to borrow his roommate’s suit for the Sullivan interview, and he had tried to move carefully in it the entire time it was his, aware of its largeness and the fineness of its wool.

Then “That’s him,” he heard Harold say, and when he turned, Harold was standing with a small man who had a measuring tape draped around his neck like a snake. “He’ll need two suits — a dark gray and a navy — and let’s get him a dozen shirts, a few sweaters, some ties, socks, shoes: he doesn’t have anything.” To him he nodded and said, “This is Marco. I’ll be back in a couple of hours or so.”

“Wait,” he said. “Harold. What are you doing?”

“Jude,” said Harold, “you need something to wear. I’m hardly an expert on this front, but you can’t show up to Sullivan’s chambers wearing what you’re wearing.”

He was embarrassed: by his clothes, by his inadequacy, by Harold’s generosity. “I know,” he said. “But I can’t accept this, Harold.”

He would’ve continued, but Harold stepped between him and Marco and turned him away. “Jude,” he said, “accept this. You’ve earned it. What’s more, you need it. I’m not going to have you humiliating me in front of Sullivan. Besides, I’ve already paid for it, and I’m not getting my money back. Right, Marco?” he called behind him.

“Right,” said Marco, immediately.

“Oh, leave it, Jude,” Harold said, when he saw him about to speak. “I’ve got to go.” And he marched out without looking back.

And so he found himself standing before the triple-leafed mirror, watching the reflection of Marco busying about his ankles, but when Marco reached up his leg to measure the inseam, he flinched, reflexively. “Easy, easy,” Marco said, as if he were a nervous horse, and patted his thigh, also as if he were a horse, and when he gave another involuntary half kick as Marco did the other leg, “Hey! I have pins in my mouth, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and held himself still.

When Marco was finished, he looked at himself in his new suit: here was such anonymity, such protection. Even if someone were to accidentally graze his back, he was wearing enough layers so that they’d never be able to feel the ridges of scars beneath. Everything was covered, everything was hidden. If he was standing still, he could be anyone, someone blank and invisible.

“I think maybe half an inch more,” Marco said, pinching the back of the jacket in around the waist. He swatted some threads off his sleeve. “Now all you need’s a good haircut.”

He found Harold waiting for him in the tie area, reading a magazine. “Are you done?” he asked, as if the entire trip had been his idea and Harold had been the one indulging his whimsy.

Over their early dinner, he tried to thank Harold again, but every time he tried, Harold stopped him with increasing impatience. “Has anyone ever told you that sometimes you just need to accept things, Jude?” he finally asked.

“You said to never just accept anything,” he reminded Harold.

“That’s in the classroom and in the courtroom,” Harold said. “Not in life. You see, Jude, in life, sometimes nice things happen to good people. You don’t need to worry — they don’t happen as often as they should. But when they do, it’s up to the good people to just say ‘thank you,’ and move on, and maybe consider that the person who’s doing the nice thing gets a bang out of it as well, and really isn’t in the mood to hear all the reasons that the person for whom he’s done the nice thing doesn’t think he deserves it or isn’t worthy of it.”

He shut up then, and after dinner he let Harold drive him back to his apartment on Hereford Street. “Besides,” Harold said as he was getting out of the car, “you looked really, really nice. You’re a great-looking kid; I hope someone’s told you that before.” And then, before he could protest, “Acceptance, Jude.”

So he swallowed what he was going to say. “Thank you, Harold. For everything.”

“You’re very welcome, Jude,” said Harold. “I’ll see you Monday.”

He stood on the sidewalk and watched Harold’s car drive away, and then went up to his apartment, which was on the second floor of a brownstone adjacent to an MIT fraternity house. The brownstone’s owner, a retired sociology professor, lived on the ground floor and leased out the remaining three floors to graduate students: on the top floor were Santosh and Federico, who were getting their doctorates in electrical engineering at MIT, and on the third floor were Janusz and Isidore, who were both Ph.D. candidates at Harvard — Janusz in biochemistry and Isidore in Near Eastern religions — and directly below them were he and his roommate, Charlie Ma, whose real name was Chien-Ming Ma and whom everyone called CM. CM was an intern at Tufts Medical Center, and they kept almost entirely opposite schedules: he would wake and CM’s door would be closed and he would hear his wet, snuffly snores, and when he returned home in the evenings at eight, after working with Harold, CM would be gone. What he saw of CM he liked — he was from Taipei and had gone to boarding school in Connecticut and had a sleepy, roguish grin that made you want to smile back at him — and he was a friend of Andy’s friend, which was how they had met. Despite his perpetual air of stoned languor, CM was tidy as well, and liked to cook: he’d come home sometimes and find a plate of fried dumplings in the center of the table, with a note beneath that read EAT ME, or, occasionally, receive a text instructing him to rotate the chicken in its marinade before he went to bed, or asking him to pick up a bunch of cilantro on his way home. He always would, and would return to find the chicken simmered into a stew, or the cilantro minced and folded into scallop pancakes. Every few months or so, when their schedules intersected, all six of them would meet in Santosh and Federico’s apartment — theirs was the largest — and eat and play poker. Janusz and Isidore would worry aloud that girls thought they were gay because they were always hanging out with each other (CM cut his eyes toward him; he had bet him twenty dollars that they were sleeping together but were trying to pretend they were straight — at any rate, an impossible thing to prove), and Santosh and Federico would complain about how stupid their students were, and about how the quality of MIT undergraduates had really gone downhill since their time there five years ago.

His and CM’s was the smallest of the apartments, because the landlord had annexed half of the floor to make a storage room. CM paid significantly more of the rent, so he had the bedroom. He occupied a corner of the living room, the part with the bay window. His bed was a floppy foam egg-carton pallet, and his books were lined up under the windowsill, and he had a lamp, and a folding paper screen to give him some privacy. He and CM had bought a large wooden table, which they placed in the dining-room alcove, and which had two metal folding chairs, one discarded from Janusz, the other from Federico. One half of the table was his, the other half CM’s, and both halves were stacked with books and papers and their laptops, both emitting their chirps and burbles throughout the day and night.

People were always stunned by the apartment’s bleakness, but he had mostly ceased to notice it — although not entirely. Now, for example, he sat on the floor before the three cardboard boxes in which he stored his clothes, and lifted his new sweaters and shirts and socks and shoes from their envelopes of white tissue paper, placing them in his lap one at a time. They were the nicest things he had ever owned, and it seemed somehow shameful to put them in boxes meant to hold file folders. And so finally, he rewrapped them and returned them carefully to their shopping bags.

The generosity of Harold’s gift unsettled him. First, there was the matter of the gift itself: he had never, never received anything so grand. Second, there was the impossibility of ever adequately repaying him. And third, there was the meaning behind the gesture: he had known for some time that Harold respected him, and even enjoyed his company. But was it possible that he was someone important to Harold, that Harold liked him more than as just a student, but as a real, actual friend? And if that was the case, why should it make him so self-conscious?

It had taken him many months to feel truly comfortable around Harold: not in the classroom or in his office, but outside of the classroom, outside of the office. In life, as Harold would say. He would return home after dinner at Harold’s house and feel a flush of relief. He knew why, too, as much as he didn’t want to admit it to himself: traditionally, men — adult men, which he didn’t yet consider himself among — had been interested in him for one reason, and so he had learned to be frightened of them. But Harold didn’t seem to be one of those men. (Although Brother Luke hadn’t seemed to be one of those men either.) He was frightened of everything, it sometimes seemed, and he hated that about himself. Fear and hatred, fear and hatred: often, it seemed that those were the only two qualities he possessed. Fear of everyone else; hatred of himself.

He had known of Harold before he met him, for Harold was known. He was a relentless questioner: every remark you made in his class would be seized upon and pecked at in an unending volley of Whys. He was trim and tall, and had a way of pacing in a tight circle, his torso pitched forward, when he was engaged or excited.

To his disappointment, there was much he simply couldn’t remember from that first-year contracts class with Harold. He couldn’t remember, for example, the specifics of the paper he wrote that interested Harold and which led to conversations with him outside the classroom and, eventually, to an offer to become one of his research assistants. He couldn’t remember anything particularly interesting he said in class. But he could remember Harold on that first day of the semester, pacing and pacing, and lecturing them in his low, quick voice.

“You’re One Ls,” Harold had said. “And congratulations, all of you. As One Ls, you’ll be taking a pretty typical course load: contracts; torts; property; civil procedure; and, next year, constitutional and criminal law. But you know all this.

“What you may not know is that this course load reflects — beautifully, simply — the very structure of our society, the very mechanics of what a society, our particular society, needs to make it work. To have a society, you first need an institutional framework: that’s constitutional law. You need a system of punishment: that’s criminal. You need to know that you have a system in place that will make those other systems work: that’s civil procedure. You need a way to govern matters of domain and ownership: that’s property. You need to know that someone will be financially accountable for injuries caused you by others: that’s torts. And finally, you need to know that people will keep their agreements, that they will honor their promises: and that is contracts.”

He paused. “Now, I don’t want to be reductive, but I’ll bet half of you are here so you can someday wheedle money out of people — torts people, there’s nothing to be ashamed of! — and the other half of you are here because you think you’re going to change the world. You’re here because you dream of arguing before the Supreme Court, because you think the real challenge of the law lies in the blank spaces between the lines of the Constitution. But I’m here to tell you — it doesn’t. The truest, the most intellectually engaging, the richest field of the law is contracts. Contracts are not just sheets of paper promising you a job, or a house, or an inheritance: in its purest, truest, broadest sense, contracts govern every realm of law. When we choose to live in a society, we choose to live under a contract, and to abide by the rules that a contract dictates for us — the Constitution itself is a contract, albeit a malleable contract, and the question of just how malleable it is, exactly, is where law intersects with politics — and it is under the rules, explicit or otherwise, of this contract that we promise not to kill, and to pay our taxes, and not to steal. But in this case, we are both the creators of and bound by this contract: as citizens of this country, we have assumed, from birth, an obligation to respect and follow its terms, and we do so daily.

“In this class, you will of course learn the mechanics of contracts — how one is created, how one is broken, how binding one is and how to unbind yourself from one — but you will also be asked to consider law itself as a series of contracts. Some are more fair — and this one time, I’ll allow you to say such a thing — than others. But fairness is not the only, or even the most important, consideration in law: the law is not always fair. Contracts are not fair, not always. But sometimes they are necessary, these unfairnesses, because they are necessary for the proper functioning of society. In this class you will learn the difference between what is fair and what is just, and, as important, between what is fair and what is necessary. You will learn about the obligations we have to one another as members of society, and how far society should go in enforcing those obligations. You will learn to see your life — all of our lives — as a series of agreements, and it will make you rethink not only the law but this country itself, and your place in it.”

He had been thrilled by Harold’s speech, and in the coming weeks, by how differently Harold thought, by how he would stand at the front of the room like a conductor, stretching out a student’s argument into strange and unimaginable formations. Once, a fairly benign discussion about the right to privacy — both the most cherished and the foggiest of constitutional rights, according to Harold, whose definition of contracts often ignored conventional boundaries and bounded happily into other fields of law — had led to an argument between the two of them about abortion, which he felt was indefensible on moral grounds but necessary on social ones. “Aha!” Harold had said; he was one of the few professors who would entertain not just legal arguments but moral ones. “And, Mr. St. Francis, what happens when we forsake morals in law for social governance? What is the point at which a country, and its people, should start valuing social control over its sense of morality? Is there such a point? I’m not convinced there is.” But he had hung in, and the class had stilled around them, watching the two of them debate back and forth.

Harold was the author of three books, but it was his last, The American Handshake: The Promises and Failures of the Declaration of Independence, that had made him famous. The book, which he had read even before he met Harold, was a legal interpretation of the Declaration of Independence: Which of its promises had been kept and which had not, and were it written today, would it be able to withstand trends in contemporary jurisprudence? (“Short answer: No,” read the Times review.) Now he was researching his fourth book, a sequel of sorts to The American Handshake, about the Constitution, from a similar perspective.

“But only the Bill of Rights, and the sexier amendments,” Harold told him when he was interviewing him for the research assistant position.

“I didn’t know some were sexier than others,” he said.

“Of course some are sexier than others,” said Harold. “Only the eleventh, twelfth, fourteenth, and sixteenth are sexy. The rest are basically the dross of politics past.”

“The thirteenth is garbage?” he asked, enjoying himself.

“I didn’t say it was garbage,” Harold said, “just not sexy.”

“But I think that’s what dross means.”

Harold sighed dramatically, grabbed the dictionary off his desk, flipped it open, and studied it for a moment. “Okay, fine,” he said, tossing it back onto a heap of papers, which slid toward the edge of the surface. “The third definition. But I meant the first definition: the leftovers, the detritus — the remains of politics past. Happy?”

“Yes,” he said, trying not to smile.

He began working for Harold on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons and evenings, when his course load was lightest — on Tuedays and Thursdays he had afternoon seminars at MIT, where he was getting his master’s, and worked in the law library at night, and on Saturdays he worked in the library in the morning and in the afternoons at a bakery called Batter, which was near the medical college, where he had worked since he was an undergraduate and where he fulfilled specialty orders: decorating cookies and making hundreds of sugar-paste flower petals for cakes and experimenting with different recipes, one of which, a ten-nut cake, had become the bakery’s best seller. He worked at Batter on Sundays as well, and one day Allison, the bakery’s owner, who entrusted him with many of the more complicated projects, handed him an order form for three dozen sugar cookies decorated to look like various kinds of bacteria. “I thought you of all people might be able to figure this out,” she said. “The customer’s wife’s a microbiologist and he wants to surprise her and her lab.”

“I’ll do some research,” he said, taking the page from her, and noting the customer’s name: Harold Stein. So he had, asking CM and Janusz for their advice, and had made cookies shaped like paisleys, like mace balls, like cucumbers, using different-colored frosting to draw their cytoplasms and plasma membranes and ribosomes and fashioning flagella from strands of licorice. He typed up a list identifying each and folded it into the box before closing it and tying it with twine; he didn’t know Harold very well then, but he liked the idea of making something for him, of impressing him, even if anonymously. And he liked wondering what the cookies were meant to celebrate: A publication? An anniversary? Or was it simple uxoriousness? Was Harold Stein the sort of person who showed up at his wife’s lab with cookies for no reason? He suspected he perhaps was.

The following week, Harold told him about the amazing cookies he’d gotten at Batter. His enthusiasm, which just a few hours ago in class had been directed at the Uniform Commercial Code, had found a new subject in the cookies. He sat, biting the inside of his cheek so he wouldn’t smile, listening to Harold talk about how genius they’d been and how Julia’s lab had been struck speechless by their detail and verisimilitude, and how he had been, briefly, the hero of the lab: “Not an easy thing to be with those people, by the way, who secretly think everyone involved in the humanities is something of a moron.”

“Sounds like those cookies were made by a real obsessive,” he said. He hadn’t told Harold he worked at Batter, and didn’t plan on doing so, either.

“Then that’s an obsessive I’d like to meet,” said Harold. “They were delicious, too.”

“Mmm,” he said, and thought of a question to ask Harold so he wouldn’t keep talking about the cookies.

Harold had other research assistants, of course — two second-years and a third-year he knew only by sight — but their schedules were such that they never overlapped. Sometimes they communicated with one another by notes or e-mail, explaining where they’d left off in their research so the next person could pick it up and carry it forward. But by the second semester of his first year, Harold had assigned him to work exclusively on the fifth amendment. “That’s a good one,” he said. “Incredibly sexy.” The two second-year assistants were assigned the ninth amendment, and the third-year, the tenth, and as much as he knew it was ridiculous, he couldn’t help but feel triumphant, as if he had been favored with something the others hadn’t.

The first invitation to dinner at Harold’s house had been spontaneous, at the end of one cold and dark March afternoon. “Are you sure?” he asked, tentative.

Harold had looked at him, curiously. “Of course,” he said. “It’s just dinner. You have to eat, right?”

Harold lived in a three-story house in Cambridge, at the edge of the undergraduate campus. “I didn’t know you lived here,” he said, as Harold pulled into the driveway. “This is one of my favorite streets. I used to walk down it every day as a shortcut to the other side of campus.”

“You and everybody else,” Harold replied. “When I bought it just before I got divorced, all these houses were occupied by grad students; all the shutters were falling off. The smell of pot was so thick you could get stoned just driving by.”

It was snowing, just lightly, but he was grateful that there were only two steps leading up to the door, and that he wouldn’t have to worry about slipping or needing Harold’s help. Inside, the house smelled of butter and pepper and starch: pasta, he thought. Harold dropped his briefcase on the floor and gave him a vague tour—“Living room; study behind it; kitchen and dining room to your left”—and he met Julia, who was tall like Harold, with short brown hair, and whom he liked instantly.

“Jude!” she said. “Finally! I’ve heard so much about you; I’m so happy to be meeting you at last.” It sounded, he thought, like she really was.

Over dinner, they talked. Julia was from an academic family from Oxford and had lived in America since graduate school at Stanford; she and Harold had met five years ago through a friend. Her lab studied a new virus that appeared to be a variant of H5N1 and they were trying to map its genetic code.

“Isn’t one of the concerns in microbiology the potential weaponization of these genomes?” he asked, and felt, rather than saw, Harold turn toward him.

“Yes, that’s right,” Julia said, and as she explained to him the controversies surrounding her and her colleagues’ work, he glanced over at Harold, who was watching him, and who raised an eyebrow at him in a gesture that he couldn’t interpret.

But then the conversation shifted, and he could almost watch as the discussion moved steadily away from Julia’s lab and inexorably toward him, could see how good a litigator Harold would be if he wanted to, could see his skill in redirecting and repositioning, almost as if their conversation were something liquid, and he was guiding it through a series of troughs and chutes, eliminating any options for its escape, until it reached its inevitable end.

“So, Jude,” Julia asked, “where did you grow up?”

“South Dakota and Montana, mostly,” he said, and he could feel the creature inside of him sit up, aware of danger but unable to escape it.

“So are your parents ranchers?” asked Harold.

He had learned over the years to anticipate this sequence of questioning, and how to deflect it as well. “No,” he said, “but a lot of people were, obviously. It’s beautiful countryside out there; have you spent any time in the West?”

Usually, this was enough, but it wasn’t for Harold. “Ha!” he said. “That’s the silkiest pivot I’ve heard in a long time.” Harold looked at him, closely enough so that he eventually looked down at his plate. “I suppose that’s your way of saying you’re not going to tell us what they do?”

“Oh, Harold, leave him alone,” said Julia, but he could feel Harold staring at him, and was relieved when dinner ended.

After that first night at Harold’s, their relationship became both deeper and more difficult. He felt he had awakened Harold’s curiosity, which he imagined as a perked, bright-eyed dog — a terrier, something relentless and keen — and wasn’t sure that was such a good thing. He wanted to know Harold better, but over dinner he had been reminded that that process — getting to know someone — was always so much more challenging than he remembered. He always forgot; he was always made to remember. He wished, as he often did, that the entire sequence — the divulging of intimacies, the exploring of pasts — could be sped past, and that he could simply be teleported to the next stage, where the relationship was something soft and pliable and comfortable, where both parties’ limits were understood and respected.

Other people might have made a few more attempts at questioning him and then left him alone — other people had left him alone: his friends, his classmates, his other professors — but Harold was not as easily dissuaded. Even his usual strategies — among them, telling his interlocutors that he wanted to hear about their lives, not talk about his: a tactic that had the benefit of being true as well as effective — didn’t work with Harold. He never knew when Harold would pounce next, but whenever he did, he was unprepared, and he felt himself becoming more self-conscious, not less, the more time they spent with each other.

They would be in Harold’s office, talking about something — the University of Virginia affirmative action case going before the Supreme Court, say — and Harold would ask, “What’s your ethnic background, Jude?”

“A lot of things,” he would answer, and then would try to change the subject, even if it meant dropping a stack of books to cause a distraction.

But sometimes the questions were contextless and random, and these were impossible to anticipate, as they came without preamble. One night he and Harold were in his office, working late, and Harold ordered them dinner. For dessert, he’d gotten cookies and brownies, and he pushed the paper bags toward him.

“No, thanks,” he said.

“Really?” Harold asked, raising his eyebrows. “My son used to love these. We tried to bake them for him at home, but we never got the recipe quite right.” He broke a brownie in half. “Did your parents bake for you a lot when you were a kid?” He would ask these questions with a deliberate casualness that he found almost unbearable.

“No,” he said, pretending to review the notes he’d been taking.

He listened to Harold chewing and, he knew, considering whether to retreat or to continue his line of questioning.

“Do you see your parents often?” Harold asked him, abruptly, on a different night.

“They’re dead,” he said, keeping his eyes on the page.

“I’m sorry, Jude,” Harold said after a silence, and the sincerity in his voice made him look up. “Mine are, too. Relatively recently. Of course, I’m much older than you.”

“I’m sorry, Harold,” he said. And then, guessing, “You were close to them.”

“I was,” said Harold. “Very. Were you close to yours?”

He shook his head. “No, not really.”

Harold was quiet. “But I’ll bet they were proud of you,” he said, finally.

Whenever Harold asked him questions about himself, he always felt something cold move across him, as if he were being iced from the inside, his organs and nerves being protected by a sheath of frost. In that moment, though, he thought he might break, that if he said anything the ice would shatter and he would splinter and crack. So he waited until he knew he would sound normal before he asked Harold if he needed him to find the rest of the articles now or if he should do it in the morning. He didn’t look at Harold, though, and spoke only to his notebook.

Harold took a long time to reply. “Tomorrow,” Harold said, quietly, and he nodded, and gathered his things to go home for the night, aware of Harold’s eyes following his lurching progress to the door.

Harold wanted to know how he had been raised, and if he had any siblings, and who his friends were, and what he did with them: he was greedy for information. At least he could answer the last questions, and he told him about his friends, and how they had met, and where they were: Malcolm in graduate school at Columbia, JB and Willem at Yale. He liked answering Harold’s questions about them, liked talking about them, liked hearing Harold laugh when he told him stories about them. He told him about CM, and how Santosh and Federico were in some sort of fight with the engineering undergrads who lived in the frat house next door, and how he had awoken one morning to a fleet of motorized dirigibles handmade from condoms floating noisily up past his window, up toward the fourth floor, each dangling signs that read SANTOSH JAIN AND FEDERICO DE LUCA HAVE MICRO-PENISES.

But when Harold was asking the other questions, he felt smothered by their weight and frequency and inevitability. And sometimes the air grew so hot with the questions Harold wasn’t asking him that it was as oppressive as if he actually had. People wanted to know so much, they wanted so many answers. And he understood it, he did — he wanted answers, too; he too wanted to know everything. He was grateful, then, for his friends, and for how relatively little they had mined from him, how they had left him to himself, a blank, faceless prairie under whose yellow surface earthworms and beetles wriggled through the black soil, and chips of bone calcified slowly into stone.

“You’re really interested in this,” he snapped at Harold once, frustrated, when Harold had asked him whether he was dating anyone, and then, hearing his tone, stopped and apologized. They had known each other for almost a year by then.

“This?” said Harold, ignoring the apology. “I’m interested in you. I don’t see what’s strange about that. This is the kind of stuff friends talk about with each other.”

And yet despite his discomfort, he kept coming back to Harold, kept accepting his dinner invitations, even though at some point in every encounter there would be a moment in which he wished he could disappear, or in which he worried he might have disappointed.

One night he went to dinner at Harold’s and was introduced to Harold’s best friend, Laurence, whom he had met in law school and who was now an appellate court judge in Boston, and his wife, Gillian, who taught English at Simmons. “Jude,” said Laurence, whose voice was even lower than Harold’s, “Harold tells me you’re also getting your master’s at MIT. What in?”

“Pure math,” he replied.

“How is that different from”—she laughed—“regular math?” Gillian asked.

“Well, regular math, or applied math, is what I suppose you could call practical math,” he said. “It’s used to solve problems, to provide solutions, whether it’s in the realm of economics, or engineering, or accounting, or what have you. But pure math doesn’t exist to provide immediate, or necessarily obvious, practical applications. It’s purely an expression of form, if you will — the only thing it proves is the almost infinite elasticity of mathematics itself, within the accepted set of assumptions by which we define it, of course.”

“Do you mean imaginary geometries, stuff like that?” Laurence asked.

“It can be, sure. But it’s not just that. Often, it’s merely proof of — of the impossible yet consistent internal logic of math itself. There’s all kinds of specialties within pure math: geometric pure math, like you said, but also algebraic math, algorithmic math, cryptography, information theory, and pure logic, which is what I study.”

“Which is what?” Laurence asked.

He thought. “Mathematical logic, or pure logic, is essentially a conversation between truths and falsehoods. So for example, I might say to you ‘All positive numbers are real. Two is a positive number. Therefore, two must be real.’ But this isn’t actually true, right? It’s a derivation, a supposition of truth. I haven’t actually proven that two is a real number, but it must logically be true. So you’d write a proof to, in essence, prove that the logic of those two statements is in fact real, and infinitely applicable.” He stopped. “Does that make sense?”

“Video, ergo est,” said Laurence, suddenly. I see it, therefore it is.

He smiled. “And that’s exactly what applied math is. But pure math is more”—he thought again—“Imaginor, ergo est.”

Laurence smiled back at him and nodded. “Very good,” he said.

“Well, I have a question,” said Harold, who’d been quiet, listening to them. “How and why on earth did you end up in law school?”

Everyone laughed, and he did, too. He had been asked that question often (by Dr. Li, despairingly; by his master’s adviser, Dr. Kashen, perplexedly), and he always changed the answer to suit the audience, for the real answer — that he wanted to have the means to protect himself; that he wanted to make sure no one could ever reach him again — seemed too selfish and shallow and tiny a reason to say aloud (and would invite a slew of subsequent questions anyway). Besides, he knew enough now to know that the law was a flimsy form of protection: if he really wanted to be safe, he should have become a marksman squinting through an eyepiece, or a chemist in a lab with his pipettes and poisons.

That night, though, he said, “But law isn’t so unlike pure math, really — I mean, it too in theory can offer an answer to every question, can’t it? Laws of anything are meant to be pressed against, and stretched, and if they can’t provide solutions to every matter they claim to cover, then they aren’t really laws at all, are they?” He stopped to consider what he’d just said. “I suppose the difference is that in law, there are many paths to many answers, and in math, there are many paths to a single answer. And also, I guess, that law isn’t actually about the truth: it’s about governance. But math doesn’t have to be convenient, or practical, or managerial — it only has to be true.

“But I suppose the other way in which they’re alike is that in mathematics, as well as in law, what matters more — or, more accurately, what’s more memorable — is not that the case, or proof, is won or solved, but the beauty, the economy, with which it’s done.”

“What do you mean?” asked Harold.

“Well,” he said, “in law, we talk about a beautiful summation, or a beautiful judgment: and what we mean by that, of course, is the loveliness of not only its logic but its expression. And similarly, in math, when we talk about a beautiful proof, what we’re recognizing is the simplicity of the proof, its … elementalness, I suppose: its inevitability.”

“What about something like Fermat’s last theorem?” asked Julia.

“That’s a perfect example of a non-beautiful proof. Because while it was important that it was solved, it was, for a lot of people — like my adviser — a disappointment. The proof went on for hundreds of pages, and drew from so many disparate fields of mathematics, and was so — tortured, jigsawed, really, in its execution, that there are still many people at work trying to prove it in more elegant terms, even though it’s already been proven. A beautiful proof is succinct, like a beautiful ruling. It combines just a handful of different concepts, albeit from across the mathematical universe, and in a relatively brief series of steps, leads to a grand and new generalized truth in mathematics: that is, a wholly provable, unshakable absolute in a constructed world with very few unshakable absolutes.” He stopped to take a breath, aware, suddenly, that he had been talking and talking, and that the others were silent, watching him. He could feel himself flushing, could feel the old hatred fill him like dirtied water once more. “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to ramble on.”

“Are you joking?” said Laurence. “Jude, I think that was the first truly revelatory conversation I’ve had in Harold’s house in probably the last decade or more: thank you.”

Everyone laughed again, and Harold leaned back in his chair, looking pleased. “See?” he caught Harold mouthing across the table to Laurence, and Laurence nodding, and he understood that this was meant about him, and was flattered despite himself, and shy as well. Had Harold talked about him to his friend? Had this been a test for him, a test he hadn’t known he was to take? He was relieved he had passed it, and that he hadn’t embarrassed Harold, and relieved too that, as uncomfortable as it sometimes made him, he might have fully earned his place in Harold’s house, and might be invited back again.

With each day he trusted Harold a little more, and at times he wondered if he was making the same mistake again. Was it better to trust or better to be wary? Could you have a real friendship if some part of you was always expecting betrayal? He felt sometimes as if he was taking advantage of Harold’s generosity, his jolly faith in him, and sometimes as if his circumspection was the wise choice after all, for if it should end badly, he’d have only himself to blame. But it was difficult to not trust Harold: Harold made it difficult, and, just as important, he was making it difficult for himself — he wanted to trust Harold, he wanted to give in, he wanted the creature inside him to tuck itself into a sleep from which it would never wake.

Late one night in his second year of law school he was at Harold’s, and when they opened the door, the steps, the street, the trees were hushed with snow, and the flakes cycloned toward the door, so fast that they both took a step backward.

“I’ll call a cab,” he said, so Harold wouldn’t have to drive him.

“No, you won’t,” Harold said. “You’ll stay here.”

And so he stayed in Harold and Julia’s spare bedroom on the second floor, separated from their room by a large windowed space they used as a library, and a brief hallway. “Here’s a T-shirt,” Harold said, lobbing something gray and soft at him, “and here’s a toothbrush.” He placed it on the bookcase. “There’s extra towels in the bathroom. Do you want anything else? Water?”

“No,” he said. “Harold, thank you.”

“Of course, Jude. Good night.”

“Good night.”

He stayed awake for a while, the feather comforter wadded around him, the mattress plush beneath him, watching the window turn white, and listening to water glugging from the faucets, and Harold and Julia’s low, indistinguishable murmurs at each other, and one or the other of them padding from one place to another, and then, finally, nothing. In those minutes, he pretended that they were his parents, and he was home for the weekend from law school to visit them, and this was his room, and the next day he would get up and do whatever it was that grown children did with their parents.

The summer after that second year, Harold invited him to their house in Truro, on Cape Cod. “You’ll love it,” he said. “Invite your friends. They’ll love it, too.” And so on the Thursday before Labor Day, once his and Malcolm’s internships had ended, they all drove up to the house from New York, and for that long weekend, Harold’s attention shifted to JB and Malcolm and Willem. He watched them too, admiring how they could answer every one of Harold’s parries, how generous they were with their own lives, how they could tell stories about themselves that they laughed at and that made Harold and Julia laugh as well, how comfortable they were around Harold and how comfortable Harold was around them. He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved. The house had a private walk down to a private spit of beach, and in the mornings the four of them would troop downhill and swim — even he did, in his pants and undershirt and an old oxford shirt, which no one bothered him about — and then lie on the sand baking, the wet clothes ungluing themselves from his body as they dried. Sometimes Harold would come and watch them, or swim as well. In the afternoons, Malcolm and JB would pedal off through the dunes on bicycles, and he and Willem would follow on foot, picking up bits of shaley shells and the sad carapaces of long-nibbled-away hermit crabs as they went, Willem slowing his pace to match his own. In the evenings, when the air was soft, JB and Malcolm sketched and he and Willem read. He felt doped, on sun and food and salt and contentment, and at night he fell asleep quickly and early, and in the mornings he woke before the others so he could stand on the back porch alone looking over the sea.

What is going to happen to me? he asked the sea. What is happening to me?

The holiday ended and the fall semester began, and it didn’t take him long to realize that over that weekend, one of his friends must have said something to Harold, although he was certain it wasn’t Willem, who was the only one to whom he’d finally told something of his past — and even then, not very much at all: three facts, each more slender than the last, all meaningless, all of which combined to make not even a beginning of a story. Even the first sentences of a fairy tale had more detail than what he had told Willem: Once upon a time, a boy and a girl lived with their father, a woodcutter, and their stepmother, deep in a cold forest. The woodcutter loved his children, but he was very poor, and so one day … So whatever Harold had learned had been speculation, buttressed by their observations of him, their theories and guesses and fictions. But whatever it was, it had been enough to make Harold’s questions to him — about who he had been and where he had come from — stop.

As the months and then the years passed, they developed a friendship in which the first fifteen years of his life remained unsaid and unspoken, as if they had never happened at all, as if he had been removed from the manufacturer’s box when he reached college, and a switch at the base of his neck had been flipped, and he had shuddered to life. He knew that those blank years were filled in by Harold’s own imaginings, and that some of those imaginings were worse than what had actually happened, and some were better. But Harold never told him what he supposed for him, and he didn’t really want to know.

He had never considered their friendship contextual, but he was prepared for the likelihood that Harold and Julia did. And so when he moved to Washington for his clerkship, he assumed that they would forget him, and he tried to prepare himself for the loss. But that didn’t happen. Instead, they sent e-mails, and called, and when one or the other was in town, they would have dinner. In the summers, he and his friends visited Truro, and over Thanksgiving, they went to Cambridge. And when he moved to New York two years later to begin his job at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Harold had been almost alarmingly excited for him. They had even offered to let him live in their apartment on the Upper West Side, but he knew they used it often, and he wasn’t sure how real their offer was, and so he declined.

Every Saturday, Harold would call and ask him about work, and he’d tell him about his boss, Marshall, the deputy U.S. Attorney, who had the unnerving ability to recite entire Supreme Court decisions from memory, closing his eyes to summon a vision of the page in his mind, his voice becoming robotic and dull as he chanted, but never dropping or adding a word. He had always thought he had a good memory, but Marshall’s amazed him.

In some ways, the U.S. Attorney’s Office reminded him of the home: it was largely male, and the place fizzed with a particular and constant hostility, the kind of hissing acrimony that naturally arises whenever a group of highly competitive people who are all evenly matched are housed in the same small space with the understanding that only some of them would have the opportunity to distinguish themselves. (Here, though, they were matched in accomplishments; at the home, they were matched in hunger, in want.) All two hundred of the assistant prosecutors, it seemed, had attended one of five or six law schools, and virtually all of them had been on the law review and moot court at their respective schools. He was part of a four-person team that worked mostly on securities fraud cases, and he and his teammates each had something — a credential, an idiosyncrasy — that they hoped lifted them above the others: he had his master’s from MIT (which no one cared about but was at least an oddity) and his circuit court clerkship with Sullivan, with whom Marshall was friendly. Citizen, his closest friend at the office, had a law degree from Cambridge and had practiced as a barrister in London for two years before moving to New York. And Rhodes, the third in their trio, had been a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina after college. (The fourth on their team was a profoundly lazy guy named Scott who, it was rumored, had only gotten the job because his father played tennis with the president.)

He was usually at the office, and sometimes, when he and Citizen and Rhodes were there late, eating takeout, he was reminded of being with his roommates in their suite at Hood. And although he enjoyed Citizen’s and Rhodes’s company, and the specificity and depth of their intelligence, he was in those moments nostalgic for his friends, who thought so differently than he did and who made him think differently as well. In the middle of one conversation with Citizen and Rhodes about logic, he recalled, suddenly, a question Dr. Li had asked him his freshman year, when he was auditioning to be accepted into his pure math seminar: Why are manhole covers round? It was an easy question, and easy to answer, but when he’d returned to Hood and had repeated Dr. Li’s question to his roommates, they were silent. And then finally JB had begun, in the dreamy tones of a wandering storyteller, “Once, very long ago, mammoths roamed the earth, and their footprints left permanent circular indentations in the ground,” and they had all laughed. He smiled, remembering it; he sometimes wished he had a mind like JB’s, one that could create stories that would delight others, instead of the mind he did have, which was always searching for an explanation, an explanation that, while perhaps correct, was empty of romance, of fancy, of wit.

“Time to whip out the credentials,” Citizen would whisper to him on the occasions that the U.S. Attorney himself would emerge onto the floor and all the assistant prosecutors would buzz toward him, mothlike, as a multitude of gray suits. They and Rhodes would join the hover, but even in those gatherings he never mentioned the one credential he knew could have made not only Marshall but the U.S. Attorney as well stop and look at him more closely. After he’d gotten the job, Harold had asked him if he could mention him to Adam, the U.S. Attorney, with whom Harold was, it happened, longtime acquaintances. But he’d told Harold he wanted to know he could make it on his own. This was true, but the greater reason was that he was tentative about naming Harold as one of his assets, because he didn’t want Harold to regret his association with him. And so he’d said nothing.

Often, however, it felt as if Harold was there anyway. Reminiscing about law school (and its attendant activity, bragging about one’s accomplishments in law school) was a favorite pastime in the office, and because so many of his colleagues had gone to his school, quite a few of them knew Harold (and the others knew of him), and he’d sometimes listen to them talk about classes they’d taken with him, or how prepared they’d had to be for them, and would feel proud of Harold, and — though he knew it was silly — proud of himself for knowing him. The following year, Harold’s book about the Constitution would be published, and everyone in the office would read the acknowledgments and see his name and his affiliation with Harold would be revealed, and many of them would be suspicious, and he’d see worry in their faces as they tried to remember what they might have said about Harold in his presence. By that time, however, he would feel he had established himself in the office on his own, had found his own place alongside Citizen and Rhodes, had made his own relationship with Marshall.

But as much as he would have liked to, as much as he craved it, he was still cautious about claiming Harold as his friend: sometimes he worried that he was only imagining their closeness, inflating it hopefully in his mind, and then (to his embarrassment) he would have to retrieve The Beautiful Promise from his shelf and turn to the acknowledgments, reading Harold’s words again, as if it were itself a contract, a declaration that what he felt for Harold was at least in some degree reciprocated. And yet he was always prepared: It will end this month, he would tell himself. And then, at the end of the month: Next month. He won’t want to talk to me next month. He tried to keep himself in a constant state of readiness; he tried to prepare himself for disappointment, even as he yearned to be proven wrong.

And still, the friendship spooled on and on, a long, swift river that had caught him in its slipstream and was carrying him along, taking him somewhere he couldn’t see. At every point when he thought that he had reached the limits of what their relationship would be, Harold or Julia flung open the doors to another room and invited him in. He met Julia’s father, a retired pulmonologist, and brother, an art history professor, when they visited from England one Thanksgiving, and when Harold and Julia came to New York, they took him and Willem out to dinner, to places they had heard about but couldn’t afford to visit on their own. They saw the apartment at Lispenard Street — Julia polite, Harold horrified — and the week that the radiators mysteriously stopped working, they left him a set of keys to their apartment uptown, which was so warm that for the first hour after he and Willem arrived, they simply sat on the sofa like mannequins, too stunned by the sudden reintroduction of heat into their lives to move. And after Harold witnessed him in the middle of an episode — this was the Thanksgiving after he moved to New York, and in his desperation (he knew he wouldn’t be able to make it upstairs), he had turned off the stove, where he had been sauteeing some spinach, and pulled himself into the pantry, where he had shut the door and laid down on the floor to wait — they had rearranged the house, so that the next time he visited, he found the spare bedroom had been moved to the ground-floor suite behind the living room where Harold’s study had been, and Harold’s desk and chair and books moved to the second floor.

But even after all of this, a part of him was always waiting for the day he’d come to a door and try the knob and it wouldn’t move. He didn’t mind that, necessarily; there was something scary and anxiety-inducing about being in a space where nothing seemed to be forbidden to him, where everything was offered to him and nothing was asked in return. He tried to give them what he could; he was aware it wasn’t much. And the things Harold gave him so easily — answers, affection — he couldn’t reciprocate.

One day after he’d known them for almost seven years, he was at the house in springtime. It was Julia’s birthday; she was turning fifty-one, and because she had been at a conference in Oslo for her fiftieth birthday, she’d decided that this would be her big celebration. He and Harold were cleaning the living room — or rather, he was cleaning, and Harold was plucking books at random from the shelves and telling him stories about how he’d gotten each one, or flipping back the covers so he could see other people’s names written inside, including a copy of The Leopard on whose flyleaf was scrawled: “Property of Laurence V. Raleigh. Do not take. Harold Stein, this means you!!”

He had threatened to tell Laurence, and Harold had threatened him back. “You’d better not, Jude, if you know what’s good for you.”

“Or what?” he’d asked, teasing him.

“Or — this!” Harold had said, and had leaped at him, and before he could recognize that Harold was just being playful, he had recoiled so violently, torquing his body to avoid contact, that he had bumped into the bookcase and had knocked against a lumpy ceramic mug that Harold’s son, Jacob, had made, which fell to the ground and broke into three neat pieces. Harold had stepped back from him then, and there was a sudden, horrible silence, into which he had nearly wept.

“Harold,” he said, crouching to the ground, picking up the pieces, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.” He wanted to beat himself against the floor; he knew this was the last thing Jacob had made Harold before he got sick. Above him, he could hear only Harold’s breathing.

“Harold, please forgive me,” he repeated, cupping the pieces in his palms. “I think I can fix this, though — I can make it better.” He couldn’t look up from the mug, its shiny buttered glaze.

He felt Harold crouch beside him. “Jude,” Harold said, “it’s all right. It was an accident.” His voice was very quiet. “Give me the pieces,” he said, but he was gentle, and he didn’t sound angry.

He did. “I can leave,” he offered.

“Of course you’re not going to leave,” Harold said. “It’s okay, Jude.”

“But it was Jacob’s,” he heard himself say.

“Yes,” said Harold. “And it still is.” He stood. “Look at me, Jude,” he said, and he finally did. “It’s okay. Come on,” and Harold held out his hand, and he took it, and let Harold pull him to his feet. He wanted to howl, then, that after everything Harold had given him, he had repaid him by destroying something precious created by someone who had been most precious.

Harold went upstairs to his study with the mug in his hands, and he finished his cleaning in silence, the lovely day graying around him. When Julia came home, he waited for Harold to tell her how stupid and clumsy he’d been, but he didn’t. That night at dinner, Harold was the same as he always was, but when he returned to Lispenard Street, he wrote Harold a real, proper letter, apologizing properly, and sent it to him.

And a few days later, he got a reply, also in the form of a real letter, which he would keep for the rest of his life.

“Dear Jude,” Harold wrote, “thank you for your beautiful (if unnecessary) note. I appreciate everything in it. You’re right; that mug means a lot to me. But you mean more. So please stop torturing yourself.

“If I were a different kind of person, I might say that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.

“Actually — maybe I am that kind of person after all.

“Love, Harold.”

It was not so many years ago — despite the fact that he knew otherwise, despite what Andy had been telling him since he was seventeen — that he was still maintaining a sort of small, steady hope that he might get better. On especially bad days, he would repeat the Philadelphia surgeon’s words to himself—“the spine has wonderful reparative qualities”—almost like a chant. A few years after meeting Andy, when he was in law school, he had finally summoned the courage to suggest this to him, had said aloud the prediction he had treasured and clung to, hoping that Andy might nod and say, “That’s exactly right. It’ll just take time.”

But Andy had snorted. “He told you that?” he asked. “It’s not going to get better, Jude; as you get older, it’ll get worse.” Andy had been looking down at his ankle as he spoke, using tweezers to pick out shreds of dead flesh from a wound he’d developed, when he suddenly froze, and even without seeing Andy’s face, he could tell he was chagrined. “I’m sorry, Jude,” he said, looking up, still cupping his foot in his hand. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you differently.” And when he couldn’t answer, he sighed. “You’re upset.”

He was, of course. “I’m fine,” he managed to say, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at Andy.

“I’m sorry, Jude,” Andy repeated, quietly. He had two settings, even then: brusque and gentle, and he had experienced both of them often, sometimes in a single appointment.

“But one thing I promise,” he said, returning to the ankle, “I’ll always be here to take care of you.”

And he had. Of all the people in his life, it was in some ways Andy who knew the most about him: Andy was the only person he’d been naked in front of as an adult, the only person who was familiar with every physical dimension of his body. Andy had been a resident when they met, and he had stayed in Boston for his fellowship, and his postfellowship, and then the two of them had moved to New York within months of each other. He was an orthopedic surgeon, but he treated him for everything, from chest colds to his back and leg problems.

“Wow,” Andy said dryly, as he sat in his examining room one day hacking up phlegm (this had been the previous spring, shortly before he had turned twenty-nine, when a bout of bronchitis had been snaking its way through the office), “I’m so glad I specialized in orthopedics. This is such good practice for me. This is exactly what I thought I’d do with my training.”

He had started to laugh, but then his coughing had begun again and Andy had thumped him on the back. “Maybe if someone recommended a real internist to me, I wouldn’t have to keep going to a chiropractor for all my medical needs,” he said.

“Mmm,” Andy said. “You know, maybe you should start seeing an internist. God knows it’d save me a lot of time, and a shitload of headaches as well.” But he would never go to see anyone but Andy, and he thought — although they had never discussed it — that Andy wouldn’t want him to, either.

For all Andy knew about him, he knew relatively little about Andy. He knew that he and Andy had gone to the same college, and that Andy was a decade older than he, and that Andy’s father was Gujarati and his mother was Welsh, and that he had grown up in Ohio. Three years ago, Andy had gotten married, and he had been surprised to be invited to the wedding, which was small and held at Andy’s in-laws’ house on the Upper West Side. He had made Willem come with him, and was even more surprised when Andy’s new wife, Jane, had thrown her arms around him when they were introduced and said, “The famous Jude St. Francis! I’ve heard so much about you!”

“Oh, really,” he’d said, his mind filling with fear, like a flock of flapping bats.

“Nothing like that,” Jane had said, smiling (she was a doctor as well: a gynecologist). “But he adores you, Jude; I’m so glad you came.” He had met Andy’s parents as well, and at the end of the evening, Andy had slung an arm around his neck and given him a hard, awkward kiss on the cheek, which he now did every time they saw each other. Andy always looked uncomfortable doing it, but also seemed compelled to keep doing it, which he found both funny and touching.

He appreciated Andy in many ways, but he appreciated most his unflappability. After they had met, after Andy had made it difficult not to continue seeing him by showing up at Hood, banging on their door after he had missed two follow-up appointments (he hadn’t forgotten; he had just decided not to go) and ignored three phone calls and four e-mails, he had resigned himself to the fact that it might not be bad to have a doctor — it seemed, after all, inevitable — and that Andy might be someone he could trust. The third time they met, Andy took his history, or what he would provide of it, and wrote down the facts he would tell him without comment or reaction.

And indeed, it was only years later — a little less than four years ago — that Andy had directly mentioned his childhood. This had been during his and Andy’s first big fight. They’d had skirmishes, of course, and disagreements, and once or twice a year Andy would deliver a long lecture to him (he saw Andy every six weeks — though more frequently these days — and could always anticipate which appointment would be the Lecture Appointment by the terseness with which Andy would greet him and conduct his examination) that covered what Andy considered his perplexing and infuriating unwillingness to take proper care of himself, his maddening refusal to see a therapist, and his bizarre reluctance to take pain medication that would probably improve his quality of life.

The fight had concerned what Andy had retroactively come to consider a botched suicide attempt. This had been right before New Year’s, and he had been cutting himself, and he had cut too close to a vein, and it had resulted in a great, sloppy, bloody mess into which he had been forced to involve Willem. In the examining room that night, Andy had refused to speak to him, he was so angry, and had actually muttered to himself as he made his stitches, each as neat and tiny as if he were embroidering them.

Even before Andy had opened his mouth at his next appointment, he had known that he was furious. He had actually considered not coming in for his checkup at all, except he knew if he didn’t, Andy would simply keep calling him — or worse, calling Willem, or worse yet, Harold — until he showed up.

“I should fucking have had you hospitalized,” were Andy’s first words to him, followed by, “I’m such a fucking idiot.”

“I think you’re overreacting,” he’d begun, but Andy ignored him.

“I happen to believe you weren’t trying to kill yourself, or I’d’ve had you committed so fast your head would’ve spun,” he said. “It’s only because statistically, anyone who cuts themselves as much as you do, and for as many years as you have, is in less immediate danger of suicide than someone who’s less consistently self-injurious.” (Andy was fond of statistics. He sometimes suspected he made them up.) “But Jude, this is crazy, and that was way too close. Either you start seeing a shrink immediately or I’m going to commit you.”

“You can’t do that,” he’d said, furious himself now, although he knew Andy could: he had looked up the laws of involuntary commitment in New York State, and they were not in his favor.

“You know I can,” Andy had said. He was almost shouting at this point. Their appointments were always after office hours, because they sometimes chatted afterward if Andy had time and was in a good mood.

“I’ll sue you,” he’d said, absurdly, and Andy had yelled back at him, “Go right ahead! Do you know how fucked up this is, Jude? Do you have any idea what kind of position you’re putting me in?”

“Don’t worry,” he’d said, sarcastically, “I don’t have any family. No one’s going to sue you for wrongful death.”

Andy had stepped back, then, as if he had tried to hit him. “How dare you,” he’d said, slowly. “You know that’s not what I mean.”

And of course he did. But “Whatever,” he said. “I’m leaving.” And he slid off the table (fortunately, he hadn’t changed out of his clothes; Andy had started lecturing him before he’d had a chance) and tried to leave the room, although leaving the room at his pace was hardly dramatic, and Andy scooted over to stand in the doorway.

“Jude,” he said, in one of his sudden mood changes, “I know you don’t want to go. But this is getting scary.” He took a breath. “Have you ever even talked to anyone about what happened when you were a kid?”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with anything,” he’d said, feeling cold. Andy had never alluded to what he’d told him, and he found himself feeling betrayed that he should do so now.

“Like hell it doesn’t,” Andy had said, and the self-conscious theatricality of the phrase — did anyone really say that outside of the movies? — made him smile despite himself, and Andy, mistaking his smile for mockery, changed directions again. “There’s something incredibly arrogant about your stubbornness, Jude,” he continued. “Your utter refusal to listen to anyone about anything that concerns your health or well-being is either a pathological case of self-destructiveness or it’s a huge fuck-you to the rest of us.”

He was hurt by this. “And there’s something incredibly manipulative about you threatening to commit me whenever I disagree with you, and especially in this case, when I’ve told you it was a stupid accident,” he hurled back at Andy. “Andy, I appreciate you, I really do. I don’t know what I’d do without you. But I’m an adult and you can’t dictate what I do or don’t do.”

“You know what, Jude?” Andy had asked (now he was yelling again). “You’re right. I can’t dictate your decisions. But I don’t have to accept them, either. Go find some other asshole to be your doctor. I’m not going to do it any longer.”

“Fine,” he’d snapped, and left.

He couldn’t remember when he had been angrier on his own behalf. Lots of things made him angry — general injustice, incompetence, directors who didn’t give Willem a part he wanted — but he rarely got angry about things that happened or had happened to him: his pains, past and present, were things he tried not to brood about, were not questions to which he spent his days searching for meaning. He already knew why they had happened: they had happened because he had deserved them.

But he knew too that his anger was unjustified. And as much as he resented his dependence upon Andy, he was grateful for him as well, and he knew Andy found his behavior illogical. But Andy’s job was to make people better: Andy saw him the way he saw a mangled tax law, as something to be untangled and repaired — whether he thought he could be repaired was almost incidental. The thing he was trying to fix — the scars that raised his back into an awful, unnatural topography, the skin stretched as glossy and taut as a roasted duck’s: the reason he was trying to save money — was not, he knew, something Andy would approve of. “Jude,” Andy would say if he ever heard what he was planning, “I promise you it’s not going to work, and you’re going to have wasted all that money. Don’t do it.”

“But they’re hideous,” he would mumble.

“They’re not, Jude,” Andy would say. “I swear to god they’re not.”

(But he wasn’t going to tell Andy anyway, so he would never have to have that particular conversation.)

The days passed and he didn’t call Andy and Andy didn’t call him. As if in punishment, his wrist throbbed at night when he was trying to sleep, and at work he forgot and banged it rhythmically against the side of his desk as he read, a longtime bad tic he’d not managed to erase. The stitches had seeped blood then, and he’d had to clean them, clumsily, in the bathroom sink.

“What’s wrong?” Willem asked him one night.

“Nothing,” he said. He could tell Willem, of course, who would listen and say “Hmm” in his Willem-ish way, but he knew he would agree with Andy.

A week after their fight, he came home to Lispenard Street — it was a Sunday, and he had been walking through west Chelsea — and Andy was waiting on the steps before their front door.

He was surprised to see him. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” Andy had replied. They stood there. “I wasn’t sure if you’d take my call.”

“Of course I would’ve.”

“Listen,” Andy said. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too. I’m sorry, Andy.”

“But I really do think you should see someone.”

“I know you do.”

And somehow they managed to leave it at that: a fragile and mutually unsatisfying cease-fire, with the question of the therapist the vast gray demilitarized zone between them. The compromise (though how this had been agreed upon as such was unclear to him now) was that at the end of every visit, he had to show Andy his arms, and Andy would examine them for new cuts. Whenever he found one, he would log it in his chart. He was never sure what might provoke another outburst from Andy: sometimes there were many new cuts, and Andy would merely groan and write them down, and sometimes there were only a few new cuts and Andy would get agitated anyway. “You’ve fucking ruined your arms, you know that, right?” he would ask him. But he would say nothing, and let Andy’s lecture wash over him. Part of him understood that by not letting Andy do his job — which was, after all, to heal him — he was being disrespectful, and was to some degree making Andy into a joke in his own office. Andy’s tallies — sometimes he wanted to ask Andy if he would get a prize once he reached a certain number, but he knew it would make him angry — were a way for him to at least pretend he could manage the situation, even if he couldn’t: it was the accrual of data as a small compensation for actual treatment.

And then, two years later, another wound had opened on his left leg, which had always been the more troublesome one, and his cuttings were set aside for the more urgent matter of his leg. He had first developed one of these wounds less than a year after the injury, and it had healed quickly. “But it won’t be the last,” the Philadelphia surgeon had said. “With an injury like yours, everything — the vascular system, the dermal system — has been so compromised that you should expect you might get these now and again.”

This was the eleventh he’d had, so although he was prepared for the sensation of it, he was never to know its cause (An insect bite? A brush against the edge of a metal filing cabinet? It was always something so gallingly small, but still capable of tearing his skin as easily as if it had been made of paper), and he was never to cease being disgusted by it: the suppuration, the sick, fishy scent, the little gash, like a fetus’s mouth, that would appear, burbling viscous, unidentifiable fluids. It was unnatural, the stuff of monster movies and myths, to walk about with an opening that wouldn’t, couldn’t be closed. He began seeing Andy every Friday night so he could debride the wound, cleaning it and removing the dead tissue and examining the area around it, looking for new skin growth, as he held his breath and gripped the side of the table and tried not to scream.

“You have to tell me when it’s painful, Jude,” Andy had said, as he breathed and sweated and counted in his head. “It’s a good thing if you can feel this, not a bad thing. It means the nerves are still alive and still doing what they’re supposed to.”

“It’s painful,” he managed to choke out.

“Scale of one to ten?”

“Seven. Eight.”

“I’m sorry,” Andy replied. “I’m almost done, I promise. Five more minutes.”

He shut his eyes and counted to three hundred, making himself go slowly.

When it was over, he would sit, and Andy would sit with him and give him something to drink: a soda, something sugary, and he’d feel the room begin to clarify itself around him, bit by blurry bit. “Slowly,” Andy would say, “or you’ll be sick.” He would watch as Andy dressed the wound — he was always at his calmest when he was stitching or sewing or wrapping — and in those moments, he would feel so vulnerable and weak that he would have agreed to anything Andy might have suggested.

“You’re not going to cut yourself on your legs,” Andy would say, more a statement than a question.

“No, I won’t.”

“Because that would be too insane, even for you.”

“I know.”

“Your anatomy is so degraded that it’d get really infected.”

“Andy. I know.”

He had, at various points, suspected that Andy was talking to his friends behind his back, and there were times when they would use Andy-like language and turns of phrase, and even four years after “The Incident,” as Andy had begun calling it, he suspected that Willem was going through the bathroom trash in the morning, and he’d had to take extra cautions disposing of his razors, bundling them in tissue and duct tape and throwing them into garbage cans on the way to work. “Your crew,” Andy called them: “What’ve you and your crew been up to these days?” (when he was in a good mood) and “I’m going to tell your fucking crew they’ve got to keep their eyes on you” (when he wasn’t).

“Don’t you dare, Andy,” he’d say. “And anyway, it’s not their responsibility.”

“Of course it is,” Andy would retort. As with other issues, they couldn’t agree on this one.

But now it was twenty months after the appearance of this most recent wound and it still hadn’t healed. Or rather, it had healed and then broken again and then healed again, and then he had woken on Friday and felt something damp and gummy on his leg — the lower calf, right above the ankle — and had known it had split. He hadn’t called Andy yet — he would do so on Monday — but it had been important to him to take this walk, which he feared would be his last for some time, maybe months.

He was on Madison and Seventy-fifth now, very near Andy’s office, and his leg was hurting him so much that he crossed to Fifth and sat on one of the benches near the wall that bordered the park. As soon as he sat, he experienced that familiar dizziness, that stomach-lifting nausea, and he bent over and waited until the cement became cement again and he would be able to stand. He felt in those minutes his body’s treason, how sometimes the central, tedious struggle in his life was his unwillingness to accept that he would be betrayed by it again and again, that he could expect nothing from it and yet had to keep maintaining it. So much time, his and Andy’s, was spent trying to repair something unfixable, something that should have wound up in charred bits on a slag heap years ago. And for what? His mind, he supposed. But there was — as Andy might have said — something incredibly arrogant about that, as if he was saving a jalopy because he had a sentimental attachment to its sound system.

If I walk just a few more blocks, I can be at his office, he thought, but he never would have. It was Sunday. Andy deserved some sort of respite from him, and besides, what he was feeling now was not something he hadn’t felt before.

He waited a few more minutes and then heaved himself to his feet, where he stood for half a minute before dropping to the bench again. Finally he was able to stand for good. He wasn’t ready yet, but he could imagine himself walking to the curb, raising his arm to hail a cab, resting his head against the back of its black vinyl banquette. He would count the steps to get there, just as he would count the steps it would take him to get from the cab and to his building, from the elevator to the apartment, and from the front door to his room. When he had learned to walk the third time — after his braces had come off — it had been Andy who had helped instruct the physical therapist (she had not been pleased, but had taken his suggestions), and Andy who had, as Ana had just four years before, watched him make his way unaccompanied across a space of ten feet, and then twenty, and then fifty, and then a hundred. His very gait — the left leg coming up to make a near-ninety-degree angle with the ground, forming a rectangle of negative space, the right listing behind — was engineered by Andy, who had made him work at it for hours until he could do it himself. It was Andy who told him he thought he was capable of walking without a cane, and when he finally did it, he’d had Andy to thank.

Monday was not very many hours away, he told himself as he struggled to stay standing, and Andy would see him as he always did, no matter how busy he was. “When did you notice the break?” Andy would say, nudging gently at it with a bit of gauze. “Friday,” he’d say. “Why didn’t you call me then, Jude?” Andy would say, irritated. “At any rate, I hope you didn’t go on your stupid fucking walk.” “No, of course not,” he’d say, but Andy wouldn’t believe him. He sometimes wondered whether Andy thought of him as only a collection of viruses and malfunctions: If you removed them, who was he? If Andy didn’t have to take care of him, would he still be interested in him? If he appeared one day magically whole, with a stride as easy as Willem’s and JB’s complete lack of self-consciousness, the way he could lean back in his chair and let his shirt hoist itself from his hips without any fear, or with Malcolm’s long arms, the skin on their insides as smooth as frosting, what would he be to Andy? What would he be to any of them? Would they like him less? More? Or would he discover — as he often feared — that what he understood as friendship was really motivated by their pity of him? How much of who he was was inextricable from what he was unable to do? Who would he have been, who would he be, without the scars, the cuts, the hurts, the sores, the fractures, the infections, the splints, and the discharges?

But of course he would never know. Six months ago, they had managed to get the wound under control, and Andy had examined it, checking and rechecking, before issuing a fleet of warnings about what he should do if it reopened.

He had been only half listening. He was feeling light that day for some reason, but Andy was querulous, and along with a lecture about his leg, he had also endured another about his cutting (too much, Andy thought), and his general appearance (too thin, Andy thought).

He had admired his leg, pivoting it and examining the place where the wound had at last closed over, as Andy talked and talked. “Are you listening to me, Jude?” he had finally demanded.

“It looks good,” he told Andy, not answering him, but wanting his reassurance. “Doesn’t it?”

Andy sighed. “It looks—” And then he stopped, and was quiet, and he had looked up, had watched Andy shut his eyes, as if refocusing himself, and then open them again. “It looks good, Jude,” he’d said, quietly. “It does.”

He had felt, then, a great surge of gratitude, because he knew Andy didn’t think it looked good, would never think it looked good. To Andy, his body was an onslaught of terrors, one against which the two of them had to be constantly attentive. He knew Andy thought he was self-destructive, or delusional, or in denial.

But what Andy never understood about him was this: he was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world. He did it when he was feeling so awful that sometimes the pain seemed to transport him to another state, one in which everything, even the past that he worked so hard to forget, seemed to fade into a gray watercolor wash. He did it when his memories crowded out all other thoughts, when it took real effort, real concentration, to tether himself to his current life, to keep himself from raging with despair and shame. He did it when he was so exhausted of trying, when being awake and alive demanded such energy that he had to lie in bed thinking of reasons to get up and try again, when it would be much easier to go to the bathroom and untape the plastic zipped bag containing his cotton pads and loose razors and alcohol wipes and bandages from its hiding place beneath the sink and simply surrender. Those were the very bad days.

It really had been a mistake, that night before New Year’s Eve when he sat in the bathroom drawing the razor across his arm: he had been half asleep still; he was normally never so careless. But when he realized what he had done, there had been a minute, two minutes — he had counted — when he genuinely hadn’t known what to do, when sitting there, and letting this accident become its own conclusion, seemed easier than making the decision himself, a decision that would ripple past him to include Willem, and Andy, and days and months of consequences.

He hadn’t known, finally, what had compelled him to grab his towel from its bar and wrap it around his arm, and then pull himself to his feet and wake Willem up. But with each minute that passed, he moved further and further from the other option, the events unfolding themselves with a speed he couldn’t control, and he longed for that year right after the injury, before he met Andy, when it seemed that everything might be improved upon, and that his future self might be something bright and clean, when he knew so little but had such hope, and faith that his hope might one day be rewarded.

Before New York there had been law school, and before that, college, and before that, there was Philadelphia, and the long, slow trip across country, and before that, there was Montana, and the boys’ home, and before Montana was the Southwest, and the motel rooms, and the lonely stretches of road and the hours spent in the car. And before that was South Dakota and the monastery. And before that? A father and a mother, presumably. Or, more realistically, simply a man and a woman. And then, probably, just a woman. And then him.

It was Brother Peter, who taught him math, and was always reminding him of his good fortune, who told him he’d been found in a garbage can. “Inside a trash bag, stuffed with eggshells and old lettuce and spoiled spaghetti — and you,” Brother Peter said. “In the alley behind the drugstore, you know the one,” even though he didn’t, as he rarely left the monastery.

Later, Brother Michael claimed this wasn’t even true. “You weren’t in the trash bin,” he told him. “You were next to the trash bin.” Yes, he conceded, there had been a trash bag, but he had been atop it, not in it, and at any rate, who knew what was in the trash bag itself, and who cared? More likely it was things thrown away from the pharmacy: cardboard and tissues and twist ties and packing chips. “You mustn’t believe everything Brother Peter says,” he reminded him, as he often did, along with: “You mustn’t indulge this tendency to self-mythologize,” as he said whenever he asked for details of how he’d come to live at the monastery. “You came, and you’re here now, and you should concentrate on your future, and not on the past.”

They had created the past for him. He was found naked, said Brother Peter (or in just a diaper, said Brother Michael), but either way, it was assumed he’d been left to, as they said, let nature have its way with him, because it was mid-April and still freezing, and a newborn couldn’t have survived for long in that weather. He must have been there for only a few minutes, however, because he was still almost warm when they found him, and the snow hadn’t yet filled the car’s tire tracks, nor the footprints (sneakers, probably a woman’s size eight) that led to the trash bin and then away from it. He was lucky they had found him (it was fate they had found him). Everything he had — his name, his birthday (itself an estimate), his shelter, his very life — was because of them. He should be grateful (they didn’t expect him to be grateful to them; they expected him to be grateful to God).

He never knew what they might answer and what they might not. A simple question (Had he been crying when they found him? Had there been a note? Had they looked for whoever had left him?) would be dismissed or unknown or unexplained, but there were declarative answers for the more complicated ones.

“The state couldn’t find anyone to take you.” (Brother Peter, again.) “And so we said we’d keep you here as a temporary measure, and then months turned into years and here you are. The end. Now finish these equations; you’re taking all day.”

But why couldn’t the state find anyone? Theory one (beloved of Brother Peter): There were simply too many unknowns — his ethnicity, his parentage, possible congenital health problems, and on and on. Where had he come from? Nobody knew. None of the local hospitals had recorded a recent live birth that matched his description. And that was worrisome to potential guardians. Theory two (Brother Michael’s): This was a poor town in a poor region in a poor state. No matter the public sympathy — and there had been sympathy, he wasn’t to forget that — it was quite another thing to add an extra child to one’s household, especially when one’s household was already so stretched. Theory three (Father Gabriel’s): He was meant to stay here. It had been God’s will. This was his home. And now he needed to stop asking questions.

Then there was a fourth theory, invoked by almost all of them when he misbehaved: He was bad, and had been bad from the beginning. “You must have done something very bad to be left behind like that,” Brother Peter used to tell him after he hit him with the board, rebuking him as he stood there, sobbing his apologies. “Maybe you cried so much they just couldn’t stand it any longer.” And he’d cry harder, fearing that Brother Peter was correct.

For all their interest in history, they were collectively irritated when he took interest in his own, as if he was persisting in a particularly tiresome hobby that he wasn’t outgrowing at a fast enough rate. Soon he learned not to ask, or at least not to ask directly, although he was always alert to stray pieces of information that he might learn in unlikely moments, from unlikely sources. With Brother Michael, he read Great Expectations, and managed to misdirect the brother into a long segue about what life for an orphan would be like in nineteenth-century London, a place as foreign to him as Pierre, just a hundred-some miles away. The lesson eventually became a lecture, as he knew it would, but from it he did learn that he, like Pip, would have been given to a relative if there were any to be identified or had. So there were none, clearly. He was alone.

His possessiveness was also a bad habit that needed to be corrected. He couldn’t remember when he first began coveting something that he could own, something that would be his and no one else’s. “Nobody here owns anything,” they told him, but was that really true? He knew that Brother Peter had a tortoiseshell comb, for example, the color of freshly tapped tree sap and just as light-filled, of which he was very proud and with which he brushed his mustache every morning. One day the comb disappeared, and Brother Peter had interrupted his history lesson with Brother Matthew to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, yelling that he had stolen the comb and had better return it if he knew what was good for him. (Father Gabriel later found the comb, which had slipped into the shallow wedge of space between the brother’s desk and the radiator.) And Brother Matthew had an original clothbound edition of The Bostonians, which had a soft-rubbed green spine and which he once held before him so he could look at its cover (“Don’t touch! I said don’t touch!”). Even Brother Luke, his favorite of the brothers, who rarely spoke and never scolded him, had a bird that all the others considered his. Technically, said Brother David, the bird was no one’s, but it had been Brother Luke who had found it and nursed it and fed it and to whom it flew, and so if Luke wanted it, Luke could have it.

Brother Luke was responsible for the monastery’s garden and greenhouse, and in the warm months, he would help him with small tasks. He knew from eavesdropping on the other brothers that Brother Luke had been a rich man before he came to the monastery. But then something happened, or he had done something (it was never clear which), and he either lost most of his money or gave it away, and now he was here, and just as poor as the others, although it was Brother Luke’s money that had paid for the greenhouse, and which helped defray some of the monastery’s operating expenses. Something about the way the other brothers mostly avoided Luke made him think he might be bad, although Brother Luke was never bad, not to him.

It was shortly after Brother Peter accused him of stealing his comb that he actually stole his first item: a package of crackers from the kitchen. He was passing by one morning on the way to the room they had set aside for his schooling, and no one was there, and the package was on the countertop, just within his reach, and he had, on impulse, grabbed it and run, stuffing it under the scratchy wool tunic he wore, a miniature version of the brothers’ own. He had detoured so he could hide it under his pillow, which had made him late for class with Brother Matthew, who had hit him with a forsythia switch as punishment, but the secret of its existence filled him with something warm and joyous. That night, alone in bed, he ate one of the crackers (which he didn’t even really like) carefully, breaking it into eight sections with his teeth and letting each piece sit on his tongue until it became soft and gluey and he could swallow it whole.

After that, he stole more and more. There was nothing in the monastery he really wanted, nothing that was really worth having, and so he simply took what he came across, with no real plan or craving: food when he could find it; a clacky black button he found on the floor of Brother Michael’s room in one of his post-breakfast prowlings; a pen from Father Gabriel’s desk, snatched when, mid-lecture, the father had turned from him to find a book; Brother Peter’s comb (this last was the only one he planned, but it gave him no greater thrill than the others). He stole matches and pencils and pieces of paper — useless junk, but someone else’s junk — shoving them down his underwear and running back to his bedroom to hide them under his mattress, which was so thin that he could feel its every spring beneath his back at night.

“Stop that running around or I’ll have to beat you!” Brother Matthew would yell at him as he hurried to his room.

“Yes, Brother,” he would reply, and make himself slow to a walk.

It was the day he took his biggest prize that he was caught: Father Gabriel’s silver lighter, stolen directly off his desk when he’d had to interrupt his lecturing of him to answer a phone call. Father Gabriel had bent over his keyboard, and he had reached out and grabbed the lighter, palming its cool heavy weight in his hand until he was finally dismissed. Once outside the father’s office, he had hurriedly pushed it into his underwear and was walking as quickly as he could back to his room when he turned the corner without looking and ran directly into Brother Pavel. Before the brother could shout at him, he had fallen back, and the lighter had fallen out, bouncing against the flagstones.

He had been beaten, of course, and shouted at, and in what he thought was a final punishment, Father Gabriel had called him into his office and told him that he would teach him a lesson about stealing other people’s things. He had watched, uncomprehending but so frightened that he couldn’t even cry, as Father Gabriel folded his handkerchief to the mouth of a bottle of olive oil, and then rubbed the oil into the back of his left hand. And then he had taken his lighter — the same one he had stolen — and held his hand under the flame until the greased spot had caught fire, and his whole hand was swallowed by a white, ghostly glow. Then he had screamed and screamed, and the father had hit him in the face for screaming. “Stop that shouting,” he’d shouted. “This is what you get. You’ll never forget not to steal again.”

When he regained consciousness, he was back in his bed, and his hand was bandaged. All of his things were gone: the stolen things, of course, but the things he had found on his own as well — the stones and feathers and arrowheads, and the fossil that Brother Luke had given him for his fifth birthday, the first gift he had ever received.

After that, after he was caught, he was made to go to Father Gabriel’s office every night and take off his clothes, and the father would examine inside him for any contraband. And later, when things got worse, he would think back to that package of crackers: if only he hadn’t stolen them. If only he hadn’t made things so bad for himself.

His rages began after his evening examinations with Father Gabriel, which soon expanded to include midday ones with Brother Peter. He would have tantrums, throwing himself against the stone walls of the monastery and screaming as loudly as he could, knocking the back of his damaged ugly hand (which, six months later, still hurt sometimes, a deep, insistent pulsing) against the hard, mean corners of the wooden dinner tables, banging the back of his neck, his elbows, his cheeks — all the most painful, tender parts — against the side of his desk. He had them in the day and at night, he couldn’t control them, he would feel them move over him like a fog and let himself relax into them, his body and voice moving in ways that excited and repelled him, for as much as he hurt afterward, he knew it scared the brothers, that they feared his anger and noise and power. They hit him with whatever they could find, they started keeping a belt looped on a nail on the schoolroom wall, they took off their sandals and beat him for so long that the next day he couldn’t even sit, they called him a monster, they wished for his death, they told him they should have left him on the garbage bag. And he was grateful for this, too, for their help exhausting him, because he couldn’t lasso the beast himself and he needed their assistance to make it retreat, to make it walk backward into the cage until it freed itself again.

He started wetting his bed and was made to go visit the father more often, for more examinations, and the more examinations the father gave him, the more he wet the bed. The father began visiting him in his room at night, and so did Brother Peter, and later, Brother Matthew, and he got worse and worse: they made him sleep in his wet nightshirt, they made him wear it during the day. He knew how badly he stank, like urine and blood, and he would scream and rage and howl, interrupting lessons, pushing books off tables so that the brothers would have to start hitting him right away, the lesson abandoned. Sometimes he was hit hard enough so that he lost consciousness, which is what he began to crave: that blackness, where time passed and he wasn’t in it, where things were done to him but he didn’t know it.

Sometimes there were reasons behind his rages, although they were reasons known only to him. He felt so ceaselessly dirty, so soiled, as if inside he was a rotten building, like the condemned church he had been taken to see in one of his rare trips outside the monastery: the beams speckled with mold, the rafters splintered and holey with nests of termites, the triangles of white sky showing immodestly through the ruined rooftop. He had learned in a history lesson about leeches, and how many years ago they had been thought to siphon the unhealthy blood out of a person, sucking the disease foolishly and greedily into their fat wormy bodies, and he had spent his free hour — after classes but before chores — wading in the stream on the edge of the monastery’s property, searching for leeches of his own. And when he couldn’t find any, when he was told there weren’t any in that creek, he screamed and screamed until his voice deserted him, and even then he couldn’t stop, even when his throat felt like it was filling itself with hot blood.

Once he was in his room, and both Father Gabriel and Brother Peter were there, and he was trying not to shout, because he had learned that the quieter he was, the sooner it would end, and he thought he saw, passing outside the doorframe quick as a moth, Brother Luke, and had felt humiliated, although he didn’t know the word for humiliation then. And so the next day he had gone in his free time to Brother Luke’s garden and had snapped off every one of the daffodils’ heads, piling them at the door of Luke’s gardener’s shed, their fluted crowns pointing toward the sky like open beaks.

Later, alone again and moving through his chores, he had been regretful, and sorrow had made his arms heavy, and he had dropped the bucket of water he was lugging from one end of the room to the other, which made him toss himself to the ground and scream with frustration and remorse.

At dinner, he was unable to eat. He looked for Luke, wondering when and how he would be punished, and when he would have to apologize to the brother. But he wasn’t there. In his anxiety, he dropped the metal pitcher of milk, the cold white liquid splattering across the floor, and Brother Pavel, who was next to him, yanked him from the bench and pushed him onto the ground. “Clean it up,” Brother Pavel barked at him, throwing a dishrag at him. “But that’ll be all you’ll eat until Friday.” It was Wednesday. “Now go to your room.” He ran, before the brother changed his mind.

The door to his room — a converted closet, windowless and wide enough for only a cot, at one end of the second story above the dining hall — was always left open, unless one of the brothers or the father were with him, in which case it was usually closed. But even as he rounded the corner from the staircase, he could see the door was shut, and for a while he lingered in the quiet, empty hallway, unsure what might be waiting for him: one of the brothers, probably. Or a monster, perhaps. After the stream incident, he occasionally daydreamed that the shadows thickening the corners were giant leeches, swaying upright, their glossy segmented skins dark and greasy, waiting to smother him with their wet, soundless weight. Finally he was brave enough and ran straight at the door, opening it with a slam, only to find his bed, with its mud-brown wool blanket, and the box of tissues, and his schoolbooks on their shelf. And then he saw it in the corner, near the head of the bed: a glass jar with a bouquet of daffodils, their bright funnels frilled at their tops.

He sat on the floor near the jar and rubbed one of the flowers’ velvet heads between his fingers, and in that moment his sadness was so great, so overpowering, that he wanted to tear at himself, to rip the scar from the back of his hand, to shred himself into bits as he had done to Luke’s flowers.

But why had he done such a thing to Brother Luke? It wasn’t as if Luke was the only one who was kind to him — when he wasn’t being made to punish him, Brother David always praised him and told him how quick he was, and even Brother Peter regularly brought him books from the library in town to read and discussed them with him afterward, listening to his opinions as if he were a real person — but not only had Luke never beaten him, he had made efforts to reassure him, to express his allegiance with him. The previous Sunday, he was to recite aloud the pre-supper prayer, and as he stood at the foot of Father Gabriel’s table, he was suddenly seized by an impulse to misbehave, to grab a handful of the cubed potatoes from the dish before him and fling them around the room. He could already feel the scrape in his throat from the screaming he would do, the singe of the belt as it slapped across his back, the darkness he would sink into, the giddy bright of day he would wake to. He watched his arm lift itself from his side, watched his fingers open, petal-like, and float toward the bowl. And just then he had raised his head and had seen Brother Luke, who gave him a wink, so solemn and brief, like a camera’s shutter-click, that he was at first unaware he had seen anything at all. And then Luke winked at him again, and for some reason this calmed him, and he came back to himself, and said his lines and sat down, and dinner passed without incident.

And now there were these flowers. But before he could think about what they might mean, the door opened, and there was Brother Peter, and he stood, waiting in that terrible moment that he could never prepare for, in which anything might happen, and anything might come.

The next day, he had left directly after his classes for the greenhouse, determined that he should say something to Luke. But as he drew closer, his resolve deserted him, and he dawdled, kicking at small stones and kneeling to pick up and then discard twigs, throwing them toward the forest that bordered the property. What, really, did he mean to say? He was about to turn back, to retreat toward a particular tree on the north edge of the grounds in whose cleft of roots he had dug a hole and begun a new collection of things — though these things were only objects he had discovered in the woods and were safely nobody’s: little rocks; a branch that was shaped a bit like a lean dog in mid-leap — and where he spent most of his free time, unearthing his possessions and holding them in his hands, when he heard someone say his name and turned and saw it was Luke, holding his hand up in greeting and walking toward him.

“I thought it was you,” Brother Luke said as he neared him (disingenuously, it would occur to him much later, for who else would it have been? He was the only child at the monastery), and although he tried, he was unable to find the words to apologize to Luke, unable in truth to find the words for anything, and instead he found himself crying. He was never embarrassed when he cried, but in this moment he was, and he turned away from Brother Luke and held the back of his scarred hand before his eyes. He was suddenly aware of how hungry he was, and how it was only Thursday afternoon, and he wouldn’t have anything to eat until the next day.

“Well,” said Luke, and he could feel the brother kneeling, very close to him. “Don’t cry; don’t cry.” But his voice was so gentle, and he cried harder.

Then Brother Luke stood, and when he spoke next, his voice was jollier. “Jude, listen,” he said. “I have something to show you. Come with me,” and he started walking toward the greenhouse, turning around to make sure he was following. “Jude,” he called again, “come with me,” and he, curious despite himself, began to follow him, walking toward the greenhouse he knew so well with the beginnings of an unfamiliar eagerness, as if he had never seen it before.

As an adult, he became obsessed in spells with trying to identify the exact moment in which things had started going so wrong, as if he could freeze it, preserve it in agar, hold it up and teach it before a class: This is when it happened. This is where it started. He’d think: Was it when I stole the crackers? Was it when I ruined Luke’s daffodils? Was it when I had my first tantrum? And, more impossibly, was it when I did whatever I did that made her leave me behind that drugstore? And what had that been?

But really, he would know: it was when he walked into the greenhouse that afternoon. It was when he allowed himself to be escorted in, when he gave up everything to follow Brother Luke. That had been the moment. And after that, it had never been right again.

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.

He, of course, had every reason to not think that, although I wouldn’t discover that until later. Then, I watched him at mealtimes, noticing how, during particularly raucous debates, he would sit back in his seat, as if physically leaning out of the ring, and observe all of you, how easily you challenged me without fear of provoking me, how thoughtlessly you reached across the table to serve yourselves more potatoes, more zucchini, more steak, how you asked for what you wanted and received it.

The thing I remember most vividly from that weekend is a small thing. We were walking, you and he and Julia and I, down that little path lined with birches that led to the lookout. (Back then it was a narrow throughway, do you remember that? It was only later that it became dense with trees.) I was with him, and you and Julia were behind us. You were talking about, oh, I don’t know — insects? Wildflowers? You two always found something to discuss, you both loved being outdoors, both loved animals: I loved this about both of you, even though I couldn’t understand it. And then you touched his shoulder and moved in front of him and knelt and retied one of his shoelaces that had come undone, and then fell back in step with Julia. It was so fluid, a little gesture: a step forward, a fold onto bended knee, a retreat back toward her side. It was nothing to you, you didn’t even think about it; you never even paused in your conversation. You were always watching him (but you all were), you took care of him in a dozen small ways, I saw all of this over those few days — but I doubt you would remember this particular incident.

But while you were doing it, he looked at me, and the look on his face — I still cannot describe it, other than in that moment, I felt something crumble inside me, like a tower of damp sand built too high: for him, and for you, and for me as well. And in his face, I knew my own would be echoed. The impossibility of finding someone to do such a thing for another person, so unthinkingly, so gracefully! When I looked at him, I understood, for the first time since Jacob died, what people meant when they said someone was heartbreaking, that something could break your heart. I had always thought it mawkish, but in that moment I realized that it might have been mawkish, but it was also true.

And that, I suppose, was when I knew.

I had never thought I would become a parent, and not because I’d had bad parents myself. Actually, I had wonderful parents: my mother died when I was very young, of breast cancer, and for the next five years it was just me and my father. He was a doctor, a general practitioner who liked to hope he might grow old with his patients.

We lived on West End, at Eighty-second Street, and his practice was in our building, on the ground floor, and I used to come by to visit after school. All his patients knew me, and I was proud to be the doctor’s son, to say hello to everyone, to watch the babies he had delivered grow into kids who looked up to me because their parents told them I was Dr. Stein’s son, that I went to a good high school, one of the best in the city, and that if they studied hard enough, they might be able to as well. “Darling,” my father called me, and when he saw me after school on those visits, he would place his palm on the back of my neck, even when I grew taller than he, and kiss me on the side of my head. “My darling,” he’d say, “how was school?”

When I was eight, he married his office manager, Adele. There was never a moment in my childhood in which I was not aware of Adele’s presence: it was she who took me shopping for new clothes when I needed them, she who joined us for Thanksgiving, she who wrapped my birthday presents. It was not so much that Adele was a mother to me; it’s that to me, a mother was Adele.

She was older, older than my father, and one of those women whom men like and feel comfortable around but never think of marrying, which is a kind way of saying she wasn’t pretty. But who needs prettiness in a mother? I asked her once if she wanted children of her own, and she said I was her child, and she couldn’t imagine having a better one, and it says everything you need to know about my father and Adele and how I felt about them and how they treated me that I never even questioned that claim of hers until I was in my thirties and my then-wife and I were fighting about whether we should have another child, a child to replace Jacob.

She was an only child, as I was an only child, and my father was an only child, too: a family of onlys. But Adele’s parents were living — my father’s were not — and we used to travel out to Brooklyn, to what has now been swallowed by Park Slope, to see them on weekends. They had lived in America for almost five decades and still spoke very little English: the father, timidly, the mother, expressively. They were blocky, like she was, and kind, like she was — Adele would speak to them in Russian, and her father, whom I called Grandpa by default, would unclench one of his fat fists and show me what was secreted within: a wooden birdcall, or a wodge of bright-pink gum. Even when I was an adult, in law school, he would always give me something, although he no longer had his store then, which meant he must have bought them somewhere. But where? I always imagined there might be a secret shop full of toys that went out of fashion generations ago, and yet was patronized, faithfully, by old immigrant men and women, who kept them in business by buying their stocks of whorl-painted wooden tops and little metal soldiers and sets of jacks, their rubber balls sticky with grime even before their plastic wrap had been torn.

I had always had a theory — born of nothing — that men who had been old enough to witness their father’s second marriage (and, therefore, old enough to make a judgment) married their stepmother, not their mother. But I didn’t marry someone like Adele. My wife, my first wife, was cool and self-contained. Unlike the other girls I knew, who were always minimizing themselves — their intelligence, of course, but also their desires and anger and fears and composure — Liesl never did. On our third date, we were walking out of a café on MacDougal Street, and a man stumbled from a shadowed doorway and vomited on her. Her sweater was chunky with it, that pumpkin-bright splatter, and I remember in particular the way a large globule clung to the little diamond ring she wore on her right hand, as if the stone itself had grown a tumor. The people around us gasped, or shrieked, but Liesl only closed her eyes. Another woman would have screeched, or squealed (I would have screeched or squealed), but I remember she only gave a great shudder, as if her body were acknowledging the disgust but also removing itself from it, and when she opened her eyes, she was recovered. She peeled off her cardigan, chucked it into the nearest garbage can. “Let’s go,” she told me. I had been mute, shocked, throughout the entire episode, but in that moment, I wanted her, and I followed her where she led me, which turned out to be her apartment, a hellhole on Sullivan Street. The entire time, she kept her right hand slightly aloft from her body, the blob of vomit still clinging to her ring.

Neither my father nor Adele particularly liked her, although they never told me so; they were polite, and respectful of my wishes. In exchange, I never asked them, never made them lie. I don’t think it was because she wasn’t Jewish — neither of my parents were religious — but, I think, because they thought I was too much in awe of her. Or maybe this is what I’ve decided, late in life. Maybe it was because what I admired as competence, they saw as frigidity, or coldness. Goodness knows they wouldn’t have been the first to think that. They were always polite to her, and she reasonably so to them, but I think they would have preferred a potential daughter-in-law who would flirt with them a little, to whom they could tell embarrassing stories about my childhood, who would have lunch with Adele and play chess with my father. Someone like you, in fact. But that wasn’t Liesl and wouldn’t ever be, and once they realized that, they too remained a bit aloof, not to express their displeasure but as a sort of self-discipline, a reminder to themselves that there were limits, her limits, that they should try to respect. When I was with her, I felt oddly relaxed, as if, in the face of such sturdy competence, even misfortune wouldn’t dare try to challenge us.

We had met in New York, where I was in law school and she was in medical school, and after graduating, I got a clerkship in Boston, and she (one year older than I) started her internship. She was training to be an oncologist. I had been admiring of that, of course, because of what it suggested: there is nothing more soothing than a woman who wants to heal, whom you imagine bent maternally over a patient, her lab coat white as clouds. But Liesl didn’t want to be admired: she was interested in oncology because it was one of the harder disciplines, because it was thought to be more cerebral. She and her fellow oncological interns had scorn for the radiologists (too mercenary), the cardiologists (too puffed-up and pleased with themselves), the pediatricians (too sentimental), and especially the surgeons (unspeakably arrogant) and the dermatologists (beneath comment, although they of course worked with them frequently). They liked the anesthesiologists (weird and geeky and fastidious, and prone to addiction), the pathologists (even more cerebral than they), and — well, that was about it. Sometimes a group of them would come over to our house, and would linger after dinner discussing cases and studies, while their partners — lawyers and historians and writers and lesser scientists — were ignored until we slunk off to the living room to discuss the various trivial, less-interesting things with which we occupied our days.

We were two adults, and it was a happy enough life. There was no whining that we didn’t spend enough time with each other, from me or from her. We remained in Boston for her residency, and then she moved back to New York to do her fellowship. I stayed. By that time I was working at a firm and was an adjunct at the law school. We saw each other on the weekends, one in Boston, one in New York. And then she completed her program and returned to Boston; we married; we bought a house, a little one, not the one I have now, just at the edge of Cambridge.

My father and Adele (and Liesl’s parents, for that matter; mysteriously, they were considerably more emotive than she was, and on our infrequent trips to Santa Barbara, while her father made jokes and her mother placed before me plates of sliced cucumbers and peppered tomatoes from her garden, she would watch with a closed-off expression, as if embarrassed, or at least perplexed by, their relative expansiveness) never asked us if we were going to have children; I think they thought that as long as they didn’t ask, there was a chance we might. The truth was that I didn’t really feel the need for it; I had never envisioned having a child, I didn’t feel about them one way or another. And that seemed enough of a reason not to: having a child, I thought, was something you should actively want, crave, even. It was not a venture for the ambivalent or passionless. Liesl felt the same way, or so we thought.

But then, one evening — I was thirty-one, she was thirty-two: young — I came home and she was already in the kitchen, waiting for me. This was unusual; she worked longer hours than I did, and I usually didn’t see her until eight or nine at night.

“I need to talk to you,” she said, solemnly, and I was suddenly scared. She saw that and smiled — she wasn’t a cruel person, Liesl, and I don’t mean to give the impression that she was without kindness, without gentleness, because she had both in her, was capable of both. “It’s nothing bad, Harold.” Then she laughed a little. “I don’t think.”

I sat. She inhaled. “I’m pregnant. I don’t know how it happened. I must’ve skipped a pill or two and forgotten. It’s almost eight weeks. I had it confirmed at Sally’s today.” (Sally was her roommate from their med-school days, her best friend, and her gynecologist.) She said all this very quickly, in staccato, digestible sentences. Then she was silent. “I’m on a pill where I don’t get my periods, you know, so I didn’t know.” And then, when I said nothing, “Say something.”

I couldn’t, at first. “How do you feel?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I feel fine.”

“Good,” I said, stupidly.

“Harold,” she said, and sat across from me, “what do you want to do?”

“What do you want to do?”

She shrugged again. “I know what I want to do. I want to know what you want to do.”

“You don’t want to keep it.”

She didn’t disagree. “I want to hear what you want.”

“What if I say I want to keep it?”

She was ready. “Then I’d seriously consider it.”

I hadn’t been expecting this, either. “Leez,” I said, “we should do what you want to do.” This wasn’t completely magnanimous; it was mostly cowardly. In this case, as with many things, I was happy to cede the decision to her.

She sighed. “We don’t have to decide tonight. We have some time.” Four weeks, she didn’t need to say.

In bed, I thought. I thought those thoughts all men think when a woman tells them she’s pregnant: What would the baby look like? Would I like it? Would I love it? And then, more crushingly: fatherhood. With all its responsibilities and fulfillments and tedium and possibilities for failure.

The next morning, we didn’t speak of it, and the day after that, we didn’t speak of it again. On Friday, as we were going to bed, she said, sleepily, “Tomorrow we’ve got to discuss this,” and I said, “Absolutely.” But we didn’t, and we didn’t, and then the ninth week passed, and then the tenth, and then the eleventh and twelfth, and then it was too late to easily or ethically do anything, and I think we were both relieved. The decision had been made for us — or rather, our indecisiveness had made the decision for us — and we were going to have a child. It was the first time in our marriage that we’d been so mutually indecisive.

We had imagined that it would be a girl, and if it was, we’d name it Adele, for my mother, and Sarah, for Sally. But it wasn’t a girl, and we instead let Adele (who was so happy she started crying, one of the very few times I’d seen her cry) pick the first name and Sally the second: Jacob More. (Why More, we asked Sally, who said it was for Thomas More.)

I have never been one of those people — I know you aren’t, either — who feels that the love one has for a child is somehow a superior love, one more meaningful, more significant, and grander than any other. I didn’t feel that before Jacob, and I didn’t feel that after. But it is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?” The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life. It seemed as improbable as the survival of one of those late-spring butterflies — you know, those little white ones — I sometimes saw wobbling through the air, always just millimeters away from smacking itself against a windshield.

And let me tell you two other things I learned. The first is that it doesn’t matter how old that child is, or when or how he became yours. Once you decide to think of someone as your child, something changes, and everything you have previously enjoyed about them, everything you have previously felt for them, is preceded first by that fear. It’s not biological; it’s something extra-biological, less a determination to ensure the survival of one’s genetic code, and more a desire to prove oneself inviolable to the universe’s feints and challenges, to triumph over the things that want to destroy what’s yours.

The second thing is this: when your child dies, you feel everything you’d expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won’t even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that’s written about mourning is all the same, and it’s all the same for a reason — because there is no real deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same.

But here’s what no one says — when it’s your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.

Ah, you tell yourself, it’s arrived. Here it is.

And after that, you have nothing to fear again.

Years ago, after the publication of my third book, a journalist once asked me if you could tell right away whether a student had a mind for law or not, and the answer is: Sometimes. But often, you’re wrong — the student who seemed so bright in the first half of the semester becomes steadily less so as the year goes on, and the student about whom you never thought one thing or another is the one who emerges as a dazzler, someone you love hearing think.

It’s often the most naturally intelligent students who have the most difficult time in their first year — law school, particularly the first year of law school, is really not a place where creativity, abstract thought, and imagination are rewarded. In this way, I often think — based upon what I’ve heard, not what I know firsthand — that it’s a bit like art school.

Julia had a friend, a man named Dennys, who was as a boy a tremendously gifted artist. They had been friends since they were small, and she once showed me some of the drawings he made when he was ten or twelve: little sketches of birds pecking at the ground, of his face, round and blank, of his father, the local veterinarian, his hand smoothing the fur of a grimacing terrier. Dennys’s father didn’t see the point of drawing lessons, however, and so he was never formally schooled. But when they were older, and Julia went to university, Dennys went to art school to learn how to draw. For the first week, he said, they were allowed to draw whatever they wanted, and it was always Dennys’s sketches that the professor selected to pin up on the wall for praise and critique.

But then they were made to learn how to draw: to re-draw, in essence. Week two, they only drew ellipses. Wide ellipses, fat ellipses, skinny ellipses. Week three, they drew circles: three-dimensional circles, two-dimensional circles. Then it was a flower. Then a vase. Then a hand. Then a head. Then a body. And with each week of proper training, Dennys got worse and worse. By the time the term had ended, his pictures were never displayed on the wall. He had grown too self-conscious to draw. When he saw a dog now, its long fur whisking the ground beneath it, he saw not a dog but a circle on a box, and when he tried to draw it, he worried about proportion, not about recording its doggy-ness.

He decided to speak to his professor. We are meant to break you down, Dennys, his professor said. Only the truly talented will be able to come back from it.

“I guess I wasn’t one of the truly talented,” Dennys would say. He became a barrister instead, lived in London with his partner.

“Poor Dennys,” Julia would say.

“Oh, it’s all right,” Dennys would sigh, but none of us were convinced.

And in that same way, law school breaks a mind down. Novelists, poets, and artists don’t often do well in law school (unless they are bad novelists, poets, and artists), but neither, necessarily, do mathematicians, logicians, and scientists. The first group fails because their logic is their own; the second fails because logic is all they own.

He, however, was a good student — a great student — from the beginning, but this greatness was often camouflaged in an aggressive nongreatness. I knew, from listening to his answers in class, that he had everything he needed to be a superb lawyer: it’s not accidental that law is called a trade, and like all trades, what it demands most is a capacious memory, which he had. What it demands next — again, like many trades — is the ability to see the problem before you … and then, just as immediately, the rat’s tail of problems that might follow. Much the way that, for a contractor, a house is not just a structure — it’s a snarl of pipes engorging with ice in the winter, of shingles swelling with humidity in the summer, of rain gutters belching up fountains of water in the spring, of cement splitting in the first autumn cold — so too is a house something else for a lawyer. A house is a locked safe full of contracts, of liens, of future lawsuits, of possible violations: it represents potential attacks on your property, on your goods, on your person, on your privacy.

Of course, you can’t literally think like this all the time, or you’d drive yourself crazy. And so for most lawyers, a house is, finally, just a house, something to fill and fix and repaint and empty. But there’s a period in which every law student — every good law student — finds that their vision shifts, somehow, and realizes that the law is inescapable, that no interaction, no aspect of daily life, escapes its long, graspy fingers. A street becomes a shocking disaster, a riot of violations and potential civil lawsuits. A marriage looks like a divorce. The world becomes temporarily unbearable.

He could do this. He could take a case and see its end; it is very difficult to do, because you have to be able to hold in your head all the possibilities, all the probable consequences, and then choose which ones to worry over and which to ignore. But what he also did — what he couldn’t stop himself from doing — was wonder as well about the moral implications of the case. And that is not helpful in law school. There were colleagues of mine who wouldn’t let their students even say the words “right” and “wrong.” “Right has nothing to do with it,” one of my professors used to bellow at us. “What is the law? What does the law say?” (Law professors enjoy being theatrical; all of us do.) Another, whenever the words were mentioned, would say nothing, but walk over to the offender and hand him a little slip of paper, a stack of which he kept in his jacket’s inside pocket, that read: Drayman 241. Drayman 241 was the philosophy department’s office.

Here, for example, is a hypothetical: A football team is going to an away game when one of their vans breaks down. So they ask the mother of one of the players if they can borrow her van to transport them. Sure, she says, but I’m not going to drive. And so she asks the assistant coach to drive the team for her. But then, as they’re driving along, something horrible happens: the van skids off the road and flips over; everyone inside dies.

There is no criminal case here. The road was slippery, the driver wasn’t intoxicated. It was an accident. But then the parents of the team, the mothers and fathers of the dead players, sue the owner of the van. It was her van, they argue, but more important, it was she who appointed the driver of her van. He was only her agent, and therefore, it is she who bears the responsibility. So: What happens? Should the plaintiffs win their suit?

Students don’t like this case. I don’t teach it that often — its extremity makes it more flashy than it is instructive, I believe — but whenever I did, I would always hear a voice in the auditorium say, “But it’s not fair!” And as annoying as that word is—fair—it is important that students never forget the concept. “Fair” is never an answer, I would tell them. But it is always a consideration.

He never mentioned whether something was fair, however. Fairness itself seemed to hold little interest for him, which I found fascinating, as people, especially young people, are very interested in what’s fair. Fairness is a concept taught to nice children: it is the governing principle of kindergartens and summer camps and playgrounds and soccer fields. Jacob, back when he was able to go to school and learn things and think and speak, knew what fairness was and that it was important, something to be valued. Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.

Right and wrong, however, are for — well, not unhappy people, maybe, but scarred people; scared people.

Or am I just thinking this now?

“So were the plaintiffs successful?” I asked. That year, his first year, I had in fact taught that case.

“Yes,” he said, and he explained why: he knew instinctively why they would have been. And then, right on cue, I heard the tiny “But it’s not fair!” from the back of the room, and before I could begin my first lecture of the season—“fair” is never an answer, etc., etc. — he said, quietly, “But it’s right.”

I was never able to ask him what he meant by that. Class ended, and everyone got up at once and almost ran for the door, as if the room was on fire. I remember telling myself to ask him about it in the next class, later that week, but I forgot. And then I forgot again, and again. Over the years, I would remember this conversation every now and again, and each time I would think: I must ask him what he meant by that. But then I never would. I don’t know why.

And so this became his pattern: he knew the law. He had a feeling for it. But then, just when I wanted him to stop talking, he would introduce a moral argument, he would mention ethics. Please, I would think, please don’t do this. The law is simple. It allows for less nuance than you’d imagine. Ethics and morals do, in reality, have a place in law — although not in jurisprudence. It is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them.

I was worried he’d make it harder for himself, that he’d complicate the real gift he had with — as much as I hate to have to say this about my profession — thinking. Stop! I wanted to tell him. But I never did, because eventually, I realized I enjoyed hearing him think.

In the end, of course, I needn’t have worried; he learned how to control it, he learned to stop mentioning right and wrong. And as we know, this tendency of his didn’t stop him from becoming a great lawyer. But later, often, I was sad for him, and for me. I wished I had urged him to leave law school, I wished I had told him to go to the equivalent of Drayman 241. The skills I gave him were not skills he needed after all. I wish I had nudged him in a direction where his mind could have been as supple as it was, where he wouldn’t have had to harness himself to a dull way of thinking. I felt I had taken someone who once knew how to draw a dog and turned him into someone who instead knew only how to draw shapes.

I am guilty of many things when it comes to him. But sometimes, illogically, I feel guiltiest for this. I opened the van door, I invited him inside. And while I didn’t drive off the road, I instead drove him somewhere bleak and cold and colorless, and left him standing there, where, back where I had collected him, the landscape shimmered with color, the sky fizzed with fireworks, and he stood openmouthed in wonder.

3

THREE WEEKS BEFORE he left for Thanksgiving in Boston, a package — a large, flat, unwieldy wooden crate with his name and address written on every side in black marker — arrived for him at work, where it sat by his desk all day until he was able to open it late that night.

From the return address, he knew what it was, but he still felt that reflexive curiosity one does when unwrapping anything, even something unwanted. Inside the box were layers of brown paper, and then layers of bubble wrap, and then, wrapped in sheets of white paper, the painting itself.

He turned it over. “To Jude with love and apologies, JB,” JB had scribbled on the canvas, directly above his signature: “Jean-Baptiste Marion.” There was an envelope from JB’s gallery taped to the back of the frame, inside of which was a letter certifying the painting’s authenticity and date, addressed to him and signed by the gallery’s registrar.

He called Willem, who he knew would have already left the theater and was probably on his way home. “Guess what I got today?”

There was only the slightest of pauses before Willem answered. “The painting.”

“Right,” he said, and sighed. “So I suppose you’re behind this?”

Willem coughed. “I just told him he didn’t have a choice in the matter any longer — not if he wanted you to talk to him again at some point.” Willem paused, and he could hear the wind whooshing past him. “Do you need help getting it home?”

“Thanks,” he said. “But I’m just going to leave it here for now and pick it up later.” He re-clad the painting in its layers and replaced it in its box, which he shoved beneath his console. Before he shut off his computer, he began a note to JB, but then stopped, and deleted what he’d written, and instead left for the night.

He was both surprised and not that JB had sent him the painting after all (and not at all surprised to learn that it had been Willem who had convinced him to do so). Eighteen months ago, just as Willem was beginning his first performances in The Malamud Theorem, JB had been offered representation by a gallery on the Lower East Side, and the previous spring, he’d had his first solo show, “The Boys,” a series of twenty-four paintings based on photographs he’d taken of the three of them. As he’d promised years ago, JB had let him see the pictures of him that he wanted to paint, and although he had approved many of them (reluctantly: he had felt queasy even as he did so, but he knew how important the series was to JB), JB had ultimately been less interested in the ones he’d approved than in the ones he wouldn’t, a few of which — including an image in which he was curled into himself in bed, his eyes open but scarily unseeing, his left hand stretched open unnaturally wide, like a ghoul’s claw — he alarmingly had no memory of JB even taking. That had been the first fight: JB wheedling, then sulking, then threatening, then shouting, and then, when he couldn’t change his mind, trying to convince Willem to advocate for him.

“You realize I don’t actually owe you anything,” JB had told him once he realized his negotiations with Willem weren’t progressing. “I mean, I don’t technically have to ask your permission here. I could technically just paint whatever the fuck I want. This is a courtesy I’m extending you, you know.”

He could’ve swamped JB with arguments, but he was too angry to do so. “You promised me, JB,” he said. “That should be enough.” He could have added, “And you owe me as my friend,” but he had a few years ago come to realize that JB’s definition of friendship and its responsibilities was different than his own, and there was no arguing with him about it: you either accepted it or you didn’t, and he had decided to accept it, although recently, the work it took to accept JB and his limitations had begun to feel more enraging and wearisome and arduous than seemed necessary.

In the end, JB had had to admit defeat, although in the months before his show opened, he had made occasional allusions to what he called his “lost paintings,” great works he could’ve made had he, Jude, been less rigid, less timid, less self-conscious, and (this was his favorite of JB’s arguments) less of a philistine. Later, though, he would be embarrassed by his own gullibility, by how he had trusted that his wishes would be respected.

The opening had been on a Thursday in late April shortly after his thirtieth birthday, a night so unseasonably cold that the plane trees’ first leaves had frozen and cracked, and rounding the corner onto Norfolk Street, he had stopped to admire the scene the gallery made, a bright golden box of light and shimmered warmth against the chilled flat black of the night. Inside, he immediately encountered Black Henry Young and a friend of theirs from law school, and then so many other people he knew — from college, and their various parties at Lispenard Street, and JB’s aunts, and Malcolm’s parents, and long-ago friends of JB’s that he hadn’t seen in years — that it had taken some time before he could push through the crowd to look at the paintings themselves.

He had always known that JB was talented. They all did, everyone did: no matter how ungenerously you might occasionally think of JB as a person, there was something about his work that could convince you that you were wrong, that whatever deficiencies of character you had ascribed to him were in reality evidence of your own pettiness and ill-temper, that hidden within JB was someone of huge sympathies and depth and understanding. And that night, he had no trouble at all recognizing the paintings’ intensity and beauty, and had felt only an uncomplicated pride in and gratitude for JB: for the accomplishment of the work, of course, but also for his ability to produce colors and images that made all other colors and images seem wan and flaccid in comparison, for his ability to make you see the world anew. The paintings had been arranged in a single row that unspooled across the walls like a stave, and the tones JB had created — dense bruised blues and bourbonish yellows — were so distinctly their own, it was as if JB had invented a different language of color altogether.

He stopped to admire Willem and the Girl, one of the pictures he had already seen and had indeed already bought, in which JB had painted Willem turned away from the camera but for his eyes, which seemed to look directly back at the viewer, but were actually looking at, presumably, a girl who had been standing in Willem’s exact sightline. He loved the expression on Willem’s face, which was one he knew very well, when he was just about to smile and his mouth was still soft and undecided, somehow, but the muscles around his eyes were already pulling themselves upward. The paintings weren’t arranged chronologically, and so after this was one of himself from just a few months ago (he hurried past the ones of himself), and following that an image of Malcolm and his sister, in what he recognized from the furniture was Flora’s long-departed first West Village apartment (Malcolm and Flora, Bethune Street).

He looked around for JB and saw him talking to the gallery director, and at that moment, JB straightened his neck and caught his eye, and gave him a wave. “Genius,” he mouthed to JB over people’s heads, and JB grinned at him and mouthed back, “Thank you.”

But then he had moved to the third and final wall and had seen them: two paintings, both of him, neither of which JB had ever shown him. In the first, he was very young and holding a cigarette, and in the second, which he thought was from around two years ago, he was sitting bent over on the edge of his bed, leaning his forehead against the wall, his legs and arms crossed and his eyes closed — it was the position he always assumed when he was coming out of an episode and was gathering his physical resources before attempting to stand up again. He hadn’t remembered JB taking this picture, and indeed, given its perspective — the camera peeking around the edge of the doorframe — he knew that he wasn’t meant to remember, because he wasn’t meant to be aware of the picture’s existence at all. For a moment, the noise of the space blotted out around him, and he could only look and look at the paintings: even in his distress, he had the presence of mind to understand that he was responding less to the images themselves than to the memories and sensations they provoked, and that his sense of violation that other people should be seeing these documentations of two miserable moments of his life was a personal reaction, specific only to himself. To anyone else, they would be two contextless paintings, meaningless unless he chose to announce their meaning. But oh, they were difficult for him to see, and he wished, suddenly and sharply, that he was alone.

He made it through the post-opening dinner, which was endless and at which he missed Willem intensely — but Willem had a show that night and hadn’t been able to come. At least he hadn’t had to speak to JB at all, who was busy holding court, and to the people who approached him — including JB’s gallerist — to tell him that the final two pictures, the ones of him, were the best in the show (as if he were somehow responsible for this), he was able to smile and agree with them that JB was an extraordinary talent.

But later, at home, after regaining control of himself, he was at last free to articulate to Willem his sense of betrayal. And Willem had taken his side so unhesitatingly, had been so angry on his behalf, that he had been momentarily soothed — and had realized that JB’s duplicity had come as a surprise to Willem as well.

This had begun the second fight, which had started with a confrontation with JB at a café near JB’s apartment, during which JB had proven maddeningly incapable of apologizing: instead, he talked and talked, about how wonderful the pictures were, and how someday, once he had gotten over whatever issues he had with himself, he’d come to appreciate them, and how it wasn’t even that big a deal, and how he really needed to confront his insecurities, which were groundless anyway, and maybe this would prove helpful in that process, and how everyone except him knew how incredibly great-looking he was, and so shouldn’t that tell him something, that maybe — no, definitely—he was the one who was wrong about himself, and finally, how the pictures were already done, they were finished, and what did he expect should happen? Would he be happier if they were destroyed? Should he rip them off the wall and set them on fire? They had been seen and couldn’t be un-seen, so why couldn’t he just accept it and get over it?

“I’m not asking you to destroy them, JB,” he’d said, so furious and dizzied by JB’s bizarre logic and almost offensive intractability that he wanted to scream. “I’m asking you to apologize.”

But JB couldn’t, or wouldn’t, and finally he had gotten up and left, and JB hadn’t tried to stop him.

After that, he simply stopped speaking to JB. Willem had made his own approach, and the two of them (as Willem told him) had actually begun shouting at each other in the street, and then Willem, too, had stopped speaking to JB, and so from then on, they had to rely primarily on Malcolm for news of JB. Malcolm, typically noncommittal, had admitted to them that he thought JB was totally in the wrong, while at the same time suggesting that they were both being unrealistic: “You know he’s not going to apologize, Judy,” he said. “This is JB we’re talking about. You’re wasting your time.”

“Am I being unreasonable?” he asked Willem after this conversation.

“No,” Willem said, immediately. “It’s fucked up, Jude. He fucked up, and he needs to apologize.”

The show sold out. Willem and the Girl was delivered to him at work, as was Willem and Jude, Lispenard Street, II, which Willem had bought. Jude, After Sickness (the title, when he learned it, had made him so newly angry and humiliated that for a moment he experienced what the saying “blind with rage” meant) was sold to a collector whose purchases were considered benedictions and predictive of future success: he only bought from artists’ debut shows, and almost every artist whose work he had bought had gone on to have a major career. Only the show’s centerpiece, Jude with Cigarette, remained unplaced, and this was due to a shockingly amateurish error, in which the director of the gallery had sold it to an important British collector and the owner of the gallery had sold it to the Museum of Modern Art.

“So, perfect,” Willem said to Malcolm, knowing Malcolm would ferry his words back to JB. “JB should tell the gallery that he’s keeping the painting, and he should just give it to Jude.”

“He can’t do that,” Malcolm said, as appalled as if Willem had suggested simply tossing the canvas into a trash can. “It’s MoMA.”

“Who cares?” Willem asked. “If he’s that fucking good, he’ll have another shot at MoMA. But I’m telling you, Malcolm, this is really the only solution he has left if he wants to keep Jude as a friend.” He paused. “And me, too.”

So Malcolm conveyed that message, and the prospect of losing Willem as a friend had been enough to make JB call Willem and demand a meeting, at which JB had cried and accused Willem of betraying him, and always taking Jude’s side, and obviously not giving a shit about his, JB’s, career, when he, JB, had always supported Willem’s.

All of this had taken place over months, as spring turned into summer, and he and Willem had gone to Truro without JB (and without Malcolm, who told them he was afraid of leaving JB on his own), and JB had gone to the Irvines’ in Aquinnah over Memorial Day and they had gone over the Fourth of July, and he and Willem had taken the long-planned trip to Croatia and Turkey by themselves.

And then it was fall, and by the time Willem and JB had their second meeting, Willem had suddenly and unexpectedly booked his first film role, playing the king in an adaptation of The Girl with the Silver Hands and was leaving to shoot in Sofia in January, and he had gotten a promotion at work and had been approached by a partner at Cromwell Thurman Grayson and Ross, one of the best corporate firms in the city, and was having to use the wheelchair Andy had gotten him that May more often than not, and Willem had broken up with his girlfriend of a year and was dating a costume designer named Philippa, and his former fellow law clerk, Kerrigan, had written a mass e-mail to everyone he had ever worked with in which he simultaneously came out and denounced conservatism, and Harold had been asking him who was coming over for Thanksgiving this year, and if he could stay a night after whoever he invited had left, because he and Julia needed to talk about something with him, and he had seen plays with Malcolm and gallery shows with Willem and had read novels that he would have argued about with JB, as the two of them were the novel-readers of the group: a whole list of things the four of them would have once picked over together that they now instead discussed in twos or threes. At first, it had been disorienting, after so many years of operating as a foursome, but he had gotten used to it, and although he missed JB — his witty self-involvement, the way he could see everything the world had to offer only as it might affect him — he also found himself unable to forgive him and, simultaneously, able to see his life without him.

And now, he supposed, their fight was over, and the painting was his. Willem came down with him to the office that Saturday and he unwrapped it and leaned it against the wall and the two of them regarded it in silence, as if it were a rare and inert zoo animal. This was the painting that had been reproduced in the Times review and, later, the Artforum story, but it wasn’t until now, in the safety of his office, that he was able to truly appreciate it — if he could forget it was him, he could almost see how lovely an image it was, and why JB would have been attracted to it: for the strange person in it who looked so frightened and watchful, who was discernibly neither female nor male, whose clothes looked borrowed, who was mimicking the gestures and postures of adulthood while clearly understanding nothing of them. He no longer felt anything for that person, but not feeling anything for that person had been a conscious act of will, like turning away from someone in the street even though you saw them constantly, and pretending you couldn’t see them day after day until one day, you actually couldn’t — or so you could make yourself believe.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do with it,” he admitted to Willem, regretfully, because he didn’t want the painting, and yet felt guilty that Willem had axed JB out of his life on his behalf, and for something he knew he would never look at again.

“Well,” said Willem, and there was a silence. “You could always give it to Harold; I’m sure he’d love it.” And he knew then that Willem had perhaps always known that he didn’t want the painting, and that it hadn’t mattered to him, that he hadn’t regretted choosing him over JB, that he didn’t blame him for having to make that decision.

“I could,” he said slowly, although he knew he wouldn’t: Harold would indeed love it (he had when he had seen the show) and would hang it somewhere prominent, and whenever he went to visit him, he would have to look at it. “I’m sorry, Willem,” he said at last, “I’m sorry to drag you down here. I think I’ll leave it here until I figure out what to do.”

“It’s okay,” Willem said, and the two of them wrapped it up again and replaced it under his desk.

After Willem left, he turned on his phone and this time, he did write JB a message. “JB,” he began, “Thanks very much for the painting, and for your apology, both of which mean a lot.” He paused, thinking about what to say next. “I’ve missed you, and want to hear what’s been going on in your life,” he continued. “Call me when you have some time to hang out.” It was all true.

And suddenly, he knew what he should do with the painting. He looked up the address for JB’s registrar and wrote her a note, thanking her for sending him Jude with Cigarette and telling her that he wanted to donate it to MoMA, and could she help facilitate the transaction?

Later, he would look back on this episode as a sort of fulcrum, the hinge between a relationship that was one thing and then became something else: his friendship with JB, of course, but also his friendship with Willem. There had been periods in his twenties when he would look at his friends and feel such a pure, deep contentment that he would wish the world around them would simply cease, that none of them would have to move from that moment, when everything was in equilibrium and his affection for them was perfect. But, of course, that was never to be: a beat later, and everything shifted, and the moment quietly vanished.

It would have been too melodramatic, too final, to say that after this JB was forever diminished for him. But it was true that for the first time, he was able to comprehend that the people he had grown to trust might someday betray him anyway, and that as disappointing as it might be, it was inevitable as well, and that life would keep propelling him steadily forward, because for everyone who might fail him in some way, there was at least one person who never would.

It was his opinion (shared by Julia) that Harold had a tendency to make Thanksgiving more complicated than it needed to be. Every year since he’d first been invited to Harold and Julia’s for the holiday, Harold promised him — usually in early November, when he was still full of enthusiasm for the project — that this year he was going to blow his mind by upending the lamest of American culinary traditions. Harold always began with big ambitions: their first Thanksgiving together, nine years ago, when he was in his second year of law school, Harold had announced he was going to make duck à l’orange, with kumquats standing in for the oranges.

But when he arrived at Harold’s house with the walnut cake he’d baked the night before, Julia was standing alone in the doorway to greet him. “Don’t mention the duck,” she whispered as she kissed him hello. In the kitchen, a harassed-looking Harold was lifting a large turkey out of the oven.

“Don’t say a word,” Harold warned him.

“What would I say?” he asked.

This year, Harold asked how he felt about trout. “Trout stuffed with other stuff,” he added.

“I like trout,” he’d answered, cautiously. “But you know, Harold, I actually like turkey.” They had a variation on this conversation every year, with Harold proposing various animals and proteins — steamed black-footed Chinese chicken, filet mignon, tofu with wood ear fungus, smoked whitefish salad on homemade rye — as turkey improvements.

“No one likes turkey, Jude,” Harold said, impatiently. “I know what you’re doing. Don’t insult me by pretending you do because you don’t think I’m actually capable of making anything else. We’re having trout, and that’s it. Also, can you make that cake you made last year? I think it’d go well with this wine I got. Just send me a list of what you need me to get.”

The perplexing thing, he always thought, was that in general, Harold wasn’t that interested in food (or wine). In fact, he had terrible taste, and was often taking him to restaurants that were overpriced yet mediocre, where Harold would happily devour dull plates of blackened meat and unimaginative sides of gloppy pasta. He and Julia (who also had little interest in food) discussed Harold’s strange fixation every year: Harold had numerous obsessions, some of them inexplicable, but this one seemed particularly so, and more so for its endurance.

Willem thought that Harold’s Thanksgiving quest had begun partly as shtick, but over the years, it had morphed into something more serious, and now he was truly unable to stop himself, even as he knew he’d never succeed.

“But you know,” Willem said, “it’s really all about you.”

“What do you mean?” he’d asked.

“It’s a performance for you,” Willem had said. “It’s his way of telling you he cares about you enough to try to impress you, without actually saying he cares about you.”

He’d dismissed this right away: “I don’t think so, Willem.” But sometimes, he pretended to himself that Willem might be right, feeling silly and a little pathetic because of how happy the thought made him.

Willem was the only one coming to Thanksgiving this year: by the time he and JB had reconciled, JB had already made plans to go to his aunts’ with Malcolm; when he’d tried to cancel, they had apparently been so irked that he’d decided not to antagonize them further.

“What’s it going to be this year?” asked Willem. They were taking the train up on Wednesday, the night before Thanksgiving. “Elk? Venison? Turtle?”

“Trout,” he said.

“Trout!” Willem replied. “Well, trout’s easy. We may actually end up with trout this year.”

“He said he was going to stuff it with something, though.”

“Oh. I take it back.”

There were eight of them at dinner: Harold and Julia, Laurence and Gillian, Julia’s friend James and his boyfriend Carey, and he and Willem.

“This is dynamite trout, Harold,” Willem said, cutting into his second piece of turkey, and everyone laughed.

What was the point, he wondered, at which he had stopped feeling so nervous and out of place at Harold’s dinners? Certainly, his friends had helped. Harold liked sparring with them, liked trying to provoke JB into making outrageous and borderline racist statements, liked teasing Willem about when he was going to settle down, liked debating structural and aesthetic trends with Malcolm. He knew Harold enjoyed engaging with them, and that they enjoyed it too, and it gave him the chance to simply listen to them being who they were without feeling the need to participate; they were a fleet of parrots shaking their bright-colored feathers at one another, presenting themselves to their peers without fear or guile.

The dinner was dominated by talk of James’s daughter, who was getting married in the summer. “I’m an old man,” James moaned, and Laurence and Gillian, whose daughters were still in college and spending the holiday at their friend’s house in Carmel, made sympathetic noises.

“This reminds me,” said Harold, looking at him and Willem, “when are you two ever going to settle down?”

“I think he means you,” he smiled at Willem.

“Harold, I’m thirty-two!” Willem protested, and everyone laughed again as Harold spluttered: “What is that, Willem? Is that an explanation? Is that a defense? It’s not like you’re sixteen!”

But as much as he enjoyed the evening, a part of his mind remained abuzz and anxious, worrying about the conversation Harold and Julia wanted to have with him the next day. He had finally mentioned it to Willem on the ride up, and in moments, when the two of them were working together (stuffing the turkey, blanching the potatoes, setting the table), they would try to figure out what Harold might have to say to him. After dinner, they put on their coats and sat in the back garden, puzzling over it again.

At least he knew that nothing was wrong with them — it was the first thing he had asked, and Harold had assured him that he and Julia were both fine. But what, then, could it be?

“Maybe he thinks I’m hanging around them too much,” he suggested to Willem. Maybe Harold was, simply, sick of him.

“Not possible,” Willem said, so quickly and declaratively that he was relieved. They were quiet. “Maybe one of them got a job offer somewhere and they’re moving?”

“I thought of that, too. But I don’t think Harold would ever leave Boston. Julia, either.”

There weren’t, in the end, many options, at least many that would make a conversation with him necessary: maybe they were selling the house in Truro (but why would they need to talk to him about that, as much as he loved the house). Maybe Harold and Julia were splitting up (but they seemed the same as they always did around each other). Maybe they were selling the New York apartment and wanted to know if he wanted to buy it from them (unlikely: he was certain they would never sell the apartment). Maybe they were renovating the apartment and needed him to oversee the renovation.

And then their speculations grew more specific and improbable: maybe Julia was coming out (maybe Harold was). Maybe Harold was being born again (maybe Julia was). Maybe they were quitting their jobs, moving to an ashram in upstate New York. Maybe they were becoming ascetics who would live in a remote Kashmiri valley. Maybe they were having his-and-hers plastic surgery. Maybe Harold was becoming a Republican. Maybe Julia had found God. Maybe Harold had been nominated to be the attorney general. Maybe Julia had been identified by the Tibetan government in exile as the next reincarnation of the Panchen Lama and was moving to Dharamsala. Maybe Harold was running for president as a Socialist candidate. Maybe they were opening a restaurant on the square that served only turkey stuffed with other kinds of meat. By this time they were both laughing so hard, as much from the nervous, self-soothing helplessness of not knowing as from the absurdity of their guesses, that they were bent over in their chairs, pressing their coat collars to their mouths to muffle the noise, their tears freezing pinchingly on their cheeks.

In bed, though, he returned to the thought that had crept, tendril-like, from some dark space of his mind and had insinuated itself into his consciousness like a thin green vine: maybe one of them had discovered something about the person he once was. Maybe he would be presented with evidence — a doctor’s report, a photograph, a (this was the nightmare scenario) film still. He had already decided he wouldn’t deny it, he wouldn’t argue against it, he wouldn’t defend himself. He would acknowledge its veracity, he would apologize, he would explain that he never meant to deceive them, he would offer not to contact them again, and then he would leave. He would ask them only to keep his secret, to not tell anyone else. He practiced saying the words: I’m so sorry, Harold. I’m so sorry, Julia. I never meant to embarrass you. But of course it was such a useless apology. He might not have meant to, but it wouldn’t make a difference: he would have; he had.

Willem left the next morning; he had a show that night. “Call me as soon as you know, okay?” he asked, and he nodded. “It’s going to be fine, Jude,” he promised. “Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out. Don’t worry, all right?”

“You know I will anyway,” he said, and tried to smile back at Willem.

“Yeah, I know,” said Willem. “But try. And call me.”

The rest of the day he kept himself busy cleaning — there was always plenty to clean at the house, as both Harold and Julia were unenthusiastic tidiers — and by the time they sat down to an early dinner he’d made of turkey stew and a beet salad, he felt almost aloft from nervousness and could only pretend to eat, moving the food around his plate like a compass point, hoping Harold and Julia wouldn’t notice. After, he began stacking the plates to take them to the kitchen, but Harold stopped him. “Leave them, Jude,” he said. “Maybe we should have our talk now?”

He felt himself go fluttery with panic. “I should really rinse them off, or everything’s going to congeal,” he protested, lamely, hearing how stupid he sounded.

“Fuck the plates,” said Harold, and although he knew that Harold genuinely didn’t care what did or didn’t congeal on his plates, for a moment he wondered if his casualness was too casual, a simulacrum of ease rather than the real thing. But finally, he could do nothing but put the dishes down and trudge after Harold into the living room, where Julia was pouring coffee for herself and Harold, and had poured tea for him.

He lowered himself to the sofa, and Harold to the chair to his left, and Julia to the squashed suzani-covered ottoman facing him: the places they always sat, the low table between them, and he wished the moment would hold itself, for what if this was the last one he would have here, the last time he would sit in this warm dark room, with its books and tart, sweet scent of cloudy apple juice and the navy-and-scarlet Turkish carpet that had buckled itself into pleats under the coffee table, and the patch on the sofa cushion where the fabric had worn thin and he could see the white muslin skin beneath — all the things that he’d allowed to grow so dear to him, because they were Harold and Julia’s, and because he had allowed himself to think of their house as his.

For a while they all sipped at their drinks, and none of them looked at the other, and he tried to pretend that this was just a normal evening, although if it had been a normal evening, none of them would be so silent.

“Well,” Harold began at last, and he set his cup down on the table, readying himself. Whatever he says, he reminded himself, don’t start making excuses for yourself. Whatever he says, accept it, and thank him for everything.

There was another long silence. “This is hard to say,” Harold continued, and shifted his mug in his hand, and he made himself wait through Harold’s next pause. “I really did have a script prepared, didn’t I?” he asked Julia, and she nodded. “But I’m more nervous than I thought I would be.”

“I know,” she said. “But you’re doing great.”

“Ha!” Harold replied. “It’s sweet of you to lie to me, though,” and smiled at her, and he had the sense that it was only the two of them in the room, and that for a moment, they had forgotten he was there at all. But then Harold was quiet again, trying to say what he’d say next.

“Jude, I’ve — we’ve — known you for almost a decade now,” Harold said at last, and he watched as Harold’s eyes moved to him and then moved away, to somewhere above Julia’s head. “And over those years, you’ve grown very dear to us; both of us. You’re our friend, of course, but we think of you as more than a friend to us; as someone more special than that.” He looked at Julia, and she nodded at him once more. “So I hope you won’t think this is too — presumptuous, I suppose — but we’ve been wondering if you might consider letting us, well, adopt you.” Now he turned to him again, and smiled. “You’d be our legal son, and our legal heir, and someday all this”—he tossed his free arm into the air in a parodic gesture of expansiveness—“will be yours, if you want it.”

He was silent. He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t react; he couldn’t even feel his face, couldn’t sense what his expression might be, and Julia hurried in. “Jude,” she said, “if you don’t want to, for whatever reason, we understand completely. It’s a lot to ask. If you say no, it won’t change how we feel about you, right, Harold? You’ll always, always be welcome here, and we hope you’ll always be part of our lives. Honestly, Jude — we won’t be angry, and you shouldn’t feel bad.” She looked at him. “Do you want some time to think about it?”

And then he could feel the numbness receding, although as if in compensation, his hands began shaking, and he grabbed one of the throw pillows and wrapped his arms around it to hide them. It took him a few tries before he was able to speak, but when he did, he couldn’t look at either of them. “I don’t need to think about it,” he said, and his voice sounded strange and thin to him. “Harold, Julia — are you kidding? There’s nothing — nothing — I’ve ever wanted more. My whole life. I just never thought—” He stopped; he was speaking in fragments. For a minute they were all quiet, and he was finally able to look at both of them. “I thought you were going to tell me you didn’t want to be friends anymore.”

“Oh, Jude,” said Julia, and Harold looked perplexed. “Why would you ever think that?” he asked.

But he shook his head, unable to explain it to them.

They were silent again, and then all of them were smiling — Julia at Harold, Harold at him, he into the pillow — unsure how to end the moment, unsure where to go next. Finally, Julia clapped her hands together and stood. “Champagne!” she said, and left the room.

He and Harold stood as well and looked at each other. “Are you sure?” Harold asked him, quietly.

“I’m as sure as you are,” he answered, just as quietly. There was an uncreative and obvious joke to be made, about how much like a marriage proposal the event seemed, but he didn’t have the heart to make it.

“You realize you’re going to be bound to us for life,” Harold smiled, and put his hand on his shoulder, and he nodded. He hoped Harold wouldn’t say one more word, because if he did, he would cry, or vomit, or pass out, or scream, or combust. He was aware, suddenly, of how exhausted, how utterly depleted he was, as much by the past few weeks of anxiety as well as the past thirty years of craving, of wanting, of wishing so intensely even as he told himself he didn’t care, that by the time they had toasted one another and first Julia and then Harold had hugged him — the sensation of being held by Harold so unfamiliar and intimate that he had nearly squirmed — he was relieved when Harold told him to leave the damn dishes and go to bed.

When he reached his room, he had to lie on the bed for half an hour before he could even think of retrieving his phone. He needed to feel the solidity of the bed beneath him, the silk of the cotton blanket against his cheek, the familiar yield of the mattress as he moved against it. He needed to assure himself that this was his world, and he was still in it, and that what had happened had really happened. He thought, suddenly, of a conversation he’d once had with Brother Peter, in which he’d asked the brother if he thought he’d ever be adopted, and the brother had laughed. “No,” he’d said, so decisively that he had never asked again. And although he must have been very young, he remembered, very clearly, that the brother’s dismissal had only hardened his resolve, although of course it wasn’t an outcome that was his to control in the slightest.

He was so discombobulated that he forgot that Willem was already onstage when he called, but when Willem called him back at intermission, he was still in the same place on the bed, in the same comma-like shape, the phone still cupped beneath his palm.

“Jude,” Willem breathed when he told him, and he could hear how purely happy Willem was for him. Only Willem — and Andy, and to some extent Harold — knew the outlines of how he had grown up: the monastery, the home, his time with the Douglasses. With everyone else, he tried to be evasive for as long as he could, until finally he would say that his parents had died when he was little, and that he had grown up in foster care, which usually stopped their questions. But Willem knew more of the truth, and he knew Willem knew that this was his most impossible, his most fervent desire. “Jude, that’s amazing. How do you feel?”

He tried to laugh. “Like I’m going to mess it up.”

“You won’t.” They were both quiet. “I didn’t even know you could adopt someone who’s a legal adult.”

“I mean, it’s not common, but you can. As long as both parties consent. It’s mostly done for purposes of inheritance.” He made another attempt at a laugh. (Stop trying to laugh, he scolded himself.) “I don’t remember much from when I studied this in family law, but I do know that I get a new birth certificate with their names on it.”

“Wow,” said Willem.

“I know,” he said.

He heard someone calling Willem’s name, commandingly, in the background. “You have to go,” he told Willem.

“Shit,” said Willem. “But Jude? Congratulations. No one deserves it more.” He called back at whoever was yelling for him. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “Do you mind if I write Harold and Julia?”

“Sure,” he said. “But Willem, don’t tell the others, okay? I just want to sit with it for a while.”

“I won’t say a word. I’ll see you tomorrow. And Jude—” But he didn’t, or couldn’t, say anything else.

“I know,” he said. “I know, Willem. I feel the same way.”

“I love you,” said Willem, and then he was gone before he had to respond. He never knew what to say when Willem said that to him, and yet he always longed for him to say it. It was a night of impossible things, and he fought to stay awake, to be conscious and alert for as long as possible, to enjoy and repeat to himself everything that had happened to him, a lifetime’s worth of wishes coming true in a few brief hours.

Back in the apartment the next day, there was a note from Willem telling him to wait up, and when Willem came home, he had ice cream and a carrot cake, which the two of them ate even though neither of them particularly liked sweets, and champagne, which they drank even though he had to wake up early the following morning. The next few weeks slid by: Harold was handling the paperwork, and sent him forms to sign — the petition for adoption, an affidavit to change his birth certificate, a request for information about his potential criminal record — which he took to the bank at lunch to have notarized; he didn’t want anyone at work to know beyond the few people he told: Marshall, and Citizen, and Rhodes. He told JB and Malcolm, who on the one hand reacted exactly as he’d anticipated — JB making a lot of unfunny jokes at an almost tic-like pace, as if he might eventually land on one that worked; Malcolm asking increasingly granular questions about various hypotheticals that he couldn’t answer — and on the other had been genuinely thrilled for him. He told Black Henry Young, who had taken two classes with Harold when he was in law school and had admired him, and JB’s friend Richard, to whom he’d grown close after one particularly long and tedious party at Ezra’s a year ago when the two of them had had a conversation that had begun with the French welfare state and then had moved on to various other topics, the only two semi-sober people in the room. He told Phaedra, who had started screaming, and another old college friend, Elijah, who had screamed as well.

And, of course, he told Andy, who at first had just stared at him and then nodded, as if he had asked if Andy had an extra bandage he could give him before he left for the night. But then he began making a series of bizarre seal-like sounds, half bark, half sneeze, and he realized that Andy was crying. The sight of it made him both horrified and slightly hysterical, unsure of what to do. “Get out of here,” Andy commanded him between sounds. “I mean it, Jude, get the fuck out,” and so he did. The next day at work, he received an arrangement of roses the size of a gardenia bush, with a note in Andy’s angry blocky handwriting that read:

JUDE — I’M SO FUCKING EMBARRASSED I CAN BARELY WRITE THIS NOTE. PLEASE FORGIVE ME FOR YESTERDAY. I COULDN’T BE HAPPIER FOR YOU AND THE ONLY QUESTION IS WHAT TOOK HAROLD SO FUCKING LONG. I HOPE YOU’LL TAKE THIS AS A SIGN THAT YOU NEED TO TAKE BETTER CARE OF YOURSELF SO SOMEDAY YOU’LL HAVE THE STRENGTH TO CHANGE HAROLD’S ADULT DIAPERS WHEN HE’S A THOUSAND YEARS OLD AND INCONTINENT, BECAUSE YOU KNOW HE’S NOT GOING TO MAKE IT EASY FOR YOU BY DYING AT A RESPECTABLE AGE LIKE A NORMAL PERSON. BELIEVE ME, PARENTS ARE PAINS IN THE ASS LIKE THAT. (BUT GREAT TOO, OF COURSE.) LOVE, ANDY

It was, he and Willem agreed, one of the best letters they’d ever read.

But then the ecstatic month passed, and it was January, and Willem left for Bulgaria to film, and the old fears returned, accompanied now by new fears. They had a court date for February fifteenth, Harold told him, and with a little rescheduling, Laurence would be presiding. Now that the date was so close, he was sharply, inescapably aware that he might ruin it for himself, and he began, at first unconsciously and then assiduously, avoiding Harold and Julia, convinced that if they were reminded too much, too actively of what they were in fact getting that they would change their minds. And so when they came into town for a play the second week in January, he pretended he was in Washington on business, and on their weekly phone calls, he tried to say very little, and to keep the conversations brief. Every day the improbability of the situation seemed to grow larger and more vivid in his mind; every time he glimpsed the reflection of his ugly zombie’s hobble in the side of a building, he would feel sickened: Who, really, would ever want this? The idea that he could become someone else’s seemed increasingly ludicrous, and if Harold saw him just once more, how could he too not come to the same conclusion? He knew it shouldn’t matter so much to him — he was, after all, an adult; he knew the adoption was more ceremonial than truly sociologically significant — but he wanted it with a steady fervor that defied logic, and he couldn’t bear it being taken away from him now, not when everyone he cared about was so happy for him, not when he was so close.

He had been close before. The year after he arrived in Montana, when he was thirteen, the home had participated in a tristate adoption fair. November was National Adoption Month, and one cold morning, they had been told to dress neatly and had been hurried onto two school buses and driven two hours to Missoula, where they were herded off the buses and into the conference room of a hotel. Theirs had been the last buses to arrive, and the room was already filled with children, boys on one side, girls on the other. In the center of the room was a long stripe of tables, and as he walked over to his side, he saw that they were stacked with labeled binders: Boys, Babies; Boys, Toddlers; Boys, 4–6; Boys, 7–9; Boys, 10–12; Boys, 13–15; Boys, 15+. Inside, they had been told, were pieces of paper with their pictures, and names, and information about themselves: where they were from, what ethnicity they were, information about how they did in school and what sports they liked to play and what talents and interests they had. What, he wondered, did his sheet of paper say about him? What talents might have been invented for him, what race, what origins?

The older boys, the ones whose names and faces were in the 15+ binder, knew they would never be adopted, and when the counselors turned away, they snuck out through the back exit to, they all knew, get high. The babies and toddlers had only to be babies and toddlers; they would be the first to be chosen, and they didn’t even know it. But as he watched from the corner he had drifted toward, he saw that some of the boys — the ones old enough to have experienced one of the fairs before, but still young enough to be hopeful — had strategies. He watched as the sullen became smiling, as the rough and bullying became jocular and playful, as boys who hated one another in the context of the home played and bantered in a way that appeared convincingly friendly. He saw the boys who were rude to the counselors, who cursed at one another in the hallways, smile and chat with the adults, the prospective parents, who were filing into the room. He watched as the toughest, the meanest of the boys, a fourteen-year-old named Shawn who had once held him down in the bathroom, his knees digging into his shoulder blades, pointed at his name tag as the man and woman he had been talking with walked toward the binders. “Shawn!” he called after them, “Shawn Grady!” and something about his hoarse hopeful voice, in which he could hear the effort, the strain, to not sound hopeful at all, made him feel sorry for Shawn for the first time, and then angry at the man and woman, who, he could tell, were actually paging through the “Boys, 7–9” binder. But those feelings passed quickly, because he tried not to feel anything those days: not hunger, not pain, not anger, not sadness.

He had no tricks, he had no skills, he couldn’t charm. When he had arrived at the home, he had been so frozen that they had left him behind the previous November, and a year later, he wasn’t sure that he was any better. He thought less and less frequently of Brother Luke, it was true, but his days outside the classroom smeared into one; most of the time he felt he was floating, trying to pretend that he didn’t occupy his own life, wishing he was invisible, wanting only to go unnoticed. Things happened to him and he didn’t fight back the way he once would have; sometimes when he was being hurt, the part of him that was still conscious wondered what the brothers would think of him now: gone were his rages, his tantrums, his struggling. Now he was the boy they had always wished him to be. Now he hoped to be someone adrift, a presence so thin and light and insubstantial that he seemed to displace no air at all.

So he was surprised — as surprised as the counselors — when he learned that night that he was one of the children chosen by a couple: the Learys. Had he noticed a woman and man looking at him, maybe even smiling at him? Maybe. But the afternoon had passed, as most did, in a haze, and even on the bus ride home, he had begun the work of forgetting it.

He would spend a probationary weekend — the weekend before Thanksgiving — with the Learys, so they could see how they liked each other. That Thursday he was driven to their house by a counselor named Boyd, who taught shop and plumbing and whom he didn’t know very well. He knew Boyd knew what some of the other counselors did to him, and although he never stopped them, he never participated, either.

But as he was getting out of the car in the Learys’ driveway — a one-story brick house, surrounded on all sides by fallow, dark fields — Boyd snatched his forearm and pulled him close, startling him into alertness.

“Don’t fuck this up, St. Francis,” he said. “This is your chance, do you hear me?”

“Yes, sir,” he’d said.

“Go on, then,” said Boyd, and released him, and he walked toward Mrs. Leary, who was standing in the doorway.

Mrs. Leary was fat, but her husband was simply big, with large red hands that looked like weaponry. They had two daughters, both in their twenties and both married, and they thought it might be nice to have a boy in the house, someone who could help Mr. Leary — who repaired large-scale farm machinery and also farmed himself — with the field work. They chose him, they said, because he seemed quiet, and polite, and they didn’t want someone rowdy; they wanted someone hardworking, someone who would appreciate what having a home and a house meant. They had read in the binder that he knew how to work, and how to clean, and that he did well on the home’s farm.

“Now, your name, that’s an unusual name,” Mrs. Leary said.

He had never thought it unusual, but “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“What would you think of maybe going by a different name?” Mrs. Leary asked. “Like, Cody, maybe? I’ve always liked the name Cody. It’s a little less — well, it’s a little more us, really.”

“I like Cody,” he said, although he didn’t really have an opinion about it: Jude, Cody, it didn’t matter to him what he was called.

“Well, good,” said Mrs. Leary.

That night, alone, he said the name aloud to himself: Cody Leary. Cody Leary. Could it be possible that he was entering this house as one person and then, as if the place were enchanted, transformed into another? Was it that simple, that fast? Gone would be Jude St. Francis, and with him, Brother Luke, and Brother Peter, and Father Gabriel, and the monastery and the counselors at the home and his shame and fears and filth, and in his place would be Cody Leary, who would have parents, and a room of his own, and would be able to make himself into whomever he chose.

The rest of the weekend passed uneventfully, so uneventfully that with each day, with each hour, he could feel pieces of himself awaken, could feel the clouds that he gathered around himself separate and vanish, could feel himself seeing into the future, and imagining the place in it he might have. He tried his hardest to be polite, and hardworking, and it wasn’t difficult: he got up early in the morning and made breakfast for the Learys (Mrs. Leary praising him so loudly and extravagantly that he had smiled, embarrassed, at the floor), and cleaned dishes, and helped Mr. Leary degrease his tools and rewire a lamp, and although there were events he didn’t care for — the boring church service they attended on Sunday; the prayers they supervised before he was allowed to go to bed — they were hardly worse than the things he didn’t like about the home, they were things he knew he could do without appearing resentful or ungrateful. The Learys, he could sense, would not be the sort of people who would behave the way that parents in books would, the way the parents he yearned for might, but he knew how to be industrious, he knew how to keep them satisfied. He was still frightened of Mr. Leary’s large red hands, and when he was left alone with him in the barn, he was shivery and watchful, but at least there was only Mr. Leary to fear, not a whole group of Mr. Learys, as there had been before, or there were at the home.

When Boyd picked him up Sunday evening, he was pleased with how he’d done, confident, even. “How’d it go?” Boyd asked him, and he was able to answer, honestly, “Good.”

He was certain, from Mrs. Leary’s last words to him—“I have a feeling we’ll be seeing much more of you very soon, Cody”—that they would call on Monday, and that soon, maybe even by Friday, he would be Cody Leary, and the home would be one more place he’d put behind him. But then Monday passed, and then Tuesday, and Wednesday, and then it was the following week, and he wasn’t called to the headmaster’s office, and his letter to the Learys had gone unanswered, and every day the driveway to the dormitory remained a long, blank stretch, and no one came to get him.

Finally, two weeks after the visit, he went to see Boyd at his workshop, where he knew he stayed late on Thursday nights. He waited through dinner out in the cold, the snow crunching under his feet, until he finally saw Boyd walking out the door.

“Christ,” Boyd said when he saw him, nearly stepping on him as he turned. “Shouldn’t you be back in the dorms, St. Francis?”

“Please,” he begged. “Please tell me — are the Learys coming to get me?” But he knew what the answer was even before he saw Boyd’s face.

“They changed their minds,” said Boyd, and although he wasn’t known, by the counselors or the boys, for his gentleness, he was almost gentle then. “It’s over, St. Francis. It’s not going to happen.” He reached out a hand toward him, but he ducked, and Boyd shook his head and began walking off.

“Wait,” he called, recovering himself and running as well as he could through the snow after Boyd. “Let me try again,” he said. “Tell me what I did wrong, and I’ll try again.” He could feel the old hysteria descending upon him, could feel inside him the vestiges of the boy who would throw fits and shout, who could still a room with his screams.

But Boyd shook his head again. “It doesn’t work like that, St. Francis,” he said, and then he stopped and looked directly at him. “Look,” he said, “in a few years you’ll be out of here. I know it seems like a long time, but it’s not. And then you’ll be an adult and you’ll be able to do whatever you want. You just have to get through these years.” And then he turned again, definitively, and stalked away from him.

“How?” he yelled after Boyd. “Boyd, tell me how! How, Boyd, how?” forgetting that he was to call him “sir,” and not “Boyd.”

That night he had his first tantrum in years, and although the punishment here was the same, more or less, as it had been at the monastery, the release, the sense of flight it had once given him, was not: now he was someone who knew better, whose screams would change nothing, and all his shouting did was bring him back to himself, so that everything, every hurt, every insult, felt sharper and brighter and stickier and more resonant than ever before.

He would never, never know what he had done wrong that weekend at the Learys’. He would never know if it had been something he could control, or something he couldn’t. And of all the things from the monastery, from the home, that he worked to scrub over, he worked hardest at forgetting that weekend, at forgetting the special shame of allowing himself to believe that he might be someone he knew he wasn’t.

But now, of course, with the court date six weeks, five weeks, four weeks away, he thought of it constantly. With Willem gone, and no one to monitor his hours and activities, he stayed up until the sun began lightening the sky, cleaning, scrubbing with a toothbrush the space beneath the refrigerator, bleaching each skinny grout-canal between the bathtub wall tiles. He cleaned so he wouldn’t cut himself, because he was cutting himself so much that even he knew how crazy, how destructive he was being; even he was scared of himself, as much by what he was doing as by his inability to control it. He had begun a new method of balancing the edge of the blade on his skin and then pressing down, as deep as he could, so that when he withdrew the razor — stuck like an ax head into a tree stump — there was half a second in which he could pull apart the two sides of flesh and see only a clean white gouge, like a side of fatted bacon, before the blood began rushing in to pool within the cut. He felt dizzy, as if his body was pumped with helium; food tasted like rot to him, and he stopped eating unless he had to. He stayed at the office until the night shift of cleaners began moving through the hallways, noisy as mice, and then stayed awake at home; he woke with his heart thudding so fast that he had to gulp air to calm himself. It was only work, and Willem’s calls, that forced him into normalcy, or he’d have never left the house, would have cut himself until he could have loosed whole pyramids of flesh from his arms and flushed them down the drain. He had a vision in which he carved away at himself — first arms, then legs, then chest and neck and face — until he was only bones, a skeleton who moved and sighed and breathed and tottered through life on its porous, brittle stalks.

He was back to seeing Andy every six weeks, and had delayed his most recent visit twice, because he dreaded what Andy might say. But finally, a little less than four weeks before the court date, he went uptown and sat in one of the examining rooms until Andy peered in to say he was running late.

“Take your time,” he said.

Andy studied him, squinting a bit. “I won’t be long,” he said, finally, and then was gone.

A few minutes later, his nurse Callie came in. “Hi, Jude,” she said. “Doctor wants me to get your weight; do you mind stepping on the scale?”

He didn’t want to, but he knew it wasn’t Callie’s fault or decision, and so he dragged himself off the table, and onto the scale, and didn’t look at the number as Callie wrote it down in his chart, and thanked him, and left the room.

“So,” Andy said after he’d come in, studying his chart. “What should we talk about first, your extreme weight loss or your excessive cutting?”

He didn’t know what to say to that. “Why do you think I’ve been cutting myself excessively?”

“I can always tell,” Andy said. “You get sort of — sort of bluish under the eyes. You’re probably not even conscious of it. And you’re wearing your sweater over the gown. Whenever it’s bad, you do that.”

“Oh,” he said. He hadn’t been aware.

They were quiet, and Andy pulled his stool close to the table and asked, “When’s the date?”

“February fifteenth.”

“Ah,” said Andy. “Soon.”

“Yes.”

“What’re you worried about?”

“I’m worried—” he began, and then stopped, and tried again. “I’m worried that if Harold finds out what I really am, he won’t want to—” He stopped. “And I don’t know which is worse: him finding out before, which means this definitely won’t happen, or him finding out after, and realizing I’ve deceived him.” He sighed; he hadn’t been able to articulate this until now, but having done so, he knew that this was his fear.

“Jude,” Andy said, carefully, “what do you think is so bad about yourself that he wouldn’t want to adopt you?”

“Andy,” he pled, “don’t make me say it.”

“But I honestly don’t know!”

“The things I’ve done,” he said, “the diseases I have from them.” He stumbled on, hating himself. “It’s disgusting; I’m disgusting.”

“Jude,” Andy began, and as he spoke, he paused between every few words, and he could feel Andy picking his way across a mine-pocked lawn, so deliberately and slowly was he going. “You were a kid, a baby. Those things were done to you. You have nothing, nothing to blame yourself for, not ever, not in any universe.”

Andy looked at him. “And even if you hadn’t been a kid, even if you had just been some horny guy who wanted to fuck everything in sight and had ended up with a bunch of STDs, it still wouldn’t be anything to be ashamed of.” He sighed. “Can you try to believe me?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“I know,” Andy said. They were quiet. “I wish you’d see a therapist, Jude,” he added, and his voice was sad. He couldn’t respond, and after a few minutes, Andy stood up. “Well,” he said, sounding determined, “let’s see them,” and he took off his sweater and held out his arms.

He could tell by Andy’s expression that it was worse than he had anticipated, and when he looked down and tried to view himself as something unfamiliar, he could see in flashes what Andy did: the gobs of bandages applied at intervals to the fresh cuts, the half-healed cuts, with their fragile stitchings of still-forming scar tissue, the one infected cut, which had developed a chunky cap of dried pus.

“So,” Andy said after a long silence, after he’d almost finished his right arm, cleaning out the infected cut and painting antibiotic cream on the others, “what about your extreme weight loss?”

“I don’t think it’s extreme.”

“Jude,” said Andy, “twelve pounds in not quite eight weeks is extreme, and you didn’t exactly have twelve pounds to spare to begin with.”

“I’m just not hungry,” he said, finally.

Andy didn’t say anything else until he finished both his arms, and then sighed and sat down again and started scribbling on his pad. “I want you to eat three full meals a day, Jude,” he said, “plus one of the things on this list. Every day. That’s in addition to standard meals, do you understand me? Or I’m going to call your crew and make them sit with you every mealtime and watch you eat, and you don’t want that, believe me.” He ripped the page off the pad and handed it to him. “And then I want you back here next week. No excuses.”

He looked at the list — PEANUT BUTTER SANDWICH. CHEESE SANDWICH. AVOCADO SANDWICH. 3 EGGS (WITH YOLKS!!!!). BANANA SMOOTHIE — and tucked it into his pants pocket.

“And the other thing I want you to do is this,” said Andy. “When you wake up in the middle of the night and want to cut yourself, I want you to call me instead. I don’t care what time it is, you call me, okay?” He nodded. “I mean it, Jude.”

“I’m sorry, Andy,” he said.

“I know you are,” said Andy. “But you don’t need to be sorry — not to me, anyway.”

“To Harold,” he said.

“No,” Andy corrected. “Not to Harold, either. Just to yourself.”

He went home and ate away at a banana until it turned to dirt in his mouth and then changed and continued washing the living-room windows, which he had begun the night before. He rubbed at them, inching the sofa closer so he could stand atop one of its arms, ignoring the twinges in his back as he climbed up and down, lugging the bucket of dirtied gray water slowly to the tub. After he’d finished the living room and Willem’s room, he was in so much pain that he had to crawl to the bathroom, and after cutting himself, he rested, holding his arm above his head and wrapping the mat about him. When his phone rang, he sat up, disoriented, before groaningly moving to his bedroom — where the clock read three a.m. — and listening to a very cranky (but alert) Andy.

“I called too late,” Andy guessed. He didn’t say anything. “Listen, Jude,” Andy continued, “you don’t stop this and I really am going to have you committed. And I’ll call Harold and tell him why. You can count on it.” He paused. “And besides which,” he added, “aren’t you tired, Jude? You don’t have to do this to yourself, you know. You don’t need to.”

He didn’t know what it was — maybe it was just the calmness of Andy’s voice, the steadiness with which he made his promise that made him realize that he was serious this time in a way he hadn’t been before; or maybe it was just the realization that yes, he was tired, so tired that he was willing, finally, to accept someone else’s orders — but over the next week, he did as he was told. He ate his meals, even as the food transformed itself by some strange alchemy to mud, to offal: he made himself chew and swallow, chew and swallow. They weren’t big meals, but they were meals. Andy called every night at midnight, and Willem called every morning at six (he couldn’t bring himself to ask, and Willem never volunteered, whether Andy had contacted him). The hours in between were the most difficult, and although he couldn’t cease cutting himself entirely, he did limit it: two cuts, and he stopped. In the absence of cutting, he felt himself being tugged toward earlier punishments — before he had been taught to cut himself, there was a period in which he would toss himself against the wall outside the motel room he shared with Brother Luke again and again until he sagged, exhausted, to the ground, and his left side was permanently stained blue and purple and brown with bruises. He didn’t do that now, but he remembered the sensation, the satisfying slam of his body against the wall, the awful pleasure of hurling himself against something so immovable.

On Friday he saw Andy, who wasn’t approving (he hadn’t gained any weight), but also didn’t lecture him (nor had he lost any), and the next day he flew to Boston. He didn’t tell anyone he was going, not even Harold. Julia, he knew, was at a conference in Costa Rica; but Harold, he knew, would be home.

Julia had given him a set of keys six years ago, when he was arriving for Thanksgiving at a time when both she and Harold happened to have department meetings, so he let himself into the house and poured a glass of water, looking out at the back garden as he drank. It was just before noon, and Harold would still be at his tennis game, so he went to the living room to wait for him. But he fell asleep, and when he woke, it was to Harold shaking his shoulder and urgently repeating his name.

“Harold,” he said, sitting up, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry; I should’ve called.”

“Jesus,” Harold said, panting; he smelled cold and sharp. “Are you all right, Jude? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing,” he said, hearing before he said it how absurd his explanation was, “I just thought I’d stop by.”

“Well,” said Harold, momentarily silent. “It’s good to see you.” He sat in his chair and looked at him. “You’ve been something of a stranger these past few weeks.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Harold shrugged. “No apologies necessary. I’m just glad you’re okay.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m okay.”

Harold tilted his head. “You don’t look too good.”

He smiled. “I’ve had the flu.” He gazed up at the ceiling, as if his lines might be written there. “The forsythia’s falling down, you know.”

“I know. It’s been a windy winter.”

“I’ll help you stake it, if you want.”

Harold looked at him for a long moment then, his mouth slightly moving, as if he was both trying and not trying to speak. Finally he said, “Yeah. Let’s go do that.”

Outside it was abruptly, insultingly cold, and both of them began sniffling. He positioned the stake and Harold hammered it into the ground, although the earth was frozen and chipped up into pottery-like shards as he did. After they’d gotten it deep enough, Harold handed him lengths of twine, and he tied the center stalks of the bush to the stake, snugly enough so they’d be secure, but not so snug that they’d be constricted. He worked slowly, making sure the knots were tight, snapping off a few branches that were too bent to recover.

“Harold,” he said, when he was halfway down the bush, “I wanted to talk to you about something, but — I don’t know where to begin.” Stupid, he told himself. This is such a stupid idea. You were so stupid to think any of this could ever happen. He opened his mouth to continue and then shut it, and then opened it again: he was a fish, dumbly blowing bubbles, and he wished he had never come, had never begun speaking.

“Jude,” said Harold, “tell me. Whatever it is.” He stopped. “Are you having second thoughts?”

“No,” he said. “No, nothing like that.” They were silent. “Are you?”

“No, of course not.”

He finished the last tie and brought himself to his feet, Harold deliberately not helping him. “I don’t want to tell you this,” he said, and looked down at the forsythia, its bare twiggy ugliness. “But I have to because — because I don’t want to be deceitful with you. But Harold — I think you think I’m one kind of person, and I’m not.”

Harold was quiet. “What kind of person do I think you are?”

“A good person,” he said. “Someone decent.”

“Well,” said Harold, “you’re right. I do.”

“But — I’m not,” he said, and could feel his eyes grow hot, despite the cold. “I’ve done things that — that good people don’t do,” he continued, lamely. “And I just think you should know that about me. That I’ve done terrible things, things I’m ashamed of, and if you knew, you’d be ashamed to know me, much less be related to me.”

“Jude,” Harold said at last. “I can’t imagine anything you might have done that would change the way I feel about you. I don’t care what you did before. Or rather — I do care; I would love to hear about your life before we met. But I’ve always had the feeling, the very strong feeling, that you never wanted to discuss it.” He stopped and waited. “Do you want to discuss it now? Do you want to tell me?”

He shook his head. He wanted to and didn’t want to, both. “I can’t,” he said. Beneath the small of his back, he felt the first unfurlings of discomfort, a blackened seed spreading its thorned branches. Not now, he begged himself, not now, a plea as impossible as the plea he really meant: Not now, not ever.

“Well,” Harold sighed, “in the absence of specifics, I won’t be able to reassure you specifically, so I’m just going to give you a blanket, all-encompassing reassurance, which I hope you’ll believe. Jude: whatever it is, whatever you did, I promise you, whether you someday tell me or not, that it will never make me regret wanting or having you as a member of my family.” He took a deep breath, held his right hand before him. “Jude St. Francis, as your future parent, I hereby absolve you of — of everything for which you seek absolution.”

And was this what he in fact wanted? Absolution? He looked at Harold’s face, so familiar he could remember its every furrow when he closed his eyes, and which, despite the flourishes and formality of his declaration, was serious and unsmiling. Could he believe Harold? The hardest thing is not finding the knowledge, Brother Luke once said to him after he’d confessed he was having difficulty believing in God. The hardest thing is believing it. He felt he had failed once again: failed to confess properly, failed to determine in advance what he wanted to hear in response. Wouldn’t it have been easier in a way if Harold had told him that he was right, that they should perhaps rethink the adoption? He would have been devastated, of course, but it would have been an old sensation, something he understood. In Harold’s refusal to let him go lay a future he couldn’t imagine, one in which someone might really want him for good, and that was a reality that he had never experienced before, for which he had no preparation, no signposts. Harold would lead and he would follow, until one day he would wake and Harold would be gone, and he would be left vulnerable and stranded in a foreign land, with no one there to guide him home.

Harold was waiting for his reply, but the pain was now unignorable, and he knew he had to rest. “Harold,” he said. “I’m sorry. But I think — I think I’d better go lie down for a while.”

“Go,” said Harold, unoffended, “go.”

In his room, he lies down atop the comforter and closes his eyes, but even after the episode ends, he’s exhausted, and tells himself he’ll nap for just a few minutes and then get up again and see what Harold has in the house: if he has brown sugar, he’ll bake something — there was a bowl of persimmons in the kitchen, and maybe he’ll make a persimmon cake.

But he doesn’t wake up. Not when Harold comes to check on him in the next hour and places the back of his hand against his cheek and then drapes a blanket over him; not when Harold checks on him again, right before dinner. He sleeps through his phone ringing at midnight and again at six a.m., and through the house phone ringing at twelve thirty and then at six thirty, and Harold’s conversations with first Andy and then Willem. He sleeps into the morning, and through lunch, and only wakes when he feels Harold’s hand on his shoulder and hears Harold saying his name, telling him his flight’s leaving in a few hours.

Before he wakes, he dreams of a man standing in a field. He can’t see the man’s features, but he is tall and thin, and he’s helping another, older man hitch the hulk of a tractor carapace to the back of a truck. He knows he’s in Montana from the whitened, curved-bowl vastness of the sky, and from the particular kind of cold there, which is completely without moisture and which feels somehow purer than cold he’s felt anywhere else.

He still can’t see the man’s features, but he thinks he knows who he is, recognizes his long strides and his way of crossing his arms in front of him as he listens to the other man. “Cody,” he calls out in his dream, and the man turns, but he’s too far away, and so he can’t quite tell if, under the brim of the man’s baseball cap, they share the same face.

The fifteenth is a Friday, which he takes off from work. There had been some talk of a dinner party on Thursday night, but in the end, they settle on an early lunch the day of the ceremony (as JB calls it). Their court appointment is at ten, and after it’s over, everyone will come back to the house to eat.

Harold had wanted to call a caterer, but he insisted he’d cook, and he spends the remains of Thursday evening in the kitchen. He does the baking that night — the chocolate-walnut cake Harold likes; the tarte tatin Julia likes; the sourdough bread they both like — and picks through ten pounds of crab and mixes the meat with egg and onion and parsley and bread crumbs and forms them into patties. He cleans the potatoes and gives the carrots a quick scrub, and chops the ends off the brussels sprouts, so that the next day all he’ll have to do is toss them in oil and shove them into the oven. He shakes the cartons of figs into a bowl, which he’ll roast and serve over ice cream topped with honey and balsamic vinaigrette. They are all of Harold and Julia’s favorite dishes, and he is glad to make them, glad to have something to give them, however small. Throughout the evening, Harold and Julia wander in and out, and although he tells them not to, they wash dishes and pans as he dirties them, pour him glasses of water and wine, and ask if they can help him, even though he tells them they should relax. Finally they leave for bed, and although he promises them that he will as well, he instead stays up, the kitchen bright and silent around him, singing quietly, his hands moving to keep the mania at bay.

The past few days have been very difficult, some of the most difficult he can remember, so difficult that one night he even called Andy after their midnight check-in, and when Andy offered to meet him at a diner at two a.m., he accepted the offer and went, desperate to get himself out of the apartment, which suddenly seemed full of irresistible temptations: razors, of course, but also knives and scissors and matches, and staircases to throw himself down. He knows that if he goes to his room now, he won’t be able to stop himself from heading directly to the bathroom, where he has long kept a bag, its contents identical to the one at Lispenard Street, taped to the sink’s undercarriage: his arms ache with yearning, and he is determined not to give in. He has both dough and batter left over, and decides he’ll make a tart with pine nuts and cranberries, and maybe a round flat cake glazed with slices of oranges and honey: by the time both are done baking, it will almost be daylight and he will be past danger and will have sucessfully saved himself.

Malcolm and JB will both be at the courthouse the next day; they’re taking the morning flight. But Willem, who was supposed to be there, won’t; he called the week before to say filming had been delayed, and he’ll now be coming home on the eighteenth, not the fourteenth. He knows there’s nothing to be done about this, but still, he mourns Willem’s absence almost fiercely: a day like this without Willem won’t be a day at all. “Call me the second it’s over,” Willem had said. “It’s killing me I can’t be there.”

He did, however, invite Andy in one of their midnight conversations, which he grew to enjoy: in those talks, they discussed everyday things, calming things, normal things — the new Supreme Court justice nominee; the most recent health-care bill (he approved of it; Andy didn’t); a biography of Rosalind Franklin they’d both read (he liked it; Andy didn’t); the apartment that Andy and Jane were renovating. He liked the novelty of hearing Andy say, with real outrage, “Jude, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” which he was used to hearing when being confronted about his cutting, or his amateurish bandaging skills, instead applied to his opinions about movies, and the mayor, and books, and even paint colors. Once he learned that Andy wouldn’t use their talks as an occasion to reprimand him, or lecture him, he relaxed into them, and even managed to learn some more things about Andy himself: Andy spoke of his twin, Beckett, also a doctor, a heart surgeon, who lived in San Francisco and whose boyfriend Andy hated and was scheming to get Beckett to dump; and how Jane’s parents were giving them their house on Shelter Island; and how Andy had been on the football team in high school, the very Americanness of which had made his parents uneasy; and how he had spent his junior year abroad in Siena, where he dated a girl from Lucca and gained twenty pounds. It wasn’t that he and Andy never spoke of Andy’s personal life — they did to some extent after every appointment — but on the phone he talked more, and he was able to pretend that Andy was only his friend and not his doctor, despite the fact that this illusion was belied by the call’s very premise.

“Obviously, you shouldn’t feel obligated to come,” he added, hastily, after inviting Andy to the court date.

“I’d love to come,” Andy said. “I was wondering when I’d be invited.”

Then he felt bad. “I just didn’t want you to feel you had to spend even more time with your weird patient who already makes your life so difficult,” he said.

“You’re not just my weird patient, Jude,” Andy said. “You’re also my weird friend.” He paused. “Or at least, I hope you are.”

He smiled into the phone. “Of course I am,” he said. “I’m honored to be your weird friend.”

And so Andy was coming as well: he’d fly back that afternoon, but Malcolm and JB would spend the night, and they’d all leave together on Saturday.

Upon arriving, he had been surprised, and then moved, to see how thoroughly Harold and Julia had cleaned the house, and how proud they were of the work they’d done. “Look!” one or the other kept saying, triumphantly pointing at a surface — a table, a chair, a corner of floor — that would normally have been obscured by stacks of books or journals, but which was now clear of all clutter. There were flowers everywhere — winter flowers: bunches of decorative cabbages and white-budded dogwood branches and paperwhite bulbs, with their sweet, faintly fecal fragrance — and the books in their cases had been straightened and even the nap on the sofa had been repaired.

“And look at this, Jude,” Julia had said, linking her arm through his, and showing him the celadon-glazed dish on the hallway table, which had been broken for as long as he’d known them, the shards that had snapped off its side permanently nested in the bowl and furred with dust. But now it had been fixed, and washed and polished.

“Wow,” he said when presented with each new thing, grinning idiotically, happy because they were so happy. He didn’t care, he never had, whether their place was clean or not — they could’ve lived surrounded by Ionic columns of old New York Times, with colonies of rats squeaking plumply underfoot for all he cared — but he knew they thought he minded, and had mistaken his incessant, tedious cleaning of everything as a rebuke, as much as he’d tried, and tried, to assure them it wasn’t. He cleaned now to stop himself, to distract himself, from doing other things, but when he was in college, he had cleaned for the others to express his gratitude: it was something he could do and had always done, and they gave him so much and he gave them so little. JB, who enjoyed living in squalor, never noticed. Malcolm, who had grown up with a housekeeper, always noticed and always thanked him. Only Willem hadn’t liked it. “Stop it, Jude,” he’d said one day, grabbing his wrist as he picked JB’s dirty shirts off the floor, “you’re not our maid.” But he hadn’t been able to stop, not then, and not now.

By the time he wipes off the countertops a final time, it’s almost four thirty, and he staggers to his room, texts Willem not to call him, and falls into a brief, brutal sleep. When he wakes, he makes the bed and showers and dresses and returns to the kitchen, where Harold is standing at the counter, reading the paper and drinking coffee.

“Well,” Harold says, looking up at him. “Don’t you look handsome.”

He shakes his head, reflexively, but the truth is that he’d bought a new tie, and had his hair cut the day before, and he feels, if not handsome, then at least neat and presentable, which he always tries to be. He rarely sees Harold in a suit, but he’s wearing one as well, and the solemnity of the occasion makes him suddenly shy.

Harold smiles at him. “You were busy last night, clearly. Did you sleep at all?”

He smiles back. “Enough.”

“Julia’s getting ready,” says Harold, “but I have something for you.”

“For me?”

“Yes,” says Harold, and picks up a small leather box, about the size of a baseball, from beside his coffee mug and holds it out to him. He opens it and inside is Harold’s watch, with its round white face and sober, forthright numbers. The band has been replaced with a new black crocodile one.

“My father gave this to me when I turned thirty,” says Harold, when he doesn’t say anything. “It was his. And you are still thirty, so I at least haven’t messed up the symmetry of this.” He takes the box from him and removes the watch and reverses it so he can see the initials engraved on the back of the face: SS/HS/JSF. “Saul Stein,” says Harold. “That was my father. And then HS for me, and JSF for you.” He returns the watch to him.

He runs his thumbtip lightly over the initials. “I can’t accept this, Harold,” he says, finally.

“Sure you can,” Harold says. “It’s yours, Jude. I already bought a new one; you can’t give it back.”

He can feel Harold looking at him. “Thank you,” he says, at last. “Thank you.” He can’t seem to say anything else.

“It’s my pleasure,” says Harold, and neither of them says anything for a few seconds, until he comes to himself and unclasps his watch and fastens Harold’s — his, now — around his wrist, holding his arm up for Harold, who nods. “Nice,” he says. “It looks good on you.”

He’s about to reply with something (what?), when he hears, and then sees, JB and Malcolm, both in suits as well.

“The door was unlocked,” JB says, as Malcolm sighs. “Harold!” he hugs him, “Congratulations! It’s a boy!”

“I’m sure Harold’s never heard that one before,” says Malcolm, waving hello at Julia, who’s entering the kitchen.

Andy arrives next, and then Gillian; they’ll meet Laurence at the courthouse.

The doorbell rings again. “Are we expecting someone else?” he asks Harold, who shrugs: “Can you get it, Jude?”

So he opens the door, and there is Willem. He stares at Willem for a second, and then, before he can tell himself to be calm, Willem springs at him like a civet cat and hugs him so hard that for a moment he fears he will tip over. “Are you surprised?” Willem says into his ear, and he can tell from his voice that he’s smiling. It’s the second time that morning he’s unable to speak.

The court will be the third time. They take two cars, and in his (driven by Harold, with Malcolm in the front seat), Willem explains that his departure date actually had been changed; but when it was changed back again, he didn’t tell him, only the others, so that his appearance would be a surprise. “Yeah, thanks for that, Willem,” says Malcolm, “I had to monitor JB like the CIA to make sure he didn’t say anything.”

They go not to the family courts but to the appeals court on Pemberton Square. Inside Laurence’s courtroom — Laurence unfamiliar in his robes: it is a day of everyone in costume — he and Harold and Julia make their promises to each other, Laurence smiling the entire time, and then there is a flurry of picture-taking, with everyone taking photos of everyone else in various arrangements and configurations. He is the only one who doesn’t take any at all, as he’s in every one.

He’s standing with Harold and Julia, waiting for Malcolm to figure out his enormous, complicated camera, when JB calls his name, and all three of them look over, and JB takes the shot. “Got it,” says JB. “Thanks.”

“JB, this’d better not be for—” he begins, but then Malcolm announces he’s ready, and the three of them swivel obediently toward him.

They’re back at the house by noon, and soon people start arriving — Gillian and Laurence and James and Carey, and Julia’s colleagues and Harold’s, some of whom he hasn’t seen since he had classes with them in law school. His old voice teacher comes, as does Dr. Li, his math professor, and Dr. Kashen, his master’s adviser, and Allison, his former boss at Batter, and a friend of all of theirs from Hood Hall, Lionel, who teaches physics at Wellesley. People come and go all afternoon, going to and from classes, meetings, trials. He had initially been reluctant to have such a gathering, with so many people — wouldn’t his acquisition of Harold and Julia as parents provoke, even encourage, questions about why he was parentless at all? — but as the hours pass, and no one asks any questions, no one demands to know why he needs a new set anyway, he finds himself forgetting his fears. He knows his telling other people about the adoption is a form of bragging, and that bragging has its own consequences, but he cannot help himself. Just this once, he implores whoever in the world is responsible for punishing him for his bad behavior. Let me celebrate this thing that has happened to me just this once.

There is no etiquette for such a party, and so their guests have invented their own: Malcolm’s parents have sent a magnum of champagne and a case of super Tuscan from a vineyard they partly own outside of Montalcino. JB’s mother sent him with a burlap sack of heirloom narcissus bulbs for Harold and Julia, and a card for him; his aunts have sent an orchid. The U.S. Attorney sends an enormous crate of fruit, with a card signed by Marshall and Citizen and Rhodes as well. People bring wine and flowers. Allison, who had years ago revealed him to Harold as the creator of the bacteria cookies, brings four dozen decorated with his original designs, which makes him blush and Julia shout with delight. The rest of the day is a binging on all things sweet: everything he does that day is perfect, everything he says comes out right. People reach for him and he doesn’t move or shy away from them; they touch him and he lets them. His face hurts from smiling. Decades of approbation, of affection are stuffed into this one afternoon, and he gorges on it, reeling from the strangeness of it all. He overhears Andy arguing with Dr. Kashen about a massive new proposed landfill project in Gurgaon, watches Willem listen patiently to his old torts professor, eavesdrops on JB explaining to Dr. Li why the New York art scene is irretrievably fucked, spies Malcolm and Carey trying to extract the largest of the crab cakes without toppling the rest of the stack.

By the early evening, everyone has left, and it is just the six of them sprawled out in the living room: he and Harold and Julia and Malcolm and JB and Willem. The house is once again messy. Julia mentions dinner, but everyone — even he — has eaten too much, and no one, not even JB, wants to think about it. JB has given Harold and Julia a painting of him, saying, before he hands it over to them, “It’s not based on a photo, just from sketches.” The painting, which JB has done in watercolors and ink on a sheet of stiff paper, is of his face and neck, and is in a different style than he associates with JB’s work: sparer and more gestural, in a somber, grayed palette. In it, his right hand is hovering over the base of his throat, as if he’s about to grab it and throttle himself, and his mouth is slightly open, and his pupils are very large, like a cat’s in gloom. It’s undeniably him — he even recognizes the gesture as his own, although he can’t, in the moment, remember what it’s meant to signal, or what emotion it accompanies. The face is slightly larger than life-size, and all of them stare at it in silence.

“It’s a really good piece,” JB says at last, sounding pleased. “Let me know if you ever want to sell it, Harold,” and finally, everyone laughs.

“JB, it’s so, so beautiful — thank you so much,” says Julia, and Harold echoes her. He is finding it difficult, as he always does when confronted with JB’s pictures of him, to separate the beauty of the art itself from the distaste he feels for his own image, but he doesn’t want to be ungracious, and so he repeats their praise.

“Wait, I have something, too,” Willem says, heading for the bedroom, and returning with a wooden statue, about eighteen inches high, of a bearded man in hydrangea-blue robes, a curl of flames, like a cobra’s hood, surrounding his reddish hair, his right arm held diagonally against his chest, his left by his side.

“Fuck’s that dude?” asks JB.

“This dude,” Willem replies, “is Saint Jude, also known as Judas Thaddeus.” He puts him on the coffee table, turns him toward Julia and Harold. “I got him at a little antiques store in Bucharest,” he tells them. “They said it’s late nineteenth-century, but I don’t know — I think he’s probably just a village carving. Still, I liked him. He’s handsome and stately, just like our Jude.”

“I agree,” says Harold, picking up the statue and holding it in his hands. He strokes the figure’s pleated robe, his wreath of fire. “Why’s his head on fire?”

“It’s to symbolize that he was at Pentecost and received the holy spirit,” he hears himself saying, the old knowledge never far, cluttering up his mind’s cellar. “He was one of the apostles.”

“How’d you know that?” Malcolm asks, and Willem, who’s sitting next to him, touches his arm. “Of course you know,” Willem says, quietly. “I always forget,” and he feels a rush of gratitude for Willem, not for remembering, but for forgetting.

“The patron saint of lost causes,” adds Julia, taking the statue from Harold, and the words come to him at once: Pray for us, Saint Jude, helper and keeper of the hopeless, pray for us—when he was a child, it was his final prayer of the night, and it wasn’t until he was older that he would be ashamed of his name, of how it seemed to announce him to the world, and would wonder if the brothers had intended it as he was certain others saw it: as a mockery; as a diagnosis; as a prediction. And yet it also felt, at times, like it was all that was truly his, and although there had been moments he could have, even should have changed it, he never did. “Willem, thank you,” Julia says. “I love him.”

“Me too,” says Harold. “Guys, this is all really sweet of you.”

He, too, has brought a present for Harold and Julia, but as the day has passed, it’s come to seem ever-smaller and more foolish. Years ago, Harold had mentioned that he and Julia had heard a series of Schubert’s early lieder performed in Vienna when they were on their honeymoon. But Harold couldn’t remember which ones they had loved, and so he had made up his own list, and augmented it with a few other songs he liked, mostly Bach and Mozart, and then rented a small sound booth and recorded a disc of himself singing them: every few months or so, Harold asks him to sing for them, but he’s always too shy to do so. Now, though, the gift feels misguided and tinny, as well as shamefully boastful, and he is embarrassed by his own presumption. Yet he can’t bring himself to throw it away. And so, when everyone is standing and stretching and saying their good nights, he slips away and wedges the disc, and the letters he’s written each of them, between two books — a battered copy of Common Sense and a frayed edition of White Noise—on a low shelf, where they might sit, undiscovered, for decades.

Normally, Willem stays with JB in the upstairs study, as he’s the only one who can tolerate JB’s snoring, and Malcolm stays with him downstairs. But that evening, as everyone heads off for bed, Malcolm volunteers that he’ll share with JB, so that he and Willem can catch up with each other.

“ ’Night, lovers,” JB calls down the staircase at them.

As they get ready for bed, Willem tells him more stories from the set: about the lead actress, who perspired so much that her entire face had to be dusted with powder every two takes; about the lead actor, who played the devil, and who was constantly trying to curry favor with the grips by buying them beers and asking them who wanted to play football, but who then had a tantrum when he couldn’t remember his lines; about the nine-year-old British actor playing the actress’s son, who had approached Willem at the craft services table to tell him that he really shouldn’t be eating crackers because they were empty calories, and wasn’t he afraid of getting fat? Willem talks and talks, and he laughs as he brushes his teeth and washes his face.

But when the lights are turned off and they are both lying in the dark, he in the bed, Willem on the sofa (after an argument in which he tried to get Willem to take the bed himself), Willem says, gently, “The apartment’s really fucking clean.”

“I know,” he winces. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Willem says. “But Jude — was it really awful?”

He understands then that Andy did tell Willem at least some of what had happened, and so he decides to answer honestly. “It wasn’t great,” he allows, and then, because he doesn’t want Willem to feel guilty, “but it wasn’t horrible.”

They are both quiet. “I wish I could’ve been there,” Willem says.

“You were,” he assures him. “But Willem — I missed you.”

Very quietly, Willem says, “I missed you, too.”

“Thank you for coming,” he says.

“Of course I was going to come, Judy,” Willem says from across the room. “I would’ve no matter what.”

He is silent, savoring this promise and committing it to memory so he can think about it in moments when he needs it most. “Do you think it went all right?” he asks.

“Are you serious?” Willem says, and he can hear him sit up. “Did you see Harold’s face? He looked like the Green Party just elected its first president and the Second Amendment was eliminated and the Red Sox were canonized, all in the same day.”

He laughs. “You really think so?”

“I know so. He was really, really happy, Jude. He loves you.”

He smiles into the dark. He wants to hear Willem say such things over and over, an endless loop of promises and avowals, but he knows such wishes are self-indulgent, and so he changes the subject, and they talk of little things, nothings, until first Willem, and then he, fall asleep.

A week later, his giddiness has mellowed into something else: a contentment, a stillness. For the past week, his nights have been unbroken stretches of sleep in which he dreams not of the past but of the present: silly dreams about work, sunnily absurd dreams about his friends. It is the first complete week in the now almost two decades since he began cutting himself that he hasn’t woken in the middle of the night, since he’s felt no need for the razor. Maybe he is cured, he dares to think. Maybe this is what he needed all along, and now that it’s happened, he is better. He feels wonderful, like a different person: whole and healthy and calm. He is someone’s son, and at times the knowledge of that is so overwhelming that he imagines it is manifesting itself physically, as if it’s been written in something shining and gold across his chest.

He is back in their apartment. Willem is with him. He has brought back with him a second statue of Saint Jude, which they keep in the kitchen, but this Saint Jude is bigger and hollow and ceramic, with a slot chiseled into the back of his head, and they feed their change through it at the end of the day; when it’s full, they decide, they’ll go buy a really good bottle of wine and drink it, and then they’ll begin again.

He doesn’t know this now, but in the years to come he will, again and again, test Harold’s claims of devotion, will throw himself against his promises to see how steadfast they are. He won’t even be conscious that he’s doing this. But he will do it anyway, because part of him will never believe Harold and Julia; as much as he wants to, as much as he thinks he does, he won’t, and he will always be convinced that they will eventually tire of him, that they will one day regret their involvement with him. And so he will challenge them, because when their relationship inevitably ends, he will be able to look back and know for certain that he caused it, and not only that, but the specific incident that caused it, and he will never have to wonder, or worry, about what he did wrong, or what he could have done better. But that is in the future. For now, his happiness is flawless.

That first Saturday after he returns from Boston, he goes up to Felix’s house as usual, where Mr. Baker has requested he come a few minutes early. They talk, briefly, and then he goes downstairs to find Felix, who is waiting for him in the music room, plinking at the piano keys.

“So, Felix,” he says, in the break they take after piano and Latin but before German and math, “your father tells me you’re going away to school next year.”

“Yeah,” says Felix, looking down at his feet. “In September. Dad went there, too.”

“I heard,” he says. “How do you feel about it?”

Felix shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says, at last. “Dad says you’re going to catch me up this spring and summer.”

“I will,” he promises. “You’re going to be so ready for that school that they won’t know what hit them.” Felix’s head is still bent, but he sees the tops of his cheeks fatten a little and knows he’s smiling, just a bit.

He doesn’t know what makes him say what he does next: Is it empathy, as he hopes, or is it a boast, an alluding aloud to the improbable and wondrous turns his life has taken over the past month? “You know, Felix,” he begins, “I never had friends, either, not for a very long time, not until I was much older than you.” He can sense, rather than see, Felix become alert, can feel him listening. “I wanted them, too,” he continues, going slowly now, because he wants to make sure his words come out right. “And I always wondered if I would ever find any, and how, and when.” He traces his index finger across the dark walnut tabletop, up the spine of Felix’s math textbook, down his cold glass of water. “And then I went to college, and I met people who, for whatever reason, decided to be my friends, and they taught me — everything, really. They made me, and make me, into someone better than I really am.

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are — not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving — and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad — or good — it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”

They’re both quiet for a long time, listening to the click of the metronome, which is faulty and sometimes starts ticking spontaneously, even after he’s stopped it. “You’re going to make friends, Felix,” he says, finally. “You will. You won’t have to work as hard at finding them as you will at keeping them, but I promise, it’ll be work worth doing. Far more worth doing than, say, Latin.” And now Felix looks up at him and smiles, and he smiles back. “Okay?” he asks him.

“Okay,” Felix says, still smiling.

“What do you want to do next, German or math?”

“Math,” says Felix.

“Good choice,” he says, and pulls Felix’s math book over to him. “Let’s pick up where we left off last time.” And Felix turns to the page and they begin.