The Late Americans

by Brandon Taylor

The effluvia of praise washes over Beth, who receives their compliments with a placid glow. The instructor, never quite in contention for the Pulitzer but never quite out of it either, nods slowly as he presides over them like a fucking youth minister. Or so Seamus imagined as he drowsed in half focus. Then, coming back to himself, to the room, becoming present, he really looked. Beth’s lips were in a thin line, her eyebrows in deep grooves. Miserable despite the praise, when praise seemed so much the point of the poems they wrote. To be clapped on the back. Celebrated. Turned into modern saints and martyrs.

Curiouser and curiouser, thought Seamus, that a person, presented with what they wanted most, could seem so miserable about it.

These sundry interruptions and redactions, all the skirmishes and misdirection. Like a dog finally catching its tail and chewing it down to the gristle.

This wasn’t poetry. This was the aping of poetry in pursuit of validation.

It would have been easier for these poets to say that sometimes you lied and sometimes you were mistaken and sometimes the truth changed on you in the course of telling. That sometimes trauma reconfigured your relationship both to the truth and to the very apparatus of telling. But no, they went on signifying. Tethering their bad ideas to recognized names and hoping someone would call them smart, call them sharp, call them radical and right, call them a poet and a thinker and a mind, even if they were just children.

She was the kind of poet whose work was chiefly about herself, as if all that had transpired in the existence of humankind was no more consequential than the slightly nervy account of her first use of a tampon. He thought her poems craven and beautiful and utterly dishonest.

But Seamus couldn’t stop. He tasted the glut of their attention. The sweet iron tang of it. He was thirsty for more. The looks on their faces, the anger, the annoyance. So sure of themselves. Of their positions.

Seamus bit down at the corner of his thumb, chewed away at a translucent sliver of dead skin. Then, like a penny at the bottom of a well, down and down below the surface of his anger, an idea glinted.

“You know what I should do?” “Get drunk? That’s my plan,” Oliver said. “I should write a poem called ‘Gorgon’s Head’ and watch those uptight assholes lose it.” “Do it,” Oliver said, leaning against the rail. The wind, raspy with cold, moved through his hair.

Again, the leading edge of an image as forceful as a premonition: Oliver’s face gone ...

There was a hostility to public life now. Or maybe that hostility had always existed, and what was new was simply the directing of it toward people who had long been exempt. Seamus thought that the whole thing had the absurd drama of a great play. All the Shakespearean misunderstanding and misspeaking, everything doubling in its extremity and consequences until it ruptured into something truly cathartic. Except that there was no catharsis. Just people hardening into the caricatures of their roles.

The water frothed near the shore under the struts of the bridge. Some plastic bottles had been caught there and filled slowly with river silt. Seamus crouched to scoop up some rocks. He lobbed them into the center of the river, each descent dark and irrevocable.

He’d gotten the job when he first came to Iowa City because, unlike Oliver and some of his classmates, he didn’t get the good fellowship, and the nonfiction goons across the river had taken all the comp/rhet sections for themselves. The director had looked at him with somnolent pity. “Sometimes, our students have had great luck finding jobs in the area,” she said in what she must have imagined was a helpful tone. “Little things to supplement.” He knew a lot about that word, supplement.

It was the height of foolishness, academia. You sank down and down in debt, in desperation, in hunger, so that you could feel a little special, a little brilliant in your small, dark corner of the universe, knowing something that no one else knew. Art was worth many things, but was it worth putting your whole family on the brink of extinction? Seamus didn’t understand Gerard’s calculus. He loved poetry, but he couldn’t always square it with the essentials of life.

He found Lena at the counter, cutting aromatics. She was on the other side of forty, but she had skinny arms and the kind of stubby ponytail Seamus associated with girls from his middle school. Her hair was box-dye copper with black roots. She looked up at him, watery green eyes, and gave him a smile, showing the craggy craters of her gums, missing teeth on the right side of her mouth. “Bisque,” he said.

He peeled a fresh pile of onions, and pulled the knife through their bulk with one certain motion. He loved that first bite of the knife through the material wet of the ingredients. He could read, in that very first moment, the final taste of the dish. It was just an onion, but in bisecting it, he felt a little closer to himself.

The partial cuts, first vertically and then horizontally, getting a dice the cheap way. Hot oil in the pot, waiting for it to shimmer. The sizzle of the onions and celery. Tossing them around, letting them settle, sweat. Eunice’s radio down in the mudroom, Chet Baker’s perfect, clear horn, the sweet sadness of his music rising up to them out of the under dark.

Seamus thought with a silly kind of meanness that if he were another kind of writer, a tacky writer, he could write about that. About the smell of his father’s rotting foot. About the simultaneous brightness and dullness of the beige room where his father did rehabilitation at the hospital, watching him fasten himself into plastic limbs that pinched and bit. Or watching him stretch the partial nubs of his fingers as wide as they would go, and the anger in his eyes when he found that he could no longer do this simple task. Outside the window of the rehab room, there had been a small garden with a cedar tree in it. Seamus spent a great deal of time looking at that tree while his father cursed as he was Velcroed into and out of temporary prosthetics. Or he could write about the smell of pills sweating in their plastic cylinder, like sea salt and shit.

Their dark house in the middle of a field of yellow grass, as if the land were unwilling to believe that spring and then summer had come. Everything about the Pennsylvania house was cold and half eclipsed.

When he returned to his parents, he was taller and paler. His parents looked like their anger and their pain and their sadness had burned them through, leaving only the struts of their foundations.

But he knew, in a way that was more feeling than knowledge,

Seamus smoked out on the garden steps. The cold had deepened as it descended. Out over the tree line, the glinting refractory of the town’s edge. The high-output glow of the CVS across the highway blunted into gauzy white by the moisture in the air.

Why couldn’t his professor look at him like a peer, like an equal, rather than a riddle of pedagogy?

In college, American Spirits became shorthand for a certain kind of young person they all wanted to be. Stylishly unkempt in the way of the 1960s Greenwich Village crowd, but in far-flung college towns where all they had was affectation. But that kind of putting-on had gone out with stomp-clap-yeah in the mid-2000s, and marooned them all in a sea of cold, sterile irony. It was now outré to smoke American Spirits, but Seamus couldn’t break the habit. His parents smoked Menthol 100s.

It was a civic inattentiveness of the soul that had made him say something so stupid.

Sometimes Fyodor thought Timo was the smartest person he had ever known. But there were other times when he thought Timo was a moron. Or, if not stupid, then just very naive in the way some black people could be when they’d grown up with money and parents who believed in them.

If you were mixed, you were black. Fyodor had no issue with that. But Timo was irritatingly middle class, and sometimes that gave him illusions about how the world saw him.

He had inherited to some degree her very pragmatic view of things—that you had to survive, and that survival was the most important part of life. Hardship was just what soft people called living. That sort of thing.

His chest looked broader, his shoulders wider somehow. He seemed more precisely himself. In a quantitative sense, as if there were more of him.

Fyodor watched a hawk skim low to the roof of the sandstone building before turning and shooting back up into the sky. It was an oppressively beautiful day.

There had been four other shootings across the South in the last month or so, each rising for a brief instant above the noise and clamor of the news, the whole country looking in one direction at one thing, burning a hole in the fabric of the culture. But then, the next day or the next, their thoughts turned back to the common demands of daily life. Everyone went back into the anonymous whir of things, safe inside their irrelevance.

His hands felt filmy and greasy. The car smelled like pine air freshener.

Every dying species sought its own kind of comfort.

The wind chapped his knuckles, but the work was good, and it left him feeling tired and hot. On bright days, he lay on his back in the bed of the truck and listened to the gray wind comb the grass flat. The fields were muddy. The spindly trees on the edge of the forest swayed.

The road was easy, a stretch of slick darkness running through yellow and brown fields. They sometimes passed houses crouching in oncoming crepuscular light, and it was like a painting of the dark interior of this country. Houses stripped by the wind and lesser fortune: white clapboard or crumbling brick; low, dark roofs; large front windows or slits of gold light in falling evening. Hills rose fitfully at the turns in the road, wild grass tufted out of their backs like fur. There were scraggly trees and frayed rope hanging from their branches and large tires sitting in yards or propped against sheds. The whole commonness of the world was before them.

The drugs were, at first, a part of it. A way of asserting their dominance over their bodies, over their parents, over the paternal order of their instructors and the needs of dance. Their way of being independent, being alive in their flesh, until they had to wake up at the first gray slice of dawn and pour themselves into tights and limber up before morning class. The drugs were, at first, just another way of putting on the pelt of how they wanted to be seen. Beautiful, young, but older than their years, wise in that they could get their bodies to do what they wanted.

That’s how young they still were, that they made plans to do something bad.

The modern dancers were a dense core of five or six, and they held themselves back from the other dancers as though they were superior, and perhaps they were. Modern was technical and demanding—part acting, part contact sport, part nervous breakdown. The person who ran the modern section was one of those philosopher artists who shouted Wittgenstein at the dancers as they worked their way through the tangled knot of his choreography. It was less a dance than an institutionalized destruction of the self.

“It’s Burns, actually,” someone interrupted. It was a guy with reddish hair and sad brown eyes. He didn’t look like he belonged to anyone.

The porch had emptied about a half hour before, but the kitchen was still dense with bodies, an overcrowded nucleus. They would fission eventually. Give themselves to the night on their way home, trailing behind them their scents and their sweat and their voices, a comet trail of the time they’d had.

The part of class he liked best was the case studies, thick packets of data on companies that had risen and fallen and been destroyed in the grand concourse of the market. He found it quite pleasurable, really, to read over the data preceding a decline, trying to pick out in the sea of numbers where the tide had started to turn, however imperceptibly, against the company. The infirmity in the organism of commerce.

Summer in Iowa was a closed fist. Nowhere to run except to the movies, if you had cash for it. And even then. Even then.

Life was full of such moments, the self momentarily exposed.

He wasn’t interested in business, in any of that entrepreneurship bullshit that was really just prosperity gospel for atheists.

This was not true. Well, it wasn’t entirely true. Well, it was entirely factual, but it was also the least generous possible reading of what had happened.

The more Timo watched the clip, the sadder it made him, and when he began to watch the other clips that sadness became something else, more complicated, as if the watching were a sieve through which his emotion was being passed over and over again, and in the refining, more of its distinct character emerged.

It was one of those gray Saturdays in early spring—dense with cold under an opaque sky lit like a blank movie screen.

Timo held his breath, tried to be another kind of person. But it killed him to let the record go uncorrected this way.

It was so tiresome having to make a grown man feel like he had something to offer.

The dancers had an aloof, feral quality to them, like coyotes in a zoo. Their shoes squeaked on the floor as they leveraged themselves forward and through the air. Loose screws rattled, and the mirrors shook as the dancers landed. They didn’t notice him, or look toward him. They were always apart from him, apart from one another too, even though they were squeezed together in rows, formations coming together and then undone. Goran hated the repetition. He called it pretentious scales, that’s all it is. They want me to go in and play them a fucking waltz and then walk out. That’s it. Timo himself hadn’t minded that so much at the time, when he played. It had been a way to absent himself. But that was over now.