Monday was not very many hours away, he told himself as he struggled to stay standing, and Andy would see him as he always did, no matter how busy he was. “When did you notice the break?” Andy would say, nudging gently at it with a bit of gauze. “Friday,” he’d say. “Why didn’t you call me then, Jude?” Andy would say, irritated. “At any rate, I hope you didn’t go on your stupid fucking walk.” “No, of course not,” he’d say, but Andy wouldn’t believe him. He sometimes wondered whether Andy thought of him as only a collection of viruses and malfunctions: If you removed them, who was he? If Andy didn’t have to take care of him, would he still be interested in him? If he appeared one day magically whole, with a stride as easy as Willem’s and JB’s complete lack of self-consciousness, the way he could lean back in his chair and let his shirt hoist itself from his hips without any fear, or with Malcolm’s long arms, the skin on their insides as smooth as frosting, what would he be to Andy? What would he be to any of them? Would they like him less? More? Or would he discover—as he often feared—that what he understood as friendship was really motivated by their pity of him? How much of who he was was inextricable from what he was unable to do? Who would he have been, who would he be, without the scars, the cuts, the hurts, the sores, the fractures, the infections, the splints, and the discharges?
But of course he would never know. Six months ago, they had managed to get the wound under control, and Andy had examined it, checking and rechecking, before issuing a fleet of warnings about what he should do if it reopened.
He had been only half listening. He was feeling light that day for some reason, but Andy was querulous, and along with a lecture about his leg, he had also endured another about his cutting (too much, Andy thought), and his general appearance (too thin, Andy thought).
He had admired his leg, pivoting it and examining the place where the wound had at last closed over, as Andy talked and talked. “Are you listening to me, Jude?” he had finally demanded.
“It looks good,” he told Andy, not answering him, but wanting his reassurance. “Doesn’t it?”
Andy sighed. “It looks—” And then he stopped, and was quiet, and he had looked up, had watched Andy shut his eyes, as if refocusing himself, and then open them again. “It looks good, Jude,” he’d said, quietly. “It does.”
He had felt, then, a great surge of gratitude, because he knew Andy didn’t think it looked good, would never think it looked good. To Andy, his body was an onslaught of terrors, one against which the two of them had to be constantly attentive. He knew Andy thought he was self-destructive, or delusional, or in denial.
But what Andy never understood about him was this: he was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world. He did it when he was feeling so awful that sometimes the pain seemed to transport him to another state, one in which everything, even the past that he worked so hard to forget, seemed to fade into a gray watercolor wash. He did it when his memories crowded out all other thoughts, when it took real effort, real concentration, to tether himself to his current life, to keep himself from raging with despair and shame. He did it when he was so exhausted of trying, when being awake and alive demanded such energy that he had to lie in bed thinking of reasons to get up and try again, when it would be much easier to go to the bathroom and untape the plastic zipped bag containing his cotton pads and loose razors and alcohol wipes and bandages from its hiding place beneath the sink and simply surrender. Those were the very bad days.
It really had been a mistake, that night before New Year’s Eve when he sat in the bathroom drawing the razor across his arm: he had been half asleep still; he was normally never so careless. But when he realized what he had done, there had been a minute, two minutes—he had counted—when he genuinely hadn’t known what to do, when sitting there, and letting this accident become its own conclusion, seemed easier than making the decision himself, a decision that would ripple past him to include Willem, and Andy, and days and months of consequences.
He hadn’t known, finally, what had compelled him to grab his towel from its bar and wrap it around his arm, and then pull himself to his feet and wake Willem up. But with each minute that passed, he moved further and further from the other option, the events unfolding themselves with a speed he couldn’t control, and he longed for that year right after the injury, before he met Andy, when it seemed that everything might be improved upon, and that his future self might be something bright and clean, when he knew so little but had such hope, and faith that his hope might one day be rewarded.
Before New York there had been law school, and before that, college, and before that, there was Philadelphia, and the long, slow trip across country, and before that, there was Montana, and the boys’ home, and before Montana was the Southwest, and the motel rooms, and the lonely stretches of road and the hours spent in the car. And before that was South Dakota and the monastery. And before that? A father and a mother, presumably. Or, more realistically, simply a man and a woman. And then, probably, just a woman. And then him.
It was Brother Peter, who taught him math, and was always reminding him of his good fortune, who told him he’d been found in a garbage can. “Inside a trash bag, stuffed with eggshells and old lettuce and spoiled spaghetti—and you,” Brother Peter said. “In the alley behind the drugstore, you know the one,” even though he didn’t, as he rarely left the monastery.
Later, Brother Michael claimed this wasn’t even true. “You weren’t in the trash bin,” he told him. “You were next to the trash bin.” Yes, he conceded, there had been a trash bag, but he had been atop it, not in it, and at any rate, who knew what was in the trash bag itself, and who cared? More likely it was things thrown away from the pharmacy: cardboard and tissues and twist ties and packing chips. “You mustn’t believe everything Brother Peter says,” he reminded him, as he often did, along with: “You mustn’t indulge this tendency to self-mythologize,” as he said whenever he asked for details of how he’d come to live at the monastery. “You came, and you’re here now, and you should concentrate on your future, and not on the past.”
They had created the past for him. He was found naked, said Brother Peter (or in just a diaper, said Brother Michael), but either way, it was assumed he’d been left to, as they said, let nature have its way with him, because it was mid-April and still freezing, and a newborn couldn’t have survived for long in that weather. He must have been there for only a few minutes, however, because he was still almost warm when they found him, and the snow hadn’t yet filled the car’s tire tracks, nor the footprints (sneakers, probably a woman’s size eight) that led to the trash bin and then away from it. He was lucky they had found him (it was fate they had found him). Everything he had—his name, his birthday (itself an estimate), his shelter, his very life—was because of them. He should be grateful (they didn’t expect him to be grateful to them; they expected him to be grateful to God).
He never knew what they might answer and what they might not. A simple question (Had he been crying when they found him? Had there been a note? Had they looked for whoever had left him?) would be dismissed or unknown or unexplained, but there were declarative answers for the more complicated ones.
“The state couldn’t find anyone to take you.” (Brother Peter, again.) “And so we said we’d keep you here as a temporary measure, and then months turned into years and here you are. The end. Now finish these equations; you’re taking all day.”