Page 531 - A Little Life: A Novel
P. 531

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
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