Page 369 - A Little Life: A Novel

the hill that led to the main road, and then down the main road itself, the
night so silent it hummed. As they walked, Brother Luke pointed out
different constellations and he named them, he got them all right, and Luke

murmured in admiration and stroked the back of his head. “You’re so
smart,” he said. “I’m so glad I picked you, Jude.”
Now they were on the road, which he had only been on a few times in his
life—to go to the doctor, or to the dentist—although now it was empty, and
little animals, muskrats and possums, gamboled before them. Then they
were at the car, a long maroon station wagon piebald with rust, its backseat
filled with boxes and black trash bags and some of Luke’s favorite plants—

the Cattleya schilleriana, with its ugly speckled petals; the Hylocereus
undatus, with its sleepy drooping head of a blossom—in their dark-green
plastic nests.
It was strange to see Brother Luke in a car, stranger than being in the car
itself. But stranger than that was the feeling he had, that everything had
been worth it, that all his miseries were going to end, that he was going to a

life that would be as good as, perhaps better than, anything he had read
about in books.
“Are you ready to go?” Brother Luke whispered to him, and grinned.
“I am,” he whispered back. And Brother Luke turned the key in the
ignition.

There were two ways of forgetting. For many years, he had envisioned
(unimaginatively) a vault, and at the end of the day, he would gather the
images and sequences and words that he didn’t want to think about again

and open the heavy steel door only enough to hurry them inside, closing it
quickly and tightly. But this method wasn’t effective: the memories seeped
out anyway. The important thing, he came to realize, was to eliminate them,
not just to store them.
So he had invented some solutions. For small memories—little slights,
insults—you relived them again and again until they were neutralized, until

they became near meaningless with repetition, or until you could believe
that they were something that had happened to someone else and you had
just heard about it. For larger memories, you held the scene in your head
like a film strip, and then you began to erase it, frame by frame. Neither
method was easy: you couldn’t stop in the middle of your erasing and