“Well,” Andy says. “I’m glad. But I’m sorry this is why you’ve stopped, Jude.”
“I am, too,” he says. They are both quiet, both, he fears, nostalgic for the days when cutting was his most serious problem.
Now it is June, now it is July. The wounds on his legs—the old ones, which he has had for more than a year, and the more recent ones, which he has had since March—have not healed. They have barely diminished. And it is then, just after the Fourth of July weekend, just after Willem’s run ends, that Andy asks if he can come talk to him and Willem. And because he knows what Andy is going to say, he lies and says that Willem is busy, that Willem doesn’t have the time, as if by delaying the conversation, he might delay his future as well, but early one Saturday evening he comes home from the office and there they are in the apartment, waiting for him.
The speech is what he expects. Andy recommends—he strongly recommends—amputation. Andy is gentle, very gentle, but he can tell, from how rehearsed his delivery is, from how formal he is, that he is nervous.
“We always knew this day would come,” Andy begins, “but that doesn’t make it any easier. Jude, only you know how much pain, how much inconvenience, you can tolerate. I can’t tell you that. I can tell you that you’ve gone on far longer than most people would. I can tell you you’ve been extraordinarily courageous—don’t make that face: you have been; you are—and I can tell you that I can’t imagine what you’ve been suffering.
“But all of that aside—even if you feel you have the wherewithal to keep going—there are some realities to consider here. The treatments aren’t working. The wounds aren’t healing. The fact that you’ve had two bone infections in less than a year is alarming to me. I’m worried you’re going to develop an allergy to one of the antibiotics, and then we’ll be really, really fucked. And even if you don’t, you’re not tolerating the drugs as well as I’d hoped you would: you’ve lost way too much weight, a troubling amount of weight, and every time I see you, you’ve gotten a little weaker.
“The tissue in your upper legs seems to be healthy enough that I’m pretty certain we’ll be able to spare both knees. And Jude, I promise you that your quality of life will improve instantly if we amputate. There won’t be any more pain in your feet. You’ve never had a wound on your thighs, and I don’t think there’s any immediate fear you will. The prosthetics available now are so infinitely superior than what they were even ten years ago that honestly, your gait will probably be better, more natural, with them than it is with your actual legs. The surgery is very straightforward—just four hours or so—and I’ll do it myself. And the inpatient recovery is brief: less than a week in the hospital, and we’ll fit you with temporary prostheses immediately.”
Andy stops, placing his hands on his knees, and looks at them. For a long while, none of them speaks, and then Willem begins to ask questions, smart questions, questions he should be asking: How long is the outpatient recovery period? What kind of physical therapy would he be doing? What are the risks associated with the surgery? He half listens to the responses, which he already knows, more or less, having researched these very questions, this very scenario, every year since Andy had first suggested it to him, seventeen years ago.
Finally, he interrupts them. “What happens if I say no?” he asks, and he can see the dismay move across both of their faces.
“If you say no, we’ll keep pushing forward with everything we’ve been doing and hope it works eventually,” Andy says. “But Jude, it’s always better to have an amputation when you get to decide to have it, not when you’re forced to have it.” He pauses. “If you get a blood infection, if you develop sepsis, then we will have to amputate, and I won’t be able to guarantee that you’ll keep the knees. I won’t be able to guarantee that you won’t lose some other extremity—a finger; a hand—that the infection won’t spread far beyond your lower legs.”
“But you can’t guarantee me that I’ll even keep the knees this time,” he says, petulant. “You can’t guarantee I won’t develop sepsis in the future.”
“No,” Andy admits. “But as I said, I think there’s a very good chance you will keep them. And I think if we remove this part of your body that’s so gravely infected that it’ll help prevent further disease.”
They are all quiet again. “This sounds like a choice that isn’t a choice,” he mutters.
Andy sighs. “As I said, Jude,” he says, “it is a choice. It’s your choice. You don’t have to make it tomorrow, or even this week. But I want you to think about it, carefully.”
He leaves, and he and Willem are left alone. “Do we have to talk about it now?” he asks, when he can finally look at Willem, and Willem shakes his head. Outside the sky is turning rose-colored; the sunset will be long and beautiful. But he doesn’t want beauty. He wishes, suddenly, that he could swim, but he hasn’t swum since the first bone infection. He hasn’t done anything. He hasn’t gone anywhere. He has had to turn his London clients over to a colleague, because his IV has tethered him to New York. His muscles have disappeared: he is soft flesh on bone; he moves like an old man. “I’m going to bed,” he tells Willem, and when Willem says, quietly, “Yasmin’s coming in a couple of hours,” he wants to cry. “Right,” he says, to the floor. “Well. I’m going to take a nap, then. I’ll wake up for Yasmin.”
That night, after Yasmin has left, he cuts himself for the first time in a long time; he watches the blood weep across the marble and into the drain. He knows how irrational it seems, his desire to keep his legs, his legs that have caused him so many problems, that have cost him how many hours, how much money, how much pain to maintain? But still: They are his. They are his legs. They are him. How can he willingly cut away a part of himself? He knows that he has already cut away so much of himself over the years: flesh, skin, scars. But somehow this is different. If he sacrifices his legs, he will be admitting to Dr. Traylor that he has won; he will be surrendering to him, to that night in the field with the car.
And it is also different because he knows that once he loses them, he will no longer be able to pretend. He will no longer be able to pretend that someday he will walk again, that someday he will be better. He will no longer be able to pretend that he isn’t disabled. Up, once more, will go his freak-show factor. He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing.
And he is tired. He doesn’t want to have to learn how to walk again. He doesn’t want to work at regaining weight he knows he will lose, weight on top of the weight he has struggled to replace from the first bone infection, weight that he has re-lost with the second. He doesn’t want to go back into the hospital, he doesn’t want to wake disoriented and confused, he doesn’t want to be visited by night terrors, he doesn’t want to explain to his colleagues that he is sick yet again, he doesn’t want the months and months of being weak, of fighting to regain his equilibrium. He doesn’t want Willem to see him without his legs, he doesn’t want to give him one more challenge, one more grotesquerie to overcome. He wants to be normal, he has only ever wanted to be normal, and yet with each year, he moves further and further from normalcy. He knows it is fallacious to think of the mind and the body as two separate, competing entities, but he cannot help it. He doesn’t want his body to win one more battle, to make the decision for him, to make him feel so helpless. He doesn’t want to be dependent on Willem, to have to ask him to lift him in and out of bed because his arms will be too useless and watery, to help him use the bathroom, to see the remains of his legs rounded into stumps. He had always assumed that there would be some sort of warning before this point, that his body would alert him before it became seriously worse. He knows, he does, that this past year and a half was his warning—a long, slow, consistent, unignorable warning—but he has chosen, in his arrogance and stupid hope, not to see it for what it is. He has chosen to believe that because he had always recovered, that he would once again, one more time. He has given himself the privilege of assuming that his chances are limitless.