Page 106 - A Little Life: A Novel
P. 106

shirts, pants, a gray blanket that resembled the clotty stuffing that vomited
                forth  from  the  sofa  in  the  shelter’s  lobby—if  he  was  getting  the  correct
                things,  the  things  that  might  have  been  on  Ana’s  list.  He  couldn’t  stop

                himself from thinking that there was something else on that list, something
                essential that Ana  thought he needed that he would  now  never know. At
                nights,  he  craved  that  list,  sometimes  more  than  he  craved  her;  he  could
                picture it in his mind, the funny up-and-down capitalizations she inserted
                into a single word, the mechanical pencil she always used, the yellow legal
                pads, left over from her years as a lawyer, on which she made her notes.
                Sometimes the letters solidified into words, and in the dream life he’d feel

                triumphant;  ah,  he’d  think,  of  course!  Of  course  that’s  what  I  need!  Of
                course Ana would know! But in the mornings, he could never remember
                what those things were. In  those moments he wished,  perversely,  that he
                had never met her, that it was surely worse to have had her for so brief a
                period than to never have had her at all.
                   They gave him a bus ticket north; Leslie came to the station to see him

                off. He had packed his things in a double-layered black garbage bag, and
                then inside the backpack he’d bought at the Army Navy Store: everything
                he owned in one neat package. On the bus he stared out the window and
                thought of nothing. He hoped his back wouldn’t betray him on the ride, and
                it didn’t.
                   He had been the first to arrive in their room, and when the second boy
                came in—it had been Malcolm—with his parents and suitcases and books

                and speakers and television and phones and computers and refrigerator and
                flotillas of digital gadgetry, he had felt the first sensations of sickening fear,
                and then anger, directed irrationally at Ana: How could she let him believe
                he might be equipped to do this? Who could he say he was? Why had she
                never  told  him  exactly  how  poor,  how  ugly,  what  a  scrap  of  bloodied,
                muddied cloth, his life really was? Why had she let him believe he might

                belong here?
                   As the months passed, this feeling dampened, but it never disappeared; it
                lived on him like a thin scum of mold. But as that knowledge became more
                acceptable, another piece became less so: he began to realize that she was
                the first and last person to whom he would never have to explain anything.
                She knew that he wore his life on his skin, that his biography was written in
                his flesh and on his bones. She would never ask him why he wouldn’t wear

                short sleeves, even in the steamiest of weather, or why he didn’t like to be
   101   102   103   104   105   106   107   108   109   110   111