Page 87 of A Little Life
“When?” he had sobbed.
“Soon,” said Luke, “soon. A year. I promise,” and he had nodded,although he had long since learned that the brother’s promises were meaningless.
But then the brother said that he would teach him a secret, something that would help him relieve his frustrations, and the next day he had taught him to cut himself, and had given him a bag already packed with razors and alcohol wipes and cotton and bandages. “You’ll have to experiment to see what feels best,” the brother had said, and had shown him how to clean and bandage the cut once he had finished. “So this is yours,” he said, giving him the bag. “You let me know when you need more supplies, and I’ll get them for you.” He had at first missed the theatrics, the force and weight, of his falls and his slams, but he soon grew to appreciate the secrecy, the control of the cuts. Brother Luke was right: the cutting was better. When he did it, it was as if he was draining away the poison, the filth, the rage inside him. It was as if his old dream of leeches had come to life and had the same effect, the effect he had always hoped it would. He wished he was made of metal, of plastic: something that could be hosed down and scrubbed clean. He had a vision of himself being pumped full of water and detergent and bleach and then blasted dry, everything inside him made hygienic again. Now, after the final client of the night had left, he took Brother Luke’s place in the bathroom, and until he heard the brother telling him it was time to come to bed, his body was his to do with what he chose.
He was so dependent on Luke: for his food, for his protection, and now for his razors. When he needed to be taken to the doctor because he was sick—he got infections from the clients, no matter how hard Brother Luke tried, and sometimes he didn’t properly clean his cuts and they became infected as well—Brother Luke took him, and got him the antibiotics he needed. He grew accustomed to Brother Luke’s body, his mouth, his hands: he didn’t like them, but he no longer jolted when Luke began to kiss him, and when the brother put his arms around him, he obediently returned the embrace. He knew there was no one else who would ever treat him as well as Luke did: even when he did something wrong, Luke never yelled at him, and even after all these years, he had still never hit him. Earlier, he had thought he might someday have a client who would be better, who might want to take him away, but now he knew that would never be the case. Once, he had started getting undressed before the client was ready, and the man had slapped his face and snapped at him. “Jesus,” he’d said, “slow down,you little slut. How many times have you done this, anyway?” And as he always did whenever the clients hit him, Luke had come out of the bathroom to yell at the man, and had made the man promise to behave better if he was going to stay. The clients called him names: he was a slut, a whore, filthy, disgusting, a nympho (he had to look that one up), a slave, garbage, trash, dirty, worthless, a nothing. But Luke never said any of those things to him. He was perfect, said Luke, he was smart, he was good at what he did and there was nothing wrong with what he did.
The brother still talked of their being together, although now he talked of a house on the sea, somewhere in central California, and would describe the stony beaches, the noisy birds, the storm-colored water. They would be together, the two of them, like a married couple. No longer were they father and son; now they were equals. When he turned sixteen, they would get married. They would go on a honeymoon to France and Germany, where he could finally use his languages around real French and Germans, and to Italy and Spain, where Brother Luke had lived for two years: once as a student, once the year after he graduated college. They would buy him a piano so he could play and sing. “Other people won’t want you if they knew how many clients you’d been with,” the Brother said. “And they’d be silly to not want you. But I’ll always want you, even if you’ve been with ten thousand clients.” He would retire when he was sixteen, Brother Luke said, and he had cried then, quietly, because he had been counting the days until he was twelve, when Brother Luke had promised he could stop.
Sometimes Luke apologized for what he had to do: when the client was cruel, when he was in pain, when he bled or was bruised. And sometimes Luke acted as if he enjoyed it. “Well, that was a good one,” he’d say, after one of the men left. “I could tell you liked that one, am I right? Don’t deny it, Jude! I heard you enjoying yourself. Well, it’s good. It’s good to enjoy your work.”
He turned twelve. They were now in Oregon, working their way toward California, Luke said. He had grown again; Brother Luke predicted he would be six foot one, six foot two when he stopped—still shorter than Brother Luke, but not by much. His voice was changing. He wasn’t a child anymore, and this made finding clients more difficult. Now there were fewer individual clients and more groups. He hated the groups, but Luke said that was the best he could do. He looked too oldfor his age: clients thought he was thirteen or fourteen, and at this age, Luke said, every year counted.
It was fall; September twentieth. They were in Montana, because Luke thought he would like to see the night sky there, the stars as bright as electrical lights. There was nothing strange about that day. Two days earlier, he’d had a large group, and it had been so awful that Luke had not only canceled his clients for the day after but had let him sleep alone for both nights, the bed completely his. That evening, though, life had returned to normal. Luke joined him in bed, and began kissing him. And then, as they were having sex, there was a banging at their door, so loud and insistent and sudden that he had almost bitten down on Brother Luke’s tongue. “Police,” he could hear, “open up. Open up right now.”
Brother Luke had clamped his hand over his mouth. “Don’t say a word,” he hissed.
“Police,” shouted the voice again. “Edgar Wilmot, we have a warrant for your arrest. Open the door right now.”
He was confused: Who was Edgar Wilmot? Was he a client? He was about to tell Brother Luke that they had made a mistake when he looked up and saw his face and realized that they were looking for Brother Luke.
Brother Luke pulled out of him and motioned for him to stay in the bed. “Don’t move,” he whispered. “I’ll be right back.” And then he ran into the bathroom; he could hear the door lock click.
“No,” he’d whispered wildly, as Luke left him. “Don’t leave me, Brother Luke, don’t leave me alone.” But the brother had left anyway.
And then everything seemed to move very slowly and very fast, both at the same time. He hadn’t moved, he had been too petrified, but then there was the splintering of wood, and the room was filled with men holding flashlights high by their heads, so that he couldn’t see their faces. One of them came over to him and said something to him—he couldn’t hear for the noise, for his panic—and pulled up his underwear and helped him to his feet. “You’re safe now,” someone told him.
He heard one of the men swear, and shout from the bathroom, “Get an ambulance right now,” and he wrestled free from the man who was holding him and ducked under another man’s arm and made three fast leaps to the bathroom, where he had seen Brother Luke with anextension cord around his neck, hanging from the hook in the center of the bathroom ceiling, his mouth open, his eyes shut, his face as gray as his beard. He had screamed, then, screamed and screamed, and then he was being dragged from the room, screaming Brother Luke’s name again and again.
He remembers little of what followed. He was questioned again and again; he was taken to a doctor at a hospital who examined him and asked him how many times he had been raped, but he hadn’t been able to answer him:Hadhe been raped? He had agreed to this, to all of this; it had been his decision, and he had made it. “How many times have you had sex?” the doctor asked instead, and he said, “With Brother Luke, or with the others?” and the doctor had said, “What others?” And after he had finished telling him, the doctor had turned away from him and put his face in his hands and then looked back at him and had opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. And then he knew for certain that what he had been doing was wrong, and he felt so ashamed, so dirty that he had wanted to die.
They took him to the home. They brought him his things: his books, the Navajo doll, the stones and twigs and acorns and the Bible with its pressed flowers he had carried with him from the monastery, his clothes that the other boys made fun of. At the home, they knew what he was, they knew what he had done, they knew he was ruined already, and so he wasn’t surprised when some of the counselors began doing to him what people had been doing to him for years. Somehow, the other boys also knew what he 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 hereallymade the wrong decision? Would itreallyhave 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.
He was careful never to say his name aloud, but sometimes he thought it, and no matter how old he got, no matter how many years had passed, there would appear Luke’s face, smiling, conjured in an instant. He thought of Luke when the two of them were falling in love, when he was being seduced and had been too much of a child, too naïve, too lonely and desperate for affection to know it. He was running to the greenhouse, he was opening the door, the heat and smell of flowers were surrounding him like a cape. It was the last time he had been so simply happy, the last time he had known such uncomplicated joy. “And here’s my beautiful boy!” Luke would cry. “Oh, Jude—I’m so happy to see you.”
