Page 122 - A Little Life: A Novel

rest of the articles now or if he should do it in the morning. He didn’t look
at Harold, though, and spoke only to his notebook.
Harold took a long time to reply. “Tomorrow,” Harold said, quietly, and

he nodded, and gathered his things to go home for the night, aware of
Harold’s eyes following his lurching progress to the door.
Harold wanted to know how he had been raised, and if he had any
siblings, and who his friends were, and what he did with them: he was
greedy for information. At least he could answer the last questions, and he
told him about his friends, and how they had met, and where they were:
Malcolm in graduate school at Columbia, JB and Willem at Yale. He liked

answering Harold’s questions about them, liked talking about them, liked
hearing Harold laugh when he told him stories about them. He told him
about CM, and how Santosh and Federico were in some sort of fight with
the engineering undergrads who lived in the frat house next door, and how
he had awoken one morning to a fleet of motorized dirigibles handmade
from condoms floating noisily up past his window, up toward the fourth

floor, each dangling signs that read SANTOSH JAIN AND FEDERICO DE
LUCA HAVE MICRO-PENISES.
But when Harold was asking the other questions, he felt smothered by
their weight and frequency and inevitability. And sometimes the air grew so
hot with the questions Harold wasn’t asking him that it was as oppressive as
if he actually had. People wanted to know so much, they wanted so many
answers. And he understood it, he did—he wanted answers, too; he too

wanted to know everything. He was grateful, then, for his friends, and for
how relatively little they had mined from him, how they had left him to
himself, a blank, faceless prairie under whose yellow surface earthworms
and beetles wriggled through the black soil, and chips of bone calcified
slowly into stone.
“You’re really interested in this,” he snapped at Harold once, frustrated,

when Harold had asked him whether he was dating anyone, and then,
hearing his tone, stopped and apologized. They had known each other for
almost a year by then.
“This?” said Harold, ignoring the apology. “I’m interested in you. I don’t
see what’s strange about that. This is the kind of stuff friends talk about
with each other.”
And yet despite his discomfort, he kept coming back to Harold, kept

accepting his dinner invitations, even though at some point in every