Page 92 - A Little Life: A Novel

poisonous and which were not and how to bale hay and how to test a
watermelon, an apple, a squash, a muskmelon for freshness by thunking it
in the right spot. (And then he knew things he wished he didn’t, things he

hoped never to have to use again, things that, when he thought of them or
dreamed of them at night, made him curl into himself with hatred and
shame.)
And yet it often seemed he knew nothing of any real value or use, not
really. The languages and the math, fine. But daily he was reminded of how
much he didn’t know. He had never heard of the sitcoms whose episodes
were constantly referenced. He had never been to a movie. He had never

gone on vacation. He had never been to summer camp. He had never had
pizza or popsicles or macaroni and cheese (and he had certainly never had
—as both Malcolm and JB had—foie gras or sushi or marrow). He had
never owned a computer or a phone, he had rarely been allowed to go
online. He had never owned anything, he realized, not really: the books he
had that he was so proud of, the shirts that he repaired again and again, they

were nothing, they were trash, the pride he took in them was more shameful
than not owning anything at all. The classroom was the safest place, and the
only place he felt fully confident: everywhere else was an unceasing
avalanche of marvels, each more baffling than the next, each another
reminder of his bottomless ignorance. He found himself keeping mental
lists of new things he had heard and encountered. But he could never ask
anyone for the answers. To do so would be an admission of extreme

otherness, which would invite further questions and would leave him
exposed, and which would inevitably lead to conversations he definitely
was not prepared to have. He felt, often, not so much foreign—for even the
foreign students (even Odval, from a village outside Ulaanbaatar) seemed to
understand these references—as from another time altogether: his
childhood might well have been spent in the nineteenth century, not the

twenty-first, for all he had apparently missed, and for how obscure and
merely decorative what he did know seemed to be. How was it that
apparently all of his peers, whether they were born in Lagos or Los
Angeles, had had more or less the same experience, with the same cultural
landmarks? Surely there was someone who knew as little as he did? And if
not, how was he ever to catch up?
In the evenings, when a group of them lay splayed in someone’s room (a

candle burning, a joint burning as well), the conversation often turned to his