Page 531 - A Little Life: A Novel

he could barely walk. On the outskirts of Philadelphia he decided he’d take
a break—he had to. He had torn a small hole in the sleeve of Colin’s jacket
and had rolled his money into a tube and shoved it inside and then closed

the hole with a safety pin he had found in one of the motel rooms. He
climbed out of the last truck, although at the time he hadn’t known it would
be the last truck; at the time he had thought: one more. One more and I’ll
make it to Boston. He hated that he had to stop now when he was so close,
but he knew he needed help; he had waited as long as he could.
The driver had stopped at a filling station near Philadelphia—he didn’t
want to drive into the city. There, he made his slow way to the bathroom; he

tried to clean himself. The illness made him tired; he had a fever. The last
thing he remembered from that day—it had been late January, he thought;
still cold, and now with a wet, stinging wind that seemed to slap against
him—was walking to the edge of the gas station, where there had been a
small tree, barren and unloved and alone, and sitting down against it, resting
his back in Colin’s now-filthy jacket against its spindly, unconvincing

trunk, and shutting his eyes, hoping that if he slept for a while, he might
feel at least a little stronger.
When he woke he knew he was in the backseat of a car, and the car was
moving, and there was Schubert playing, and he allowed himself to be
comforted by that, because it was something he knew, something familiar in
such unfamiliarity, in a strange car being driven by a stranger, a stranger he
was too weak to sit up and examine, through a strange landscape to an

unknown destination. When he woke again he was in a room, a living room,
and he looked around him: at the sofa he was on, the coffee table in front of
it, two armchairs, a stone fireplace, all in shades of brown. He stood, still
dizzy but less dizzy, and as he did, he noticed there was a man standing in a
doorway, watching him, a man a little shorter than he, and thin, but with a
sloping stomach and fertile, swelling hips. He had glasses that had black

plastic bracketing their top half but were clear glass beneath, and a tonsure
of hair trimmed very short and soft, like a mink’s coat.
“Come to the kitchen and have something to eat,” the man said in a quiet
toneless voice, and he did, walking slowly after him and into a kitchen that,
except for its tiles and walls, was also brown: brown table, brown
cupboards, brown chairs. He sat in the chair at the foot of the table, and the
man put a plate before him with a hamburger and a slide of fries, a glass