Page 330 - A Little Life: A Novel

looking,” he remembers Richard saying. One side of him is gluey with
vomit; he can feel other liquids—he cannot think about what they are—
moving down other parts of him: his face, his neck, his thighs.

He is whimpering from pain and fear, clutching the edge of the
doorframe, when he hears, rather than sees, Caleb move back and run at
him, and then his foot is kicking him in his back, and he is flying into the
black of the staircase.
As he soars, he thinks, suddenly, of Dr. Kashen. Or not of Dr. Kashen,
necessarily, but the question he had asked him when he was applying to be
his advisee: What’s your favorite axiom? (The nerd pickup line, CM had

once called it.)
“The axiom of equality,” he’d said, and Kashen had nodded, approvingly.
“That’s a good one,” he’d said.
The axiom of equality states that x always equals x: it assumes that if you
have a conceptual thing named x, that it must always be equivalent to itself,
that it has a uniqueness about it, that it is in possession of something so

irreducible that we must assume it is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to
itself for all time, that its very elementalness can never be altered. But it is
impossible to prove. Always, absolutes, nevers: these are the words, as
much as numbers, that make up the world of mathematics. Not everyone
liked the axiom of equality—Dr. Li had once called it coy and twee, a fan
dance of an axiom—but he had always appreciated how elusive it was, how
the beauty of the equation itself would always be frustrated by the attempts

to prove it. It was the kind of axiom that could drive you mad, that could
consume you, that could easily become an entire life.
But now he knows for certain how true the axiom is, because he himself
—his very life—has proven it. The person I was will always be the person I
am, he realizes. The context may have changed: he may be in this
apartment, and he may have a job that he enjoys and that pays him well, and

he may have parents and friends he loves. He may be respected; in court, he
may even be feared. But fundamentally, he is the same person, a person
who inspires disgust, a person meant to be hated. And in that microsecond
that he finds himself suspended in the air, between the ecstasy of being aloft
and the anticipation of his landing, which he knows will be terrible, he
knows that x will always equal x, no matter what he does, or how many
years he moves away from the monastery, from Brother Luke, no matter

how much he earns or how hard he tries to forget. It is the last thing he