And then, finally, there comes an evening in which he knows that his efforts will not satisfy him any longer: he needs to cut himself, extensively and severely. The hyenas are beginning to make little howls, sharp yelps that seem to come from some other creature within them, and he knows that they will be quieted only by his pain. He considers what to do: Willem will be home in a week. If he cuts himself now, the cuts won’t heal properly before he returns, and Willem will be angry. But if he doesn’t do something—then he doesn’t know. He has to, he has to. He has waited too long, he realizes; he has thought he could see himself through; he has been unrealistic.

He gets up from bed and walks through the empty apartment, into the quiet kitchen. The night’s schedule—cookies for Harold; organize Willem’s sweaters; Richard’s studio—glows whitely from the counter, ignored but beckoning, pleading to be heeded, the salvation it offers as flimsy as the paper it’s printed on. For a moment he stands, unable to move, and then slowly, reluctantly, he walks to the door above the staircase and unbolts it, and then, after another moment’s pause, swings it open.

He hasn’t opened this door since the night with Caleb, and now he leans into its mouth, looking down into its black, clutching its frame as he had on that night, wondering if he can bring himself to do it. He knows this will appease the hyenas. But there is something so degrading about it, so extreme, so sick, that he knows that if he were to do it, he will have crossed some line, that he will, in fact, have become someone who needs to be hospitalized. Finally, finally, he unsticks himself from the frame, his hands shaking, and slams the door shut, slams the bolt back into its slot, and stumps away from it.

At work the next day, he goes downstairs with another of the partners, Sanjay, and a client so the client can smoke. They have a few clients who smoke, and when they go downstairs, he goes with them, and they continue their meeting on the sidewalk. Lucien had a theory that smokers are most comfortable, and relaxed, while smoking, and therefore easier to manipulate in the moment, and although he had laughed when Lucien had told him that, he knows he’s probably correct.

He is in his wheelchair that day because his feet are throbbing, although he hates to have the clients see him so impaired. “Believe me, Jude,” Lucien had said when he had worried aloud about this to him years ago, “the clients think you’re the same ball-crushing asshole whether you’re sitting down or standing up, so for god’s sake, stay in your chair.” Outside it is cold and dry, which makes his feet hurt a little less for some reason, and as the three of them talk, he finds himself staring, hypnotized, at the small orange flame at the tip of the client’s cigarette, which winks at him, growing duller and brighter, as the client exhales and inhales. Suddenly, he knows what he is going to do, but that revelation is followed almost instantly by a blunt punch to his abdomen, because he knows that he is going to betray Willem, and not only is he going to betray him but he is going to lie to him as well.

That day is a Friday, and as he drives to Andy’s, he works out his plan, excited and relieved to have a solution. Andy is in one of his cheerful, combative moods, and he allows himself to be distracted by him, by his brisk energy. Somewhere along the way, he and Andy have begun speaking of his legs the way one would of a troublesome and wayward relative who is nonetheless impossible to abandon and in need of constant care. “The old bastards,” Andy calls them, and the first time he did, he had begun laughing at the accuracy of the nickname, with its suggestion of exasperation that always threatened to overshadow the underlying and reluctant fondness.

“How’re the old bastards?” Andy asks him now, and he smiles and says, “Lazy and sucking up all my resources, as usual.”

But his mind is also full of what he is about to do, and when Andy asks him, “And what does your better half have to say for himself these days?” he snaps at him: “What do you mean by that?” and Andy stops and looks at him, curiously. “Nothing,” he says. “I just wanted to know how Willem’s doing.”

Willem, he thinks, and simply hearing his name said aloud fills him with anguish. “He’s great,” he says, quietly.

At the end of the appointment, as always, Andy examines his arms, and this time, as he has for the last few times, grunts his approval. “You’ve really cut back,” he says. “No pun intended.”

“You know me—always trying to better myself,” he says, keeping his tone jocular, but Andy looks him in the eyes. “I know,” he says, softly. “I know it must be hard, Jude. But I’m glad, I really am.”

Over dinner, Andy complains about his brother’s new boyfriend, whom he hates. “Andy,” he tells him, “you can’t hate all of Beckett’s boyfriends.”

“I know, I know,” Andy says. “It’s just that he’s such a lightweight, and Beckett could do so much better. I did tell you he pronounced Proust as Prowst, right?”

“Several times,” he says, smiling to himself. He had met this new reviled boyfriend of Beckett’s—a sweet, jovial aspiring landscape architect—at a dinner party at Andy’s three months ago. “But Andy—I thought he was nice. And he loves Beckett. And anyway, are you really going to sit around having conversations about Proust with him?”

Andy sighs. “You sound like Jane,” he says, grouchily.

“Well,” he says, smiling again. “Maybe you should listen to Jane.” He laughs, then, feeling lighter than he has in weeks, and not just because of Andy’s sulky expression. “There are worse crimes than not being fully conversant with Swann’s Way, you know.”

As he drives home, he thinks of his plan, but then realizes he will have to wait, because he is going to claim that he has burned himself in a cooking accident, and if something goes wrong and he has to see Andy, Andy will ask him why he was cooking on the same night they were eating dinner. Tomorrow, then, he thinks; I’ll do it tomorrow. That way, he can write an e-mail to Willem tonight in which he’ll mention that he’s going to try to make the fried plantains JB likes: a semi-spontaneous decision that will go terribly wrong.

You do know that this is how mentally ill people make their plans, says the dry and belittling voice inside him. You do know that this planning is something only a sick person would do.

Stop it, he tells it. Stop it. The fact that I know this is sick means I’m not. At that, the voice hoots with laughter: at his defensiveness, at his six-year-old’s illogic, at his revulsion for the word “sick,” his fear that it might attach itself to him. But even the voice, its mocking, swaggering distaste for him, isn’t enough to stop him.

The next evening he changes into a short-sleeve T-shirt, one of Willem’s, and goes to the kitchen. He arranges everything he needs: the olive oil; a long wooden match. He places his left forearm in the sink, as if it’s a bird to be plucked, and chooses an area a few inches above where his palm begins, before taking the paper towel he’s wet with oil and rubbing it onto his skin in an apricot-sized circle. He stares for a few seconds at the gleaming grease stain, and then he takes a breath and strikes the match against the side of its box and holds the flame to his skin until he catches on fire.

The pain is—what is the pain? Ever since the injury, there has not been a single day in which he is not in some sort of pain. Sometimes the pain is infrequent, or mild, or intermittent. But it is always there. “You have to be careful,” Andy is always telling him. “You’ve gotten so inured to it that you’ve lost the ability to recognize when it’s a sign of something worse. So even if it’s only a five or a six, if it looks like this”—they had been speaking about one of the wounds on his legs around which he had noticed that the skin was turning a poisonous blackish gray, the color of rot—“then you have to imagine that for most people it would be a nine or a ten, and you have to, have to come see me. Okay?”