Page 98 - A Little Life: A Novel

to that?) Somehow, though, over the tellings and retellings, the explanation
was changed to a car accident, and then to a drunken driving accident.
“The easiest explanations are often the right ones,” his math professor,

Dr. Li, always said, and maybe the same principle applied here. Except he
knew it didn’t. Math was one thing. Nothing else was that reductive.
But the odd thing was this: by his story morphing into one about a car
accident, he was being given an opportunity for reinvention; all he had to
do was claim it. But he never could. He could never call it an accident,
because it wasn’t. And so was it pride or stupidity to not take the escape
route he’d been offered? He didn’t know.

And then he noticed something else. He was in the middle of another
episode—a highly humiliating one, it had taken place just as he was coming
off of his shift at the library, and Willem had just happened to be there a few
minutes early, about to start his own shift—when he heard the librarian, a
kind, well-read woman whom he liked, ask why he had these. They had
moved him, Mrs. Eakeley and Willem, to the break room in the back, and

he could smell the burned-sugar tang of old coffee, a scent he despised
anyway, so sharp and assaultive that he almost vomited.
“A car injury,” he heard Willem’s reply, as from across a great black lake.
But it wasn’t until that night that he registered what Willem had said, and
the word he had used: injury, not accident. Was it deliberate, he wondered?
What did Willem know? He was so addled that he might have actually
asked him, had Willem been around, but he wasn’t—he was at his

girlfriend’s.
No one was there, he realized. The room was his. He felt the creature
inside him—which he pictured as slight and raggedy and lemurlike, quick-
reflexed and ready to sprint, its dark wet eyes forever scanning the
landscape for future dangers—relax and sag to the ground. It was at these
moments that he found college most enjoyable: he was in a warm room, and

the next day he would have three meals and eat as much as he wanted, and
in between he would go to classes, and no one would try to hurt him or
make him do anything he didn’t want to do. Somewhere nearby were his
roommates—his friends—and he had survived another day without
divulging any of his secrets, and placed another day between the person he
once was and the person he was now. It seemed, always, an
accomplishment worthy of sleep, and so he did, closing his eyes and

readying himself for another day in the world.