Chapter Text
The closet in their bedroom is full with neat shelves of folded pants, drawers of ties and belts and socks, rails lined with jackets—so much space that Willem had laughed, disbelievingly, walking in for the first time, and said, “I still don’t have anything to put in it,” and he had said, “Neither do I.”
But there’s one portion he cares for most: the bright sheaf of Willem’s shirts arranged directly across from the door, Henleys and polos and crisp button-downs all hanging together. Unless retrieving a shirt, he cannot look at that side of the closet—it is filled with memories of their life together, so strong he has to press his eyes closed, very tightly, and wait for them to disappear. There is the flannel Willem changed into at home; there is the suit jacket he wore to his last premiere; there is the joke shirt Harold bought him for Christmas. It is these images that he finds the hardest to bear, decades reduced to—what? Shirts with their sleeves dangling emptily by their sides, the very picture of lifelessness.
He had always enjoyed Willem’s general disregard for fashion—despite Kit’s lamentations, he liked seeing him wear his faded college sweatshirt to the grocery store, buying him loungewear the same warm gray of his eyes, and yet now he finds those unremarkable remnants exceedingly painful: the clothes Willem wore on television or for magazine shoots are one ache, but the frayed sleeves of the crewneck he wore to bed in the winter and the soft cotton t-shirt he loved to feel pressed against his bare back in the spring are another entirely. It is these clothes he reaches for most often, but they are never enough—he had realized, despairingly, that it was Willem, warm and soft with sleep, that had imbued them with comfort.
He changes in the bedroom with the lights off and his back to the closet, both relieved to be free of scrutiny and yet missing the sense of giddy fear that had swelled in him each time he had been brave with Willem. He dresses briskly, putting on Willem’s crewneck and a pair of loose pants before he can think about how his body has changed since he’s stopped eating, how monstrous he looks beneath the shield of his clothing; then he slips into bed, removes his prosthetics, and stretches out across the mattress, sighing. The sheets are cold under his legs, and he twines one arm loosely under the long pillow. As he does every night, he is thinking of Willem when he slips into a bottomless black sleep, the last vestiges of sandalwood drifting from Willem’s sweatshirt and pulling him deeper. Willem, he thinks, as he always does, and then he is gone.
When he wakes a few hours later, he is instantly and inexplicably anguished. He simply cannot understand why his body persists in rousing him when it is evidently pointless—if he were to stay home, locking the door and letting down the shades to choke the apartment in darkness, who would care? Rosen Pritchard would replace him; Harold and Julia would go back to Boston; his friends would continue with their own lives. He could sit in the apartment and play Willem’s movies, his voice messages, on a loop as he slept for years and years, and the world would move seamlessly to fill in the space he had left, as if he had never existed at all.
Even as he imagines his own absence, his life goes on. He moves mindlessly through the apartment as pale light streams in the east windows; now he feels that the windows aren’t so much framing the space but spotlighting his imprisonment, his paralysis in a life uninhabitable by the person he has once again become.
What am I waiting for? He asks himself over and over, and for months he does nothing: he wakes early, swims, and goes to work, coming home only when the sun has already begun to rise and his mind is deliciously foggy. He showers and curls up in bed with one of Willem’s shirts; most nights, he doesn’t eat, so the descent into sleep is a little more slick, and the sleep itself more fathomless. He cuts himself infrequently, once or twice a week, more out of a sense of routine and obligation than anything else. At times it seems the only constancy in his life, the only thing tying him to his old life and its patterns.
He feels, almost, that he is too exhausted to kill himself. He has given everything he can; it’s not enough. Every day he wakes and craves something desperately, something he knows no longer exists on earth. He cannot try and recreate it; he doesn’t know where to begin. But the energy he must muster to conceive a plan, to execute it, is simply not there.
He knows he won’t be able to try again; he cannot convince himself he will get better, as much as he tells himself that he always has. Something fundamental has changed this time, and there is no fixing it. There will be no better, no hope, no fight this time: without someone to understand him as Willem had, there is nothing tethering him to the world. He is free to go wherever he pleases, to return to what he knows: the savannah, the hyenas, the cabin that is no longer so distant.
The hyenas watch him constantly now, panting and snapping at the air. Even though he knows he is being hunted, he appreciates their honesty, comforted by the knowledge that they see him for what he is. Every time he is looked at by Harold or Sanjay or Lucien, with his half-blank eyes and incessantly drooling mouth, he feels like a ghost, like their gazes have gone straight through him. To them he is a visit, an assignment; a meal or a weight. He knows they mean well, but he finds himself—unfairly—resenting them anyway. Has Harold forgotten the hours they had spent arguing over ordinances in his classroom, or frantically piecing together recipes as the pots on the stove boiled over? Has Sanjay forgotten how they used to catch each other’s eye in meetings, or hide in his office during lunch and complain about being the only sane ones left? Lucien can be forgiven his disregard, but he bitterly misses their old conversations anyway. Everyone has resorted to pretending he is newly sick, that he has only recently become someone else entirely. He is treated like a child, like some fragile pink thing newly acquainted with the world, but it’s not what he needs: he knows how to feed himself, how to put himself to sleep—he simply doesn’t see a reason to. What he needs to be explained is the rest of personhood, what to do with the parts of him that are incompatible with life.
Past the rudimentary things he can offer them—time, friendship, advice—his friends have always seen him as a riddle, an undefined disease to be diagnosed and cured. Even to himself he is foremost a list of problems: cutting, deformity, illness, in varying urgency. His titles and accomplishments come later, each of his achievements tainted with the fact of himself, the knowledge of his atrocities. Only to Willem had he always been a whole person, someone worthy of listening to, someone important enough to build a life around.
Even though his hallucinations are too irregular to be relied upon, for a while he dreams of him, so frequently and vividly that it almost feels real, and it is almost enough. In his dreams Willem talks to him, tells him banal stories from their life together, until he feels loosed from his body, his contours gone blurry, existing only as the person whose life Willem is describing in pictures. In these dreams he can never recollect the experience Willem is describing, relying only on Willem to remind him, to return him to that moment. What happened next, he tries to ask Willem, then what? —but he can’t make a sound. He can only listen; he can only remember.
If he has the time, he drives up to Garrison after these dreams. There, he sits on the floor in front of Willem’s filing cabinet, pulls out the drawers and holds the folders in his hands, staring at their lives contained in a single weight. He spreads the pictures and letters from each file and envelope across the office floor, sorting them into a kind of timeline, kneeling until his legs grow painful then fuzzily numb, recalling how time had once been alive. Here is their first time in Paris; here are their first emails to each other, awkward and eager; here is the day they moved into the Lispenard apartment. Perry Street; Malcolm’s wedding; Willem and Harold playing in a doubles tennis tournament in Cambridge. He watches his own life unfold beneath his palms, sees himself fall more comfortably into the rhythm he had run for decades, the images getting at once more and less exciting: wild dogs in Botswana, then a stack of Willem’s novels on his bedside table; JB pinching threads of saffron between his fingers at an Indian bazaar, then a blackened turkey, still steaming, in the oven in Harold and Julia’s kitchen. Black Henry Young cradling a cup of tea in an izakaya; India painting on the rooftop; Malcolm and JB on cobalt-blue bikes in Truro; the photos go on and on, and he wants nothing more to let himself be swallowed up in their ceaselessness, to return to a time before he knew everything that would happen to him, when the future seemed to stretch even wider than his past.
But even before he’s gotten to the Alhambra, even before the beginning of his and Willem’s relationship, he has to stop: he knows he is approaching the abrupt ending, where the photos and letters and communications cease suddenly, as if it is not only Willem but all of them who have died. He thinks feverishly of all the unsent emails he has written to Willem since his death, order slips for pillows and cologne, prescriptions for sleeping pills, imagining the scraps of his new life stuffed into one more folder. “Jude V,” full of detritus and decay, the wreckage of a time barely survived. As he sits back heavily and stares at his life documented before him, he is seized with panic. All of this is behind him; all of it is lost. He will never be so close to his friends again, will never again lie awake eager for the next day.
He cleans the files up afterwards, always, slotting everything back into its original place—he can’t bear the thought of Willem’s painstaking documentation being disturbed. As he does so, the timeline shrinking backwards into nothingness, he knows that not all of these experiences are technically irreproducible: he could still see India on the rare occasions she’s in the city, could still follow JB’s lone tire tracks down the beach at dusk. But he doesn’t see a point in doing any of this, not when the comfort of every moment has been shattered. After he will have no home to return to, no one to carry his old memories so he can bear the freshness of the present.
The fall arrives with a haze of smoke come down from wildfires in Canada; it takes three months of incessant winter snowfall to dampen the scent. Now it is March, springtime—the magnolias that line the streets are blossoming into fresh colors, and the air no longer smells of smoke but sun, and he is coming undone from the puppeteer’s string of optimism that had carried him through each day of his life. As he swims and sits in his office and in the car with Mr. Ahmed, he finds himself questioning why he bothers, why he continues even though he no longer takes any joy in any of it. For the first time he begins to lose faith that the reason for persisting will soon be revealed to him; for the first time he increasingly feels that he shouldn’t, that he should instead loose himself from everything and allow his life to rearrange itself into a configuration in which he is no longer necessary.
He begins to imagine disappearing more insistently, his office perpetually dark, the guest bed in Cambridge permanently made, the flowers in Lantern House wilting and crumbling onto the counter. He cannot even bring himself to feel guilty about these images—he cannot muster more than a flicker of remorse when Julia brings soup to his door and he thanks her even as he turns her away, citing a nonexistent case—he is too tired. In some ways he feels already long gone: he hasn’t been to dinner with JB in a month, hasn’t seen Andy in weeks, and he can’t remember the last time he’s gone to visit Harold of his own accord.
Every conversation wears itself down the same path—someone will tell him he doesn’t look well; he will nod and say he’s fine, he’s been working too much and has fallen sick; they will pause only briefly before smiling and nodding, like he has said the right thing. He supposes the only thing stronger than their concern for him is their desire for him to be healed; they are so eager to be reassured of this that they will allow themselves to be convinced by the weakest of performances.
He is genuinely unable to discern whether he wants someone to call out his deception, to be forced into a new round of rehabilitation and be instructed to live, to be held and comforted and promised a future where things will finally be better, but no one does: it is as though after all these decades, everyone has finally convinced themselves he is healed, healed and newly autonomous. At least they have been relieved of this burden, he thinks—they are all far too old to be concerning themselves with his life, not when their own lives have been postponed for so long.
For months he waits and waits, deliberates and decides and changes his mind; after Willem, it is his second thought when he wakes, and the second-to-last before he falls asleep. He just needs a plan, he thinks, one that he can rely on, because he can’t bear to fail again. But one afternoon, when he is feeling lighter than usual—he has almost forgotten about it, really, as much as he ever does—it comes to him, and he knows, and the decision is easy after all, hardly a decision at all. Once he has decided, he feels almost instantly better, so much so that he is relieved, then feels silly for it. Of course this is the right decision; of course it has been all along. He doesn’t blame himself for trying—life is important, after all; without it, he would never have met Willem. He would never have met Harold, or Julia, or Malcolm, or JB, all of the people who have brought him such pleasure, such happiness. He has been immeasurably fortunate to have had them—he has learned things he will always treasure—but that time has passed: he will move on, and then they will too.
He feels so restored that he ends up going to Cambridge for his birthday after all, where Harold grins tentatively at him when he teases him about his baking (the second tier of the slightly-blackened cake is slipping dangerously off its perch, and why is there a second tier anyway, he’s getting older, not married) and smiles wider when they go out for ice cream to make up for it (Julia insists her taste buds need to be cleansed) and he orders something for himself.
He really does begin eating better, too: he has no need for his hallucinations anymore. Either he will be reunited with Willem, or he will be able to forget him. When he slips on his prosthetics one morning, they are snug around the blunt ends of his calves, and he can stand and walk very slowly. The next day this is easier, and even more so the next. When he strides into the office one day, everyone stares at him until he snaps at them to get back to work, even though he’s not really upset.
He’s ready; he’s so ready, eager almost to the point of exhilaration. He wants to be done, to be free, to save himself. Before he does, though, he wants to be sure to tell Willem of his plans, to clarify that he isn’t abandoning him, but that he simply can’t keep living like this.
Dear Willem, he begins—then what? He sits there for long minutes just looking at Willem’s name written. How many times has he done so unconsciously, in letters, in paperwork, in sticky notes left on the nightstand? The last time, he thinks, had been in Willem’s birthday card that final August. Fifty-two, he’d written, and still surrounded by fangirls whenever we’re in the city. God knows where we’ll be on your sixtieth. Happy birthday. This card never made it into the filing cabinet; it still sits exactly where Willem had left it on the kitchen counter in Garrison, against which Willem had pulled him, laughing.
“What is this supposed to mean?” he had teased. “Am I losing my touch?” and he had shaken his head where it was pressed against Willem’s, smiling so hard his face hurt.
How sick is it that the one time he really wants to speak and be heard, the first time he has craved for someone to listen to him, he will only ever be met with silence? There are so many stories, so many confessions, he wishes he could tell Willem now. “Wait,” he used to say aloud, staring at his image on the television screen, “stay with me, listen to what I have to say. I’m ready now. I’ll tell you everything.” Just give me a few more years, a few more conversations. I still want to talk to you. I still want to be freed. I know I can be that, Willem, but I can’t manage it without you.
But Willem had only ever looked back at him, both of them trapped in time, him aching with longing and grief for the life they could have had, for the man he could feel himself becoming. When Willem was alive, sometimes he could look at him and see himself reflected back, a boy and then an old man, and feel relieved that he had gotten old after all, that he wouldn’t be visually preserved at fifteen, that he would be remembered as someone entirely different—or, hopefully, though he knew it was a foolish wish, he wouldn’t be remembered at all.
Dear Willem—
I miss you. I miss our life together. It was so good, wasn’t it?
I hope you haven’t been missing me, and that you’ve gotten everything I couldn’t give you. Whatever happiness you have now, you deserve it. You were always the best of us.
I want you to know I’ve tried. I know you’ll understand, only you. You’re the only one who could ever help me.
I’m too late for saving now, anyway. I’ve had enough. I’m so exhausted; I can’t go on like this.
Even in writing this he feels, for the first time since Willem’s death, that overwhelming relief that came with baring a secret. Last summer, when he could feel the anniversary creeping towards him and, simultaneously, felt that he was being suffocated by the memories that had been drawn to the surface but that he was now incapable of releasing, he had tried to write to Willem, to tell him more of what had happened to him. In his desperation he had felt that Willem might be able to solve things for him as he always had, to relieve him of a portion of his burden, and he was only all the more panicked when he paused in his writing and felt only cold, the room still silent around him, no reassurance forthcoming. He shudders to think of it now, and has to remind himself that there is still a way he can be released, that he isn’t resigned to a life he can only remember.
I thought we had more time. I thought we would sit side-by-side on the deck at Lantern House for decades more, drinking Julia’s iced tea and letting Laurence’s grandchildren rock our chairs back and forth. I was going to take a few weeks off in January, after you came home—I thought then that even those four months apart were too long. I had no idea.
I’ve spent so much of my life waiting for you to come home. Forgive me—I can’t wait any longer.
I love you. I hope I’ll see you again soon.
He has more to say—he wants nothing more than to tell Willem of everything from the last three years without him, every irritating client and uncouth joke from JB, but it won’t solve anything, not when he can’t see Willem smile and shake his head and say, alternatingly, “you’re a saint, Judy, I don’t know how you put up with it,” and “you should just retire, Judy, Rosen Pritchard has gotten their share of you; it’s my turn now.” Even when he would then have to respond “no, I’m not,” and “no, I can’t,” he would love it, love the routine and the way it made Willem grin. He often thinks it’s the familiarity of these patterns he misses most, sending Willem pictures of copies of The Little Prince captioned found you, getting pictures of orange and grey tabby cats with their tails curled around one another that Willem hadn’t even needed to caption.
By June, he knows he’s nearly ready: he has been sure to spend at least an hour outside every day, and sleep for at least six—even he can tell his coloring looks normal again, or even better than normal. He hardly cuts himself; he has no need to. The knowledge of what he plans to do is solace enough. Walking is nearly painless now, as are his swims; he is as close to healthy as he’s ever been, or so Andy tells him when he sees him for the first time in nearly three months.
“Jude,” Andy says, sighing, “I haven’t seen you since March. You can’t disappear like that ever again, promise me.”
“I promise,” he says. “I’m sorry, Andy,” and goes willingly to him when he sees Andy make an aborted movement towards him, as if he had wanted to hug him and had stopped himself. He lets Andy put his arms around him and breathe in shuddering bursts into his hair, and holds him too, inhaling the familiar smell of antiseptic and the cologne Andy has worn since he was a resident at their college, thoughts occupied with the relief and heavy certainty that this will be their last time together. His last time in this examination room, where he has sat and bled and laughed and bargained and shouted decade after decade—the place where he has been most consistently able to expose himself to another person, the place where he has always been understood without having to explain it; his last time with his doctor, under whose hands he has been taken apart and painstakingly pieced back together; his last time with one of his dearest friends, who has always cared for him, even if he hasn’t always trusted him.
He listens to Andy deliver his spiel—more sleeping, more eating, call him whenever, not just when he feels like cutting, he means it—and feels a rush of nostalgia: how many times has he heard these words? He has always been able to rely on Andy, not only to tell him these things, but to understand those rituals are part of him, and to rail relentlessly against them anyway, to believe he can be saved. As always, he is fascinated and touched by Andy’s inexplicable insistence upon repairing what he insists upon doing to himself, caring for him even when he refuses; as if he is something more than wounds, something precious enough to be restored.
He hopes, then, that Andy won’t feel too distraught, though he knows he will: his longest, greatest project, a failure. He hasn’t been cured, though by no fault of Andy’s. He is simply an aberration, an anomaly—treatment-resistant.
“Any more brain fog,” Andy asks, “any sense of impairment?” He shakes his head. He hasn’t felt so clear since the day he decided how he’d do it, ever since Richard returned from Belize two years ago and told him of his diving misadventures, how he had surfaced too quickly and almost given himself an embolism, and he had thought, abruptly— that’s it . The swiftness of his decision had scared him as much as it had relieved him: he hadn’t realized he had been seeking a solution so readily, but he had reassured himself with the fact that sickness was only dangerous if it was undiscovered, and if it was incurable. As long as he is aware of it—and as long as he can handle it, he is safe.
He promises Andy things have changed, that he’s taking care of himself, and Andy hugs him again, tightly, and lets him go, and he does. Thank you, Andy, he says, really, and wishes Andy knew what he meant. Soon enough, he thinks, he will.
Dinner with Harold is scheduled in the city a week later: Harold smiles when he sees him, and he feels a pang of guilt when he sees the tension leave his shoulders, but it is dampened by the crush of relief he’s felt ever since he decided he was going to leave. He decides, then, that these few intermediary weeks are the greatest comfort, both of them relieved in a promise they have found themselves on opposite sides of.
After their meal, they walk slowly around the city, him mindful of how old Harold has become, how deliberate his movements must be. At the same time, he is aware of his new swiftness, his new agility, and wonders: it could always have been like this, if I wanted. Would I have chosen it, had I known ? But he knows he wouldn’t have—his one fatal flaw has always been his desire to cling to things that have no use, waiting and waiting for the disease to spread, if only for the sake of being able to call that rot his own. But that’s all over now; he’s finally grown up.
Last is JB, JB who has always been the most difficult to love, JB who has always been the most difficult to shake. JB is coming to pick him up in the morning, and they will spend the weekend in Garrison. He has decided JB will be the one to find him; squeamish as he is, he knows JB will need it. He is allowing JB what he has always craved: to see him as he is, unveiled, without secrets. JB has always loved to watch him at his most vulnerable, has always sought out that state, and now he can gorge himself on it. Now he doesn’t mind being seen—tomorrow he will not belong to himself anymore. He will not belong to anyone.
This is all I have to offer you, he tells the JB-in-his-head, who blinks resignedly back at him. He pictures himself dissolving into a mess of colors on a palette, JB dipping in a brush, the dull smear of paint brightening under his hands. This much he can trust JB with—JB has always seen the ugliest parts of him and turned them into something captivating, even he at once enthralled and sickened by what JB has made of him. Jude with Cigarette; Jude After Sickness; Jude, Alone —these are pieces of him that even he cannot recall, but JB seems to have memorized those versions of him down to the bone, down to expressions and gestures he hadn’t recognized as his own.
Sometimes when they were sitting on the deck in Truro or leaning over the kitchen counter eating peanuts after dinner, he would feel JB looking at him so intensely that he was unsettled; it was as if his eyes had become his camera, as if he had been trying to commit every detail to memory. Now that they are the only ones left, this has gotten worse: JB will step forward and look at him quickly, scanning and cataloguing him as if he knows their time together is now finite. Maybe JB has always known this, just as he has always known the truth about him.
Even JB is unaware of how much he truly knows, how much of him lives in his galleries and on his palettes in wide grey pools, messy streaks of silty browns and snake-scale greens. He is unaware of what he has done to warrant being seen so thoroughly, and to be represented as such. It’s not as though he even acts like a friend to JB any longer. He cancels their dinners, begs out of trips up to Garrison, sends flowers and congratulations in lieu of actually attending his galleries. He can’t stand to see those paintings of the four of them any longer, or—even worse—of himself, to learn how he appears in JB’s imagination; the person he has always been known as is now foreign, someone he might have met and exchanged words with but whose mannerisms, whose preferences and pleasantries he cannot remember the shape of.
He understands well enough that the most unnatural thing about what he is doing is, arguably, that he isn't supposed to know when it’s his last time seeing someone he loves. He has always felt this way about relationships, that much of their preciousness could be attributed to their precariousness and vulnerability to any of a host of dangers, each person’s presence strung carefully together into an exquisite gossamer cobweb to which he clings, aware that any minute shift could tear apart the fabric of their life together, and this is the same agony of waiting for someone to leave him, the same certainty that things will never be the same. But he has no other choice: he waits, and smiles, and makes conversation, and waits and waits, until those scheduled last meetings pass him by, and he is watching Lucien (pushed by one of his daughters), then the Chief, then Flora, then JB, then Harold, then Julia, turn and disappear down the hallway or the street, into a world that still hasn’t finished with them.
When he comes home for the final time, he still puts his shoes a few inches to the right of the doorframe, leaving space for Willem’s ratty sneakers, and drops his keys quietly in the bowl on the counter, as not to wake him. Even though he has prepared to do this alone, he cannot prevent himself by being chased by Willem’s scent, by the sight of his things, around their apartment. He had initially planned for it to take place in the bedroom, to grant himself a little comfort, but he cannot bring himself to do it in the bed where he and Willem had both slept, intertwined, believing they were inseparable. As he stares at his comforter, at the novels and sleeping medication on his nightstand, he is suddenly filled with the desire to take another shirt from the closet, climb into bed and curl around it with his nose tucked into the fabric—but he reminds himself of his resolve, that even if he has broken his promise to Harold, he cannot break the one he has made to himself.
So instead he makes his slow way to the closet, where he flips slowly through the hangers, running his hands along each shirt and remembering how it had been worn—a baby blue polo Willem had gone golfing in once before Harold scoffed at him and said, you look like a Republican ; a warm fleece-lined jacket he’d brought back from shooting in Moscow; a ratty polyester long-sleeve that had once belonged to his father.
Finally he chooses a warm cream linen, run with little coconut shell buttons and delicate floral embroidery, and which Willem had worn faithfully through the summer and on every vacation; he remembers draping it over Willem’s sunburnt shoulders as he sat reading beside the pool, and Willem turning to smile up at him.
The memory is so clear he finds himself smiling as he looks down at the shirt clasped between his palms, an ancient muscle memory slowly retracing itself across his face—he had only ever smiled at Willem like that. He can almost hear Willem say, “there you are, Judy, I missed you,” and feel the breadth of his shoulders warm and baked with sun beneath his palms. He thinks of Willem in Croatia, in Hanoi, in their kitchen at Lantern House standing by the sink, singing in his sweet voice. If he had known, he thinks again, if he had known—he would have quit his job and traveled with him; he would have bought him a dozen new shirts just for the pleasure of spotting him across a piazza, making his way across to him.
It is silent around him—there are no crowds, no music, no delighted Willem calling his name—and he remembers he is not in Siena, and Willem is gone, and he is alone. He should have taken more photos; he has only one, which he now savors, of Willem, sunglasses perched atop his head, cradling a stray cat in the crook of one arm and laughing. He craves the way Willem had given love so freely, so fluently, as if time hadn’t been intended for any other purpose; he feels directionless, like a miser, clutching his affection close to his chest, waiting for an opportunity to spend it that will never come.
But now he clutches that shirt so tightly his knuckles go white, trying and trying to forget. He feels made of nothing but memory, an artifact left over from a period of brightness now gone dirty with neglect. He wishes desperately to be restored; he knows it's too late.
He opens his bedside table and stands there for long minutes staring inside, watching the large gauge needle left over from his antibiotic treatments click against the inside of the drawer before falling still. When he had been in the hospital five Septembers ago with osteomyelitis, the nurse delivering his antibiotics had struggled to access his artery for how thick the webbings of scar tissue on his arms had grown. So instead she had used an artery in his groin: it had been wildly uncomfortable and humiliating, and he doubts he can reach it himself. He doesn’t have many options, but he needs to do this, possibly more than he’s ever needed anything.
He is unbuttoning his shirt sleeve; he is unwrapping the needle, fingers so cold they are almost numb; he is opening the shower door and stepping inside and sliding to the floor. These are patterns he knows, muscle memory. His fingers find the scar from that New Year’s Eve so many years ago, when Willem had taken him to Andy’s and he had decided to live. He had cut through his radial artery, Andy had told him, hands trembling once he had finished with his stitches; he had been lucky to come in when he had. Now he feels around that mark, pressing deep into the mounds of scar tissue surrounding it until he feels the faint pulsing of blood beneath his fingers. He exhales once, sharply, then cuts directly through that raised scar, deep enough that blood surges down his arm. This he wipes away with the back of his hand before seizing the needle and pushing it into the incision, crying out at the burn of its slide, of his skin parting around it.
Before he can waver, he depresses the plunger: the pain is instantly unlike anything he has ever felt before, tearing up his arm to the shoulder and drowning him in a crushing pressure, so intense his mouth drops open and the needle nearly slips from his hand. One more, he thinks, and he’ll be finished, and he hears himself panting as he releases the plunger and injects himself again. Now he is screaming without words, writhing on the tile even as he feels himself depleting, the energy sapping from his muscles.
Even as he grasps emptily at the tiles, panting in shock and disbelief—this is a pain he has not known in decades—an indescribable longing creeps up on him and swallows him with the pain, washing over him with the lingering scent of sandalwood. The bathroom swims before him, the shower and toilet and handrails Malcolm had installed tilting around him. His letter to Harold, he thinks, dizzily, did he sign it? Had he apologized? There are still so many debts he owes the people who had loved him, so many hours of effort gone unrepaid. But it is too late—as he tries to stand, he remembers he has taken off his prosthetics, and slides helplessly back to the floor, where his head lolls against his shoulder and his eyes close; when he opens them, the stunning marble of his floors has gone an odd cream.
He hears himself making strange sounds, gasps and mumbling wheezes; he swings rapidly between chills and fever; he reaches with one trembling hand to grasp at Willem’s shirt as it slips from his chest; only on his third pass does he manage to seize it and press his cheek against it. When he has it, he feels immensely comforted. Take me, he says, or tries to—he can’t form the words. I’m ready. For once in his life as he slips toward unconsciousness, he is not swarmed with memories: there is no Brother Luke, no Dr. Traylor, no Caleb. There is only the cool tile beneath him, and the scent of sandalwood, and the sting of each of his nerves on fire. Even though he has always prided himself on his mind, his rationality, he isn’t unsettled by the new incoherence of his thoughts. Finally he has been freed from having to remember—that relief is greater than any pain.
When he had pictured this scenario, dozens of times over, he had imagined himself thinking of everything he was trying to escape, allowing himself to be chased into that new world where he could be safe. But instead he thinks of nothing, of nothings: Willem pointing at the fiery-red of the foliage across the lake at Lantern House, Laurence’s granddaughters braiding dandelions into bracelets, Malcolm holding up sprigs of different firs and saying, smell this. An image of Julia wiping the dust from the cracked ceramic bowl in their foyer is swimming behind his eyelids when the visions end. This is how it’s always been: the moments pass him by, and he lets them.