A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

Malcolm, who was now pushing his mushrooms and tofu—he always ordered the same dish: oyster mushrooms and braised tofu in a treacly brown sauce—around his plate, as Willem and JB eyed it.

They could make bad, unsalable, worthless art for generations and they would still be able to buy at whim the best oils they wanted, and impractically large lofts in downtown Manhattan that they could trash with their bad architectural decisions, and when they got sick of the artist’s life—as JB was convinced Ezra someday would—all they would need to do is call their trust officers and be awarded an enormous lump sum of cash of an amount that the four of them (well, maybe not Malcolm) could never dream of seeing in their lifetimes.

His early pieces had included The Mace, a tennis ball that he had de-fuzzed, sliced in half, and filled with sand before coating it in glue and rolling it around and around in a carpet of hair so that the bristles moved like seaweed underwater, and “The Kwotidien,” in which he covered various household items—a stapler; a spatula; a teacup—in pelts of hair.

but it involved the combing out and braiding together of many pieces in order to make one apparently endless rope of frizzing black hair.

In thanks, JB had given Jude a hair-covered hairbrush, but then had reclaimed the gift when it looked like Ezra’s father’s friend might be interested in buying it (he didn’t, but JB never returned the hairbrush to Jude).

“Never,” Willem said. “I love Diane Arbus.” Dean stiffened, and his little features seemed to gather themselves into a knot in the center of his little face. “It’s DeeAnn.” “What?” “DeeAnn. You pronounce her name ‘DeeAnn.’ ”

(normally she was surly and silent and was actually a bit feared in the office for creating on the wall above her desk an elaborate sculpture of a heart made entirely of X-ACTO blades),

If that doesn't scream love to SH

“How long is this going to go on for?” Jude asked. “Forever, I hope.” And he did. His one regret was that he hadn’t begun earlier, back when they were all young.

“What’s this band called?” “Okay, here’s the thing,” JB said, grinning. “It’s called Smegma Cake 2.” “What?” he asked, laughing. “Smegma Cake 2? Why? What happened to Smegma Cake 1?” “It got a staph infection,” JB shouted over the noise of the train clattering into the station. An older woman standing near them scowled in their direction.

At Ortolan they were taught to be warm but not familiar, accessible but not informal. “It’s not Friendly’s,” his boss, Findlay, the restaurant’s general manager, liked to say. “Smile, but don’t tell people your name.”

When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy? How did you know when to stop?

But these were days of self-fulfillment, where settling for something that was not quite your first choice of a life seemed weak-willed and ignoble. Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice. There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault.

Ambition and atheism: “Ambition is my only religion,”

And then he’d laugh his sad, contrived, walrus-bark laugh: “Ah! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

He semi-apologetically, but mostly proudly, explained his plan to them one Saturday—as of midnight that night, he would stop talking to Willem altogether, and would reduce his conversational output with Malcolm by a half. Because Jude’s race was undetermined, he would continue speaking to him, but would only do so in riddles or Zen koans, in recognition of the unknowability of his ethnic origins.

“What point?” Malcolm had asked. “That you can be as annoying to white people without talking to them as when you are talking to them?”

He enjoyed these divulgences more than he expected—these were real teenagers who’d had the sorts of real, plain lives he had always wondered about—and he found it both relaxing and educational to sit there late at night and listen to them.

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.

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),

(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?)

“You said to never just accept anything,” he reminded Harold. “That’s in the classroom and in the courtroom,” Harold said. “Not in life. You see, Jude, in life, sometimes nice things happen to good people. You don’t need to worry—they don’t happen as often as they should. But when they do, it’s up to the good people to just say ‘thank you,’ and move on, and maybe consider that the person who’s doing the nice thing gets a bang out of it as well, and really isn’t in the mood to hear all the reasons that the person for whom he’s done the nice thing doesn’t think he deserves it or isn’t worthy of it.”

“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.

Sometimes he was hit hard enough so that he lost consciousness, which is what he began to crave: that blackness, where time passed and he wasn’t in it, where things were done to him but he didn’t know it.

And in that same way, law school breaks a mind down. Novelists, poets, and artists don’t often do well in law school (unless they are bad novelists, poets, and artists), but neither, necessarily, do mathematicians, logicians, and scientists. The first group fails because their logic is their own; the second fails because logic is all they own.

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.

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.”

Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

How can you help someone who won’t be helped while realizing that if you don’t try to help, then you’re not being a friend at all?

And that, he sometimes felt, was why he loved being high so much: not because it offered an escape from everyday life, as so many people thought, but because it made everyday life seem less everyday.

but seeing Jackson once smack down a hundred-dollar bill for two candy bars when they were both high and giggly and starving at three in the morning, telling the cashier to keep the change, had sobered him.

There was something obscene about how careless Jackson was with money, something that reminded JB that as much as he thought of himself otherwise, he too was boring, and conventional, and his mother’s son.

Harold read The Hobbit to him, which he had never read, and when Harold couldn’t come, Julia came, and picked up where Harold had left off: those were his favorite visits.

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.

What. The. Fuck.

He went to the kitchen to make himself coffee, and as he did, he whispered the lines back to himself, those lines he thought of whenever he was coming home, coming back to Greene Street after a long time away—“And tell me this: I must be absolutely sure. This place I’ve reached, is it truly Ithaca?”—as all around him, the apartment filled with light.

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.

You do know that this is how mentally ill people make their plans, says the dry and belittling voice inside him. You do know that this planning is something only a sick person would do.

“Fine,” he pants. “Fucking cut yourself to ribbons for all I care. You love the cutting more than you love me, anyway.”