Page 100 - A Little Life: A Novel

had been so awful—unbearable, almost, as if someone had reached in and
grabbed his spine like a snake and was trying to loose it from its bundles of
nerves by shaking it—that later, when the surgeon told him that an injury

like his was an “insult” to the body, and one the body would never recover
from completely, he had understood what the word meant and realized how
correct and well-chosen it was.
“You mean he’s going to have these all his life?” Ana had asked, and he
had been grateful for her outrage, especially because he was too tired and
frightened to summon forth any of his own.
“I wish I could say no,” said the surgeon. And then, to him, “But they

may not be this severe in the future. You’re young now. The spine has
wonderful reparative qualities.”
“Jude,” she’d said to him when the next one came, two days after the
first. He could hear her voice, but as if from far away, and then, suddenly,
awfully close, filling his mind like explosions. “Hold on to my hand,” she’d
said, and again, her voice swelled and receded, but she seized his hand and

he held it so tightly he could feel her index finger slide oddly over her ring
finger, could almost feel every small bone in her palm reposition
themselves in his grip, which had the effect of making her seem like
something delicate and intricate, although there was nothing delicate about
her in either appearance or manner. “Count,” she commanded him the third
time it happened, and he did, counting up to a hundred again and again,
parsing the pain into negotiable increments. In those days, before he learned

it was better to be still, he would flop on his bed like a fish on a boat deck,
his free hand scrabbling for a halyard line to cling to for safety, the hospital
mattress unyielding and uncaring, searching for a position in which the
discomfort might lessen. He tried to be quiet, but he could hear himself
making strange animal noises, so that at times a forest appeared beneath his
eyelids, populated with screech owls and deer and bears, and he would

imagine he was one of them, and that the sounds he was making were
normal, part of the woods’ unceasing soundtrack.
When it had ended, she would give him some water, a straw in the glass
so he wouldn’t have to raise his head. Beneath him, the floor tilted and
bucked, and he was often sick. He had never been in the ocean, but he
imagined this was what it might feel like, imagined the swells of water
forcing the linoleum floor into quavering hillocks. “Good boy,” she’d say as

he drank. “Have a little more.”