Page 329 - A Little Life: A Novel

him, toward the front door. Into the elevator they go, and down the flights,
and then he is being dragged out of the elevator and marched down the
hallway toward the lobby. By now he is hysterical, pleading with Caleb,

asking him again and again what he’s doing, what he’s going to do to him.
At the front door, Caleb lifts him, and for a moment his face is fitted into
the tiny dirty glass window that looks out onto Greene Street, and then
Caleb is opening the door and he is being pushed out, naked, into the street.
“No!” he shouts, half inside, half outside. “Caleb, please!” He is pulled
between a crazed hope and a desperate fear that someone will walk by. But
it is raining too hard; no one will walk by. The rain drums a wild pattern on

his face.
“Beg me,” says Caleb, raising his voice over the rain, and he does,
pleading with him. “Beg me to stay,” Caleb demands. “Apologize to me,”
and he does, again and again, his mouth filling with his own blood, his own
tears.
Finally he is brought inside, and is dragged back to the elevator, where

Caleb says things to him, and he apologizes and apologizes, repeating
Caleb’s words back to him as he instructs: I’m repulsive. I’m disgusting. I’m
worthless. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
In the apartment, Caleb lets go of his neck, and he falls, his legs unsteady
beneath him, and Caleb kicks him in the stomach so hard that he vomits,
and then again in his back, and he slides over Malcolm’s lovely, clean floors
and into the vomit. His beautiful apartment, he thinks, where he has always

been safe. This is happening to him in his beautiful apartment, surrounded
by his beautiful things, things that have been given to him in friendship,
things that he has bought with money he has earned. His beautiful
apartment, with its doors that lock, where he was meant to be protected
from broken elevators and the degradation of pulling himself upstairs on his
arms, where he was meant to always feel human and whole.

Then he is being lifted again, and moved, but it is difficult to see where
he’s being taken: one eye is already swollen shut, and the other is blurry.
His vision keeps blinking in and out.
But then he realizes that Caleb is taking him to the door that leads to the
emergency stairs. It is the one element of the old loft that Malcolm kept:
both because he had to and because he liked how bluntly utilitarian it was,
how unapologetically ugly. Now Caleb unslides the bolt, and he finds

himself standing at the top of the dark, steep staircase. “So descent-into-hell