Page 127 - A Little Life: A Novel

clothes ungluing themselves from his body as they dried. Sometimes Harold
would come and watch them, or swim as well. In the afternoons, Malcolm
and JB would pedal off through the dunes on bicycles, and he and Willem

would follow on foot, picking up bits of shaley shells and the sad carapaces
of long-nibbled-away hermit crabs as they went, Willem slowing his pace to
match his own. In the evenings, when the air was soft, JB and Malcolm
sketched and he and Willem read. He felt doped, on sun and food and salt
and contentment, and at night he fell asleep quickly and early, and in the
mornings he woke before the others so he could stand on the back porch
alone looking over the sea.

What is going to happen to me? he asked the sea. What is happening to
me?
The holiday ended and the fall semester began, and it didn’t take him
long to realize that over that weekend, one of his friends must have said
something to Harold, although he was certain it wasn’t Willem, who was
the only one to whom he’d finally told something of his past—and even

then, not very much at all: three facts, each more slender than the last, all
meaningless, all of which combined to make not even a beginning of a
story. Even the first sentences of a fairy tale had more detail than what he
had told Willem: Once upon a time, a boy and a girl lived with their father,
a woodcutter, and their stepmother, deep in a cold forest. The woodcutter
loved his children, but he was very poor, and so one day … So whatever
Harold had learned had been speculation, buttressed by their observations

of him, their theories and guesses and fictions. But whatever it was, it had
been enough to make Harold’s questions to him—about who he had been
and where he had come from—stop.
As the months and then the years passed, they developed a friendship in
which the first fifteen years of his life remained unsaid and unspoken, as if
they had never happened at all, as if he had been removed from the

manufacturer’s box when he reached college, and a switch at the base of his
neck had been flipped, and he had shuddered to life. He knew that those
blank years were filled in by Harold’s own imaginings, and that some of
those imaginings were worse than what had actually happened, and some
were better. But Harold never told him what he supposed for him, and he
didn’t really want to know.
He had never considered their friendship contextual, but he was prepared

for the likelihood that Harold and Julia did. And so when he moved to