Page 314 - A Little Life: A Novel

watching him move, likes how, like Willem, he is so easy in his own body.
He likes how Caleb will sometimes in sleep sling an arm possessively
across his chest. He likes waking with Caleb next to him. He likes how

Caleb is slightly strange, how he carries a faint threat of danger: he is
different from the people he has sought out his entire adult life, people he
has determined will never hurt him, people defined by their kindnesses.
When he is with Caleb, he feels simultaneously more and less human.
The first time Caleb hit him, he was both surprised and not. This was at
the end of July, and he had gone over to Caleb’s at midnight, after leaving
the office. He had used his wheelchair that day—lately, something had been

going wrong with his feet; he didn’t know what it was, but he could barely
feel them, and had the dislocating sense that he would topple over if he tried
to walk—but at Caleb’s, he had left the chair in the car and had instead
walked very slowly to the front door, lifting each foot unnaturally high as
he went so he wouldn’t trip.
He knew from the moment he entered the apartment that he shouldn’t

have come—he could see that Caleb was in a terrible mood and could feel
how the very air was hot and stagnant with his anger. Caleb had finally
moved into a building in the Flower District, but he hadn’t unpacked much,
and he was edgy and tense, his teeth squeaking against themselves as he
tightened his jaw. But he had brought food, and he moved his way slowly
over to the counter to set it down, talking brightly to try to distract Caleb
from his gait, trying, desperately, to make things better.

“Why are you walking like that?” Caleb interrupted him.
He hated admitting to Caleb that something else was wrong with him; he
couldn’t bring himself to do it once again. “Am I walking strangely?” he
asked.
“Yeah—you look like Frankenstein’s monster.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. Leave, said the voice inside him. Leave now. “I

wasn’t aware of it.”
“Well, stop it. It looks ridiculous.”
“All right,” he said, quietly, and spooned some curry into a bowl for
Caleb. “Here,” he said, but as he was heading toward Caleb, trying to walk
normally, he tripped, his right foot over his left, and dropped the bowl, the
green curry splattering against the carpet.
Later, he will remember how Caleb didn’t say anything, just whirled

around and struck him with the back of his hand, and he had fallen back, his