Page 524 - A Little Life: A Novel

Help me, he wanted to say again, as she left the room. Please. Please.
But he couldn’t. He never saw her again.
Later, as an adult, he would wonder if he had invented this nurse, if he

had conjured her out of desperation, a simulacrum of kindness that was
almost as good as the real thing. He would argue with himself: If she had
existed, truly existed, wouldn’t she have told someone about him? Wouldn’t
someone have been sent to help him? But his memories from this period
were something slightly blur-edged and unreliable, and as the years went
by, he was to come to realize that he was, always, trying to make his life,
his childhood, into something more acceptable, something more normal. He

would startle himself from a dream about the counselors, and would try to
comfort himself: There were only two of them who used you, he would tell
himself. Maybe three. The others didn’t. They weren’t all cruel to you. And
then he would try, for days, to remember how many there had actually been:
Was it two? Or was it three? For years, he couldn’t understand why this was
so important to him, why it mattered to him so much, why he was always

trying to argue against his own memories, to spend so much time debating
the details of what had happened. And then he realized that it was because
he thought that if he could convince himself that it was less awful than he
remembered, then he could also convince himself that he was less damaged,
that he was closer to healthy, than he feared he was.
Finally he was sent back to the home, and the first time he had seen his
back, he had recoiled, moving so quickly away from the bathroom mirror

that he had slipped and fallen on a section of wet tile. In those initial weeks
after the beating, when the scar tissue was still forming, it had made a
puffed mound of flesh on his back, and at lunch he would sit alone and the
older boys would whip damp pellets of napkin at it, trying to get them to
ping off of it as against a target, cheering when they hit him. Until that
point, he had never thought too specifically about his appearance. He knew

he was ugly. He knew he was ruined. He knew he was diseased. But he had
never considered himself grotesque. But now he was. There seemed to be
an inevitability to this, to his life: that every year he would become worse—
more disgusting, more depraved. Every year, his right to humanness
diminished; every year, he became less and less of a person. But he didn’t
care any longer; he couldn’t allow himself to.
It was difficult to live without caring, however, and he found himself

curiously unable to forget Brother Luke’s promise, that when he was