Page 488 - A Little Life: A Novel

to illustrate a point—he needed to pick up his tempo—but he had always
liked the image, and sometimes, when he feels a memory encroaching, just
a single one, easy to control and dismiss, he sings or plays until it goes

away, the music a shield between him and it.
He was in his first year of law school when his life began appearing to
him as memories. He would be doing something everyday—cooking
dinner, filing books at the library, frosting a cake at Batter, looking up an
article for Harold—and suddenly, a scene would appear before him, a dumb
show meant only for him. In those years, the memories were tableaux, not
narratives, and he would see a single one repeatedly for days: a diorama of

Brother Luke on top of him, or one of the counselors from the home, who
used to grab him as he walked by, or a client emptying his change from his
pants pockets and setting it in the dish on the nightstand that Brother Luke
had placed there for that purpose. And sometimes the memories were
briefer and vaguer still: a client’s blue sock patterned with horse heads that
he had worn even in bed; the first meal in Philadelphia that Dr. Traylor had

ever given him (a burger; a paper sleeve of French fries); a peachy woolen
pillow in his room at Dr. Traylor’s house that he could never look at without
thinking of torn flesh. When these memories announced themselves, he
would find himself disoriented: it always took him a moment to remember
that these scenes were not only from his life, but his life itself. In those
days, he would let them interrupt him, and there would be times in which he
would come out of his spell and would find his hand still wrapped around

the plastic cone of frosting poised over the cookie before him, or still
holding the book half on, half off the shelf. It was then that he began
comprehending how much of his life he had learned to simply erase, even
days after it had happened, and also that somehow, somewhere, he had lost
that ability. He knew it was the price of enjoying life, that if he was to be
alert to the things he now found pleasure in, he would have to accept its

cost as well. Because as assaultive as his memories were, his life coming
back to him in pieces, he knew he would endure them if it meant he could
also have friends, if he kept being granted the ability to take comfort in
others.
He thought of it as a slight parting of worlds, in which something buried
wisped up from the loamy, turned earth and hovered before him, waiting for
him to recognize it and claim it as his own. Their very reappearance was

defiant: Here we are, they seemed to say to him. Did you really think we