Page 521 - A Little Life: A Novel

message for Dr. Loehmann, whose card Willem has kept in his wallet all
these years and produces, magician-like, within seconds, and from there to
bed, and they will lie there, looking at each other, each afraid to ask the

other: he to ask Jude to finish his story; Jude to ask him when he is leaving,
because his leaving now seems an inevitability, a matter of logistics.
On and on they stare, until Jude’s face becomes almost meaningless as a
face to him: it is a series of colors, of planes, of shapes that have been
arranged in such a way to give other people pleasure, but to give its owner
nothing. He doesn’t know what he is going to do. He is dizzy with what he
has heard, with comprehending the enormity of his misconceptions, with

stretching his understanding past what is imaginable, with the knowledge
that all of his carefully maintained edifices are now destroyed beyond
repair.
But for now, they are in their bed, in their room, in their apartment, and
he reaches over and takes Jude’s hand, holds it gently in his own.
“You’ve told me about how you got to Montana,” he hears himself

saying. “So tell me: What happened next?”

It was a time he rarely thought about, his flight to Philadelphia, because it
was a period in which he had been so afloat from himself that even as he
had lived his life, it had felt dreamlike and not quite real; there had been
times in those weeks when he had opened his eyes and was genuinely
unable to discern whether what had just happened had actually happened, or
whether he had imagined it. It had been a useful skill, this persistent and
unshatterable somnambulism, and it had protected him, but then that ability,

like his ability to forget, had abandoned him as well and he was never to
acquire it again.
He had first noticed this suspension at the home. At nights, he would
sometimes be awakened by one of the counselors, and he would follow
them down to the office where one of them was always on duty, and he
would do whatever they wanted. After they were done, he would be

escorted back to his room—a small space with a bunk bed that he shared
with a mentally disabled boy, slow and fat and frightened-looking and
prone to rages, whom he knew the counselors also sometimes took with
them at night—and locked in again. There were a few of them the
counselors used, but aside from his roommate, he didn’t know who the