Page 529 - A Little Life: A Novel

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