Page 379 - A Little Life: A Novel

silvery sheen of scar tissue, but it didn’t help, not enough. At night, he
prayed to a god he didn’t believe in, and hadn’t for years: Help me, help me,
help me, he pleaded. He was losing himself; this had to stop. He couldn’t

keep running forever.
It was August; the city was empty. Malcolm was in Sweden on holiday
with Sophie; Richard was in Capri; Rhodes was in Maine; Andy was on
Shelter Island (“Remember,” he’d said before he left, as he always said
before a long vacation, “I’m just two hours away; you need me, and I catch
the next ferry back”). He couldn’t bear to be around Harold, whom he
couldn’t see without being reminded of his debasement; he called and told

him he had too much work to go to Truro. Instead he spontaneously bought
a ticket to Paris and spent the long, lonely Labor Day weekend there,
wandering the streets by himself. He didn’t contact anyone he knew there—
not Citizen, who was working for a French bank, or Isidore, his upstairs
neighbor from Hereford Street, who was teaching there, or Phaedra, who
had taken a job as the director of a satellite of a New York gallery—they

wouldn’t have been in the city anyway.
He was tired, he was so tired. It was taking so much energy to hold the
beasts off. He sometimes had an image of himself surrendering to them, and
they would cover him with their claws and beaks and talons and peck and
pinch and pluck away at him until he was nothing, and he would let them.
After he returned from Paris, he had a dream in which he was running
across a cracked reddish plain of earth. Behind him was a dark cloud, and

although he was fast, the cloud was faster. As it drew closer, he heard a
buzzing, and realized it was a swarm of insects, terrible and oily and noisy,
with pincerlike protuberances jutting out from beneath their eyes. He knew
that if he stopped, he would die, and yet even in the dream he knew he
couldn’t go on for much longer; at some point, he had stopped being able to
run and had started hobbling instead, reality asserting itself even in his

dreams. And then he heard a voice, one unfamiliar but calm and
authoritative, speak to him. Stop, it said. You can end this. You don’t have to
do this. It was such a relief to hear those words, and he stopped, abruptly,
and faced the cloud, which was seconds, feet away from him, exhausted and
waiting for it to be over.
He woke, frightened, because he knew what the words meant, and they
both terrified and comforted him. Now, as he moved through his days, he