A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

“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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

“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.

And then one Saturday morning he woke very early, just as the sky was brightening. It was late May, and the weather was unpredictable: some days it felt like March, other days, like July. Ninety feet away from him lay Jude. And suddenly his timidity, his confusion, his dithering seemed silly. He was home, and home was Jude. He loved him; he was meant to be with him; he would never hurt him—he trusted himself with that much. And so what was there to fear?

Since then, he has been constantly pitting what he knows of Willem against what he expects of someone—anyone—who has any physical desire for him. It is as if he somehow expects that the Willem he has known will be replaced by another; as if there will be a different Willem for what is a different relationship.

This, he realizes, is what he wanted from a relationship all along. This is what he meant when he hoped he might someday be touched.

But now, here it is: all the physical contact that he knows exists between healthy people who love each other and are having sex, without the dreaded sex itself.

“Surprises, maybe,” he said. “But not nasty ones.”

increasingly distant from him—so affect him, so alter his life. But then, he might as well ask—as he often does—why he has let the first fifteen years of his life so dictate the past twenty-eight. He has been lucky beyond measure; he has an adulthood that people dream about: Why, then, does he insist on revisiting and replaying events that happened so long ago? Why can he not simply take pleasure in his present? Why must he so honor his past? Why does it become more vivid, not less, the further he moves from it?

“I’m going to tell you,” he says to Willem, and Willem nods, but before he does, he leans over and kisses Willem. It is the first time in his life that he has ever initiated a kiss, and he hopes that with it he is conveying to Willem everything he cannot say, not even in the dark, not even in the early-morning gray: everything he is ashamed of, everything he is grateful for.

it had seemed to him the ideal expression of an adult relationship, to have someone with whom you could discuss the mechanics of a shared existence.

“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 you’re not. You’re selfish. You’re selfish and you’re stubborn and you’re proud and you’re going to ruin the best thing that has happened to you. Don’t you understand that?”

“Stop trying to fix me, Willem,” Jude spits back at him. “What am I to you? Why are you with me anyway? I’m not your goddamned charity project. I was doing just fine without you.”

“Sorry if I’m not living up to being the ideal boyfriend, Jude. I know you prefer your relationships heavy on the sadism, right? Maybe if I kicked you down the stairs a few times I’d be living up to your standards?”

“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.”

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.

sound illogical to you,” he tells Willem, who looks back at him. “But even all these years later, I still can’t think of myself as disabled. I mean—I know I am. I know I am. I have been for twice as long as I haven’t been. It’s the only way you’ve known me: as someone who—who needs help. But I remember myself as someone who used to be able to walk whenever he wanted to, as someone who used to be able to run.

“I think every person who becomes disabled thinks they were robbed of something. But I suppose I’ve always felt that—that if I acknowledge that I am disabled, then I’ll have conceded to Dr. Traylor, then I’ll have let Dr. Traylor determine the shape of my life. And so I pretend I’m not; I pretend I am who I was before I met him. And I know it’s not logical or practical. But mostly, I’m sorry because—because I know it’s selfish. I know my pretending has consequences for you. So—I’m going to stop.”

Each day, he chose a few white pebbles from the side of the road and put them in a jar to take home; at night, he sat in his hotel room with his feet wrapped in hot towels.

It is a thirty-minute drive back to the house from the station, a little faster if he hurries, but he doesn’t hurry, because the drive itself is pretty. And when he crosses the final large intersection, he doesn’t even see the truck coming toward him,

“Willem,” he said aloud to the apartment, because sometimes, when it was very bad, he spoke to him. “Come back to me. Come back.”

Inside it is everything: every letter he had ever written Willem, every substantial e-mail printed out. There are birthday cards he’d given Willem. There are photographs of him, some of which he has never seen. There is the Artforum issue with Jude with Cigarette on the cover. There is a card from Harold written shortly after the adoption, thanking Willem for coming and for the gift. There is an article about him winning a prize in law school, which he certainly hadn’t sent Willem but someone clearly had. He hadn’t needed to catalog his life after all—Willem had been doing it for him all along.

he has the sense that if he stretches his hand out and strokes the canvas, he will feel beneath his fingertips Willem’s hair, his fringe of eyelashes. But he doesn’t do this, of course, just looks up at last and sees JB smiling at him, sadly. “The title card’s been mounted already,” JB says, and he goes slowly to the wall behind the painting and sees its title—Willem Listening to Jude Tell a Story, Greene Street—and he feels his breath abandon him; it feels as if his heart is made of something oozing and cold, like ground meat, and it is being squeezed inside a fist so that chunks of it are falling, plopping to the ground near his feet.

On he plays, his recriminations beating a rhythm in his head. But then he also thinks: If I had never met Willem. If I had never met Harold. If I had never met Julia, or Andy, or Malcolm, or JB, or Richard, or Lucien, or so many other people: Rhodes and Citizen and Phaedra and Elijah. The Henry Youngs. Sanjay. All the most terrifying Ifs involve people. All the good ones do as well.

In those months I thought often of what I was trying to do, of how hard it is to keep alive someone who doesn’t want to stay alive.

He missed you. I missed you, too. We all did. I think you should know that, that I didn’t just miss you because you made him better: I missed you for you. I missed watching the pleasure you took in doing the things you enjoyed, whether it was eating or running after a tennis ball or flinging yourself into the pool. I missed talking with you, missed watching you move through a room, missed watching you fall to the lawn under a passel of Laurence’s grandchildren, pretending that you couldn’t get up from under their weight. (That same day, Laurence’s youngest grandchild, the one who had a crush on you, had made you a bracelet of knotted-together dandelion flowers, and you had thanked her and worn it all day, and every time she had spotted it on your wrist, she had run over and buried her face in her father’s back: I missed that, too.) But mostly, I missed watching you two together; I missed watching you watch him, and him watch you; I missed how thoughtful you were with each other, missed how thoughtlessly, sincerely affectionate you were with him; missed watching you listen to each other, the way you both did so intently. That painting JB did—Willem Listening to Jude Tell a Story—was so true, the expression so right: I knew what was happening in the painting even before I read its title.

Once, a month or so after we all returned home from Italy, we were sitting on this bench, and he said to me, “Do you think he was happy with me?” He was so quiet I thought I had imagined it, but then he looked at me and I saw I hadn’t. “Of course he was,” I told him. “I know he was.” He shook his head. “There were so many things I didn’t do,” he said at last. I didn’t know what he meant by this, but it didn’t change my mind. “Whatever it was, I know it didn’t matter,” I told him. “I know he was happy with you. He told me.” He looked at me, then. “I know it,” I repeated. “I know it.” (You had never said this to me, not explicitly, but I know you will forgive me; I know you will. I know you would have wanted me to say this.)

“It is,” I said. “But you’ve started over too, Jude. You’re admirable, too.” He glanced at me, then looked away. “I mean it,” I said.

And then he said—he was trying to make me feel better, too; we were each performing for the other—“Did I ever tell you about the time we jumped off the roof to the fire escape outside our bedroom?”

But although I could never have imagined the person he would become for me, I knew how he would leave me: despite all my hopes, and pleas, and insinuations, and threats, and magical thoughts, I knew. And five months later—June twelfth, a day with no significant anniversaries associated with it, a nothing day—he did.

“At least Willem isn’t here,” we said to one another. “At least Willem isn’t here to see this.” Though, of course—if you were here, wouldn’t he still be as well?

didn’t know that Andy would be dead three years later of a heart attack, or Richard two years after that of brain cancer. You all died so young: you, Malcolm, him. Elijah, of a stroke, when he was sixty; Citizen, when he was sixty as well, of pneumonia.

In the end there was, and is, only JB,

I sat down one Saturday to clean out the bookcases, an ambitious project that I soon lost interest in, when I found, tucked between two books, two envelopes, our names in his handwriting. I opened my envelope, my heart thrumming, and saw my name—Dear Harold—and read his note from decades ago, from the day of his adoption, and cried, sobbed, really, and then I slipped the disc into the computer and heard his voice, and although I would have cried anyway for its beauty, I cried more because it was his. And then Julia came home and found me and read her note and we cried all over again. And it wasn’t until a few weeks after that that I was able to open the letter he had left us on his table. I hadn’t been able to bear it earlier; I wasn’t sure I would be able to bear it now. But I did. It was eight pages long, and typed, and it was a confession: of Brother Luke, and Dr. Traylor, and what had happened to him. It took us several days to read, because although it was brief, it was also endless, and we had to keep putting the pages down and walking away from them, and then bracing each other—Ready?—and sitting down and reading some more. “I’m sorry,” he wrote. “Please forgive me. I never meant to deceive you.”

Or maybe he is closer still: maybe he is that gray cat that has begun to sit outside our neighbor’s house, purring when I reach out my hand to it; maybe he is that new puppy I see tugging at the end of my other neighbor’s leash; maybe he is that toddler I saw running through the square a few months ago, shrieking with joy, his parents huffing after him; maybe he is that flower that suddenly bloomed on the rhododendron bush I thought had died long ago; maybe he is that cloud, that wave, that rain, that mist. 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.

I didn’t know so much of this. Then, we were only standing and looking up at that red-brick building, and I was pretending that I never had to fear for him, and he was letting me pretend this: that all the dangerous things he could have done, all the ways he could have broken my heart, were in the past, the stuff of stories, that the time that lay behind us was scary, but the time that lay ahead of us was not. “You jumped off the roof?” I repeated. “Why on earth would you have...