Page 255 - A Little Life: A Novel

through the corridors in their boxers, and when he went to the bathroom at
the end of the hall, there’d be someone in there taking a sponge bath in the
sink or shaving or brushing his teeth, and he’d nod at them—“Whassup,

man?”—and they’d nod back. Sadly, however, the overall effect was less
collegiate and more institutional. This depressed him. JB could have found
studio space elsewhere, better, more private studio space, but he’d taken
this one because (he was embarrassed to admit) the building looked like a
dormitory, and he hoped it might feel like college again. But it didn’t.
The building was also supposed to be a “low noise density” site,
whatever that meant, but along with the artists, a number of bands—ironic

thrasher bands, ironic folk bands, ironic acoustic bands—had also rented
studios there, which meant that the hallway was always jumbled with noise,
all of the bands’ instruments melding together to make one long whine of
guitar feedback. The bands weren’t supposed to be there, and once every
few months, when the owner of the building, a Mr. Chen, stopped by for a
surprise inspection, he would hear the shouts bouncing through the

hallways, even through his closed door, each person’s call of alarm echoed
by the next, until the warning had saturated all five floors—“Chen!”
“Chen!” “Chen!”—so by the time Mr. Chen stepped inside the front door,
all was quiet, so unnaturally quiet that he imagined he could hear his next-
door neighbor grinding his inks against his whetstone, and his other
neighbor’s spirograph skritching against canvas. And then Mr. Chen would
get into his car and drive away, and the echoes would reverse themselves

—“Clear!” “Clear!” “Clear!”—and the cacophony would rise up again, like
a flock of screeching cicadas.
Once he was certain he was alone on the floor (god, where was
everyone? Was he truly the last person left on earth?), he took off his shirt
and then, after a moment, his pants, and began cleaning his studio, which he
hadn’t done in months. Back and forth he walked to the trash cans near the

service elevator, stuffing them full of old pizza boxes and empty beer cans
and scraps of paper with doodles on them and brushes whose bristles had
gone strawlike because he hadn’t cleaned them and palettes of watercolors
that had turned to clay because he hadn’t kept them moist.
Cleaning was boring; it was particularly boring while sober. He reflected,
as he sometimes did, that none of the supposedly good things that were
supposed to happen to you when you were on meth had happened to him.

Other people he knew had grown gaunt, or had nonstop anonymous sex, or