Page 62 - A Little Life: A Novel

them one Saturday—as of midnight that night, he would stop talking to
Willem altogether, and would reduce his conversational output with
Malcolm by a half. Because Jude’s race was undetermined, he would

continue speaking to him, but would only do so in riddles or Zen koans, in
recognition of the unknowability of his ethnic origins.
Malcolm could see by the look that Jude and Willem exchanged with
each other, brief and unsmiling though, he observed irritatedly, full of
meaning (he always suspected the two of them of conducting an
extracurricular friendship from which he was excluded), that they were
amused by this and were prepared to humor JB. For his part, he supposed

he should be grateful for what might amount to a period of respite from JB,
but he wasn’t grateful and he wasn’t amused: he was annoyed, both by JB’s
easy playfulness with race and by his using this stupid, gimmicky project
(for which he would probably get an A) to make a commentary on
Malcolm’s identity, which was really none of JB’s business.
Living with JB under the terms of his project (and really, when were they

not negotiating their lives around JB’s whims and whimsies?) was actually
very much like living with JB under normal circumstances. Minimizing his
conversations with Malcolm did not reduce the number of times JB asked
Malcolm if he could pick up something for him at the store, or refill his
laundry card since Malcolm was going anyway, or if he could borrow
Malcolm’s copy of Don Quixote for Spanish class because he’d left his in
the basement men’s room in the library. His not speaking to Willem didn’t

also mean that there wasn’t plenty of nonverbal communication, including
lots of texts and notes that he’d scribble down (“Scrning of Godfather at
Rex’s—coming?”) and hand him, which Malcolm was positive was not
what Lozano had intended. And his poor-man’s Ionesconian exchanges with
Jude suddenly dissolved when he needed Jude to do his calculus homework,
at which point Ionesco abruptly transformed into Mussolini, especially after

Ionesco realized that there was a whole other problem set he hadn’t even
begun because he had been busy in the men’s room in the library, and class
began in forty-three minutes (“But that’s enough time for you, right,
Judy?”).
Naturally, JB being JB and their peers easy prey for anything that was
glib and glittery, JB’s little experiment was written up in the school paper,
and then in a new black literary magazine, There Is Contrition, and became,

for a short tedious period, the talk of the campus. The attention had revived