A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

By June she was so weak she couldn’t sit. Fourteen months after they’d met, she was the one in bed, and he was the one next to her.

“Promise me.” “I promise.” But even then, he couldn’t believe her. She sighed. “I should’ve made you talk more,” she said. It was the last thing she ever said to him. Two weeks later—July third—she was dead.

everything he owned in one neat package. On the bus he stared out the window and thought of nothing. He hoped his back wouldn’t betray him on the ride, and it didn’t.

But she was right about one thing: it did get harder and harder. He did blame himself.

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

The generosity of Harold’s gift unsettled him. First, there was the matter of the gift itself: he had never, never received anything so grand. Second, there was the impossibility of ever adequately repaying him.

He would return home after dinner at Harold’s house and feel a flush of relief. He knew why, too, as much as he didn’t want to admit it to himself: traditionally, men—adult men, which he didn’t yet consider himself among—had been interested in him for one reason, and so he had learned to be frightened of them.

He was frightened of everything, it sometimes seemed, and he hated that about himself. Fear and hatred, fear and hatred: often, it seemed that those were the only two qualities he possessed. Fear of everyone else; hatred of himself.

But fairness is not the only, or even the most important, consideration in law: the law is not always fair. Contracts are not fair, not always. But sometimes they are necessary, these unfairnesses, because they are necessary for the proper functioning of society.

difference between what is fair and what is just, and, as important, between what is fair and what is necessary.

Besides, he knew enough now to know that the law was a flimsy form of protection: if he really wanted to be safe, he should have become a marksman squinting through an eyepiece, or a chemist in a lab with his pipettes and poisons.

“But law isn’t so unlike pure math, really—I mean, it too in theory can offer an answer to every question, can’t it? Laws of anything are meant to be pressed against, and stretched, and if they can’t provide solutions to every matter they claim to cover, then they aren’t really laws at all, are they?”

He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.

This was true, but the greater reason was that he was tentative about naming Harold as one of his assets, because he didn’t want Harold to regret his association with him. And so he’d said nothing.

“Dear Jude,” Harold wrote, “thank you for your beautiful (if unnecessary) note. I appreciate everything in it. You’re right; that mug means a lot to me. But you mean more. So please stop torturing yourself. “If I were a different kind of person, I might say that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully. “Actually—maybe I am that kind of person after all. “Love, Harold.”

“You’re right. I can’t dictate your decisions. But I don’t have to accept them, either.

He felt in those minutes his body’s treason, how sometimes the central, tedious struggle in his life was his unwillingness to accept that he would be betrayed by it again and again, that he could expect nothing from it and yet had to keep maintaining it. So much time, his and Andy’s, was spent trying to repair something unfixable, something that should have wound up in charred bits on a slag heap years ago. And for what? His mind, he supposed.

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

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

He had been beaten, of course, and shouted at, and in what he thought was a final punishment, Father Gabriel had called him into his office and told him that he would teach him a lesson about stealing other people’s things.

Father Gabriel folded his handkerchief to the mouth of a bottle of olive oil, and then rubbed the oil into the back of his left hand. And then he had taken his lighter—the same one he had stolen—and held his hand under the flame until the greased spot had caught fire, and his whole hand was swallowed by a white, ghostly glow. Then he had screamed and screamed, and the father had hit him in the face for screaming. “Stop that shouting,” he’d shouted. “This is what you get. You’ll never forget not to steal again.”

After that, after he was caught, he was made to go to Father Gabriel’s office every night and take off his clothes, and the father would examine inside him for any contraband.

His rages began after his evening examinations with Father Gabriel, which soon expanded to include midday ones with Brother Peter.

They hit him with whatever they could find, they started keeping a belt looped on a nail on the schoolroom wall, they took off their sandals and beat him for so long that the next day he couldn’t even sit, they called him a monster, they wished for his death, they told him they should have left him on the garbage bag.

And he was grateful for this, too, for their help exhausting him, because he couldn’t lasso the beast himself and he needed their assistance to make it retreat, to make it walk backward into the cage until it freed itself again.

The father began visiting him in his room at night, and so did Brother Peter, and later, Brother Matthew, and he got worse and worse: they made him sleep in his wet nightshirt, they made him wear it during the day.

Once he was in his room, and both Father Gabriel and Brother Peter were there, and he was trying not to shout, because he had learned that the quieter he was, the sooner it would end,

As an adult, he became obsessed in spells with trying to identify the exact moment in which things had started going so wrong, as if he could freeze it, preserve it in agar, hold it up and teach it before a class: This is when it happened. This is where it started.

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

But it is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear.

Every day, your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?” The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors.

Once you decide to think of someone as your child, something changes, and everything you have previously enjoyed about them, everything you have previously felt for them, is preceded first by that fear.

when your child dies, you feel everything you’d expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won’t even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that’s written about mourning is all the same, and it’s all the same for a reason—because there is no real deviation from the text.

Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.

It is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them.

but he had a few years ago come to realize that JB’s definition of friendship and its responsibilities was different than his own, and there was no arguing with him about it: you either accepted it or you didn’t, and he had decided to accept it, although recently, the work it took to accept JB and his limitations had begun to feel more enraging and wearisome and arduous than seemed necessary.

Later, he would look back on this episode as a sort of fulcrum, the hinge between a relationship that was one thing and then became something else: his friendship with JB, of course, but also his friendship with Willem.

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

“So I hope you won’t think this is too—presumptuous, I suppose—but we’ve been wondering if you might consider letting us, well, adopt you.” Now he turned to him again, and smiled. “You’d be our legal son, and our legal heir, and someday all this”—he tossed his free arm into the air in a parodic gesture of expansiveness—“will be yours, if you want it.”

“Harold, Julia—are you kidding? There’s nothing—nothing—I’ve ever wanted more. My whole life. I just never thought—” He stopped; he was speaking in fragments. For a minute they were all quiet, and he was finally able to look at both of them. “I thought you were going to tell me you didn’t want to be friends anymore.”

He thought, suddenly, of a conversation he’d once had with Brother Peter, in which he’d asked the brother if he thought he’d ever be adopted, and the brother had laughed. “No,” he’d said, so decisively that he had never asked again.

“You were a kid, a baby. Those things were done to you. You have nothing, nothing to blame yourself for, not ever, not in any universe.”

“And even if you hadn’t been a kid, even if you had just been some horny guy who wanted to fuck everything in sight and had ended up with a bunch of STDs, it still wouldn’t be anything to be ashamed of.”

He cleaned now to stop himself, to distract himself, from doing other things,

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

Some of them behaved differently around him now—especially in the last year or so—but most of them were dedicated to lives and interests and pursuits that were so specific and, at times, marginal, that Willem’s accomplishments were treated as neither more nor less important than their own.

Success, among JB’s Hood Hall assortment, wasn’t defined by your box-office numbers (as it was for his agent and manager) or your costars or your reviews (as it was by his grad-school classmates): it was defined simply and only by how good your work was, and whether you were proud of it.

But really, both of them knew why they kept attending these parties: because they had become one of the few opportunities the four of them had to be together, and at times they seemed to be their only opportunity to create memories the four of them could share, keeping their friendship alive by dropping bundles of kindling onto a barely smoldering black smudge of fire. It was their way of pretending everything was the same. It also provided them an excuse to pretend that everything was fine with JB, when they all three knew that something wasn’t.

He sensed that JB—who had so loved college, its structures and hierarchies and microsocieties that he had known how to navigate so well—was trying with every party to re-create the easy, thoughtless companionship they had once had, when their professional identities were still foggy to them and they were united by their aspirations instead of divided by their daily realities.

When he had begun looking, a year and a half ago, he had known only that he wanted to live downtown and that he needed a building with an elevator, so that Jude would be able to visit him.