Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

I know what you two talk about when I’m not around,’ she says quietly. Wallace spins so that they face each other again. He is surprised to find her looking down into the space between her thighs. Her scalp is red, dry. It is a curious position for her. As if someone set a stuffed animal on a shelf and left it. The blank vacancy of her body. He feels a flicker of sympathy, the memory of last night, being discussed like an object of communal fascination.

Wallace can smell his own blood. He touches the end of his nose to see if there is blood there, but no, he isn’t bleeding. There is just the metallic sheen of blood coating everything. Its heat. Its bitterness. He can taste it too. ‘Oh, no one

The world is momentarily illuminated by something coarse and bright. He blinks. He grips the back of his chair to keep himself still, steady, even. He thinks of Brigit, her warmth, her kind voice.

He said to Simone, She doesn’t talk that way to anyone else. She doesn’t treat them like this. And Simone said, Wallace. Don’t be dramatic. It isn’t racism. You just need to catch up. Work harder. The most unfair part of it, Wallace thinks, is that when you tell white people that something is racist, they hold it up to the light and try to discern if you are telling the truth. As if they can tell by the grain if something is racist or not, and they always trust their own judgement. It’s unfair because white people have a vested interest in underestimating racism, its amount, its intensity, its shape, its effects. They are the fox in the henhouse.

Nothing. Except to work. And now the work has been turned on him. His work is an insult to them. She hates him because he works, but he works only so that people might not hate him and might not rescind his place in the world. He works only so that he might get by in life on whatever he can muster.

there’s a small channel in him going from his head to his feet, a channel through which a cold substance is churning at all times, cooling him from within, like a second circulatory system. There is something to it, isn’t there? Something beyond his grasp.

that fair?’ Wallace asks. ‘Do you think his job is the reason he downloaded a gay sex app? Or do you think it’s something more elemental?’ ‘I think my boyfriend is trying to cheat on me, is what I think. And I think I want my friend to stay and not throw his life away.’ ‘Persuasive.’

will go wrong. Vincent is not just Vincent, but also a symbol, collecting with each passing day more and more significance. He is a ward, an inoculation against the uncertainty of the future. ‘I hate that you feel this way. I hate that

too long. Mostly fine. This is why Wallace never tells anyone anything. This is why he keeps the truth to himself, because other people don’t know what to do with your shit, with the reality of other people’s feelings. They don’t know what to do when they’ve heard something that does not align with their own perception of things. There is a pause. And a silence. ‘But it was your dad,’

hear that,’ Cole says, nodding. ‘I hear that, Wallace.’ ‘And, uhm, I just, yeah, I’m going through it, working the steps of grief, you know?’ ‘That’s so important.’ Cole touches his arm. ‘I’m so glad you aren’t just internalising things.’ ‘Thanks,’ Wallace says, letting the edge of an emotion he doesn’t feel rise in his voice. ‘It’s been really helpful to have people in my life who really get me.’ ‘We all love you, Wallace,’ Cole says, smiling. He pulls Wallace in for a hug. ‘We all want you to be happy.’

him across the mouth, or forcing him to wash under his arms and between his legs in front of her, in front of company, when she wasn’t subjecting him to the innumerable dark hairs of her anger and her fear and her mistrust – then

Yngve explained it all later, with an arm wrapped around Wallace’s neck, laughing in his ear. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said. ‘But, you know, she’s, like, vegan, so …’ Wallace tried not to look disappointed when he collected his dish of uneaten meatballs at the end of the night, tried not to think of the money he’d spent and the time in his kitchen, wiping sweat, towelling brown stains off his hands, trying to get it exactly right, trying to make the sauce perfect for them – and the little dish, he’d been so proud of the little dish, red

crying. ‘Where’s Thom?’ Wallace asks, and it’s like Emma collapses into a single, dark line. She closes in on him.

Vincent barely pauses, says, ‘How you want to leave, I mean. How you want to quit. Your dad dying. Perspective, right?’ Wallace feels their gazes strike the surface of his body like pellets.

Wallace nods. There is a hollow hissing sound from somewhere overhead. Now that they are all quiet, he can hear it perfectly. What is that, he wonders. That sound like something escaping, a leak.

‘Besides, they spent so much money on your training. It seems ungrateful to leave.’ ‘So I should stay out of gratitude?’ ‘I mean, if you don’t feel you can keep up, then for sure, you should go. But they brought you in knowing what your deficiencies were and—’ ‘My deficiencies?’ ‘Yes. Your deficiencies. I won’t say what they are. You already know. You come from a challenging background. It is unfortunate, but it is how it is.’ Wallace can only taste ashes in his mouth.

Emma puts her head on Wallace’s shoulder, but she won’t say anything either, can’t bring herself to. No one does. No one ever does. Silence is their way of getting by, because if they are silent long enough, then this moment of minor discomfort will pass for them, will fold down into the landscape

They are always laughing. This is it, Wallace thinks. That’s how they get by. Silence and laughter, silence and laughter, switch and swing. The way one glides through this life without having to think about anything hard. He still feels the sting of embarrassment, but it has ebbed. Vincent’s gaze clips the outside of his own. Wallace eats his food. The tasteless, strained, diluted flavour of white people food, its curious texture, its ugliness. He eats his food. He grinds his teeth. His anger is cold. There’s a skin stretching across it.

‘Don’t tell me what I know,’ Miller says, cracking a smile. It is a deflection, and a bad one at that, which annoys Wallace. A deflection out of kindness. A kindness that seeks to encompass all futures, that asserts its constancy regardless of what might come. Miller, stroking the back of Wallace’s neck and looking down at him like an amused nursery school teacher, is saying something,

Wallace nods slowly, carefully, making sure that the gesture is immaculate, perfect, a faultless contrition. He can do this. It is a skill in life, serving this function, to be contrite, to pay obeisance.

thing he has said all morning. The refusal to go forward, to repeat the pattern, to let himself be folded up into this language that robs the world of all its honesty. He does not want to get swallowed up by it again, by this way of looking at things without looking at

them, by this oblique shadow-speak. Just because you say you’re sorry, or you say that someone doesn’t deserve something, does not erase the facts of what has or has not happened, or who has or has not acted. Wallace is tired.

and he becomes aware of the way his body is both a thing on the earth and a vehicle for his entire life’s history. His body is both a tangible self and his depression, his anxiety, his wellness, his illness, his disordered eating, the fear of blood pouring out of him. It is both itself and not itself, image and afterimage. He feels unhappy when he looks at someone beautiful or desirable because he feels the gulf between himself and the other, their body and his body. An accounting of his body’s failures slides down the back of his eyes, and he sees how far from grace he’s been made and planted.

stops. ‘I don’t want you to go.’ But what he means to say is that he does not want Miller to stay or to go, that there is a flat, cold indifference in him, inflected by his nature to please. At heart he wants only to please