"Fuck the plates," said Harold, and although he knew that Harold genuinely didn't care what did or didn't congeal on his plates, for a moment he wondered if his casualness was too casual, a simulacrum of ease rather than the real thing. But finally, he could do nothing but put the dishes down and trudge after Harold into the living room, where Julia was pouring coffee for herself and Harold, and had poured tea for him.

He lowered himself to the sofa, and Harold to the chair to his left, and Julia to the squashed suzani-covered ottoman facing him: the places they always sat, the low table between them, and he wished the moment would hold itself, for what if this was the last one he would have here, the last time he would sit in this warm dark room, with its books and tart, sweet scent of cloudy apple juice and the navy-and-scarlet Turkish carpet that had buckled itself into pleats under the coffee table, and the patch on the sofa cushion where the fabric had worn thin and he could see the white muslin skin beneath-all the things that he'd allowed to grow so dear to him, because they were Harold and Julia's, and because he had allowed himself to think of their house as his.

For a while they all sipped at their drinks, and none of them looked at the other, and he tried to pretend that this was just a normal evening, although if it had been a normal evening, none of them would be so silent.

"Well," Harold began at last, and he set his cup down on the table, readying himself. Whatever he says, he reminded himself, don't start making excuses for yourself. Whatever he says, accept it, and thank him for everything.

There was another long silence. "This is hard to say," Harold continued, and shifted his mug in his hand, and he made himself wait through Harold's next pause. "I really did have a script prepared, didn't I?" he asked Julia, and she nodded. "But I'm more nervous than I thought I would be."

"I know," she said. "But you're doing great."

"Ha!" Harold replied. "It's sweet of you to lie to me, though," and smiled at her, and he had the sense that it was only the two of them in the room, and that for a moment, they had forgotten he was there at all. But then Harold was quiet again, trying to say what he'd say next.

"Jude, I've-we've-known you for almost a decade now," Harold said at last, and he watched as Harold's eyes moved to him and then moved away, to somewhere above Julia's head. "And over those years, you've grown very dear to us; both of us. You're our friend, of course, but we think of you as more than a friend to us; as someone more special than that." He looked at Julia, and she nodded at him once more. "So I hope you won't think this is too-presumptuous, I suppose-but we've been wondering if you might consider letting us, well, adopt you." Now he turned to him again, and smiled. "You'd be our legal son, and our legal heir, and someday all this"-he tossed his free arm into the air in a parodic gesture of expansiveness-"will be yours, if you want it."

He was silent. He couldn't speak, he couldn't react; he couldn't even feel his face, couldn't sense what his expression might be, and Julia hurried in. "Jude," she said, "if you don't want to, for whatever reason, we understand completely. It's a lot to ask. If you say no, it won't change how we feel about you, right, Harold? You'll always, always be welcome here, and we hope you'll always be part of our lives. Honestly, Jude-we won't be angry, and you shouldn't feel bad." She looked at him. "Do you want some time to think about it?"

And then he could feel the numbness receding, although as if in compensation, his hands began shaking, and he grabbed one of the throw pillows and wrapped his arms around it to hide them. It took him a few tries before he was able to speak, but when he did, he couldn't look at either of them. "I don't need to think about it," he said, and his voice sounded strange and thin to him. "Harold, Julia-are you kidding? There's nothing-nothing-I've ever wanted more. My whole life. I just never thought-" He stopped; he was speaking in fragments. For a minute they were all quiet, and he was finally able to look at both of them. "I thought you were going to tell me you didn't want to be friends anymore."

"Oh, Jude," said Julia, and Harold looked perplexed. "Why would you ever think that?" he asked.

But he shook his head, unable to explain it to them.

They were silent again, and then all of them were smiling-Julia at Harold, Harold at him, he into the pillow-unsure how to end the moment, unsure where to go next. Finally, Julia clapped her hands together and stood. "Champagne!" she said, and left the room.

He and Harold stood as well and looked at each other. "Are you sure?" Harold asked him, quietly.

"I'm as sure as you are," he answered, just as quietly. There was an uncreative and obvious joke to be made, about how much like a marriage proposal the event seemed, but he didn't have the heart to make it.

"You realize you're going to be bound to us for life," Harold smiled, and put his hand on his shoulder, and he nodded. He hoped Harold wouldn't say one more word, because if he did, he would cry, or vomit, or pass out, or scream, or combust. He was aware, suddenly, of how exhausted, how utterly depleted he was, as much by the past few weeks of anxiety as well as the past thirty years of craving, of wanting, of wishing so intensely even as he told himself he didn't care, that by the time they had toasted one another and first Julia and then Harold had hugged him-the sensation of being held by Harold so unfamiliar and intimate that he had nearly squirmed-he was relieved when Harold told him to leave the damn dishes and go to bed.

When he reached his room, he had to lie on the bed for half an hour before he could even think of retrieving his phone. He needed to feel the solidity of the bed beneath him, the silk of the cotton blanket against his cheek, the familiar yield of the mattress as he moved against it. He needed to assure himself that this was his world, and he was still in it, and that what had happened had really happened. He thought, suddenly, of a conversation he'd once had with Brother Peter, in which he'd asked the brother if he thought he'd ever be adopted, and the brother had laughed. "No," he'd said, so decisively that he had never asked again. And although he must have been very young, he remembered, very clearly, that the brother's dismissal had only hardened his resolve, although of course it wasn't an outcome that was his to control in the slightest.

He was so discombobulated that he forgot that Willem was already onstage when he called, but when Willem called him back at intermission, he was still in the same place on the bed, in the same comma-like shape, the phone still cupped beneath his palm.

"Jude," Willem breathed when he told him, and he could hear how purely happy Willem was for him. Only Willem-and Andy, and to some extent Harold-knew the outlines of how he had grown up: the monastery, the home, his time with the Douglasses. With everyone else, he tried to be evasive for as long as he could, until finally he would say that his parents had died when he was little, and that he had grown up in foster care, which usually stopped their questions. But Willem knew more of the truth, and he knew Willem knew that this was his most impossible, his most fervent desire. "Jude, that's amazing. How do you feel?"

He tried to laugh. "Like I'm going to mess it up."

"You won't." They were both quiet. "I didn't even know you could adopt someone who's a legal adult."

"I mean, it's not common, but you can. As long as both parties consent. It's mostly done for purposes of inheritance." He made another attempt at a laugh. (Stop trying to laugh, he scolded himself.) "I don't remember much from when I studied this in family law, but I do know that I get a new birth certificate with their names on it."

"Wow," said Willem.

"I know," he said.

He heard someone calling Willem's name, commandingly, in the background. "You have to go," he told Willem.

"Shit," said Willem. "But Jude? Congratulations. No one deserves it more." He called back at whoever was yelling for him. "I've got to go," he said. "Do you mind if I write Harold and Julia?"

"Sure," he said. "But Willem, don't tell the others, okay? I just want to sit with it for a while."

"I won't say a word. I'll see you tomorrow. And Jude-" But he didn't, or couldn't, say anything else.

"I know," he said. "I know, Willem. I feel the same way."

"I love you," said Willem, and then he was gone before he had to respond. He never knew what to say when Willem said that to him, and yet he always longed for him to say it. It was a night of impossible things, and he fought to stay awake, to be conscious and alert for as long as possible, to enjoy and repeat to himself everything that had happened to him, a lifetime's worth of wishes coming true in a few brief hours.

Back in the apartment the next day, there was a note from Willem telling him to wait up, and when Willem came home, he had ice cream and a carrot cake, which the two of them ate even though neither of them particularly liked sweets, and champagne, which they drank even though he had to wake up early the following morning. The next few weeks slid by: Harold was handling the paperwork, and sent him forms to sign-the petition for adoption, an affidavit to change his birth certificate, a request for information about his potential criminal record-which he took to the bank at lunch to have notarized; he didn't want anyone at work to know beyond the few people he told: Marshall, and Citizen, and Rhodes. He told JB and Malcolm, who on the one hand reacted exactly as he'd anticipated-JB making a lot of unfunny jokes at an almost tic-like pace, as if he might eventually land on one that worked; Malcolm asking increasingly granular questions about various hypotheticals that he couldn't answer-and on the other had been genuinely thrilled for him. He told Black Henry Young, who had taken two classes with Harold when he was in law school and had admired him, and JB's friend Richard, to whom he'd grown close after one particularly long and tedious party at Ezra's a year ago when the two of them had had a conversation that had begun with the French welfare state and then had moved on to various other topics, the only two semi-sober people in the room. He told Phaedra, who had started screaming, and another old college friend, Elijah, who had screamed as well.

And, of course, he told Andy, who at first had just stared at him and then nodded, as if he had asked if Andy had an extra bandage he could give him before he left for the night. But then he began making a series of bizarre seal-like sounds, half bark, half sneeze, and he realized that Andy was crying. The sight of it made him both horrified and slightly hysterical, unsure of what to do. "Get out of here," Andy commanded him between sounds. "I mean it, Jude, get the fuck out," and so he did. The next day at work, he received an arrangement of roses the size of a gardenia bush, with a note in Andy's angry blocky handwriting that read: JUDE-I'M SO FUCKING EMBARRASSED I CAN BARELY WRITE THIS NOTE. PLEASE FORGIVE ME FOR YESTERDAY. I COULDN'T BE HAPPIER FOR YOU AND THE ONLY QUESTION IS WHAT TOOK HAROLD SO FUCKING LONG. I HOPE YOU'LL TAKE THIS AS A SIGN THAT YOU NEED TO TAKE BETTER CARE OF YOURSELF SO SOMEDAY YOU'LL HAVE THE STRENGTH TO CHANGE HAROLD'S ADULT DIAPERS WHEN HE'S A THOUSAND YEARS OLD AND INCONTINENT, BECAUSE YOU KNOW HE'S NOT GOING TO MAKE IT EASY FOR YOU BY DYING AT A RESPECTABLE AGE LIKE A NORMAL PERSON. BELIEVE ME, PARENTS ARE PAINS IN THE ASS LIKE THAT. (BUT GREAT TOO, OF COURSE.) LOVE, ANDY It was, he and Willem agreed, one of the best letters they'd ever read.

But then the ecstatic month passed, and it was January, and Willem left for Bulgaria to film, and the old fears returned, accompanied now by new fears. They had a court date for February fifteenth, Harold told him, and with a little rescheduling, Laurence would be presiding. Now that the date was so close, he was sharply, inescapably aware that he might ruin it for himself, and he began, at first unconsciously and then assiduously, avoiding Harold and Julia, convinced that if they were reminded too much, too actively of what they were in fact getting that they would change their minds. And so when they came into town for a play the second week in January, he pretended he was in Washington on business, and on their weekly phone calls, he tried to say very little, and to keep the conversations brief. Every day the improbability of the situation seemed to grow larger and more vivid in his mind; every time he glimpsed the reflection of his ugly zombie's hobble in the side of a building, he would feel sickened: Who, really, would ever want this? The idea that he could become someone else's seemed increasingly ludicrous, and if Harold saw him just once more, how could he too not come to the same conclusion? He knew it shouldn't matter so much to him-he was, after all, an adult; he knew the adoption was more ceremonial than truly sociologically significant-but he wanted it with a steady fervor that defied logic, and he couldn't bear it being taken away from him now, not when everyone he cared about was so happy for him, not when he was so close.

He had been close before. The year after he arrived in Montana, when he was thirteen, the home had participated in a tristate adoption fair. November was National Adoption Month, and one cold morning, they had been told to dress neatly and had been hurried onto two school buses and driven two hours to Missoula, where they were herded off the buses and into the conference room of a hotel. Theirs had been the last buses to arrive, and the room was already filled with children, boys on one side, girls on the other. In the center of the room was a long stripe of tables, and as he walked over to his side, he saw that they were stacked with labeled binders: Boys, Babies; Boys, Toddlers; Boys, 46; Boys, 79; Boys, 1012; Boys, 1315; Boys, 15+. Inside, they had been told, were pieces of paper with their pictures, and names, and information about themselves: where they were from, what ethnicity they were, information about how they did in school and what sports they liked to play and what talents and interests they had. What, he wondered, did his sheet of paper say about him? What talents might have been invented for him, what race, what origins?

The older boys, the ones whose names and faces were in the 15+ binder, knew they would never be adopted, and when the counselors turned away, they snuck out through the back exit to, they all knew, get high. The babies and toddlers had only to be babies and toddlers; they would be the first to be chosen, and they didn't even know it. But as he watched from the corner he had drifted toward, he saw that some of the boys-the ones old enough to have experienced one of the fairs before, but still young enough to be hopeful-had strategies. He watched as the sullen became smiling, as the rough and bullying became jocular and playful, as boys who hated one another in the context of the home played and bantered in a way that appeared convincingly friendly. He saw the boys who were rude to the counselors, who cursed at one another in the hallways, smile and chat with the adults, the prospective parents, who were filing into the room. He watched as the toughest, the meanest of the boys, a fourteen-year-old named Shawn who had once held him down in the bathroom, his knees digging into his shoulder blades, pointed at his name tag as the man and woman he had been talking with walked toward the binders. "Shawn!" he called after them, "Shawn Grady!" and something about his hoarse hopeful voice, in which he could hear the effort, the strain, to not sound hopeful at all, made him feel sorry for Shawn for the first time, and then angry at the man and woman, who, he could tell, were actually paging through the "Boys, 79" binder. But those feelings passed quickly, because he tried not to feel anything those days: not hunger, not pain, not anger, not sadness.

He had no tricks, he had no skills, he couldn't charm. When he had arrived at the home, he had been so frozen that they had left him behind the previous November, and a year later, he wasn't sure that he was any better. He thought less and less frequently of Brother Luke, it was true, but his days outside the classroom smeared into one; most of the time he felt he was floating, trying to pretend that he didn't occupy his own life, wishing he was invisible, wanting only to go unnoticed. Things happened to him and he didn't fight back the way he once would have; sometimes when he was being hurt, the part of him that was still conscious wondered what the brothers would think of him now: gone were his rages, his tantrums, his struggling. Now he was the boy they had always wished him to be. Now he hoped to be someone adrift, a presence so thin and light and insubstantial that he seemed to displace no air at all.

So he was surprised-as surprised as the counselors-when he learned that night that he was one of the children chosen by a couple: the Learys. Had he noticed a woman and man looking at him, maybe even smiling at him? Maybe. But the afternoon had passed, as most did, in a haze, and even on the bus ride home, he had begun the work of forgetting it.

He would spend a probationary weekend-the weekend before Thanksgiving-with the Learys, so they could see how they liked each other. That Thursday he was driven to their house by a counselor named Boyd, who taught shop and plumbing and whom he didn't know very well. He knew Boyd knew what some of the other counselors did to him, and although he never stopped them, he never participated, either.

But as he was getting out of the car in the Learys' driveway-a one-story brick house, surrounded on all sides by fallow, dark fields-Boyd snatched his forearm and pulled him close, startling him into alertness.

"Don't fuck this up, St. Francis," he said. "This is your chance, do you hear me?"

"Yes, sir," he'd said.

"Go on, then," said Boyd, and released him, and he walked toward Mrs. Leary, who was standing in the doorway.

Mrs. Leary was fat, but her husband was simply big, with large red hands that looked like weaponry. They had two daughters, both in their twenties and both married, and they thought it might be nice to have a boy in the house, someone who could help Mr. Leary-who repaired large-scale farm machinery and also farmed himself-with the field work. They chose him, they said, because he seemed quiet, and polite, and they didn't want someone rowdy; they wanted someone hardworking, someone who would appreciate what having a home and a house meant. They had read in the binder that he knew how to work, and how to clean, and that he did well on the home's farm.

"Now, your name, that's an unusual name," Mrs. Leary said.

He had never thought it unusual, but "Yes, ma'am," he said.

"What would you think of maybe going by a different name?" Mrs. Leary asked. "Like, Cody, maybe? I've always liked the name Cody. It's a little less-well, it's a little more us, really."

"I like Cody," he said, although he didn't really have an opinion about it: Jude, Cody, it didn't matter to him what he was called.

"Well, good," said Mrs. Leary.

That night, alone, he said the name aloud to himself: Cody Leary. Cody Leary. Could it be possible that he was entering this house as one person and then, as if the place were enchanted, transformed into another? Was it that simple, that fast? Gone would be Jude St. Francis, and with him, Brother Luke, and Brother Peter, and Father Gabriel, and the monastery and the counselors at the home and his shame and fears and filth, and in his place would be Cody Leary, who would have parents, and a room of his own, and would be able to make himself into whomever he chose.

The rest of the weekend passed uneventfully, so uneventfully that with each day, with each hour, he could feel pieces of himself awaken, could feel the clouds that he gathered around himself separate and vanish, could feel himself seeing into the future, and imagining the place in it he might have. He tried his hardest to be polite, and hardworking, and it wasn't difficult: he got up early in the morning and made breakfast for the Learys (Mrs. Leary praising him so loudly and extravagantly that he had smiled, embarrassed, at the floor), and cleaned dishes, and helped Mr. Leary degrease his tools and rewire a lamp, and although there were events he didn't care for-the boring church service they attended on Sunday; the prayers they supervised before he was allowed to go to bed-they were hardly worse than the things he didn't like about the home, they were things he knew he could do without appearing resentful or ungrateful. The Learys, he could sense, would not be the sort of people who would behave the way that parents in books would, the way the parents he yearned for might, but he knew how to be industrious, he knew how to keep them satisfied. He was still frightened of Mr. Leary's large red hands, and when he was left alone with him in the barn, he was shivery and watchful, but at least there was only Mr. Leary to fear, not a whole group of Mr. Learys, as there had been before, or there were at the home.

When Boyd picked him up Sunday evening, he was pleased with how he'd done, confident, even. "How'd it go?" Boyd asked him, and he was able to answer, honestly, "Good."

He was certain, from Mrs. Leary's last words to him-"I have a feeling we'll be seeing much more of you very soon, Cody"-that they would call on Monday, and that soon, maybe even by Friday, he would be Cody Leary, and the home would be one more place he'd put behind him. But then Monday passed, and then Tuesday, and Wednesday, and then it was the following week, and he wasn't called to the headmaster's office, and his letter to the Learys had gone unanswered, and every day the driveway to the dormitory remained a long, blank stretch, and no one came to get him.

Finally, two weeks after the visit, he went to see Boyd at his workshop, where he knew he stayed late on Thursday nights. He waited through dinner out in the cold, the snow crunching under his feet, until he finally saw Boyd walking out the door.

"Christ," Boyd said when he saw him, nearly stepping on him as he turned. "Shouldn't you be back in the dorms, St. Francis?"

"Please," he begged. "Please tell me-are the Learys coming to get me?" But he knew what the answer was even before he saw Boyd's face.

"They changed their minds," said Boyd, and although he wasn't known, by the counselors or the boys, for his gentleness, he was almost gentle then. "It's over, St. Francis. It's not going to happen." He reached out a hand toward him, but he ducked, and Boyd shook his head and began walking off.

"Wait," he called, recovering himself and running as well as he could through the snow after Boyd. "Let me try again," he said. "Tell me what I did wrong, and I'll try again." He could feel the old hysteria descending upon him, could feel inside him the vestiges of the boy who would throw fits and shout, who could still a room with his screams.

But Boyd shook his head again. "It doesn't work like that, St. Francis," he said, and then he stopped and looked directly at him. "Look," he said, "in a few years you'll be out of here. I know it seems like a long time, but it's not. And then you'll be an adult and you'll be able to do whatever you want. You just have to get through these years." And then he turned again, definitively, and stalked away from him.

"How?" he yelled after Boyd. "Boyd, tell me how! How, Boyd, how?" forgetting that he was to call him "sir," and not "Boyd."

That night he had his first tantrum in years, and although the punishment here was the same, more or less, as it had been at the monastery, the release, the sense of flight it had once given him, was not: now he was someone who knew better, whose screams would change nothing, and all his shouting did was bring him back to himself, so that everything, every hurt, every insult, felt sharper and brighter and stickier and more resonant than ever before.

He would never, never know what he had done wrong that weekend at the Learys'. He would never know if it had been something he could control, or something he couldn't. And of all the things from the monastery, from the home, that he worked to scrub over, he worked hardest at forgetting that weekend, at forgetting the special shame of allowing himself to believe that he might be someone he knew he wasn't.

But now, of course, with the court date six weeks, five weeks, four weeks away, he thought of it constantly. With Willem gone, and no one to monitor his hours and activities, he stayed up until the sun began lightening the sky, cleaning, scrubbing with a toothbrush the space beneath the refrigerator, bleaching each skinny grout-canal between the bathtub wall tiles. He cleaned so he wouldn't cut himself, because he was cutting himself so much that even he knew how crazy, how destructive he was being; even he was scared of himself, as much by what he was doing as by his inability to control it. He had begun a new method of balancing the edge of the blade on his skin and then pressing down, as deep as he could, so that when he withdrew the razor-stuck like an ax head into a tree stump-there was half a second in which he could pull apart the two sides of flesh and see only a clean white gouge, like a side of fatted bacon, before the blood began rushing in to pool within the cut. He felt dizzy, as if his body was pumped with helium; food tasted like rot to him, and he stopped eating unless he had to. He stayed at the office until the night shift of cleaners began moving through the hallways, noisy as mice, and then stayed awake at home; he woke with his heart thudding so fast that he had to gulp air to calm himself. It was only work, and Willem's calls, that forced him into normalcy, or he'd have never left the house, would have cut himself until he could have loosed whole pyramids of flesh from his arms and flushed them down the drain. He had a vision in which he carved away at himself-first arms, then legs, then chest and neck and face-until he was only bones, a skeleton who moved and sighed and breathed and tottered through life on its porous, brittle stalks.

He was back to seeing Andy every six weeks, and had delayed his most recent visit twice, because he dreaded what Andy might say. But finally, a little less than four weeks before the court date, he went uptown and sat in one of the examining rooms until Andy peered in to say he was running late.

"Take your time," he said.

Andy studied him, squinting a bit. "I won't be long," he said, finally, and then was gone.

A few minutes later, his nurse Callie came in. "Hi, Jude," she said. "Doctor wants me to get your weight; do you mind stepping on the scale?"

He didn't want to, but he knew it wasn't Callie's fault or decision, and so he dragged himself off the table, and onto the scale, and didn't look at the number as Callie wrote it down in his chart, and thanked him, and left the room.

"So," Andy said after he'd come in, studying his chart. "What should we talk about first, your extreme weight loss or your excessive cutting?"

He didn't know what to say to that. "Why do you think I've been cutting myself excessively?"

"I can always tell," Andy said. "You get sort of-sort of bluish under the eyes. You're probably not even conscious of it. And you're wearing your sweater over the gown. Whenever it's bad, you do that."

"Oh," he said. He hadn't been aware.

They were quiet, and Andy pulled his stool close to the table and asked, "When's the date?"

"February fifteenth."

"Ah," said Andy. "Soon."

"Yes."

"What're you worried about?"

"I'm worried-" he began, and then stopped, and tried again. "I'm worried that if Harold finds out what I really am, he won't want to-" He stopped. "And I don't know which is worse: him finding out before, which means this definitely won't happen, or him finding out after, and realizing I've deceived him." He sighed; he hadn't been able to articulate this until now, but having done so, he knew that this was his fear.

"Jude," Andy said, carefully, "what do you think is so bad about yourself that he wouldn't want to adopt you?"

"Andy," he pled, "don't make me say it."

"But I honestly don't know!"

"The things I've done," he said, "the diseases I have from them." He stumbled on, hating himself. "It's disgusting; I'm disgusting."

"Jude," Andy began, and as he spoke, he paused between every few words, and he could feel Andy picking his way across a mine-pocked lawn, so deliberately and slowly was he going. "You were a kid, a baby. Those things were done to you. You have nothing, nothing to blame yourself for, not ever, not in any universe."

Andy looked at him. "And even if you hadn't been a kid, even if you had just been some horny guy who wanted to fuck everything in sight and had ended up with a bunch of STDs, it still wouldn't be anything to be ashamed of." He sighed. "Can you try to believe me?"

He shook his head. "I don't know."

"I know," Andy said. They were quiet. "I wish you'd see a therapist, Jude," he added, and his voice was sad. He couldn't respond, and after a few minutes, Andy stood up. "Well," he said, sounding determined, "let's see them," and he took off his sweater and held out his arms.

He could tell by Andy's expression that it was worse than he had anticipated, and when he looked down and tried to view himself as something unfamiliar, he could see in flashes what Andy did: the gobs of bandages applied at intervals to the fresh cuts, the half-healed cuts, with their fragile stitchings of still-forming scar tissue, the one infected cut, which had developed a chunky cap of dried pus.

"So," Andy said after a long silence, after he'd almost finished his right arm, cleaning out the infected cut and painting antibiotic cream on the others, "what about your extreme weight loss?"

"I don't think it's extreme."

"Jude," said Andy, "twelve pounds in not quite eight weeks is extreme, and you didn't exactly have twelve pounds to spare to begin with."

"I'm just not hungry," he said, finally.

Andy didn't say anything else until he finished both his arms, and then sighed and sat down again and started scribbling on his pad. "I want you to eat three full meals a day, Jude," he said, "plus one of the things on this list. Every day. That's in addition to standard meals, do you understand me? Or I'm going to call your crew and make them sit with you every mealtime and watch you eat, and you don't want that, believe me." He ripped the page off the pad and handed it to him. "And then I want you back here next week. No excuses."

He looked at the list-PEANUT BUTTER SANDWICH. CHEESE SANDWICH. AVOCADO SANDWICH. 3 EGGS (WITH YOLKS!!!!). BANANA SMOOTHIE-and tucked it into his pants pocket.

"And the other thing I want you to do is this," said Andy. "When you wake up in the middle of the night and want to cut yourself, I want you to call me instead. I don't care what time it is, you call me, okay?" He nodded. "I mean it, Jude."

"I'm sorry, Andy," he said.

"I know you are," said Andy. "But you don't need to be sorry-not to me, anyway."

"To Harold," he said.

"No," Andy corrected. "Not to Harold, either. Just to yourself."

He went home and ate away at a banana until it turned to dirt in his mouth and then changed and continued washing the living-room windows, which he had begun the night before. He rubbed at them, inching the sofa closer so he could stand atop one of its arms, ignoring the twinges in his back as he climbed up and down, lugging the bucket of dirtied gray water slowly to the tub. After he'd finished the living room and Willem's room, he was in so much pain that he had to crawl to the bathroom, and after cutting himself, he rested, holding his arm above his head and wrapping the mat about him. When his phone rang, he sat up, disoriented, before groaningly moving to his bedroom-where the clock read three a.m.-and listening to a very cranky (but alert) Andy.

"I called too late," Andy guessed. He didn't say anything. "Listen, Jude," Andy continued, "you don't stop this and I really am going to have you committed. And I'll call Harold and tell him why. You can count on it." He paused. "And besides which," he added, "aren't you tired, Jude? You don't have to do this to yourself, you know. You don't need to."

He didn't know what it was-maybe it was just the calmness of Andy's voice, the steadiness with which he made his promise that made him realize that he was serious this time in a way he hadn't been before; or maybe it was just the realization that yes, he was tired, so tired that he was willing, finally, to accept someone else's orders-but over the next week, he did as he was told. He ate his meals, even as the food transformed itself by some strange alchemy to mud, to offal: he made himself chew and swallow, chew and swallow. They weren't big meals, but they were meals. Andy called every night at midnight, and Willem called every morning at six (he couldn't bring himself to ask, and Willem never volunteered, whether Andy had contacted him). The hours in between were the most difficult, and although he couldn't cease cutting himself entirely, he did limit it: two cuts, and he stopped. In the absence of cutting, he felt himself being tugged toward earlier punishments-before he had been taught to cut himself, there was a period in which he would toss himself against the wall outside the motel room he shared with Brother Luke again and again until he sagged, exhausted, to the ground, and his left side was permanently stained blue and purple and brown with bruises. He didn't do that now, but he remembered the sensation, the satisfying slam of his body against the wall, the awful pleasure of hurling himself against something so immovable.