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“No,” Andy says. “If you ruin this, Jude—if you keep lying to someone who loves you, who really loves you, who has only ever wanted to see you exactly as you are—then you will only have yourself to blame. It will be your fault. And it’ll be your fault not because of who you are or what’s been done to you or the diseases you have or what you think you look like, but because of how you behave, because you won’t trust Willem enough to talk to him honestly, to extend to him the same sort of generosity and faith that he has always, always extended to you. I know you think you’re sparing him, but
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Often he was struck by the sensation—which he had experienced at Lispenard Street as well—that they were playing house, that he was living some boyhood fantasy of running away from the world and its rules with his best friend and living in some unsuitable but perfectly commodious structure (a train car; a tree house) that wasn’t meant to be a home but had become one because of its occupants’ shared conviction to make it so.
“I’m not Hemming, Willem,” Jude hisses at him. “I’m not going to be the cripple you get to save for the one you couldn’t.”
This is my little world, and I don’t know what to do in it. He feels trapped, and yet how can he feel trapped when he can’t even negotiate the small place he occupies?
But being with you is like being in this fantastic landscape,” he continues, slowly. “You think it’s one thing, a forest, and then suddenly it changes, and it’s a meadow, or a jungle, or cliffs of ice. And they’re all beautiful, but they’re strange as well, and you don’t have a map, and you don’t understand how you got from one terrain to the next so abruptly, and you don’t know when the next transition will arrive, and you don’t have any of the equipment you need. And so you keep walking through, and trying to adjust as you go, but you don’t really know what you’re doing, and often you make
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And then he realized that it was because he thought that if he could convince himself that it was less awful than he remembered, then he could also convince himself that he was less damaged, that he was closer to healthy, than he feared he was.
“but he doesn’t want you to admire him; he wants you to see him as he is. He wants you to tell him that his life, as inconceivable as it is, is still a life.”
Now, though, as an almost-forty-eight-year-old, he saw people’s relationships as reflections of their keenest yet most inarticulable desires, their hopes and insecurities taking shape physically, in the form of another person.
He now viewed a successful relationship as one in which both people had recognized the best of what the other person had to offer and had chosen to value it as well.
but it was not a helpful line of thought, and it made him too upset. And so he tried not to consider it. But it was always there, running through their friendship, their lives, like a vein of turquoise forking through stone.
He had looked at Jude, then, and had felt that same sensation he sometimes did when he thought, really thought of Jude and what his life had been: a sadness, he might have called it, but it wasn’t a pitying sadness; it was a larger sadness, one that seemed to encompass all the poor striving people, the billions he didn’t know, all living their lives, a sadness that mingled with a wonder and awe at how hard humans everywhere tried to live, even when their days were so very difficult, even when their circumstances were so wretched. Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It’s so sad,
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He sometimes thinks he continues to come more for Meredith’s sake than for Lucien’s, and he realizes that this is the way it is, the way it must be: you don’t visit the lost, you visit the people who search for the lost.
He woke missing Willem so profoundly that he felt he was going blind.
Oh god, he thought, and had gone back inside, oh god. He wanted the reminders to stop; he dreaded the day when they would.
“Jude,” he says, “there’s not an expiration date on needing help, or needing people. You don’t get to a certain age and it stops.”
This, he thinks, is his punishment for depending on others: one by one, they will leave him, and he will be alone again, and this time it will be worse because he will remember it had once been better. He has the sense, once again, that his life is moving backward, that it is becoming smaller and smaller, the cement box shrinking around him until he is left with a space so cramped that he must fold himself into a crouch, because if he lies down, the ceiling will lower itself upon him and he will be smothered.
And seeing these images, he once again marveled at how perfect JB’s understanding was of a life together, of his life, of how everything in his apartment—Willem’s sweatpants, still slung over the edge of the laundry hamper; Willem’s toothbrush, still waiting in the glass on the bathroom sink; Willem’s watch, its face splintered from the accident, still sitting untouched on his nightstand—had become totemic, a series of runes only he could read.
“I know my life’s meaningful because”—and here he stopped, and looked shy, and was silent for a moment before he continued—“because I’m a good friend. I love my friends, and I care about them, and I think I make them happy.”
But I couldn’t stop thinking this: that life tethered life.
It is also then that I wish I believed in some sort of life after life, that in another universe, maybe on a small red planet where we have not legs but tails, where we paddle through the atmosphere like seals, where the air itself is sustenance, composed of trillions of molecules of protein and sugar and all one has to do is open one’s mouth and inhale in order to remain alive and healthy, maybe you two are there together, floating through the climate.
It isn’t only that he died, or how he died; it is what he died believing. And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.
