"What is it?" I asked, taking the package from him.

He shrugged. "Dunno. But it was stuck there pretty good, with duct tape." He repacked his things as I stood there dumbly, staring at the bag, and gave me a wave and left; I heard him say goodbye to Jude as he walked out, whistling.

I looked at the bag. It was a regular, pint-size clear plastic bag, and inside it was a stack of ten razor blades, and individually packaged alcohol wipes, and pieces of gauze, folded into springy squares, and bandages. I stood there, holding this bag, and I knew what it was for, even though I had never seen proof of it, and had indeed never seen anything like it. But I knew.

I went to the kitchen, and there he was, washing off a bowlful of fingerlings, still happy. He was even humming something, very softly, which he did only when he was very contented, like how a cat purrs to itself when it's alone in the sun. "You should've told me you needed help installing the toilet," he said, not looking up. "I could have done it for you and saved you a bill." He knew how to do all those things: plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, gardening. We once went to Laurence's so he could explain to Laurence how, exactly, he could safely unearth the young crabapple tree from one corner of his backyard and successfully move it to another, one that got more sun.

For a while I stood there watching him. I felt so many things at once that together, they combined to make nothing, a numbness, an absence of feeling caused by a surplus of feeling. Finally I said his name, and he looked up. "What's this?" I asked him, and held the bag in front of him.

He went very still, one hand suspended above the bowl, and I remember watching how little droplets of water beaded and dripped off the ends of his fingertips, as if he had slashed himself with a knife and was bleeding water. He opened his mouth, and shut it.

"I'm sorry, Harold," he said, very softly. He lowered his hand, and dried it, slowly, on the dish towel.

That made me angry. "I'm not asking you to apologize, Jude," I told him. "I'm asking you what this is. And don't say 'It's a bag with razors in it.' What is this? Why did you tape it beneath your sink?"

He stared at me for a long time with that look he had-I know you know the one-where you can see him receding even as he looks at you, where you can see the gates within him closing and locking themselves, the bridges being cranked above the moat. "You know what it's for," he finally said, still very quietly.

"I want to hear you say it," I told him.

"I just need it," he said.

"Tell me what you do with these," I said, and watched him.

He looked down into the bowl of potatoes. "Sometimes I need to cut myself," he said, finally. "I'm sorry, Harold."

And suddenly I was panicked, and my panic made me irrational. "What the fuck does that mean?" I asked him-I may have even shouted it.

He was moving backward now, toward the sink, as if I might lunge at him and he wanted some distance. "I don't know," he said. "I'm sorry, Harold."

"How often is sometimes?" I asked.

He too was panicking now, I could see. "I don't know," he said. "It varies."

"Well, estimate. Give me a ballpark."

"I don't know," he said, desperate, "I don't know. A few times a week, I guess."

"A few times a week!" I said, and then stopped. Suddenly I had to get out of there. I took my coat from the chair and crammed the bag into its inside pocket. "You'd better be here when I get back," I told him, and left. (He was a bolter: whenever he thought Julia or I were displeased with him, he would try as quickly as he could to get out of our sight, as if he were an offending object that needed to be removed.) I walked downstairs, toward the beach, and then through the dunes, feeling the sort of rage that comes with the realization of one's gross inadequacy, of knowing for certain that you are at fault. It was the first time I realized that as much as he was two people around us, so were we two people around him: we saw of him what we wanted, and allowed ourselves not to see anything else. We were so ill-equipped. Most people are easy: their unhappinesses are our unhappinesses, their sorrows are understandable, their bouts of self-loathing are fast-moving and negotiable. But his were not. We didn't know how to help him because we lacked the imagination needed to diagnose the problems. But this is making excuses.

By the time I returned to the house it was almost dark, and I could see, through the window, his outline moving about in the kitchen. I sat on a chair on the porch and wished Julia were there, that she wasn't in England with her father.

The back door opened. "Dinner," he said, quietly, and I got up to go inside.

He'd made one of my favorite meals: the sea bass I had bought the day before, poached, and potatoes roasted the way he knew I liked them, with lots of thyme and carrots, and a cabbage salad that I knew would have the mustard-seed dressing I liked. But I didn't have an appetite for any of it. He served me, and then himself, and sat.

"This looks wonderful," I told him. "Thank you for making it." He nodded. We both looked at our plates, at his lovely meal that neither of us would eat.

"Jude," I said, "I have to apologize. I'm really sorry-I never should have run out on you like that."

"It's all right," he said, "I understand."

"No," I told him. "It was wrong of me. I was just so upset."

He looked back down. "Do you know why I was upset?" I asked him.

"Because," he began, "because I brought that into your house."

"No," I said. "That's not why. Jude, this house isn't just my house, or Julia's: it's yours, too. I want you to feel you can bring anything you'd have at home here.

"I'm upset because you're doing this terrible thing to yourself." He didn't look up. "Do your friends know you do this? Does Andy?"

He nodded, slightly. "Willem knows," he said, in a low voice. "And Andy."

"And what does Andy say about this?" I asked, thinking, Goddammit, Andy.

"He says-he says I should see a therapist."

"And have you?" He shook his head, and I felt rage build up in me again. "Why not?" I asked him, but he didn't say anything. "Is there a bag like this in Cambridge?" I said, and after a silence, he looked up at me and nodded again.

"Jude," I said, "why do you do this to yourself?"

For a long time, he was quiet, and I was quiet too. I listened to the sea. Finally, he said, "A few reasons."

"Like what?"

"Sometimes it's because I feel so awful, or ashamed, and I need to make physical what I feel," he began, and glanced at me before looking down again. "And sometimes it's because I feel so many things and I need to feel nothing at all-it helps clear them away. And sometimes it's because I feel happy, and I have to remind myself that I shouldn't."

"Why?" I asked him once I could speak again, but he only shook his head and didn't answer, and I too went silent.

He took a breath. "Look," he said, suddenly, decisively, looking at me directly, "if you want to dissolve the adoption, I'll understand."

I was so stunned that I was angry-that hadn't even occurred to me. I was about to bark something back when I looked at him, at how he was trying to be brave, and saw that he was terrified: He really did think this was something I might want to do. He really would understand if I said I did. He was expecting it. Later, I realized that in those years just after the adoption, he was always wondering how permanent it was, always wondering what he would eventually do that would make me disown him.

"I would never," I said, as firmly as I could.

That night, I tried to talk to him. He was ashamed of what he did, I could see that, but he genuinely couldn't understand why I cared so much, why it so upset you and me and Andy. "It's not fatal," he kept saying, as if that were the concern, "I know how to control it." He wouldn't see a shrink, but he couldn't tell me why. He hated doing it, I could tell, but he also couldn't conceive of a life without it. "I need it," he kept saying. "I need it. It makes things right." But surely, I told him, there was a time in your life when you didn't have it?, and he shook his head. "I need it," he repeated. "It helps me, Harold, you have to believe me on this one."

"Why do you need it?" I asked.

He shook his head. "It helps me control my life," he said, finally.

At the end, there was nothing more I could say. "I'm keeping this," I said, holding the bag up, and he winced, and nodded. "Jude," I said, and he looked back at me. "If I throw this away, are you going to make another one?"

He was very quiet, then, looking at his plate. "Yes," he said.

I threw it out anyway, of course, stuffing it deep into a garbage bag that I carried to the Dumpster at the end of the road. We cleaned the kitchen in silence-we were both exhausted, and neither of us had eaten anything-and then he went to bed, and I did as well. In those days I was still trying to be respectful of his personal space, or I'd have grabbed him and held him, but I didn't.

But as I was lying awake in bed, I thought of him, his long fingers craving the slice of the razor between them, and went downstairs to the kitchen. I got the big mixing bowl from the drawer beneath the oven, and began loading it with everything sharp I could find: knives and scissors and corkscrews and lobster picks. And then I took it with me to the living room, where I sat in my chair, the one facing the sea, clasping the bowl in my arms.

I woke to a creaking. The kitchen floorboards were noisy, and I sat up in the dark, willing myself to stay silent, and listened to his walk, the distinctive soft stamp of his left foot followed by the swish of his right, and then a drawer opening and, a few seconds later, shutting. Then another drawer, then another, until he had opened and shut every drawer, every cupboard. He hadn't turned on the light-there was moonlight enough-and I could envision him standing in the newly blunt world of the kitchen, understanding that I'd taken everything from him: I had even taken the forks. I sat, holding my breath, listening to the silence from the kitchen. For a moment it was almost as if we were having a conversation, a conversation without words or sight. And then, finally, I heard him turn and his footsteps retreating, back to his room.

When I got home to Cambridge the next night, I went to his bathroom and found another bag, a double of the Truro one, and threw it away. But I never found another of those bags again in either Cambridge or Truro. He must have found some other place to hide them, someplace I never discovered, because he couldn't have carried those blades back and forth on the plane. But whenever I was at Greene Street, I would find an opportunity to sneak off to his bathroom. Here, he kept the bag in his same old hiding place, and every time, I would steal it, and shove it into my pocket, and then throw it away after I left. He must have known I did this, of course, but we never discussed it. Every time it would be replaced. Until he learned he had to hide it from you as well, there was not a single time I checked that I failed to find it. Still, I never stopped checking: whenever I was at the apartment, or later, the house upstate, or the flat in London, I would go to his bathroom and look for that bag. I never found it again. Malcolm's bathrooms were so simple, so clean-lined, and yet even in them he had found somewhere to conceal it, somewhere I would never again discover.

Over the years, I tried to talk about it with him. The day after I found the first bag, I called Andy and started yelling at him, and Andy, uncharacteristically, let me. "I know," he said. "I know." And then: "Harold, I'm not asking sarcastically or rhetorically. I want you to tell me: What should I do?" And of course, I didn't know what to tell him.

You were the one who got furthest with him. But I know you blamed yourself. I blamed myself, too. Because I did something worse than accepting it: I tolerated it. I chose to forget he was doing this, because it was too difficult to find a solution, and because I wanted to enjoy him as the person he wanted us to see, even though I knew better. I told myself that I was letting him keep his dignity, while choosing to forget that for thousands of nights, he sacrificed it. I would rebuke him and try to reason with him, even though I knew those methods didn't work, and even knowing that, I didn't try something else: something more radical, something that might alienate me from him. I knew I was being a coward, because I never told Julia about that bag, I never told her what I had learned about him that night in Truro. Eventually she found out, and it was one of the very few times I'd seen her so angry. "How could you let this keep happening?" she asked me. "How could you let this go on for this long?" She never said she held me directly responsible, but I knew she did, and how could she not? I did, too.

And now here I was in his apartment, where a few hours ago, while I was lying awake, he was being beaten. I sat down on the sofa with my phone in my hand to wait for Andy's call, telling me that he was ready to be returned to me, that he was ready to be released into my care. I opened the shade across from me and sat back down and stared into the steely sky until each cloud blurred into the next, until finally I could see nothing at all, only a haze of gray as the day slowly slurred into night.

Andy called at six that evening, nine hours after I'd dropped him off, and met me at the door. "He's asleep in the examining room," he said. And then: "Broken left wrist, four broken ribs, thank Christ no broken bones in his legs. No concussion, thank god. Fractured coccyx. Dislocated shoulder, which I reset. Bruising all up and down his back and torso; he was kicked, clearly. But no internal bleeding. His face looks worse than it is: his eyes and nose are fine, no breaks, and I iced the bruising, which you have to do, too-regularly.

"Lacerations on his legs. This is what I'm worried about. I've written you a scrip for antibiotics; I'm going to start him on a low dosage as a preventative measure, but if he mentions feeling hot, or chilled, you have to let me know right away-the last thing he needs is an infection there. His back is stripped-"

"What do you mean, 'stripped'?" I asked him.

He looked impatient. "Flayed," he said. "He was whipped, probably with a belt, but he wouldn't tell me. I bandaged them, but I'm giving you this antibiotic ointment and you're going to need to keep the wounds cleaned and change the dressings starting tomorrow. He's not going to want to let you, but it's too fucking bad. I wrote down all the instructions in here."

He handed me a plastic bag; I looked inside: bottles of pills, rolls of bandages, tubes of cream. "These," said Andy, plucking something out, "are painkillers, and he hates them. But he's going to need them; make him take a pill every twelve hours: once in the morning, once at night. They're going to make him woozy, so don't let him outside on his own, don't let him lift anything. They're also going to make him nauseated, but you have to make him eat: something simple, like rice and broth. Try to make him stay in his chair; he's not going to want to move around much anyway.

"I called his dentist and made an appointment for Monday at nine; he's lost a couple of teeth. The most important thing is that he sleeps as much as he can; I'll stop by tomorrow afternoon and every night this week. Do not let him go to work, although-I don't think he'll want to."

He stopped as abruptly as he'd started, and we stood there in silence. "I can't fucking believe this," Andy said, finally. "That fucking asshole. I want to find that fuck and kill him."

"I know," I said. "Me too."

He shook his head. "He wouldn't let me report it," he said. "I begged him."

"I know," I said. "Me too."

It was a shock anew to see him, and he shook his head when I tried to help him into the chair, and so we stood and watched as he lowered himself into the seat, still in his same clothes, the blood now dried into rusty continents. "Thank you, Andy," he said, very quietly. "I'm sorry," and Andy placed his palm on the back of his head and said nothing.

By the time we got back to Greene Street, it was dark. His wheelchair was, as you know, one of those very lightweight, elegant ones, one so aggressive about its user's self-sufficiency that there were no handles on it, because it was assumed that the person in it would never allow himself the indignity of being pushed by another. You had to grab the top of the backrest, which was very low, and guide the chair that way. I stopped in the entryway to turn on the lights, and we both blinked.

"You cleaned," he said.

"Well, yes," I said. "Not as good a job as you would've done, I'm afraid."

"Thank you," he said.

"Of course," I said. We were quiet. "Why don't I help you get changed and then you can have something to eat?"

He shook his head. "No, thank you. But I'm not hungry. And I can do it myself." Now he was subdued, controlled: the person I had seen earlier was gone, caged once more in his labyrinth in some little-opened cellar. He was always polite, but when he was trying to protect himself or assert his competency, he became more so: polite and slightly remote, as if he was an explorer among a dangerous tribe, and was being careful not to find himself too involved in their goings-on.

I sighed, inwardly, and took him to his room; I told him I'd be here if he needed me, and he nodded. I sat on the floor outside the closed door and waited: I could hear the faucets turning on and off, and then his steps, and then a long period of silence, and then the sigh of the bed as he sat on it.

When I went in, he was under the covers, and I sat down next to him, on the edge of the bed. "Are you sure you don't want to eat anything?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, and after a pause, he looked at me. He could open his eyes now, and against the white of the sheets, he was the loamy, fecund colors of camouflage: the jungle-green of his eyes, and the streaky gold-and-brown of his hair, and his face, less blue than it had been this morning and now a dark shimmery bronze. "Harold, I'm so sorry," he said. "I'm sorry I yelled at you last night, and I'm sorry I cause so many problems for you. I'm sorry that-"

"Jude," I interrupted him, "you don't need to be sorry. I'm sorry. I wish I could make this better for you."

He closed his eyes, and opened them, and looked away from me. "I'm so ashamed," he said, softly.

I stroked his hair, then, and he let me. "You don't have to be," I said. "You didn't do anything wrong." I wanted to cry, but I thought he might, and if he wanted to, I would try not to. "You know that, right?" I asked him. "You know this wasn't your fault, you know you didn't deserve this?" He said nothing, so I kept asking, and asking, until finally he gave a small nod. "You know that guy is a fucking asshole, right?" I asked him, and he turned his face away. "You know you're not to blame, right?" I asked him. "You know that this says nothing about you and what you're worth?"

"Harold," he said. "Please." And I stopped, although really, I should have kept going.

For a while we said nothing. "Can I ask you a question?" I said, and after a second or two, he nodded again. I didn't even know what I was going to say until I was saying it, and as I was saying it, I didn't know where it had come from, other than I suppose it was something I had always known and had never wanted to ask, because I dreaded his answer: I knew what it would be, and I didn't want to hear it. "Were you sexually abused as a child?"

I could sense, rather than see, him stiffen, and under my hand, I could feel him shudder. He still hadn't looked at me, and now he rolled to his left side, moving his bandaged arm to the pillow next to him. "Jesus, Harold," he said, finally.

I withdrew my hand. "How old were you when it happened?" I asked.

There was a pause, and then he pushed his face into the pillow. "Harold," he said, "I'm really tired. I need to sleep."

I put my hand on his shoulder, which jumped, but I held on. Beneath my palm I could feel his muscles tense, could feel that shiver running through him. "It's okay," I told him. "You don't have anything to be ashamed of," I said. "It's not your fault, Jude, do you understand me?" But he was pretending to be asleep, though I could still feel that vibration, everything in his body alert and alarmed.

I sat there for a while longer, watching him hold himself rigid. Finally I left, closing the door behind me.

I stayed for the rest of the week. You called him that night, and I answered his phone and lied to you, said something useless about an accident, heard the worry in your voice and wanted so badly to tell you the truth. The next day, you called again and I listened outside his door as he lied to you as well: "A car accident. No. No, not serious. What? I was up at Richard's house for the weekend. I nodded off and hit a tree. I don't know; I was tired-I've been working a lot. No, a rental. Because mine's in the shop. It's not a big deal. No, I'm going to be fine. No, you know Harold-he's just overreacting. I promise. I swear. No, he's in Rome until the end of next month. Willem: I promise. It's fine! Okay. I know. Okay. I promise; I will. You too. Bye."

Mostly, he was meek, tractable. He ate his soup every morning, he took his pills. They made him logy. Every morning he was in his study, working, but by eleven he was on the couch, sleeping. He slept through lunch, and all afternoon, and I only woke him for dinner. You called him every night. Julia called him, too: I always tried to eavesdrop, but couldn't hear much of their conversations, only that he didn't say much, which meant Julia must have been saying a great deal. Malcolm came over several times, and the Henry Youngs and Elijah and Rhodes visited as well. JB sent over a drawing of an iris; I had never known him to draw flowers before. He fought me, as Andy had predicted, on the dressings on his legs and back, which he wouldn't, no matter how I pleaded with and shouted at him, let me see. He let Andy, and I heard Andy say to him, "You're going to need to come uptown every other day and let me change these. I mean it."

"Fine," he snapped.

Lucien came to see him, but he was asleep in his study. "Don't wake him," he said, and then, peeking in at him, "Jesus." We talked for a bit, and he told me about how admired he was at the firm, which is something you never get tired of hearing about your child, whether he is four and in preschool and excels with clay, or is forty and in a white-shoe firm and excels in the protection of corporate criminals. "I'd say you must be proud of him, but I think I know your politics too well for that." He grinned. He liked Jude quite a bit, I could tell, and I found myself feeling slightly jealous, and then stingy for feeling jealous at all.

"No," I said. "I am proud of him." I felt bad then, for my years of scolding him about Rosen Pritchard, the one place where he felt safe, the one place he felt truly weightless, the one place where his fears and insecurities banished themselves.

By the following Monday, the day before I left, he looked better: his cheeks were the color of mustard, but the swelling had subsided, and you could see the bones of his face again. It seemed to hurt him a little less to breathe, a little less to speak, and his voice was less breathy, more like itself. Andy had let him halve his morning pain dosage, and he was more alert, though not exactly livelier. We played a game of chess, which he won.

"I'll be back on Thursday evening," I told him over dinner. I only had classes on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays that semester.

"No," he said, "you don't have to. Thank you, Harold, but really-I'll be fine."

"I already bought the ticket," I said. "And anyway, Jude-you don't always have to say no, you know. Remember? Acceptance?" He didn't say anything else.

So what else can I tell you? He went back to work that Wednesday, despite Andy's suggestion he stay home through the end of the week. And despite his threats, Andy came over every night to change his dressings and inspect his legs. Julia returned, and every weekend in October, she or I would go to New York and stay with him at Greene Street. Malcolm stayed with him during the week. He didn't like it, I could tell, but we decided we didn't care what he liked, not in this matter.

He got better. His legs didn't get infected. Neither did his back. He was lucky, Andy kept saying. He regained the weight he had lost. By the time you came home, in early November, he was almost healed. By Thanksgiving, which we had that year at the apartment in New York so he wouldn't have to travel, his cast had been removed and he was walking again. I watched him closely over dinner, watched him talking with Laurence and laughing with one of Laurence's daughters, but couldn't stop thinking of him that night, his face when Caleb grabbed his wrist, his expression of pain and shame and fear. I thought of the day I had learned he was using a wheelchair at all: it was shortly after I had found the bag in Truro and was in the city for a conference, and he had come into the restaurant in his chair, and I had been shocked. "Why did you never tell me?" I asked, and he had pretended to be surprised, acted like he thought he had. "No," I said, "you hadn't," and finally he had told me that he hadn't wanted me to see him that way, as someone weak and helpless. "I would never think of you that way," I'd told him, and although I didn't think I did, it did change how I thought of him; it made me remember that what I knew of him was just a tiny fraction of who he was.

It sometimes seemed as if that week had been a haunting, one that only Andy and I had witnessed. In the months that followed, someone would occasionally joke about it: his poor driving, his Wimbledon ambitions, and he would laugh back, make some self-deprecating comment. He could never look at me in those moments; I was a reminder of what had really happened, a reminder of what he saw as his degradation.

But later, I would recognize how that incident had taken something large from him, how it had changed him: into someone else, or maybe into someone he had once been. I would see the months before Caleb as a period in which he was healthier than he'd been: he had allowed me to hug him when I saw him, and when I touched him-putting an arm around him as I passed him in the kitchen-he would let me; his hand would go on chopping the carrots before him in the same steady rhythm. It had taken twenty years for that to happen. But after Caleb, he regressed. At Thanksgiving, I had gone toward him to embrace him, but he had quickly stepped to the left-just a bit, just enough so that my arms closed around air, and there had been a second in which we looked at each other, and I knew that whatever I had been allowed just a few months ago I would be no longer: I knew I would have to start all over. I knew that he had decided that Caleb was right, that he was disgusting, that he had, somehow, deserved what had happened to him. And that was the worst thing, the most reprehensible thing. He had decided to believe Caleb, to believe him over us, because Caleb confirmed what he had always thought and always been taught, and it is always easier to believe what you already think than to try to change your mind.

Later, when things got bad, I would wonder what I could have said or done. Sometimes I would think that there was nothing I could have said-there was something that might have helped, but none of us saying it could have convinced him. I still had those fantasies: the gun, the posse, Fifty West Twenty-ninth Street, apartment 17J. But this time we wouldn't shoot. We would take Caleb Porter by each arm, lead him down to the car, drive him to Greene Street, drag him upstairs. We would tell him what to say, and warn him that we would be just outside the door, waiting in the elevator, the pistol cocked and pointed at his back. And from behind the door, we'd listen to what he said: I didn't mean any of it. I was completely wrong. The things I did, but more than that, the things I said, they were meant for someone else. Believe me, because you believed me before: you are beautiful and perfect, and I never meant what I said. I was wrong, I was mistaken, no one could ever have been more wrong than I was.