But although he knows how foolish he is being, he still cannot bring himself to eat. The very act of it now repels him. He wishes he were above want, above need. He has a vision of his life as a sliver of soap, worn and used and smoothed into a slender, blunt-ended arrowhead, a little more of it disintegrating with every day.
And then there is what he doesn’t like to admit to himself but is conscious of thinking. He cannot break his promise to Harold—he won’t. But if he stops eating, if he stops trying, the end will be the same anyway.
Usually he knows how melodramatic, how narcissistic, how unrealistic he is being, and at least once a day he scolds himself. The fact is, he finds himself less and less able to summon Willem’s specifics without depending on props: He cannot remember what Willem’s voice sounds like without first playing one of the saved voice messages. He can no longer remember Willem’s scent without first smelling one of his shirts. And so he fears he is grieving not so much for Willem but for his own life: its smallness, its worthlessness.
He has never been concerned with his legacy, or never thought he had been. And it is a helpful thing that he isn’t, for he will leave nothing behind: not buildings or paintings or films or sculptures. Not books. Not papers. Not people: not a spouse, not children, probably not parents, and, if he keeps behaving the way he is, not friends. Not even new law. He has created nothing. He has made nothing, nothing but money: the money he has earned; the money given to him to compensate for Willem being taken from him. His apartment will revert to Richard. The other properties will be given away or sold and their proceeds donated to charities. His art will go to museums, his books to libraries, his furniture to whoever wants it. It will be as if he has never existed. He has the feeling, unhappy as it is, that he was at his most valuable in those motel rooms, where he was at least something singular and meaningful to someone, although what he had to offer was being taken from him, not given willingly. But there he had at least been real to another person; what they saw him as was actually what he was. There, he was at his least deceptive.
He had never been able to truly believe Willem’s interpretation of him, as someone who was brave, and resourceful, and admirable. Willem would say those things and he would feel ashamed, as if he’d been swindling him: Who was this person Willem was describing? Even his confession hadn’t changed Willem’s perception of him—in fact, Willem seemed to respect him more, not less, because of it, which he had never understood but in which he had allowed himself to find solace. But although he hadn’t been convinced, it was somehow sustaining that someone else had seen him as a worthwhile person, that someone had seen his as a meaningful life.
The spring before Willem died, they’d had some people over for dinner—just the four of them and Richard and Asian Henry Young—and Malcolm, in one of the occasional spikes of regret he had been experiencing over his and Sophie’s decision not to have children, even though, as they all reminded him, they hadn’t wanted children to begin with, had asked, “Without them, I just wonder: What’s been the point of it all? Don’t you guys ever worry about this? How do any of us know our lives are meaningful?”
“Excuse me, Mal,” Richard had said, pouring him the last of the wine from one bottle as Willem uncorked another, “but I find that offensive. Are you saying our lives are less meaningful because we don’t have kids?”
“No,” Malcolm said. Then he thought. “Well, maybe.”
“I know my life’s meaningful,” Willem had said, suddenly, and Richard had smiled at him.
“Of course your life’s meaningful,” JB had said. “You make things people actually want to see, unlike me and Malcolm and Richard and Henry here.”
“People want to see our stuff,” said Asian Henry Young, sounding wounded.
“I meant people outside of New York and London and Tokyo and Berlin.”
“Oh, them. But who cares about those people?”
“No,” Willem said, after they’d all stopped laughing. “I know my life’s meaningful because”—and here he stopped, and looked shy, and was silent for a moment before he continued—“because I’m a good friend. I love my friends, and I care about them, and I think I make them happy.”
The room became quiet, and for a few seconds, he and Willem had looked at each other across the table, and the rest of the people, the apartment itself, fell away: they were two people on two chairs, and around them was nothingness. “To Willem,” he finally said, and raised his glass, and so did everyone else. “To Willem!” they all echoed, and Willem smiled back at him.
Later that evening, when everyone had left and they were in bed, he had told Willem that he was right. “I’m glad you know your life has meaning,” he told him. “I’m glad it’s not something I have to convince you of. I’m glad you know how wonderful you are.”
“But your life has just as much meaning as mine,” Willem had said. “You’re wonderful, too. Don’t you know that, Jude?”
At the time, he had muttered something, something that Willem might interpret as an agreement, but as Willem slept, he lay awake. It had always seemed to him a very plush kind of problem, a privilege, really, to consider whether life was meaningful or not. He didn’t think his was. But this didn’t bother him so much.
And although he hadn’t fretted over whether his life was worthwhile, he had always wondered why he, why so many others, went on living at all; it had been difficult to convince himself at times, and yet so many people, so many millions, billions of people, lived in misery he couldn’t fathom, with deprivations and illnesses that were obscene in their extremity. And yet on and on and on they went. So was the determination to keep living not a choice at all, but an evolutionary implementation? Was there something in the mind itself, a constellation of neurons as toughened and scarred as tendon, that prevented humans from doing what logic so often argued they should? And yet that instinct wasn’t infallible—he had overcome it once. But what had happened to it after? Had it weakened, or become more resilient? Was his life even his to choose to live any longer?
He had known, ever since the hospital, that it was impossible to convince someone to live for his own sake. But he often thought it would be a more effective treatment to make people feel more urgently the necessity of living for others: that, to him, was always the most compelling argument. The fact was, he did owe Harold. He did owe Willem. And if they wanted him to stay alive, then he would. At the time, as he slogged through day after day, his motivations had been murky to him, but now he could recognize that he had done it for them, and that rare selflessness had been something he could be proud of after all. He hadn’t understood why they wanted him to stay alive, only that they had, and so he had done it. Eventually, he had learned how to rediscover contentment, joy, even. But it hadn’t begun that way.
And now he is once again finding life more and more difficult, each day a little less possible than the last. In his every day stands a tree, black and dying, with a single branch jutting to its right, a scarecrow’s sole prosthetic, and it is from this branch that he hangs. Above him a rain is always misting, which makes the branch slippery. But he clings to it, as tired as he is, because beneath him is a hole bored into the earth so deep that he cannot see where it ends. He is petrified to let go because he will fall into the hole, but eventually he knows he will, he knows he must: he is so tired. His grasp weakens a bit, just a little bit, with every week.
So it is with guilt and regret, but also with a sense of inevitability, that he cheats on his promise to Harold. He cheats when he tells Harold he is being sent away to Jakarta for business and will miss Thanksgiving. He cheats when he begins growing a beard, which he hopes will disguise the gauntness in his face. He cheats when he tells Sanjay he’s fine, he’s just had an intestinal flu. He cheats when he tells his secretary she doesn’t need to get him lunch because he picked something up on the way into the office. He cheats when he cancels the next month’s worth of dates with Richard and JB and Andy, telling them he has too much work. He cheats every time he lets the voice whisper to him, unbidden, It won’t be long now, it won’t be long. He isn’t so deluded that he thinks he will be able to literally starve himself to death—but he does think that there will be a day, closer now than ever before, in which he will be so weak that he will stumble and fall and crash his head against the Greene Street lobby’s cement floors, in which he will contract a virus and not have the resources to make it retreat.