The Late Americans

by Brandon Taylor

Seamus felt some of that old Marxist guilt. The reflexive pity and shame of being a little better off than a person to whom he was speaking.

Fyodor found it funny sometimes, but mostly, he wondered why it was that things couldn’t work the way they were supposed to. But then maybe this was the way things were supposed to work, he thought. Maybe things were supposed to bleed together.

People in graduate school were always talking about going to law school, except for the people in law school, who talked about going into real estate. Painters, dancers, poets, and even scientists dreamed at their desks of the law, of a codified system that ran through all their lives and kept them from bilious harm. What they wanted was something that made sense and made money and could convert their temporary suffering into something more stable and right.

They were not stupid, but they certainly were not smart either, and he resented this, their need for him to educate them. What he wanted was for no one to need him, to require of him nothing. Because that way he wouldn’t have to feel this way, this awful terror at comprehending his own failure.

“I just mean. We get so hung up on these labels, like poet, painter, dancer, grad student—it’s all because we’re godless faggots and our world has no central organizing theme anymore.”

He had gone around giving away all his power, seeking certainty, approval. But that’s what children did. Seamus had been a child, selfish and stubborn in his ways.