Page 391 - A Little Life: A Novel

stopped teaching because he had felt the calling to join the monastery, and
sometimes it was because he was weary from having to constantly negotiate
with the school’s principal, who clearly didn’t care for children the way the

brother did; or how in some stories, he had grown up in east Texas, but in
others, he had spent his childhood in Carmel, or Laramie, or Eugene?
Or was it the day that they were passing through Utah to Idaho, on their
way to Washington? They rarely ventured into actual towns—their America
was denuded of trees, of flowers, theirs was just long stretches of roadway,
the only green thing Brother Luke’s lone surviving cattleya, which
continued to live and leaf, though not bud—but this time they had, because

Brother Luke had a doctor friend in one of the towns, and he wanted him to
be examined because it was clear he had picked up some sort of disease
from one of the clients, despite the precautions Brother Luke made them
take. He didn’t know the name of the town, but he was startled at the signs
of normalcy, of life around him, and he stared out of his window in silence,
looking at these scenes that he had always imagined but rarely saw: women

standing on the street with strollers, talking and laughing with one another;
a jogger panting by; families with dogs; a world made of not just men but
also of children and women. Normally on these drives he would close his
eyes—he slept all the time now, waiting for each day to end—but this day,
he felt unusually alert, as if the world was trying to tell him something, and
all he had to do was listen to its message.
Brother Luke was trying to read the map and drive at the same time, and

finally he pulled over, studying the map and muttering. Luke had stopped
across the street from a baseball field, and he watched as, if at once, it
began to fill with people: women, mostly, and then, running and shouting,
boys. The boys wore uniforms, white with red stripes, but despite that, they
all looked different—different hair, different eyes, different skin. Some
were skinny, like he was, and some were fat. He had never seen so many

boys his own age at one time, and he looked and looked at them. And then
he noticed that although they were different, they were actually the same:
they were all smiling, and laughing, excited to be outside, in the dry, hot air,
the sun bright above them, their mothers unloading cans of soda and bottles
of water and juice from plastic carrying containers.
“Aha! We’re back on track!” he heard Luke saying, and heard him fold
up the map. But before he started the engine again, he felt Luke follow his

gaze, and for a moment the two of them sat staring at the boys in silence,