Oh Willem, he thought. You don’t know how badly I want to tell you. “I’m sorry, Willem,” he said, instead.

“Fine, you’re sorry,” said Willem. “Go to bed. Do you still have extra toothbrushes in the same place?”

“Yes,” he said.

The next night he came home late from work, and found Willem lying on the sofa in his room again, reading. “How was your day?” he asked, not lowering his book.

“Fine,” he said. He waited to see if Willem was going to explain himself, but he didn’t, and eventually he went to the bathroom. In the closet, he passed Willem’s duffel bag, which was unzipped and filled with enough clothes that it was clear he was going to stay for a while.

He felt pathetic admitting it to himself, but having Willem there—not just in his apartment, but in his room—helped. They didn’t speak much, but his very presence steadied and refocused him. He thought less of Caleb; he thought less of everything. It was as if the necessity of proving himself normal to Willem really did make him more normal. Just being around someone he knew would never harm him, not ever, was soothing, and he was able to quiet his mind, and sleep. As grateful as he was, though, he was also disgusted at himself, by how dependent he was, how weak. Was there no end to his needs? How many people had helped him over the years, and why had they? Why had he let them? A better friend would have told Willem to go home, told him he would be fine on his own. But he didn’t do this. He let Willem spend the few remaining weeks he had in New York sleeping on his sofa like a dog.

At least he didn’t have to worry about upsetting Robin, as Willem and Robin had broken up toward the end of the Odyssey shoot, when Robin discovered that Willem had cheated on her with one of the costume assistants. “And I didn’t even really like her,” Willem had told him in one of their phone calls. “I did it for the worst reason of all—because I was bored.”

He had considered this. “No,” he said, “the worst reason of all would’ve been because you were trying to be cruel. Yours was just the stupidest reason of all.”

There had been a pause, and then Willem had started laughing. “Thanks for that, Jude,” he said. “Thanks for making me feel both better and worse.”

Willem stayed with him until the very day he had to leave for Colombo. He was playing the eldest son of a faded Dutch merchant family in Sri Lanka in the early nineteen-forties, and had grown a thick mustache that curled up at its tips; when Willem hugged him, he felt it brushing against his ear. For a moment, he wanted to break down and beg Willem not to leave. Don’t go, he wanted to tell him. Stay here with me. I’m scared to be alone. He knew that if he did say this, Willem would: or he would at least try. But he would never say this. He knew it would be impossible for Willem to delay the shoot, and he knew that Willem would feel guilty for his inability to do so. Instead, he tightened his hold on Willem, which was something he rarely did—he rarely showed Willem any physical affection—and he could feel that Willem was surprised, but then he increased his pressure as well, and the two of them stood there, wrapped around each other, for a long time. He remembered thinking that he wasn’t wearing enough layers to really let Willem hug him this closely, that Willem would be able to feel the scars on his back through his shirt, but in the moment it was more important to simply be near him; he had the sense that this was the last time this would happen, the last time he would see Willem. He had this fear every time Willem went away, but it was keener this time, less theoretical; it felt more like a real departure.

After Willem left, things were fine for a few days. But then they got bad again. The hyenas returned, more numerous and famished than before, more vigilant in their hunt. And then everything else returned as well: years and years and years of memories he had thought he had controlled and defanged, all crowding him once again, yelping and leaping before his face, unignorable in their sounds, indefatigable in their clamor for his attention. He woke gasping for air: he woke with the names of people he had sworn he would never think of again on his tongue. He replayed the night with Caleb again and again, obsessively, the memory slowing so that the seconds he was standing naked in the rain on Greene Street stretched into hours, so that his flight down the stairs took days, so that Caleb’s raping him in the shower, in the elevator, took weeks. He had visions of taking an ice pick and jamming it through his ear, into his brain, to stop the memories. He dreamed of slamming his head against the wall until it split and cracked and the gray meat tumbled out with a wet, bloody thunk. He had fantasies of emptying a container of gasoline over himself and then striking a match, of his mind being gobbled by fire. He bought a set of X-ACTO blades and held three of them in his palm and made a fist around them and watched the blood drip from his hand into the sink as he screamed into the quiet apartment.

He asked Lucien for more work and was given it, but it wasn’t enough. He tried to volunteer for more hours at the artists’ nonprofit, but they didn’t have any additional shifts to give him. He tried to volunteer at a place where Rhodes had once done some pro bono work, an immigrants’ rights organization, but they said they were really looking for Mandarin and Arabic speakers at the moment and didn’t want to waste his time. He cut himself more and more; he began cutting around the scars themselves, so that he could actually remove wedges of flesh, each piece topped with a silvery sheen of scar tissue, but it didn’t help, not enough. At night, he prayed to a god he didn’t believe in, and hadn’t for years: Help me, help me, help me, he pleaded. He was losing himself; this had to stop. He couldn’t keep running forever.

It was August; the city was empty. Malcolm was in Sweden on holiday with Sophie; Richard was in Capri; Rhodes was in Maine; Andy was on Shelter Island (“Remember,” he’d said before he left, as he always said before a long vacation, “I’m just two hours away; you need me, and I catch the next ferry back”). He couldn’t bear to be around Harold, whom he couldn’t see without being reminded of his debasement; he called and told him he had too much work to go to Truro. Instead he spontaneously bought a ticket to Paris and spent the long, lonely Labor Day weekend there, wandering the streets by himself. He didn’t contact anyone he knew there—not Citizen, who was working for a French bank, or Isidore, his upstairs neighbor from Hereford Street, who was teaching there, or Phaedra, who had taken a job as the director of a satellite of a New York gallery—they wouldn’t have been in the city anyway.

He was tired, he was so tired. It was taking so much energy to hold the beasts off. He sometimes had an image of himself surrendering to them, and they would cover him with their claws and beaks and talons and peck and pinch and pluck away at him until he was nothing, and he would let them.

After he returned from Paris, he had a dream in which he was running across a cracked reddish plain of earth. Behind him was a dark cloud, and although he was fast, the cloud was faster. As it drew closer, he heard a buzzing, and realized it was a swarm of insects, terrible and oily and noisy, with pincerlike protuberances jutting out from beneath their eyes. He knew that if he stopped, he would die, and yet even in the dream he knew he couldn’t go on for much longer; at some point, he had stopped being able to run and had started hobbling instead, reality asserting itself even in his dreams. And then he heard a voice, one unfamiliar but calm and authoritative, speak to him. Stop, it said. You can end this. You don’t have to do this. It was such a relief to hear those words, and he stopped, abruptly, and faced the cloud, which was seconds, feet away from him, exhausted and waiting for it to be over.