Page 101 - A Little Life: A Novel

“It’ll get better,” she’d say, and he’d nod, because he couldn’t begin to
imagine his life if it didn’t get better. His days now were hours: hours
without pain and hours with it, and the unpredictability of this schedule—

and his body, although it was his in name only, for he could control nothing
of it—exhausted him, and he slept and slept, the days slipping away from
him uninhabited.
Later, it would be easier to simply tell people that it was his legs that hurt
him, but that wasn’t really true: it was his back. Sometimes he could predict
what would trigger the spasming, that pain that would extend down his
spine into one leg or the other, like a wooden stake set aflame and thrust

into him: a certain movement, lifting something too heavy or too high,
simple tiredness. But sometimes he couldn’t. And sometimes the pain
would be preceded by an interlude of numbness, or a twinging that was
almost pleasurable, it was so light and zingy, just a sensation of electric
prickles moving up and down his spine, and he would know to lie down and
wait for it to finish its cycle, a penance he could never escape or avoid. But

sometimes it barged in, and those were the worst: he grew fearful that it
would arrive at some terribly inopportune time, and before each big
meeting, each big interview, each court appearance, he would beg his own
back to still itself, to carry him through the next few hours without incident.
But all of this was in the future, and each lesson he learned he did so over
hours and hours of these episodes, stretched out over days and months and
years.

As the weeks passed, she brought him books, and told him to write down
titles he was interested in and she would go to the library and get them—but
he was too shy to do so. He knew she was his social worker, and that she
had been assigned to him, but it wasn’t until more than a month had passed,
and the doctors had begun to talk about his casts being removed in a matter
of weeks, that she first asked him about what had happened.

“I don’t remember,” he said. It was his default answer for everything
back then. It was a lie as well; in uninvited moments, he’d see the car’s
headlights, twinned glares of white, rushing toward him, and recall how
he’d shut his eyes and jerked his head to the side, as if that might have
prevented the inevitable.
She waited. “It’s okay, Jude,” she said. “We basically know what
happened. But I need you to tell me at some point, so we can talk about it.”

She had interviewed him earlier, did he remember? There had apparently