Page 536 - A Little Life: A Novel

That night in the bedroom, he looked for something to cut himself with,
but there was nothing sharp in the room, nothing at all; even the books had
only soft bloated pages. So he pressed his fingernails into his calves as hard

as he could, bent over and wincing from the effort and discomfort, and
finally he was able to puncture the skin, and then work his nail back and
forth in the cut to make it wider. He was only able to make three incisions
in his right leg, and then he was too tired, and he fell asleep again.
The third morning he felt demonstrably better: stronger, more alert. He
ate his breakfast and read his book, and then he moved the tray aside and
stuck his head through the flapped cutout and tried and tried to fit his

shoulders through it. But no matter what angle he tried, he was simply too
large and the opening too small and at last he had to stop.
After he had rested, he poked his head through the hole again. He had a
direct view of the living room to his left, and the kitchen area to his right,
and he looked and looked as if for clues. The house was very tidy; he could
tell from how tidy it was that Dr. Traylor lived alone. If he craned his neck,

he could see, on the far left, a staircase leading to a second story, and just
beyond that, the front door, but he couldn’t see how many locks it had.
Mainly, though, the house was defined by its silence: there was no ticking
of clocks, no sound of cars or people outside. It could have been a house
zooming through space, so quiet was it. The only noise was the refrigerator,
purring its intermittent whir, but when it stopped, the silence was absolute.
But as featureless as the house was, he was also fascinated by it: it was

only the third house he had ever been in. The second had been the Learys’.
The first house had been a client’s, a very important client, Brother Luke
had told him, outside Salt Lake City, who had paid extra because he didn’t
want to come to the motel room. That house had been enormous, all
sandstone and glass, and Brother Luke had come with him, and had
secreted himself in the bathroom—a bathroom as big as one of their motel

rooms—off the bedroom where he and the client had had sex. Later, as an
adult, he would fetishize houses, especially his own house, although even
before he had Greene Street, or Lantern House, or the flat in London, he
would treat himself every few months to a magazine about homes, about
people who spent their lives making pretty places even prettier, and he
would turn the pages slowly, studying every picture. His friends laughed at
him for this, but he didn’t care: he dreamed of the day he’d have someplace

of his own, with things that were absolutely his.