Page 489 - A Little Life: A Novel

would let you abandon us? Did you really think we wouldn’t come back?
Eventually, he was also made to recognize how much he had edited—edited
and reconfigured, refashioned into something easier to accept—from even

the past few years: the film he had seen his junior year of two detectives
coming to tell a student at college that the man who had hurt him had died
in prison hadn’t been a film at all—it had been his life, and he had been the
student, and he had stood there in the Quad outside of Hood, and the two
detectives were the people who had found him and arrested Dr. Traylor in
the field that night, and they had taken him to the hospital and had made
sure Dr. Traylor had gone to prison, and they had come to find him to tell

him in person that he had nothing to fear again. “Pretty fancy stuff,” one of
the detectives had said, looking around him at the beautiful campus, at its
old brick buildings where you could go and be absolutely safe. “We’re
proud of you, Jude.” But he had fuzzed this memory, he had changed it to
the detective simply saying “We’re proud of you,” and had left off his
name, just as he had left out the panic he now remembered he had vividly

felt despite their news, the dread that later someone would ask him who
those people were that he had been talking to, the almost nauseous
wrongness of his past life intruding so physically on his present.
Eventually he had learned how to manage the memories. He couldn’t
stop them—after they had begun, they had never ended—but he had grown
more adept at anticipating their arrival. He became able to diagnose it, that
moment or day in which he could tell that something was going to visit him,

and he would have to figure out how it wanted to be addressed: Did it want
confrontation, or soothing, or simply attention? He would determine what
sort of hospitality it wanted, and then he would determine how to make it
leave, to retreat back to that other place.
A small memory he could contain, but as the days go by and he waits for
Willem, he recognizes that this is a long eel of a memory, slippery and

uncatchable, and it whipsaws its way through him, its tail slapping against
his organs so that he feels the memory as something alive and wounding,
feels its meaty, powerful smack against his intestines, his heart, his lungs.
Sometimes they were like this, and these were the hardest to lasso and
corral, and with every day it seems to grow inside him, until he feels
himself stuffed not with blood and muscle and water and bone but with the
memory itself, expanding balloon-like to inflate his very fingertips. After

Caleb, he had realized that there were some memories he was simply not