Page 541 - A Little Life: A Novel

so that he lived in a constant half daze of fear, so that he knew that he
would die in Dr. Traylor’s house. One night he had a dream of himself as a
man, a real adult, but he was still in the basement and waiting for Dr.

Traylor, and he knew in the dream that something had happened to him, that
he had lost his mind, that he was like his roommate in the home, and he
woke and prayed that he might die soon. During the daytime, as he slept, he
dreamed of Brother Luke, and when he woke from those dreams he realized
how much Luke had always protected him, how well he had treated him,
how kind he had been to him. He had limped to the top of the wooden
staircase then, and thrown himself down it, and then had pulled himself up

and had done it again.
And then one day (Three months later? Four? Later, Ana would tell him
that Dr. Traylor had said it was twelve weeks after he had found him at the
gas station), Dr. Traylor said, “I’m tired of you. You’re dirty and you
disgust me and I want you to leave.”
He couldn’t believe it. But then he remembered to speak. “Okay,” he

said, “okay. I’ll leave now.”
“No,” said Dr. Traylor, “you’ll leave how I want you to leave.”
For several days, nothing happened, and he assumed that this too had
been a lie, and he was grateful that he hadn’t gotten too excited, that he was
finally able to recognize a lie when he was told it. Dr. Traylor had begun to
serve him his meals on a fold of the day’s newspaper, and one day he
looked at the date and realized it was his birthday. “I am fifteen,” he

announced to the quiet room, and hearing himself say those words—the
hopes, the fantasies, the impossibilities that only he knew lay behind them
—he was sick. But he didn’t cry: his ability to not cry was his only
accomplishment, the only thing he could take pride in.
And then one night Dr. Traylor came downstairs with his fire poker. “Get
up,” he said, and jabbed him in the back with the poker as he fumblingly

climbed the stairs, falling to his knees and getting up again and tripping
again and standing again. He was prodded all the way to the front door,
which was ajar, just slightly, and then outside, into the night. It was still
cold, and still wet, but even through his fear he could recognize that the
weather was changing, that even as time had suspended itself for him, it had
not for the rest of the world, in which the seasons had marched on
uncaringly; he could smell the air turning green. Next to him was a bare

bush with a black branch, but at its very tip it was sprouting buboes of pale