Page 144 - A Little Life: A Novel

Later, Brother Michael claimed this wasn’t even true. “You weren’t in the
trash bin,” he told him. “You were next to the trash bin.” Yes, he conceded,
there had been a trash bag, but he had been atop it, not in it, and at any rate,

who knew what was in the trash bag itself, and who cared? More likely it
was things thrown away from the pharmacy: cardboard and tissues and
twist ties and packing chips. “You mustn’t believe everything Brother Peter
says,” he reminded him, as he often did, along with: “You mustn’t indulge
this tendency to self-mythologize,” as he said whenever he asked for details
of how he’d come to live at the monastery. “You came, and you’re here
now, and you should concentrate on your future, and not on the past.”

They had created the past for him. He was found naked, said Brother
Peter (or in just a diaper, said Brother Michael), but either way, it was
assumed he’d been left to, as they said, let nature have its way with him,
because it was mid-April and still freezing, and a newborn couldn’t have
survived for long in that weather. He must have been there for only a few
minutes, however, because he was still almost warm when they found him,

and the snow hadn’t yet filled the car’s tire tracks, nor the footprints
(sneakers, probably a woman’s size eight) that led to the trash bin and then
away from it. He was lucky they had found him (it was fate they had found
him). Everything he had—his name, his birthday (itself an estimate), his
shelter, his very life—was because of them. He should be grateful (they
didn’t expect him to be grateful to them; they expected him to be grateful to
God).

He never knew what they might answer and what they might not. A
simple question (Had he been crying when they found him? Had there been
a note? Had they looked for whoever had left him?) would be dismissed or
unknown or unexplained, but there were declarative answers for the more
complicated ones.
“The state couldn’t find anyone to take you.” (Brother Peter, again.)

“And so we said we’d keep you here as a temporary measure, and then
months turned into years and here you are. The end. Now finish these
equations; you’re taking all day.”
But why couldn’t the state find anyone? Theory one (beloved of Brother
Peter): There were simply too many unknowns—his ethnicity, his
parentage, possible congenital health problems, and on and on. Where had
he come from? Nobody knew. None of the local hospitals had recorded a

recent live birth that matched his description. And that was worrisome to