“Anything else,” he says. “This tastes like dog food.” But he is speaking to Harold, staring at him, daring him to flinch, to break. His pulse leaps in his throat with anticipation: He can see Harold springing from his chair and hitting him in the face. He can see Harold crumpling with tears. He can see Harold ordering him out of his house. “Get the fuck out of here, Jude,” Harold will say. “Get out of our lives and never come back.”
“Fine,” he’ll say. “Fine, fine. I don’t need you anyway, Harold. I don’t need any of you.” What a relief it will be to learn that Harold had never really wanted him after all, that his adoption was a whim, a folly whose novelty tarnished long ago.
But Harold does none of those things, just looks at him. “Jude,” he says at last, very quietly.
“Jude, Jude,” he mocks him, squawking his own name back to Harold like a jay. “Jude, Jude.” He is so angry, so furious: there is no word for what he is. Hatred sizzles through his veins. Harold wants him to live, and now Harold is getting his wish. Now Harold is seeing him as he is.
Do you know how badly I could hurt you? he wants to ask Harold. Do you know I could say things that you would never forget, that you would never forgive me for? Do you know I have that power? Do you know that every day I have known you I have been lying to you? Do you know what I really am? Do you know how many men I have been with, what I have let them do to me, the things that have been inside me, the noises I have made? His life, the only thing that is his, is being possessed: By Harold, who wants to keep him alive, by the demons who scrabble through his body, dangling off his ribs, puncturing his lungs with their talons. By Brother Luke, by Dr. Traylor. What is life for? he asks himself. What is my life for?
Oh, he thinks, will I never forget? Is this who I am after all, after all these years?
He can feel his nose start to bleed, and he pushes back from the table. “I’m leaving,” he tells them, as Julia enters the room with a sandwich. He sees that she has cut off its crusts and sliced it into triangles, the way you would for a child, and for a second he wavers and almost begins to bawl, but then he recalls himself and glares again at Harold.
“No, you’re not,” Harold says, not angrily, but decisively. He stands up from his chair, points his finger at him. “You’re staying and you’re finishing.”
“No, I’m not,” he announces. “Call Andy, I don’t care. I’m going to kill myself, Harold, I’m going to kill myself no matter what you do, and you’re not going to be able to stop me.”
“Jude,” he hears Julia whisper. “Jude, please.”
Harold walks over to him, taking the plate from Julia as he does, and he thinks: This is it. He raises his chin, he waits for Harold to hit him in the face with it, but he doesn’t, just puts the plate before him. “Eat,” Harold says, his voice tight. “You’re going to eat this now.”
He thinks, unexpectedly, of the day he had his first episode at Harold and Julia’s. Julia was at the grocery store, and Harold was upstairs printing out a worrisomely complicated recipe for a soufflé he claimed he was going to make. There he had lain in the pantry, trying to keep himself from kicking his legs out in agony, listening to Harold clatter down the stairs and into the kitchen. “Jude?” he’d called, not seeing him, and as quiet as he had tried to be, he had made a noise anyway, and Harold had opened the door and found him. He had known Harold for six years by that point, but he was always careful around him, dreading but expecting the day when he would be revealed to him as he really was. “I’m sorry,” he’d tried to tell Harold, but he was only able to croak.
“Jude,” Harold had said, frightened, “can you hear me?,” and he’d nodded, and Harold had entered the pantry himself, picking his way around the stacks of paper towels and jugs of dishwasher detergent, lowering himself to the floor and gently pulling his head into his lap, and for a second he had thought that this was the moment he had always half anticipated, the one in which Harold would unzip his pants and he would have to do what he had always done. But he hadn’t, had just stroked his head, and after a while, as he twitched and grunted, his body tensing itself with pain, its heat filling his joints, he realized that Harold was singing to him. It was a song he had never heard before but that he recognized instinctually was a child’s song, a lullaby, and he juddered and chattered and hissed through his teeth, opening and closing his left hand, gripping the throat of a nearby bottle of olive oil with his right, as on and on Harold sang. As he lay there, so desperately humiliated, he knew that after this incident Harold would either become distant from him or would draw closer still. And because he didn’t know which would happen, he found himself hoping—as he never had before and never would again—that this episode would never end, that Harold’s song would never finish, that he would never have to learn what followed it.
And now he is so much older, Harold is so much older, Julia is so much older, they are three old people and he is being given a sandwich meant for a child, and a directive—Eat—meant for a child as well. We are so old, we have become young again, he thinks, and he picks up the plate and throws it against the far wall, where it shatters, spectacularly. He sees the sandwich had been grilled cheese, sees one of the triangular slabs slap itself against the wall and then ooze down it, the white cheese dripping off in gluey clumps.
Now, he thinks, almost giddily, as Harold comes close to him once more, now, now, now. And Harold raises his hand and he waits to be hit so hard that this night will end and he will wake in his own bed and for a while be able to forget this moment, will be able to forget what he has done.
But instead he finds Harold wrapping him in his arms, and he tries to push him away, but Julia is holding him too, leaning over the carapace of his wheelchair, and he is trapped between them. “Leave me alone,” he roars at them, but his energy is dissipating and he is weak and hungry. “Leave me alone,” he tries again, but his words are shapeless and useless, as useless as his arms, as his legs, and he soon stops trying.
“Jude,” Harold says to him, quietly. “My poor Jude. My poor sweetheart.” And with that, he starts to cry, for no one has ever called him sweetheart, not since Brother Luke. Sometimes Willem would try—sweetheart, Willem would try to call him, honey—and he would make him stop; the endearment was filthy to him, a word of debasement and depravity. “My sweetheart,” Harold says again, and he wants him to stop; he wants him to never stop. “My baby.” And he cries and cries, cries for everything he has been, for everything he might have been, for every old hurt, for every old happiness, cries for the shame and joy of finally getting to be a child, with all of a child’s whims and wants and insecurities, for the privilege of behaving badly and being forgiven, for the luxury of tendernesses, of fondnesses, of being served a meal and being made to eat it, for the ability, at last, at last, of believing a parent’s reassurances, of believing that to someone he is special despite all his mistakes and hatefulness, because of all his mistakes and hatefulness.
It ends with Julia finally going to the kitchen and making another sandwich; it ends with him eating it, truly hungry for the first time in months; it ends with him spending the night in the extra bedroom, with Harold and Julia kissing him good night; it ends with him wondering if maybe time really is going to loop back upon itself after all, except in this rendering, he will have Julia and Harold as parents from the beginning, and who knows what he will be, only that he will be better, that he will be healthier, that he will be kinder, that he won’t feel the need to struggle so hard against his own life. He has a vision of himself as a fifteen-year-old, running into the house in Cambridge, shouting words—“Mom! Dad!”—he has never said before, and although he can’t imagine what would have made this dream self so excited (for all his study of normal children, their interests and behaviors, he knows few specifics), he understands that he is happy. Maybe he is wearing a soccer uniform, his arms and legs bare; maybe he is accompanied by a friend, by a girlfriend. He has probably never had sex before; he is probably trying at every opportunity to do so. He would think sometimes of who he would be as an adult, but it would never occur to him that he might not have someone to love, sex, his own feet running across a field of grass as soft as carpet. All those hours, all those hours he has spent cutting, and hiding the cutting, and beating back his memories, what would he do instead with all those hours? He would be a better person, he knows. He would be a more loving one.