Page 490 - A Little Life: A Novel

going to be able to control, and so his only recourse was to wait until they
had tired themselves out, until they swam back into the dark of his
subconscious and left him alone again.

And so he waits, letting the memory—the nearly two weeks he had spent
in trucks, trying to get from Montana to Boston—occupy him, as if his very
mind, his body, is a motel, and this memory his sole guest. His challenge in
this period is to fulfill his promise to Willem, to not cut himself, and so he
creates a strict and consuming schedule for the hours between midnight and
four a.m., which are the most dangerous. On Saturday he makes a list of
what he will do each night for the next few weeks, rotating swimming with

cooking and piano-playing and baking and work at Richard’s and sorting
through all of his and Willem’s old clothes and pruning the bookcases and
resewing the loose buttons on Willem’s shirt that he was going to have Mrs.
Zhou do but is perfectly capable of doing himself and cleaning out the
detritus that has accumulated in the drawer near the stove: twist ties and
sticky rubber bands and safety pins and matchbooks. He makes pints of

chicken stock and ground-lamb meatballs for Willem’s return and freezes
them, and bakes loaves of bread for Richard to take to the food kitchen
where they are both on the board and whose finances he helps administer.
After feeding the starter, he sits at the table and reads novels, old favorites
of his, the words and plots and characters comforting and lived-in and
unchanged. He wishes he had a pet—a dumb, grateful dog, panting and
smiling; a frigid cat, glaring judgmentally at him through her slitted orange

eyes—some other breathing thing in the apartment that he could speak to,
the sound of whose soft padding footsteps would bring him back to himself.
He works all night, and just before he drops off to sleep, he cuts himself—
once on the left arm, once on the right—and when he wakes, he is tired but
proud of himself for making it through intact.
But then it is two weeks before Willem is to come home, and just as the

memory is fading, checking out of him until the next time it comes to visit,
the hyenas return. Or perhaps return is the wrong word, because once Caleb
introduced them into his life, they have never left. Now, however, they
don’t chase him, because they know they don’t need to: his life is a vast
savanna, and he is surrounded by them. They lie splayed in the yellow
grass, drape themselves lazily over the baobab trees’ low branches that
spread from their trunks like tentacles, and stare at him with their keen

yellow eyes. They are always there, and after he and Willem began having