Page 529 - A Little Life: A Novel
P. 529

again and again and again; sometimes the drivers gave him food or money,
                and  sometimes  they  didn’t.  They  all  had  little  nests  they  had  made  for
                themselves in the trailers of their trucks, and they lay there, and sometimes

                after it was over, they would drive him a little farther, and he would sleep,
                the world moving beneath him in a perpetual earthquake. At filling stations
                he would buy things to eat and would wait around, and eventually someone
                would  choose  him—someone  always  did—and  he  would  climb  into  the
                truck.
                   “Where’re you headed?” they would ask him.
                   “Boston,” he would say. “My uncle’s there.”

                   Sometimes  he  felt  the  shame  of  what  he  was  doing  so  intensely  he
                wanted to vomit: he knew he would never be able to claim to himself that
                he had been coerced; he’d had sex with these men freely, he had let them do
                whatever  they  wanted,  he  had  performed  enthusiastically  and  well.  And
                sometimes he was unsentimental: he was doing what he had to do. There
                was no other way. This was his skill, his one great skill, and he was using it

                to get somewhere better. He was using himself to save himself.
                   Sometimes  the  men  would  want  him  for  longer  and  they  would  get  a
                motel room, and he would imagine Brother Luke waiting in the bathroom
                for him. Sometimes they would talk to him—I have a son your age, they’d
                say;  I  have  a  daughter  your  age—and  he  would  lie  there  and  listen.
                Sometimes they would watch television until they were ready to go again.
                Some of them were cruel to him; some of them made him fear he would be

                killed, or hurt so badly he wouldn’t be able to escape, and in those moments
                he would be terrified, and he would wish, desperately, for Brother Luke, for
                the monastery, for the nurse who had been so kind to him. But most of them
                were  neither  cruel  nor  kind.  They  were  clients,  and  he  was  giving  them
                what they wanted.
                   Years later, when he was able to review these weeks more objectively, he

                would be dumbstruck by how stupid he had been, by how small his oculus:
                Why  hadn’t  he  simply  escaped?  Why  hadn’t  he  taken  the  money  he  had
                earned  and  bought  a  bus  ticket?  He  would  try  and  try  to  remember  how
                much he had earned, and although he knew it hadn’t been much, he thought
                that it might have been enough for a ticket somewhere, anywhere, even if
                not Boston. But then, it simply hadn’t occurred to him. It was as if the entire
                store of resourcefulness he had possessed, every piece of courage, had been

                spent on his flight from the home, and once on his own, he had simply let
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