Page 543 - A Little Life: A Novel

call out—not angrily, not even loudly—“Get up. Get up and run; get up and
run or we’re going back to the house,” and he would make himself stand
and run again.

He ran. He didn’t know then that this was the last time in his life that he
would ever run, and much later he would wonder: If I had known that,
would I have been able to run faster? But of course it was an impossible
question, a non-question, an axiom with no solution. He fell again and
again, and on the twelfth time, he was moving his mouth, trying to say
something, but nothing would come out. “Get up,” he heard the man say.
“Get up. The next time you fall will be the last,” and he got up again.

By this time he was no longer running, he was walking and stumbling, he
was crawling from the car and the car was bumping against him harder and
harder. Make this stop, he thought, make this stop. He remembered—who
had told him this? one of the brothers, but which one?—a story of a piteous
little boy, a boy, he had been told, in much worse circumstances than he was
in, who after being so good for so long (another way in which he and the

boy had been different), prayed one night to God to take him: I’m ready, the
boy said in the story, I’m ready, and an angel, terrible and golden-winged,
with eyes that burned with fire, appeared and wrapped his wings around the
boy and the boy turned to cinders and was gone, released from this world.
I’m ready, he said, I’m ready, and he waited for the angel with his awful,
fearsome beauty to come save him.
The last time he fell, he couldn’t get up again. “Get up!” he heard Dr.

Traylor yell. “Get up!” But he couldn’t. And then he heard the engine start
again, and he felt the headlights coming toward him, two streams of fire
like the angel’s eyes, and he turned his head to the side and waited, and the
car came toward him and then over him and it was done.
And that was the end. After that, he became an adult. As he lay in the
hospital, Ana sitting by his side, he made promises to himself. He evaluated

the mistakes he had made. He never had known whom to trust: he had
followed anyone who had shown him any kindness. After, though, he
decided that he would change this. No longer would he trust people so
quickly. No longer would he have sex. No longer would he expect to be
saved.
“It’ll never be this bad,” Ana used to say to him in the hospital.
“Things’ll never be this bad again,” and although he knew she meant the

pain, he also liked to think she meant his life in general: that with every