"I burned myself," Jude says at last, very softly.

"How?" he asks, wildly, and once again, Jude's answer is delivered in such a low voice that he misses most of it, but he can still distinguish certain words: olive oil-match-fire.

"Why?" he yells, desperately. "Why did you do this, Jude?" He is so angry-at himself, at Jude-that for the first time since he has known him, he wants to hit him, he can see his fist smashing into Jude's nose, into his cheek. He wants to see his face shattered, and he wants to be the one to do it.

"I was trying not to cut myself," Jude says, tinily, and this makes him newly livid.

"So it's my fault?" he asks. "You're doing this to punish me?"

"No," Jude pleads with him, "no, Willem, no-I just-"

But he interrupts him. "Why have you never told me who Brother Luke is?" he hears himself ask.

He can tell that Jude is startled. "What?" he asks.

"You promised me you would," he says. "Remember? It was my birthday present." The final words sound more sarcastic than he intended. "Tell me," he says. "Tell me right now."

"I can't, Willem," Jude says. "Please. Please."

He sees that Jude is in agony, and still he pushes. "You've had four years to figure out how to do it," he says, and as Jude moves to put the keys in the ignition, he reaches over and snatches them from him. "I think that's enough of a grace period. Tell me right now," and then, when there is still no reaction, he shouts at Jude again: "Tell me."

"He was one of the brothers at the monastery," Jude whispers.

"And?" he screams at him. I am so stupid, he thinks, even as he yells. I am so, so, so stupid. I am so gullible. And then, simultaneously: He's scared of me. I'm yelling at someone I love and making him scared of me. He suddenly remembers yelling at Andy all those years ago: You're mad because you can't figure out how to make him better and so you're taking it out on me. Oh god, he thinks. Oh god. Why am I doing this?

"And I ran away with him," Jude says, his voice so faint now that Willem has to lean in to hear him.

"And?" he says, but he can see that Jude is about to cry, and suddenly, he stops, and leans back, exhausted and disgusted with himself, and suddenly frightened as well: What if the next question he asks is the question that finally opens the gates, and everything he has ever wanted to know about Jude, everything he has never wanted to confront, comes surging out at last? They sit there for a long time, the car filling with their shaky breaths. He can feel his fingertips turning numb. "Let's go," he finally says.

"Where?" Jude asks, and Willem looks at him.

"We only have an hour to Boston," he says. "And they're expecting us," and Jude nods, and wipes his face with his handkerchief, and takes the keys from him, and drives them slowly out of the gas station.

As they move down the highway, he has a sudden vision of what it really means to set yourself on fire. He thinks of the campfires he had built as a Boy Scout, the tepee of twigs you'd arrange around a knot of newspaper, the way the shimmering flames made the air around them wobbly, their awful beauty. And then he thinks of Jude doing that to his own skin, imagines orange chewing through his flesh, and he is sick. "Pull over," he gasps to Jude, and Jude screeches off the road and he leans out of the car and vomits until he has nothing more to expel.

"Willem," he hears Jude saying, and the sound of his voice enrages him and devastates him, both.

They are silent for the rest of the drive, and when Jude pulls the car bumpily into Harold and Julia's driveway, there is a brief moment in which they look at each other, and it is as if he is looking at someone he has never seen before. He looks at Jude and sees a handsome man with long hands and legs and a beautiful face, the kind of face you look at and keep looking at, and if he were meeting this man at a party or at a restaurant, he would talk to him, because it would be an excuse to keep looking at him, and he would never think that this man would be someone who cut himself so much that the skin on his arms no longer felt like skin, but cartilage, or that he once dated someone who beat him so hard he could have died, or that one night he rubbed his skin with oil so that the flame he touched to his own body would burn brighter and faster, and that he had gotten this idea from someone who had once done this very thing to him, years ago, when he was a child and had done nothing worse than take something shiny and irresistible from a loathed and loathsome guardian's desk.

He opens his mouth to say something when they hear Harold and Julia calling out their welcomes to them, and they both blink and turn and get out of the car, fixing their mouths into smiles as they do. As he kisses Julia, he can hear Harold, behind him, saying to Jude, "Are you okay? Are you sure? You look a little off," and then Jude's murmured assent.

He goes to the bedroom with their bag, and Jude goes directly to the kitchen. He takes out their toothbrushes and electric razors and puts them in the bathroom, and then he lies down on the bed.

He sleeps all afternoon; he is too overwhelmed to do anything else. Dinner is just the four of them, and he looks in the mirror, quickly practicing his laugh, before he joins the others in the dining room. Over dinner, Jude is very quiet, but Willem tries to talk and listen as if everything is normal, though it is difficult, as his mind is full of what he has learned.

Even through his rage and despair, he registers that Jude has almost nothing on his plate, but when Harold says, "Jude, you have to eat more; you've gotten way too skinny. Right, Willem?" and looks to him for the support and cajoling he would normally, reflexively offer, he instead shrugs. "Jude's an adult," he says, his voice odd to him. "He knows what's best for him," and out of the corner of his eyes, he sees Julia and Harold exchange glances with each other, and Jude look down at his plate. "I ate a lot when I was cooking," he says, and they all know this is untrue, because Jude never snacks while he's cooking, and doesn't let anyone else do so, either: "The Snack Stasi," JB calls him. He watches Jude absentmindedly cup his hand around his sweatered arm right where the burn would be, and then he looks up, and sees Willem staring, and drops his hand and looks back down again.

Somehow they get through dinner, and as he and Julia do the dishes, he keeps the conversation topical and light. After, they go to the living room, where Harold is waiting for him to watch the previous weekend's game, which he has recorded. At the entryway to the room, he pauses: normally, he would join Jude and squash in beside him on the oversize, overstuffed chair that has been squished in next to what they call Harold's Chair, but tonight he cannot sit next to Jude-he can barely look at him. And yet if he doesn't, Julia and Harold will know for certain that something is seriously wrong between them. But as he hesitates, Jude stands and, as if anticipating his quandary, announces that he's tired and is going to bed. "Are you sure?" Harold asks. "The evening's just beginning." But Jude says he is, and kisses Julia good night and waves vaguely in Harold and Willem's direction, and once again, he sees Julia and Harold look at each other.

Julia eventually leaves as well-she has never understood the appeal of American football-and after she goes, Harold pauses the game and looks over at him. "Is everything okay with you two?" he asks, and Willem nods. Later, when he too is going to bed, Harold reaches out his hand for his own as he passes him. "You know, Willem," he says, squeezing his palm, "Jude's not the only one we love," and he nods again, his vision blurring, and tells Harold good night and leaves.

Their bedroom is silent, and for a while he stands, staring at Jude's form beneath the blanket. Willem can tell he's not actually asleep-he is too still to actually be sleeping-but is pretending to be, and finally, he undresses, folding his clothes over the back of the chair near the dresser. When he slips into bed, he can tell Jude is still awake, and the two of them lie there for a long time on their opposite sides of the bed, both of them afraid of what he, Willem, might say.

He sleeps, though, and when he wakes, the room is more silent still, a real silence this time, and out of habit, he rolls toward Jude's side of the bed, and opens his eyes when he realizes that Jude isn't there, and that in fact his side of the bed is cool.

He sits. He stands. He hears a small sound, too small to even be named as sound, and then he turns and sees the bathroom door, closed. But all is dark. He goes to the door anyway, and fiercely turns the knob, slams it open, and the towel that's been jammed under the door to blot out the light trails after it like a train. And there, leaning against the bathtub, is Jude, as he knew he would be, fully dressed, his eyes huge and terrified.

"Where is it?" he spits at him, although he wants to moan, he wants to cry: at his failing, at this horrible, grotesque play that is being performed night after night after night, for which he is the only, accidental audience, because even when there is no audience, the play is staged anyway to an empty house, its sole performer so diligent and dedicated that nothing can prevent him from practicing his craft.

"I'm not," Jude says, and Willem knows he's lying.

"Where is it, Jude?" he asks, and he crouches before him, seizes his hands: nothing. But he knows he has been cutting himself: he knows it from how large his eyes are, from how gray his lips are, from how his hands are shaking.

"I'm not, Willem, I'm not," Jude says-they are speaking in whispers so they won't wake Julia and Harold, one flight above them-and then, before he can think, he is tearing at Jude, trying to pull his clothes away from him, and Jude is fighting him but he can't use his left arm at all and isn't at his strongest anyway, and they are screaming at each other with no sound. He is on top of Jude, then, working his knees into his shoulders the way a fightmaster on a set once taught him to do, a method he knows both paralyzes and hurts, and then he is stripping Jude's clothes off and Jude is frantic beneath him, threatening and then begging him to stop. He thinks, dully, that anyone watching them would think this was a rape, but he isn't trying to rape, he reminds himself: he is trying to find the razor. And then he hears it, the ping of metal on tile, and he grabs the edge of it between his fingers and throws it behind him, and then goes back to undressing him, yanking his clothes away with a brutal efficiency that surprises him even as he does it, but it isn't until he pulls down Jude's underwear that he sees the cuts: six of them, in neat parallel horizontal stripes, high on his left thigh, and he releases Jude and scuttles away from him as if he is diseased.

"You-are-crazy," he says, flatly and slowly, after his initial shock has lessened somewhat. "You're crazy, Jude. To cut yourself on your legs, of all places. You know what can happen; you know you can get infected there. What the hell are you thinking?" He is gasping with exertion, with misery. "You're sick," he says, and he is recognizing, again as if Jude is a stranger, how thin he really is, and wondering why he hadn't noticed before. "You're sick. You need to be hospitalized. You need-"

"Stop trying to fix me, Willem," Jude spits back at him. "What am I to you? Why are you with me anyway? I'm not your goddamned charity project. I was doing just fine without you."

"Oh yeah?" he asks. "Sorry if I'm not living up to being the ideal boyfriend, Jude. I know you prefer your relationships heavy on the sadism, right? Maybe if I kicked you down the stairs a few times I'd be living up to your standards?" He sees Jude move back from him then, pressing himself hard against the tub, sees something in his eyes flatten and close.

"I'm not Hemming, Willem," Jude hisses at him. "I'm not going to be the cripple you get to save for the one you couldn't."

He rocks back on his heels then, stands, backs away, scooping up the razor as he does and then throwing it as hard as he can at Jude's face, Jude bringing his arms up to shield himself, the razor bouncing off his palm. "Fine," he pants. "Fucking cut yourself to ribbons for all I care. You love the cutting more than you love me, anyway." He leaves, wishing he could slam the door behind him, banging off the light switch as he goes.

Back in the bedroom, he grabs his pillows and one of the blankets from the bed and flings himself down on the sofa. If he could leave altogether, he would, but Harold and Julia's presence stops him, so he doesn't. He turns facedown and screams, really screams, into the pillow, hitting his fists and kicking his legs against the cushions like a child having a tantrum, his rage mingling with a regret so complete that he is breathless. He is thinking many things, but he cannot articulate or distinguish any of them, and three successive fantasies spool quickly through his mind: he will get in the car and escape and never talk to Jude again; he will go back into the bathroom and hold him until he acquiesces, until he can heal him; he will call Andy now, right now, and have Jude committed first thing in the morning. But he does none of those things, just beats and kicks uselessly, as if he is swimming in place.

At last, he stops, and lies still, and finally, after what feels like a very long time, he hears Jude creep into the room, as soft and slow as something beaten, a dog perhaps, some unloved creature who lives only to be abused, and then the creak of the bed as he climbs into it.

The long ugly night lurches on, and he sleeps, a shallow, furtive slumber, and when he wakes, it isn't quite daylight, but he pulls on his clothes and running shoes and goes outside, wrung dry with exhaustion, trying not to think of anything. As he runs, tears, whether from the cold or from everything, intermittently cloud his vision, and he rubs his eyes angrily, keeps going, making himself go faster, inhaling the wind in large, punishing gulps, feeling its ache in his lungs. When he returns, he goes back to their room, where Jude is still lying on his side, curled into himself, and for a second he imagines, with a jolt of horror, that he is dead, and is about to speak his name when Jude shifts a bit in his sleep, and he instead goes to the bathroom and showers, packs his running clothes into their bag, dresses for the day, and goes to the kitchen, shutting the bedroom door quietly behind him. There in the kitchen is Harold, who offers him a cup of coffee as he always does, and as always since he began his relationship with Jude, he shakes his head, although right now just the smell of coffee-its woody, barky warmth-makes him almost ravenous. Harold doesn't know why he's stopped drinking it, only that he has, and is always, as he says, trying to lead him back down the road to temptation, and although normally he would joke around with him, this morning he doesn't. He can't even look at Harold, he is so ashamed. And he is resentful as well: of Harold's unspoken but, he senses, unshakable expectation that he will always know what to do about Jude; the disappointment, the disdain he knows Harold would feel for him if he knew what he had said and done in the nighttime.

"You don't look great," Harold tells him.

"I'm not," he says. "Harold, I'm really sorry. Kit texted late last night, and this director I thought I was going to meet up with this week is leaving town tonight; I have to get back to the city today."

"Oh no, Willem, really?" Harold begins, and then Jude walks in, and Harold says, "Willem says you guys have to go back to the city this morning."

"You can stay," he says to Jude, but doesn't lift his eyes from the toast he's buttering. "Keep the car. But I need to get back."

"No," says Jude, after a short silence. "I should get back, too."

"What the hell kind of Thanksgiving is this? You guys just eat and run? What am I going to do with all that turkey?" Harold says, but his theatrical outrage is muted, and Willem can feel him looking at both of them in turn, trying to figure out what's happening, what's gone wrong.

He waits for Jude to get ready, trying to make small talk with Julia and ignore Harold's unspoken questions. He goes to the car first to make it clear he's driving, and as he's saying goodbye, Harold looks at him and opens his mouth, and then shuts it, and hugs him instead. "Drive safely," he says.

In the car he seethes, keeps accelerating and then reminding himself to slow down. It's not even eight in the morning, and it's Thanksgiving Day, and the highway is empty. Next to him, Jude is turned away from him, his face against the glass: Willem still hasn't looked at him, doesn't know what expression he wears, can't see the smudges under his eyes that Andy had told him in the hospital were a telltale sign that Jude has been cutting himself too much. His anger quickens and recedes by the mile: sometimes he sees Jude lying to him-he is always lying to him, he realizes-and the fury fills him like hot oil. And sometimes he thinks of what he said, and the way he behaved, and the entire situation, that the person he loves is so terrible to himself, and feels such a sense of remorse that he has to grip the steering wheel to make himself focus. He thinks: Is he right? Do I see him as Hemming? And then he thinks: No. That's Jude's delusion, because he can't understand why anyone would want to be with him. It's not the truth. But the explanation doesn't comfort him, and indeed makes him more wretched.

Just past New Haven, he stops. Normally, the passage through New Haven is the opportunity for him to recount their favorite stories from when he and JB were roommates in grad school: The time he was made to help JB and Asian Henry Young mount their guerrilla exhibition of swaying carcasses of meat outside of the medical college. The time JB cut off all his dreads and left them in the sink until Willem finally cleaned them up two weeks later. The time he and JB danced to techno music for forty straight minutes so JB's friend Greig, a video artist, could record them. "Tell me the one when JB filled Richard's tub with tadpoles," Jude would say, grinning in anticipation. "Tell me the one about the time you dated that lesbian." "Tell me the one when JB crashed that feminist orgy." But today neither of them says anything, and they roll past New Haven in silence.

He gets out of the car to gas up and go to the bathroom. "I'm not stopping again," he tells Jude, who hasn't moved, but Jude only shakes his head, and Willem slams the door shut, his anger returning.

They are at Greene Street before noon, and they get out of the car in silence, into the elevator in silence, into the apartment in silence. He takes their bag to the bedroom; behind him, he can hear Jude sit down and begin playing something on the piano-Schumann, he recognizes, Fantasy in C: a pretty vigorous number for someone who's so wan and helpless, he thinks sourly-and realizes he has to get out of the apartment.

He doesn't even take his coat off, just heads back into the living room with his keys. "I'm going out," he says, but Jude doesn't stop playing. "Do you hear me?" he shouts. "I'm leaving."

Then Jude looks up, stops playing. "When are you coming back?" he asks, quietly, and Willem feels his resolve weaken.

But then he remembers how angry he is. "I don't know," he says. "Don't wait up." He punches the button for the elevator. There is a pause, and then Jude resumes playing.

And then he is out in the world, and all the stores are closed, and SoHo is quiet. He walks to the West Side Highway, walks up it in silence, his sunglasses on, his scarf, which he bought in Jaipur (a gray for Jude, a blue for him), and which is of such soft cashmere that it snags on even the slightest of stubble, wrapped around his stubbly neck. He walks and walks; later, he won't even remember what he thought about, if he thought about anything. When he is hungry, he veers east to buy a slice of pizza, which he eats on the street, hardly tasting it, before returning to the highway. This is my world, he thinks, as he stands at the river and looks across it toward New Jersey. This is my little world, and I don't know what to do in it. He feels trapped, and yet how can he feel trapped when he can't even negotiate the small place he occupies? How can he hope for more when he can't comprehend what he thought he did?

Nightfall is abrupt and brief, and the wind more intense, and still he walks. He wants warmth, food, a room with people laughing. But he can't bear to go into a restaurant, not by himself on Thanksgiving, not in the mood he's in: he'll be recognized, and he doesn't have the energy for the small talk, the bonhomie, the graciousness, that such encounters will necessitate. His friends have always teased him about his invisibility claim, his idea that he can somehow manipulate his own visibility, his own recognizability, but he had really believed it, even when evidence kept disproving him. Now he sees this belief as yet more proof of his self-deception, his way of constantly pretending that the world will align itself to his vision of it: That Jude will get better because he wants him to. That he understands him because he likes to think he does. That he can walk through SoHo and no one will know who he is. But really, he is a prisoner: of his job, of his relationship, and mostly, of his own willful naivete.

Finally he buys a sandwich and catches a taxi south to Perry Street, to his apartment that is barely his anymore: in a few weeks, in fact, it no longer will be, because he has sold it to Miguel, his friend from Spain, who is spending more time in the States. But tonight, it still is, and he lets himself in, cautiously, as if the apartment may have deteriorated, may have started breeding monsters, since he was last there. It is early, but he takes off his clothes anyway, and picks Miguel's clothes off Miguel's chaise longue and takes Miguel's blanket off Miguel's bed and lies down on the chaise, letting the helplessness and tumult of the day-only a day, and so much has happened!-descend, and cries.

As he's crying, his phone rings, and he gets up, thinking it might be Jude, but it's not: it's Andy.

"Andy," he cries, "I fucked up, I really fucked up. I did something horrible."

"Willem," Andy says gently. "I'm sure it's not as bad as you think it is. I'm sure you're being too hard on yourself."

So he tells Andy, haltingly, explaining what has happened, and after he is finished, Andy is silent. "Oh, Willem," he sighs, but he doesn't sound angry, only sad. "Okay. It is as bad as you think it is," and for some reason, this makes him laugh a little, but then also moan.

"What should I do?" he asks, and Andy sighs again.

"If you want to stay with him, I'd go home and talk to him," he says, slowly. "And if you don't want to stay with him-I'd go home and talk to him anyway." He pauses. "Willem, I'm really sorry."

"I know," he says. And then, as Andy's saying goodbye, he stops him. "Andy," he says, "tell me honestly: Is he mentally ill?"

There's a very long silence, until Andy says, "I don't think so, Willem. Or rather: I don't think there's anything chemically wrong with him. I think his craziness is all man-made." He is silent. "Make him talk to you, Willem," he says. "If he talks to you, I think you'll-I think you'll understand why he is the way he is." And suddenly, he needs to get home, and he is dressing and hurrying out the door, hailing a cab and getting into it, getting out and getting into the elevator, opening the door and letting himself into the apartment, which is silent, disconcertingly silent. On the way over, he had a sudden image, one that felt like a premonition, that Jude had died, that he had killed himself, and he runs through the apartment shouting his name.

"Willem?" he hears, and he runs through their bedroom, with their bed still made, and then sees Jude in the far left corner of their closet, curled up on the ground, facing the wall. But he doesn't think about why he's there, he just drops to the floor next to him. He doesn't know if he has permission to touch him, but he does so anyway, wrapping his arms around him. "I'm sorry," he says to the back of Jude's head. "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean what I said-I would be distraught if you hurt yourself. I am distraught." He exhales. "And I never, ever should have gotten physical with you. Jude, I'm so sorry."

"I'm sorry, too," Jude whispers, and they are silent. "I'm sorry about what I said. I'm sorry I lied to you, Willem."

They are quiet for a long time. "Do you remember the time you told me you were afraid that you were a series of nasty surprises for me?" he asks him, and Jude nods, slightly. "You aren't," he tells him. "You aren't. But being with you is like being in this fantastic landscape," he continues, slowly. "You think it's one thing, a forest, and then suddenly it changes, and it's a meadow, or a jungle, or cliffs of ice. And they're all beautiful, but they're strange as well, and you don't have a map, and you don't understand how you got from one terrain to the next so abruptly, and you don't know when the next transition will arrive, and you don't have any of the equipment you need. And so you keep walking through, and trying to adjust as you go, but you don't really know what you're doing, and often you make mistakes, bad mistakes. That's sometimes what it feels like."

They're silent. "So basically," Jude says at last, "basically, you're saying I'm New Zealand."

It takes him a second to realize Jude is joking, and when he does he begins to laugh, unhingedly, with relief and sorrow, and he turns Jude toward him and kisses him. "Yes," he says. "Yes, you're New Zealand."

Then they are quiet again, and serious, but at least they are looking at each other.

"Are you going to leave?" Jude asks, so quietly that Willem can barely hear him.

He opens his mouth; shuts it. Oddly, even with everything he has thought and not thought over the last day and night, he has not considered leaving, and now he thinks about it. "No," he says. And then, "I don't think so," and he watches Jude shut his eyes and then open them, and nod. "Jude," he says, and the words come to his mouth as he says them, and as he speaks, he knows he is doing the right thing, "I do think you need help-help I don't know how to give you." He takes a breath. "I either want you to voluntarily commit yourself, or I want you to start seeing Dr. Loehmann twice a week." He watches Jude for a long time; he can't tell what he's thinking.

"And what if I don't want to do either?" Jude asks. "Are you going to leave?"

He shakes his head. "Jude, I love you," he says. "But I can't-I can't condone this kind of behavior. I won't be able to stick around and watch you do this to yourself if I thought you'd interpret my presence as some sort of tacit approval. So. Yes. I guess I would."

Again they are quiet, and Jude turns over and lies on his back. "If I tell you what happened to me," he begins, falteringly, "if I tell you everything I can't discuss-if I tell you, Willem, do I still have to go?"

He looks at him, shakes his head again. "Oh, Jude," he says. "Yes. Yes, you still have to. But I hope you'll tell me anyway, I really do. Whatever it is; whatever it is."

They are quiet once more, and this time, their quiet turns to sleep, and the two of them fit into each other and sleep and sleep until Willem hears Jude's voice speaking to him, and then he wakes, and he listens as Jude talks. It will take hours, because Jude is sometimes unable to continue, and Willem will wait and hold him so tightly that Jude won't be able to breathe. Twice he will try to wrench himself away, and Willem will pin him to the ground and hold him there until he calms himself. Because they are in the closet, they won't know what time it is, only that there has been a day that has arrived and departed, because they will have seen flat carpets of sun unroll themselves into the closet's doorways from the bedroom, from the bathroom. He will listen to stories that are unimaginable, that are abominable; he will excuse himself, three times, to go to the bathroom and study his face in the mirror and remind himself that he has only to find the courage to listen, although he will want to cover his ears and cover Jude's mouth to make the stories cease. He will study the back of Jude's head, because Jude can't face him, and imagine the person he thinks he knows collapsing into rubble, clouds of dust gusting around him, as nearby, teams of artisans try to rebuild him in another material, in another shape, as a different person than the person who had stood for years and years. On and on and on the stories will go, and in their path will lie squalor: blood and bones and dirt and disease and misery. After Jude has finished telling him about his time with Brother Luke, Willem will ask him, again, if he enjoys having sex at all, even a little, even occasionally, and he will wait the many long minutes until Jude says he doesn't, that he hates it, that he always has, and he will nod, devastated, but relieved to have the real answer. And then he will ask him, not even knowing where the question has been hiding, if he's even attracted to men, and Jude will tell him, after a silence, that he's not certain, that he had always had sex with men, and so assumed he always would. "Are you interested in having sex with women?" he'll ask him, and he'll watch as, after another long silence, Jude shakes his head. "No," he'll say. "It's too late for me, Willem," and he will tell him it's not, that there are things they can do to help him, but Jude will shake his head again. "No," he'll say. "No, Willem, I've had enough. No more," and he will realize, as if slapped, the truth of this, and will stop. They will sleep again, and this time, his dreams will be terrible. He will dream he is one of the men in the motel rooms, he will realize that he has behaved like one of them; he will wake with nightmares, and it will be Jude who has to calm him. Finally they will heave themselves from the floor-it will be Saturday afternoon, and they will have been lying in the closet since Thursday night-and shower and eat something, something hot and comforting, and then they will go directly from the kitchen into the study, where he will listen as Jude leaves a message for Dr. Loehmann, whose card Willem has kept in his wallet all these years and produces, magician-like, within seconds, and from there to bed, and they will lie there, looking at each other, each afraid to ask the other: he to ask Jude to finish his story; Jude to ask him when he is leaving, because his leaving now seems an inevitability, a matter of logistics.

On and on they stare, until Jude's face becomes almost meaningless as a face to him: it is a series of colors, of planes, of shapes that have been arranged in such a way to give other people pleasure, but to give its owner nothing. He doesn't know what he is going to do. He is dizzy with what he has heard, with comprehending the enormity of his misconceptions, with stretching his understanding past what is imaginable, with the knowledge that all of his carefully maintained edifices are now destroyed beyond repair.

But for now, they are in their bed, in their room, in their apartment, and he reaches over and takes Jude's hand, holds it gently in his own.

"You've told me about how you got to Montana," he hears himself saying. "So tell me: What happened next?"

It was a time he rarely thought about, his flight to Philadelphia, because it was a period in which he had been so afloat from himself that even as he had lived his life, it had felt dreamlike and not quite real; there had been times in those weeks when he had opened his eyes and was genuinely unable to discern whether what had just happened had actually happened, or whether he had imagined it. It had been a useful skill, this persistent and unshatterable somnambulism, and it had protected him, but then that ability, like his ability to forget, had abandoned him as well and he was never to acquire it again.

He had first noticed this suspension at the home. At nights, he would sometimes be awakened by one of the counselors, and he would follow them down to the office where one of them was always on duty, and he would do whatever they wanted. After they were done, he would be escorted back to his room-a small space with a bunk bed that he shared with a mentally disabled boy, slow and fat and frightened-looking and prone to rages, whom he knew the counselors also sometimes took with them at night-and locked in again. There were a few of them the counselors used, but aside from his roommate, he didn't know who the other boys were, only that they existed. He was nearly mute in those sessions, and as he knelt or squatted or lay, he thought of a round clock face, its second hand gliding impassively around it, counting the revolutions until it ended. But he never begged, he never pled. He never bargained or made promises or cried. He didn't have the energy; he didn't have the conviction-not any longer, not anymore.

It was a few months after his weekend with the Learys that he tried to run away. He had classes at the community college on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and on those days, one of the counselors would wait for him in the parking lot and drive him back to the home. He dreaded the end of classes, he dreaded the ride home: he never knew which counselor would be waiting for him, and when he reached the parking lot and saw who it was, his footsteps would sometimes slow, but it was as if he was a magnet, something controlled by ions, not will, and into the car he would be drawn.

But one afternoon-this was in March, shortly before he turned fourteen-he had turned the corner and had seen the counselor, a man named Rodger who was the cruelest, the most demanding, the most vicious of them all, and he had stopped. For the first time in a long time, something in him resisted, and instead of continuing toward Rodger, he had crept backward down the hallway, and then, once he was certain he was safely out of sight, he had run.

He hadn't prepared for this, he had no plan, but some hidden, fiery part of him had, it seemed, been making observations as the rest of his mind sat cocooned in its thick, cottony slumber, and he found himself running toward the science lab, which was being renovated, and then under a curtain of blue plastic tarp that shielded one exposed side of the building, and then worming into the eighteen inches of space that separated the decaying interior wall from the new cement exterior that they were building around it. There was just enough room for him to wedge himself in, and he burrowed himself as deep into the space as he could, carefully working himself into a horizontal position, making sure his feet weren't visible.

As he lay there, he tried to decide what he could do next. Rodger would wait for him and then, when he didn't appear, they would eventually look for him. But if he could last here for the night, if he could wait until everything was silent around him, then he could escape. This was as far as he could think, although he was cognizant enough to realize that his chances were poor: he had no food, no money, and although it was only five in the afternoon, it was already very cold. He could feel his back and legs and palms, all the parts pressed against the stone, numbing themselves, could feel his nerves turning to thousands of pinpricks. But he could also feel, for the first time in months, his mind coming alert, could feel, for the first time in years, the giddy thrill of being able to make a decision, however poor or ill-conceived or unlikely. Suddenly, the pinpricks felt like not a punishment but a celebration, like hundreds of miniature fireworks exploding within him and for him, as if his body were reminding him of who he was and of what he still owned: himself.

He lasted two hours before the security guard's dog found him and he was dragged out by his feet, his palms scraping against the cement blocks he clung to even then, by this time so cold that he tripped as he walked, that his fingers were too iced to open the car door, and as soon as he was inside, Rodger had turned around and hit him in the face, and the blood from his nose was thick and hot and reassuring and the taste of it on his lips oddly nourishing, like soup, as if his body were something miraculous and self-healing, determined to save itself.

That evening they had taken him to the barn, where they sometimes took him at night, and beat him so badly that he had blacked out almost immediately after it had begun. He had been hospitalized that night, and then again a few weeks later, when the wounds had gotten infected. For those weeks, he had been left alone, and although they had been told at the hospital that he was a delinquent, that he was troubled, that he was a problem and a liar, the nurses were kind to him: there was one, an older woman, who had sat by his bed and held a glass of apple juice with a straw in it so he could sip from it without lifting his head (he'd had to lie on his side so they could clean his back and drain the wounds).

"I don't care what you did," she told him one night, after she had changed his bandages. "No one deserves this. Do you hear me, young man?"

Then help me, he wanted to say. Please help me. But he didn't. He was too ashamed.

She sat next to him again and put her hand on his forehead. "Try to behave yourself, all right?" she had said, but her voice had been gentle. "I don't want to see you back here."

Help me, he wanted to say again, as she left the room. Please. Please. But he couldn't. He never saw her again.

Later, as an adult, he would wonder if he had invented this nurse, if he had conjured her out of desperation, a simulacrum of kindness that was almost as good as the real thing. He would argue with himself: If she had existed, truly existed, wouldn't she have told someone about him? Wouldn't someone have been sent to help him? But his memories from this period were something slightly blur-edged and unreliable, and as the years went by, he was to come to realize that he was, always, trying to make his life, his childhood, into something more acceptable, something more normal. He would startle himself from a dream about the counselors, and would try to comfort himself: There were only two of them who used you, he would tell himself. Maybe three. The others didn't. They weren't all cruel to you. And then he would try, for days, to remember how many there had actually been: Was it two? Or was it three? For years, he couldn't understand why this was so important to him, why it mattered to him so much, why he was always trying to argue against his own memories, to spend so much time debating the details of what had happened. And then he realized that it was because he thought that if he could convince himself that it was less awful than he remembered, then he could also convince himself that he was less damaged, that he was closer to healthy, than he feared he was.

Finally he was sent back to the home, and the first time he had seen his back, he had recoiled, moving so quickly away from the bathroom mirror that he had slipped and fallen on a section of wet tile. In those initial weeks after the beating, when the scar tissue was still forming, it had made a puffed mound of flesh on his back, and at lunch he would sit alone and the older boys would whip damp pellets of napkin at it, trying to get them to ping off of it as against a target, cheering when they hit him. Until that point, he had never thought too specifically about his appearance. He knew he was ugly. He knew he was ruined. He knew he was diseased. But he had never considered himself grotesque. But now he was. There seemed to be an inevitability to this, to his life: that every year he would become worse-more disgusting, more depraved. Every year, his right to humanness diminished; every year, he became less and less of a person. But he didn't care any longer; he couldn't allow himself to.

It was difficult to live without caring, however, and he found himself curiously unable to forget Brother Luke's promise, that when he was sixteen, his old life would stop and his new life would begin. He knew, he did, that Brother Luke had been lying, but he couldn't stop thinking about it. Sixteen, he would think to himself at night. Sixteen. When I am sixteen, this will end.

He had asked Brother Luke, once, what their life would be like after he turned sixteen. "You'll go to college," Luke had said, immediately, and he had thrilled to this. He had asked where he would go, and Luke had named the college he had attended as well (although when he had gotten to that college after all, he had looked up Brother Luke-Edgar Wilmot-and had realized there was no record of him having ever attended the school, and he had been relieved, relieved to not have something in common with the brother, although it was he who had let him imagine that he might someday be there). "I'll move to Boston, too," Luke said. "And we'll be married, so we'll live in an apartment off campus." Sometimes they discussed this: the courses he would take, the things Brother Luke had done when he was at college, the places they would travel to after he graduated. "Maybe we'll have a son together one day," Luke said once, and he had stiffened, for he knew without Luke saying so that Luke would do to this phantom son of theirs what had been done to him, and he remembered thinking that that would never happen, that he would never let this ghost child, this child who didn't exist, ever exist, that he would never let another child be around Luke. He remembered thinking that he would protect this son of theirs, and for a brief, awful moment, he wished he would never turn sixteen at all, because he knew that once he did, Luke would need someone else, and that he couldn't let that happen.

But now Luke was dead. The phantom child was safe. He could safely turn sixteen. He could turn sixteen and be safe.

The months passed. His back healed. Now a security guard waited for him after his classes and walked him to the parking lot to wait for the counselor on duty. One day at the end of the fall semester, his math professor talked to him after class had ended: Had he thought about college yet? He could help him; he could help him get there-he could go somewhere excellent, somewhere top-flight. And oh, he wanted to go, he wanted to get away, he wanted to go to college. He was tugged, in those days, between trying to resign himself to the fact that his life would forever more be what it was, and the hope, small and stupid and stubborn as it was, that it could be something else. The balance-between resignation and hope-shifted by the day, by the hour, sometimes by the minute. He was always, always trying to decide how he should be-if his thoughts should be of acceptance or of escape. In that moment he had looked at his professor, but as he was about to answer-Yes; yes, help me-something stopped him. The professor had always been kind to him, but wasn't there something about that kindness that made him resemble Brother Luke? What if the professor's offer of help cost him? He argued with himself as the professor waited for his answer. One more time won't hurt you, said the desperate part of him, the part that wanted to leave, the part that was counting every day until sixteen, the part the other part of him jeered at. It's one more time. He's another client. Now is not the time to start getting proud.