"Nothing," he said. "I'm tired. I need to go home."

"Fine," Willem said. He hailed a cab, and helped him in, and then got in himself. "Greene and Broome," he said to the driver.

In the cab, his hands began to shake. This had been happening more and more, and he didn't know how to stop it. It had started when he was a child, but it had happened only in extreme circumstances-when he was trying not to cry, or when he was in extraordinary pain but knew that he couldn't make a sound. But now it happened at strange moments: only cutting helped, but sometimes the shaking was so severe that he had difficulty controlling the razor. He crossed his arms against himself and hoped Willem wouldn't notice.

At the front door, he tried to get rid of Willem, but Willem wouldn't leave. "I want to be alone," he told him.

"I understand," Willem said. "We'll be alone together." They had stood there, facing each other, until he had finally turned to the door, but he couldn't fit the key into the lock because he was shaking so badly, and Willem took the keys from him and opened the door.

"What the hell is going on with you?" Willem asked as soon as they were in the apartment.

"Nothing," he said, "nothing," and now his teeth were chattering, which was something that had never accompanied the shaking when he was young but now happened almost every time.

Willem stepped close to him, but he turned his face away. "Something happened while I was away," Willem said, tentatively. "I don't know what it is, but something happened. Something's wrong. You've been acting strangely ever since I got home from The Odyssey. I don't know why." He stopped, and put his hands on his shoulders. "Tell me, Jude," he said. "Tell me what it is. Tell me and we'll figure out how to make it better."

"No," he whispered. "I can't, Willem, I can't." There was a long silence. "I want to go to bed," he said, and Willem released him, and he went to the bathroom.

When he came out, Willem was wearing one of his T-shirts, and was lofting the duvet from the guest room over the sofa in his bedroom, the sofa under the painting of Willem in the makeup chair. "What're you doing?" he asked.

"I'm staying here tonight," Willem said.

He sighed, but Willem started talking before he could. "You have three choices, Jude," he said. "One, I call Andy and tell him I think there's something really going wrong with you and I take you up to his office for an evaluation. Two, I call Harold, who freaks out and calls Andy. Or three, you let me stay here and monitor you because you won't talk to me, you won't fucking tell me anything, and you never seem to understand that you at least owe your friends the opportunity to try to help you-you at least owe me that." His voice cracked. "So what's it going to be?"

Oh Willem, he thought. You don't know how badly I want to tell you. "I'm sorry, Willem," he said, instead.

"Fine, you're sorry," said Willem. "Go to bed. Do you still have extra toothbrushes in the same place?"

"Yes," he said.

The next night he came home late from work, and found Willem lying on the sofa in his room again, reading. "How was your day?" he asked, not lowering his book.

"Fine," he said. He waited to see if Willem was going to explain himself, but he didn't, and eventually he went to the bathroom. In the closet, he passed Willem's duffel bag, which was unzipped and filled with enough clothes that it was clear he was going to stay for a while.

He felt pathetic admitting it to himself, but having Willem there-not just in his apartment, but in his room-helped. They didn't speak much, but his very presence steadied and refocused him. He thought less of Caleb; he thought less of everything. It was as if the necessity of proving himself normal to Willem really did make him more normal. Just being around someone he knew would never harm him, not ever, was soothing, and he was able to quiet his mind, and sleep. As grateful as he was, though, he was also disgusted at himself, by how dependent he was, how weak. Was there no end to his needs? How many people had helped him over the years, and why had they? Why had he let them? A better friend would have told Willem to go home, told him he would be fine on his own. But he didn't do this. He let Willem spend the few remaining weeks he had in New York sleeping on his sofa like a dog.

At least he didn't have to worry about upsetting Robin, as Willem and Robin had broken up toward the end of the Odyssey shoot, when Robin discovered that Willem had cheated on her with one of the costume assistants. "And I didn't even really like her," Willem had told him in one of their phone calls. "I did it for the worst reason of all-because I was bored."

He had considered this. "No," he said, "the worst reason of all would've been because you were trying to be cruel. Yours was just the stupidest reason of all."

There had been a pause, and then Willem had started laughing. "Thanks for that, Jude," he said. "Thanks for making me feel both better and worse."

Willem stayed with him until the very day he had to leave for Colombo. He was playing the eldest son of a faded Dutch merchant family in Sri Lanka in the early nineteen-forties, and had grown a thick mustache that curled up at its tips; when Willem hugged him, he felt it brushing against his ear. For a moment, he wanted to break down and beg Willem not to leave. Don't go, he wanted to tell him. Stay here with me. I'm scared to be alone. He knew that if he did say this, Willem would: or he would at least try. But he would never say this. He knew it would be impossible for Willem to delay the shoot, and he knew that Willem would feel guilty for his inability to do so. Instead, he tightened his hold on Willem, which was something he rarely did-he rarely showed Willem any physical affection-and he could feel that Willem was surprised, but then he increased his pressure as well, and the two of them stood there, wrapped around each other, for a long time. He remembered thinking that he wasn't wearing enough layers to really let Willem hug him this closely, that Willem would be able to feel the scars on his back through his shirt, but in the moment it was more important to simply be near him; he had the sense that this was the last time this would happen, the last time he would see Willem. He had this fear every time Willem went away, but it was keener this time, less theoretical; it felt more like a real departure.

After Willem left, things were fine for a few days. But then they got bad again. The hyenas returned, more numerous and famished than before, more vigilant in their hunt. And then everything else returned as well: years and years and years of memories he had thought he had controlled and defanged, all crowding him once again, yelping and leaping before his face, unignorable in their sounds, indefatigable in their clamor for his attention. He woke gasping for air: he woke with the names of people he had sworn he would never think of again on his tongue. He replayed the night with Caleb again and again, obsessively, the memory slowing so that the seconds he was standing naked in the rain on Greene Street stretched into hours, so that his flight down the stairs took days, so that Caleb's raping him in the shower, in the elevator, took weeks. He had visions of taking an ice pick and jamming it through his ear, into his brain, to stop the memories. He dreamed of slamming his head against the wall until it split and cracked and the gray meat tumbled out with a wet, bloody thunk. He had fantasies of emptying a container of gasoline over himself and then striking a match, of his mind being gobbled by fire. He bought a set of X-ACTO blades and held three of them in his palm and made a fist around them and watched the blood drip from his hand into the sink as he screamed into the quiet apartment.

He asked Lucien for more work and was given it, but it wasn't enough. He tried to volunteer for more hours at the artists' nonprofit, but they didn't have any additional shifts to give him. He tried to volunteer at a place where Rhodes had once done some pro bono work, an immigrants' rights organization, but they said they were really looking for Mandarin and Arabic speakers at the moment and didn't want to waste his time. He cut himself more and more; he began cutting around the scars themselves, so that he could actually remove wedges of flesh, each piece topped with a silvery sheen of scar tissue, but it didn't help, not enough. At night, he prayed to a god he didn't believe in, and hadn't for years: Help me, help me, help me, he pleaded. He was losing himself; this had to stop. He couldn't keep running forever.

It was August; the city was empty. Malcolm was in Sweden on holiday with Sophie; Richard was in Capri; Rhodes was in Maine; Andy was on Shelter Island ("Remember," he'd said before he left, as he always said before a long vacation, "I'm just two hours away; you need me, and I catch the next ferry back"). He couldn't bear to be around Harold, whom he couldn't see without being reminded of his debasement; he called and told him he had too much work to go to Truro. Instead he spontaneously bought a ticket to Paris and spent the long, lonely Labor Day weekend there, wandering the streets by himself. He didn't contact anyone he knew there-not Citizen, who was working for a French bank, or Isidore, his upstairs neighbor from Hereford Street, who was teaching there, or Phaedra, who had taken a job as the director of a satellite of a New York gallery-they wouldn't have been in the city anyway.

He was tired, he was so tired. It was taking so much energy to hold the beasts off. He sometimes had an image of himself surrendering to them, and they would cover him with their claws and beaks and talons and peck and pinch and pluck away at him until he was nothing, and he would let them.

After he returned from Paris, he had a dream in which he was running across a cracked reddish plain of earth. Behind him was a dark cloud, and although he was fast, the cloud was faster. As it drew closer, he heard a buzzing, and realized it was a swarm of insects, terrible and oily and noisy, with pincerlike protuberances jutting out from beneath their eyes. He knew that if he stopped, he would die, and yet even in the dream he knew he couldn't go on for much longer; at some point, he had stopped being able to run and had started hobbling instead, reality asserting itself even in his dreams. And then he heard a voice, one unfamiliar but calm and authoritative, speak to him. Stop, it said. You can end this. You don't have to do this. It was such a relief to hear those words, and he stopped, abruptly, and faced the cloud, which was seconds, feet away from him, exhausted and waiting for it to be over.

He woke, frightened, because he knew what the words meant, and they both terrified and comforted him. Now, as he moved through his days, he heard that voice in his head, and he was reminded that he could, in fact, stop. He didn't, in fact, have to keep going.

He had considered killing himself before, of course; when he was in the home, and in Philadelphia, and after Ana had died. But something had always stopped him, although now, he couldn't remember what that thing had been. Now as he ran from the hyenas, he argued with himself: Why was he doing this? He was so tired; he so wanted to stop. Knowing that he didn't have to keep going was a solace to him, somehow; it reminded him that he had options, it reminded him that even though his subconscious wouldn't obey his conscious, it didn't mean he wasn't still in control.

Almost as an experiment, he began thinking of what it would mean for him to leave: in January, after his most lucrative year at the firm yet, he had updated his will, so that was in order. He would need to write a letter to Willem, a letter to Harold, a letter to Julia; he would also want to write something to Lucien, to Richard, to Malcolm. To Andy. To JB, forgiving him. Then he could go. Every day, he thought about it, and thinking about it made things easier. Thinking about it gave him fortitude.

And then, at some point, it was no longer an experiment. He couldn't remember how he had decided, but after he had, he felt lighter, freer, less tormented. The hyenas were still chasing him, but now he could see, very far in the distance, a house with an open door, and he knew that once he had reached that house, he would be safe, and everything that pursued him would fall away. They didn't like it, of course-they could see the door as well, they knew he was about to elude them-and every day the hunt got worse, the army of things chasing him stronger and louder and more insistent. His brain was vomiting memories, they were flooding everything else-he thought of people and sensations and incidents he hadn't thought of in years. Tastes appeared on his tongue as if by alchemy; he smelled fragrances he hadn't smelled in decades. His system was compromised; he would drown in his memories; he had to do something. He had tried-all his life, he had tried. He had tried to be someone different, he had tried to be someone better, he had tried to make himself clean. But it hadn't worked. Once he had decided, he was fascinated by his own hopefulness, by how he could have saved himself years of sorrow by just ending it-he could have been his own savior. No law said he had to keep on living; his life was still his own to do with what he pleased. How had he not realized this in all these years? The choice now seemed obvious; the only question was why it had taken him so long.

He talked to Harold; he could tell by the relief in Harold's voice that he must be sounding more normal. He talked to Willem. "You sound better," Willem said, and he could hear the relief in Willem's voice as well.

"I am," he said. He felt a pull of regret after talking to both of them, but he was determined. He was no good for them, anyway; he was only an extravagant collection of problems, nothing more. Unless he stopped himself, he would consume them with his needs. He would take and take and take from them until he had chewed away their every bit of flesh; they could answer every difficulty he posed to them and he would still find new ways to destroy them. For a while, they would mourn him, because they were good people, the best, and he was sorry for that-but eventually they would see that their lives were better without him in it. They would see how much time he had stolen from them; they would understand what a thief he had been, how he had suckled away all their energy and attention, how he had exsanguinated them. He hoped they would forgive him; he hoped they would see that this was his apology to them. He was releasing them-he loved them most of all, and this was what you did for people you loved: you gave them their freedom.

The day came: a Monday at the end of September. The night before he had realized that it was almost exactly a year after the beating, although he hadn't planned it that way. He left work early that evening. He had spent the weekend organizing his projects; he had written Lucien a memo detailing the status of everything he had been working on. At home, he lined up his letters on the dining-room table, and a copy of his will. He had left a message with Richard's studio manager that the toilet in the master bathroom kept running and asked if Richard could let in the plumber the following day at nine-both Richard and Willem had a set of keys to his apartment-because he would be away on business.

He took off his suit jacket and tie and shoes and watch and went to the bathroom. He sat in the shower area with his sleeves pushed up. He had a glass of scotch, which he sipped at to steady himself, and a box cutter, which he knew would be easier to hold than a razor. He knew what he needed to do: three straight vertical lines, as deep and long as he could make them, following the veins up both arms. And then he would lie down and wait.

He waited for a while, crying a bit, because he was tired and frightened and because he was ready to go, he was ready to leave. Finally he rubbed his eyes and began. He started with his left arm. He made the first cut, which was more painful than he had thought it would be, and he cried out. Then he made the second. He took another drink of the scotch. The blood was viscous, more gelatinous than liquid, and a brilliant, shimmering oil-black. Already his pants were soaked with it, already his grip was loosening. He made the third.

When he was done with both arms, he slumped against the back of the shower wall. He wished, absurdly, for a pillow. He was warm from the scotch, and from his own blood, which lapped at him as it pooled around his legs-his insides meeting his outsides, the inner bathing the outer. He closed his eyes. Behind him, the hyenas howled, furious at him. Before him stood the house with its open door. He wasn't close yet, but he was closer than he'd been: close enough to see that inside, there was a bed where he could rest, where he could lie down and sleep after his long run, where he would, for the first time in his life, be safe.

After they crossed into Nebraska, Brother Luke stopped at the edge of a wheat field and beckoned him out of the car. It was still dark, but he could hear the birds stirring, hear them talk back to a sun they couldn't yet see. He took the brother's hand and they skulked from the car and to a large tree, where Luke explained that the other brothers would be looking for them, and they would have to change their appearance. He took off the hated tunic, and put on the clothes Brother Luke held out for him: a sweatshirt with a hood and a pair of jeans. Before he did, though, he stood still as Luke cut off his hair with an electric razor. The brothers rarely cut his hair, and it was long, past his ears, and Brother Luke made sad noises as he removed it. "Your beautiful hair," he said, and carefully wrapped the length of it in his tunic and then stuffed it into a garbage bag. "You look like every other boy now, Jude. But later, when we're safe, you can grow it back, all right?" and he nodded, although really, he liked the idea of looking like every other boy. And then Brother Luke changed clothes himself, and he turned away to give the brother privacy. "You can look, Jude," said Luke, laughing, but he shook his head. When he turned back, the brother was unrecognizable, in a plaid shirt and jeans of his own, and he smiled at him before shaving off his beard, the silvery bristles falling from him like splinters of metal. There were baseball caps for both of them, although the inside of Brother Luke's was fitted with a yellowish wig, which covered his balding head completely. There were pairs of glasses for both of them as well: his were black and round and fitted with just glass, not real lenses, but Brother Luke's were square and large and brown and had the same thick lenses as his real glasses, which he put into the bag. He could take them off when they were safe, Brother Luke told him.

They were on their way to Texas, which is where they'd build their cabin. He had always imagined Texas as flat land, just dust and sky and road, which Brother Luke said was mostly true, but there were parts of the state-like in east Texas, where he was from-that were forested with spruce and cedars.

It took them nineteen hours to reach Texas. It would have been less time, but at one point Brother Luke pulled off the side of the highway and said he needed to nap for a while, and the two of them slept for several hours. Brother Luke had packed them something to eat as well-peanut butter sandwiches-and in Oklahoma they stopped again in the parking lot of a rest stop to eat them.

The Texas of his mind had, with just a few descriptions from Brother Luke, transformed from a landscape of tumbleweeds and sod into one of pines, so tall and fragrant that they cottoned out all other sound, all other life, so when Brother Luke announced that they were now, officially, in Texas, he looked out the window, disappointed.

"Where are the forests?" he asked.

Brother Luke laughed. "Patience, Jude."

They would need to stay in a motel for a few days, Brother Luke explained, both to make sure the other brothers weren't following them and so he could begin scouting for the perfect place to build their cabin. The motel was called The Golden Hand, and their room had two beds-real beds-and Brother Luke let him choose which one he wanted. He took the one near the bathroom, and Brother Luke took the one near the window, with a view of their car. "Why don't you take a shower, and I'm going to go to the store and get us some supplies," said the brother, and he was suddenly frightened. "What's wrong, Jude?"

"Are you going to come back?" he asked, hating how scared he sounded.

"Of course I'll come back, Jude," said the brother, hugging him. "Of course I will."

When he did, he had a loaf of sliced bread, and a jar of peanut butter, and a hand of bananas, and a quart of milk, and a bag of almonds, and some onions and peppers and chicken breasts. That evening, Brother Luke set up the small hibachi he'd brought in the parking lot and they grilled the onions and peppers and chicken, and Brother Luke gave him a glass of milk.

Brother Luke established their routine. They woke early, before the sun was up, and Brother Luke made himself a pot of coffee with the coffeemaker he'd brought, and then they drove into town, to the high school's track, where Luke let him run around for an hour as he sat in the bleachers, drinking his coffee and watching him. Then they returned to the motel room, where the brother gave him lessons. Brother Luke had been a math professor before he came to the monastery, but he had wanted to work with children, and so he had later taught sixth grade. But he knew about other subjects as well: history and books and music and languages. He knew so much more than the other brothers, and he wondered why Luke had never taught him when they lived at the monastery. They ate lunch-peanut butter sandwiches again-and then had more classes until three p.m., when he was allowed outside again to run around the parking lot, or to take a walk with the brother down the highway. The motel faced the interstate, and the whoosh of the passing cars provided a constant soundtrack. "It's like living by the sea," Brother Luke always said.

After this, Brother Luke made a third pot of coffee and then drove off to look for locations where they'd build their cabin, and he stayed behind in their motel room. The brother always locked him into the room for his safety. "Don't open the door for anyone, do you hear me?" asked the brother. "Not for anyone. I have a key and I'll let myself in. And don't open the curtains; I don't want anyone to see you're in here alone. There are dangerous people out there in the world; I don't want you to get hurt." It was for this same reason that he wasn't to use Brother Luke's computer, which he took with him anyway whenever he left the room. "You don't know who's out there," Brother Luke would say. "I want you to be safe, Jude. Promise me." He promised.

He would lie on his bed and read. The television was forbidden to him: Luke would feel it when he came back to the room, to see if it was warm, and he didn't want to displease him, he didn't want to get in trouble. Brother Luke had brought a piano keyboard in his car, and he practiced on it; the brother was never mean to him, but he did take lessons seriously. As the sky grew dark, though, he would find himself sitting on the edge of Brother Luke's bed, pinching back the curtain and scanning the parking lot for Brother Luke's car; some part of him was always worried that Brother Luke wouldn't return for him after all, that he was growing tired of him, that he would be left alone. There was so much he didn't know about the world, and the world was a scary place. He tried to remind himself that there were things he could do, that he knew how to work, that maybe he could get a job cleaning the motel, but he was always anxious until he saw the station wagon pulling toward him, and then he would be relieved, and would promise himself that he would do better the next day, that he would never give Brother Luke a reason to not return to him.

One evening the brother came back to the room looking tired. A few days ago, he had returned excited: he had found the perfect piece of land, he said. He described a clearing surrounded by cedars and pines, a little stream nearby busy with fish, the air so cool and quiet that you could hear every pinecone as it fell to the soft ground. He had even shown him a picture, all dark greens and shadows, and had explained where their cabin would go, and how he could help build it, and where they would make a sleeping loft, a secret fort, just for him.

"What's wrong, Brother Luke?" he asked him, after the brother had been silent so long that he could no longer stand it.

"Oh, Jude," said the brother, "I've failed." He told him how he had tried and tried to buy the land, but he just didn't have the money. "I'm sorry, Jude, I'm sorry," he said, and then, to his amazement, the brother began to cry.

He had never before seen an adult cry. "Maybe you could teach again, Brother Luke," he said, trying to comfort him. "I like you. If I were a kid, I'd like to be taught by you," and the brother smiled a bit at him and stroked his hair and said it didn't work like that, that he'd have to get licensed by the state, and it was a long and complicated process.

He thought and thought. And then he remembered: "Brother Luke," he said, "I could help-I could get a job. I could help earn money."

"No, Jude," said the brother. "I can't let you do that."

"But I want to," he said. He remembered Brother Michael telling him how much he cost for the monastery to maintain, and felt guilty and frightened, both. Brother Luke had done so much for him, and he had done nothing in return. He not only wanted to help earn money; he had to.

At last he was able to convince the brother, who hugged him. "You really are one in a million, you know that?" Luke asked him. "You really are special." And he smiled into the brother's sweater.

The next day they had classes as usual, and then the brother left again, this time, he said, to find him a good job: something he could do that would help them earn money so they could buy the land and build the cabin. And this time Luke returned smiling, excited even, and seeing this, he was excited as well.

"Jude," said the brother, "I met someone who wants to give you some work; he's waiting right outside and you can start now."

He smiled back at the brother. "What am I going to do?" he asked. At the monastery, he had been taught to sweep, and dust, and mop. He could wax a floor so well that even Brother Matthew had been impressed. He knew how to polish silver, and brass, and wood. He knew how to clean between tiles and how to scrub a toilet. He knew how to clean leaves out of gutters and clean and reset a mousetrap. He knew how to wash windows and do laundry by hand. He knew how to iron, he knew how to sew on buttons, he knew how to make stitches so even and fine that they looked as if they had been done by machine.

He knew how to cook. He could only make a dozen or so dishes from start to finish, but he knew how to clean and peel potatoes, carrots, rutabaga. He could chop hills of onions and never cry. He could debone a fish and knew how to pluck and clean a chicken. He knew how to make dough, he knew how to make bread. He knew how to whip egg whites until they transformed from liquid to solid to something better than solid: something like air given form.

And he knew how to garden. He knew which plants craved sun and which shied from it. He knew how to determine whether a plant was parched or drowning in too much water. He knew when a tree or bush needed to be repotted, and when it was hardy enough to be transferred into the earth. He knew which plants needed to be protected from cold, and how to protect them. He knew how to make a clipping and how to make the clipping grow. He knew how to mix fertilizer, how to add eggshells into the soil for extra protein, how to crush an aphid without destroying the leaf it was perched on. He could do all of these things, although he was hoping he would get to garden, because he wanted to work outside, and on his morning runs, he could feel that summer was coming, and on their drives to the track, he had seen fields in bloom with wildflowers, and he wanted to be among them.

Brother Luke knelt by him. "You're going to do what you did with Father Gabriel and a couple of the brothers," he said, and then, slowly, he understood what Luke was saying, and he stepped back toward the bed, everything within him seizing with fear. "Jude, it's going to be different now," Luke said, before he could say anything. "It'll be over so fast, I promise you. And you're so good at it. And I'll be waiting in the bathroom to make sure nothing goes wrong, all right?" He stroked his hair. "Come here," he said, and held him. "You are a wonderful kid," he said. "It's because of you and what you're doing that we're going to have our cabin, all right?" Brother Luke had talked and talked, and finally, he had nodded.

The man had come in (many years later, his would be one of the very few of their faces he would remember, and sometimes, he would see men on the street and they would look familiar, and he would think: How do I know him? Is he someone I was in court with? Was he the opposing counsel on that case last year? And then he would remember: he looks like the first of them, the first of the clients) and Luke had gone to the bathroom, which was just behind his bed, and he and the man had had sex and then the man had left.

That night he was very quiet, and Luke was gentle and tender with him. He had even brought him a cookie-a gingersnap-and he had tried to smile at Luke, and tried to eat it, but he couldn't, and when Luke wasn't looking, he wrapped it in a piece of paper and threw it away. The next day he hadn't wanted to go to the track in the morning, but Luke had said he'd feel better with some exercise, and so they had gone and he had tried to run, but it was too painful and he had eventually sat down and waited until Luke said they could leave.

Now their routine was different: they still had classes in the mornings and afternoons, but now, some evenings, Brother Luke brought back men, his clients. Sometimes there was just one; sometimes there were several. The men brought their own towels and their own sheets, which they fitted over the bed before they began and unpeeled and took with them when they left.

He tried very hard not to cry at night, but when he did, Brother Luke would come sit with him and rub his back and comfort him. "How many more until we can get the cabin?" he asked, but Luke just shook his head, sadly. "I won't know for a while," he said. "But you're doing such a good job, Jude. You're so good at it. It's nothing to be ashamed of." But he knew there was something shameful about it. No one had ever told him there was, but he knew anyway. He knew what he was doing was wrong.

And then, after a few months-and many motels; they moved every ten days or so, all around east Texas, and with every move, Luke took him to the forest, which really was beautiful, and to the clearing where they'd have their cabin-things changed again. He was lying in his bed one night (a night during a week in which there had been no clients. "A little vacation," Luke had said, smiling. "Everyone needs a break, especially someone who works as hard as you do") when Luke asked, "Jude, do you love me?"

He hesitated. Four months ago, he would've said yes immediately, proudly and unthinkingly. But now-did he love Brother Luke? He often wondered about this. He wanted to. The brother had never hurt him, or hit him, or said anything mean to him. He took care of him. He was always waiting just behind the wall to make sure nothing bad happened to him. The week before, a client had tried to make him do something Brother Luke said he never had to do if he didn't want to, and he had been struggling and trying to cry out, but there had been a pillow over his face and he knew his noises were muffled. He was frantic, almost sobbing, when suddenly the pillow had been lifted from his face, and the man's weight from his body, and Brother Luke was telling the man to get out of the room, in a tone he had never before heard from the brother but which had frightened and impressed him.

And yet something else told him that he shouldn't love Brother Luke, that the brother had done something to him that was wrong. But he hadn't. He had volunteered for this, after all; it was for the cabin in the woods, where he would have his own sleeping loft, that he was doing this. And so he told the brother he did.

He was momentarily happy when he saw the smile on the brother's face, as if he had presented him with the cabin itself. "Oh, Jude," he said, "that is the greatest gift I could ever get. Do you know how much I love you? I love you more than I love my own self. I think of you like my own son," and he had smiled back, then, because sometimes, he had privately thought of Luke as his father, and he as Luke's son. "Your dad said you're nine, but you look older," one of the clients had said to him, suspiciously, before they had begun, and he had answered what Luke had told him to say-"I'm tall for my age"-both pleased and oddly not-pleased that the client had thought Luke was his father.

Then Brother Luke had explained to him that when two people loved each other as much as they did, that they slept in the same bed, and were naked with each other. He hadn't known what to say to this, but before he could think of what it might be, Brother Luke was moving into bed with him and taking off his clothes and then kissing him. He had never kissed before-Brother Luke didn't let the clients do it with him-and he didn't like it, didn't like the wetness and the force of it. "Relax," the brother told him. "Just relax, Jude," and he tried to as much as he could.

The first time the brother had sex with him, he told him it would be different than with the clients. "Because we're in love," he'd said, and he had believed him, and when it had felt the same after all-as painful, as difficult, as uncomfortable, as shameful-he assumed he was doing something wrong, especially because the brother was so happy afterward. "Wasn't that nice?" the brother asked him, "didn't it feel different?," and he had agreed, too embarrassed to admit that it had been no different at all, that it had been just as awful as it had been with the client the day before.

Brother Luke usually didn't have sex with him if he'd seen clients earlier in the evening, but they always slept in the same bed, and they always kissed. Now one bed was used for the clients, and the other was theirs. He grew to hate the taste of Luke's mouth, its old-coffee tang, his tongue something slippery and skinned trying to burrow inside of him. Late at night, as the brother lay next to him asleep, pressing him against the wall with his weight, he would sometimes cry, silently, praying to be taken away, anywhere, anywhere else. He no longer thought of the cabin: he now dreamed of the monastery, and thought of how stupid he'd been to leave. It had been better there after all. When they were out in the mornings and would pass people, Brother Luke would tell him to lower his eyes, because his eyes were distinctive and if the brothers were looking for them, they would give them away. But sometimes he wanted to raise his eyes, as if they could by their very color and shape telegraph a message across miles and states to the brothers: Here I am. Help me. Please take me back. Nothing was his any longer: not his eyes, not his mouth, not even his name, which Brother Luke only called him in private. Around everyone else, he was Joey. "And this is Joey," Brother Luke would say, and he would rise from the bed and wait, his head bent, as the client inspected him.

He cherished his lessons, because they were the one time Brother Luke didn't touch him, and in those hours, the brother was who he remembered, the person he had trusted and followed. But then the lessons would end for the day, and every evening would conclude the same as the evening before.

He grew more and more silent. "Where's my smiley boy?" the brother would ask him, and he would try to smile back at him. "It's okay to enjoy it," the brother would say, sometimes, and he would nod, and the brother would smile at him and rub his back. "You like it, don't you?" he would ask, and wink, and he would nod at him, mutely. "I can tell," Luke would say, still smiling, proud of him. "You were made for this, Jude." Some of the clients would say that to him as well-You were born for this-and as much as he hated it, he also knew that they were right. He was born for this. He had been born, and left, and found, and used as he had been intended to be used.

In later years, he would try to remember when exactly it was that he must have realized that the cabin was never going to be built, that the life he had dreamed of would never be his. When he had begun, he had kept track of the number of clients he had seen, thinking that when he reached a certain number-forty? fifty?-he would surely be done, he would surely be allowed to stop. But then the number grew larger and larger, until one day he had looked at it and realized how large it was and had started crying, so scared and sick of what he had done that he had stopped counting. So was it when he reached that number? Or was it when they left Texas altogether, Luke promising him that the forests were better in Washington State anyway, and they drove west, through New Mexico and Arizona, and then north, stopping for weeks in little towns, staying in little motels that were the twins of that very first motel they had ever stayed in, and that no matter where they stopped, there were always men, and on the nights there weren't men, there was Brother Luke, who seemed to crave him the way he himself had never craved anything? Was it when he realized that he hated his weeks off even more than the normal weeks, because the return to his regular life was so much more terrible than if he had never had a vacation at all? Was it when he began noticing the inconsistencies in Brother Luke's stories: how sometimes it wasn't his son but a nephew, who hadn't died but had in fact moved away, and Brother Luke never saw him again; or how sometimes, he stopped teaching because he had felt the calling to join the monastery, and sometimes it was because he was weary from having to constantly negotiate with the school's principal, who clearly didn't care for children the way the brother did; or how in some stories, he had grown up in east Texas, but in others, he had spent his childhood in Carmel, or Laramie, or Eugene?

Or was it the day that they were passing through Utah to Idaho, on their way to Washington? They rarely ventured into actual towns-their America was denuded of trees, of flowers, theirs was just long stretches of roadway, the only green thing Brother Luke's lone surviving cattleya, which continued to live and leaf, though not bud-but this time they had, because Brother Luke had a doctor friend in one of the towns, and he wanted him to be examined because it was clear he had picked up some sort of disease from one of the clients, despite the precautions Brother Luke made them take. He didn't know the name of the town, but he was startled at the signs of normalcy, of life around him, and he stared out of his window in silence, looking at these scenes that he had always imagined but rarely saw: women standing on the street with strollers, talking and laughing with one another; a jogger panting by; families with dogs; a world made of not just men but also of children and women. Normally on these drives he would close his eyes-he slept all the time now, waiting for each day to end-but this day, he felt unusually alert, as if the world was trying to tell him something, and all he had to do was listen to its message.

Brother Luke was trying to read the map and drive at the same time, and finally he pulled over, studying the map and muttering. Luke had stopped across the street from a baseball field, and he watched as, if at once, it began to fill with people: women, mostly, and then, running and shouting, boys. The boys wore uniforms, white with red stripes, but despite that, they all looked different-different hair, different eyes, different skin. Some were skinny, like he was, and some were fat. He had never seen so many boys his own age at one time, and he looked and looked at them. And then he noticed that although they were different, they were actually the same: they were all smiling, and laughing, excited to be outside, in the dry, hot air, the sun bright above them, their mothers unloading cans of soda and bottles of water and juice from plastic carrying containers.

"Aha! We're back on track!" he heard Luke saying, and heard him fold up the map. But before he started the engine again, he felt Luke follow his gaze, and for a moment the two of them sat staring at the boys in silence, until at last Luke stroked his hair. "I love you, Jude," he said, and after a moment, he replied as he always did-"I love you, too, Brother Luke"-and they drove away.

He was the same as those boys, but he was really not: he was different. He would never be one of them. He would never be someone who would run across a field while his mother called after him to come have a snack before he played so he wouldn't get tired. He would never have his bed in the cabin. He would never be clean again. The boys were playing on the field, and he was driving with Brother Luke to the doctor, the kind of doctor he knew from his previous visits to other doctors would be somehow wrong, somehow not a good person. He was as far away from them as he was from the monastery. He was so far gone from himself, from who he had hoped to be, that it was as if he was no longer a boy at all but something else entirely. This was his life now, and there was nothing he could do about it.

At the doctor's office, Luke leaned over and held him. "We're going to have fun tonight, just you and me," he said, and he nodded, because there was nothing else he could do. "Let's go," said Luke, releasing him, and he got out of the car, and followed Brother Luke across the parking lot and toward the brown door that was already opening to let them inside.

The first memory: a hospital room. He knew it was a hospital room even before he opened his eyes because he could smell it, because its quality of silence-a silence that wasn't really silent-was familiar. Next to him: Willem, asleep in a chair. Then he had been confused-why was Willem here? He was supposed to be away, somewhere. He remembered: Sri Lanka. But he wasn't. He was here. How strange, he thought. I wonder why he's here? That was the first memory.

The second memory: the same hospital room. He turned and saw Andy sitting on the side of his bed, Andy, unshaven and awful-looking, giving him a strange, unconvincing smile. He felt Andy squeeze his hand-he hadn't realized he had a hand until he felt Andy squeeze it-and had tried to squeeze back, but couldn't. Andy had looked up at someone. "Nerve damage?" he heard Andy ask. "Maybe," said this other person, the person he couldn't see, "but if we're lucky, it's more likely it's-" And he had closed his eyes and fallen back asleep. That was the second memory.

The third and fourth and fifth and sixth memories weren't really memories at all: they were people's faces, their hands, their voices, leaning into his face, holding his hand, talking to him-they were Harold and Julia and Richard and Lucien. Same for the seventh and eighth: Malcolm, JB.

The ninth memory was Willem again, sitting next to him, telling him he was so sorry, but he had to leave. Just for a little while, and then he'd be back. He was crying, and he wasn't sure why, but it didn't seem so unusual-they all cried, they cried and apologized to him, which he found perplexing, as none of them had done anything wrong: he knew that much, at least. He tried to tell Willem not to cry, that he was fine, but his tongue was so thick in his mouth, a great useless slab, and he couldn't make it operate. Willem was already holding one of his hands, but he didn't have the energy to lift the other so he could put it on Willem's arm and reassure him, and finally he had given up.

In the tenth memory, he was still in the hospital, but in a different room, and he was still so tired. His arms ached. He had two foam balls, one cupped in each palm, and he was supposed to squeeze them for five seconds and then release them for five. Then squeeze them for five, and release them for five. He couldn't remember who had told him this, or who had given him the balls, but he did so anyway, although whenever he did, his arms hurt more, a burning, raw pain, and he couldn't do more than three or four repetitions before he was exhausted and had to stop.

And then one night he had awoken, swimming up through layers of dreams he couldn't remember, and had realized where he was, and why. He had gone back to sleep then, but the next day he turned his head and saw a man sitting in a chair next to his bed: he didn't know who the man was, but he had seen him before. He would come and sit and stare at him and sometimes he would talk to him, but he could never concentrate on what the man was saying, and would eventually close his eyes.

"I'm in a mental institution," he told the man now, and his voice sounded wrong to him, reedy and hoarse.

The man smiled. "You're in the psychiatric wing of a hospital, yes," he said. "Do you remember me?"

"No," he said, "but I recognize you."

"I'm Dr. Solomon. I'm a psychiatrist here at the hospital." There was a silence. "Do you know why you're here?"

He closed his eyes and nodded. "Where's Willem?" he asked. "Where's Harold?"

"Willem had to go back to Sri Lanka to finish shooting," said the doctor. "He'll be back"-he heard the sound of paper flipping-"October ninth. So in ten days. Harold's coming at noon; it's when he's been coming, do you remember?" He shook his head. "Jude," the doctor said, "can you tell me why you're here?"

"Because," he began, swallowing. "Because of what I did in the shower."

There was another silence. "That's right," said the doctor, softly. "Jude, can you tell me why-" But that was all he heard, because he had fallen asleep again.

The next time he woke, the man was gone, but Harold was in his place. "Harold," he said, in his strange new voice, and Harold, who had been sitting with his elbows on his thighs and his face in his hands, looked up as suddenly as if he'd shouted.

"Jude," he said, and sat next to him on the bed. He took the ball out of his right hand and replaced it with his own hand.

He thought that Harold looked terrible. "I'm sorry, Harold," he said, and Harold began to cry. "Don't cry," he told him, "please don't cry," and Harold got up and went to the bathroom and he could hear him blowing his nose.