Page 411 - A Little Life: A Novel

was. They called him names, the same names the clients had called him;
they left him alone. When he approached a group of them, they would get
up and run away.

They hadn’t brought him his bag with razors, and so he had learned to
improvise: he stole an aluminum can lid from the trash and sterilized it over
the gas flame one afternoon when he was on kitchen duty and used that,
stuffing it under his mattress. He stole a new lid every week.
He thought of Brother Luke every day. At the school, he skipped four
grades; they allowed him to attend classes in math, in piano, in English
literature, in French and German at the community college. His teachers

asked him who had taught him what he knew, and he said his father had.
“He did a good job,” his English teacher told him. “He must have been an
excellent teacher,” and he had been unable to respond, and she had
eventually moved on to the next student. At night, when he was with the
counselors, he pretended that Brother Luke was standing right behind the
wall, waiting to spring out in case things got too awful, which meant that

everything that was happening to him were things Brother Luke knew he
could bear.
After he had come to trust Ana, he told her a few things about Brother
Luke. But he was unwilling to tell her everything. He told no one. He had
been a fool to follow Luke, he knew that. Luke had lied to him, he had done
terrible things to him. But he wanted to believe that, through everything, in
spite of everything, Luke really had loved him, that that part had been real:

not a perversion, not a rationalization, but real. He didn’t think he could
take Ana saying, as she said of the others, “He was a monster, Jude. They
say they love you, but they say that so they can manipulate you, don’t you
see? This is what pedophiles do; this is how they prey on children.” As an
adult, he was still unable to decide what he thought about Luke. Yes, he was
bad. But was he worse than the other brothers? Had he really made the

wrong decision? Would it really have been better if he had stayed at the
monastery? Would he have been more or less damaged by his time there?
Luke’s legacies were in everything he did, in everything he was: his love of
reading, of music, of math, of gardening, of languages—those were Luke.
His cutting, his hatred, his shame, his fears, his diseases, his inability to
have a normal sex life, to be a normal person—those were Luke, too. Luke
had taught him how to find pleasure in life, and he had removed pleasure

absolutely.