《渺小一生》:“那两个老恶棍怎么样了？”

　 Willem comes home twice during the course of the shoot for long weekends; but one weekend he is sick with a stomach flu, and the next Willem is sick with bronchitis. But both times—as he feels every time he hears Willem walk into the apartment, calling his name—he must remind himself that this is his life, and that in this life, Willem is coming home to him. In those moments, he feels that his dislike of sex is miserly, that he must be misremembering how bad it is, and that even if he isn’t, he has simply to try harder, that he has to pity himself less. Toughen up, he scolds himself as he kisses Willem goodbye at the end of these weekends. Don’t you dare ruin this. Don’t you dare complain about what you don’t even deserve.

威廉去伦敦拍片期间，中间两度在周末回家——第一个周末他得了肠胃型流感，第二次是得了支气管炎。不过这两次，每当他感觉到自己听见威廉走进公寓、喊他的名字时，他就得提醒自己这是他的生活，而在他的生活里，威廉回家了，回到了他身边。那些时刻，他会觉得自己不喜欢性爱实在太小心眼了，他一定把那糟糕的程度记错了，就算他没记错，他只要更努力，千万别再那么自怜自艾就好。坚强起来，那两个周末结束时，他一边跟威廉吻别，一边在心里暗骂自己。绝对不准毁掉这个。绝对不准抱怨你根本不配得到的。

　 And then one night, less than a month before Willem is due to come home for good, he wakes and believes he is in the trailer of a massive semitruck, and that the bed beneath him is a dirtied blue quilt folded in half, and that his every bone is being jounced as the truck trundles its way down the highway. Oh no, he thinks, oh no, and he gets up and hurries to the piano and begins playing as many Bach partitas as he can remember, out of sequence and too loud and too fast. He is reminded of a fable Brother Luke had once told him during one of their piano lessons of an old woman in a house who played her lute faster and faster so the imps outside her door would dance themselves into a sludge. Brother Luke had told him this story to illustrate a point—he needed to pick up his tempo—but he had always liked the image, and sometimes, when he feels a memory encroaching, just a single one, easy to control and dismiss, he sings or plays until it goes away, the music a shield between him and it.

有个晚上，还剩不到一个月威廉就会拍完电影回家，他半夜醒来，相信自己是在一辆庞大的半拖车车厢里，身下的床是一条折成一半的肮脏蓝色拼缀布，身上的每根骨头随着卡车隆隆驶过高速公路而震动。啊不，他心想，啊不，他起床冲到钢琴前面，开始弹奏他记得的巴赫组曲，一首接一首，太大声又太急。他想到卢克修士以前上钢琴课时说过的寓言故事，一个屋里的老女人弹着鲁特琴，越弹越快，门外跳舞的小恶魔们就跟着越跳越快，最后全部瘫软在地。卢克修士跟他说这个故事是要表明一个重点：他得掌握速度。但他一直很喜欢那个画面。有时，当他觉得回忆袭来，只有单一的一个，很容易控制且打发走时，他就会唱歌或弹琴，直到回忆消失，音乐是他和回忆之间的一道屏障。

　 He was in his first year of law school when his life began appearing to him as memories. He would be doing something everyday—cooking dinner, filing books at the library, frosting a cake at Batter, looking up an article for Harold—and suddenly, a scene would appear before him, a dumb show meant only for him. In those years, the memories were tableaux, not narratives, and he would see a single one repeatedly for days: a diorama of Brother Luke on top of him, or one of the counselors from the home, who used to grab him as he walked by, or a client emptying his change from his pants pockets and setting it in the dish on the nightstand that Brother Luke had placed there for that purpose. And sometimes the memories were briefer and vaguer still: a client’s blue sock patterned with horse heads that he had worn even in bed; the first meal in Philadelphia that Dr. Traylor had ever given him (a burger; a paper sleeve of French fries); a peachy woolen pillow in his room at Dr. Traylor’s house that he could never look at without thinking of torn flesh. When these memories announced themselves, he would find himself disoriented: it always took him a moment to remember that these scenes were not only from his life, but his life itself. In those days, he would let them interrupt him, and there would be times in which he would come out of his spell and would find his hand still wrapped around the plastic cone of frosting poised over the cookie before him, or still holding the book half on, half off the shelf. It was then that he began comprehending how much of his life he had learned to simply erase, even days after it had happened, and also that somehow, somewhere, he had lost that ability. He knew it was the price of enjoying life, that if he was to be alert to the things he now found pleasure in, he would have to accept its cost as well. Because as assaultive as his memories were, his life coming back to him in pieces, he knew he would endure them if it meant he could also have friends, if he kept being granted the ability to take comfort in others.

上法学院第一年时，他的生活中开始出现种种回忆画面。他做着一些日常的事情，像是做晚餐、在图书馆把书上架、在烘焙工房给蛋糕上糖霜、帮哈罗德查一篇文章，忽然间，一个画面出现在眼前，像一出只有他看得懂的哑剧。在那几年，那些回忆是活人扮演的静态画面，不是动态的描写，他会好几天重复看到同一个画面，像立体透视模型：卢克修士趴在他上方，或是少年之家里的一个辅导员，经过他身边时总要抓住他，或是一名顾客把长裤口袋里的零钱清出来，放在床头桌上卢克修士刻意为此摆放的盘子里。有时那些回忆更短暂、更模糊：某个顾客上床时没脱掉的、有马头纹样的蓝色袜子；在费城时特雷勒医生给他吃的第一餐（汉堡、用尖筒纸卷装的炸薯条）；在特雷勒医生的房子里，他住的房间有一个粉橘色的羊毛枕头，他每次看到都会想到撕开的肉。当这些回忆不请自来，他发现自己不知身在何处。总要花上好一会儿，才想起这些画面不但源自他的人生，也是他的人生本身。在那些日子里，他会被这些回忆打断，有时他从那种着魔状态走出来后，会发现自己手里还拿着挤糖霜的尖锥形塑料袋，停在面前的饼干上方，或者手上还拿着一本书，半插在架上。此时他才开始明白，以前他学会把那么多人生的种种都清除掉，甚至在事发后几天就刻意忘得一干二净，但同时他也明白，不知怎的，他现在已经失去了那种能力。他知道这是享受生活的代价，如果他能感受到现在让他觉得愉悦的事物，那么他也得接受因此而来的破坏。因为尽管他的回忆展开猛烈的攻击，让他陆续想起过往的片段，但他知道自己可以忍受这些回忆的折磨，只要他可以拥有朋友，有能力继续从别人身上获得安慰。

　 He thought of it as a slight parting of worlds, in which something buried wisped up from the loamy, turned earth and hovered before him, waiting for him to recognize it and claim it as his own. Their very reappearance was defiant: Here we are, they seemed to say to him. Did you really think we would let you abandon us? Did you really think we wouldn’t come back? Eventually, he was also made to recognize how much he had edited—edited and reconfigured, refashioned into something easier to accept—from even the past few years: the film he had seen his junior year of two detectives coming to tell a student at college that the man who had hurt him had died in prison hadn’t been a film at all—it had been his life, and he had been the student, and he had stood there in the Quad outside of Hood, and the two detectives were the people who had found him and arrested Dr. Traylor in the field that night, and they had taken him to the hospital and had made sure Dr. Traylor had gone to prison, and they had come to find him to tell him in person that he had nothing to fear again. “Pretty fancy stuff,” one of the detectives had said, looking around him at the beautiful campus, at its old brick buildings where you could go and be absolutely safe. “We’re proud of you, Jude.” But he had fuzzed this memory, he had changed it to the detective simply saying “We’re proud of you,” and had left off his name, just as he had left out the panic he now remembered he had vividly felt despite their news, the dread that later someone would ask him who those people were that he had been talking to, the almost nauseous wrongness of his past life intruding so physically on his present.

他把这种情况想成是世界稍微裂开了一道缝隙，他以前埋葬的东西从土壤中挣扎往上，翻开泥土，停留在他眼前，等着他辨识出来，认领回去。那些回忆的重现带着一种挑衅：我们来了，它们仿佛在对他说。你真以为我们会让你抛弃我们？你真以为我们不会回来？最后，他也发现自己以前剪辑了多少回忆（剪辑并重新组合、设计为某种比较容易接受的回忆），即使是发生没几年的事情——他记得大三那年看过一部电影，两个警探到大学里告诉一个学生，说以前伤害他的那个男人已经死在狱中。但其实那根本不是电影，而是他的真实人生，他就是那个学生。当时他站在虎德馆外的方院里，那两位警探就是那一夜在田野里发现他并逮捕特雷勒医生的人。他们把他送去医院，确保特雷勒医生会坐穿牢底，后来他们来学校找他，当面跟他说他以后不必再害怕了。“这里真不错啊，”其中一个警探说，看着周围美丽的校园、那些古老的砖造建筑物，在里面来去绝对安全，“裘德，我们以你为荣。”但他故意使这段回忆模糊，去掉了自己的名字，改成那个警探只说：“我们以你为荣。”同样的，他现在才想起来，他之前还抹掉了当时感觉到的强烈恐慌（这对他明明是好消息），担心事后有人问他刚刚跟他讲话的那两个是什么人。他往昔人生那种近乎令人作呕的谬误，现在却如此具体地闯入眼前。

　 Eventually he had learned how to manage the memories. He couldn’t stop them—after they had begun, they had never ended—but he had grown more adept at anticipating their arrival. He became able to diagnose it, that moment or day in which he could tell that something was going to visit him, and he would have to figure out how it wanted to be addressed: Did it want confrontation, or soothing, or simply attention? He would determine what sort of hospitality it wanted, and then he would determine how to make it leave, to retreat back to that other place.

最后他学会如何控制回忆。他无法阻止它们（一旦开始，就永远不会停止），但他逐渐摸熟如何预测它们的到来。他变得可以判断，某个时候或某一天，他可以感觉出即将有往事来访，他得先搞清楚该怎么处理这段回忆：它是想要当面跟他对抗，还是想要抚慰他，或只是想要吸引他的注意？他会判定它需要什么样的款待，然后决定如何让它离开，退回原来的地方。

　 A small memory he could contain, but as the days go by and he waits for Willem, he recognizes that this is a long eel of a memory, slippery and uncatchable, and it whipsaws its way through him, its tail slapping against his organs so that he feels the memory as something alive and wounding, feels its meaty, powerful smack against his intestines, his heart, his lungs. Sometimes they were like this, and these were the hardest to lasso and corral, and with every day it seems to grow inside him, until he feels himself stuffed not with blood and muscle and water and bone but with the memory itself, expanding balloon-like to inflate his very fingertips. After Caleb, he had realized that there were some memories he was simply not going to be able to control, and so his only recourse was to wait until they had tired themselves out, until they swam back into the dark of his subconscious and left him alone again.

一段小小的回忆他还可以控制，但是当他等着威廉回来时，一天天过去，他才发现这次来访的回忆是一条长长的鳗鱼，滑溜得抓不住，在他体内扭来扭去地蹿动，尾巴拍击着他的器官，让他感觉到那些回忆像是个伤人的活物，感觉到它结实而有力地拍击着他的肠子、他的心脏、他的肺。有时那些回忆就像这样，是最难抓住也最难控制的。随着每一天过去，那条鳗鱼在他体内似乎越长越大，直到他觉得自己全身不光塞满了血液、肌肉、水、骨头，还有回忆，像气球似的膨胀到了他的每一个指尖。在凯莱布之后，他已经明白有些回忆他就是没办法控制，他唯一能仰仗的，就是等到这些回忆自己累垮，游回他潜意识的黑暗深处，还他清静。

　 And so he waits, letting the memory—the nearly two weeks he had spent in trucks, trying to get from Montana to Boston—occupy him, as if his very mind, his body, is a motel, and this memory his sole guest. His challenge in this period is to fulfill his promise to Willem, to not cut himself, and so he creates a strict and consuming schedule for the hours between midnight and four a.m., which are the most dangerous. On Saturday he makes a list of what he will do each night for the next few weeks, rotating swimming with cooking and piano-playing and baking and work at Richard’s and sorting through all of his and Willem’s old clothes and pruning the bookcases and resewing the loose buttons on Willem’s shirt that he was going to have Mrs. Zhou do but is perfectly capable of doing himself and cleaning out the detritus that has accumulated in the drawer near the stove: twist ties and sticky rubber bands and safety pins and matchbooks. He makes pints of chicken stock and ground-lamb meatballs for Willem’s return and freezes them, and bakes loaves of bread for Richard to take to the food kitchen where they are both on the board and whose finances he helps administer. After feeding the starter, he sits at the table and reads novels, old favorites of his, the words and plots and characters comforting and lived-in and unchanged. He wishes he had a pet—a dumb, grateful dog, panting and smiling; a frigid cat, glaring judgmentally at him through her slitted orange eyes—some other breathing thing in the apartment that he could speak to, the sound of whose soft padding footsteps would bring him back to himself. He works all night, and just before he drops off to sleep, he cuts himself—once on the left arm, once on the right—and when he wakes, he is tired but proud of himself for making it through intact.

于是他等着，让那些回忆占据他（有将近两个星期，他都待在各辆卡车里，设法要从蒙大拿州去波士顿），好像他的脑子、他的身体是间汽车旅馆，而这些回忆是他唯一的住客。在这期间，他的挑战就是做到他对威廉的承诺，不要割自己，于是他为每天午夜12点到凌晨4点（这段时间最危险）订出一套严谨而消耗体力的时间表。到了星期六，他会规划接下来两周每一夜要做的事情，游泳、做菜、弹钢琴、烘焙、去理查德的工作室打杂、整理他和威廉的旧衣服、整理书柜、把威廉衬衫上松掉的纽扣重新缝好（他本来要交给周太太缝的，但反正自己完全可以处理）、清理厨房炉子旁边那个抽屉里累积的乱七八糟的东西：用来束紧袋口的金属丝、旧橡皮筋、安全别针、纸板火柴。他做了大量的鸡汤和羊肉丸，冷冻起来等威廉回来时可以吃，又烤了好多面包，让理查德拿到慈善厨房去，他们都是那里的委员，他还帮忙管理财务。做完一开始的体力活之后，他就坐在桌前重读他喜欢的一些小说，那些字句、情节、角色熟悉不变，令他安心。他真希望自己有宠物（一只愚蠢而懂得感恩的狗，喘着气息微笑，或是一只冷淡的猫，用缩成一条线的橘色眼珠批判地瞪着他），希望公寓里有其他会呼吸的东西，让他对着它们讲讲话，它们柔软的脚掌发出的脚步声可以让他回到现实。他彻夜工作，然后，就在他倒下去睡觉前，会去割自己——左手臂一道，右手臂一道——等到醒来时，他会很疲倦，但也很骄傲自己完整地熬过了这一夜。

　 But then it is two weeks before Willem is to come home, and just as the memory is fading, checking out of him until the next time it comes to visit, the hyenas return. Or perhaps return is the wrong word, because once Caleb introduced them into his life, they have never left. Now, however, they don’t chase him, because they know they don’t need to: his life is a vast savanna, and he is surrounded by them. They lie splayed in the yellow grass, drape themselves lazily over the baobab trees’ low branches that spread from their trunks like tentacles, and stare at him with their keen yellow eyes. They are always there, and after he and Willem began having sex, they multiplied, and on bad days, or on days when he was particularly dreading it, they multiply further. On those days, he can feel their whiskers twitch as he moves slowly through their territory, he can feel their careless derision: he knows he is theirs, and they know it, too.

但接着，离威廉回家只剩两星期了，正当回忆逐渐消退，暂时退房离开后，那些鬣狗回来了。或者不该说回来，因为自从凯莱布把这些鬣狗带入他的人生之后，它们始终不曾离开。总之，现在它们不再追着他跑，因为知道没有必要：他的人生是一片辽阔的无树平原，而他被它们包围着。那些鬣狗四肢大张地趴在发黄的草地上，或是爬到猴面包树上那些有如触须般伸展的低矮树枝上暂歇，锐利的黄色眼珠瞪着他。它们总是在那里，在他和威廉有性生活之后，它们的数量成倍增加了。碰到糟糕的日子，或是他特别担心要做爱的日子，鬣狗的数量就变得更多。在那些日子里，当他缓缓走过它们的领域时，可以感觉到它们的胡须抽动，感觉到它们漫不经心的嘲笑：他知道自己会落入它们手中，它们也知道。

　 And although he craves the vacations from sex that Willem’s work provides him, he knows too that he ought not to, for the reentry into that world is always difficult; it had been that way when he was a child, too, when the only thing worse than the rhythms of sex had been readjusting to the rhythms of sex. “I can’t wait to come home and see you,” Willem says when they next speak, and although there is nothing leering in his tone, although he hasn’t mentioned sex at all, he knows from past experience that Willem will want to have it the night of his return, and that he will want to have it more times than usual for the remainder of his first week back home, and that he will especially want to have it because both of them had taken turns being sick on his two furloughs and so nothing had happened either time.

尽管他渴望威廉的工作能为他提供性爱假期，他也知道自己不必太高兴，因为休假之后，要再进入那个世界总是很困难；他小时候就是这样，唯一比性交节奏更糟糕的事，就是重新调整，以便进入性交节奏。“我等不及要回家看你了。”下一次通电话时威廉这么说，尽管口气毫无挑逗之意，尽管根本没提到性爱，但他凭借过往的经验，知道威廉回来的头一夜就会想要，那星期的接下来几天会比平常要更多次，而且这回他会特别想要，因为之前两次他休假回来，他们两个轮流感冒了，所以两次都没做。

　 “Me too,” he says.

“我也是。”他说。

　 “How’s the cutting?” Willem asks, lightly, as if he’s asking about how Julia’s maple trees are faring, or how the weather is. He always asks this at the end of their conversations, as if the subject is something he’s only mildly interested in and is inquiring about to be polite.

“割自己的状况怎么样了？”威廉轻松地问，好像在问他朱丽娅种的那几棵苹果树状况如何，或是天气怎么样。他们每次通话末尾，他都会这么问，好像这个话题他不怎么关心，只是出于礼貌要问一声。

　 “Fine,” he says, as he always does. “Only twice this week,” he adds, and this is true.

“很好，”他说，一如往常，“这星期只有两次。”这是实话。

　 “Good, Judy,” Willem says. “Thank god. I know it’s hard. But I’m proud of you.” He always sounds so relieved in these moments, as if he is expecting to hear—which he probably is—some other answer entirely: Not well, Willem. I cut myself so much last night that my arm fell off entirely. I don’t want you to be surprised when you see me. He feels a mix of genuine pride, then, both that Willem should trust him so much and that he is actually getting to tell him the truth, and an enervating, bone-deep sorrow, that Willem should have to ask him at all, that this should be something that they are actually proud of. Other people are proud of their boyfriends’ talents or looks or athleticism; Willem, however, gets to be proud that his boyfriend has managed to pass another night without slicing himself with a razor.

“很好，小裘，”威廉说，“感谢老天。我知道很难，但我真以你为荣。”在这些时刻，威廉的口气总是那么如释重负，好像他期望听到（大概也真是如此）某种完全不同的答案：不太好，威廉。我昨天夜里割自己了好多刀，割到整只手臂的肉都掉光了。我不希望你看到我时吓一跳。他会感觉到一种由衷的骄傲，因为威廉竟然这么信任他，而且自己真的可以说出实话。同时，那骄傲中混合了一种令人感到乏力、彻骨的悲伤，因为威廉竟然还得问他，而且这竟然是他们两个引以为傲的事情。其他人会以他们男友的才华、外貌或身手矫健为傲；但威廉，却只能以男友设法度过一夜、没用刮胡刀片割自己为傲。

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

终于，有一夜，他知道自己的种种努力再也无法满足他了，他得割自己，割得又多又狠。那些鬣狗开始发出小小的号叫，那种尖吠仿佛发自它们体内的另一种生物，他知道只有自己的疼痛才能让它们安静下来。他想着该怎么做：威廉再过一周就要回家了。如果他现在割自己，威廉回家之前伤口不可能痊愈，威廉就会生气。但如果他不做些事情，接下来就不知道会怎么样了。他一定要做点事，非做不可。此时他明白自己已经等得太久了；他原先太不切实际了，竟然以为自己熬得过去。

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

他从床上爬起来，走过空荡荡的公寓，进入安静的厨房。那一夜的时间表在料理台上发出白光（烤饼干给哈罗德、整理威廉的毛衣、去理查德的工作室），尽管被忽视但依然召唤着他，恳求被注意，它提供的拯救好轻好薄，有如那张承载字迹的纸。一时间他站在那里，动不了，然后缓缓地、不情愿地，他走向通往安全梯的那扇门，拉开门闩，又暂停一下，才打开门。

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

自从凯莱布那一夜之后，他再也没打开过这扇门。现在他探身进去，往下看着里头的黑暗，就像那一夜般紧抓着门框，不知道自己能否鼓起勇气去做。他知道跳下去可以平息那些鬣狗。但这件事有种过于屈辱，极端、病态的成分，他知道如果做了，他就跨过了某些界限，就该被强制住院了。最后，最后，他离开了门框，双手颤抖，然后把门甩上，用力闩上门，大步离开。

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

次日上班时，他跟另一个合伙人桑杰和一个客户去楼下，那个客户想抽烟。他们抽烟的客户不多，每回要下楼抽烟时，他都会跟着一起去，在人行道上继续之前的谈话。吕西安有个理论，说抽烟的人在抽烟时最舒服、最放松，在此时最容易操控。尽管吕西安说这话的时候，他听了大笑，但他知道他讲的大概没错。

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

那天，他因为双脚抽痛坐了轮椅，尽管他讨厌让客户看到他这副残障的样子。“相信我，裘德，”几年前他跟吕西安说出这些忧虑时，吕西安这么告诉他，“你不管是坐下还是站着，客户照样认为你是个超级暴力的大混蛋，所以老天在上，你就乖乖坐你的轮椅吧。”外头寒冷而干燥，让他觉得双脚的疼痛稍微减轻了些。他们三个人谈话时，他发现自己被催眠似的瞪着客户烟头上小小的橘色火光，觉得那火光在跟他挤眼睛，随着那顾客的吞吐，火光一下黯淡些，一下又明亮些。忽然间，他知道自己该怎么做了，然而这个天启让他几乎立刻觉得肚子挨了一记重击，因为他知道他就要背叛威廉了，不单是背叛，还要撒谎。

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

那天是星期五，他开车去安迪的诊所时一路拟定计划，为了有个解答而觉得兴奋、放松。这天安迪处于那种兴高采烈、斗志昂扬的状态，于是他允许自己把注意力转移到安迪和他旺盛的精力上。期间，两人聊起他的腿，就像在聊某个麻烦又任性的亲戚，但是你不可能抛弃他，还得随时照料。“那两个恶棍。”安迪如此称呼他的两条腿，第一次说的时候，他被这个绰号的准确程度逗得大笑，其中带有的恼怒往往盖过了那隐藏的、有些不情愿的喜爱。

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

“那两个老恶棍怎么样了？”安迪这会儿问他。他微笑说：“老样子，懒惰，又吸光了我所有的精力。”