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.