A Little Life

1

THE NIGHT BEFORE he leaves for Boston for their friend Lionel’s wedding, he gets a message from Dr. Li telling him that Dr. Kashen has died. “It was a heart attack; very fast,” Dr. Li writes. The funeral is Friday afternoon.

The next morning he drives directly to the cemetery, and from the cemetery to Dr. Kashen’s house, a two-story wooden structure in Newton where the professor used to host a year-end dinner for all of his current graduate students. It was understood that you weren’t to discuss math at these parties. “You can talk about anything else,” he’d tell them. “But we’re not talking about math.” Only at Dr. Kashen’s parties would he be the least socially inept person in the room (he was also, not coincidentally, the least brilliant), and the professor would always make him start the conversation. “So, Jude,” he’d say. “What are you interested in these days?” At least two of his fellow graduate students — both of them PhD candidates — had mild forms of autism, and he could see how hard they worked at making conversation, how hard they worked at their table manners, and prior to these dinners, he did some research into what was new in the worlds of online gaming (which one of them loved) and tennis (which the other loved), so he’d be able to ask them questions they could answer. Dr. Kashen wanted his students to someday be able to find jobs, and along with teaching them math, he also thought it his responsibility to socialize them, to teach them how to behave among others.

Sometimes Dr. Kashen’s son, Leo, who was five or six years older than he, would be at dinner at well. He too had autism, but unlike Donald’s and Mikhail’s, his was instantly noticeable, and severe enough so that although he’d completed high school, he hadn’t been able to attend more than a semester of college, and had only been able to get a job as a programmer for the phone company, where he sat in a small room day after day fixing screen after screen of code. He was Dr. Kashen’s only child, and he still lived at home, along with Dr. Kashen’s sister, who had moved in after his wife had died, years ago.

At the house, he speaks to Leo, who seems glazed, and mumbles, looking away from him as he does, and then to Dr. Kashen’s sister, who was a math professor at Northeastern.

“Jude,” she says, “it’s lovely to see you. Thank you for coming.” She holds his hand. “My brother always talked about you, you know.”

“He was a wonderful teacher,” he tells her. “He gave me so much. I’m so sorry.”

“Yes,” she says. “It was very sudden. And poor Leo”—they look at Leo, who is gazing at nothing—“I don’t know how he’s going to deal with this.” She kisses him goodbye. “Thank you again.”

Outside, it is fiercely cold, and the windshield is sticky with ice. He drives slowly to Harold and Julia’s, letting himself in and calling their names.

“And here he is!” says Harold, materializing from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a dish towel. Harold hugs him, which he had begun doing at some point, and as uncomfortable as it makes him, he thinks it’ll be more uncomfortable to try to explain why he’d like Harold to stop. “I’m so sorry about Kashen, Jude. I was shocked to hear it — I ran into him on the courts about two months back and he looked like he was in great shape.”

“He was,” he says, unwinding his scarf, as Harold takes his coat. “And not that old, either: seventy-four.”

“Jesus,” says Harold, who has just turned sixty-five. “There’s a cheery thought. Go put your stuff in your room and come into the kitchen. Julia’s tied up in a meeting but she’ll be home in an hour or so.”

He drops his bag in the guest room—“Jude’s room,” Harold and Julia call it; “your room”—and changes out of his suit and heads toward the kitchen, where Harold is peering into a pot on the stove, as if down a well. “I’m trying to make a bolognese,” he says, without turning around, “but something’s happening; it keeps separating, see?”

He looks. “How much olive oil did you use?”

“A lot.”

“What’s a lot?”

“A lot. Too much, obviously.”

He smiles. “I’ll fix it.”

“Thank god,” says Harold, stepping away from the stove. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

Over dinner, they speak of Julia’s favorite researcher, who she thinks might be trying to jump to another lab, and of the latest gossip circulating through the law school, and of the anthology of essays about Brown versus Board of Education that Harold is editing, and of one of Laurence’s twin daughters, who is getting married, and then Harold says, grinning, “So, Jude, the big birthday’s coming up.”

“Three months away!” Julia chirps, and he groans. “What are you going to do?”

“Probably nothing,” he says. He hasn’t planned anything, and he has forbidden Willem from planning anything, either. Two years ago, he threw Willem a big party for his fortieth at Greene Street, and although the four of them had always said they’d go somewhere for each of their fortieth birthdays, it hasn’t worked out that way. Willem had been in L.A. filming on his actual birthday, but after he had finished, they’d gone to Botswana on a safari. But it had been just the two of them: Malcolm had been working on a project in Beijing, and JB — well, Willem hadn’t mentioned inviting JB, and he hadn’t, either.

“You have to do something,” says Harold. “We could have a dinner for you here, or in the city.”

He smiles but shakes his head. “Forty’s forty,” he says. “It’s just another year.” As a child, though, he never thought he’d make it to forty: in the months after the injury, he would sometimes have dreams of himself as an adult, and although the dreams were very vague — he was never quite certain where he was living or what he was doing, though in those dreams he was usually walking, sometimes running — he was always young in them; his imagination refused to let him advance into middle age.

To change the subject, he tells them about Dr. Kashen’s funeral, where Dr. Li gave a eulogy. “People who don’t love math always accuse mathematicians of trying to make math complicated,” Dr. Li had said. “But anyone who does love math knows it’s really the opposite: math rewards simplicity, and mathematicians value it above all else. So it’s no surprise that Walter’s favorite axiom was also the most simple in the realm of mathematics: the axiom of the empty set.

“The axiom of the empty set is the axiom of zero. It states that there must be a concept of nothingness, that there must be the concept of zero: zero value, zero items. Math assumes there’s a concept of nothingness, but is it proven? No. But it must exist.

“And if we are being philosophical — which we today are — we can say that life itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero. We know that both states exist, but we will not be conscious of either experience: they are states that are necessary parts of life, even as they cannot be experienced as life. We assume the concept of nothingness, but we cannot prove it. But it must exist. So I prefer to think that Walter has not died but has instead proven for himself the axiom of the empty set, that he has proven the concept of zero. I know nothing else would have made him happier. An elegant mind wants elegant endings, and Walter had the most elegant mind. So I wish him goodbye; I wish him the answer to the axiom he so loved.”

They are all quiet for a while, contemplating this. “Please tell me that isn’t your favorite axiom,” Harold says suddenly, and he laughs. “No,” he says. “It’s not.”

He sleeps in the next day, and that night he goes to the wedding, where because both of the grooms lived in Hood, he knows almost everyone. The non-Hood guests — Lionel’s colleagues from Wellesley, and Sinclair’s from Harvard, where he teaches European history — stand near one another as if for protection, looking bored and bemused. The wedding is loose-limbed and slightly chaotic — Lionel starts assigning his guests tasks as soon as they arrive, which most of them neglect: he is supposed to be making sure everyone signs the guest book; Willem is supposed to be helping people find their tables — and people walk around saying how, thanks to Lionel and Sinclair, thanks to this wedding, they won’t have to go to their twentieth reunion this year. They are all here: Willem and his girlfriend, Robin; Malcolm and Sophie; and JB and his new boyfriend, whom he hasn’t met, and he knows, even before checking their place cards, that they will all be assigned to the same table. “Jude!” people he hasn’t seen in years say to him. “How are you? Where’s JB? I just spoke to Willem! I just saw Malcolm!” And then, “Are you four all still as close as you were?”

“We all still talk,” he says, “and they’re doing great,” which is the answer he and Willem had decided they’d give. He wonders what JB is saying, whether he is skimming over the truth, as he and Willem are, or whether he is lying outright, or whether, in a fit of JBish forthrightness, he is telling the truth: “No. We hardly ever speak anymore. I only really talk to Malcolm these days.”

He hasn’t seen JB in months and months. He hears of him, of course: through Malcolm, through Richard, through Black Henry Young. But he doesn’t see him any longer, because even nearly three years later, he is unable to forgive him. He has tried and tried. He knows how intractable, how mean, how uncharitable he is being. But he can’t. When he sees JB, he sees him doing his imitation of him, sees him confirming in that moment everything he has feared and thought he looks like, everything he has feared and thought other people think about him. But he had never thought his friends saw him like that; or at least, he never thought they would tell him. The accuracy of the imitation tears at him, but the fact that it was JB doing it devastates him. Late at night, when he can’t sleep, the image he sometimes sees is JB dragging himself in a half-moon, his mouth agape and drooling, his hands held before him in claws: I’m Jude. I’m Jude St. Francis.

That night, after they had taken JB to the hospital and admitted him — JB had been stuporous and dribbling when they took him in, but then had recovered and become angry, violent, screaming wordlessly at them all, thrashing against the orderlies, wresting his body out of their arms until they had sedated him and dragged him, lolling, down the hallway — Malcolm had left in one taxi and he and Willem had gone home to Perry Street in another.

He hadn’t been able to look at Willem in the cab, and without anything to distract him — no forms to fill out, no doctors to talk to — he had felt himself grow cold despite the hot, muggy night, and his hands begin to shake, and Willem had reached over and taken his right hand and held it in his left for the rest of the long, silent ride downtown.

He was there for JB’s recovery. He decided he’d stay until he got better; he couldn’t abandon JB then, not after all their time together. The three of them took shifts, and after work he’d sit by JB’s hospital bed and read. Sometimes JB was awake, but most of the time he wasn’t. He was detoxing, but the doctor had also discovered that JB had a kidney infection, and so he stayed on in the hospital’s main ward, liquids dripping into his arm, his face slowly losing its bloat. When he was awake, JB would beg him for forgiveness, sometimes dramatically and pleadingly, and sometimes — when he was more lucid — quietly. These were the conversations he found most difficult.

“Jude, I’m so sorry,” he’d say. “I was so messed up. Please tell me you forgive me. I was so awful. I love you, you know that. I would never want to hurt you, never.”

“I know you were messed up, JB,” he’d say. “I know.”

“Then tell me you forgive me. Please, Jude.”

He’d be silent. “It’s going to be okay, JB,” he’d say, but he couldn’t make the words—I forgive you—leave his mouth. At night, alone, he would say them again and again: I forgive you, I forgive you. It would be so simple, he’d admonish himself. It would make JB feel better. Say it, he’d command himself as JB looked at him, the whites of his eyes smeary and yellowed. Say it. But he couldn’t. He knew he was making JB feel worse; he knew it and was still unable to say it. The words were stones, held just under his tongue. He couldn’t release them, he just couldn’t.

Later, when JB called him nightly from rehab, strident and pedantic, he’d sat silently through his monologues on what a better person he’d become, and how he had realized he had no one to depend on but himself, and how he, Jude, needed to realize that there was more in life than just work, and to live every day in the moment and learn to love himself. He listened and breathed and said nothing. And then JB had come home and had had to readjust, and none of them heard very much from him at all for a few months. He had lost the lease on his apartment, and had moved back in with his mother while he reestablished his life.

But then one day he had called. It had been early February, almost seven months exactly after they had taken him to the hospital, and JB wanted to see him and talk. He suggested JB meet him at a café called Clementine that was near Willem’s building, and as he inched his way past the tightly spaced tables to a seat against the back wall, he realized why he had chosen this place: because it was too small, and too cramped, for JB to do his impression of him, and recognizing that, he felt foolish and cowardly.

He hadn’t seen JB in a long time, and JB leaned over the table and hugged him, lightly, carefully, before sitting down.

“You look great,” he said.

“Thanks,” said JB. “So do you.”

For twenty minutes or so, they discussed JB’s life: he had joined Crystal Meth Anonymous. He was going to live with his mother for another few months or so, and then decide what to do next. He was working again, on the same series he’d been working on before he went away.

“That’s great, JB,” he’d said. “I’m proud of you.”

And then there was a silence, and they both stared at other people. A few tables away from him was a girl wearing a long gold necklace she kept winding and unwinding around her fingers. He watched her talk to her friend, wrapping and unwrapping her necklace, until she looked up at him and he looked away.

“Jude,” JB began, “I wanted to tell you — completely sober — that I’m so sorry. It was horrible. It was—” He shook his head. “It was so cruel. I can’t—” He stopped again, and there was a silence. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I know you are, JB,” he said, and he felt a sort of sadness he’d never felt before. Other people had been cruel to him, had made him feel awful, but they hadn’t been people he loved, they hadn’t been people he had always hoped saw him as someone whole and undamaged. JB had been the first.

And yet JB had also been one of the first to be his friend. When he’d had the episode in college that had made his roommates take him to the hospital where he had met Andy, it had been JB, Andy later told him, who had carried him in, and JB who had demanded that he be seen first, who had made such an upset in the ER that he had been ejected — but not before a doctor had been summoned.

He could see JB’s love for him in his paintings of him. He remembered one summer in Truro, watching JB sketch, and he had known from the expression on JB’s face, his little smile, and the lingering, delicate way his large forearm moved over the page, that he was drawing something he treasured, something that was dear to him. “What’re you drawing?” he’d asked, and JB had turned to him, and held up the notepad, and he had seen it was a picture of him, of his face.

Oh, JB, he thought. Oh, I will miss you.

“Can you forgive me, Jude?” JB asked, and looked at him.

He didn’t have words, he could only shake his head. “I can’t, JB,” he said, finally. “I can’t. I can’t look at you without seeing—” He stopped. “I can’t,” he repeated. “I’m sorry, JB, I’m so sorry.”

“Oh,” said JB, and he swallowed. They sat there for a long time, not saying anything.

“I’ll always want wonderful things for you,” he said to JB, who nodded, slowly, not looking at him.

“Well,” JB said, finally, and stood, and he stood as well, and held his hand out to JB, who looked at it as if it were something alien, something he’d never seen before, examining it, squinting at it. And then at last he took it, but instead of shaking it, he lowered his lips to it and held them there. And then JB returned his hand to him and bumbled, nearly ran, out of the café, bumping against the little tables—“Sorry, sorry”—as he went.

He still sees JB now and then, mostly at parties, always in groups, and the two of them are polite and cordial with each other. They make small talk, which is the most painful thing. JB has never tried to hug or kiss him again; he comes over to him with his hand already outstretched, and he takes it, and they shake. He sent JB flowers — but with only the briefest of notes — when “Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days” opened, and although he skipped the opening, he had gone to the gallery the following Saturday, on his way up to work, where he had spent an hour moving slowly from one painting to the next. JB had planned on including himself in this series, but in the end he hadn’t: there was just him, and Malcolm, and Willem. The paintings were beautiful, and as he looked at each, he thought not so much of the lives depicted in them, as of the life who created them — so many of these paintings were done when JB was at his most miserable, his most helpless, and yet they were self-assured, and subtle, and to see them was to imagine the empathy and tenderness and grace of the person who made them.

Malcolm has remained friends with JB, although he felt the need to apologize to him for this fact. “Oh no, Malcolm,” he’d said, once Malcolm had confessed, asking him for his permission. “You should absolutely still be friends with him.” He doesn’t want JB to be abandoned by them all; he doesn’t want Malcolm to feel he has to prove his loyalty to him by disavowing JB. He wants JB to have a friend who’s known him since he was eighteen, since he was the funniest, brightest person in the school, and he and everyone else knew it.

But Willem has never spoken to JB again. Once JB returned from rehab, he called JB and said that he couldn’t be friends with him any longer, and that JB knew why. And that had been the end. He had been surprised by this, and saddened, because he had always loved watching JB and Willem laugh together, and spar with each other, and loved having them tell him about their lives: they were both so fearless, so bold; they were his emissaries to a less inhibited, more joyful world. They had always known how to take pleasure from everything, and he had always admired that in them, and had been grateful that they had been willing to share it with him.

“You know, Willem,” he said once, “I hope the reason you’re not talking to JB isn’t because of what happened with me.”

“Of course it’s because of what happened with you,” Willem had said.

“But that’s not a reason,” he’d said.

“Of course it is,” Willem had said. “There’s no better reason than that.”

He had never done it before, and so he had no real understanding of how slow, and sad, and difficult it was to end a friendship. Richard knows that he and JB and Willem and JB don’t talk any longer, but he doesn’t know why — or at least not from him. Now, years later, he no longer even blames JB; he simply cannot forget. He finds that some small but unignorable part of him is always wondering if JB will do it again; he finds he is scared of being left alone with him.

Two years ago, the first year JB didn’t come up to Truro, Harold asked him if anything was the matter. “You never talk about him anymore,” he said.

“Well,” he began, not knowing how to continue. “We’re not really — we’re not really friends any longer, Harold.”

“I’m sorry, Jude,” Harold said after a silence, and he nodded. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“No,” he said, concentrating on snapping the tops off the radishes. “It’s a long story.”

“Can it be repaired, do you think?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Harold sighed. “I’m sorry, Jude,” he repeated. “It must be bad.” He was quiet. “I always loved seeing you four together, you know. You had something special.”

He nodded, again. “I know,” he said. “I agree. I miss him.”

He misses JB still; he expects he always will. He especially misses JB at events like this wedding, where the four of them would once have spent the night talking and laughing about everyone else, enviable and near obnoxious in their shared pleasure, their pleasure in one another. But now there are JB and Willem, nodding at each other across the table, and Malcolm, talking very fast to try to obscure any tension, and the other three people at the table, whom the four of them — he will always think of them as the four of them; the four of us — start interrogating with inappropriate intensity, laughing loudly at their jokes, using them as unwitting human shields. He is seated next to JB’s boyfriend — the nice white boy he had always wanted — who is in his twenties and has just gotten his nursing degree and is clearly besotted with JB. “What was JB like in college?” asks Oliver, and he says, “Very much the way he is today: funny, and sharp, and outrageous, and smart. And talented. He was always, always talented.”

“Hmm,” says Oliver thoughtfully, looking over at JB, who is listening to Sophie with what seems like exaggerated concentration. “I never think of JB as funny, really.” And then he looks over at JB as well, wondering if Oliver has perhaps interpreted JB incorrectly or whether JB has, in fact, become someone else, someone he now wouldn’t recognize as the person he knew for so many years.

At the end of the night, there are kisses and handshakes, and when Oliver — to whom JB has clearly told nothing — tells him they should get together, the three of them, because he’s always wanted to get to know him, one of JB’s oldest friends, he smiles and says something vague, and gives JB a wave before heading outside, where Willem is waiting for him.

“How was it for you?” Willem asks.

“Okay,” he says, smiling back at him. He thinks these meetings with JB are even harder for Willem than they are for him. “You?”

“Okay,” Willem says. His girlfriend drives up to the curb; they are staying at a hotel. “I’ll call you tomorrow, all right?”

Back in Cambridge, he lets himself into the silent house and walks as softly as he can back to his bathroom, where he prises his bag from beneath the loose tile near the toilet and cuts himself until he feels absolutely empty, holding his arms over the bathtub, watching the porcelain stain itself crimson. As he always does after seeing JB, he wonders if he has made the right decision. He wonders if all of them — he, Willem, JB, Malcolm — will lie awake that night longer than usual, thinking of one another’s faces and of conversations, good and bad, that they have had with one another over what had been more than twenty years of friendship.

Oh, he thinks, if I were a better person. If I were a more generous person. If I were a less self-involved person. If I were a braver person.

Then he stands, gripping the towel bar as he does; he has cut himself too much tonight, and he is faint. He goes over to the full-length mirror that is hung on the back of the bedroom’s closet door. In his apartment on Greene Street, there are no full-length mirrors. “No mirrors,” he told Malcolm. “I don’t like them.” But really, he doesn’t want to be confronted with his image; he doesn’t want to see his body, his face staring back at him.

But here at Harold and Julia’s, there is a mirror, and he stands in front of it for a few seconds, contemplating himself, before adopting the hunched pose JB had that night. JB was right, he thinks. He was right. And that is why I can’t forgive him.

Now he drops his mouth open. Now he hops in a little circle. Now he drags his leg behind him. His moans fill the air in the quiet, still house.

The first Saturday in May, he and Willem have what they’ve been calling the Last Supper at a tiny, very expensive sushi restaurant near his office on Fifty-sixth Street. The restaurant has only six seats, all at a wide, velvety cypress counter, and for the three hours they spend there, they are the only patrons.

Although they both knew how much the meal would cost, they’re both stunned when they look at the check, and then both start laughing, though he’s not sure if it’s the absurdity of spending so much on a single dinner, or the fact that they have, or the fact that they can that is to blame.

“I’ll get it,” Willem says, but as he’s reaching for his wallet, the waiter comes over to him with his credit card, which he’d given to him when Willem was in the bathroom.

“Goddammit, Jude,” Willem says, and he grins.

“It’s the Last Supper, Willem,” he says. “You can get me a taco when you come back.”

“If I come back,” Willem says. It has been their running joke. “Jude, thank you. You weren’t supposed to pay for this.”

It’s the first warm night of the year, and he tells Willem that if he really wants to thank him for dinner, he’ll walk with him. “How far?” asks Willem, warily. “We’re not going to walk all the way down to SoHo, Jude.”

“Not far.”

“It’d better not be,” Willem says, “because I’m really tired.” This is Willem’s new strategy, and he is very fond of it: instead of telling him he can’t do certain things because it’s not good for his legs or back, Willem instead tries to make himself sound incapable in order to dissuade him. These days, Willem is always too tired to walk, or too achey, or too hot, or too cold. But he knows that these things are untrue. One Saturday afternoon after they’d gone to some galleries, Willem had told him he couldn’t walk from Chelsea to Greene Street (“I’m too tired”), and so they had taken a cab instead. But then the next day at lunch, Robin had said, “Wasn’t it a beautiful day yesterday? After Willem got home, we ran for — what, eight miles, right, Willem? — all the way up and down the highway.”

“Oh, did you?” he asked her, looking at Willem, who smiled sheepishly at him.

“What can I say?” he said. “I unexpectedly got a second wind.”

They start walking south, first veering east from Broadway so they won’t have to cross through Times Square. Willem’s hair has been colored dark for his next role, and he has a beard, so he’s not instantly recognizable, but neither of them want to get stuck in a scrum of tourists.

This is the last time he will see Willem for what will likely be more than six months. On Tuesday, he leaves for Cyprus to begin work on The Iliad and The Odyssey; he will play Odysseus in both. The two films will be shot consecutively and released consecutively, but they will have the same cast and the same director, too. The shoot will take him all across southern Europe and northern Africa before moving to Australia, where some of the battle scenes are being shot, and because the pace is so intense and the distances he has to travel so far, it’s unclear whether he’ll have much time, if any, to come home on breaks. It is the most elaborate and ambitious shoot Willem has been on, and he is nervous. “It’s going to be incredible, Willem,” he reassures him.

“Or an incredible disaster,” Willem says. He isn’t glum, he never is, but he can tell Willem is anxious, and eager to do well, and worried that he will somehow disappoint. But he is worried before every film, and yet — as he reminds Willem — every one has turned out fine, better than fine. However, he thinks, this is one of the reasons that Willem will always have work, and good work: because he does take it seriously, because he does feel so responsible.

He, though, is dreading the next six months, especially because Willem has been so present for the last year and a half. First he was shooting a small project, one based in Brooklyn, that lasted just a few weeks. And then he was in a play, a production called The Maldivian Dodo, about two brothers, both ornithologists, one of whom is slowly tipping into an uncategorizable madness. The two of them had a late dinner every Thursday night for the entire run of the play, which he saw — as he has with all of Willem’s plays — multiple times. On his third viewing, he spotted JB with Oliver, just a few rows ahead of him but on the left side of the theater, and throughout the show he kept glancing over at JB to see if he was laughing at or concentrating on the same lines, aware that this was the first of Willem’s productions that the three of them hadn’t seen together, as a group, at least once.

“So, listen,” Willem says as they move down Fifth Avenue, which is empty of people, just bright-lit windows and stray bits of garbage twirling in the light, soft breeze — plastic bags, puffed up with air into jellyfish, and twists of newspaper—“I told Robin I’d talk to you about something.”

He waits. He has been conscious of not making the same mistake with Robin and Willem that he made with Philippa and Willem — when Willem asks him to accompany them anywhere, he makes sure that he’s cleared it with Robin first (finally Willem had told him to stop asking, that Robin knew how much he meant to him and she was fine with it, and if she wasn’t fine with it, she’d have to get fine with it), and he has tried to present himself to Robin as someone independent and not likely to move in with them when he’s old. (He’s not sure exactly how to communicate this message, however, and so is therefore unsure if he’s been successful or not.) But he likes Robin — she’s a classics professor at Columbia who was hired to serve as a consultant on the films two years ago, and she has a spiky sense of humor that reminds him of JB, somehow.

“Okay,” says Willem, and takes a deep breath, and he steadies himself. Oh no, he thinks. “Do you remember Robin’s friend Clara?”

“Sure,” he says. “The one I met at Clementine.”

“Yes!” says Willem, triumphantly. “That’s her!”

“God, Willem, give me some credit; it was just last week.”

“I know, I know. Well, anyway, here’s the thing — she’s interested in you.”

He is perplexed. “What do you mean?”

“She asked Robin if you were single.” He pauses. “I told her I didn’t think you were interested in seeing anyone, but I’d ask. So. I’m asking.”

The idea is so preposterous that it takes him a while to understand what Willem’s saying, and when he does, he stops, and laughs, embarrassed and disbelieving. “You’ve got to be kidding, Willem,” he says. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Why is it ridiculous?” asks Willem, suddenly serious. “Jude, why?”

“Willem,” he says, recovering himself. “It’s very flattering. But—” He winces and laughs again. “It’s absurd.”

“What is?” Willem says, and he can feel the conversation turn. “That someone should be attracted to you? This isn’t the first time this has happened, you know. You just can’t see it because you won’t let yourself.”

He shakes his head. “Let’s talk about something else, Willem.”

“No,” says Willem. “You’re not getting out of this one, Jude. Why is it ridiculous? Why is it absurd?”

He is suddenly so uncomfortable that he actually does stop, right on the corner of Fifth and Forty-fifth, and starts scanning the avenue for a cab. But of course, there are no cabs.

As he considers how to respond, he thinks back to a time a few days after that night in JB’s apartment, when he had asked Willem if JB had been correct, at least in some part: Did Willem resent him? Did he not tell them enough?

Willem had been silent for such a long time that he knew the answer even before he heard it. “Look, Jude,” Willem had said, slowly, “JB was — JB was out of his mind. I could never be sick of you. You don’t owe me your secrets.” He paused. “But, yes, I do wish you’d share more of yourself with me. Not so I could have the information but so, maybe, I could be of some help.” He stopped and looked at him. “That’s all.”

Since then, he has tried to tell Willem more things. But there are so many topics that he has never discussed with anyone since Ana, now twenty-five years ago, that he finds he literally doesn’t have the language to do so. His past, his fears, what was done to him, what he has done to himself — they are subjects that can only be discussed in tongues he doesn’t speak: Farsi, Urdu, Mandarin, Portuguese. Once, he tried to write some things down, thinking that it might be easier, but it wasn’t — he is unclear how to explain himself to himself.

“You’ll find your own way to discuss what happened to you,” he remembers Ana saying. “You’ll have to, if you ever want to be close to anyone.” He wishes, as he often does, that he had let her talk to him, that he had let her teach him how to do it. His silence had begun as something protective, but over the years it has transformed into something near oppressive, something that manages him rather than the other way around. Now he cannot find a way out of it, even when he wants to. He imagines he is floating in a small bubble of water, encased on all sides by walls and ceilings and floors of ice, all many feet thick. He knows there is a way out, but he is unequipped; he has no tools to begin his work, and his hands scrabble uselessly against the ice’s slick. He had thought that by not saying who he was, he was making himself more palatable, less strange. But now, what he doesn’t say makes him stranger, an object of pity and even suspicion.

“Jude?” Willem prompts him. “Why is it absurd?”

He shakes his head. “It just is.” He starts walking again.

For a block, they say nothing. Then Willem asks, “Jude, do you ever want to be with someone?”

“I never thought I would.”

“But that’s not what I asked.”

“I don’t know, Willem,” he says, unable to look at Willem’s face. “I guess I just don’t think that sort of thing is for someone like me.”

“What does that mean?”

He shakes his head again, not saying anything, but Willem persists. “Because you have some health problems? Is that why?”

Health problems, says something sour and sardonic inside him. Now, that’s a euphemism. But he doesn’t say this out loud. “Willem,” he pleads. “I’m begging you to stop talking about this. We’ve had such a good night. It’s our last night, and then I’m not going to see you. Can we please change the subject? Please?”

Willem doesn’t say anything for another block, and he thinks the moment has passed, but then Willem says, “You know, when we first started going out, Robin asked me whether you were gay or straight and I had to tell her I didn’t know.” He pauses. “She was shocked. She kept saying, ‘This is your best friend since you guys were teenagers and you don’t know?’ Philippa used to ask me about you as well. And I’d tell her the same thing I told Robin: that you’re a private person and I’ve always tried to respect your privacy.

“But I guess this is the kind of stuff I wish you’d tell me, Jude. Not so I can do anything with the information, but just because it gives me a better sense of who you are. I mean, maybe you’re neither. Maybe you’re both. Maybe you’re just not interested. It doesn’t make a difference to me.”

He doesn’t, he can’t say anything in response, and they walk another two blocks: Thirty-eighth Street, Thirty-seventh Street. He is conscious of his right foot dragging against the pavement the way it does when he is tired or dispirited, too tired or dispirited to make a greater effort, and is grateful that Willem is on his left, and therefore less likely to notice it.

“I worry sometimes that you’ve decided to convince yourself that you’re somehow unattractive or unlovable, and that you’ve decided that certain experiences are off-limits for you. But they’re not, Jude: anyone would be lucky to be with you,” says Willem a block later. Enough of this, he thinks; he can tell by Willem’s tone that he is building up to a longer speech and he is now actively anxious, his heart beating a funny rhythm.

“Willem,” he says, turning to him. “I think I’d better take a taxi after all; I’m getting tired — I’d better get to bed.”

“Jude, come on,” says Willem, with enough impatience in his voice that he flinches. “Look, I’m sorry. But really, Jude. You can’t just leave when I’m trying to talk to you about something important.”

This stops him. “You’re right,” he says. “I’m sorry. And I’m grateful, Willem, I really am. But this is just too difficult for me to discuss.”

“Everything’s too difficult for you to discuss,” says Willem, and he flinches again. Willem sighs. “I’m sorry. I always keep thinking that someday I’m going to talk to you, really talk to you, and then I never do, because I’m afraid you’re going to shut down and then you won’t talk to me at all.” They are silent, and he is chastened, because he knows Willem is right — that is exactly what he’d do. A few years ago, Willem had tried to talk to him about his cutting. They had been walking then too, and after a certain point the conversation had become so intolerable that he had hailed a cab and frantically pulled himself in, leaving Willem standing on the sidewalk, calling his name in disbelief; he had cursed himself even as the car sped south. Willem had been furious; he had apologized; they had made up. But Willem has never initiated that conversation again, and neither has he. “But tell me this, Jude: Are you ever lonely?”

“No,” he says, finally. A couple walks by, laughing, and he thinks of the beginning of their walk, when they too were laughing. How has he managed to ruin this night, the last time he will see Willem for months? “You don’t need to worry about me, Willem. I’ll always be fine. I’ll always be able to take care of myself.”

And then Willem sighs, and sags, and looks so defeated that he feels a twist of guilt. But he is also relieved, because he senses that Willem doesn’t know how to continue the conversation, and he will soon be able to redirect him, and end the evening pleasantly, and escape. “You always say that.”

“Because it’s always true.”

There is a long, long silence. They are standing in front of a Korean barbeque restaurant, and the air is dense and fragrant with steam and smoke and roasting meat. “Can I go?” he asks finally, and Willem nods. He goes to the curb and raises his arm, and a cab glides to his side.

Willem opens the door for him and then, as he’s getting in, puts his arms around him and holds him, and he finally does the same. “I’m going to miss you,” Willem says into the back of his neck. “Are you going to take care of yourself while I’m gone?”

“Yes,” he says. “I promise.” He steps back and looks at him. “Until November, then.”

Willem makes a face that’s not quite a smile. “November,” he echoes.

In the cab, he finds he really is tired, and he leans his forehead against the greased window and closes his eyes. By the time he reaches home, he feels as leaden as a corpse, and in the apartment, he starts taking off his clothes — shoes, sweater, shirt, undershirt, pants — as soon as he’s locked the door behind him, leaving them littering the floor in a trail as he makes his way to the bathroom. His hands tremor as he unsticks the bag from beneath the sink, and although he hadn’t thought he’d need to cut himself that night — nothing that day or early evening had indicated he might — he is almost ravenous for it now. He has long ago run out of blank skin on his forearms, and he now recuts over old cuts, using the edge of the razor to saw through the tough, webby scar tissue: when the new cuts heal, they do so in warty furrows, and he is disgusted and dismayed and fascinated all at once by how severely he has deformed himself. Lately he has begun using the cream that Andy gave him for his back on his arms, and he thinks it helps, a bit: the skin feels looser, the scars a little softer and more supple.

The shower area Malcolm has created in this bathroom is enormous, so large he now sits within it when he’s cutting, his legs stretched out before him, and after he’s done, he’s careful to wash away the blood because the floor is a great plain of marble, and as Malcolm has told him again and again, once you stain marble, there’s nothing that can be done. And then he is in bed, light-headed but not quite sleepy, staring at the dark, mercury-like gleam the chandelier makes in the shadowy room.

“I’m lonely,” he says aloud, and the silence of the apartment absorbs the words like blood soaking into cotton.

This loneliness is a recent discovery, and is different from the other lonelinesses he has experienced: it is not the childhood loneliness of not having parents; or of lying awake in a motel room with Brother Luke, trying not to move, not to rouse him, while the moon threw hard white stripes of light across the bed; or of the time he ran away from the home, the successful time, and spent the night wedged into the cleft of an oak tree’s buckling roots that spread open like a pair of legs, making himself as small as he could. He had thought he was lonely then, but now he realizes that what he was feeling was not loneliness but fear. But now he has nothing to fear. Now he has protected himself: he has this apartment with its triple-locked doors, and he has money. He has parents, he has friends. He will never again have to do anything he doesn’t want to for food, or transportation, or shelter, or escape.

He hadn’t been lying to Willem: he is not meant for a relationship and has never thought he was. He has never envied his friends theirs — to do so would be akin to a cat coveting a dog’s bark: it is something that would never occur to him to envy, because it is impossible, something that is simply alien to his very species. But recently, people have been behaving as if it is something he could have, or should want to have, and although he knows they mean it in part as a kindness, it feels like a taunt: they could be telling him he could be a decathlete and it would be as obtuse and as cruel.

He expects it from Malcolm and Harold; Malcolm because he is happy and sees a single path — his path — to happiness, and so therefore occasionally asks him if he can set him up with someone, or if he wants to find someone, and then is bewildered when he declines; Harold because he knows that the part of the parental role Harold most enjoys is inserting himself into his life and rooting about in it as best as he can. He has grown to enjoy this too, sometimes — he is touched that someone is interested enough in him to order him around, to be disappointed by the decisions he makes, to have expectations for him, to assume the responsibility of ownership of him. Two years ago, he and Harold were at a restaurant and Harold was giving him a lecture about how his job at Rosen Pritchard had made him essentially an accessory to corporate malfeasance, when they both realized that their waiter was standing above them, holding his pad before him.

“Pardon me,” said the waiter. “Should I come back?”

“No, don’t worry,” Harold said, picking up his menu. “I’m just yelling at my son, but I can do that after we order.” The waiter had given him a commiserating smile, and he had smiled back, thrilled to have been claimed as another’s in public, to finally be a member of the tribe of sons and daughters. Later, Harold had resumed his rant, and he had pretended to be upset, but really, he had been happy the entire night, contentment saturating his every cell, smiling so much that Harold had finally asked him if he was drunk.

But now Harold too has started to ask him questions. “This is a terrific place,” he said when he was in town the previous month for the birthday dinner he’d commanded Willem not to throw for him and which Willem had done anyway. Harold had stopped by the apartment the next day, and as he always did, rambled about it admiringly, saying the same things he always did: “This is a terrific place”; “It’s so clean in here”; “Malcolm did such a good job”; and, lately, “It’s massive, though, Jude. Don’t you get lonely in here by yourself?”

“No, Harold,” he said. “I like being alone.”

Harold had grunted. “Willem seems happy,” he said. “Robin seems like a nice girl.”

“She is,” he said, making Harold a cup of tea. “And I think he is happy.”

“Jude, don’t you want that for yourself?” Harold asked.

He sighed. “No, Harold, I’m fine.”

“Well, what about me and Julia?” asked Harold. “We’d like to see you with someone.”

“You know I want to make you and Julia happy,” he said, trying to keep his voice level. “But I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to help you on this front. Here.” He gave Harold his tea.

Sometimes he wonders whether this very idea of loneliness is something he would feel at all had he not been awakened to the fact that he should be feeling lonely, that there is something strange and unacceptable about the life he has. Always, there are people asking him if he misses what it had never occurred to him to want, never occurred to him he might have: Harold and Malcolm, of course, but also Richard, whose girlfriend, a fellow artist named India, has all but moved in with him, and people he sees less frequently as well — Citizen and Elijah and Phaedra and even Kerrigan, his old colleague from Judge Sullivan’s chambers, who had looked him up a few months ago when he was in town with his husband. Some of them ask him with pity, and some ask him with suspicion: the first group feels sorry for him because they assume his singlehood is not his decision but a state imposed upon him; and the second group feels a kind of hostility for him, because they think that singlehood is his decision, a defiant violation of a fundamental law of adulthood.

Either way, being single at forty is different from being single at thirty, and with every year it becomes less understandable, less enviable, and more pathetic, more inappropriate. For the past five years, he has attended every partners’ dinner alone, and a year ago, when he became an equity partner, he attended the partners’ annual retreat alone as well. The week before the retreat, Lucien had come into his office one Friday night and sat down to review the week’s business, as he often did. They talked about the retreat, which was going to be in Anguilla, and which the two of them genuinely dreaded, unlike the other partners, who pretended to dread it but actually (he and Lucien agreed) were looking forward to it.

“Is Meredith coming?” he asked.

“She is.” There was a silence, and he knew what was coming next. “Are you bringing anyone?”

“No,” he said.

Another silence, in which Lucien stared at the ceiling. “You’ve never brought anyone to one of these events, have you?” asked Lucien, his voice carefully casual.

“No,” he said, and then, when Lucien didn’t say anything, “Are you trying to tell me something, Lucien?”

“No, of course not,” Lucien said, looking back at him. “This isn’t the sort of firm where we keep track of those kinds of things, Jude, you know that.”

He had felt a flush of anger and embarrassment. “Except it clearly is. If the management committee is saying something, Lucien, you have to tell me.”

“Jude,” said Lucien. “We’re not. You know how much everyone here respects you. I just think — and this is not the firm talking, just me — that I’d like to see you settled down with someone.”

“Okay, Lucien, thanks,” he’d said, wearily. “I’ll take that under advisement.”

But as self-conscious as he is about appearing normal, he doesn’t want a relationship for propriety’s sake: he wants it because he has realized he is lonely. He is so lonely that he sometimes feels it physically, a sodden clump of dirty laundry pressing against his chest. He cannot unlearn the feeling. People make it sound so easy, as if the decision to want it is the most difficult part of the process. But he knows better: being in a relationship would mean exposing himself to someone, which he has still never done to anyone but Andy; it would mean the confrontation of his own body, which he has not seen unclothed in at least a decade — even in the shower he doesn’t look at himself. And it would mean having sex with someone, which he hasn’t done since he was fifteen, and which he dreads so completely that the thought of it makes his stomach fill with something waxy and cold. When he first started seeing Andy, Andy would occasionally ask him if he was sexually active, until he finally told Andy that he would tell him when and if it ever happened, and until then, Andy could stop asking him. So Andy never asked again, and he has never had to volunteer the information. Not having sex: it was one of the best things about being an adult.

But as much as he fears sex, he also wants to be touched, he wants to feel someone else’s hands on him, although the thought of that too terrifies him. Sometimes he looks at his arms and is filled with a self-hatred so fiery that he can barely breathe: much of what his body has become has been beyond his control, but his arms have been all his doing, and he can only blame himself. When he had begun cutting himself, he cut on his legs — just the calves — and before he learned to be organized about how he applied them, he swiped the blade across the skin in haphazard strokes, so it looked as if he had been scratched by a crosshatch of grasses. No one ever noticed — no one ever looks at a person’s calves. Even Brother Luke hadn’t bothered him about them. But now, no one could not notice his arms, or his back, or his legs, which are striped with runnels where damaged tissue and muscle have been removed, and indentations the size of thumbprints, where the braces’ screws had once been drilled through the flesh and into the bone, and satiny ponds of skin where he had sustained burns in the injury, and the places where his wounds have closed over, where the flesh now craters slightly, the area around them tinged a permanent dull bronze. When he has clothes on, he is one person, but without them, he is revealed as he really is, the years of rot manifested on his skin, his own flesh advertising his past, its depravities and corruptions.

Once, in Texas, one of his clients had been a man who was grotesque — so fat that his stomach had dropped into a pendant of flesh between his legs, and covered everywhere with floes of eczema, the skin so dry that when he moved, small ghostly strips of it floated from his arms and back and into the air. He had been sickened, seeing the man, and yet they all sickened him, and so in a way, this man was no better or worse than the others. As he had given the man a blow job, the man’s stomach pressing against his neck, the man had cried, apologizing to him: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, he said, the tips of his fingers on the top of his head. The man had long fingernails, each as thick as bone, and he dragged them over his scalp, but gently, as if they were tines of a comb. And somehow, it is as if over the years he has become that man, and he knows that if anyone were to see him, they too would feel repulsed, nauseated by his deformities. He doesn’t want someone to have to stand before the toilet retching, as he had done afterward, scooping handfuls of liquid soap into his mouth, gagging at the taste, trying to make himself clean again.

So he will never have to do anything he doesn’t want to for food or shelter: he finally knows that. But what is he willing to do to feel less alone? Could he destroy everything he’s built and protected so diligently for intimacy? How much humiliation is he ready to endure? He doesn’t know; he is afraid of discovering the answer.

But increasingly, he is even more afraid that he will never have the chance to discover it at all. What does it mean to be a human, if he can never have this? And yet, he reminds himself, loneliness is not hunger, or deprivation, or illness: it is not fatal. Its eradication is not owed him. He has a better life than so many people, a better life than he had ever thought he would have. To wish for companionship along with everything else he has seems a kind of greed, a gross entitlement.

The weeks pass. Willem’s schedule is erratic, and he calls him at odd hours: at one in the morning, at three in the afternoon. He sounds tired, but it isn’t in Willem’s nature to complain, and he doesn’t. He tells him about the scenery, the archaeological sites they’ve been given permission to shoot in, the little mishaps on set. When Willem is away, he is increasingly inclined to stay indoors and do nothing, which he knows isn’t healthy, and so he has been vigilant about filling his weekends with events, with parties and dinners. He goes to museum shows, and to plays with Black Henry Young and to galleries with Richard. Felix, whom he tutored so long ago, now helms a punk band called the Quiet Amerikans, and he makes Malcolm come with him to their show. He tells Willem about what he’s seen and what he’s read, about conversations with Harold and Julia, about Richard’s latest project and his clients at the nonprofit, about Andy’s daughter’s birthday party and Phaedra’s new job, about people he’s talked to and what they’ve said.

“Five and a half more months,” Willem says at the end of one conversation.

“Five and a half more,” he repeats.

That Thursday he goes to dinner at Rhodes’s new apartment, which is near Malcolm’s parents’ house, and which Rhodes had told him over drinks in December is the source of all his nightmares: he wakes at night with ledgers scrolling through his mind, the stuff of his life — tuition, mortgages, maintenances, taxes — reduced to terrifyingly large figures. “And this is with my parents’ help,” he’d said. “And Alex wants to have another kid. I’m forty-five, Jude, and I’m already beat; I’m going to be working until I’m eighty if we have a third.”

Tonight, he is relieved to see, Rhodes seems more relaxed, his neck and cheeks pink. “Christ,” Rhodes says, “how do you stay so thin year after year?” When they had met at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, fifteen years ago, Rhodes had still looked like a lacrosse player, all muscle and sinew, but since joining the bank, he has thickened, grown abruptly old.

“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘scrawny,’ ” he tells Rhodes.

Rhodes laughs. “I don’t think so,” he says, “but I’d take scrawny at this point.”

There are eleven people at dinner, and Rhodes has to retrieve his desk chair from his office, and the bench from Alex’s dressing room. He remembers this about Rhodes’s dinners: the food is always perfect, there are always flowers on the table, and yet something always goes wrong with the guest list and the seating — Alex invites someone she’s just met and forgets to tell Rhodes, or Rhodes miscounts, and what is intended as a formal, organized event becomes instead chaotic and casual. “Shit!” Rhodes says, as he always does, but he’s always the only one who minds.

Alex is seated to his left, and he talks to her about her job as the public relations director of a fashion label called Rothko, which she has just quit, to Rhodes’s consternation. “Do you miss it yet?” he asks.

“Not yet,” she says. “I know Rhodes isn’t happy about it”—she smiles—“but he’ll get over it. I just felt I should stay home while the kids are young.”

He asks about the country house the two of them have bought in Connecticut (another source of Rhodes’s nightmares), and she tells him about the renovation, which is grinding into its third summer, and he groans in sympathy. “Rhodes said you were looking somewhere in Columbia County,” she says. “Did you end up buying?”

“Not yet,” he says. It had been a choice: either the house, or he and Richard were going to renovate the ground floor, make the garage usable and add a gym and a small pool — one with a constant current, so you could swim in place in it — and in the end, he chose the renovation. Now he swims every morning in complete privacy; not even Richard enters the gym area when he’s in it.

“We wanted to wait on the house, actually,” Alex admits. “But really, we didn’t have a choice — we wanted the kids to have a yard while they were little.”

He nods; he has heard this story before, from Rhodes. Often, it feels as if he and Rhodes (and he and almost every one of his contemporaries at the firm) are living parallel versions of adulthood. Their world is governed by children, little despots whose needs — school and camp and activities and tutors — dictate every decision, and will for the next ten, fifteen, eighteen years. Having children has provided their adulthood with an instant and nonnegotiable sense of purpose and direction: they decide the length and location of that year’s vacation; they determine if there will be any leftover money, and if so, how it might be spent; they give shape to a day, a week, a year, a life. Children are a kind of cartography, and all one has to do is obey the map they present to you on the day they are born.

But he and his friends have no children, and in their absence, the world sprawls before them, almost stifling in its possibilities. Without them, one’s status as an adult is never secure; a childless adult creates adulthood for himself, and as exhilarating as it often is, it is also a state of perpetual insecurity, of perpetual doubt. Or it is to some people — certainly it is to Malcolm, who recently reviewed with him a list he’d made in favor of and against having children with Sophie, much as he had when he was deciding whether to marry Sophie in the first place, four years ago.

“I don’t know, Mal,” he said, after listening to Malcolm’s list. “It sounds like the reasons for having them are because you feel you should, not because you really want them.”

“Of course I feel I should,” said Malcolm. “Don’t you ever feel like we’re all basically still living like children, Jude?”

“No,” he said. And he never had: his life was as far from his childhood as he could imagine. “That’s your dad talking, Mal. Your life won’t be any less valid, or any less legitimate, if you don’t have kids.”

Malcolm had sighed. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.” He’d smiled. “I mean, I don’t really want them.”

He smiled back. “Well,” he said, “you can always wait. Maybe someday you can adopt a sad thirty-year-old.”

“Maybe,” Malcolm said again. “After all, I hear it is a trend in certain parts of the country.”

Now Alex excuses herself to help Rhodes in the kitchen, who has been calling her name with mounting urgency—“Alex. Alex! Alex!”—and he turns to the person on his right, whom he doesn’t recognize from Rhodes’s other parties, a dark-haired man with a nose that looks like it’s been broken: it starts heading decisively in one direction before reversing directions, just as decisively, right below the bridge.

“Caleb Porter.”

“Jude St. Francis.”

“Let me guess: Catholic.”

“Let me guess: not.”

Caleb laughs. “You’re right about that.”

They talk, and Caleb tells him he’s just moved to the city from London, where he’s spent the past decade as the president of a fashion label, to take over as the new CEO at Rothko. “Alex very sweetly and spontaneously invited me yesterday, and I thought”—he shrugs—“why not? It’s this, a good meal with nice people, or sitting in a hotel room looking desultorily at real estate listings.” From the kitchen there is a timpani clatter of falling metal, and Rhodes swearing. Caleb looks at him, his eyebrows raised, and he smiles. “Don’t worry,” he reassures him. “This always happens.”

Over the remainder of the meal, Rhodes makes attempts to corral his guests into a group conversation, but it doesn’t work — the table is too wide, and he has unwisely seated friends near each other — and so he ends up talking to Caleb. He is forty-nine, and grew up in Marin County, and hasn’t lived in New York since he was in his thirties. He too went to law school, although, he says, he’s never used a day of what he learned at work.

“Never?” he asks. He is always skeptical when people say that; he is skeptical of people who claim law school was a colossal waste, a three-year mistake. Although he also recognizes that he is unusually sentimental about law school, which gave him not only his livelihood but, in many ways, his life.

Caleb thinks. “Well, maybe not never, but not in the way you’d expect,” he finally says. He has a deep, careful, slow voice, at once soothing and, somehow, slightly menacing. “The thing that actually has ended up being useful is, of all things, civil procedure. Do you know anyone who’s a designer?”

“No,” he says. “But I have a lot of friends who’re artists.”

“Well, then. You know how differently they think — the better the artist, the higher the probability that they’ll be completely unsuited for business. And they really are. I’ve worked at five houses in the past twenty-odd years, and what’s fascinating is witnessing the patterns of behavior — the refusal to hew to deadlines, the inability to stay within budget, the near incompetence when it comes to managing a staff — that are so consistent you begin to wonder if lacking these qualities is something that’s a prerequisite to having the job, or whether the job itself encourages these sorts of conceptual gaps. So what you have to do, in my position, is construct a system of governance within the company, and then make sure it’s enforceable and punishable. I’m not quite sure how to explain it: you can’t tell them that it’s good business to do one thing or another — that means nothing to them, or at least to some of them, as much as they say they understand it — you have to instead present it as the bylaws of their own small universe, and convince them that if they don’t follow these rules, their universe will collapse. As long as you can persuade them of this, you can get them to do what you need. It’s completely maddening.”

“So why do you keep working with them?”

“Because — they do think so differently. It’s fascinating to watch. Some of them are essentially subliterate: you get notes from them and they can really barely construct a sentence. But then you watch them sketching, or draping, or just putting colors together, and it’s … I don’t know. It’s wondrous. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

“No — I know exactly what you mean,” he says, thinking of Richard, and JB, and Malcolm, and Willem. “It’s as if you’re being allowed entrée into a way of thinking you don’t even have language to imagine, much less articulate.”

“That’s exactly right,” Caleb says, and smiles at him for the first time.

The dinner winds down, and as everyone’s drinking coffee, Caleb disentangles his legs from under the table. “I’m going to head off,” he says. “I think I’m still on London time. But it was a pleasure meeting you.”

“You, too,” he says. “I really enjoyed it. And good luck establishing a system of civil governance within Rothko.”

“Thanks, I’ll need it,” says Caleb, and then, as he’s about to stand, he stops and says, “Would you like to have dinner sometime?”

For a moment, he is paralyzed. But then he rebukes himself: he has nothing to fear. Caleb has just moved back to the city — he knows how difficult it must be to find someone to talk to, how difficult it is to find friends when, in your absence, all your friends have started families and are strangers to you. It is talking, nothing more. “That’d be great,” he says, and he and Caleb exchange cards.

“Don’t get up,” Caleb says, as he starts to rise. “I’ll be in touch.” He watches as Caleb — who is taller than he had thought, at least two inches taller than he is, with a powerful-looking back — rumbles his goodbyes to Alex and Rhodes and then leaves without turning around.

He gets a message from Caleb the following day, and they schedule a dinner for Thursday. Late in the afternoon, he calls Rhodes to thank him for dinner, and ask him about Caleb.

“I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t even speak to him,” Rhodes says. “Alex invited him very last minute. This is exactly what I’m talking about with these dinner parties: Why is she inviting someone who’s taking over at a company she’s just leaving?”

“So you don’t know anything about him?”

“Nothing. Alex says he’s well-respected and that Rothko fought hard to bring him back from London. But that’s all I know. Why?” He can almost hear Rhodes smiling. “Don’t tell me you’re expanding your client base from the glamorous world of securities and pharma?”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing, Rhodes,” he says. “Thanks again. And tell Alex thanks as well.”

Thursday arrives, and he meets Caleb at an izakaya in west Chelsea. After they’ve ordered, Caleb says, “You know, I was looking at you all through that dinner and trying to remember where I knew you from, and then I realized — it was a painting by Jean-Baptiste Marion. The creative director at my last company owned it — actually, he tried to make the company pay for it, but that’s a different story. It’s a really tight image of your face, and you’re standing outside; you can see a streetlight behind you.”

“Right,” he says. This has happened to him a few times before, and he always finds it unsettling. “I know exactly the one you mean; it’s from ‘Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days’—the third series.”

“That’s right,” says Caleb, and smiles at him. “Are you and Marion close?”

“Not so much anymore,” he says, and as always, it hurts him to admit it. “But we were college roommates — I’ve known him for years.”

“It’s a great series,” Caleb says, and they talk about JB’s other work, and Richard, whose work Caleb also knows, and Asian Henry Young; and about the paucity of decent Japanese restaurants in London; and about Caleb’s sister, who lives in Monaco with her second husband and their huge brood of children; and about Caleb’s parents, who died, after long illnesses, when he was in his thirties; and about the house in Bridgehampton that Caleb’s law school classmate is letting him use this summer while he’s in L.A. And then there is enough talk of Rosen Pritchard, and the financial mess that Rothko has been left in by the departing CEO to convince him that Caleb is looking not just for a friend but potentially for representation as well, and he starts thinking about who at the firm should be responsible for the company. He thinks: I should give this to Evelyn, who is one of the young partners the firm nearly lost the previous year to, in fact, a fashion house, where she would have been their in-house counsel. Evelyn would be good for this account — she is smart and she is interested in the industry, and it would be a good match.

He is thinking this when Caleb abruptly asks, “Are you single?” And then, laughing, “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Sorry,” he says, startled, but smiling back. “I am, yes. But — I was just having this very conversation with my friend.”

“And what did your friend say?”

“He said—” he begins, but then stops, embarrassed, and confused by the sudden shift of topic, of tone. “Nothing,” he says, and Caleb smiles, almost as if he has actually recounted the conversation, but doesn’t press him. He thinks then how he will make this evening into a story to tell Willem, especially this most recent exchange. You win, Willem, he’ll say to him, and if Willem tries to bring up the subject again, he decides he’ll let him, and that this time, he won’t evade his questions.

He pays and they walk outside, where it is raining, not heavily, but steadily enough so that there are no cabs, and the streets gleam like licorice. “I have a car waiting,” Caleb says. “Can I drop you somewhere?”

“You don’t mind?”

“Not at all.”

The car takes them downtown, and by the time they’ve reached Greene Street it’s pouring, so hard that they can no longer discern shapes through the window, just colors, spangles of red and yellow lights, the city reduced to the honking of horns and the clatter of rain against the roof of the car, so loud that they can barely hear each other over the din. They stop and he’s about to get out when Caleb tells him to wait, he has an umbrella and will walk him into the building, and before he can object, Caleb is getting out and unsnapping an umbrella, and the two of them huddle beneath it and into the lobby, the door thudding shut behind him, leaving them standing in the darkened entryway.

“This is a hell of a lobby,” Caleb says, dryly, looking up at the bare bulb. “Although it does have a sort of end-of-empire chic,” and he laughs, and Caleb smiles. “Does Rosen Pritchard know you’re living in a place like this?” he asks, and then, before he can answer, Caleb leans in and kisses him, very hard, so that his back is pressed against the door, and Caleb’s arms make a cage around him.

In that moment, he goes blank, the world, his very self, erasing themselves. It has been a long, long time since anyone has kissed him, and he remembers the sense of helplessness he felt whenever it happened, and how Brother Luke used to tell him to just open his mouth and relax and do nothing, and now — out of habit and memory, and the inability to do anything else — that is what he does, and waits for it to be over, counting the seconds and trying to breathe through his nose.

Finally, Caleb steps back and looks at him, and after a while, he looks back. And then Caleb does it again, this time holding his face between his hands, and he has that sensation he always had when he was a child and was being kissed, that his body was not his own, that every gesture he made was predetermined, reflex after reflex after reflex, and that he could do nothing but succumb to whatever might happen to him next.

Caleb stops a second time and steps back again, looking at him and raising his eyebrows the way he had at Rhodes’s dinner, waiting for him to say something.

“I thought you were looking for legal representation,” he says at last, and the words are so idiotic that he can feel his face get hot.

But Caleb doesn’t laugh. “No,” he says. There is another long silence, and it is Caleb who speaks next. “Aren’t you going to invite me up?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” he says, and he wishes, suddenly, for Willem, although this is not the sort of problem that Willem has helped him with before, and in fact, probably not the sort of problem that Willem would even consider a problem at all. He knows what a stolid, careful person he is, and although that stolidity and sense of caution guarantee he will never be the most interesting, or provocative, or glittery person in any gathering, in any room, they have protected him so far, they have given him an adulthood free of sordidness and filth. But sometimes he wonders whether he has insulated himself so much that he has neglected some essential part of being human: maybe he is ready to be with someone. Maybe enough time has passed so it will be different. Maybe he is wrong, maybe Willem is right: maybe this isn’t an experience that is forbidden to him forever. Maybe he is less disgusting than he thinks. Maybe he really is capable of this. Maybe he won’t be hurt after all. Caleb seems, in that moment, to have been conjured, djinn-like, the offspring of his worst fears and greatest hopes, and dropped into his life as a test: On one side is everything he knows, the patterns of his existence as regular and banal as the steady plink of a dripping faucet, where he is alone but safe, and shielded from everything that could hurt him. On the other side are waves, tumult, rainstorms, excitement: everything he cannot control, everything potentially awful and ecstatic, everything he has lived his adult life trying to avoid, everything whose absence bleeds his life of color. Inside him, the creature hesitates, perching on its hind legs, pawing the air as if feeling for answers.

Don’t do it, don’t fool yourself, no matter what you tell yourself, you know what you are, says one voice.

Take a chance, says the other voice. You’re lonely. You have to try. This is the voice he always ignores.

This may never happen again, the voice adds, and this stops him.

It will end badly, says the first voice, and then both voices fall silent, waiting to see what he will do.

He doesn’t know what to do; he doesn’t know what will happen. He has to find out. Everything he has learned tells him to leave; everything he has wished for tells him to stay. Be brave, he tells himself. Be brave for once.

And so he looks back at Caleb. “Let’s go,” he says, and although he is already frightened, he begins the long walk down the narrow hallway toward the elevator as if he is not, and along with the scrape of his right foot against the cement, he hears the tap of Caleb’s footsteps, and the explosions of rain pinging off the fire escape, and the thrum of his own anxious heart.

A year ago, he had begun working on a defense for a gigantic pharmaceutical company called Malgrave and Baskett whose board of directors was being sued by a group of their shareholders for malfeasance, incompetence, and neglect of their fiduciary duties. “Gee,” Lucien had said, sarcastically, “I wonder why they’d think that?”

He had sighed. “I know,” he said. Malgrave and Baskett was a disaster, and everyone knew it. Over the previous few years, before they had come to Rosen Pritchard, the company had had to contend with two whistle-blower lawsuits (one alleging that a manufacturing facility was dangerously out of date, the other that a different facility was producing contaminated products), had been served with subpoenas in connection with an investigation into an elaborate kickback scheme involving a chain of nursing homes, and had been alleged to be illegally marketing one of their bestselling drugs, which was approved only for treatment of schizophrenics, to Alzheimer’s patients.

And so he had spent the last eleven months interviewing fifty of Malgrave and Baskett’s current and former directors and officers and compiling a report to answer the lawsuit’s claims. He had fifteen other lawyers on his team; one night he overheard some of them referring to the company as Malpractice and Bastard.

“Don’t you dare let the client hear you say that,” he scolded them. It was late, two in the morning; he knew they were tired. If he had been Lucien, he would have yelled at them, but he was tired too. The previous week, another of the associates on the case, a young woman, had stood up from her desk at three a.m., looked around her, and collapsed. He had called an ambulance and sent everyone home for the night, as long as they returned by nine a.m.; he had stayed an hour longer and then had gone home himself.

“You let them go home and you stayed here?” asked Lucien the next day. “You’re getting soft, St. Francis. Thank god you don’t act like this when you’re at trial or we’d never get anywhere. If only opposing counsel knew what a pushover they were actually dealing with.”

“So does this mean the firm isn’t going to send poor Emma Gersh any flowers?”

“Oh, we already sent them,” said Lucien, getting up and wandering out of his office. “ ‘Emma: Get better, get back here soon. Or else. Love from your family at Rosen Pritchard.’ ”

He loved going to trial, he loved arguing and speaking in a courtroom — you never got to do it enough — but his goal with Malgrave and Baskett was to get the lawsuit tossed by a judge before it entered the grinding, tedious drone years of investigation and discovery. He wrote the motion to dismiss, and in early September, the district court judge threw out the suit.

“I’m proud of you,” Lucien says that night. “Malpractice and Bastard don’t know how fucking lucky they are; that suit was as solid as they come.”

“Well, there’s a lot that Malpractice and Bastard don’t seem to know,” he says.

“True. But I guess you can be complete cretins as long as you have enough sense to hire the right lawyer.” He stands. “Are you going anywhere this weekend?”

“No.”

“Well, do something relaxing. Go outside. Have a meal. You don’t look too good.”

“Good night, Lucien!”

“Okay, okay. Good night. And congratulations — really. This is a big one.”

He stays at the office for another two hours, tidying and sorting papers, attempting to batten down the constant detritus. He feels no sense of relief, or victory, after these outcomes: just a tiredness, but a simple, well-earned tiredness, as if he has completed a day’s worth of physical labor. Eleven months: interviews, research, more interviews, fact-checking, writing, rewriting — and then, in an instant, it is over, and another case will take its place.

Finally he goes home, where he is suddenly so exhausted that he stops on the way to his bedroom to sit on the sofa, and wakes an hour later, disoriented and parched. He hasn’t seen or talked to most of his friends in the past few months — even his conversations with Willem have been briefer than usual. Part of this is attributable to Malpractice and Bastard, and the frantic preparations they had demanded; but the other part is attributable to his ongoing confusion over Caleb, about whom he has not told Willem. This weekend, though, Caleb is in Bridgehampton, and he is glad of the time alone.

He still doesn’t know how he feels about Caleb, even three months later. He is not altogether certain that Caleb even likes him. Or rather: he knows he enjoys talking to him, but there are times when he catches Caleb looking at him with an expression that borders on disgust. “You’re really handsome,” Caleb once said, his voice perplexed, taking his chin between his fingers and turning his face toward him. “But—” And although he didn’t finish, he could sense what Caleb wanted to say: But something’s wrong. But you still repel me. But I don’t understand why I don’t like you, not really.

He knows Caleb hates his walk, for example. A few weeks after they had started seeing each other, Caleb was sitting on the sofa and he had gone to get a bottle of wine, and as he was walking back, he noticed Caleb staring at him so intently that he had grown nervous. He poured the wine, and they drank, and then Caleb said, “You know, when I met you, we were sitting down, so I didn’t know you had a limp.”

“That’s true,” he said, reminding himself that this was not something for which he had to apologize: he hadn’t entrapped Caleb; he hadn’t intended to deceive him. He took a breath and tried to sound light, mildly curious. “Would you not have wanted to go out with me if you’d known?”

“I don’t know,” Caleb said, after a silence. “I don’t know.” He had wanted to vanish, then, to close his eyes and reel back time, back to before he had ever met Caleb. He would have turned down Rhodes’s invitation; he would have kept living his little life; he would have never known the difference.

But as much as Caleb hates his walk, he loathes his wheelchair. The first time Caleb had come over in daylight, he had given him a tour of the apartment. He was proud of the apartment, and every day he was grateful to be in it, and disbelieving that it was his. Malcolm had kept Willem’s suite — as they called it — where it had been, but had enlarged it and added an office at its northern edge, close to the elevator. And then there was the long open space, with a piano, and a living-room area facing south, and a table that Malcolm had designed on the northern side, the side without windows, and behind it, a bookcase that covered the entire wall until the kitchen, hung with art by his friends, and friends of friends, and other pieces that he had bought over the years. The whole eastern end of the apartment was his: you crossed from the bedroom, on the north side, through the closet and into the bathroom, which had windows that looked east and south. Although he mostly kept the shades in the apartment lowered, you could open them all at once and the space would feel like a rectangle of pure light, the veil between you and the outside world mesmerizingly thin. He often feels as if the apartment is a falsehood: it suggests that the person within it is someone open, and vital, and generous with his answers, and he of course is not that person. Lispenard Street, with its half-obscured alcoves and dark warrens and walls that had been painted over so many times that you could feel ridges and blisters where moths and bugs had been entombed in its layers, was a much more accurate reflection of who he is.

For Caleb’s visit, he had let the place shimmer with sunlight, and he could tell Caleb was impressed. They walked slowly through it, Caleb looking at the art and asking about different pieces: where he had gotten them, who had made them, noting the ones he recognized.

And then they came to the bedroom, and he was showing Caleb the piece at the far end of the room — a painting of Willem in the makeup chair he had bought from “Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days”—when Caleb asked, “Whose wheelchair is that?”

He looked where Caleb was looking. “Mine,” he said, after a pause.

“But why?” Caleb had asked him, looking confused. “You can walk.”

He didn’t know what to say. “Sometimes I need it,” he said, finally. “Rarely. I don’t use it that often.”

“Good,” said Caleb. “See that you don’t.”

He was startled. Was this an expression of concern, or was it a threat? But before he could figure out what he should feel, or what he should answer, Caleb had turned, and was heading into his closet, and he followed him, continuing his tour.

A month after that, he had met Caleb late one night outside his office in the far western borderland of the Meatpacking District. Caleb too worked long hours; it was early July and Rothko would present their spring line in eight weeks. He had driven to work that day, but it was a dry night, and so he got out of the car and sat in his chair under a streetlamp until Caleb came down, talking to someone else. He knew Caleb had seen him — he had raised his hand in his direction and Caleb had given him a barely perceptible nod: neither of them were demonstrative people — and watched Caleb until he finished his conversation and the other man had begun walking east.

“Hi,” he said, as Caleb came over to him.

“Why are you in your wheelchair?” Caleb demanded.

For a moment, he couldn’t speak, and when he did, he stammered. “I had to use it today,” he finally said.

Caleb sighed, and rubbed at his eyes. “I thought you didn’t use it.”

“I don’t,” he said, so ashamed that he could feel himself start to sweat. “Not really. I only use it when I absolutely have to.”

Caleb nodded, but continued pinching the bridge of his nose. He wouldn’t look at him. “Look,” he said at last, “I don’t think we should have dinner after all. You’re obviously not feeling well, and I’m tired. I’ve got to get some sleep.”

“Oh,” he said, dismayed. “That’s all right. I understand.”

“Okay, good,” said Caleb. “I’ll call you later.” He watched Caleb move down the street with his long strides until he disappeared around the corner, and then had gotten into his car and driven home and cut himself until he was bleeding so much that he couldn’t grip the razor properly.

The next day was Friday, and he didn’t hear from Caleb at all. Well, he thought. That’s that. And it was fine: Caleb didn’t like the fact that he was in a wheelchair. Neither did he. He couldn’t resent Caleb for not being able to accept what he himself couldn’t accept.

But then, on Saturday morning, Caleb called just as he was coming back upstairs from the pool. “I’m sorry about Thursday night,” Caleb said. “I know it must seem heartless and bizarre to you, this — aversion I have to your wheelchair.”

He sat down in one of the chairs around the dining-room table. “It doesn’t seem bizarre at all,” he said.

“I told you my parents were sick for much of my adult life,” Caleb said. “My father had multiple sclerosis, and my mother — no one knew what she had. She got sick when I was in college and never got better. She had face pains, headaches: she was in a sort of constant low-grade discomfort, and although I don’t doubt it was real, what bothered me so much is that she never seemed to want to try to get better. She just gave up, as did he. Everywhere you looked there was evidence of their surrender to illness: first canes, then walkers, then wheelchairs, then scooters, and vials of pills and tissues and the perpetual scent of pain creams and gels and who knows what else.”

He stopped. “I want to keep seeing you,” he said, at last. “But — but I can’t be around these accessories to weakness, to disease. I just can’t. I hate it. It embarrasses me. It makes me feel — not depressed, but furious, like I need to fight against it.” He paused again. “I just didn’t know that’s who you were when I met you,” he said at last. “I thought I could be okay with it. But I’m not sure I can. Can you understand that?”

He swallowed; he wanted to cry. But he could understand it; he felt exactly as Caleb did. “I can,” he said.

And yet improbably, they had continued after all. He is astonished, still, by the speed and thoroughness with which Caleb insinuated himself into his life. It was like something out of a fairy tale: a woman living on the edge of a dark forest hears a knock and opens the door of her cottage. And although it is just for a moment, and although she sees no one, in those seconds, dozens of demons and wraiths have slipped past her and into her house, and she will never be able to rid herself of them, ever. Sometimes this was how it felt. Was this the way it was for other people? He doesn’t know; he is too afraid to ask. He finds himself replaying old conversations he has had or overheard with people talking about their relationships, trying to gauge the normalcy of his against theirs, looking for clues about how he should conduct himself.

And then there is the sex, which is worse than he had imagined: he had forgotten just how painful it was, how debasing, how repulsive, how much he disliked it. He hates the postures, the positions it demands, each of them degrading because they leave him so helpless and weak; he hates the tastes of it and the smells of it. But mostly, he hates the sounds of it: the meaty smack of flesh hitting flesh, the wounded-animal moans and grunts, the things said to him that were perhaps meant to be arousing but he can only interpret as diminishing. Part of him, he realizes, had always thought it would be better as an adult, as if somehow the mere fact of age would transform the experience into something glorious and enjoyable. In college, in his twenties, in his thirties, he would listen to people talk about it with such pleasure, such delight, and he would think: That’s what you’re so excited about? Really? That’s not how I remember it at all. And yet he cannot be the one who’s correct, and everyone else — millennia of people — wrong. So clearly there is something he doesn’t understand about sex. Clearly he is doing something incorrectly.

That first night they had come upstairs, he had known what Caleb had expected. “We have to go slowly,” he told him. “It’s been a long time.”

Caleb looked at him in the dark; he hadn’t turned on the light. “How long?” he asked.

“Long,” was all he could say.

And for a while, Caleb was patient. But then he wasn’t. There came a night in which Caleb tried to remove his clothes, and he had pulled out of his grasp. “I can’t,” he said. “Caleb — I can’t. I don’t want you to see what I look like.” It had taken everything he had to say this, and he was so scared he was cold.

“Why?” Caleb had asked.

“I have scars,” he said. “On my back and legs, and on my arms. They’re bad; I don’t want you to see them.”

He hadn’t known, really, what Caleb would say. Would he say: I’m sure they’re not so bad? And then would he have to take his clothes off after all? Or would he say: Let’s see, and then he would take his clothes off, and Caleb would get up and leave? He saw Caleb hesitate.

“You won’t like them,” he added. “They’re disgusting.”

And that had seemed to decide something for Caleb. “Well,” he said, “I don’t need to see all of your body, right? Just the relevant parts.” And for that night, he had lain there, half dressed and half not, waiting for it to be over and more humiliated than if Caleb had demanded he take his clothes off after all.

But despite these disappointments, things have also not been horrible with Caleb, either. He likes Caleb’s slow, thoughtful way of speaking, the way he talks about the designers he’s worked with, his understanding of color and his appreciation of art. He likes that he can discuss his work — about Malpractice and Bastard — and that Caleb will not only understand the challenges his cases present for him but will find them interesting as well. He likes how closely Caleb listens to his stories, and how his questions show how closely he’s been paying attention. He likes how Caleb admires Willem’s and Richard’s and Malcolm’s work, and lets him talk about them as much as he wants. He likes how, when he is leaving, Caleb will put his hands on either side of his face and hold them there for a moment in a sort of silent blessing. He likes Caleb’s solidity, his physical strength: he likes watching him move, likes how, like Willem, he is so easy in his own body. He likes how Caleb will sometimes in sleep sling an arm possessively across his chest. He likes waking with Caleb next to him. He likes how Caleb is slightly strange, how he carries a faint threat of danger: he is different from the people he has sought out his entire adult life, people he has determined will never hurt him, people defined by their kindnesses. When he is with Caleb, he feels simultaneously more and less human.

The first time Caleb hit him, he was both surprised and not. This was at the end of July, and he had gone over to Caleb’s at midnight, after leaving the office. He had used his wheelchair that day — lately, something had been going wrong with his feet; he didn’t know what it was, but he could barely feel them, and had the dislocating sense that he would topple over if he tried to walk — but at Caleb’s, he had left the chair in the car and had instead walked very slowly to the front door, lifting each foot unnaturally high as he went so he wouldn’t trip.

He knew from the moment he entered the apartment that he shouldn’t have come — he could see that Caleb was in a terrible mood and could feel how the very air was hot and stagnant with his anger. Caleb had finally moved into a building in the Flower District, but he hadn’t unpacked much, and he was edgy and tense, his teeth squeaking against themselves as he tightened his jaw. But he had brought food, and he moved his way slowly over to the counter to set it down, talking brightly to try to distract Caleb from his gait, trying, desperately, to make things better.

“Why are you walking like that?” Caleb interrupted him.

He hated admitting to Caleb that something else was wrong with him; he couldn’t bring himself to do it once again. “Am I walking strangely?” he asked.

“Yeah — you look like Frankenstein’s monster.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. Leave, said the voice inside him. Leave now. “I wasn’t aware of it.”

“Well, stop it. It looks ridiculous.”

“All right,” he said, quietly, and spooned some curry into a bowl for Caleb. “Here,” he said, but as he was heading toward Caleb, trying to walk normally, he tripped, his right foot over his left, and dropped the bowl, the green curry splattering against the carpet.

Later, he will remember how Caleb didn’t say anything, just whirled around and struck him with the back of his hand, and he had fallen back, his head bouncing against the carpeted floor. “Just get out of here, Jude,” he heard Caleb say, not even yelling, even before his vision returned. “Get out; I can’t look at you right now.” And so he had, bringing himself to his feet and walking his ridiculous monster’s walk out of the apartment, leaving Caleb to clean up the mess he had made.

The next day his face began to turn colors, the area around his left eye shading into improbably lovely tones: violets and ambers and bottle greens. By the end of the week, when he went uptown for his appointment with Andy, his cheek was the color of moss, and his eye was swollen nearly shut, the upper lid a puffed, tender, shiny red.

“Jesus Christ, Jude,” said Andy, when he saw him. “What the fuck happened to you?”

“Wheelchair tennis,” he said, and even grinned, a grin he had practiced in the mirror the night before, his cheek twitching with pain. He had researched everything: where the matches were played, and how frequently, and how many people were in the club. He had made up a story, recited it to himself and to people at the office until it sounded natural, even comic: a forehand from the opposing player, who had played in college, he not turning quickly enough, the thwack the ball had made when it hit his face.

He told all this to Andy as Andy listened, shaking his head. “Well,” he said. “I’m glad you’re trying something new. But Christ, Jude. Is this such a good idea?”

“You’re the one who’s always telling me to stay off my feet,” he reminded Andy.

“I know, I know,” said Andy. “But you have the pool; isn’t that enough? And at any rate, you should’ve come to me after this happened.”

“It’s just a bruise, Andy,” he said.

“It’s a pretty fucking bad bruise, Jude. I mean, Jesus.”

“Well, anyway,” he said, trying to sound unconcerned, even a little defiant. “I need to talk to you about my feet.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s such a strange sensation; they feel like they’re encased in cement coffins. I can’t feel where they are in space — I can’t control them. I lift one leg up and when I put it back down, I can feel in my calf that I’ve placed the foot, but I can’t feel it in the foot itself.”

“Oh, Jude,” Andy said. “It’s a sign of nerve damage.” He sighed. “The good news, besides the fact that you’ve been spared it all this time, is that it’s not going to be a permanent condition. The bad news is that I can’t tell you when it’ll end, or when it might start again. And the other bad news is that the only thing we can do — besides wait — is treat it with pain medication, which I know you won’t take.” He paused. “Jude, I know you don’t like the way they make you feel,” Andy said, “but there are some better ones on the market now than when you were twenty, or even thirty. Do you want to try? At least let me give you something mild for your face: Isn’t it killing you?”

“It’s not so bad,” he lied. But he did accept a prescription from Andy in the end.

“And stay off your feet,” Andy said, after he had examined his face. “And stay off the courts, too, for god’s sake.” And, as he was leaving, “And don’t think we’re not going to discuss your cutting!” because he was cutting himself more since he had begun seeing Caleb.

Back on Greene Street, he parked in the short driveway preceding the building’s garage and was fitting his key into the front door when he heard someone call his name, and then saw Caleb climbing out of his car. He was in his wheelchair, and he tried to get inside quickly. But Caleb was faster than he, and grabbed the door as it was closing, and then the two of them were in the lobby again, alone.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said to Caleb, at whom he couldn’t look.

“Jude, listen,” Caleb said. “I’m so sorry. I really am. I was just — it’s been a terrible time at work, everything’s such shit there — I’d have come over earlier this week, but it’s been so bad that I couldn’t even get away — and I completely took it out on you. I’m really sorry.” He crouched beside him. “Jude. Look at me.” He sighed. “I’m so sorry.” He took his face in his hands and turned it toward him. “Your poor face,” he said quietly.

He still can’t quite understand why he let Caleb come up that night. If he is to admit it to himself, he feels there was something inevitable, even, in a small way, a relief, about Caleb’s hitting him: all along, he had been waiting for some sort of punishment for his arrogance, for thinking he could have what everyone else has, and here — at last — it was. This is what you get, said the voice inside his head. This is what you get for pretending to be someone you know you’re not, for thinking you’re as good as other people. He remembers how JB had been so terrified of Jackson, and how he had understood his fear, how he had understood how you could get trapped by another human being, how what seemed so easy — the act of walking away from them — could feel so difficult. He feels about Caleb the way he once felt about Brother Luke: someone in whom he had, rashly, entrusted himself, someone in whom he had placed such hopes, someone he hoped could save him. But even when it became clear that they would not, even when his hopes turned rancid, he was unable to disentangle himself from them, he was unable to leave. There is a sort of symmetry to his pairing with Caleb that makes sense: they are the damaged and the damager, the sliding heap of garbage and the jackal sniffing through it. They exist only to themselves — he has met no one in Caleb’s life, and he has not introduced Caleb to anyone in his. They both know that something about what they are doing is shameful. They are bound to each other by their mutual disgust and discomfort: Caleb tolerates his body, and he tolerates Caleb’s revulsion.

He has always known that if he wanted to be with someone, he would have to make an exchange. And Caleb, he knows, is the best he will ever be able to find. At least Caleb isn’t misshapen, isn’t a sadist. Nothing being done to him now is something that hasn’t been done to him before — he reminds himself of this again and again.

One weekend at the end of September, he drives out to Caleb’s friend’s house in Bridgehampton, which Caleb is now occupying until early October. Rothko’s presentation went well, and Caleb has been more relaxed, affectionate, even. He has only hit him once more, a punch to the sternum that sent him skidding across the floor, but had apologized directly afterward. But other than that, things have been unremarkable: Caleb spends Wednesday and Thursday nights at Greene Street and then drives out to the beach on Fridays. He goes to the office early and stays late. After his success with Malpractice and Bastard, he had thought he might have a respite, even a short one, but he hasn’t — a new client, an investment firm being investigated for securities fraud, has come in, and even now, he feels guilty about skipping a Saturday at work.

His guilt aside, that Saturday is perfect, and they spend most of the day outdoors, both of them working. In the evening, Caleb grills them steaks. As he does, he sings, and he stops working to listen to him, and knows that they are both happy, and that for a moment, all of their ambivalence about each other is dust, something impermanent and weightless. That night, they go to bed early, and Caleb doesn’t make him have sex, and he sleeps deeply, better than he has in weeks.

But the next morning, he can tell even before he is fully conscious that the pain in his feet is back. It had vanished, completely and unpredictably, two weeks ago, but now it’s returned, and as he stands, he can also tell it’s gotten worse: it is as if his legs end at his ankles, and his feet are simultaneously inanimate and vividly painful. To walk, he must look down at them; he needs visual confirmation that he is lifting one, and visual confirmation that he is placing it down again.

He takes ten steps, but each one takes a greater and greater effort — the movement is so difficult, takes so much mental energy, that he is nauseated, and sits down again on the edge of the bed. Don’t let Caleb see you like this, he warns himself, before remembering: Caleb is out running, as he does every morning. He is alone in the house.

He has some time, then. He drags himself to the bathroom on his arms and into the shower. He thinks of the spare wheelchair in his car. Surely Caleb will have no objections to him getting it, especially if he can present himself as basically healthy, and this as just a small setback, a day-long inconvenience. He was planning on driving back to the city very early the next morning, but he could leave earlier if he needs to, although he would rather not — yesterday had been so nice. Maybe today can be as well.

He is dressed and waiting on the sofa in the living room, pretending to read a brief, when Caleb returns. He can’t tell what kind of mood he’s in, but he’s generally mild after his runs, even indulgent.

“I sliced some of the leftover steak,” he tells him. “Do you want me to make you eggs?”

“No, I can do it,” Caleb says.

“How was your run?”

“Good. Great.”

“Caleb,” he says, trying to keep his tone light, “listen — I’ve been having this problem with my feet; it’s just some side effects from nerve damage that comes and goes, but it makes it really difficult for me to walk. Do you mind if I get the wheelchair from my car?”

Caleb doesn’t say anything for a minute, just finishes drinking his bottle of water. “You can still walk, though, right?”

He forces himself to look back at Caleb. “Well — technically, yes. But—”

“Jude,” says Caleb, “I know your doctor probably disagrees, but I have to say I think there’s something a little — weak, I guess, about your always going to the easiest solution. I think you have to just endure some things, you know? This is what I meant with my parents: it was always such a succumbing to their every pain, their every twinge.

“So I think you should tough it out. I think if you can walk, you should. I just don’t think you should get into this habit of babying yourself when you’re capable of doing better.”

“Oh,” he says. “Right. I understand.” He feels a profound shame, as if he has just asked for something filthy and illicit.

“I’m going to shower,” says Caleb, after a silence, and leaves.

For the rest of the day, he tries to move very little, and Caleb, as if not wanting to find reason to get angry with him, doesn’t ask him to do anything. Caleb makes lunch, which they both eat on the sofa, both working on their computers. The kitchen and living room are one large sunlit space, with full-length windows that open onto the lawn overlooking the beach, and when Caleb is in the kitchen making dinner, he takes advantage of his turned back to inch, wormlike, to the hallway bathroom. He wants to go to the bedroom to get more aspirin out of his bag, but it’s too far, and he instead waits in the doorway on his knees until Caleb turns toward the stove again before crawling back to the sofa, where he has spent the entire day.

“Dinner,” Caleb announces, and he takes a breath and brings himself to his feet, which are cinder blocks, they are so heavy and clunky, and, watching them, begins to make his way to the table. It feels like it takes minutes, hours, to walk to his chair, and at one point he looks up and sees Caleb, his jaw moving, watching him with what looks like hate.

“Hurry up,” Caleb says.

They eat in silence. He can barely stand it. The scrape of the knife against the plate: unbearable. The crunch of Caleb biting down, unnecessarily hard, on a green bean: unbearable. The feel of food in his mouth, all of it becoming a fleshy nameless beast: unbearable.

“Caleb,” he begins, very quietly, but Caleb doesn’t answer him, just pushes back his chair and stands and goes to the sink.

“Bring me your plate,” Caleb says, and then watches him. He stands, slowly, and begins his trek to the sink, eyeing each footfall before he begins a new step.

He will wonder, later, if he forced the moment, if he could have in fact made the twenty steps without falling had he just concentrated harder. But that isn’t what happens. He moves his right foot just half a second before his left one has landed, and he falls, and the plate falls before him, the china shattering on the floor. And then, moving as swiftly as if he’d anticipated it, there is Caleb, yanking him up by his hair and punching him in the face with his fist, so hard that he is airborne, and when he lands, he does so against the table, knocking the base of his skull against its edge. His fall makes the bottle of wine jump off the surface, the liquid glugging onto the floor, and Caleb makes a roar, and snatches at the bottle by its throat and hits him on the back of his neck with it.

“Caleb,” he gasps, “please, please.” He was never one to beg for mercy, not even as a child, but he has become that person, somehow. When he was a child, his life meant little to him; he wishes, now, that that were still true. “Please,” he says. “Caleb, please forgive me — I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

But Caleb, he knows, is no longer human. He is a wolf, he is a coyote. He is muscle and rage. And he is nothing to Caleb, he is prey, he is disposable. He is being dragged to the edge of the sofa, he knows what will happen next. But he continues to ask, anyway. “Please, Caleb,” he says. “Please don’t. Caleb, please.”

When he regains consciousness, he is on the floor near the back of the sofa, and the house is silent. “Hello?” he calls, hating the quaver in his voice, but he doesn’t hear anything. He doesn’t need to — he knows, somehow, that he is alone.

He sits up. He pulls up his underwear and pants and flexes his fingers, his hands, brings his knees to his chest and back down again, moves his shoulders back and forward, turns his neck from left to right. There is something sticky on the back of his neck, but when he examines it, he’s relieved to see it’s not blood but wine. Everything hurts, but nothing is broken.

He crawls to the bedroom. He quickly cleans himself off in the bathroom and gathers his things and puts them in his bag. He scuttles to the door. For an instant he is afraid that his car will have disappeared, and he will be stranded, but it is there, next to Caleb’s, waiting for him. He checks his watch: it is midnight.

He moves his way across the lawn on his hands and knees, his bag slung painfully over one shoulder, the two hundred feet between the door and the car transforming themselves into miles. He wants to stop, he is so tired, but he knows he must not.

In the car, he doesn’t look at his reflection in the mirror; he starts the engine and drives away. But about half an hour later, once he knows he is far enough from the house to be safe, he begins to shake, so badly that the car swerves beneath him, and he pulls off the road to wait, leaning his forehead against the steering wheel.

He waits for ten minutes, twenty. And then he turns, although the very movement is a punishment, and finds his phone in his bag. He dials Willem’s number and waits.

“Jude!” says Willem, sounding surprised. “I was just going to call you.”

“Hi, Willem,” he says, and hopes his voice sounds normal. “I guess I read your thoughts.”

They talk for a few minutes, and then Willem asks, “Are you okay?”

“Of course,” he says.

“You sound a little strange.”

Willem, he wants to say. Willem, I wish you were here. But instead he says, “Sorry. I just have a headache.”

They talk some more, and as they’re about to hang up, Willem says, “You’re sure you’re okay.”

“Yes,” he says. “I’m fine.”

“Okay,” says Willem. “Okay.” And then, “Five more weeks.”

“Five more.” He wishes for Willem so intensely he can barely breathe.

After they hang up, he waits for another ten minutes, until he finally stops shaking, and then he starts the car again and drives the rest of the way home.

The next day, he makes himself look at his reflection in the bathroom mirror and nearly cries out in shame and shock and misery. He is so deformed, so astoundingly ugly — even for him, it is extraordinary. He makes himself as presentable as he can; he puts on his favorite suit. Caleb had kicked him in his side, and every movement, every breath, is painful. Before he leaves the house, he makes an appointment with the dentist because he can feel that one of his upper teeth has been knocked loose, and an appointment at Andy’s for that evening.

He goes to work. “This is not a good look for you, St. Francis,” one of the other senior partners, whom he likes a lot, says at the morning management committee meeting, and everyone laughs.

He forces a smile. “I’m afraid you’re right,” he says. “And I’m sure you’ll all be disappointed when I announce that my days as a potential Paralympic tennis champion are, sadly, over.”

“Well, I’m not sad,” says Lucien, as everyone around the table groans in mock disappointment. “You get plenty of aggression out in court. I think that should be your sole combat sport from now on.”

That night at his appointment, Andy swears at him. “What’d I say about tennis, Jude?” he asks.

“I know,” he says. “But never again, Andy, I promise.”

“What’s this?” Andy asks, placing his fingers on the back of his neck.

He sighs, theatrically. “I turned, and there was an incident with a nasty backhand.” He waits for Andy to say something, but he doesn’t, only smears some antibiotic cream on his neck and then bandages it.

The next day, Andy calls him at his office. “I need to talk to you in person,” he says. “It’s important. Can you meet me somewhere?”

He’s alarmed. “Is everything okay?” he asks. “Are you all right, Andy?”

“I’m fine,” Andy says. “But I need to see you.”

He takes an early dinner break and they meet near his office, at a bar whose regular customers are the Japanese bankers who work in the tower next to Rosen Pritchard’s. Andy is already there when he arrives, and he places his palm, gently, on the unmarked side of his face.

“I ordered you a beer,” Andy says.

They drink in silence and then Andy says, “Jude, I wanted to see your face when I asked you this. But are you — are you hurting yourself?”

“What?” he asks, surprised.

“These tennis accidents,” Andy says, “are they actually — something else? Are you throwing yourself down stairs or against walls, or something?” He takes a breath. “I know you used to do that when you were a kid. Are you doing it again?”

“No, Andy,” he says. “No. I’m not doing this to myself. I swear to you. I swear on — on Harold and Julia. I swear on Willem.”

“Okay,” Andy says, exhaling. “I mean, that’s a relief. It’s a relief to know you’re just being a bonehead and not following doctor’s orders, which, of course, is nothing new. And, apparently, that you’re a terrible tennis player.” He smiles, and he makes himself smile back.

Andy orders them more beers, and for a while, they are quiet. “Do you know, Jude,” Andy says, slowly, “that over the years I have wondered and wondered what to do about you? No, don’t say anything — let me finish. I would — I do — lie awake at night asking myself if I’m making the right decisions about you: there’ve been so many times when I was so close to having you committed, to calling Harold or Willem and telling them that we needed to get together and have you taken to a hospital. I’ve talked to classmates of mine who are shrinks and told them about you, about this patient I’m very close to, and asked them what they would do in my position. I’ve listened to all their advice. I’ve listened to my shrink’s advice. But no one can ever tell me for certain what the right answer is.

“I’ve tortured myself about this. But I’ve always felt — you’re so high-functioning in so many ways, and you’ve achieved this weird but undeniably successful equilibrium in your life, that I felt that, I don’t know, I just shouldn’t upset it. You know? So I’ve let you go on cutting yourself year after year, and every year, every time I see you, I wonder if I’m doing the right thing by letting you do so, and how and if I should be pushing harder to get you help, to make you stop doing this to yourself.”

“I’m sorry, Andy,” he whispers.

“No, Jude,” Andy says. “It’s not your fault. You’re the patient. I’m supposed to figure out what’s best for you, and I feel — I don’t know if I have. So when you came in with bruises, the first thing I thought was that I had made the wrong decision after all. You know?” Andy looks at him, and he is surprised once more to see Andy swipe, quickly, at his eyes. “All these years,” says Andy, after a pause, and they are both quiet again.

“Andy,” he says, wanting to cry himself. “I swear to you I’m not doing anything else to myself. Just the cutting.”

“Just the cutting!” Andy repeats, and makes a strange squawk of laughter. “Well, I suppose — given the context — I have to be grateful for that. ‘Just the cutting.’ You know how messed up that is, right, that that should be such a relief to me?”

“I know,” he says.

Tuesday turns to Wednesday, and then to Thursday; his face feels worse, and then better, and then worse again. He had worried that Caleb might call him or, worse, materialize at his apartment, but the days pass and he doesn’t: maybe he has stayed out in Bridgehampton. Maybe he has gotten run over by a car. He finds, oddly, that he feels nothing — not fear, not hate, not anything. The worst has happened, and now he is free. He has had a relationship, and it was awful, and now he will never need to have one again, because he has proven himself incapable of being in one. His time with Caleb has confirmed everything he feared people would think of him, of his body, and his next task is to learn to accept that, and to do so without sorrow. He knows he will still probably feel lonely in the future, but now he has something to answer that loneliness; now he knows for certain that loneliness is the preferable state to whatever it was — terror, shame, disgust, dismay, giddiness, excitement, yearning, loathing — he felt with Caleb.

That Friday he sees Harold, who is in town for a conference at Columbia. He had already written Harold to warn him of his injury, but it doesn’t stop Harold from overreacting, exclaiming and fussing over him and asking him dozens of times if he is actually all right.

They have met at one of Harold’s favorite restaurants, where the beef comes from cows that the chef has named and raised himself on a farm upstate, and the vegetables are grown on the roof of the building, and they are talking and eating their entrées — he is careful to only chew on the right side of his mouth, and to avoid letting any food come in contact with his new tooth — when he senses someone standing near their table, and when he looks up, it is Caleb, and although he had convinced himself he feels nothing, he is immediately, overwhelmingly terrified.

He had never seen Caleb drunk in their time together, but he can tell instantly that he is, and in a dangerous mood. “Your secretary told me where you were,” Caleb says to him. “You must be Harold,” he says, and extends his hand to Harold, who shakes it, looking bewildered.

“Jude?” Harold asks him, but he can’t speak.

“Caleb Porter,” says Caleb, and slides into the semicircular booth, pressing against his side. “Your son and I are dating.”

Harold looks at Caleb, and then at him, and opens his mouth, speechless for the first time since he has known him.

“Let me ask you something,” Caleb says to Harold, leaning in as if delivering a confidence, and he stares at Caleb’s face, his vulpine handsomeness, his dark, glinting eyes. “Be honest. Don’t you ever wish you had a normal son, not a cripple?”

For a moment, no one says anything, and he can feel something, a current, sizzle in the air. “Who the fuck are you?” hisses Harold, and then he watches Harold’s face change, his features contorting so quickly and violently from shock to disgust to anger that he looks, for an instant, inhuman, a ghoul in Harold’s clothing. And then his expression changes again, and he watches something harden in Harold’s face, as if his very muscles are ossifying before him.

“You did this to him,” he says to Caleb, very slowly. And then to him, in dismay, “It wasn’t tennis, was it, Jude. This man did this to you.”

“Harold, don’t,” he begins to say, but Caleb has grabbed his wrist, and is gripping it so hard that he feels it might be breaking. “You little liar,” he says to him. “You’re a cripple and a liar and a bad fuck. And you’re right — you’re disgusting. I couldn’t even look at you, not ever.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” says Harold, biting down on each word. They are all of them speaking in whispers, but the conversation feels so loud, and the rest of the restaurant so silent, that he is certain everyone can hear them.

“Harold, don’t,” he begs him. “Stop, please.”

But Harold doesn’t listen to him. “I’m going to call the police,” he says, and Caleb slides out of the booth and stands, and Harold stands as well. “Get out of here right now,” Harold repeats, and now everyone really is looking in their direction, and he is so mortified that he feels sick.

“Harold,” he pleads.

He can tell from Caleb’s swaying motion that he is really very drunk, and when he pushes at Harold’s shoulder, Harold is about to push back when he finds his voice, finally, and shouts Harold’s name, and Harold turns to him and lowers his arm. Caleb gives him his small smile, then, and turns and leaves, shoving past some of the waiters who have silently gathered around him.

Harold stands there for a moment, staring at the door, and then begins to follow Caleb, and he calls Harold’s name again, desperate, and Harold comes back to him.

“Jude—” Harold begins, but he shakes his head. He is so angry, so furious, that his humiliation has almost been eclipsed by his rage. Around them, he can hear people’s conversations resuming. He hails their waiter and gives him his credit card, which is returned to him in what feels like seconds. He doesn’t have his wheelchair today, for which he is enormously, bitterly grateful, and in those moments he is leaving the restaurant, he feels he has never been so nimble, has never moved so quickly or decisively.

Outside, it is pouring. His car is parked a block away, and he shuffles down the sidewalk, Harold silent at his side. He is so livid he wishes he could not give Harold a ride at all, but they are on the east side, near Avenue A, and Harold will never be able to find a cab in the rain.

“Jude—” Harold says once they’re in the car, but he interrupts him, keeping his eyes on the road before him. “I was begging you not to say anything, Harold,” he says. “And you did anyway. Why did you do that, Harold? You think my life is a joke? You think my problems are just an opportunity for you to grandstand?” He doesn’t even know what he means, doesn’t know what he’s trying to say.

“No, Jude, of course not,” says Harold, his voice gentle. “I’m sorry — I just lost it.”

This sobers him for some reason, and for a few blocks they are silent, listening to the sluice of the wipers.

“Were you really going out with him?” Harold asks.

He gives a single, terse nod. “But not anymore?” Harold asks, and he shakes his head. “Good,” Harold mutters. And then, very softly, “Did he hit you?”

He has to wait and control himself before he can answer. “Only a few times,” he says.

“Oh, Jude,” says Harold, in a voice he has never heard Harold use before.

“Let me ask you something, though,” Harold says, as they edge down Fifteenth Street, past Sixth Avenue. “Jude — why were you going out with someone who would treat you like that?”

He doesn’t answer for another block, trying to think of what he could say, how he could articulate his reasons in a way Harold would understand. “I was lonely,” he says, finally.

“Jude,” Harold says, and stops. “I understand that,” he says. “But why him?”

“Harold,” he says, and he hears how awful, how wretched, he sounds, “when you look like I do, you have to take what you can get.”

They are quiet again, and then Harold says, “Stop the car.”

“What?” he says. “I can’t. There are people behind me.”

“Stop the damn car, Jude,” Harold repeats, and when he doesn’t, Harold reaches over and grabs the wheel and pulls it sharply to the right, into an empty space in front of a fire hydrant. The car behind passes them, its horn bleating a long, warning note.

“Jesus, Harold!” he yells. “What the hell are you trying to do? You nearly got us into an accident!”

“Listen to me, Jude,” says Harold slowly, and reaches for him, but he pulls himself back against the window, away from Harold’s hands. “You are the most beautiful person I have ever met — ever.”

“Harold,” he says, “stop, stop. Please stop.”

“Look at me, Jude,” says Harold, but he can’t. “You are. It breaks my heart that you can’t see this.”

“Harold,” he says, and he is almost moaning, “please, please. If you care about me, you’ll stop.”

“Jude,” says Harold, and reaches for him again, but he flinches, and brings his hands up to protect himself. Out of the edge of his eye, he can see Harold lower his hand, slowly.

He finally puts his hands back on the steering wheel, but they are shaking too badly for him to start the ignition, and he tucks them under his thighs, waiting. “Oh god,” he hears himself repeating, “oh god.”

“Jude,” Harold says again.

“Leave me alone, Harold,” he says, and now his teeth are chattering as well, and it is difficult for him to speak. “Please.”

They sit there in silence for minutes. He concentrates on the sound of the rain, the traffic light turning red and green and orange, and the count of his breaths. Finally his shaking stops, and he starts the car and drives west, and north, up to Harold’s building.

“Come stay in the apartment tonight,” Harold says, turning to him, but he shakes his head, staring straight ahead. “At least come up and have a cup of tea and wait until you feel a little better,” but he shakes his head again. “Jude,” Harold says, “I’m really sorry — for everything, for all of it.” He nods, but still can’t say anything. “Will you call me if you need anything?” Harold persists, and he nods again. And then Harold reaches his hand up, slowly, as if he is a feral animal, and strokes the back of his head, twice, before getting out, closing the door softly behind him.

He takes the West Side Highway home. He is so sore, so depleted: but now his humiliations are complete. He has been punished enough, he thinks, even for him. He will go home, and cut himself, and then he will begin forgetting: this night in particular, but also the past four months.

At Greene Street he parks in the garage and rides the elevator up past the silent floors, clinging to the cage-door mesh; he is so tired that he will slump to the ground if he doesn’t. Richard is away for the fall at a residency in Rome, and the building is sepulchral around him.

He steps into his darkened apartment and is feeling for the light switch when something clots him, hard, on the swollen side of his face, and even in the dark he can see his new tooth project itself into the air.

It is Caleb, of course, and he can hear and smell his breath even before Caleb flicks the master switch and the apartment is illuminated, dazzlingly, into something brighter than day, and he looks up and sees Caleb above him, peering down at him. Even drunk, he is composed, and now some of his drunkenness has been clarified by rage, and his gaze is steady and focused. He feels Caleb grab him by his hair, feels him hit him on the right side of his face, the good one, feels his head snapping backward in response.

Caleb still hasn’t said anything, and now he drags him to the sofa, the only sounds Caleb’s steady breaths and his frantic gulps. He pushes his face into the cushions and holds his head down with one hand, while with the other, he begins pulling off his clothes. He begins to panic, then, and struggle, but Caleb presses one arm against the back of his neck, which paralyzes him, and he is unable to move; he can feel himself become exposed to the air piece by piece — his back, his arms, the backs of his legs — and when everything’s been removed, Caleb yanks him to his feet again and pushes him away, but he falls, and lands on his back.

“Get up,” says Caleb. “Right now.”

He does; his nose is discharging something, blood or mucus, that is making it difficult for him to breathe. He stands; he has never felt more naked, more exposed in his life. When he was a child, and things were happening to him, he used to be able to leave his body, to go somewhere else. He would pretend he was something inanimate — a curtain rod, a ceiling fan — a dispassionate, unfeeling witness to the scene occurring beneath him. He would watch himself and feel nothing: not pity, not anger, nothing. But now, although he tries, he finds he cannot remove himself. He is in this apartment, his apartment, standing before a man who detests him, and he knows this is the beginning, not the end, of a long night, one he has no choice but to wait through and endure. He will not be able to control this night, he will not be able to stop it.

“My god,” Caleb says, after looking at him for a few long moments; it is the first time he has ever seen him wholly naked. “My god, you really are deformed. You really are.”

For some reason, it is this, this pronouncement, that brings them both back to themselves, and he finds himself, for the first time in decades, crying. “Please,” he says. “Please, Caleb, I’m sorry.” But Caleb has already grabbed him by the back of his neck and is hurrying him, half dragging him, toward the front door. Into the elevator they go, and down the flights, and then he is being dragged out of the elevator and marched down the hallway toward the lobby. By now he is hysterical, pleading with Caleb, asking him again and again what he’s doing, what he’s going to do to him. At the front door, Caleb lifts him, and for a moment his face is fitted into the tiny dirty glass window that looks out onto Greene Street, and then Caleb is opening the door and he is being pushed out, naked, into the street.

“No!” he shouts, half inside, half outside. “Caleb, please!” He is pulled between a crazed hope and a desperate fear that someone will walk by. But it is raining too hard; no one will walk by. The rain drums a wild pattern on his face.

“Beg me,” says Caleb, raising his voice over the rain, and he does, pleading with him. “Beg me to stay,” Caleb demands. “Apologize to me,” and he does, again and again, his mouth filling with his own blood, his own tears.

Finally he is brought inside, and is dragged back to the elevator, where Caleb says things to him, and he apologizes and apologizes, repeating Caleb’s words back to him as he instructs: I’m repulsive. I’m disgusting. I’m worthless. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

In the apartment, Caleb lets go of his neck, and he falls, his legs unsteady beneath him, and Caleb kicks him in the stomach so hard that he vomits, and then again in his back, and he slides over Malcolm’s lovely, clean floors and into the vomit. His beautiful apartment, he thinks, where he has always been safe. This is happening to him in his beautiful apartment, surrounded by his beautiful things, things that have been given to him in friendship, things that he has bought with money he has earned. His beautiful apartment, with its doors that lock, where he was meant to be protected from broken elevators and the degradation of pulling himself upstairs on his arms, where he was meant to always feel human and whole.

Then he is being lifted again, and moved, but it is difficult to see where he’s being taken: one eye is already swollen shut, and the other is blurry. His vision keeps blinking in and out.

But then he realizes that Caleb is taking him to the door that leads to the emergency stairs. It is the one element of the old loft that Malcolm kept: both because he had to and because he liked how bluntly utilitarian it was, how unapologetically ugly. Now Caleb unslides the bolt, and he finds himself standing at the top of the dark, steep staircase. “So descent-into-hell looking,” he remembers Richard saying. One side of him is gluey with vomit; he can feel other liquids — he cannot think about what they are — moving down other parts of him: his face, his neck, his thighs.

He is whimpering from pain and fear, clutching the edge of the doorframe, when he hears, rather than sees, Caleb move back and run at him, and then his foot is kicking him in his back, and he is flying into the black of the staircase.

As he soars, he thinks, suddenly, of Dr. Kashen. Or not of Dr. Kashen, necessarily, but the question he had asked him when he was applying to be his advisee: What’s your favorite axiom? (The nerd pickup line, CM had once called it.)

“The axiom of equality,” he’d said, and Kashen had nodded, approvingly. “That’s a good one,” he’d said.

The axiom of equality states that x always equals x: it assumes that if you have a conceptual thing named x, that it must always be equivalent to itself, that it has a uniqueness about it, that it is in possession of something so irreducible that we must assume it is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to itself for all time, that its very elementalness can never be altered. But it is impossible to prove. Always, absolutes, nevers: these are the words, as much as numbers, that make up the world of mathematics. Not everyone liked the axiom of equality — Dr. Li had once called it coy and twee, a fan dance of an axiom — but he had always appreciated how elusive it was, how the beauty of the equation itself would always be frustrated by the attempts to prove it. It was the kind of axiom that could drive you mad, that could consume you, that could easily become an entire life.

But now he knows for certain how true the axiom is, because he himself — his very life — has proven it. The person I was will always be the person I am, he realizes. The context may have changed: he may be in this apartment, and he may have a job that he enjoys and that pays him well, and he may have parents and friends he loves. He may be respected; in court, he may even be feared. But fundamentally, he is the same person, a person who inspires disgust, a person meant to be hated. And in that microsecond that he finds himself suspended in the air, between the ecstasy of being aloft and the anticipation of his landing, which he knows will be terrible, he knows that x will always equal x, no matter what he does, or how many years he moves away from the monastery, from Brother Luke, no matter how much he earns or how hard he tries to forget. It is the last thing he thinks as his shoulder cracks down upon the concrete, and the world, for an instant, jerks blessedly away from beneath him: x = x, he thinks. x = x, x = x.

2

WHEN JACOB WAS very small, maybe six months old or so, Liesl came down with pneumonia. Like most healthy people, she was a terrible sick person: grouchy and petulant and, mostly, stunned by the unfamiliar place in which she now found herself. “I don’t get sick,” she kept saying, as if some mistake had been made, as if what had been given her had been meant for someone else.

Because Jacob was a sickly baby — not in any dramatic way, but he had already had two colds in his short life, and even before I knew what his smile looked like, I knew what his cough sounded like: a surprisingly mature hack — we decided that it would be better if Liesl spent the next few days at Sally’s to rest and get better, and I stayed at home with Jacob.

I thought myself basically competent with my son, but over the course of the weekend, I must have called my father twenty times to ask him about the various little mysteries that kept presenting themselves, or to confirm with him what I knew I knew but which, in my fluster, I had forgotten: He was making strange noises that sounded like hiccups but were too irregular to actually be hiccups — what were they? His stool was a little runny — was that a sign of anything? He liked to sleep on his stomach, but Liesl said that he should be on his back, and yet I had always heard that he’d be perfectly fine on his stomach — would he be? Of course, I could’ve looked all of this up, but I wanted definitive answers, and I wanted to hear them from my father, who had not just the right answers but the right way of delivering them. It comforted me to hear his voice. “Don’t worry,” he said at the end of every call. “You’re doing just fine. You know how to do this.” He made me believe I did.

After Jacob got sick, I called my father less: I couldn’t bear to talk to him. The questions I now had for him — how would I get through this?; what would I do, afterward?; how could I watch my child die? — were ones I couldn’t even bring myself to ask, and ones I knew would make him cry to try to answer.

He had just turned four when we noticed that something was wrong. Every morning, Liesl would take him to nursery school, and every afternoon, after my last class, I would pick him up. He had a serious face, and so people thought that he was a more somber kid than he really was: at home, though, he ran around, up and down the staircase, and I ran after him, and when I was lying on the couch reading, he would come flopping down on top of me. Liesl too became playful around him, and sometimes the two of them would run through the house, shrieking and squealing, and it was my favorite noise, my favorite kind of clatter.

It was October when he began getting tired. I picked him up one day, and all of the other children, all of his friends, were in a jumble, talking and jumping, and then I looked for my son and saw him in a far corner of the room, curled on his mat, sleeping. One of the teachers was sitting near him, and when she saw me, she waved me over. “I think he might be coming down with something,” she said. “He’s been a little listless for the past day or so, and he was so tired after lunch that we just let him sleep.” We loved this school: other schools made the kids try to read, or have lessons, but this school, which was favored by the university’s professors, was what I thought school should be for a four-year-old — all they seemed to do was listen to people reading them books, and make various crafts, and go on field trips to the zoo.

I had to carry him out to the car, but when we got home, he woke and was fine, and ate the snack I made him, and listened to me read to him before we built the day’s centerpiece together. For his birthday, Sally had gotten him a set of beautiful wooden blocks that were carved into geode-like shapes and could be stacked very high and into all sorts of interesting forms; every day we built a new construction in the center of the table, and when Liesl got home, Jacob would explain to her what we’d been building — a dinosaur, a spaceman’s tower — and Liesl would take a picture of it.

That night I told Liesl what Jacob’s teacher had said, and the next day, Liesl took him to the doctor, who said he seemed perfectly normal, that nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Still, we watched him over the next few days: Was he more energetic or less? Was he sleeping longer than usual, eating less than usual? We didn’t know. But we were frightened: there is nothing more terrifying than a listless child. The very word seems, now, a euphemism for a terrible fate.

And then, suddenly, things began to accelerate. We went to my parents’ over Thanksgiving and were having dinner when Jacob began seizing. One moment he was present, and the next he was rigid, his body becoming a plank, sliding off the chair and beneath the table, his eyeballs rolling upward, his throat making a strange, hollow clicking noise. It lasted only ten seconds or so, but it was awful, so awful I can still hear that horrible clicking noise, still see the horrible stillness of his head, his legs marching back and forth in the air.

My father ran and called a friend of his at New York Presbyterian and we rushed there, and Jacob was admitted, and the four of us stayed in his room overnight — my father and Adele lying on their coats on the floor, Liesl and I sitting on either side of the bed, unable to look at each other.

Once he had stabilized, we went home, where Liesl had called Jacob’s pediatrician, another med-school classmate of hers, to make appointments with the best neurologist, the best geneticist, the best immunologist — we didn’t know what it was, but whatever it was, she wanted to make sure Jacob had the best. And then began the months of going from one doctor to the next, of having Jacob’s blood drawn and brain scanned and reflexes tested and eyes peered into and hearing examined. The whole process was so invasive, so frustrating — I had never known there were so many ways to say “I don’t know” until I met these doctors — and at times I would think of how difficult, how impossible it must be for parents who didn’t have the connections we did, who didn’t have Liesl’s scientific literacy and knowledge. But that literacy didn’t make it easier to see Jacob cry when he was pricked with needles, so many times that one vein, the one in his left arm, began to collapse, and all those connections didn’t prevent him from getting sicker and sicker, from seizing more and more, and he would shake and froth, and emit a growl, something primal and frightening and far too low-pitched for a four-year-old, as his head knocked from side to side and his hands gnarled themselves.

By the time we had our diagnosis — an extremely rare neurodegenerative disease called Nishihara syndrome, one so rare that it wasn’t even included on batteries of genetic tests — he was almost blind. That was February. By June, when he turned five, he rarely spoke. By August, we didn’t think he could hear any longer.

He seized more and more. We tried one drug after the next; we tried them in combinations. Liesl had a friend who was a neurologist who told us about a new drug that hadn’t been approved in the States yet but was available in Canada; that Friday, Liesl and Sally drove up to Montreal and back, all in twelve hours. For a while the drug worked, although it gave him a terrible rash, and whenever we touched his skin he would open his mouth and scream, although no sound came out, and tears would run out of his eyes. “I’m sorry, buddy,” I would plead with him, even though I knew he couldn’t hear me, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

I could barely concentrate at work. I was only teaching part-time that year; it was my second year at the university, my third semester. I would walk through campus and overhear conversations — someone talking about splitting up with her boyfriend, someone talking about a bad grade he got on a test, someone talking about his sprained ankle — and would feel rage. You stupid, petty, selfish, self-absorbed people, I wanted to say. You hateful people, I hate you. Your problems aren’t problems. My son is dying. At times my loathing was so profound I would get sick. Laurence was teaching at the university then as well, and he would pick up my classes when I had to take Jacob to the hospital. We had a home health-care worker, but we took him to every appointment so we could keep track of how fast he was leaving us. In September, his doctor looked at us after he had examined him. “Not long now,” he said, and he was very gentle, and that was the worst part.

Laurence came over every Wednesday and Saturday night; Gillian came every Tuesday and Thursday; Sally came every Monday and Sunday; another friend of Liesl’s, Nathan, came every Friday. When they were there, they would cook or clean, and Liesl and I would sit with Jacob and talk to him. He had stopped growing sometime in the last year, and his arms and legs had gone soft from lack of use: they were floppy, boneless even, and you had to make sure that when you held him, you held his limbs close to you, or they would simply dangle off of him and he would look dead. He had stopped opening his eyes at all in early September, although sometimes they would leak fluids: tears, or a clumpy, yellowish mucus. Only his face remained plump, and that was because he was on such massive doses of steroids. One drug or another had left him with an eczematic rash on his cheeks, candied-red and sandpapery, that was always hot and rough to the touch.

My father and Adele moved in with us in mid-September, and I couldn’t look at him. I knew he knew what it was like to see children dying; I knew how much it hurt him that it was my child. I felt as if I had failed: I felt that I was being punished for not wanting Jacob more passionately when he had been given to us. I felt that if I had been less ambivalent about having children, this never would have happened; I felt that I was being reminded of how foolish and stupid I’d been to not recognize what a gift I’d been given, a gift that so many people yearned for and yet I had been willing to send back. I was ashamed — I would never be the father my father was, and I hated that he was here witnessing my failings.

Before Jacob had been born, I had asked my father one night if he had any words of wisdom for me. I had been joking, but he took it seriously, as he took all questions I asked him. “Hmm,” he said. “Well, the hardest thing about being a parent is recalibration. The better you are at it, the better you will be.”

At the time, I had pretty much ignored this advice, but as Jacob got sicker and sicker, I thought of it more and more frequently, and realized how correct he was. We all say we want our kids to be happy, only happy, and healthy, but we don’t want that. We want them to be like we are, or better than we are. We as humans are very unimaginative in that sense. We aren’t equipped for the possibility that they might be worse. But I guess that would be asking too much. It must be an evolutionary stopgap — if we were all so specifically, vividly aware of what might go horribly wrong, we would none of us have children at all.

When we first realized that Jacob was sick, that there was something wrong with him, we both tried very hard to recalibrate, and quickly. We had never said that we wanted him to go to college, for example; we simply assumed he would, and to graduate school as well, because we both had. But that first night we spent in the hospital, after his first seizure, Liesl, who was always a planner, who had a brilliant ability to see five steps, ten steps, ahead, said, “No matter what this is, he can still live a long and healthy life, you know. There are great schools we can send him to. There are places where he can be taught to be independent.” I had snapped at her: I had accused her of writing him off so quickly, so easily. Later, I felt ashamed about this. Later, I admired her: I admired how rapidly, how fluidly, she was adjusting to the fact that the child she thought she would have was not the child she did have. I admired how she knew, well before I did, that the point of a child is not what you hope he will accomplish in your name but the pleasure that he will bring you, whatever form it comes in, even if it is a form that is barely recognizable as pleasure at all — and, more important, the pleasure you will be privileged to bring him. For the rest of Jacob’s life, I lagged one step behind Liesl: I kept dreaming he would get better, that he would return to what he had been; she, however, thought only about the life he could have given the current realities of his situation. Maybe he could go to a special school. Okay, he couldn’t go to school at all, but maybe he could be in a playgroup. Okay, he wouldn’t be able to be in a playgroup, but maybe he would be able to live a long life anyway. Okay, he wouldn’t live a long life, but maybe he could live a short happy life. Okay, he couldn’t live a short happy life, but maybe he could live a short life with dignity: we could give him that, and she would hope for nothing else for him.

I was thirty-two when he was born, thirty-six when he was diagnosed, thirty-seven when he died. It was November tenth, just less than a year after his first seizure. We had a service at the university, and even in my deadened state, I saw all the people — our parents, our friends and colleagues, and Jacob’s friends, first graders now, and their parents — who had come, and had cried.

My parents went home to New York. Liesl and I eventually went back to work. For months, we barely spoke. We couldn’t even touch each other. Part of it was exhaustion, but we were also ashamed: of our mutual failure, of the unfair but unshakable feeling that each of us could have done better, that the other person hadn’t quite risen to the occasion. A year after Jacob died, we had our first conversation about whether we should have another child, and although it began politely, it ended awfully, in recriminations: about how I had never wanted Jacob in the first place, about how she had never wanted him, about how I had failed, about how she had. We stopped talking; we apologized. We tried again. But every discussion ended the same way. They were not conversations from which it was possible to recover, and eventually, we separated.

It amazes me now how thoroughly we stopped communicating. The divorce was very clean, very easy — perhaps too clean, too easy. It made me wonder what had brought us together before Jacob — had we not had him, how and for what would we have stayed together? It was only later that I was able to remember why I had loved Liesl, what I had seen and admired in her. But at the time, we were like two people who’d had a single mission, difficult and draining, and now the mission was over, and it was time for us to part and return to our regular lives.

For many years, we didn’t speak — not out of acrimony, but out of something else. She moved to Portland. Shortly after I met Julia, I ran into Sally — she had moved as well, to Los Angeles — who was in town visiting her parents and who told me that Liesl had remarried. I told Sally to send her my best, and Sally said she would.

Sometimes I would look her up: she was teaching at the medical school at the University of Oregon. Once I had a student who looked so much like what we had always imagined Jacob would look like that I nearly called her. But I never did.

And then, one day, she called me. It had been sixteen years. She was in town for a conference, and asked if I wanted to have lunch. It was strange, both foreign and instantly familiar, to hear her voice again, that voice with which I’d had thousands of conversations, about things both important and mundane. That voice I had heard sing to Jacob as he juddered in her arms, that voice I had heard say “This is the best one yet!” as she took a picture of the day’s tower of blocks.

We met at a restaurant near the medical college’s campus that had specialized in what it had called “upscale hummus” when she was a resident and which we had considered a special treat. Now it was a place that specialized in artisanal meatballs, but it still smelled, interestingly, of hummus.

We saw each other; she looked as I had remembered her. We hugged and sat. For a while we spoke of work, of Sally and her new girlfriend, of Laurence and Gillian. She told me about her husband, an epidemiologist, and I told her about Julia. She’d had another child, a girl, when she was forty-three. She showed me a picture. She was beautiful, the girl, and looked just like Liesl. I told her so, and she smiled. “And you?” she asked. “Did you ever have another?”

I did, I said. I had just adopted one of my former students. I could see she was surprised, but she smiled, and congratulated me, and asked me about him, and how it had happened, and I told her.

“That’s great, Harold,” she said, after I’d finished. And then, “You love him a lot.”

“I do,” I said.

I would like to tell you that it was the beginning of a sort of second-stage friendship for us, that we stayed in touch and that every year, we would talk about Jacob, what he could have been. But it wasn’t, though not in a bad way. I did tell her, in that meeting, about that student of mine who had so unnerved me, and she said that she understood exactly what I meant, and that she too had had students — or had simply passed young men in the street — whom she thought she recognized from somewhere, only to realize later that she had imagined they might be our son, alive and well and away from us, no longer ours, but walking freely through the world, unaware that we might have been searching for him all this time.

I hugged her goodbye; I wished her well. I told her I cared about her. She said all the same things. Neither of us offered to stay in touch with the other; both of us, I like to think, had too much respect for the other to do so.

But over the years, at odd moments, I would hear from her. I would get an e-mail that read only “Another sighting,” and I would know what she meant, because I sent her those e-mails, too: “Harvard Square, appx 25-y-o, 6′2″, skinny, reeking of pot.” When her daughter graduated from college, she sent me an announcement, and then another for her daughter’s wedding, and a third when her first grandchild was born.

I love Julia. She was a scientist too, but she was always so different from Liesl — cheery where Liesl was composed, expressive where Liesl was interior, innocent in her delights and enthusiasms. But as much as I love her, for many years a part of me couldn’t stop feeling that I had something deeper, something more profound with Liesl. We had made someone together, and we had watched him die together. Sometimes I felt that there was something physical connecting us, a long rope that stretched between Boston and Portland: when she tugged on her end, I felt it on mine. Wherever she went, wherever I went, there it would be, that shining twined string that stretched and pulled but never broke, our every movement reminding us of what we would never have again.

After Julia and I decided we were going to adopt him, about six months before we actually asked him, I told Laurence. I knew Laurence liked him a great deal, and respected him, and thought he was good for me, and I also knew that Laurence — being Laurence — would be wary.

He was. We had a long talk. “You know how much I like him,” he said, “but really, Harold, how much do you actually know about this kid?”

“Not much,” I said. But I knew he wasn’t Laurence’s worst possible scenario: I knew he wasn’t a thief, that he wasn’t going to come kill me and Julia in our bed at night. Laurence knew this, too.

Of course, I also knew, without knowing for certain, without any real evidence, that something had gone very wrong for him at some point. That first time you were all up in Truro, I came down to the kitchen late one night and found JB sitting at the table, drawing. I always thought JB was a different person when he was alone, when he was certain he didn’t have to perform, and I sat and looked at what he was sketching — pictures of all of you — and asked him about what he was studying in grad school, and he told me about people whose work he admired, three-fourths of whom were unknown to me.

As I was leaving to go upstairs, JB called my name, and I came back. “Listen,” he said. He sounded embarrassed. “I don’t want to be rude or anything, but you should lay off asking him so many questions.”

I sat down again. “Why?”

He was uncomfortable, but determined. “He doesn’t have any parents,” he said. “I don’t know the circumstances, but he won’t even discuss it with us. Not with me, anyway.” He stopped. “I think something terrible happened to him when he was a kid.”

“What kind of terrible?” I asked.

He shook his head. “We’re not really certain, but we think it must be really bad physical abuse. Haven’t you noticed he never takes off his clothes, or how he never lets anyone touch him? I think someone must have beat him, or—” He stopped. He was loved, he was protected; he didn’t have the courage to conjure what might have followed that or, and neither did I. But I had noticed, of course — I hadn’t been asking to make him uncomfortable, but even when I saw that it did make him uncomfortable, I hadn’t been able to stop.

“Harold,” Julia would say after he left at night, “you’re making him uneasy.”

“I know, I know,” I’d say. I knew nothing good lay behind his silence, and as much as I didn’t want to hear what the story was, I wanted to hear it as well.

About a month before the adoption went through, he turned up at the house one weekend, very unexpectedly: I came in from my tennis game, and there he was on the couch, asleep. He had come to talk to me, he had come to try to confess something to me. But in the end, he couldn’t.

That night Andy called me in a panic looking for him, and when I asked Andy why he was calling him at midnight anyway, he quickly turned vague. “He’s been having a really hard time,” he said.

“Because of the adoption?” I asked.

“I can’t really say,” he said, primly — as you know, doctor-patient confidentiality was something Andy adhered to irregularly but with great dedication when he did. And then you called, and made up your own vague stories.

The next day, I asked Laurence if he could find out if he had any juvenile records in his name. I knew it was unlikely that he’d discover anything, and even if he did, the records would be sealed.

I had meant what I told him that weekend: whatever he had done didn’t matter to me. I knew him. Who he had become was the person who mattered to me. I told him that who he was before made no difference to me. But of course, this was naïve: I adopted the person he was, but along with that came the person he had been, and I didn’t know who that person was. Later, I would regret that I hadn’t made it clearer to him that that person, whoever he was, was someone I wanted as well. Later, I would wonder, incessantly, what it would have been like for him if I had found him twenty years before I did, when he was a baby. Or if not twenty, then ten, or even five. Who would he have been, and who would I have been?

Laurence’s search turned up nothing, and I was relieved and disappointed. The adoption happened; it was a wonderful day, one of the best. I never regretted it. But being his parent was never easy. He had all sorts of rules he’d constructed for himself over the decades, based on lessons someone must have taught him — what he wasn’t entitled to; what he mustn’t enjoy; what he mustn’t hope or wish for; what he mustn’t covet — and it took some years to figure out what these rules were, and longer still to figure out how to try to convince him of their falsehood. But this was very difficult: they were rules by which he had survived his life, they were rules that made the world explicable to him. He was terrifically disciplined — he was in everything — and discipline, like vigilance, is a near-impossible quality to get someone to abandon.

Equally difficult was my (and your) attempts to get him to abandon certain ideas about himself: about how he looked, and what he deserved, and what he was worth, and who he was. I have still never met anyone as neatly or severely bifurcated as he: someone who could be so utterly confident in some realms and so utterly despondent in others. I remember watching him in court once and feeling both awed and chilled. He was defending one of those pharmaceutical companies in whose care and protection he had made his name in a federal whistle-blower suit. It was a big suit, a major suit — it is on dozens of syllabi now — but he was very, very calm; I have rarely seen a litigator so calm. On the stand was the whistle-blower in question, a middle-aged woman, and he was so relentless, so dogged, so pointed, that the courtroom was silent, watching him. He never raised his voice, he was never sarcastic, but I could see that he relished it, that this very act, catching that witness in her inconsistencies — which were slight, very slight, so slight another lawyer might have missed them — was nourishing to him, that he found pleasure in it. He was a gentle person (though not to himself), gentle in manners and voice, and yet in the courtroom that gentleness burned itself away and left behind something brutal and cold. This was about seven months after the incident with Caleb, five months before the incident to follow, and as I watched him reciting the witness’s own statements back to her, never glancing down at the notepad before him, his face still and handsome and self-assured, I kept seeing him in the car that terrible night, when he had turned from me and had protected his head with his hands when I reached out to touch the side of his face, as if I were another person who would try to hurt him. His very existence was twinned: there was who he was at work and who he was outside of it; there was who he was then and who he had been; there was who he was in court and who he had been in the car, so alone with himself that I had been frightened.

That night, uptown, I had paced in circles, thinking about what I had learned about him, what I had seen, how hard I had fought to keep from howling when I heard him say the things he had — worse than Caleb, worse than what Caleb had said, was hearing that he believed it, that he was so wrong about himself. I suppose I had always known he felt this way, but hearing him say it so baldly was even worse than I could have imagined. I will never forget him saying “when you look like I do, you have to take what you can get.” I will never forget the despair and anger and hopelessness I felt when I heard him say that. I will never forget his face when he saw Caleb, when Caleb sat down next to him, and I was too slow to understand what was happening. How can you call yourself a parent if your child feels this way about himself? That was something I would never be able to recalibrate. I suppose — having never parented an adult myself — that I had never known how much was actually involved. I didn’t resent having to do it: I felt only stupid and inadequate that I hadn’t realized it earlier. After all, I had been an adult with a parent, and I had turned to my father constantly.

I called Julia, who was in Santa Fe at a conference about new diseases, and told her what had happened, and she gave a long, sad sigh. “Harold,” she began, and then stopped. We’d had conversations about what his life had been before us, and although both of us were wrong, her guesses would turn out to be more accurate than mine, although at the time I had thought them ridiculous, impossible.

“I know,” I said.

“You have to call him.”

But I had been. I called and called and the phone rang and rang.

That night I lay awake alternately worrying and having the kinds of fantasies men have: guns, hit men, vengeance. I had waking dreams in which I called Gillian’s cousin, who was a detective in New York, and had Caleb Porter arrested. I had dreams in which I called you, and you and Andy and I staked out his apartment and killed him.

The next morning I left early, before eight, and bought bagels and orange juice and went down to Greene Street. It was a gray day, soggy and humid, and I rang the buzzer three times, each for several seconds, before stepping back toward the curb, squinting up at the sixth floor.

I was about to buzz again when I heard his voice coming over the speaker: “Hello?”

“It’s me,” I said. “Can I come up?” There was no response. “I want to apologize,” I said. “I need to see you. I brought bagels.”

There was another silence. “Hello?” I asked.

“Harold,” he said, and I noticed his voice sounded funny. Muffled, as if his mouth had grown an extra set of teeth and he was speaking around them. “If I let you up, do you promise you won’t get angry and start yelling?”

I was quiet then, myself. I didn’t know what this meant. “Yes,” I said, and after a second or two, the door clicked open.

I stepped off the elevator, and for a minute, I saw nothing, just that lovely apartment with its walls of light. And then I heard my name and looked down and saw him.

I nearly dropped the bagels. I felt my limbs turn to stone. He was sitting on the ground, but leaning on his right hand for support, and as I knelt beside him, he turned his head away and held his left hand before his face as if to shield himself.

“He took the spare set of keys,” he said, and his face was so swollen that his lips barely had room to move. “I came home last night and he was here.” He turned toward me then, and his face was an animal skinned and turned inside out and left in the heat, its organs melting together into a pudding of flesh: all I could see of his eyes were their long line of lashes, a smudge of black against his cheeks, which were a horrible blue, the blue of decay, of mold. I thought he might have been crying then, but he didn’t cry. “I’m sorry, Harold, I’m so sorry.”

I made sure I wasn’t going to start shouting — not at him, just shouting to express something I couldn’t say — before I spoke to him. “We’re going to get you better,” I said. “We’re going to call the police, and then—”

“No,” he said. “Not the police.”

“We have to,” I said. “Jude. You have to.”

“No,” he said. “I won’t report it. I can’t”—he took a breath—“I can’t take the humiliation. I can’t.”

“All right,” I said, thinking that I would discuss this with him later. “But what if he comes back?”

He shook his head, just slightly. “He won’t,” he said, in his new mumbly voice.

I was beginning to feel light-headed from the effort of suppressing the need to run out and find Caleb and kill him, from the effort of accepting that someone had done this to him, from seeing him, someone who was so dignified, who made certain to always be composed and neat, so beaten, so helpless. “Where’s your chair?” I asked him.

He made a sound like a bleat, and said something so quietly I had to ask him to repeat it, though I could see how much pain it caused him to speak. “Down the stairs,” he finally said, and this time, I was certain he was crying, although he couldn’t even open his eyes enough for tears. He began to shake.

I was shaking myself by this point. I left him there, sitting on the floor, and went to retrieve his wheelchair, which had been thrown down the stairs so hard that it had bounced off the far wall and was halfway down to the fourth floor. On the way back to him, I noticed the floor was tacky with something, and saw too a large bright splash of vomit near the dining-room table, congealed into paste.

“Put your arm around my neck,” I told him, and he did, and as I lifted him, he cried out, and I apologized and settled him in his chair. As I did, I noticed that the back of his shirt — he was wearing one of those gray thermal-weave sweatshirts he liked to sleep in — was bloody, with new and old blood, and the back of his pants were bloody as well.

I stepped away from him and called Andy, told him I had an emergency. I was lucky: Andy had stayed in the city that weekend, and he would meet us at his office in twenty minutes.

I drove us there. I helped him out of the car — he seemed unwilling to use his left arm, and when I had him stand, he held his right leg aloft, so that it wouldn’t touch the ground, and made a strange noise, a bird’s noise, as I wrapped my arm around his chest to lower him into the chair — and when Andy opened the door and saw him, I thought he was going to throw up.

“Jude,” Andy said once he could speak, crouching beside him, but he didn’t respond.

Once we’d installed him in an examination room, we spoke in the receptionist’s area. I told him about Caleb. I told him what I thought had happened. I told him what I thought was wrong: that I thought he had broken his left arm, that something was wrong with his right leg, that he was bleeding and where, that the floors had blood on them. I told him he wouldn’t report it to the police.

“Okay,” Andy said. He was in shock, I could see. He kept swallowing. “Okay, okay.” He stopped and rubbed at his eyes. “Will you wait here for a little while?”

He came out from the examining room forty minutes later. “I’m going to take him to the hospital to get some X-rays,” he said. “I’m pretty sure his left wrist is broken, and some of his ribs. And if his leg is—” He stopped. “If it is, this is really going to be a problem,” he said. He seemed to have forgotten I was in the room. Then he recalled himself. “You should go,” he said. “I’ll call you when I’m almost done.”

“I’ll stay,” I said.

“Don’t, Harold,” he said, and then, more gently, “you have to call his office; there’s no way he can go into work this week.” He paused. “He said — he said you should tell them he was in a car accident.”

As I was leaving, he said, quietly, “He told me he was playing tennis.”

“I know,” I said. I felt bad for us, then, for being so stupid. “He told me that, too.”

I went back to Greene Street with his keys. For a long time, many minutes, I just stood there in the doorway, looking at the space. Some of the cloud cover had parted, but it didn’t take much sun — even with the shades drawn — to make that apartment feel light. I had always thought it a hopeful place, with its high ceilings, its cleanliness, its visibility, its promise of transparency.

This was his apartment, and so of course there were lots of cleaning products, and I started cleaning. I mopped the floors; the sticky areas were dried blood. It was difficult to distinguish because the floors were so dark, but I could smell it, a dense, wild scent that the nose instantly recognizes. He had clearly tried to clean the bathroom, but here too there were swipes of blood on the marble, dried into the rusty pinks of sunsets; these were difficult to remove, but I did the best I could. I looked in the trash cans — for evidence, I suppose, but there was nothing: they had all been cleaned and emptied. His clothes from the night before were scattered near the living-room sofa. The shirt was so ripped, clawed at almost, that I threw it away; the suit I took to be dry-cleaned. Otherwise, the apartment was very tidy. I had entered the bedroom with dread, expecting to find lamps broken, clothes strewn about, but it was so unruffled that you might have thought that no one lived there at all, that it was a model house, an advertisement for an enviable life. The person who lived here would have parties, and would be carefree and sure of himself, and at night he would raise the shades and he and his friends would dance, and people passing by on Greene Street, on Mercer, would look up at that box of light floating in the sky, and imagine its inhabitants above unhappiness, or fear, or any concerns at all.

I e-mailed Lucien, whom I’d met once, and who was a friend of a friend of Laurence’s, actually, and said there had been a terrible car accident, and that Jude was in the hospital. I went to the grocery store and bought things that would be easy for him to eat: soups, puddings, juices. I looked up Caleb Porter’s address, and repeated it to myself — Fifty West Twenty-ninth Street, apartment 17J — until I had it memorized. I called the locksmith and said it was an emergency and that I needed to have all the locks changed: front door, elevator, apartment door. I opened the windows to let the damp air carry away the fragrance of blood, of disinfectant. I left a message with the law school secretary saying there was a family emergency and I wouldn’t be able to teach that week. I left messages for a couple of my colleagues asking if they could cover for me. I thought about calling my old law school friend, who worked at the D.A.’s office. I would explain what had happened; I wouldn’t use his name. I would ask how we could have Caleb Porter arrested.

“But you’re saying the victim won’t report it?” Avi would say.

“Well, yes,” I’d have to admit.

“Can he be convinced?”

“I don’t think so,” I’d have to admit.

“Well, Harold,” Avi would say, perplexed and irritated. “I don’t know what to tell you, then. You know as well as I do that I can’t do anything if the victim won’t speak.” I remembered thinking, as I very rarely thought, what a flimsy thing the law was, so dependent on contingencies, a system of so little comfort, of so little use to those who needed its protections the most.

And then I went into his bathroom and felt under the sink and found his bag of razors and cotton pads and threw it down the incinerator. I hated that bag, I hated that I knew I would find it.

Seven years before, he had come to the house in Truro in early May. It had been a spontaneous visit: I was up there trying to write, there were cheap tickets, I told him he should come, and to my surprise — he never left the offices of Rosen Pritchard, even then — he did. He was happy that day, and so was I. I left him chopping a head of purple cabbage in the kitchen and took the plumber upstairs, where he was installing a new toilet in our bathroom, and then on his way out asked him if he could come take a look at the sink in the downstairs bathroom, the one in Jude’s room, which had been leaking.

He did, tightened something, changed something else, and then, as he was emerging from the cabinet, handed something to me. “This was taped under the basin,” he said.

“What is it?” I asked, taking the package from him.

He shrugged. “Dunno. But it was stuck there pretty good, with duct tape.” He repacked his things as I stood there dumbly, staring at the bag, and gave me a wave and left; I heard him say goodbye to Jude as he walked out, whistling.

I looked at the bag. It was a regular, pint-size clear plastic bag, and inside it was a stack of ten razor blades, and individually packaged alcohol wipes, and pieces of gauze, folded into springy squares, and bandages. I stood there, holding this bag, and I knew what it was for, even though I had never seen proof of it, and had indeed never seen anything like it. But I knew.

I went to the kitchen, and there he was, washing off a bowlful of fingerlings, still happy. He was even humming something, very softly, which he did only when he was very contented, like how a cat purrs to itself when it’s alone in the sun. “You should’ve told me you needed help installing the toilet,” he said, not looking up. “I could have done it for you and saved you a bill.” He knew how to do all those things: plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, gardening. We once went to Laurence’s so he could explain to Laurence how, exactly, he could safely unearth the young crabapple tree from one corner of his backyard and successfully move it to another, one that got more sun.

For a while I stood there watching him. I felt so many things at once that together, they combined to make nothing, a numbness, an absence of feeling caused by a surplus of feeling. Finally I said his name, and he looked up. “What’s this?” I asked him, and held the bag in front of him.

He went very still, one hand suspended above the bowl, and I remember watching how little droplets of water beaded and dripped off the ends of his fingertips, as if he had slashed himself with a knife and was bleeding water. He opened his mouth, and shut it.

“I’m sorry, Harold,” he said, very softly. He lowered his hand, and dried it, slowly, on the dish towel.

That made me angry. “I’m not asking you to apologize, Jude,” I told him. “I’m asking you what this is. And don’t say ‘It’s a bag with razors in it.’ What is this? Why did you tape it beneath your sink?”

He stared at me for a long time with that look he had — I know you know the one — where you can see him receding even as he looks at you, where you can see the gates within him closing and locking themselves, the bridges being cranked above the moat. “You know what it’s for,” he finally said, still very quietly.

“I want to hear you say it,” I told him.

“I just need it,” he said.

“Tell me what you do with these,” I said, and watched him.

He looked down into the bowl of potatoes. “Sometimes I need to cut myself,” he said, finally. “I’m sorry, Harold.”

And suddenly I was panicked, and my panic made me irrational. “What the fuck does that mean?” I asked him — I may have even shouted it.

He was moving backward now, toward the sink, as if I might lunge at him and he wanted some distance. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry, Harold.”

“How often is sometimes?” I asked.

He too was panicking now, I could see. “I don’t know,” he said. “It varies.”

“Well, estimate. Give me a ballpark.”

“I don’t know,” he said, desperate, “I don’t know. A few times a week, I guess.”

“A few times a week!” I said, and then stopped. Suddenly I had to get out of there. I took my coat from the chair and crammed the bag into its inside pocket. “You’d better be here when I get back,” I told him, and left. (He was a bolter: whenever he thought Julia or I were displeased with him, he would try as quickly as he could to get out of our sight, as if he were an offending object that needed to be removed.)

I walked downstairs, toward the beach, and then through the dunes, feeling the sort of rage that comes with the realization of one’s gross inadequacy, of knowing for certain that you are at fault. It was the first time I realized that as much as he was two people around us, so were we two people around him: we saw of him what we wanted, and allowed ourselves not to see anything else. We were so ill-equipped. Most people are easy: their unhappinesses are our unhappinesses, their sorrows are understandable, their bouts of self-loathing are fast-moving and negotiable. But his were not. We didn’t know how to help him because we lacked the imagination needed to diagnose the problems. But this is making excuses.

By the time I returned to the house it was almost dark, and I could see, through the window, his outline moving about in the kitchen. I sat on a chair on the porch and wished Julia were there, that she wasn’t in England with her father.

The back door opened. “Dinner,” he said, quietly, and I got up to go inside.

He’d made one of my favorite meals: the sea bass I had bought the day before, poached, and potatoes roasted the way he knew I liked them, with lots of thyme and carrots, and a cabbage salad that I knew would have the mustard-seed dressing I liked. But I didn’t have an appetite for any of it. He served me, and then himself, and sat.

“This looks wonderful,” I told him. “Thank you for making it.” He nodded. We both looked at our plates, at his lovely meal that neither of us would eat.

“Jude,” I said, “I have to apologize. I’m really sorry — I never should have run out on you like that.”

“It’s all right,” he said, “I understand.”

“No,” I told him. “It was wrong of me. I was just so upset.”

He looked back down. “Do you know why I was upset?” I asked him.

“Because,” he began, “because I brought that into your house.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not why. Jude, this house isn’t just my house, or Julia’s: it’s yours, too. I want you to feel you can bring anything you’d have at home here.

“I’m upset because you’re doing this terrible thing to yourself.” He didn’t look up. “Do your friends know you do this? Does Andy?”

He nodded, slightly. “Willem knows,” he said, in a low voice. “And Andy.”

“And what does Andy say about this?” I asked, thinking, Goddammit, Andy.

“He says — he says I should see a therapist.”

“And have you?” He shook his head, and I felt rage build up in me again. “Why not?” I asked him, but he didn’t say anything. “Is there a bag like this in Cambridge?” I said, and after a silence, he looked up at me and nodded again.

“Jude,” I said, “why do you do this to yourself?”

For a long time, he was quiet, and I was quiet too. I listened to the sea. Finally, he said, “A few reasons.”

“Like what?”

“Sometimes it’s because I feel so awful, or ashamed, and I need to make physical what I feel,” he began, and glanced at me before looking down again. “And sometimes it’s because I feel so many things and I need to feel nothing at all — it helps clear them away. And sometimes it’s because I feel happy, and I have to remind myself that I shouldn’t.”

“Why?” I asked him once I could speak again, but he only shook his head and didn’t answer, and I too went silent.

He took a breath. “Look,” he said, suddenly, decisively, looking at me directly, “if you want to dissolve the adoption, I’ll understand.”

I was so stunned that I was angry — that hadn’t even occurred to me. I was about to bark something back when I looked at him, at how he was trying to be brave, and saw that he was terrified: He really did think this was something I might want to do. He really would understand if I said I did. He was expecting it. Later, I realized that in those years just after the adoption, he was always wondering how permanent it was, always wondering what he would eventually do that would make me disown him.

“I would never,” I said, as firmly as I could.

That night, I tried to talk to him. He was ashamed of what he did, I could see that, but he genuinely couldn’t understand why I cared so much, why it so upset you and me and Andy. “It’s not fatal,” he kept saying, as if that were the concern, “I know how to control it.” He wouldn’t see a shrink, but he couldn’t tell me why. He hated doing it, I could tell, but he also couldn’t conceive of a life without it. “I need it,” he kept saying. “I need it. It makes things right.” But surely, I told him, there was a time in your life when you didn’t have it? and he shook his head. “I need it,” he repeated. “It helps me, Harold, you have to believe me on this one.”

“Why do you need it?” I asked.

He shook his head. “It helps me control my life,” he said, finally.

At the end, there was nothing more I could say. “I’m keeping this,” I said, holding the bag up, and he winced, and nodded. “Jude,” I said, and he looked back at me. “If I throw this away, are you going to make another one?”

He was very quiet, then, looking at his plate. “Yes,” he said.

I threw it out anyway, of course, stuffing it deep into a garbage bag that I carried to the Dumpster at the end of the road. We cleaned the kitchen in silence — we were both exhausted, and neither of us had eaten anything — and then he went to bed, and I did as well. In those days I was still trying to be respectful of his personal space, or I’d have grabbed him and held him, but I didn’t.

But as I was lying awake in bed, I thought of him, his long fingers craving the slice of the razor between them, and went downstairs to the kitchen. I got the big mixing bowl from the drawer beneath the oven, and began loading it with everything sharp I could find: knives and scissors and corkscrews and lobster picks. And then I took it with me to the living room, where I sat in my chair, the one facing the sea, clasping the bowl in my arms.

I woke to a creaking. The kitchen floorboards were noisy, and I sat up in the dark, willing myself to stay silent, and listened to his walk, the distinctive soft stamp of his left foot followed by the swish of his right, and then a drawer opening and, a few seconds later, shutting. Then another drawer, then another, until he had opened and shut every drawer, every cupboard. He hadn’t turned on the light — there was moonlight enough — and I could envision him standing in the newly blunt world of the kitchen, understanding that I’d taken everything from him: I had even taken the forks. I sat, holding my breath, listening to the silence from the kitchen. For a moment it was almost as if we were having a conversation, a conversation without words or sight. And then, finally, I heard him turn and his footsteps retreating, back to his room.

When I got home to Cambridge the next night, I went to his bathroom and found another bag, a double of the Truro one, and threw it away. But I never found another of those bags again in either Cambridge or Truro. He must have found some other place to hide them, someplace I never discovered, because he couldn’t have carried those blades back and forth on the plane. But whenever I was at Greene Street, I would find an opportunity to sneak off to his bathroom. Here, he kept the bag in his same old hiding place, and every time, I would steal it, and shove it into my pocket, and then throw it away after I left. He must have known I did this, of course, but we never discussed it. Every time it would be replaced. Until he learned he had to hide it from you as well, there was not a single time I checked that I failed to find it. Still, I never stopped checking: whenever I was at the apartment, or later, the house upstate, or the flat in London, I would go to his bathroom and look for that bag. I never found it again. Malcolm’s bathrooms were so simple, so clean-lined, and yet even in them he had found somewhere to conceal it, somewhere I would never again discover.

Over the years, I tried to talk about it with him. The day after I found the first bag, I called Andy and started yelling at him, and Andy, uncharacteristically, let me. “I know,” he said. “I know.” And then: “Harold, I’m not asking sarcastically or rhetorically. I want you to tell me: What should I do?” And of course, I didn’t know what to tell him.

You were the one who got furthest with him. But I know you blamed yourself. I blamed myself, too. Because I did something worse than accepting it: I tolerated it. I chose to forget he was doing this, because it was too difficult to find a solution, and because I wanted to enjoy him as the person he wanted us to see, even though I knew better. I told myself that I was letting him keep his dignity, while choosing to forget that for thousands of nights, he sacrificed it. I would rebuke him and try to reason with him, even though I knew those methods didn’t work, and even knowing that, I didn’t try something else: something more radical, something that might alienate me from him. I knew I was being a coward, because I never told Julia about that bag, I never told her what I had learned about him that night in Truro. Eventually she found out, and it was one of the very few times I’d seen her so angry. “How could you let this keep happening?” she asked me. “How could you let this go on for this long?” She never said she held me directly responsible, but I knew she did, and how could she not? I did, too.

And now here I was in his apartment, where a few hours ago, while I was lying awake, he was being beaten. I sat down on the sofa with my phone in my hand to wait for Andy’s call, telling me that he was ready to be returned to me, that he was ready to be released into my care. I opened the shade across from me and sat back down and stared into the steely sky until each cloud blurred into the next, until finally I could see nothing at all, only a haze of gray as the day slowly slurred into night.

Andy called at six that evening, nine hours after I’d dropped him off, and met me at the door. “He’s asleep in the examining room,” he said. And then: “Broken left wrist, four broken ribs, thank Christ no broken bones in his legs. No concussion, thank god. Fractured coccyx. Dislocated shoulder, which I reset. Bruising all up and down his back and torso; he was kicked, clearly. But no internal bleeding. His face looks worse than it is: his eyes and nose are fine, no breaks, and I iced the bruising, which you have to do, too — regularly.

“Lacerations on his legs. This is what I’m worried about. I’ve written you a scrip for antibiotics; I’m going to start him on a low dosage as a preventative measure, but if he mentions feeling hot, or chilled, you have to let me know right away — the last thing he needs is an infection there. His back is stripped—”

“What do you mean, ‘stripped’?” I asked him.

He looked impatient. “Flayed,” he said. “He was whipped, probably with a belt, but he wouldn’t tell me. I bandaged them, but I’m giving you this antibiotic ointment and you’re going to need to keep the wounds cleaned and change the dressings starting tomorrow. He’s not going to want to let you, but it’s too fucking bad. I wrote down all the instructions in here.”

He handed me a plastic bag; I looked inside: bottles of pills, rolls of bandages, tubes of cream. “These,” said Andy, plucking something out, “are painkillers, and he hates them. But he’s going to need them; make him take a pill every twelve hours: once in the morning, once at night. They’re going to make him woozy, so don’t let him outside on his own, don’t let him lift anything. They’re also going to make him nauseated, but you have to make him eat: something simple, like rice and broth. Try to make him stay in his chair; he’s not going to want to move around much anyway.

“I called his dentist and made an appointment for Monday at nine; he’s lost a couple of teeth. The most important thing is that he sleeps as much as he can; I’ll stop by tomorrow afternoon and every night this week. Do not let him go to work, although — I don’t think he’ll want to.”

He stopped as abruptly as he’d started, and we stood there in silence. “I can’t fucking believe this,” Andy said, finally. “That fucking asshole. I want to find that fuck and kill him.”

“I know,” I said. “Me too.”

He shook his head. “He wouldn’t let me report it,” he said. “I begged him.”

“I know,” I said. “Me too.”

It was a shock anew to see him, and he shook his head when I tried to help him into the chair, and so we stood and watched as he lowered himself into the seat, still in his same clothes, the blood now dried into rusty continents. “Thank you, Andy,” he said, very quietly. “I’m sorry,” and Andy placed his palm on the back of his head and said nothing.

By the time we got back to Greene Street, it was dark. His wheelchair was, as you know, one of those very lightweight, elegant ones, one so aggressive about its user’s self-sufficiency that there were no handles on it, because it was assumed that the person in it would never allow himself the indignity of being pushed by another. You had to grab the top of the backrest, which was very low, and guide the chair that way. I stopped in the entryway to turn on the lights, and we both blinked.

“You cleaned,” he said.

“Well, yes,” I said. “Not as good a job as you would’ve done, I’m afraid.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“Of course,” I said. We were quiet. “Why don’t I help you get changed and then you can have something to eat?”

He shook his head. “No, thank you. But I’m not hungry. And I can do it myself.” Now he was subdued, controlled: the person I had seen earlier was gone, caged once more in his labyrinth in some little-opened cellar. He was always polite, but when he was trying to protect himself or assert his competency, he became more so: polite and slightly remote, as if he was an explorer among a dangerous tribe, and was being careful not to find himself too involved in their goings-on.

I sighed, inwardly, and took him to his room; I told him I’d be here if he needed me, and he nodded. I sat on the floor outside the closed door and waited: I could hear the faucets turning on and off, and then his steps, and then a long period of silence, and then the sigh of the bed as he sat on it.

When I went in, he was under the covers, and I sat down next to him, on the edge of the bed. “Are you sure you don’t want to eat anything?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, and after a pause, he looked at me. He could open his eyes now, and against the white of the sheets, he was the loamy, fecund colors of camouflage: the jungle-green of his eyes, and the streaky gold-and-brown of his hair, and his face, less blue than it had been this morning and now a dark shimmery bronze. “Harold, I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I yelled at you last night, and I’m sorry I cause so many problems for you. I’m sorry that—”

“Jude,” I interrupted him, “you don’t need to be sorry. I’m sorry. I wish I could make this better for you.”

He closed his eyes, and opened them, and looked away from me. “I’m so ashamed,” he said, softly.

I stroked his hair, then, and he let me. “You don’t have to be,” I said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” I wanted to cry, but I thought he might, and if he wanted to, I would try not to. “You know that, right?” I asked him. “You know this wasn’t your fault, you know you didn’t deserve this?” He said nothing, so I kept asking, and asking, until finally he gave a small nod. “You know that guy is a fucking asshole, right?” I asked him, and he turned his face away. “You know you’re not to blame, right?” I asked him. “You know that this says nothing about you and what you’re worth?”

“Harold,” he said. “Please.” And I stopped, although really, I should have kept going.

For a while we said nothing. “Can I ask you a question?” I said, and after a second or two, he nodded again. I didn’t even know what I was going to say until I was saying it, and as I was saying it, I didn’t know where it had come from, other than I suppose it was something I had always known and had never wanted to ask, because I dreaded his answer: I knew what it would be, and I didn’t want to hear it. “Were you sexually abused as a child?”

I could sense, rather than see, him stiffen, and under my hand, I could feel him shudder. He still hadn’t looked at me, and now he rolled to his left side, moving his bandaged arm to the pillow next to him. “Jesus, Harold,” he said, finally.

I withdrew my hand. “How old were you when it happened?” I asked.

There was a pause, and then he pushed his face into the pillow. “Harold,” he said, “I’m really tired. I need to sleep.”

I put my hand on his shoulder, which jumped, but I held on. Beneath my palm I could feel his muscles tense, could feel that shiver running through him. “It’s okay,” I told him. “You don’t have anything to be ashamed of,” I said. “It’s not your fault, Jude, do you understand me?” But he was pretending to be asleep, though I could still feel that vibration, everything in his body alert and alarmed.

I sat there for a while longer, watching him hold himself rigid. Finally I left, closing the door behind me.

I stayed for the rest of the week. You called him that night, and I answered his phone and lied to you, said something useless about an accident, heard the worry in your voice and wanted so badly to tell you the truth. The next day, you called again and I listened outside his door as he lied to you as well: “A car accident. No. No, not serious. What? I was up at Richard’s house for the weekend. I nodded off and hit a tree. I don’t know; I was tired — I’ve been working a lot. No, a rental. Because mine’s in the shop. It’s not a big deal. No, I’m going to be fine. No, you know Harold — he’s just overreacting. I promise. I swear. No, he’s in Rome until the end of next month. Willem: I promise. It’s fine! Okay. I know. Okay. I promise; I will. You too. Bye.”

Mostly, he was meek, tractable. He ate his soup every morning, he took his pills. They made him logy. Every morning he was in his study, working, but by eleven he was on the couch, sleeping. He slept through lunch, and all afternoon, and I only woke him for dinner. You called him every night. Julia called him, too: I always tried to eavesdrop, but couldn’t hear much of their conversations, only that he didn’t say much, which meant Julia must have been saying a great deal. Malcolm came over several times, and the Henry Youngs and Elijah and Rhodes visited as well. JB sent over a drawing of an iris; I had never known him to draw flowers before. He fought me, as Andy had predicted, on the dressings on his legs and back, which he wouldn’t, no matter how I pleaded with and shouted at him, let me see. He let Andy, and I heard Andy say to him, “You’re going to need to come uptown every other day and let me change these. I mean it.”

“Fine,” he snapped.

Lucien came to see him, but he was asleep in his study. “Don’t wake him,” he said, and then, peeking in at him, “Jesus.” We talked for a bit, and he told me about how admired he was at the firm, which is something you never get tired of hearing about your child, whether he is four and in preschool and excels with clay, or is forty and in a white-shoe firm and excels in the protection of corporate criminals. “I’d say you must be proud of him, but I think I know your politics too well for that.” He grinned. He liked Jude quite a bit, I could tell, and I found myself feeling slightly jealous, and then stingy for feeling jealous at all.

“No,” I said. “I am proud of him.” I felt bad then, for my years of scolding him about Rosen Pritchard, the one place where he felt safe, the one place he felt truly weightless, the one place where his fears and insecurities banished themselves.

By the following Monday, the day before I left, he looked better: his cheeks were the color of mustard, but the swelling had subsided, and you could see the bones of his face again. It seemed to hurt him a little less to breathe, a little less to speak, and his voice was less breathy, more like itself. Andy had let him halve his morning pain dosage, and he was more alert, though not exactly livelier. We played a game of chess, which he won.

“I’ll be back on Thursday evening,” I told him over dinner. I only had classes on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays that semester.

“No,” he said, “you don’t have to. Thank you, Harold, but really — I’ll be fine.”

“I already bought the ticket,” I said. “And anyway, Jude — you don’t always have to say no, you know. Remember? Acceptance?” He didn’t say anything else.

So what else can I tell you? He went back to work that Wednesday, despite Andy’s suggestion he stay home through the end of the week. And despite his threats, Andy came over every night to change his dressings and inspect his legs. Julia returned, and every weekend in October, she or I would go to New York and stay with him at Greene Street. Malcolm stayed with him during the week. He didn’t like it, I could tell, but we decided we didn’t care what he liked, not in this matter.

He got better. His legs didn’t get infected. Neither did his back. He was lucky, Andy kept saying. He regained the weight he had lost. By the time you came home, in early November, he was almost healed. By Thanksgiving, which we had that year at the apartment in New York so he wouldn’t have to travel, his cast had been removed and he was walking again. I watched him closely over dinner, watched him talking with Laurence and laughing with one of Laurence’s daughters, but couldn’t stop thinking of him that night, his face when Caleb grabbed his wrist, his expression of pain and shame and fear. I thought of the day I had learned he was using a wheelchair at all: it was shortly after I had found the bag in Truro and was in the city for a conference, and he had come into the restaurant in his chair, and I had been shocked. “Why did you never tell me?” I asked, and he had pretended to be surprised, acted like he thought he had. “No,” I said, “you hadn’t,” and finally he had told me that he hadn’t wanted me to see him that way, as someone weak and helpless. “I would never think of you that way,” I’d told him, and although I didn’t think I did, it did change how I thought of him; it made me remember that what I knew of him was just a tiny fraction of who he was.

It sometimes seemed as if that week had been a haunting, one that only Andy and I had witnessed. In the months that followed, someone would occasionally joke about it: his poor driving, his Wimbledon ambitions, and he would laugh back, make some self-deprecating comment. He could never look at me in those moments; I was a reminder of what had really happened, a reminder of what he saw as his degradation.

But later, I would recognize how that incident had taken something large from him, how it had changed him: into someone else, or maybe into someone he had once been. I would see the months before Caleb as a period in which he was healthier than he’d been: he had allowed me to hug him when I saw him, and when I touched him — putting an arm around him as I passed him in the kitchen — he would let me; his hand would go on chopping the carrots before him in the same steady rhythm. It had taken twenty years for that to happen. But after Caleb, he regressed. At Thanksgiving, I had gone toward him to embrace him, but he had quickly stepped to the left — just a bit, just enough so that my arms closed around air, and there had been a second in which we looked at each other, and I knew that whatever I had been allowed just a few months ago I would be no longer: I knew I would have to start all over. I knew that he had decided that Caleb was right, that he was disgusting, that he had, somehow, deserved what had happened to him. And that was the worst thing, the most reprehensible thing. He had decided to believe Caleb, to believe him over us, because Caleb confirmed what he had always thought and always been taught, and it is always easier to believe what you already think than to try to change your mind.

Later, when things got bad, I would wonder what I could have said or done. Sometimes I would think that there was nothing I could have said — there was something that might have helped, but none of us saying it could have convinced him. I still had those fantasies: the gun, the posse, Fifty West Twenty-ninth Street, apartment 17J. But this time we wouldn’t shoot. We would take Caleb Porter by each arm, lead him down to the car, drive him to Greene Street, drag him upstairs. We would tell him what to say, and warn him that we would be just outside the door, waiting in the elevator, the pistol cocked and pointed at his back. And from behind the door, we’d listen to what he said: I didn’t mean any of it. I was completely wrong. The things I did, but more than that, the things I said, they were meant for someone else. Believe me, because you believed me before: you are beautiful and perfect, and I never meant what I said. I was wrong, I was mistaken, no one could ever have been more wrong than I was.

3

EVERY AFTERNOON AT four, after the last of his classes and before the first of his chores, he had a free period of an hour, but on Wednesdays, he was given two hours. Once, he had spent those afternoons reading or exploring the grounds, but recently, ever since Brother Luke had told him he could, he had spent them all at the greenhouse. If Luke was there, he would help the brother water the plants, memorizing their names—Miltonia spectabilis, Alocasia amazonica, Asystasia gangetica—so he could repeat them back to the brother and be praised. “I think the Heliconia vellerigera’s grown,” he’d say, petting its furred bracts, and Brother Luke would look at him and shake his head. “Unbelievable,” he’d say. “My goodness, what a great memory you have,” and he’d smile to himself, proud to have impressed the brother.

If Brother Luke wasn’t there, he instead passed the time playing with his things. The brother had shown him how if he moved aside a stack of plastic planters in the far corner of the room, there was a small grate, and if you removed the grate, there was a small hole beneath, big enough to hold a plastic garbage bag of his possessions. So he had unearthed his twigs and stones from under the tree and moved his haul to the greenhouse, where it was warm and humid, and where he could examine his objects without losing feeling in his hands. Over the months, Luke had added to his collection: he gave him a wafer of sea glass that the brother said was the color of his eyes, and a metal whistle that had a round little ball within it that jangled like a bell when you shook it, and a small cloth doll of a man wearing a woolen burgundy top and a belt trimmed with tiny turquoise-colored beads that the brother said had been made by a Navajo Indian, and had been his when he was a boy. Two months ago, he had opened his bag and discovered that Luke had left him a candy cane, and although it had been February, he had been thrilled: he had always wanted to taste a candy cane, and he broke it into sections, sucking each into a spear point before biting down on it, gnashing the sugar into his molars.

The brother had told him that the next day he had to make sure to come right away, as soon as classes ended, because he had a surprise for him. All day he had been antsy and distracted, and although two of the brothers had hit him — Michael, across the face; Peter, across the backside — he had barely noticed. Only Brother David’s warning, that he would be made to do extra chores instead of having his free hours if he didn’t start concentrating, made him focus, and somehow, he finished the day.

As soon as he was outside, out of view of the monastery building, he ran. It was spring, and he couldn’t help but feel happy: he loved the cherry trees, with their froth of pink blossoms, and the tulips, their glossed, improbable colors, and the new grass, soft and tender beneath him. Sometimes, when he was alone, he would take the Navajo doll and a twig he had found that was shaped like a person outside and sit on the grass and play with them. He made up voices for them both, whispering to himself, because Brother Michael had said that boys didn’t play with dolls, and that he was getting too old to play, anyway.

He wondered if Brother Luke was watching him run. One Wednesday, Brother Luke had said, “I saw you running up here today,” and as he was opening his mouth to apologize, the brother had continued, “Boy, what a great runner you are! You’re so fast!” and he had been literally speechless, until the brother, laughing, told him he should close his mouth.

When he stepped inside the greenhouse, there was no one there. “Hello?” he called out. “Brother Luke?”

“In here,” he heard, and he turned toward the little room that was appended to the greenhouse, the one stocked with the supplies of fertilizer and bottles of ionized water and a hanging rack of clippers and shears and gardening scissors and the floor stacked with bags of mulch. He liked this room, with its woodsy, mossy smell, and he went toward it eagerly and knocked.

When he walked in, he was at first disoriented. The room was dark and still, but for a small flame that Brother Luke was bent over on the floor. “Come closer,” said the brother, and he did.

“Closer,” the brother said, and laughed. “Jude, it’s okay.”

So he went closer, and the brother held something up and said “Surprise!” and he saw it was a muffin, a muffin with a lit wooden match thrust into its center.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s your birthday, right?” asked the brother. “And this is your birthday cake. Go on, make a wish; blow out the candle.”

“It’s for me?” he asked, as the flame guttered.

“Yes, it’s for you,” said the brother. “Hurry, make a wish.”

He had never had a birthday cake before, but he had read about them and he knew what to do. He shut his eyes and wished, and then opened them and blew out the match, and the room went completely dark.

“Congratulations,” Luke said, and turned on the light. He handed him the muffin, and when he tried to offer the brother some of it, Luke shook his head: “It’s yours.” He ate the muffin, which had little blueberries and which he thought was the best thing he had ever tasted, so sweet and cakey, and the brother watched him and smiled.

“And I have something else for you,” said Luke, and reached behind him, and handed him a package, a large flat box wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. “Go on, open it,” Luke said, and he did, removing the newspaper carefully so it could be reused. The box was plain faded cardboard, and when he opened it, he found it contained an assortment of round pieces of wood. Each piece was notched on both ends, and Brother Luke showed him how the pieces could be slotted within one another to build boxes, and then how he could lay twigs across the top to make a sort of roof. Many years later, when he was in college, he would see a box of these logs in the window of a toy store, and would realize that his gift had been missing parts: a red-peaked triangular structure to build a roof, and the flat green planks that lay across it. But in the moment, it had left him mute with joy, until he had remembered his manners and thanked the brother again and again.

“You’re welcome,” said Luke. “After all, you don’t turn eight every day, do you?”

“No,” he admitted, smiling wildly at the gift, and for the rest of his free period, he had built houses and boxes with the pieces while Brother Luke watched him, sometimes reaching over to tuck his hair behind his ears.

He spent every minute he could with the brother in the greenhouse. With Luke, he was a different person. To the other brothers, he was a burden, a collection of problems and deficiencies, and every day brought a new detailing of what was wrong with him: he was too dreamy, too emotional, too energetic, too fanciful, too curious, too impatient, too skinny, too playful. He should be more grateful, more graceful, more controlled, more respectful, more patient, more dexterous, more disciplined, more reverent. But to Brother Luke, he was smart, he was quick, he was clever, he was lively. Brother Luke never told him he asked too many questions, or told him that there were certain things he would have to wait to know until he grew up. The first time Brother Luke tickled him, he had gasped and then laughed, uncontrollably, and Brother Luke had laughed with him, the two of them tussling on the floor beneath the orchids. “You have such a lovely laugh,” Brother Luke said, and “What a great smile you have, Jude,” and “What a joyful person you are,” until it was as if the greenhouse was someplace bewitched, somewhere that transformed him into the boy Brother Luke saw, someone funny and bright, someone people wanted to be around, someone better and different than he actually was.

When things were bad with the other brothers, he imagined himself in the greenhouse, playing with his things or talking to Brother Luke, and repeated back to himself the things Brother Luke said to him. Sometimes things were so bad he wasn’t able to go to dinner, but the next day, he would always find something in his room that Brother Luke had left him: a flower, or a red leaf, or a particularly bulbous acorn, which he had begun collecting and storing under the grate.

The other brothers had noticed he was spending all his time with Brother Luke and, he sensed, disapproved. “Be careful around Luke,” warned Brother Pavel of all people, Brother Pavel who hit him and yelled at him. “He’s not who you think he is.” But he ignored him. They were none of them who they said they were.

One day he went to the greenhouse late. It had been a very hard week; he had been beaten very badly; it hurt him to walk. He had been visited by both Father Gabriel and Brother Matthew the previous evening, and every muscle hurt. It was a Friday; Brother Michael had unexpectedly released him early that day, and he had thought he might go play with his logs. As he always did after those sessions, he wanted to be alone — he wanted to sit in that warm space with his toys and pretend he was far away.

No one was in the greenhouse when he arrived, and he lifted the grate and took out his Indian doll and the box of logs, but even as he was playing with them, he found himself crying. He was trying to cry less — it always made him feel worse, and the brothers hated it and punished him for it — but he couldn’t help himself. He had at least learned to cry silently, and so he did, although the problem with crying silently was that it hurt, and it took all your concentration, and eventually he had to put his toys down. He stayed until the first bell rang, and then put his things away and ran back downhill toward the kitchen, where he would peel carrots and potatoes and chop celery for the night’s meal.

And then, for reasons he was never able to determine, not even when he was an adult, things suddenly became very bad. The beatings got worse, the sessions got worse, the lectures got worse. He wasn’t sure what he had done; to himself, he seemed the same as he always had. But it was as if the brothers’ collective patience with him were reaching some sort of end. Even Brothers David and Peter, who loaned him books, as many as he wanted, seemed less inclined to speak to him. “Go away, Jude,” said Brother David, when he came to talk to him about a book of Greek myths the brother had given him. “I don’t want to look at you now.”

Increasingly he was becoming convinced that they were going to get rid of him, and he was terrified, because the monastery was the only home he had ever had. How would he survive, what would he do, in the outside world, which the brothers had told him was full of dangers and temptations? He could work, he knew that; he knew how to garden, and how to cook, and how to clean: maybe he could get a job doing one of those things. Maybe someone else might take him in. If that happened, he reassured himself, he would be better. He wouldn’t make any of the mistakes he had made with the brothers.

“Do you know how much it costs to take care of you?” Brother Michael had asked him one day. “I don’t think we ever thought we’d have you around for this long.” He hadn’t known what to say to either of those statements, and so had sat staring dumbly at the desk. “You should apologize,” Brother Michael told him.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Now he was so tired that he didn’t have strength even to go to the greenhouse. Now after his classes he went down to a corner of the cellar, where Brother Pavel had told him there were rats but Brother Matthew said there weren’t, and climbed onto one of the wire storage units where boxes of oil and pasta and sacks of flour were stored, and rested, waiting until the bell rang and he had to go back upstairs. At dinners, he avoided Brother Luke, and when the brother smiled at him, he turned away. He knew for certain now that he wasn’t the boy Brother Luke thought he was — joyful? funny? — and he was ashamed of himself, of how he had deceived Luke, somehow.

He had been avoiding Luke for a little more than a week when one day he went down to his hiding place and saw the brother there, waiting for him. He looked for somewhere to hide, but there was nowhere, and instead he began to cry, turning his face to the wall and apologizing as he did.

“Jude, it’s all right,” said Brother Luke, and stood near him, patting him on the back. “It’s all right, it’s all right.” The brother sat on the cellar steps. “Come here, come sit next to me,” he said, but he shook his head, too embarrassed to do so. “Then at least sit down,” said Luke, and he did, leaning against the wall. Luke stood, then, and began looking through the boxes on one of the high shelves, until he retrieved something from one and held it out to him: a glass bottle of apple juice.

“I can’t,” he said, instantly. He wasn’t supposed to be in the cellar at all: he entered it through the small window on the side and then climbed down the wire shelves. Brother Pavel was in charge of the stores and counted them every week; if something was missing, he’d be blamed. He always was.

“Don’t worry, Jude,” said the brother. “I’ll replace it. Go on — take it,” and finally, after some coaxing, he did. The juice was sweet as syrup, and he was torn between sipping it, to make it last, and gulping it, in case the brother changed his mind and it was taken from him.

After he had finished, they sat in silence, and then the brother said, in a low voice, “Jude — what they do to you: it’s not right. They shouldn’t be doing that to you; they shouldn’t be hurting you,” and he almost started crying again. “I would never hurt you, Jude, you know that, don’t you?” and he was able to look at Luke, at his long, kind, worried face, with his short gray beard and his glasses that made his eyes look even larger, and nod.

“I know, Brother Luke,” he said.

Brother Luke was quiet for a long time before he spoke next. “Do you know, Jude, that before I came here, to the monastery, I had a son? You remind me so much of him. I loved him so much. But he died, and then I came here.”

He didn’t know what to say, but he didn’t have to say anything, it seemed, because Brother Luke kept talking.

“I look at you sometimes, and I think: you don’t deserve to have these things happen to you. You deserve to be with someone else, someone—” And then Brother Luke stopped again, because he had begun to cry again. “Jude,” he said, surprised.

“Don’t,” he sobbed, “please, Brother Luke — don’t let them send me away; I’ll be better, I promise, I promise. Don’t let them send me away.”

“Jude,” said the brother, and sat down next to him, pulling him into his body. “No one’s sending you away. I promise; no one’s going to send you away.” Finally he was able to calm himself again, and the two of them sat silent for a long time. “All I meant to say was that you deserve to be with someone who loves you. Like me. If you were with me, I’d never hurt you. We’d have such a wonderful time.”

“What would we do?” he asked, finally.

“Well,” said Luke, slowly, “we could go camping. Have you ever been camping?”

He hadn’t, of course, and Luke told him about it: the tent, the fire, the smell and snap of burning pine, the marshmallows impaled on sticks, the owls’ hoots.

The next day he returned to the greenhouse, and over the following weeks and months, Luke would tell him about all the things they might do together, on their own: they would go to the beach, and to the city, and to a fair. He would have pizza, and hamburgers, and corn on the cob, and ice cream. He would learn how to play baseball, and how to fish, and they would live in a little cabin, just the two of them, like father and son, and all morning long they would read, and all afternoon they would play. They would have a garden where they would grow all their vegetables, and flowers, too, and yes, maybe they’d have a greenhouse someday as well. They would do everything together, go everywhere together, and they would be like best friends, only better.

He was intoxicated by Luke’s stories, and when things were awful, he thought of them: the garden where they’d grow pumpkins and squash, the creek that ran behind the house where they’d catch perch, the cabin — a larger version of the ones he built with his logs — where Luke promised him he would have a real bed, and where even on the coldest of nights, they would always be warm, and where they could bake muffins every week.

One afternoon — it was early January, and so cold that they had to wrap all the greenhouse plants in burlap despite the heaters — they had been working in silence. He could always tell when Luke wanted to talk about their house and when he didn’t, and he knew that today was one of his quiet days, when the brother seemed elsewhere. Brother Luke was never unkind when he was in these moods, only quiet, but the kind of quiet he knew to avoid. But he yearned for one of Luke’s stories; he needed it. It had been such an awful day, the kind of day in which he had wanted to die, and he wanted to hear Luke tell him about their cabin, and about all the things they would do there when they were alone. In their cabin, there would be no Brother Matthew or Father Gabriel or Brother Peter. No one would shout at him or hurt him. It would be like living all the time in the greenhouse, an enchantment without end.

He was reminding himself not to speak when Brother Luke spoke to him. “Jude,” he said, “I’m very sad today.”

“Why, Brother Luke?”

“Well,” said Brother Luke, and paused. “You know how much I care for you, right? But lately I’ve been feeling that you don’t care for me.”

This was terrible to hear, and for a moment he couldn’t speak. “That’s not true!” he told the brother.

But Brother Luke shook his head. “I keep talking to you about our house in the forest,” he said, “but I don’t get the feeling that you really want to go there. To you, they’re just stories, like fairy tales.”

He shook his head. “No, Brother Luke. They’re real to me, too.” He wished he could tell Brother Luke just how real they were, just how much he needed them, how much they had helped him. Brother Luke looked so upset, but finally he was able to convince him that he wanted that life, too, that he wanted to live with Brother Luke and no one else, that he would do whatever he needed to in order to have it. And finally, finally, the brother had smiled, and crouched and hugged him, moving his arms up and down his back. “Thank you, Jude, thank you,” he said, and he, so happy to have made Brother Luke so happy, thanked him back.

And then Brother Luke looked at him, suddenly serious. He had been thinking about it a lot, he said, and he thought it was time for them to build their cabin; it was time that they go away together. But he, Luke, wouldn’t do it alone: Was Jude going to come with him? Did he give him his word? Did he want to be with Brother Luke the way Brother Luke wanted to be with him, just the two of them in their small and perfect world? And of course he did — of course he did.

So there was a plan. They would leave in two months, before Easter; he would celebrate his ninth birthday in their cabin. Brother Luke would take care of everything — all he needed to do was be a good boy, and study hard, and not cause any problems. And, most important, say nothing. If they found out what they were doing, Brother Luke said, then he would be sent away, away from the monastery, to make his way on his own, and Brother Luke wouldn’t be able to help him then. He promised.

The next two months were terrible and wonderful at the same time. Terrible because they passed so slowly. Wonderful because he had a secret, one that made his life better, because it meant his life in the monastery had an end. Every day he woke up eager, because it meant he was one day closer to being with Brother Luke. Every time one of the brothers was with him, he would remember that soon he would be far away from them, and it would be a little less bad. Every time he was beaten or yelled at, he would imagine himself in the cabin, and it would give him the fortitude — a word Brother Luke had taught him — to withstand it.

He had begged Brother Luke to let him help with the preparations, and Brother Luke had told him to gather a sample of every flower and leaf from all the different kinds of plants on the monastery grounds. And so in the afternoons he prowled the property with his Bible, pressing leaves and petals between its pages. He spent less time in the greenhouse, but whenever he saw Luke, the brother would give him one of his somber winks, and he would smile to himself, their secret something warm and delicious.

The night finally arrived, and he was nervous. Brother Matthew was with him in the early evening, right after dinner, but eventually he left, and he was alone. And then there was Brother Luke, holding his finger pressed to his lips, and he nodded. He helped Luke load his books and underwear into the paper bag he held open, and then they were tiptoeing down the hallway, and down the stairs, and then through the darkened building and into the night.

“There’s just a short walk to the car,” Luke whispered to him, and then, when he stopped, “Jude, what’s wrong?”

“My bag,” he said, “my bag from the greenhouse.”

And then Luke smiled his kind smile, and put his hand on his head. “I put it in the car already,” he said, and he smiled back, so grateful to Luke for remembering.

The air was cold, but he hardly noticed. On and on they walked, down the monastery’s long graveled driveway, and past the wooden gates, and up the hill that led to the main road, and then down the main road itself, the night so silent it hummed. As they walked, Brother Luke pointed out different constellations and he named them, he got them all right, and Luke murmured in admiration and stroked the back of his head. “You’re so smart,” he said. “I’m so glad I picked you, Jude.”

Now they were on the road, which he had only been on a few times in his life — to go to the doctor, or to the dentist — although now it was empty, and little animals, muskrats and possums, gamboled before them. Then they were at the car, a long maroon station wagon piebald with rust, its backseat filled with boxes and black trash bags and some of Luke’s favorite plants — the Cattleya schilleriana, with its ugly speckled petals; the Hylocereus undatus, with its sleepy drooping head of a blossom — in their dark-green plastic nests.

It was strange to see Brother Luke in a car, stranger than being in the car itself. But stranger than that was the feeling he had, that everything had been worth it, that all his miseries were going to end, that he was going to a life that would be as good as, perhaps better than, anything he had read about in books.

“Are you ready to go?” Brother Luke whispered to him, and grinned.

“I am,” he whispered back. And Brother Luke turned the key in the ignition.

There were two ways of forgetting. For many years, he had envisioned (unimaginatively) a vault, and at the end of the day, he would gather the images and sequences and words that he didn’t want to think about again and open the heavy steel door only enough to hurry them inside, closing it quickly and tightly. But this method wasn’t effective: the memories seeped out anyway. The important thing, he came to realize, was to eliminate them, not just to store them.

So he had invented some solutions. For small memories — little slights, insults — you relived them again and again until they were neutralized, until they became near meaningless with repetition, or until you could believe that they were something that had happened to someone else and you had just heard about it. For larger memories, you held the scene in your head like a film strip, and then you began to erase it, frame by frame. Neither method was easy: you couldn’t stop in the middle of your erasing and examine what you were looking at, for example; you couldn’t start scrolling through parts of it and hope you wouldn’t get ensnared in the details of what had happened, because you of course would. You had to work at it every night, until it was completely gone.

Though they never disappeared completely, of course. But they were at least more distant — they weren’t things that followed you, wraithlike, tugging at you for attention, jumping in front of you when you ignored them, demanding so much of your time and effort that it became impossible to think of anything else. In fallow periods — the moments before you fell asleep; the minutes before you were landing after an overnight flight, when you weren’t awake enough to do work and weren’t tired enough to sleep — they would reassert themselves, and so it was best to imagine, then, a screen of white, huge and light-lit and still, and hold it in your mind like a shield.

In the weeks following the beating, he worked on forgetting Caleb. Before going to bed, he went to the door of his apartment and, feeling foolish, tried forcing his old set of keys into the locks to assure himself that they didn’t fit, that he really was once again safe. He set, and reset, the alarm system he’d had installed, which was so sensitive that even passing shadows triggered a flurry of beeps. And then he lay awake, his eyes open in the dark room, concentrating on forgetting. But it was so difficult — there were so many memories from those months that stabbed him that he was overwhelmed. He heard Caleb’s voice saying things to him, he saw the expression on Caleb’s face as he had stared at his unclothed body, he felt the horrid blank airlessness of his fall down the staircase, and he crunched himself into a knot and put his hands over his ears and closed his eyes. Finally he would get up and go to his office at the other end of the apartment and work. He had a big case coming up, and he was grateful for it; his days were so occupied that he had little time to think of anything else. For a while he was hardly going home at all, just two hours to sleep and an hour to shower and change, until one evening he’d had an episode at work, a bad one, the first time he ever had. The night janitor had found him on the floor, and had called the building’s security department, who had called the firm’s chairman, a man named Peterson Tremain, who had called Lucien, who was the only one he had told what to do in case something like this should happen: Lucien had called Andy, and then both he and the chairman had come into the office and waited with him for Andy to arrive. He had seen them, seen their feet, and even as he had gasped and writhed on the ground, he had tried to find the energy to beg them to leave, to reassure them that he was fine, that he just needed to be left alone. But they hadn’t left, and Lucien had wiped the vomit from his mouth, tenderly, and then sat on the floor near his head and held his hand and he had been so embarrassed he had almost cried. Later, he had told them again and again that it was nothing, that this happened all the time, but they had made him take the rest of the week off, and the following Monday, Lucien had told him that they were making him go home at a reasonable hour: midnight on the weekdays, nine p.m. on the weekends.

“Lucien,” he’d said, frustrated, “this is ridiculous. I’m not a child.”

“Believe me, Jude,” Lucien had said. “I told the rest of the management committee I thought we should ride you like you were an Arabian at the Preakness, but for some strange reason, they’re worried about your health. Also, the case. For some reason, they think if you get sick, we won’t win the case.” He had fought and fought with Lucien, but it hadn’t made a difference: at midnight, his office lights abruptly clicked off, and he had at last resigned himself to going home when he had been told.

Since the Caleb incident, he had barely been able to talk to Harold; even seeing him was a kind of torture. This made Harold and Julia’s visits — which were increasingly frequent — challenging. He was mortified that Harold had seen him like that: when he thought of it, Harold seeing his bloody pants, Harold asking him about his childhood (How obvious was he? Could people actually tell by talking to him what had happened to him so many years ago? And if so, how could he better conceal it?), he was so sharply nauseated that he had to stop what he was doing and wait for the moment to pass. He could feel Harold trying to treat him the same as he had, but something had shifted. No longer did Harold harass him about Rosen Pritchard; no longer did he ask him what it was like to abet corporate malfeasance. And he certainly never mentioned the possibility that he might settle down with someone. Now his questions were about how he felt: How was he? How was he feeling? How were his legs? Had he been tiring himself out? Had he been using the chair a lot? Did he need help with anything? He always answered the exact same way: fine, fine, fine; no, no, no.

And then there was Andy, who had abruptly reinitiated his nightly phone calls. Now he called at one a.m. every night, and during their appointments — which Andy had increased to every other week — he was un-Andyish, quiet and polite, which made him anxious. He examined his legs, he counted his cuts, he asked all the questions he always did, he checked his reflexes. And every time he got home, when he was emptying his pockets of change, he found that Andy had slipped in a card for a doctor, a psychologist named Sam Loehmann, and on it had written FIRST VISIT’S ON ME. There was always one of these cards, each time with a different note: DO IT FOR ME, JUDE, or ONE TIME. THAT’S IT. They were like annoying fortune cookies, and he always threw them away. He was touched by the gesture but also weary of it, of its pointlessness; it was the same feeling he had whenever he had to replace the bag under the sink after Harold’s visits. He’d go to the corner of his closet where he kept a box filled with hundreds of alcohol wipes and bandages, stacks and stacks of gauze, and dozens of packets of razors, and make a new bag, and tape it back in its proper place. People had always decided how his body would be used, and although he knew that Harold and Andy were trying to help him, the childish, obdurate part of him resisted: he would decide. He had such little control of his body anyway — how could they begrudge him this?

He told himself he was fine, that he had recovered, that he had regained his equilibrium, but really, he knew something was wrong, that he had been changed, that he was slipping. Willem was home, and even though he hadn’t been there to witness what had happened, even though he didn’t know about Caleb, about his humiliation — he had made certain of this, telling Harold and Julia and Andy that he’d never speak to them again if they said anything to anyone — he was still somehow ashamed to be seen by him. “Jude, I’m so sorry,” Willem had said when he had returned and seen his cast. “Are you sure you’re okay?” But the cast was nothing, the cast was the least shameful part, and for a minute, he had been tempted to tell Willem the truth, to collapse against him the way he never had and start crying, to confess everything to Willem and ask him to make him feel better, to tell him that he still loved him in spite of who he was. But he didn’t, of course. He had already written Willem a long e-mail full of elaborate lies detailing his car accident, and the first night they were reunited, they had stayed up so late talking about everything but that e-mail that Willem had slept over, the two of them falling asleep on the living-room sofa.

But he kept his life moving along. He got up, he went to work. He simultaneously craved company, so he wouldn’t think of Caleb, and dreaded it, because Caleb had reminded him how inhuman he was, how deficient, how disgusting, and he was too embarrassed to be around other people, normal people. He thought of his days the way he thought of taking steps when he was experiencing the pain and numbness in his feet: he would get through one, and then the next, and then the next, and eventually things would get better. Eventually he would learn how to fold those months into his life and accept them and keep going. He always had.

The court case came, and he won. It was a huge win, Lucien kept telling him, and he knew it was, but mostly he felt panic: Now what was he going to do? He had a new client, a bank, but the work there was of the long, tedious, fact-gathering sort, not the kind of frantic work that required twenty-hour days. He would be at home, by himself, with nothing but the Caleb incident to occupy his mind. Tremain congratulated him, and he knew he should be happy, but when he asked the chairman for more work, Tremain had laughed. “No, St. Francis,” he said. “You’re going on vacation. That’s an order.”

He didn’t go on vacation. He promised first Lucien, and then Tremain, he would, but that he couldn’t at the moment. But it was as he had feared: he would be at home, making himself dinner, or at a movie with Willem, and suddenly a scene from his months with Caleb would appear. And then there would be a scene from the home, and a scene from his years with Brother Luke, and then a scene from his months with Dr. Traylor, and then a scene from the injury, the headlights’ white glare, his head jerking to the side. And then his mind would fill with images, banshees demanding his attention, snatching and tearing at him with their long, needley fingers. Caleb had unleashed something within him, and he was unable to coax the beasts back into their dungeon — he was made aware of how much time he actually spent controlling his memories, how much concentration it took, how fragile his command over them had been all along.

“Are you all right?” Willem asked him one night. They had seen a play, which he had barely registered, and then had gone out to dinner, where he had half listened to Willem, hoping he was making the correct responses as he moved his food around his plate and tried to act normal.

“Yes,” he said.

Things were getting worse; he knew it and didn’t know how to make it better. It was eight months after the incident, and every day he thought about it more, not less. He felt sometimes as if his months with Caleb were a pack of hyenas, and every day they chased him, and every day he spent all his energy running from them, trying to escape being devoured by their snapping, foaming jaws. All the things that had helped in the past — the concentrating; the cutting — weren’t helping now. He cut himself more and more, but the memories wouldn’t disappear. Every morning he swam, and every night he swam again, for miles, until he had energy enough only to shower and climb into bed. As he swam, he chanted to himself: he conjugated Latin verbs, he recited proofs, he quoted back to himself decisions that he had studied in law school. His mind was his, he told himself. He would control this; he wouldn’t be controlled.

“I have an idea,” Willem said at the end of another meal in which he had failed to say much of anything. He had responded a second or two too late to everything Willem had said, and after a while, they were both quiet. “We should take a vacation together. We should go on that trip to Morocco we were supposed to take two years ago. We can do it as soon as I get back. What do you think, Jude? It’ll be fall, then — it’ll be beautiful.” It was late June: nine months after the incident. Willem was leaving again at the beginning of August for a shoot in Sri Lanka; he wouldn’t be back until the beginning of October.

As Willem spoke, he was thinking of how Caleb had called him deformed, and only Willem’s silence had reminded him it was his turn to respond. “Sure, Willem,” he said. “That sounds great.”

The restaurant was in the Flatiron District, and after they paid, they walked for a while, neither of them saying anything, when suddenly, he saw Caleb coming toward them, and in his panic, he grabbed Willem and yanked him into the doorway of a building, startling them both with his strength and swiftness.

“Jude,” Willem said, alarmed, “what are you doing?”

“Don’t say anything,” he whispered to Willem. “Just stay here and don’t turn around,” and Willem did, facing the door with him.

He counted the seconds until he was certain Caleb must have passed, and then looked cautiously out toward the sidewalk and saw that it hadn’t been Caleb at all, just another tall, dark-haired man, but not Caleb, and he had exhaled, feeling defeated and stupid and relieved all at once. He noticed then that he still had Willem’s shirt bunched in his hand, and he released it. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, Willem.”

“Jude, what happened?” Willem asked, trying to look him in the eyes. “What was that?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I just thought I saw someone I didn’t want to see.”

“Who?”

“No one. This lawyer on a case I’m working on. He’s a prick; I hate dealing with him.”

Willem looked at him. “No,” he said, at last. “It wasn’t another lawyer. It was someone else, someone you’re scared of.” There was a pause. Willem looked down the street, and then back at him. “You’re frightened,” he said, his voice wondering. “Who was it, Jude?”

He shook his head, trying to think of a lie he could tell Willem. He was always lying to Willem: big lies, small lies. Their entire relationship was a lie — Willem thought he was one person, and really, he wasn’t. Only Caleb knew the truth. Only Caleb knew what he was.

“I told you,” he said, at last. “This other lawyer.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Yes, it was.” Two women walked by them, and as they passed, he heard one of them whisper excitedly to the other, “That was Willem Ragnarsson!” He closed his eyes.

“Listen,” Willem said, quietly, “what’s going on with you?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m tired. I need to go home.”

“Fine,” Willem said. He hailed a cab, and helped him in, and then got in himself. “Greene and Broome,” he said to the driver.

In the cab, his hands began to shake. This had been happening more and more, and he didn’t know how to stop it. It had started when he was a child, but it had happened only in extreme circumstances — when he was trying not to cry, or when he was in extraordinary pain but knew that he couldn’t make a sound. But now it happened at strange moments: only cutting helped, but sometimes the shaking was so severe that he had difficulty controlling the razor. He crossed his arms against himself and hoped Willem wouldn’t notice.

At the front door, he tried to get rid of Willem, but Willem wouldn’t leave. “I want to be alone,” he told him.

“I understand,” Willem said. “We’ll be alone together.” They had stood there, facing each other, until he had finally turned to the door, but he couldn’t fit the key into the lock because he was shaking so badly, and Willem took the keys from him and opened the door.

“What the hell is going on with you?” Willem asked as soon as they were in the apartment.

“Nothing,” he said, “nothing,” and now his teeth were chattering, which was something that had never accompanied the shaking when he was young but now happened almost every time.

Willem stepped close to him, but he turned his face away. “Something happened while I was away,” Willem said, tentatively. “I don’t know what it is, but something happened. Something’s wrong. You’ve been acting strangely ever since I got home from The Odyssey. I don’t know why.” He stopped, and put his hands on his shoulders. “Tell me, Jude,” he said. “Tell me what it is. Tell me and we’ll figure out how to make it better.”

“No,” he whispered. “I can’t, Willem, I can’t.” There was a long silence. “I want to go to bed,” he said, and Willem released him, and he went to the bathroom.

When he came out, Willem was wearing one of his T-shirts, and was lofting the duvet from the guest room over the sofa in his bedroom, the sofa under the painting of Willem in the makeup chair. “What’re you doing?” he asked.

“I’m staying here tonight,” Willem said.

He sighed, but Willem started talking before he could. “You have three choices, Jude,” he said. “One, I call Andy and tell him I think there’s something really going wrong with you and I take you up to his office for an evaluation. Two, I call Harold, who freaks out and calls Andy. Or three, you let me stay here and monitor you because you won’t talk to me, you won’t fucking tell me anything, and you never seem to understand that you at least owe your friends the opportunity to try to help you — you at least owe me that.” His voice cracked. “So what’s it going to be?”

Oh Willem, he thought. You don’t know how badly I want to tell you. “I’m sorry, Willem,” he said, instead.

“Fine, you’re sorry,” said Willem. “Go to bed. Do you still have extra toothbrushes in the same place?”

“Yes,” he said.

The next night he came home late from work, and found Willem lying on the sofa in his room again, reading. “How was your day?” he asked, not lowering his book.

“Fine,” he said. He waited to see if Willem was going to explain himself, but he didn’t, and eventually he went to the bathroom. In the closet, he passed Willem’s duffel bag, which was unzipped and filled with enough clothes that it was clear he was going to stay for a while.

He felt pathetic admitting it to himself, but having Willem there — not just in his apartment, but in his room — helped. They didn’t speak much, but his very presence steadied and refocused him. He thought less of Caleb; he thought less of everything. It was as if the necessity of proving himself normal to Willem really did make him more normal. Just being around someone he knew would never harm him, not ever, was soothing, and he was able to quiet his mind, and sleep. As grateful as he was, though, he was also disgusted at himself, by how dependent he was, how weak. Was there no end to his needs? How many people had helped him over the years, and why had they? Why had he let them? A better friend would have told Willem to go home, told him he would be fine on his own. But he didn’t do this. He let Willem spend the few remaining weeks he had in New York sleeping on his sofa like a dog.

At least he didn’t have to worry about upsetting Robin, as Willem and Robin had broken up toward the end of the Odyssey shoot, when Robin discovered that Willem had cheated on her with one of the costume assistants. “And I didn’t even really like her,” Willem had told him in one of their phone calls. “I did it for the worst reason of all — because I was bored.”

He had considered this. “No,” he said, “the worst reason of all would’ve been because you were trying to be cruel. Yours was just the stupidest reason of all.”

There had been a pause, and then Willem had started laughing. “Thanks for that, Jude,” he said. “Thanks for making me feel both better and worse.”

Willem stayed with him until the very day he had to leave for Colombo. He was playing the eldest son of a faded Dutch merchant family in Sri Lanka in the early nineteen-forties, and had grown a thick mustache that curled up at its tips; when Willem hugged him, he felt it brushing against his ear. For a moment, he wanted to break down and beg Willem not to leave. Don’t go, he wanted to tell him. Stay here with me. I’m scared to be alone. He knew that if he did say this, Willem would: or he would at least try. But he would never say this. He knew it would be impossible for Willem to delay the shoot, and he knew that Willem would feel guilty for his inability to do so. Instead, he tightened his hold on Willem, which was something he rarely did — he rarely showed Willem any physical affection — and he could feel that Willem was surprised, but then he increased his pressure as well, and the two of them stood there, wrapped around each other, for a long time. He remembered thinking that he wasn’t wearing enough layers to really let Willem hug him this closely, that Willem would be able to feel the scars on his back through his shirt, but in the moment it was more important to simply be near him; he had the sense that this was the last time this would happen, the last time he would see Willem. He had this fear every time Willem went away, but it was keener this time, less theoretical; it felt more like a real departure.

After Willem left, things were fine for a few days. But then they got bad again. The hyenas returned, more numerous and famished than before, more vigilant in their hunt. And then everything else returned as well: years and years and years of memories he had thought he had controlled and defanged, all crowding him once again, yelping and leaping before his face, unignorable in their sounds, indefatigable in their clamor for his attention. He woke gasping for air: he woke with the names of people he had sworn he would never think of again on his tongue. He replayed the night with Caleb again and again, obsessively, the memory slowing so that the seconds he was standing naked in the rain on Greene Street stretched into hours, so that his flight down the stairs took days, so that Caleb’s raping him in the shower, in the elevator, took weeks. He had visions of taking an ice pick and jamming it through his ear, into his brain, to stop the memories. He dreamed of slamming his head against the wall until it split and cracked and the gray meat tumbled out with a wet, bloody thunk. He had fantasies of emptying a container of gasoline over himself and then striking a match, of his mind being gobbled by fire. He bought a set of X-ACTO blades and held three of them in his palm and made a fist around them and watched the blood drip from his hand into the sink as he screamed into the quiet apartment.

He asked Lucien for more work and was given it, but it wasn’t enough. He tried to volunteer for more hours at the artists’ nonprofit, but they didn’t have any additional shifts to give him. He tried to volunteer at a place where Rhodes had once done some pro bono work, an immigrants’ rights organization, but they said they were really looking for Mandarin and Arabic speakers at the moment and didn’t want to waste his time. He cut himself more and more; he began cutting around the scars themselves, so that he could actually remove wedges of flesh, each piece topped with a silvery sheen of scar tissue, but it didn’t help, not enough. At night, he prayed to a god he didn’t believe in, and hadn’t for years: Help me, help me, help me, he pleaded. He was losing himself; this had to stop. He couldn’t keep running forever.

It was August; the city was empty. Malcolm was in Sweden on holiday with Sophie; Richard was in Capri; Rhodes was in Maine; Andy was on Shelter Island (“Remember,” he’d said before he left, as he always said before a long vacation, “I’m just two hours away; you need me, and I catch the next ferry back”). He couldn’t bear to be around Harold, whom he couldn’t see without being reminded of his debasement; he called and told him he had too much work to go to Truro. Instead he spontaneously bought a ticket to Paris and spent the long, lonely Labor Day weekend there, wandering the streets by himself. He didn’t contact anyone he knew there — not Citizen, who was working for a French bank, or Isidore, his upstairs neighbor from Hereford Street, who was teaching there, or Phaedra, who had taken a job as the director of a satellite of a New York gallery — they wouldn’t have been in the city anyway.

He was tired, he was so tired. It was taking so much energy to hold the beasts off. He sometimes had an image of himself surrendering to them, and they would cover him with their claws and beaks and talons and peck and pinch and pluck away at him until he was nothing, and he would let them.

After he returned from Paris, he had a dream in which he was running across a cracked reddish plain of earth. Behind him was a dark cloud, and although he was fast, the cloud was faster. As it drew closer, he heard a buzzing, and realized it was a swarm of insects, terrible and oily and noisy, with pincerlike protuberances jutting out from beneath their eyes. He knew that if he stopped, he would die, and yet even in the dream he knew he couldn’t go on for much longer; at some point, he had stopped being able to run and had started hobbling instead, reality asserting itself even in his dreams. And then he heard a voice, one unfamiliar but calm and authoritative, speak to him. Stop, it said. You can end this. You don’t have to do this. It was such a relief to hear those words, and he stopped, abruptly, and faced the cloud, which was seconds, feet away from him, exhausted and waiting for it to be over.

He woke, frightened, because he knew what the words meant, and they both terrified and comforted him. Now, as he moved through his days, he heard that voice in his head, and he was reminded that he could, in fact, stop. He didn’t, in fact, have to keep going.

He had considered killing himself before, of course; when he was in the home, and in Philadelphia, and after Ana had died. But something had always stopped him, although now, he couldn’t remember what that thing had been. Now as he ran from the hyenas, he argued with himself: Why was he doing this? He was so tired; he so wanted to stop. Knowing that he didn’t have to keep going was a solace to him, somehow; it reminded him that he had options, it reminded him that even though his subconscious wouldn’t obey his conscious, it didn’t mean he wasn’t still in control.

Almost as an experiment, he began thinking of what it would mean for him to leave: in January, after his most lucrative year at the firm yet, he had updated his will, so that was in order. He would need to write a letter to Willem, a letter to Harold, a letter to Julia; he would also want to write something to Lucien, to Richard, to Malcolm. To Andy. To JB, forgiving him. Then he could go. Every day, he thought about it, and thinking about it made things easier. Thinking about it gave him fortitude.

And then, at some point, it was no longer an experiment. He couldn’t remember how he had decided, but after he had, he felt lighter, freer, less tormented. The hyenas were still chasing him, but now he could see, very far in the distance, a house with an open door, and he knew that once he had reached that house, he would be safe, and everything that pursued him would fall away. They didn’t like it, of course — they could see the door as well, they knew he was about to elude them — and every day the hunt got worse, the army of things chasing him stronger and louder and more insistent. His brain was vomiting memories, they were flooding everything else — he thought of people and sensations and incidents he hadn’t thought of in years. Tastes appeared on his tongue as if by alchemy; he smelled fragrances he hadn’t smelled in decades. His system was compromised; he would drown in his memories; he had to do something. He had tried — all his life, he had tried. He had tried to be someone different, he had tried to be someone better, he had tried to make himself clean. But it hadn’t worked. Once he had decided, he was fascinated by his own hopefulness, by how he could have saved himself years of sorrow by just ending it — he could have been his own savior. No law said he had to keep on living; his life was still his own to do with what he pleased. How had he not realized this in all these years? The choice now seemed obvious; the only question was why it had taken him so long.

He talked to Harold; he could tell by the relief in Harold’s voice that he must be sounding more normal. He talked to Willem. “You sound better,” Willem said, and he could hear the relief in Willem’s voice as well.

“I am,” he said. He felt a pull of regret after talking to both of them, but he was determined. He was no good for them, anyway; he was only an extravagant collection of problems, nothing more. Unless he stopped himself, he would consume them with his needs. He would take and take and take from them until he had chewed away their every bit of flesh; they could answer every difficulty he posed to them and he would still find new ways to destroy them. For a while, they would mourn him, because they were good people, the best, and he was sorry for that — but eventually they would see that their lives were better without him in it. They would see how much time he had stolen from them; they would understand what a thief he had been, how he had suckled away all their energy and attention, how he had exsanguinated them. He hoped they would forgive him; he hoped they would see that this was his apology to them. He was releasing them — he loved them most of all, and this was what you did for people you loved: you gave them their freedom.

The day came: a Monday at the end of September. The night before he had realized that it was almost exactly a year after the beating, although he hadn’t planned it that way. He left work early that evening. He had spent the weekend organizing his projects; he had written Lucien a memo detailing the status of everything he had been working on. At home, he lined up his letters on the dining-room table, and a copy of his will. He had left a message with Richard’s studio manager that the toilet in the master bathroom kept running and asked if Richard could let in the plumber the following day at nine — both Richard and Willem had a set of keys to his apartment — because he would be away on business.

He took off his suit jacket and tie and shoes and watch and went to the bathroom. He sat in the shower area with his sleeves pushed up. He had a glass of scotch, which he sipped at to steady himself, and a box cutter, which he knew would be easier to hold than a razor. He knew what he needed to do: three straight vertical lines, as deep and long as he could make them, following the veins up both arms. And then he would lie down and wait.

He waited for a while, crying a bit, because he was tired and frightened and because he was ready to go, he was ready to leave. Finally he rubbed his eyes and began. He started with his left arm. He made the first cut, which was more painful than he had thought it would be, and he cried out. Then he made the second. He took another drink of the scotch. The blood was viscous, more gelatinous than liquid, and a brilliant, shimmering oil-black. Already his pants were soaked with it, already his grip was loosening. He made the third.

When he was done with both arms, he slumped against the back of the shower wall. He wished, absurdly, for a pillow. He was warm from the scotch, and from his own blood, which lapped at him as it pooled around his legs — his insides meeting his outsides, the inner bathing the outer. He closed his eyes. Behind him, the hyenas howled, furious at him. Before him stood the house with its open door. He wasn’t close yet, but he was closer than he’d been: close enough to see that inside, there was a bed where he could rest, where he could lie down and sleep after his long run, where he would, for the first time in his life, be safe.

After they crossed into Nebraska, Brother Luke stopped at the edge of a wheat field and beckoned him out of the car. It was still dark, but he could hear the birds stirring, hear them talk back to a sun they couldn’t yet see. He took the brother’s hand and they skulked from the car and to a large tree, where Luke explained that the other brothers would be looking for them, and they would have to change their appearance. He took off the hated tunic, and put on the clothes Brother Luke held out for him: a sweatshirt with a hood and a pair of jeans. Before he did, though, he stood still as Luke cut off his hair with an electric razor. The brothers rarely cut his hair, and it was long, past his ears, and Brother Luke made sad noises as he removed it. “Your beautiful hair,” he said, and carefully wrapped the length of it in his tunic and then stuffed it into a garbage bag. “You look like every other boy now, Jude. But later, when we’re safe, you can grow it back, all right?” and he nodded, although really, he liked the idea of looking like every other boy. And then Brother Luke changed clothes himself, and he turned away to give the brother privacy. “You can look, Jude,” said Luke, laughing, but he shook his head. When he turned back, the brother was unrecognizable, in a plaid shirt and jeans of his own, and he smiled at him before shaving off his beard, the silvery bristles falling from him like splinters of metal. There were baseball caps for both of them, although the inside of Brother Luke’s was fitted with a yellowish wig, which covered his balding head completely. There were pairs of glasses for both of them as well: his were black and round and fitted with just glass, not real lenses, but Brother Luke’s were square and large and brown and had the same thick lenses as his real glasses, which he put into the bag. He could take them off when they were safe, Brother Luke told him.

They were on their way to Texas, which is where they’d build their cabin. He had always imagined Texas as flat land, just dust and sky and road, which Brother Luke said was mostly true, but there were parts of the state — like in east Texas, where he was from — that were forested with spruce and cedars.

It took them nineteen hours to reach Texas. It would have been less time, but at one point Brother Luke pulled off the side of the highway and said he needed to nap for a while, and the two of them slept for several hours. Brother Luke had packed them something to eat as well — peanut butter sandwiches — and in Oklahoma they stopped again in the parking lot of a rest stop to eat them.

The Texas of his mind had, with just a few descriptions from Brother Luke, transformed from a landscape of tumbleweeds and sod into one of pines, so tall and fragrant that they cottoned out all other sound, all other life, so when Brother Luke announced that they were now, officially, in Texas, he looked out the window, disappointed.

“Where are the forests?” he asked.

Brother Luke laughed. “Patience, Jude.”

They would need to stay in a motel for a few days, Brother Luke explained, both to make sure the other brothers weren’t following them and so he could begin scouting for the perfect place to build their cabin. The motel was called The Golden Hand, and their room had two beds — real beds — and Brother Luke let him choose which one he wanted. He took the one near the bathroom, and Brother Luke took the one near the window, with a view of their car. “Why don’t you take a shower, and I’m going to go to the store and get us some supplies,” said the brother, and he was suddenly frightened. “What’s wrong, Jude?”

“Are you going to come back?” he asked, hating how scared he sounded.

“Of course I’ll come back, Jude,” said the brother, hugging him. “Of course I will.”

When he did, he had a loaf of sliced bread, and a jar of peanut butter, and a hand of bananas, and a quart of milk, and a bag of almonds, and some onions and peppers and chicken breasts. That evening, Brother Luke set up the small hibachi he’d brought in the parking lot and they grilled the onions and peppers and chicken, and Brother Luke gave him a glass of milk.

Brother Luke established their routine. They woke early, before the sun was up, and Brother Luke made himself a pot of coffee with the coffeemaker he’d brought, and then they drove into town, to the high school’s track, where Luke let him run around for an hour as he sat in the bleachers, drinking his coffee and watching him. Then they returned to the motel room, where the brother gave him lessons. Brother Luke had been a math professor before he came to the monastery, but he had wanted to work with children, and so he had later taught sixth grade. But he knew about other subjects as well: history and books and music and languages. He knew so much more than the other brothers, and he wondered why Luke had never taught him when they lived at the monastery. They ate lunch — peanut butter sandwiches again — and then had more classes until three p.m., when he was allowed outside again to run around the parking lot, or to take a walk with the brother down the highway. The motel faced the interstate, and the whoosh of the passing cars provided a constant soundtrack. “It’s like living by the sea,” Brother Luke always said.

After this, Brother Luke made a third pot of coffee and then drove off to look for locations where they’d build their cabin, and he stayed behind in their motel room. The brother always locked him into the room for his safety. “Don’t open the door for anyone, do you hear me?” asked the brother. “Not for anyone. I have a key and I’ll let myself in. And don’t open the curtains; I don’t want anyone to see you’re in here alone. There are dangerous people out there in the world; I don’t want you to get hurt.” It was for this same reason that he wasn’t to use Brother Luke’s computer, which he took with him anyway whenever he left the room. “You don’t know who’s out there,” Brother Luke would say. “I want you to be safe, Jude. Promise me.” He promised.

He would lie on his bed and read. The television was forbidden to him: Luke would feel it when he came back to the room, to see if it was warm, and he didn’t want to displease him, he didn’t want to get in trouble. Brother Luke had brought a piano keyboard in his car, and he practiced on it; the brother was never mean to him, but he did take lessons seriously. As the sky grew dark, though, he would find himself sitting on the edge of Brother Luke’s bed, pinching back the curtain and scanning the parking lot for Brother Luke’s car; some part of him was always worried that Brother Luke wouldn’t return for him after all, that he was growing tired of him, that he would be left alone. There was so much he didn’t know about the world, and the world was a scary place. He tried to remind himself that there were things he could do, that he knew how to work, that maybe he could get a job cleaning the motel, but he was always anxious until he saw the station wagon pulling toward him, and then he would be relieved, and would promise himself that he would do better the next day, that he would never give Brother Luke a reason to not return to him.

One evening the brother came back to the room looking tired. A few days ago, he had returned excited: he had found the perfect piece of land, he said. He described a clearing surrounded by cedars and pines, a little stream nearby busy with fish, the air so cool and quiet that you could hear every pinecone as it fell to the soft ground. He had even shown him a picture, all dark greens and shadows, and had explained where their cabin would go, and how he could help build it, and where they would make a sleeping loft, a secret fort, just for him.

“What’s wrong, Brother Luke?” he asked him, after the brother had been silent so long that he could no longer stand it.

“Oh, Jude,” said the brother, “I’ve failed.” He told him how he had tried and tried to buy the land, but he just didn’t have the money. “I’m sorry, Jude, I’m sorry,” he said, and then, to his amazement, the brother began to cry.

He had never before seen an adult cry. “Maybe you could teach again, Brother Luke,” he said, trying to comfort him. “I like you. If I were a kid, I’d like to be taught by you,” and the brother smiled a bit at him and stroked his hair and said it didn’t work like that, that he’d have to get licensed by the state, and it was a long and complicated process.

He thought and thought. And then he remembered: “Brother Luke,” he said, “I could help — I could get a job. I could help earn money.”

“No, Jude,” said the brother. “I can’t let you do that.”

“But I want to,” he said. He remembered Brother Michael telling him how much he cost for the monastery to maintain, and felt guilty and frightened, both. Brother Luke had done so much for him, and he had done nothing in return. He not only wanted to help earn money; he had to.

At last he was able to convince the brother, who hugged him. “You really are one in a million, you know that?” Luke asked him. “You really are special.” And he smiled into the brother’s sweater.

The next day they had classes as usual, and then the brother left again, this time, he said, to find him a good job: something he could do that would help them earn money so they could buy the land and build the cabin. And this time Luke returned smiling, excited even, and seeing this, he was excited as well.

“Jude,” said the brother, “I met someone who wants to give you some work; he’s waiting right outside and you can start now.”

He smiled back at the brother. “What am I going to do?” he asked. At the monastery, he had been taught to sweep, and dust, and mop. He could wax a floor so well that even Brother Matthew had been impressed. He knew how to polish silver, and brass, and wood. He knew how to clean between tiles and how to scrub a toilet. He knew how to clean leaves out of gutters and clean and reset a mousetrap. He knew how to wash windows and do laundry by hand. He knew how to iron, he knew how to sew on buttons, he knew how to make stitches so even and fine that they looked as if they had been done by machine.

He knew how to cook. He could only make a dozen or so dishes from start to finish, but he knew how to clean and peel potatoes, carrots, rutabaga. He could chop hills of onions and never cry. He could debone a fish and knew how to pluck and clean a chicken. He knew how to make dough, he knew how to make bread. He knew how to whip egg whites until they transformed from liquid to solid to something better than solid: something like air given form.

And he knew how to garden. He knew which plants craved sun and which shied from it. He knew how to determine whether a plant was parched or drowning in too much water. He knew when a tree or bush needed to be repotted, and when it was hardy enough to be transferred into the earth. He knew which plants needed to be protected from cold, and how to protect them. He knew how to make a clipping and how to make the clipping grow. He knew how to mix fertilizer, how to add eggshells into the soil for extra protein, how to crush an aphid without destroying the leaf it was perched on. He could do all of these things, although he was hoping he would get to garden, because he wanted to work outside, and on his morning runs, he could feel that summer was coming, and on their drives to the track, he had seen fields in bloom with wildflowers, and he wanted to be among them.

Brother Luke knelt by him. “You’re going to do what you did with Father Gabriel and a couple of the brothers,” he said, and then, slowly, he understood what Luke was saying, and he stepped back toward the bed, everything within him seizing with fear. “Jude, it’s going to be different now,” Luke said, before he could say anything. “It’ll be over so fast, I promise you. And you’re so good at it. And I’ll be waiting in the bathroom to make sure nothing goes wrong, all right?” He stroked his hair. “Come here,” he said, and held him. “You are a wonderful kid,” he said. “It’s because of you and what you’re doing that we’re going to have our cabin, all right?” Brother Luke had talked and talked, and finally, he had nodded.

The man had come in (many years later, his would be one of the very few of their faces he would remember, and sometimes, he would see men on the street and they would look familiar, and he would think: How do I know him? Is he someone I was in court with? Was he the opposing counsel on that case last year? And then he would remember: he looks like the first of them, the first of the clients) and Luke had gone to the bathroom, which was just behind his bed, and he and the man had had sex and then the man had left.

That night he was very quiet, and Luke was gentle and tender with him. He had even brought him a cookie — a gingersnap — and he had tried to smile at Luke, and tried to eat it, but he couldn’t, and when Luke wasn’t looking, he wrapped it in a piece of paper and threw it away. The next day he hadn’t wanted to go to the track in the morning, but Luke had said he’d feel better with some exercise, and so they had gone and he had tried to run, but it was too painful and he had eventually sat down and waited until Luke said they could leave.

Now their routine was different: they still had classes in the mornings and afternoons, but now, some evenings, Brother Luke brought back men, his clients. Sometimes there was just one; sometimes there were several. The men brought their own towels and their own sheets, which they fitted over the bed before they began and unpeeled and took with them when they left.

He tried very hard not to cry at night, but when he did, Brother Luke would come sit with him and rub his back and comfort him. “How many more until we can get the cabin?” he asked, but Luke just shook his head, sadly. “I won’t know for a while,” he said. “But you’re doing such a good job, Jude. You’re so good at it. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” But he knew there was something shameful about it. No one had ever told him there was, but he knew anyway. He knew what he was doing was wrong.

And then, after a few months — and many motels; they moved every ten days or so, all around east Texas, and with every move, Luke took him to the forest, which really was beautiful, and to the clearing where they’d have their cabin — things changed again. He was lying in his bed one night (a night during a week in which there had been no clients. “A little vacation,” Luke had said, smiling. “Everyone needs a break, especially someone who works as hard as you do”) when Luke asked, “Jude, do you love me?”

He hesitated. Four months ago, he would’ve said yes immediately, proudly and unthinkingly. But now—did he love Brother Luke? He often wondered about this. He wanted to. The brother had never hurt him, or hit him, or said anything mean to him. He took care of him. He was always waiting just behind the wall to make sure nothing bad happened to him. The week before, a client had tried to make him do something Brother Luke said he never had to do if he didn’t want to, and he had been struggling and trying to cry out, but there had been a pillow over his face and he knew his noises were muffled. He was frantic, almost sobbing, when suddenly the pillow had been lifted from his face, and the man’s weight from his body, and Brother Luke was telling the man to get out of the room, in a tone he had never before heard from the brother but which had frightened and impressed him.

And yet something else told him that he shouldn’t love Brother Luke, that the brother had done something to him that was wrong. But he hadn’t. He had volunteered for this, after all; it was for the cabin in the woods, where he would have his own sleeping loft, that he was doing this. And so he told the brother he did.

He was momentarily happy when he saw the smile on the brother’s face, as if he had presented him with the cabin itself. “Oh, Jude,” he said, “that is the greatest gift I could ever get. Do you know how much I love you? I love you more than I love my own self. I think of you like my own son,” and he had smiled back, then, because sometimes, he had privately thought of Luke as his father, and he as Luke’s son. “Your dad said you’re nine, but you look older,” one of the clients had said to him, suspiciously, before they had begun, and he had answered what Luke had told him to say—“I’m tall for my age”—both pleased and oddly not-pleased that the client had thought Luke was his father.

Then Brother Luke had explained to him that when two people loved each other as much as they did, that they slept in the same bed, and were naked with each other. He hadn’t known what to say to this, but before he could think of what it might be, Brother Luke was moving into bed with him and taking off his clothes and then kissing him. He had never kissed before — Brother Luke didn’t let the clients do it with him — and he didn’t like it, didn’t like the wetness and the force of it. “Relax,” the brother told him. “Just relax, Jude,” and he tried to as much as he could.

The first time the brother had sex with him, he told him it would be different than with the clients. “Because we’re in love,” he’d said, and he had believed him, and when it had felt the same after all — as painful, as difficult, as uncomfortable, as shameful — he assumed he was doing something wrong, especially because the brother was so happy afterward. “Wasn’t that nice?” the brother asked him, “didn’t it feel different?” and he had agreed, too embarrassed to admit that it had been no different at all, that it had been just as awful as it had been with the client the day before.

Brother Luke usually didn’t have sex with him if he’d seen clients earlier in the evening, but they always slept in the same bed, and they always kissed. Now one bed was used for the clients, and the other was theirs. He grew to hate the taste of Luke’s mouth, its old-coffee tang, his tongue something slippery and skinned trying to burrow inside of him. Late at night, as the brother lay next to him asleep, pressing him against the wall with his weight, he would sometimes cry, silently, praying to be taken away, anywhere, anywhere else. He no longer thought of the cabin: he now dreamed of the monastery, and thought of how stupid he’d been to leave. It had been better there after all. When they were out in the mornings and would pass people, Brother Luke would tell him to lower his eyes, because his eyes were distinctive and if the brothers were looking for them, they would give them away. But sometimes he wanted to raise his eyes, as if they could by their very color and shape telegraph a message across miles and states to the brothers: Here I am. Help me. Please take me back. Nothing was his any longer: not his eyes, not his mouth, not even his name, which Brother Luke only called him in private. Around everyone else, he was Joey. “And this is Joey,” Brother Luke would say, and he would rise from the bed and wait, his head bent, as the client inspected him.

He cherished his lessons, because they were the one time Brother Luke didn’t touch him, and in those hours, the brother was who he remembered, the person he had trusted and followed. But then the lessons would end for the day, and every evening would conclude the same as the evening before.

He grew more and more silent. “Where’s my smiley boy?” the brother would ask him, and he would try to smile back at him. “It’s okay to enjoy it,” the brother would say, sometimes, and he would nod, and the brother would smile at him and rub his back. “You like it, don’t you?” he would ask, and wink, and he would nod at him, mutely. “I can tell,” Luke would say, still smiling, proud of him. “You were made for this, Jude.” Some of the clients would say that to him as well—You were born for this—and as much as he hated it, he also knew that they were right. He was born for this. He had been born, and left, and found, and used as he had been intended to be used.

In later years, he would try to remember when exactly it was that he must have realized that the cabin was never going to be built, that the life he had dreamed of would never be his. When he had begun, he had kept track of the number of clients he had seen, thinking that when he reached a certain number — forty? fifty? — he would surely be done, he would surely be allowed to stop. But then the number grew larger and larger, until one day he had looked at it and realized how large it was and had started crying, so scared and sick of what he had done that he had stopped counting. So was it when he reached that number? Or was it when they left Texas altogether, Luke promising him that the forests were better in Washington State anyway, and they drove west, through New Mexico and Arizona, and then north, stopping for weeks in little towns, staying in little motels that were the twins of that very first motel they had ever stayed in, and that no matter where they stopped, there were always men, and on the nights there weren’t men, there was Brother Luke, who seemed to crave him the way he himself had never craved anything? Was it when he realized that he hated his weeks off even more than the normal weeks, because the return to his regular life was so much more terrible than if he had never had a vacation at all? Was it when he began noticing the inconsistencies in Brother Luke’s stories: how sometimes it wasn’t his son but a nephew, who hadn’t died but had in fact moved away, and Brother Luke never saw him again; or how sometimes, he stopped teaching because he had felt the calling to join the monastery, and sometimes it was because he was weary from having to constantly negotiate with the school’s principal, who clearly didn’t care for children the way the brother did; or how in some stories, he had grown up in east Texas, but in others, he had spent his childhood in Carmel, or Laramie, or Eugene?

Or was it the day that they were passing through Utah to Idaho, on their way to Washington? They rarely ventured into actual towns — their America was denuded of trees, of flowers, theirs was just long stretches of roadway, the only green thing Brother Luke’s lone surviving cattleya, which continued to live and leaf, though not bud — but this time they had, because Brother Luke had a doctor friend in one of the towns, and he wanted him to be examined because it was clear he had picked up some sort of disease from one of the clients, despite the precautions Brother Luke made them take. He didn’t know the name of the town, but he was startled at the signs of normalcy, of life around him, and he stared out of his window in silence, looking at these scenes that he had always imagined but rarely saw: women standing on the street with strollers, talking and laughing with one another; a jogger panting by; families with dogs; a world made of not just men but also of children and women. Normally on these drives he would close his eyes — he slept all the time now, waiting for each day to end — but this day, he felt unusually alert, as if the world was trying to tell him something, and all he had to do was listen to its message.

Brother Luke was trying to read the map and drive at the same time, and finally he pulled over, studying the map and muttering. Luke had stopped across the street from a baseball field, and he watched as, if at once, it began to fill with people: women, mostly, and then, running and shouting, boys. The boys wore uniforms, white with red stripes, but despite that, they all looked different — different hair, different eyes, different skin. Some were skinny, like he was, and some were fat. He had never seen so many boys his own age at one time, and he looked and looked at them. And then he noticed that although they were different, they were actually the same: they were all smiling, and laughing, excited to be outside, in the dry, hot air, the sun bright above them, their mothers unloading cans of soda and bottles of water and juice from plastic carrying containers.

“Aha! We’re back on track!” he heard Luke saying, and heard him fold up the map. But before he started the engine again, he felt Luke follow his gaze, and for a moment the two of them sat staring at the boys in silence, until at last Luke stroked his hair. “I love you, Jude,” he said, and after a moment, he replied as he always did—“I love you, too, Brother Luke”—and they drove away.

He was the same as those boys, but he was really not: he was different. He would never be one of them. He would never be someone who would run across a field while his mother called after him to come have a snack before he played so he wouldn’t get tired. He would never have his bed in the cabin. He would never be clean again. The boys were playing on the field, and he was driving with Brother Luke to the doctor, the kind of doctor he knew from his previous visits to other doctors would be somehow wrong, somehow not a good person. He was as far away from them as he was from the monastery. He was so far gone from himself, from who he had hoped to be, that it was as if he was no longer a boy at all but something else entirely. This was his life now, and there was nothing he could do about it.

At the doctor’s office, Luke leaned over and held him. “We’re going to have fun tonight, just you and me,” he said, and he nodded, because there was nothing else he could do. “Let’s go,” said Luke, releasing him, and he got out of the car, and followed Brother Luke across the parking lot and toward the brown door that was already opening to let them inside.

The first memory: a hospital room. He knew it was a hospital room even before he opened his eyes because he could smell it, because its quality of silence — a silence that wasn’t really silent — was familiar. Next to him: Willem, asleep in a chair. Then he had been confused — why was Willem here? He was supposed to be away, somewhere. He remembered: Sri Lanka. But he wasn’t. He was here. How strange, he thought. I wonder why he’s here? That was the first memory.

The second memory: the same hospital room. He turned and saw Andy sitting on the side of his bed, Andy, unshaven and awful-looking, giving him a strange, unconvincing smile. He felt Andy squeeze his hand — he hadn’t realized he had a hand until he felt Andy squeeze it — and had tried to squeeze back, but couldn’t. Andy had looked up at someone. “Nerve damage?” he heard Andy ask. “Maybe,” said this other person, the person he couldn’t see, “but if we’re lucky, it’s more likely it’s—” And he had closed his eyes and fallen back asleep. That was the second memory.

The third and fourth and fifth and sixth memories weren’t really memories at all: they were people’s faces, their hands, their voices, leaning into his face, holding his hand, talking to him — they were Harold and Julia and Richard and Lucien. Same for the seventh and eighth: Malcolm, JB.

The ninth memory was Willem again, sitting next to him, telling him he was so sorry, but he had to leave. Just for a little while, and then he’d be back. He was crying, and he wasn’t sure why, but it didn’t seem so unusual — they all cried, they cried and apologized to him, which he found perplexing, as none of them had done anything wrong: he knew that much, at least. He tried to tell Willem not to cry, that he was fine, but his tongue was so thick in his mouth, a great useless slab, and he couldn’t make it operate. Willem was already holding one of his hands, but he didn’t have the energy to lift the other so he could put it on Willem’s arm and reassure him, and finally he had given up.

In the tenth memory, he was still in the hospital, but in a different room, and he was still so tired. His arms ached. He had two foam balls, one cupped in each palm, and he was supposed to squeeze them for five seconds and then release them for five. Then squeeze them for five, and release them for five. He couldn’t remember who had told him this, or who had given him the balls, but he did so anyway, although whenever he did, his arms hurt more, a burning, raw pain, and he couldn’t do more than three or four repetitions before he was exhausted and had to stop.

And then one night he had awoken, swimming up through layers of dreams he couldn’t remember, and had realized where he was, and why. He had gone back to sleep then, but the next day he turned his head and saw a man sitting in a chair next to his bed: he didn’t know who the man was, but he had seen him before. He would come and sit and stare at him and sometimes he would talk to him, but he could never concentrate on what the man was saying, and would eventually close his eyes.

“I’m in a mental institution,” he told the man now, and his voice sounded wrong to him, reedy and hoarse.

The man smiled. “You’re in the psychiatric wing of a hospital, yes,” he said. “Do you remember me?”

“No,” he said, “but I recognize you.”

“I’m Dr. Solomon. I’m a psychiatrist here at the hospital.” There was a silence. “Do you know why you’re here?”

He closed his eyes and nodded. “Where’s Willem?” he asked. “Where’s Harold?”

“Willem had to go back to Sri Lanka to finish shooting,” said the doctor. “He’ll be back”—he heard the sound of paper flipping—“October ninth. So in ten days. Harold’s coming at noon; it’s when he’s been coming, do you remember?” He shook his head. “Jude,” the doctor said, “can you tell me why you’re here?”

“Because,” he began, swallowing. “Because of what I did in the shower.”

There was another silence. “That’s right,” said the doctor, softly. “Jude, can you tell me why—” But that was all he heard, because he had fallen asleep again.

The next time he woke, the man was gone, but Harold was in his place. “Harold,” he said, in his strange new voice, and Harold, who had been sitting with his elbows on his thighs and his face in his hands, looked up as suddenly as if he’d shouted.

“Jude,” he said, and sat next to him on the bed. He took the ball out of his right hand and replaced it with his own hand.

He thought that Harold looked terrible. “I’m sorry, Harold,” he said, and Harold began to cry. “Don’t cry,” he told him, “please don’t cry,” and Harold got up and went to the bathroom and he could hear him blowing his nose.

That night, once he was alone, he cried as well: not because of what he had done but because he hadn’t been successful, because he had lived after all.

His mind grew a little clearer with every day. Every day, he was awake a little longer. Mostly, he felt nothing. People came to see him and cried and he looked at them and could register only the strangeness of their faces, the way everyone looked the same when they cried, their noses hoggy, rarely used muscles pulling their mouths in unnatural directions, into unnatural shapes.

He thought of nothing, his mind was a clean sheet of paper. He learned little pieces of what had happened: how Richard’s studio manager had thought the plumber was coming at nine that night, not nine the following morning (even in his haze, he wondered how anyone could think a plumber would come at nine in the evening); how Richard had found him and called an ambulance and had ridden with him to the hospital; how Richard had called Andy and Harold and Willem; how Willem had flown back from Colombo to be with him. He did feel sorry that it had been Richard who’d had to discover him — that was always the part of the plan that had made him uncomfortable, although at the time he had remembered thinking that Richard had a high tolerance for blood, having once made sculptures with it, and so was the least likely among his friends to be traumatized — and had apologized to Richard, who had stroked the back of his hand and told him it was fine, it was okay.

Dr. Solomon came every day and tried to talk to him, but he didn’t have much to say. Most of the time, people didn’t talk to him at all. They came and sat and did work of their own, or spoke to him without seeming to expect a reply, which he appreciated. Lucien came often, usually with a gift, once with a large card that everyone in the office had signed—“I’m sure this is just the thing to make you feel better,” he’d said, dryly, “but here it is, anyway”—and Malcolm made him one of his imaginary houses, its windows crisp vellum, which he placed on his bedside table. Willem called him every morning and every night. Harold read The Hobbit to him, which he had never read, and when Harold couldn’t come, Julia came, and picked up where Harold had left off: those were his favorite visits. Andy arrived every evening, after visiting hours had ended, and had dinner with him; he was concerned that he wasn’t eating enough, and brought him a serving of whatever he was having. He brought him a container of beef barley soup, but his hands were still too weak to hold the spoon, and Andy had to feed him, one slow spoonful after the next. Once, this would have embarrassed him, but now he simply didn’t care: he opened his mouth and accepted the food, which was flavorless, and chewed and swallowed.

“I want to go home,” he told Andy one evening, as he watched Andy eat his turkey club sandwich.

Andy finished his bite and looked at him. “Oh, do you?”

“Yes,” he said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. “I want to leave.” He thought Andy would say something sarcastic, but he only nodded, slowly. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’ll talk to Solomon.” He grimaced. “Eat your sandwich.”

The next day Dr. Solomon said, “I hear you want to go home.”

“I feel like I’ve been here a long time,” he said.

Dr. Solomon was quiet. “You have been here a little while,” he said. “But given your history of self-injury and the seriousness of your attempt, your doctor — Andy — and parents thought it was for the best.”

He thought about this. “So if my attempt had been less serious, I could have gone home earlier?” It seemed too logical to be an effective policy.

The doctor smiled. “Probably,” he said. “But I’m not completely opposed to letting you go home, Jude, although I think we have to put some protective measures in place.” He stopped. “It troubles me, however, that you’ve been so unwilling to discuss why you made the attempt in the first place. Dr. Contractor — I’m sorry: Andy — tells me that you’ve always resisted therapy, can you tell me why?” He said nothing, and neither did the doctor. “Your father tells me that you were in an abusive relationship last year, and that it’s had long-term reverberations,” said the doctor, and he felt himself go cold. But he willed himself not to answer, and closed his eyes, and finally he could hear Dr. Solomon get up to leave. “I’ll be back tomorrow, Jude,” he said as he left.

Eventually, once it was clear that he wasn’t going to speak to any of them and that he was in no state to hurt himself again, they let him go, with stipulations: He was to be released into Julia and Harold’s care. It was strongly recommended that he remain on a milder course of the drugs that he’d been given in the hospital. It was very strongly recommended that he see a therapist twice a week. He was to see Andy once a week. He was to take a sabbatical from work, which had already been arranged. He agreed to everything. He signed his name — the pen wobbly in his grip — on the discharge papers, under Andy’s and Dr. Solomon’s and Harold’s.

Harold and Julia took him to Truro, where Willem was already waiting for him. Every night he slept, extravagantly, and during the day he and Willem walked slowly down the hill to the ocean. It was early October and too cold to get into the water, but they would sit on the sand and look out at the horizon line, and sometimes Willem would talk to him and sometimes he wouldn’t. He dreamed that the sea had turned into a solid block of ice, its waves frozen in mid-crest, and that Willem was at a far shore, beckoning to him, and he was making his way slowly across its wide expanse to him, his hands and face numb from the wind.

They ate dinner early, because he went to bed so early. The meals were always something simple, easy to digest, and if there was meat, one of the three of them would cut it up for him in advance so he wouldn’t have to try to wield a knife. Harold poured him a glass of milk every dinner, as if he was a child, and he drank it. He wasn’t allowed to leave the table until he had eaten at least half of what was on his plate, and he wasn’t allowed to serve himself, either. He was too tired to fight this; he did the best he could.

He was always cold, and sometimes he woke in the middle of the night, shivering despite the covers heaped on top of him, and he would lie there, watching Willem, who was sharing his room, breathing on the couch opposite him, watching clouds drift across the slice of moon he could see between the edge of the window frame and the blind, until he was able to sleep again.

Sometimes he thought about what he had done and felt that same sorrow he had felt in the hospital: the sorrow that he had failed, that he was still alive. And sometimes he thought about it and felt dread: now everyone really would treat him differently. Now he really was a freak, a bigger freak than he’d been before. Now he would have to begin anew in his attempts to convince people he was normal. He thought of the office, the one place where what he had been hadn’t mattered. But now there would always be another, competing story about him. Now he wouldn’t just be the youngest equity partner in the firm’s history (as Tremain sometimes introduced him); now he would be the partner who had tried to kill himself. They must be furious with him, he thought. He thought of his work there, and wondered who was handling it. They probably didn’t even need him to come back. Who would want to work with him again? Who would trust him again?

And it wasn’t just Rosen Pritchard who would see him differently — it was everyone. All the autonomy he had spent years accumulating, trying to prove to everyone that he deserved: now it was gone. Now he couldn’t even cut his own food. The day before, Willem had had to help him tie his shoes. “It’ll get better, Judy,” he said to him, “it’ll get better. The doctor said it’s just going to take time.” In the mornings, Harold or Willem had to shave him because his hands were still too unsteady; he looked at his unfamiliar face in the mirror as they dragged the razor down his cheeks and under his chin. He had taught himself to shave in Philadelphia when he was living with the Douglasses, but Willem had retaught him their freshman year, alarmed, he later told him, by his tentative, hacking movements, as if he was clearing brush with a scythe. “Good at calculus, bad at shaving,” he’d said then, and had smiled at him so he wouldn’t feel more self-conscious.

Then he would tell himself, You can always try again, and just thinking that made him feel stronger, although perversely, he was somehow less inclined to try again. He was too exhausted. Trying again meant preparation. It meant finding something sharp, finding some time alone, and he was never alone. Of course, he knew there were other methods, but he remained stubbornly fixated on the one he had chosen, even though it hadn’t worked.

Mostly, though, he felt nothing. Harold and Julia and Willem asked him what he wanted for breakfast, but the choices were impossible and overwhelming — pancakes? Waffles? Cereal? Eggs? What kind of eggs? Soft-boiled? Hard? Scrambled? Sunny-side? Fried? Over easy? Poached? — and he’d shake his head, and they eventually stopped asking. They stopped asking his opinion on anything, which he found restful. After lunch (also absurdly early), he napped on the living-room sofa in front of the fire, falling asleep to the sound of their murmurs, the slosh of water as they did the dishes. In the afternoons, Harold read to him; sometimes Willem and Julia stayed to listen as well.

After ten days or so, he and Willem went home to Greene Street. He had been dreading his return, but when he went to his bathroom, the marble was clean and stainless. “Malcolm,” said Willem, before he had to ask. “He finished last week. It’s all new.” Willem helped him into bed, and gave him a manila envelope with his name on it, which he opened after Willem left. Inside were the letters he had written everyone, still sealed, and the sealed copy of his will, and a note from Richard: “I thought you would want these. Love, R.” He slid them back into the envelope, his hands shaking; the next day he put them in his safe.

The next morning he woke very early, creeping past Willem sleeping on the sofa at the far end of his bedroom, and walked through the apartment. Someone had put flowers in every room, or branches of maple leaves, or bowls of squashes. The space smelled delicious, like apples and cedar. He went to his study, where someone had stacked his mail on his desk, and where Malcolm’s little paper house sat atop a stack of books. He saw unopened envelopes from JB, from Asian Henry Young, from India, from Ali, and knew they had made drawings for him. He walked past the dining-room table, letting his fingers skim along the spines of the books lined up on their shelves; he wandered into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and saw that it was filled with things he liked. Richard had started working more with ceramics, and at the center of the dining table was a large, amorphous piece, the glaze rough and pleasant under his palms, painted with white threadlike veins. Next to it stood his and Willem’s Saint Jude statue, which Willem had taken with him when he moved to Perry Street, but which had now found its way back to him.

The days slipped by and he let them. In the morning he swam, and he and Willem ate breakfast. The physical therapist came and had him practice squeezing rubber balls, short lengths of rope, toothpicks, pens. Sometimes he had to pick up multiple objects with one hand, holding them between his fingers, which was difficult. His hands shook more than ever, and he felt sharp prickles vibrating through his fingers, but she told him not to worry, that it was his muscles repairing themselves, his nerves resetting themselves. He had lunch, he napped. While he napped, Richard came to watch him and Willem went out to run errands and go downstairs to the gym and, he hoped, do something interesting and indulgent that didn’t involve him and his problems. People came to see him in the afternoon: all the same people, and new people, too. They stayed an hour and then Willem made them leave. Malcolm came with JB and the four of them had an awkward, polite conversation about things they had done when they were in college, but he was glad to see JB, and thought he might like to see him again when he was less cloudy-headed, so he could apologize to him and tell him he forgave him. As he was leaving, JB told him, quietly, “It’ll get better, Judy. Trust me, I know,” and then added, “At least you didn’t hurt anyone in the process,” and he felt guilty, because he knew he had. Andy came at the end of the day and examined him; he unwrapped his bandages and cleaned the area around his stitches. He still hadn’t looked at his stitches — he couldn’t bring himself to — and when Andy was cleaning them, he looked elsewhere or closed his eyes. After Andy left, they ate dinner, and after dinner, after the boutiques and few remaining galleries had shuttered for the night and the neighborhood was deserted, they walked, making a neat square around SoHo — east to Lafayette, north to Houston, west to Sixth, south to Grand, east to Greene — before returning home. It was a short walk, but it left him exhausted, and he once fell on the way to the bedroom, his legs simply sliding out from beneath him. Julia and Harold took the train down on Thursdays and spent all day Friday and Saturday with him, and part of Sunday as well.

Every morning, Willem asked him, “Do you want to talk to Dr. Loehmann today?” And every morning he answered, “Not yet, Willem. Soon, I promise.”

By the end of October, he was feeling stronger, less shaky. He was managing to stay awake for longer stretches at a time. He could lie on his back and hold a book up without it trembling so badly that he had to roll over onto his stomach so he could prop it against a pillow. He could butter his own bread, and he could wear shirts with buttons again because he was able to slip the button into its hole.

“What’re you reading?” he asked Willem one afternoon, sitting next to him on the living-room couch.

“A play I’m thinking of doing,” Willem said, putting the pages down.

He looked at a point beyond Willem’s head. “Are you going away again?” It was monstrously selfish to ask, but he couldn’t stop himself.

“No,” said Willem, after a silence. “I thought I’d stick around New York for a while, if that’s okay with you.”

He smiled at the couch’s cushions. “It’s fine with me,” he said, and looked up to see Willem smiling at him. “It’s nice to see you smile again,” was all he said, and went back to reading.

In November he realized that he had done nothing to celebrate Willem’s forty-third birthday in late August, and mentioned it to him. “Well, technically, you get a pass, because I wasn’t here,” said Willem. “But sure, I’ll let you make it up to me. Let’s see.” He thought. “Are you ready to go out into the world? Do you want to have dinner? An early dinner?”

“Sure,” he said, and they went the next week to a little Japanese place in the East Village that served pressed sushi and where they’d been going for years. He ordered his own food, although he had been nervous, worried that he was somehow choosing incorrectly, but Willem was patient and waited as he deliberated, and when he had decided, he’d nodded at him. “Good choice,” he said. As they ate, they spoke of their friends, and the play Willem had decided he was going to do, and the novel he was reading: anything but him.

“I think we should go to Morocco,” he said as they walked slowly home, and Willem looked at him.

“I’ll look into it,” Willem said, and took his arm to move him out of the path of a bicyclist who was zooming down the street.

“I want to get you something for your birthday,” he said, a few blocks later. Really, he wanted to get Willem something to thank him, and to try to express what he couldn’t say to him: a gift that would properly convey years of gratitude and love. After their earlier conversation about the play, he had remembered that Willem had, in fact, committed the previous year to a project that would be shooting in Russia in early January. But when he mentioned this to him, Willem had shrugged. “Oh, that?” he’d asked. “Didn’t work out. It’s fine. I didn’t really want to do it anyway.” He had been suspicious, though, and when he had looked online, there were reports that Willem had pulled out of the film for personal reasons; another actor had been cast instead. He had stared at the screen then, the story blurring before him, but when he had asked Willem about it, Willem had shrugged again. “That’s what you say when you realize you and the director really aren’t on the same page and no one wants to lose face,” he said. But he knew that Willem wasn’t telling him the truth.

“You don’t need to get me anything,” Willem said, as he knew he would, and he said (as he always did), “I know I don’t need to, but I want to.” And then he added, also as he always did, “A better friend would know what to get you and wouldn’t have to ask for suggestions.”

“A better friend would,” Willem agreed, as he always did, and he smiled, because it felt like one of their normal conversations.

More days passed. Willem moved back into his suite at the other end of the apartment. Lucien called him a few times to ask him about one thing or another, apologizing as he did, but he was happy to get his calls, and happy that Lucien now began their conversations by complaining about a client or a colleague instead of asking how he was. Aside from Tremain and Lucien and one or two other people, no one at the firm knew the real reason he’d been absent: they, like his clients, had been told he was recovering from emergency spinal cord surgery. He knew that when he returned to Rosen Pritchard, Lucien would immediately restart him on his normal caseload; there would be no talk of giving him an easy transition, no speculation about his ability to handle the stress, and he was grateful for that. He stopped taking his drugs, which he realized were making him feel dopey, and after they had left his system, he was amazed by how clear he felt — even his vision was different, as if a plate-glass window had been wiped clean of all grease and smears and he was finally getting to admire the brilliant green lawn beyond it, the pear trees with their yellow fruit.

But he also realized that the drugs had been protecting him, and without them, the hyenas returned, less numerous and more sluggish, but still circling him, still following him, less motivated in their pursuit but still there, his unwanted but dogged companions. Other memories came back to him as well, the same old ones, but new ones too, and he was made much more sharply aware of how severely he had inconvenienced everyone, of how much he had asked from people, of how he had taken what he would never, ever be able to repay. And then there was the voice, which whispered to him at odd moments, You can try again, you can try again, and he tried to ignore it, because at some point — in the same, undefinable way that he had decided to kill himself in the first place — he had decided he would work on getting better, and he didn’t want to be reminded that he could try again, that being alive, as ignominious and absurd as it often was, wasn’t his only option.

Thanksgiving came, which they once again had at Harold and Julia’s apartment on West End Avenue, and which was once again a small group: Laurence and Gillian (their daughters had gone to their husbands’ families’ houses for the holiday), him, Willem, Richard and India, Malcolm and Sophie. At the meal, he could feel everyone trying not to pay too much attention to him, and when Willem mentioned the trip they were taking to Morocco in the middle of December, Harold was so relaxed, so incurious, that he knew that he must have already thoroughly discussed it with Willem (and, probably, Andy) in advance, and given his permission.

“When do you go back to Rosen Pritchard?” asked Laurence, as if he’d been away on holiday.

“January third,” he said.

“So soon!” said Gillian.

He smiled back at her. “Not soon enough,” he said. He meant it; he was ready to try to be normal again, to make another attempt at being alive.

He and Willem left early, and that evening he cut himself for the second time since he was released from the hospital. This was another thing the drugs had dampened: his need to cut, to feel that bright, startling slap of pain. The first time he did it, he was shocked by how much it hurt, and had actually wondered why he had been doing this to himself for so long — what had he been thinking? But then he felt everything within him slow, felt himself relax, felt his memories dim, and had remembered how it helped him, remembered why he had begun doing it at all. The scars from his attempt were three vertical lines on both arms, from the base of his palm to just below the inside of his elbow, and they hadn’t healed well; it looked as if he had shoved pencils just beneath the skin. They had a strange, pearly shine, almost as if the skin had been burned, and now he made a fist, watching them tighten in response.

That night he woke screaming, which had been happening as he readjusted to life, to an existence with dreams; on the drugs, there were no dreams, not really, or if there were, they were so strange and pointless and meandering that he soon forgot them. But in this dream he was in one of the motel rooms, and there was a group of men, and they were grabbing at him, and he was desperate, trying to fight them. But they kept multiplying, and he knew he would lose, he knew he would be destroyed.

One of the men kept calling his name, and then put his hand on his cheek, and for some reason that made him more terrified, and he pushed his hand away, and then the man poured water on him and he woke, gasping, to see Willem next to him, his face pale, holding a glass in his hand. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Willem said, “I couldn’t get you out of it, Jude, I’m sorry. I’m going to get you a towel,” and came back with a towel and the glass filled with water, but he was shaking too badly to hold it. He apologized again and again to Willem, who shook his head and told him not to worry, that it was all right, that it was just a dream. Willem got him a new shirt, and turned around as he changed and then took the wet one to the bathroom.

“Who’s Brother Luke?” asked Willem, as they sat there together in silence and waited for his breathing to return to normal. And then, when he didn’t answer, “You kept screaming ‘Help me, Brother Luke, help me.’ ” He was quiet. “Who is he, Jude? Was he someone from the monastery?”

“I can’t, Willem,” he said, and he yearned for Ana. Ask me one more time, Ana, he said to her, and I’ll tell you. Teach me how to do it. This time I’ll listen. This time I’ll talk.

That weekend they went to Richard’s house upstate and took a long walk through the woods that backed the property. Later, he successfully completed the first meal he’d cooked since he was released. He made Willem’s favorite, lamb chops, and although he’d needed Willem’s help carving the chop itself — he still wasn’t agile enough to do it on his own — he did everything else by himself. That night he woke again, screaming, and again there was Willem (though without the glass of water this time), and him asking about Brother Luke, and why he kept begging for his help, and again, he wasn’t able to answer.

The next day he was tired, and his arms ached, and his body ached as well, and on their walk, he said very little, and Willem didn’t say much himself. In the afternoon they reviewed their plans for Morocco: they would begin in Fez, and then drive through the desert, where they’d stay near Ouarzazate, and end in Marrakech. On their way back, they’d stop in Paris to visit Citizen and a friend of Willem’s for a few days; they’d be home just before the new year.

As they were eating dinner, Willem said, “You know, I thought of what you could give me for my birthday.”

“Oh?” he said, relieved to be able to concentrate on something he could give Willem, rather than having to ask Willem for yet more help, thinking of all the time he had stolen from him. “Let’s hear it.”

“Well,” said Willem, “it’s kind of a big thing.”

“Anything,” he said. “I mean it,” and Willem gave him a look he couldn’t quite interpret. “Really,” he assured him. “Anything.”

Willem put down his lamb sandwich and took a breath. “Okay,” he said. “What I really want for my birthday is for you to tell me who Brother Luke is. And not just who he is, but what your — your relationship with him was, and why you think you keep calling out his name at night.” He looked at him. “I want you to be honest, and thorough, and tell me the whole story. That’s what I want.”

There was a long silence. He realized he still had a mouthful of food, and he somehow swallowed it, and put down his sandwich as well, which he was still holding aloft. “Willem,” he said at last, because he knew that Willem was serious, and that he wouldn’t be able to dissuade him, to convince him to wish for something else, “part of me does want to tell you. But if I do—” He stopped. “But if I do, I’m afraid you’re going to be disgusted by me. Wait,” he said, as Willem began to speak. He looked at Willem’s face. “I promise you I will. I promise you. But — but you’re going to have to give me some time. I’ve never really discussed it before, and I need to figure out how to say the words.”

“Okay,” Willem said at last. “Well.” He paused. “How about if we work up to it, then? I ask you about something easier, and you answer that, and you’ll see that it’s not so bad, talking about it? And if it is, we’ll discuss that, too.”

He inhaled; exhaled. This is Willem, he reminded himself. He would never hurt you, not ever. It’s time. It’s time. “Okay,” he said, finally. “Okay. Ask me.”

He could see Willem leaning back in his chair and staring at him, trying to determine which to choose of the hundreds of questions that one friend should be able to ask another and yet he had never been allowed to do. Tears came to his eyes, then, for how lopsided he had let their friendship become, and for how long Willem had stayed with him, year after year, even when he had fled from him, even when he had asked him for help with problems whose origins he wouldn’t reveal. In his new life, he promised himself, he would be less demanding of his friends; he would be more generous. Whatever they wanted, he would give them. If Willem wanted information, he could have it, and it was up to him to figure out how to give it to him. He would be hurt again and again — everyone was — but if he was going to try, if he was going to be alive, he had to be tougher, he had to prepare himself, he had to accept that this was part of the bargain of life itself.

“Okay, I’ve got one,” Willem said, and he sat up straighter, readying himself. “How did you get the scar on the back of your hand?”

He blinked, surprised. He wasn’t sure what the question was going to be, but now that it had come, he was relieved. He rarely thought of the scar these days, and now he looked at it, its taffeta gleam, and as he ran his fingertips across it, he thought of how this scar led to so many other problems, and then to Brother Luke, and then to the home, and to Philadelphia, to all of it.

But what in life wasn’t connected to some greater, sadder story? All Willem was asking for was this one story; he didn’t need to drag everything else behind it, a huge ugly snarl of difficulties.

He thought about how he could start, and plotted what he’d say in his head before he opened his mouth. Finally, he was ready. “I was always a greedy kid,” he began, and across the table, he watched Willem lean forward on his elbows, as for the first time in their friendship, he was the listener, and he was being told a story.

He was ten, he was eleven. His hair grew long again, longer even than it had been at the monastery. He grew taller, and Brother Luke took him to a thrift store, where you could buy a sack of clothes and pay by the pound. “Slow down!” Brother Luke would joke with him, pushing down on the top of his head as if he were squashing him back to a smaller size. “You’re growing up too fast for me!”

He slept all the time now. In his lessons, he was awake, but as the day turned to late afternoon, he would feel something descend upon him, and would begin yawning, unable to keep his eyes open. At first Brother Luke joked about this as well—“My sleepyhead,” he said, “my dreamer”—but one night, he sat down with him after the client had left. For months, years, he had struggled with the clients, more out of reflex than because he thought he was capable of making them stop, but recently, he had begun to simply lie there, inert, waiting for whatever was going to happen to be over. “I know you’re tired,” Brother Luke had said. “It’s normal; you’re growing. It’s tiring work, growing. And I know you work hard. But Jude, when you’re with your clients, you have to show a little life; they’re paying to be with you, you know — you have to show them you’re enjoying it.” When he said nothing, the brother added, “Of course, I know it’s not enjoyable for you, not the way it is with just us, but you have to show a little energy, all right?” He leaned over, tucked his hair behind his ear. “All right?” He nodded.

It was also around then that he began throwing himself into walls. The motel they were staying in — this was in Washington — had a second floor, and once he had gone upstairs to refill their bucket of ice. It had been a wet, slippery day, and as he was walking back, he had tripped and fallen, bouncing the entire way downstairs. Brother Luke had heard the noise his fall made and had run out. Nothing had been broken, but he had been scraped and was bleeding, and Brother Luke had canceled the appointment he had for that evening. That night, the brother had been careful with him, and had brought him tea, but he had felt more alive than he had in weeks. Something about the fall, the freshness of the pain, had been restorative. It was honest pain, clean pain, a pain without shame or filth, and it was a different sensation than he had felt in years. The next week, he went to get ice again, but this time, on his way back to the room, he stopped in the little triangle of space beneath the stairwell, and before he was conscious of what he was doing, he was tossing himself against the brick wall, and as he did so, he imagined he was knocking out of himself every piece of dirt, every trace of liquid, every memory of the past few years. He was resetting himself; he was returning himself to something pure; he was punishing himself for what he had done. After that, he felt better, energized, as if he had run a very long race and then had vomited, and he had been able to return to the room.

Eventually, however, Brother Luke realized what he was doing, and there had been another talk. “I understand you get frustrated,” Brother Luke said, “but Jude, what you’re doing isn’t good for you. I’m worried about you. And the clients don’t like seeing you all bruised.” They were silent. A month ago, after a very bad night — there had been a group of men, and after they had left, he had sobbed, wailed, coming as close to a tantrum as he had in years, while Luke sat next to him and rubbed his sore stomach and held a pillow over his mouth to muffle the sound — he had begged Luke to let him stop. And the brother had cried and said he would, that there was nothing more he’d like than for it to be just the two of them, but he had long ago spent all his money taking care of him. “I don’t regret it for an instant, Jude,” said the brother, “but we don’t have any money now. You’re all I’ve got. I’m so sorry. But I’m really saving now; eventually, you’ll be able to stop, I promise.”

“When?” he had sobbed.

“Soon,” said Luke, “soon. A year. I promise,” and he had nodded, although he had long since learned that the brother’s promises were meaningless.

But then the brother said that he would teach him a secret, something that would help him relieve his frustrations, and the next day he had taught him to cut himself, and had given him a bag already packed with razors and alcohol wipes and cotton and bandages. “You’ll have to experiment to see what feels best,” the brother had said, and had shown him how to clean and bandage the cut once he had finished. “So this is yours,” he said, giving him the bag. “You let me know when you need more supplies, and I’ll get them for you.” He had at first missed the theatrics, the force and weight, of his falls and his slams, but he soon grew to appreciate the secrecy, the control of the cuts. Brother Luke was right: the cutting was better. When he did it, it was as if he was draining away the poison, the filth, the rage inside him. It was as if his old dream of leeches had come to life and had the same effect, the effect he had always hoped it would. He wished he was made of metal, of plastic: something that could be hosed down and scrubbed clean. He had a vision of himself being pumped full of water and detergent and bleach and then blasted dry, everything inside him made hygienic again. Now, after the final client of the night had left, he took Brother Luke’s place in the bathroom, and until he heard the brother telling him it was time to come to bed, his body was his to do with what he chose.

He was so dependent on Luke: for his food, for his protection, and now for his razors. When he needed to be taken to the doctor because he was sick — he got infections from the clients, no matter how hard Brother Luke tried, and sometimes he didn’t properly clean his cuts and they became infected as well — Brother Luke took him, and got him the antibiotics he needed. He grew accustomed to Brother Luke’s body, his mouth, his hands: he didn’t like them, but he no longer jolted when Luke began to kiss him, and when the brother put his arms around him, he obediently returned the embrace. He knew there was no one else who would ever treat him as well as Luke did: even when he did something wrong, Luke never yelled at him, and even after all these years, he had still never hit him. Earlier, he had thought he might someday have a client who would be better, who might want to take him away, but now he knew that would never be the case. Once, he had started getting undressed before the client was ready, and the man had slapped his face and snapped at him. “Jesus,” he’d said, “slow down, you little slut. How many times have you done this, anyway?” And as he always did whenever the clients hit him, Luke had come out of the bathroom to yell at the man, and had made the man promise to behave better if he was going to stay. The clients called him names: he was a slut, a whore, filthy, disgusting, a nympho (he had to look that one up), a slave, garbage, trash, dirty, worthless, a nothing. But Luke never said any of those things to him. He was perfect, said Luke, he was smart, he was good at what he did and there was nothing wrong with what he did.

The brother still talked of their being together, although now he talked of a house on the sea, somewhere in central California, and would describe the stony beaches, the noisy birds, the storm-colored water. They would be together, the two of them, like a married couple. No longer were they father and son; now they were equals. When he turned sixteen, they would get married. They would go on a honeymoon to France and Germany, where he could finally use his languages around real French and Germans, and to Italy and Spain, where Brother Luke had lived for two years: once as a student, once the year after he graduated college. They would buy him a piano so he could play and sing. “Other people won’t want you if they knew how many clients you’d been with,” the Brother said. “And they’d be silly to not want you. But I’ll always want you, even if you’ve been with ten thousand clients.” He would retire when he was sixteen, Brother Luke said, and he had cried then, quietly, because he had been counting the days until he was twelve, when Brother Luke had promised he could stop.

Sometimes Luke apologized for what he had to do: when the client was cruel, when he was in pain, when he bled or was bruised. And sometimes Luke acted as if he enjoyed it. “Well, that was a good one,” he’d say, after one of the men left. “I could tell you liked that one, am I right? Don’t deny it, Jude! I heard you enjoying yourself. Well, it’s good. It’s good to enjoy your work.”

He turned twelve. They were now in Oregon, working their way toward California, Luke said. He had grown again; Brother Luke predicted he would be six foot one, six foot two when he stopped — still shorter than Brother Luke, but not by much. His voice was changing. He wasn’t a child anymore, and this made finding clients more difficult. Now there were fewer individual clients and more groups. He hated the groups, but Luke said that was the best he could do. He looked too old for his age: clients thought he was thirteen or fourteen, and at this age, Luke said, every year counted.

It was fall; September twentieth. They were in Montana, because Luke thought he would like to see the night sky there, the stars as bright as electrical lights. There was nothing strange about that day. Two days earlier, he’d had a large group, and it had been so awful that Luke had not only canceled his clients for the day after but had let him sleep alone for both nights, the bed completely his. That evening, though, life had returned to normal. Luke joined him in bed, and began kissing him. And then, as they were having sex, there was a banging at their door, so loud and insistent and sudden that he had almost bitten down on Brother Luke’s tongue. “Police,” he could hear, “open up. Open up right now.”

Brother Luke had clamped his hand over his mouth. “Don’t say a word,” he hissed.

“Police,” shouted the voice again. “Edgar Wilmot, we have a warrant for your arrest. Open the door right now.”

He was confused: Who was Edgar Wilmot? Was he a client? He was about to tell Brother Luke that they had made a mistake when he looked up and saw his face and realized that they were looking for Brother Luke.

Brother Luke pulled out of him and motioned for him to stay in the bed. “Don’t move,” he whispered. “I’ll be right back.” And then he ran into the bathroom; he could hear the door lock click.

“No,” he’d whispered wildly, as Luke left him. “Don’t leave me, Brother Luke, don’t leave me alone.” But the brother had left anyway.

And then everything seemed to move very slowly and very fast, both at the same time. He hadn’t moved, he had been too petrified, but then there was the splintering of wood, and the room was filled with men holding flashlights high by their heads, so that he couldn’t see their faces. One of them came over to him and said something to him — he couldn’t hear for the noise, for his panic — and pulled up his underwear and helped him to his feet. “You’re safe now,” someone told him.

He heard one of the men swear, and shout from the bathroom, “Get an ambulance right now,” and he wrestled free from the man who was holding him and ducked under another man’s arm and made three fast leaps to the bathroom, where he had seen Brother Luke with an extension cord around his neck, hanging from the hook in the center of the bathroom ceiling, his mouth open, his eyes shut, his face as gray as his beard. He had screamed, then, screamed and screamed, and then he was being dragged from the room, screaming Brother Luke’s name again and again.

He remembers little of what followed. He was questioned again and again; he was taken to a doctor at a hospital who examined him and asked him how many times he had been raped, but he hadn’t been able to answer him: Had he been raped? He had agreed to this, to all of this; it had been his decision, and he had made it. “How many times have you had sex?” the doctor asked instead, and he said, “With Brother Luke, or with the others?” and the doctor had said, “What others?” And after he had finished telling him, the doctor had turned away from him and put his face in his hands and then looked back at him and had opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. And then he knew for certain that what he had been doing was wrong, and he felt so ashamed, so dirty that he had wanted to die.

They took him to the home. They brought him his things: his books, the Navajo doll, the stones and twigs and acorns and the Bible with its pressed flowers he had carried with him from the monastery, his clothes that the other boys made fun of. At the home, they knew what he was, they knew what he had done, they knew he was ruined already, and so he wasn’t surprised when some of the counselors began doing to him what people had been doing to him for years. Somehow, the other boys also knew what he was. They called him names, the same names the clients had called him; they left him alone. When he approached a group of them, they would get up and run away.

They hadn’t brought him his bag with razors, and so he had learned to improvise: he stole an aluminum can lid from the trash and sterilized it over the gas flame one afternoon when he was on kitchen duty and used that, stuffing it under his mattress. He stole a new lid every week.

He thought of Brother Luke every day. At the school, he skipped four grades; they allowed him to attend classes in math, in piano, in English literature, in French and German at the community college. His teachers asked him who had taught him what he knew, and he said his father had. “He did a good job,” his English teacher told him. “He must have been an excellent teacher,” and he had been unable to respond, and she had eventually moved on to the next student. At night, when he was with the counselors, he pretended that Brother Luke was standing right behind the wall, waiting to spring out in case things got too awful, which meant that everything that was happening to him were things Brother Luke knew he could bear.

After he had come to trust Ana, he told her a few things about Brother Luke. But he was unwilling to tell her everything. He told no one. He had been a fool to follow Luke, he knew that. Luke had lied to him, he had done terrible things to him. But he wanted to believe that, through everything, in spite of everything, Luke really had loved him, that that part had been real: not a perversion, not a rationalization, but real. He didn’t think he could take Ana saying, as she said of the others, “He was a monster, Jude. They say they love you, but they say that so they can manipulate you, don’t you see? This is what pedophiles do; this is how they prey on children.” As an adult, he was still unable to decide what he thought about Luke. Yes, he was bad. But was he worse than the other brothers? Had he really made the wrong decision? Would it really have been better if he had stayed at the monastery? Would he have been more or less damaged by his time there? Luke’s legacies were in everything he did, in everything he was: his love of reading, of music, of math, of gardening, of languages — those were Luke. His cutting, his hatred, his shame, his fears, his diseases, his inability to have a normal sex life, to be a normal person — those were Luke, too. Luke had taught him how to find pleasure in life, and he had removed pleasure absolutely.

He was careful never to say his name aloud, but sometimes he thought it, and no matter how old he got, no matter how many years had passed, there would appear Luke’s face, smiling, conjured in an instant. He thought of Luke when the two of them were falling in love, when he was being seduced and had been too much of a child, too naïve, too lonely and desperate for affection to know it. He was running to the greenhouse, he was opening the door, the heat and smell of flowers were surrounding him like a cape. It was the last time he had been so simply happy, the last time he had known such uncomplicated joy. “And here’s my beautiful boy!” Luke would cry. “Oh, Jude — I’m so happy to see you.”