A Little Life (16 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, but
what
Plato?”

“Have you read Plato?”

“I don’t see—”

“
Have
you?”

“No, but—”

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

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

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

“I want to ask you a question.”

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

“What?” he asked again, warily.

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

“We have?” Willem asked in fake surprise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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