Page 129 - A Little Life: A Novel

He was usually at the office, and sometimes, when he and Citizen and
Rhodes were there late, eating takeout, he was reminded of being with his
roommates in their suite at Hood. And although he enjoyed Citizen’s and

Rhodes’s company, and the specificity and depth of their intelligence, he
was in those moments nostalgic for his friends, who thought so differently
than he did and who made him think differently as well. In the middle of
one conversation with Citizen and Rhodes about logic, he recalled,
suddenly, a question Dr. Li had asked him his freshman year, when he was
auditioning to be accepted into his pure math seminar: Why are manhole
covers round? It was an easy question, and easy to answer, but when he’d

returned to Hood and had repeated Dr. Li’s question to his roommates, they
were silent. And then finally JB had begun, in the dreamy tones of a
wandering storyteller, “Once, very long ago, mammoths roamed the earth,
and their footprints left permanent circular indentations in the ground,” and
they had all laughed. He smiled, remembering it; he sometimes wished he
had a mind like JB’s, one that could create stories that would delight others,

instead of the mind he did have, which was always searching for an
explanation, an explanation that, while perhaps correct, was empty of
romance, of fancy, of wit.
“Time to whip out the credentials,” Citizen would whisper to him on the
occasions that the U.S. Attorney himself would emerge onto the floor and
all the assistant prosecutors would buzz toward him, mothlike, as a
multitude of gray suits. They and Rhodes would join the hover, but even in

those gatherings he never mentioned the one credential he knew could have
made not only Marshall but the U.S. Attorney as well stop and look at him
more closely. After he’d gotten the job, Harold had asked him if he could
mention him to Adam, the U.S. Attorney, with whom Harold was, it
happened, longtime acquaintances. But he’d told Harold he wanted to know
he could make it on his own. This was true, but the greater reason was that

he was tentative about naming Harold as one of his assets, because he didn’t
want Harold to regret his association with him. And so he’d said nothing.
Often, however, it felt as if Harold was there anyway. Reminiscing about
law school (and its attendant activity, bragging about one’s
accomplishments in law school) was a favorite pastime in the office, and
because so many of his colleagues had gone to his school, quite a few of
them knew Harold (and the others knew of him), and he’d sometimes listen

to them talk about classes they’d taken with him, or how prepared they’d