Page 54 - A Little Life: A Novel
P. 54

spent  playing  with  them:  reading  to  them,  pushing  them  around  the
                grounds,  tickling  them  with  feathers.  During  recess  all  the  classrooms
                opened  their  doors  to  the  school’s  central  courtyard,  and  the  space  filled

                with  children  on  such  a  variety  of  wheeled  contraptions  and  vessels  and
                vehicles  that  it  sometimes  sounded  as  if  it  was  populated  by  mechanical
                insects,  all  of  them  squeaking  and  whirring  and  clucking  at  once.  There
                were children in wheelchairs, and children on small, scaled-down mopeds
                that  putted  and  clicked  along  the  flagstones  at  a  tortoise’s  speed,  and
                children  strapped  prone  atop  smooth  lengths  of  wood  that  resembled
                abbreviated  surfboards  on  wheels,  and  who  pulled  themselves  along  the

                ground with their elbowed stumps, and a few children with no means of
                conveyance at all, who sat in their minders’ laps, the backs of their necks
                cupped in their minders’ palms. Those were the ones who reminded him
                most keenly of Hemming.
                   Some of the children on the motorcycles and the wheeled boards could
                speak, and he would toss, very gently, large foam balls to them and organize

                races around the courtyard. He would always begin these races at the head
                of  the  pack,  loping  with  an  exaggerated  slowness  (though  not  so
                exaggerated that he appeared too broadly comic; he wanted them to think
                he was actually trying), but at some point, usually a third of the way around
                the square, he would pretend to trip on something and fall, spectacularly, to
                the ground, and all the kids would pass him and laugh. “Get up, Willem, get
                up!” they’d cry, and he would, but by that point they would have finished

                the lap and he would come in last place. He wondered, sometimes, if they
                envied him the dexterity of being able to fall and get up again, and if so, if
                he  should  stop  doing  it,  but  when  he  asked  his  supervisor,  he  had  only
                looked at Willem and said that the kids thought he was funny and that he
                should keep falling. And so every day he fell, and every afternoon, when he
                was waiting with the students for their parents to come pick them up, the

                ones who could speak would ask him if he was going to fall the next day.
                “No way,” he’d say, confidently, as they giggled. “Are you kidding? How
                clumsy do you think I am?”
                   It was, in many ways, a good summer. The apartment was near MIT and
                belonged to Jude’s math professor, who was in Leipzig for the season, and
                who was charging them such a negligible rent that the two of them found
                themselves  making  small  repairs  to  the  place  in  order  to  express  their

                gratitude:  Jude  organized  the  books  that  were  stacked  into  quavering,
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