A Little Life (90 page)

And then behind him he heard another pair of footsteps slapping against the pavement, and a familiar jangling noise, and he knew it was Dr. Traylor. He didn’t even shout at him, he didn’t even threaten, but as he turned his head to see how close the doctor was—and he was very close, just a few yards behind him—he tripped and fell, his cheek banging against the road.

After he had fallen, all of his energy deserted him, a flock of birds rising noisily and swiftly flying away, and he saw that the jangling noise was Dr. Traylor’s unbuckled belt, which he was sliding out from his pants and then using to beat him, and he huddled into himself as he was hit and hit and hit. All that time, the doctor said nothing, and all he could hear were Dr. Traylor’s breaths, his gasps from exertion as he brought the belt down harder and harder on his back, his legs, his neck.

Back at the house, the beating continued, and over the next days,
the next weeks, he was beat more. Not regularly—he never knew when it might happen next—but often enough so that coupled with his lack of food, he was always dizzy, he was always weak: he felt he would never have the strength to run again. As he feared, the sex also got worse, and he was made to do things that he was never able to talk about, not to anyone, not even to himself, and again, although it wasn’t always terrifying, it was often enough so that he lived in a constant half daze of fear, so that he knew that he would die in Dr. Traylor’s house. One night he had a dream of himself as a man, a real adult, but he was still in the basement and waiting for Dr. Traylor, and he knew in the dream that something had happened to him, that he had lost his mind, that he was like his roommate in the home, and he woke and prayed that he might die soon. During the daytime, as he slept, he dreamed of Brother Luke, and when he woke from those dreams he realized how much Luke had always protected him, how well he had treated him, how kind he had been to him. He had limped to the top of the wooden staircase then, and thrown himself down it, and then had pulled himself up and had done it again.

And then one day (Three months later? Four? Later, Ana would tell him that Dr. Traylor had said it was twelve weeks after he had found him at the gas station), Dr. Traylor said, “I’m tired of you. You’re dirty and you disgust me and I want you to leave.”

He couldn’t believe it. But then he remembered to speak. “Okay,” he said, “okay. I’ll leave now.”

“No,” said Dr. Traylor, “you’ll leave how I want you to leave.”

For several days, nothing happened, and he assumed that this too had been a lie, and he was grateful that he hadn’t gotten too excited, that he was finally able to recognize a lie when he was told it. Dr. Traylor had begun to serve him his meals on a fold of the day’s newspaper, and one day he looked at the date and realized it was his birthday. “I am fifteen,” he announced to the quiet room, and hearing himself say those words—the hopes, the fantasies, the impossibilities that only he knew lay behind them—he was sick. But he didn’t cry: his ability to not cry was his only accomplishment, the only thing he could take pride in.

And then one night Dr. Traylor came downstairs with his fire poker. “Get up,” he said, and jabbed him in the back with the poker as he fumblingly climbed the stairs, falling to his knees and getting up again and tripping again and standing again. He was prodded all the
way to the front door, which was ajar, just slightly, and then outside, into the night. It was still cold, and still wet, but even through his fear he could recognize that the weather was changing, that even as time had suspended itself for him, it had not for the rest of the world, in which the seasons had marched on uncaringly; he could smell the air turning green. Next to him was a bare bush with a black branch, but at its very tip it was sprouting buboes of pale lilac, and he stared at it frantically, trying to seize a picture of it and hold it in his mind, before he was poked forward.

At the car Dr. Traylor held open the trunk and jabbed him again with the fire poker, and he could hear himself making sounds like sobs, but he wasn’t crying, and he climbed inside, although he was so weak that Dr. Traylor had to help him, pinching the sleeve of his shirt between his fingers so he wouldn’t have to actually touch him.

They drove. The trunk was clean and large, and he rolled about in it, feeling them go around corners and up hills and down hills, and then along long stretches of plain, even road. And then the car swerved left and he was being bounced along some uneven surface and then the car stopped.

For a while, three minutes—he counted—nothing happened, and he listened and listened but he could hear nothing, just his own breaths, his own heart.

The trunk opened, and Dr. Traylor helped him out, plucking his shirt, and shoved him to the front of the car with the fire poker. “Stay there,” he said, and he did, shivering, watching the doctor get back into the car, roll down the window, lean out at him. “Run,” the doctor said, and when he stood there, frozen, “you like running so much, right? So run.” And Dr. Traylor started the engine and finally, he woke and ran.

They were in a field, a large barren square of dirt where there would in a few weeks be grass but now there was nothing, just patches of shallow ice that broke under his bare feet like pottery, and small white pebbles that glowed like stars. The field dipped in the middle, just slightly, and on his right was the road. He couldn’t see how big the road was, only that there was one, but there were no cars passing. To his left the field was fenced with wire, but it was farther away, and he couldn’t see what lay beyond the wire.

He ran, the car just behind him. At first it actually felt good to be running, to be outdoors, to be away from that house: even this, the ice
under his feet like glass, the wind smacking against his face, the tap of the fender as it nudged against the back of his legs, even all this was better than that house, that room with its cinder-block walls and window so small it was no window at all.

He ran. Dr. Traylor followed him, and sometimes he would accelerate, and he would run faster. But he couldn’t run like he used to run, and he fell, and fell again. Each time he fell, the car would slow, and Dr. Traylor would call out—not angrily, not even loudly—“Get up. Get up and run; get up and run or we’re going back to the house,” and he would make himself stand and run again.

He ran. He didn’t know then that this was the last time in his life that he would ever run, and much later he would wonder: If I had known that, would I have been able to run faster? But of course it was an impossible question, a non-question, an axiom with no solution. He fell again and again, and on the twelfth time, he was moving his mouth, trying to say something, but nothing would come out. “Get up,” he heard the man say. “Get up. The next time you fall will be the last,” and he got up again.

By this time he was no longer running, he was walking and stumbling, he was crawling from the car and the car was bumping against him harder and harder. Make this stop, he thought, make this stop. He remembered—who had told him this? one of the brothers, but which one?—a story of a piteous little boy, a boy, he had been told, in much worse circumstances than he was in, who after being so good for so long (another way in which he and the boy had been different), prayed one night to God to take him: I’m ready, the boy said in the story, I’m ready, and an angel, terrible and golden-winged, with eyes that burned with fire, appeared and wrapped his wings around the boy and the boy turned to cinders and was gone, released from this world.

I’m ready
, he said,
I’m ready
, and he waited for the angel with his awful, fearsome beauty to come save him.

The last time he fell, he couldn’t get up again. “Get up!” he heard Dr. Traylor yell. “Get up!” But he couldn’t. And then he heard the engine start again, and he felt the headlights coming toward him, two streams of fire like the angel’s eyes, and he turned his head to the side and waited, and the car came toward him and then over him and it was done.

And that was the end. After that, he became an adult. As he lay
in the hospital, Ana sitting by his side, he made promises to himself. He evaluated the mistakes he had made. He never had known whom to trust: he had followed anyone who had shown him any kindness. After, though, he decided that he would change this. No longer would he trust people so quickly. No longer would he have sex. No longer would he expect to be saved.

“It’ll never be this bad,” Ana used to say to him in the hospital. “Things’ll never be this bad again,” and although he knew she meant the pain, he also liked to think she meant his life in general: that with every year, things would get better. And she had been right: things did get better. And Brother Luke had been right as well, because when he was sixteen, his life changed. A year after Dr. Traylor, he was in the college he had dreamed of; with every day he didn’t have sex, he was becoming cleaner and cleaner. His life became more improbable by the year. Every year, his own good fortunes multiplied and intensified, and he was astonished again and again by the things and generosities that were bequeathed to him, by the people who entered his life, people so different from the people he had known that they seemed to be another species altogether: How, after all, could Dr. Traylor and Willem both be named the same sort of being? How could Father Gabriel and Andy? How could Brother Luke and Harold? Did what existed in the first group also exist in the second, and if so, how had that second group chosen otherwise, how had they chosen what to become? Things had not just corrected themselves; they had reversed themselves, to an almost absurd degree. He had gone from nothing to an embarrassing bounty. He would remember, then, Harold’s claim that life compensated for its losses, and he would realize the truth of that, although sometimes it would seem like life had not just compensated for itself but had done so extravagantly, as if his very life was begging him to forgive it, as if it were piling riches upon him, smothering him in all things beautiful and wonderful and hoped-for so he wouldn’t resent it, so he would allow it to keep moving him forward. And so, as the years went by, he broke his promises to himself again and again. He
did
end up following people who were kind to him. He
did
trust people again. He
did
have sex again. He
did
hope to be saved. And he was right to do so: not every time, of course, but most of the time. He ignored what the past had taught him and more often than he should have been, he was rewarded for it. He regretted none of it, not even the sex, because he
had had it with hope, and to make someone else happy, someone who had given him everything.

One night shortly after he and Willem had become a couple, they had been at a dinner party at Richard’s, a raucous, casual affair of just people they loved and people they liked—JB and Malcolm and Black Henry Young and Asian Henry Young and Phaedra and Ali and all of their boyfriends and girlfriends, their husbands and wives. He was in the kitchen helping Richard prepare dessert, and JB came in—he was a little drunk—and put his arm around his neck and kissed him on the cheek. “Well, Judy,” he said, “you really ended up with it all in the end, didn’t you? The career, the money, the apartment, the man. How’d you get so lucky?” JB had grinned at him, and he had grinned back. He was glad Willem wasn’t there to overhear that comment, because he knew Willem would get testy at what he saw as JB’s jealousy, at his conviction that everyone else had, and had had, life easier than he did, that he, Jude, was blessed in a way that no one else was.

But he didn’t see it like this. He knew it was in part JB’s way of being ironic, of congratulating him for fortune that they both knew was, yes, excessive but also deeply appreciated. And if he was to be honest, he was also flattered by JB’s jealousy: to JB, he wasn’t a cripple who was being cosmically repaid for a lousy run; he was JB’s equal, someone in whom JB saw only the things to envy and never the things to pity. And besides, JB was right: How
did
he get so lucky? How
did
he end up with everything he had? He was never to know; he was always to wonder.

“I don’t know, JB,” he said, handing him the first slice of cake and smiling at him, as from the dining room, he could hear Willem’s voice saying something, and then a blast of laughter from everyone else, a sound of pure delight. “But you know, I’ve been lucky all my life.”

T
HE WOMAN
’
S NAME
is Claudine and she is a friend of a friend of an acquaintance, a jewelry designer, which is something of a deviation for him, as he usually only sleeps with people in the industry, who are more accustomed to, more forgiving of, temporary arrangements.

She is thirty-three, with long dark hair that lightens at its tips, and very small hands, hands like a child’s, on which she wears rings that she has made, dark with gold and glinting with stones; before they have sex, she takes them off last, as if these rings, not her underwear, are what conceal the most private parts of her.

They have been sleeping together—not seeing each other, because he sees no one—for almost two months, which again is a deviation for him, and he knows he will have to end it soon. He had told her when they had begun that it was only sex, that he was in love with someone else, and that he couldn’t spend the night, not ever, and she had seemed fine with that; she had said she was fine with it, anyway, and that she was in love with someone else herself. But he has seen no evidence of another man in her apartment, and whenever he texts, she is always available. Another warning sign: he will have to end it.

Now he kisses her on her forehead, sits up. “I have to go,” he says.

“No,” she says. “Stay. Just a little longer.”

“I can’t,” he says.

“Five minutes,” she says.

“Five,” he agrees, and lies back down. But after five minutes he kisses her again on the side of the face. “I really do have to go,” he tells
her, and she makes a noise, one of protest and resignation, and turns over onto her side.

He goes to her bathroom, showers and rinses out his mouth, comes back and kisses her again. “I’ll text you,” he says, disgusted by how he has been reduced to a vocabulary consisting almost entirely of clichés. “Thank you for letting me come over.”