Chapter 1 #4
He is aware, dimly, that his friends are watching him, that they are worried about him.
At some point it had emerged that one of the reasons he remembers so little from the days after the accident was because he had been in the hospital, on a suicide watch.
Now he stumbles through his days and wonders why he isn’t, in fact, killing himself.
This is, after all, the time to do it. No one would blame him. And yet he doesn’t.
At least no one tells him that he should move on.
He doesn’t want to move on, he doesn’t want to move into something else: he wants to remain exactly at this stage, forever.
At least no one tells him he’s in denial.
Denial is what sustains him, and he is dreading the day when his delusions will lose their power to convince him.
For the first time in decades, he isn’t cutting himself at all.
If he doesn’t cut himself, he remains numb, and he needs to remain numb; he needs the world to not come too close to him.
He has finally managed to achieve what Willem had always hoped for him; all it took was Willem being taken from him.
In January he had a dream that he and Willem were in the house upstate making dinner and talking: something they’d done hundreds of times.
But in the dream, although he could hear his own voice, he couldn’t hear Willem’s—he could see his mouth moving, but he couldn’t hear anything he was saying.
He had woken, then, and had thrown himself into his wheelchair and moved as quickly as he could into his study, where he scrolled through all of his old e-mails, searching and searching until he found a few voice messages from Willem that he had forgotten to delete.
The messages were brief, and unrevealing, but he played them over and over, weeping, bent double with grief, the messages’ very banality—“Hey. Judy. I’m going to the farmers’ market to pick up those ramps.
But do you want anything else? Let me know”—something precious, because it was proof of their life together.
“Willem,” he said aloud to the apartment, because sometimes, when it was very bad, he spoke to him. “Come back to me. Come back.”
He feels no sense of survivor’s guilt but rather survivor’s incomprehension: he had always, always known he would predecease Willem.
They all knew it. Willem, Andy, Harold, JB, Malcolm, Julia, Richard: he would die before all of them.
The only question was how he would die—it would be by his own hand, or it would be by infection.
But none of them had ever thought that Willem, of all people, would die before he did.
There had been no plans made for that, no contingencies.
Had he known this was a possibility, had it been less absurd a concept, he would have stockpiled.
He would have made recordings of Willem’s voice talking to him and kept them.
He would have taken more pictures. He would have tried to distill Willem’s very body chemistry.
He would have taken him, just-woken, to the perfumer in Florence.
“Here,” he would’ve said. “This. This scent. I want you to bottle this.” Jane had once told him that as a girl she had been terrified her father would die, and she had secretly made digital copies of her father’s dictation (he had been a doctor as well) and stored them on flash drives.
And when her father finally did die, four years ago, she had rediscovered them, and had sat in a room playing them, listening to her father dictating orders in his calm, patient voice.
How he envied Jane this; how he wished he had thought to do the same.
At least he had Willem’s films, and his e-mails, and letters he had written him over the years, all of which he had saved.
At least he had Willem’s clothes, and articles about Willem, all of which he had kept.
At least he had JB’s paintings of Willem; at least he had photographs of Willem: hundreds of them, though he only allotted himself a certain number.
He decided he would allow himself to look at ten of them every week, and he would look and look at them for hours.
It was his decision whether he wanted to review one a day or look at all ten in a single sitting.
He was terrified his computer would be destroyed and he would lose these images; he made multiple copies of the photographs and stored the discs in various places: in his safe at Greene Street, in his safe at Lantern House, in his desk at Rosen Pritchard, in his safe-deposit box at the bank.
He had never considered Willem a thorough cataloger of his own life—he isn’t either—but one Sunday in early March he skips his drugged slumber and instead drives to Garrison.
He has only been to the house twice since that September day, but the gardeners still come, and the bulbs are beginning to bud around the driveway, and when he steps inside, there is a vase of cut plum branches on the kitchen counter and he stops, staring at them: Had he texted the housekeeper to tell her he was coming?
He must have. But for a moment he fancies that at the beginning of every week someone comes and places a new arrangement of flowers on the counter, and at the end of every week, another week in which no one comes to see them, they are thrown away.
He goes to his study, where they had installed extra cabinetry so Willem could store his files and paperwork there as well.
He sits on the floor, shrugging off his coat, then takes a breath and opens the first drawer.
Here are file folders, each labeled with the name of a play or movie, and inside each folder is the shooting version of the script, with Willem’s notes on them.
Sometimes there are call sheets from days when an actor he knew Willem particularly admired was going to be filming with him: he remembers how excited Willem had been on The Sycamore Court , how he had sent him a photo of that day’s call sheet with his name typed directly beneath Clark Butterfield’s.
“Can you believe it?!” his message had read.
I can totally believe it , he’d written back.
He flips through these files, lifting them out at random and carefully sorting through their contents. The next three drawers are all the same things: films, plays, other projects.
In the fifth drawer is a file marked “Wyoming,” and in this are mostly photos, most of which he has seen before: pictures of Hemming; pictures of Willem with Hemming; pictures of their parents; pictures of the siblings Willem never knew: Britte and Aksel.
There is a separate envelope with a dozen pictures of just Willem, only Willem: school photos, and Willem in a Boy Scout uniform, and Willem in a football uniform.
He stares at these pictures, his hands in fists, before placing them back in their envelope.
There are a few other things in the Wyoming file as well: a third-grade book report, written in Willem’s careful cursive, on The Wizard of Oz that makes him smile; a hand-drawn birthday card to Hemming that makes him want to cry.
His mother’s death announcement; his father’s.
A copy of their will. A few letters, from him to his parents, from his parents to him, all in Swedish—these he sets aside to have translated.
He knows Willem had never kept a journal, and yet when he looks through the “Boston” file, he thinks for some reason he might find something.
But there is nothing. Instead there are more pictures, all of which he has seen before: of Willem, so shiningly handsome; of Malcolm, looking suspicious and slightly feral, with the stringy, unsuccessful Afro he had tried to cultivate throughout college; of JB, looking essentially the same as he does now, merry and fat-cheeked; of him, looking scared and drowned and very skinny, in his awful too-big clothes and with his awful too-long hair, in his braces that imprisoned his legs in their black, foamy embrace.
He stops at a picture of the two of them sitting on the sofa in their suite in Hood, Willem leaning into him and looking at him, smiling, clearly saying something, and him, laughing with his hand over his mouth, which he had learned to do after the counselors at the home told him he had an ugly smile.
They look like two different creatures, not just two different people, and he has to quickly refile the picture before he tears it in half.
Now it is becoming difficult to breathe, but he keeps going.
In the “Boston” file, in the “New Haven” file, are reviews from the college newspapers of plays Willem had been in; there is the story about JB’s Lee Lozano–inspired performance art piece.
There is, touchingly, the one calculus exam on which Willem had made a B, an exam he had coached him on for months.
And then he reaches into the drawer again, most of which is occupied not by a hanging file but by a large, accordion-shaped one, the kind they use at the firm. He hefts it out and sees that it is marked only with his name, and slowly opens it.
Inside it is everything: every letter he had ever written Willem, every substantial e-mail printed out.
There are birthday cards he’d given Willem.
There are photographs of him, some of which he has never seen.
There is the Artforum issue with Jude with Cigarette on the cover.
There is a card from Harold written shortly after the adoption, thanking Willem for coming and for the gift.
There is an article about him winning a prize in law school, which he certainly hadn’t sent Willem but someone clearly had.
He hadn’t needed to catalog his life after all—Willem had been doing it for him all along.
But why had Willem cared about him so much? Why had he wanted to spend so much time around him? He had never been able to understand this, and now he never will.