Page 370 - A Little Life: A Novel

examine what you were looking at, for example; you couldn’t start scrolling
through parts of it and hope you wouldn’t get ensnared in the details of
what had happened, because you of course would. You had to work at it

every night, until it was completely gone.
Though they never disappeared completely, of course. But they were at
least more distant—they weren’t things that followed you, wraithlike,
tugging at you for attention, jumping in front of you when you ignored
them, demanding so much of your time and effort that it became impossible
to think of anything else. In fallow periods—the moments before you fell
asleep; the minutes before you were landing after an overnight flight, when

you weren’t awake enough to do work and weren’t tired enough to sleep—
they would reassert themselves, and so it was best to imagine, then, a screen
of white, huge and light-lit and still, and hold it in your mind like a shield.
In the weeks following the beating, he worked on forgetting Caleb.
Before going to bed, he went to the door of his apartment and, feeling
foolish, tried forcing his old set of keys into the locks to assure himself that

they didn’t fit, that he really was once again safe. He set, and reset, the
alarm system he’d had installed, which was so sensitive that even passing
shadows triggered a flurry of beeps. And then he lay awake, his eyes open
in the dark room, concentrating on forgetting. But it was so difficult—there
were so many memories from those months that stabbed him that he was
overwhelmed. He heard Caleb’s voice saying things to him, he saw the
expression on Caleb’s face as he had stared at his unclothed body, he felt

the horrid blank airlessness of his fall down the staircase, and he crunched
himself into a knot and put his hands over his ears and closed his eyes.
Finally he would get up and go to his office at the other end of the
apartment and work. He had a big case coming up, and he was grateful for
it; his days were so occupied that he had little time to think of anything else.
For a while he was hardly going home at all, just two hours to sleep and an

hour to shower and change, until one evening he’d had an episode at work,
a bad one, the first time he ever had. The night janitor had found him on the
floor, and had called the building’s security department, who had called the
firm’s chairman, a man named Peterson Tremain, who had called Lucien,
who was the only one he had told what to do in case something like this
should happen: Lucien had called Andy, and then both he and the chairman
had come into the office and waited with him for Andy to arrive. He had

seen them, seen their feet, and even as he had gasped and writhed on the