Page 143 - A Little Life: A Novel

exhausted of trying, when being awake and alive demanded such energy
that he had to lie in bed thinking of reasons to get up and try again, when it
would be much easier to go to the bathroom and untape the plastic zipped

bag containing his cotton pads and loose razors and alcohol wipes and
bandages from its hiding place beneath the sink and simply surrender.
Those were the very bad days.
It really had been a mistake, that night before New Year’s Eve when he
sat in the bathroom drawing the razor across his arm: he had been half
asleep still; he was normally never so careless. But when he realized what
he had done, there had been a minute, two minutes—he had counted—when

he genuinely hadn’t known what to do, when sitting there, and letting this
accident become its own conclusion, seemed easier than making the
decision himself, a decision that would ripple past him to include Willem,
and Andy, and days and months of consequences.
He hadn’t known, finally, what had compelled him to grab his towel from
its bar and wrap it around his arm, and then pull himself to his feet and

wake Willem up. But with each minute that passed, he moved further and
further from the other option, the events unfolding themselves with a speed
he couldn’t control, and he longed for that year right after the injury, before
he met Andy, when it seemed that everything might be improved upon, and
that his future self might be something bright and clean, when he knew so
little but had such hope, and faith that his hope might one day be rewarded.

Before New York there had been law school, and before that, college, and
before that, there was Philadelphia, and the long, slow trip across country,

and before that, there was Montana, and the boys’ home, and before
Montana was the Southwest, and the motel rooms, and the lonely stretches
of road and the hours spent in the car. And before that was South Dakota
and the monastery. And before that? A father and a mother, presumably. Or,
more realistically, simply a man and a woman. And then, probably, just a
woman. And then him.

It was Brother Peter, who taught him math, and was always reminding
him of his good fortune, who told him he’d been found in a garbage can.
“Inside a trash bag, stuffed with eggshells and old lettuce and spoiled
spaghetti—and you,” Brother Peter said. “In the alley behind the drugstore,
you know the one,” even though he didn’t, as he rarely left the monastery.