“You’ll find your own way to discuss what happened to you,” he remembers Ana saying. “You’ll have to, if you ever want to be close to anyone.” He wishes, as he often does, that he had let her talk to him, that he had let her teach him how to do it. His silence had begun as something protective, but over the years it has transformed into something near oppressive, something that manages him rather than the other way around. Now he cannot find a way out of it, even when he wants to. He imagines he is floating in a small bubble of water, encased on all sides by walls and ceilings and floors of ice, all many feet thick. He knows there is a way out, but he is unequipped; he has no tools to begin his work, and his hands scrabble uselessly against the ice’s slick. He had thought that by not saying who he was, he was making himself more palatable, less strange. But now, what he doesn’t say makes him stranger, an object of pity and even suspicion.

“Jude?” Willem prompts him. “Why is it absurd?”

He shakes his head. “It just is.” He starts walking again.

For a block, they say nothing. Then Willem asks, “Jude, do you ever want to be with someone?”

“I never thought I would.”

“But that’s not what I asked.”

“I don’t know, Willem,” he says, unable to look at Willem’s face. “I guess I just don’t think that sort of thing is for someone like me.”

“What does that mean?”

He shakes his head again, not saying anything, but Willem persists. “Because you have some health problems? Is that why?”

Health problems, says something sour and sardonic inside him. Now, that’s a euphemism. But he doesn’t say this out loud. “Willem,” he pleads. “I’m begging you to stop talking about this. We’ve had such a good night. It’s our last night, and then I’m not going to see you. Can we please change the subject? Please?”

Willem doesn’t say anything for another block, and he thinks the moment has passed, but then Willem says, “You know, when we first started going out, Robin asked me whether you were gay or straight and I had to tell her I didn’t know.” He pauses. “She was shocked. She kept saying, ‘This is your best friend since you guys were teenagers and you don’t know?’ Philippa used to ask me about you as well. And I’d tell her the same thing I told Robin: that you’re a private person and I’ve always tried to respect your privacy.

“But I guess this is the kind of stuff I wish you’d tell me, Jude. Not so I can do anything with the information, but just because it gives me a better sense of who you are. I mean, maybe you’re neither. Maybe you’re both. Maybe you’re just not interested. It doesn’t make a difference to me.”

He doesn’t, he can’t say anything in response, and they walk another two blocks: Thirty-eighth Street, Thirty-seventh Street. He is conscious of his right foot dragging against the pavement the way it does when he is tired or dispirited, too tired or dispirited to make a greater effort, and is grateful that Willem is on his left, and therefore less likely to notice it.

“I worry sometimes that you’ve decided to convince yourself that you’re somehow unattractive or unlovable, and that you’ve decided that certain experiences are off-limits for you. But they’re not, Jude: anyone would be lucky to be with you,” says Willem a block later. Enough of this, he thinks; he can tell by Willem’s tone that he is building up to a longer speech and he is now actively anxious, his heart beating a funny rhythm.

“Willem,” he says, turning to him. “I think I’d better take a taxi after all; I’m getting tired—I’d better get to bed.”

“Jude, come on,” says Willem, with enough impatience in his voice that he flinches. “Look, I’m sorry. But really, Jude. You can’t just leave when I’m trying to talk to you about something important.”

This stops him. “You’re right,” he says. “I’m sorry. And I’m grateful, Willem, I really am. But this is just too difficult for me to discuss.”

“Everything’s too difficult for you to discuss,” says Willem, and he flinches again. Willem sighs. “I’m sorry. I always keep thinking that someday I’m going to talk to you, really talk to you, and then I never do, because I’m afraid you’re going to shut down and then you won’t talk to me at all.” They are silent, and he is chastened, because he knows Willem is right—that is exactly what he’d do. A few years ago, Willem had tried to talk to him about his cutting. They had been walking then too, and after a certain point the conversation had become so intolerable that he had hailed a cab and frantically pulled himself in, leaving Willem standing on the sidewalk, calling his name in disbelief; he had cursed himself even as the car sped south. Willem had been furious; he had apologized; they had made up. But Willem has never initiated that conversation again, and neither has he. “But tell me this, Jude: Are you ever lonely?”

“No,” he says, finally. A couple walks by, laughing, and he thinks of the beginning of their walk, when they too were laughing. How has he managed to ruin this night, the last time he will see Willem for months? “You don’t need to worry about me, Willem. I’ll always be fine. I’ll always be able to take care of myself.”

And then Willem sighs, and sags, and looks so defeated that he feels a twist of guilt. But he is also relieved, because he senses that Willem doesn’t know how to continue the conversation, and he will soon be able to redirect him, and end the evening pleasantly, and escape. “You always say that.”

“Because it’s always true.”

There is a long, long silence. They are standing in front of a Korean barbeque restaurant, and the air is dense and fragrant with steam and smoke and roasting meat. “Can I go?” he asks finally, and Willem nods. He goes to the curb and raises his arm, and a cab glides to his side.

Willem opens the door for him and then, as he’s getting in, puts his arms around him and holds him, and he finally does the same. “I’m going to miss you,” Willem says into the back of his neck. “Are you going to take care of yourself while I’m gone?”

“Yes,” he says. “I promise.” He steps back and looks at him. “Until November, then.”

Willem makes a face that’s not quite a smile. “November,” he echoes.

In the cab, he finds he really is tired, and he leans his forehead against the greased window and closes his eyes. By the time he reaches home, he feels as leaden as a corpse, and in the apartment, he starts taking off his clothes—shoes, sweater, shirt, undershirt, pants—as soon as he’s locked the door behind him, leaving them littering the floor in a trail as he makes his way to the bathroom. His hands tremor as he unsticks the bag from beneath the sink, and although he hadn’t thought he’d need to cut himself that night—nothing that day or early evening had indicated he might—he is almost ravenous for it now. He has long ago run out of blank skin on his forearms, and he now recuts over old cuts, using the edge of the razor to saw through the tough, webby scar tissue: when the new cuts heal, they do so in warty furrows, and he is disgusted and dismayed and fascinated all at once by how severely he has deformed himself. Lately he has begun using the cream that Andy gave him for his back on his arms, and he thinks it helps, a bit: the skin feels looser, the scars a little softer and more supple.

The shower area Malcolm has created in this bathroom is enormous, so large he now sits within it when he’s cutting, his legs stretched out before him, and after he’s done, he’s careful to wash away the blood because the floor is a great plain of marble, and as Malcolm has told him again and again, once you stain marble, there’s nothing that can be done. And then he is in bed, light-headed but not quite sleepy, staring at the dark, mercury-like gleam the chandelier makes in the shadowy room.

“I’m lonely,” he says aloud, and the silence of the apartment absorbs the words like blood soaking into cotton.