The Late Americans

by Brandon Taylor

It was the sort of room that made you want to whisper. The air just ate your voice.

Playing was a little like dancing that way—the physicality of it, the precise dimensions of the room and the keys, everything as unforgiving as the sides of a polygon drawn on paper. It was the reason that Timo had given it up for math, like trading one brutal occupation with space for another. He could understand the arrangement of finite physical quantities.

Ivan still had a dancer’s grace and muscularity. His movements were precise but smooth, like a practiced habit. He smeared three different kinds of mustard onto a slice of bread, folded it, and ate it like a kid in a cafeteria. He chewed with anguished pleasure.

The public had a distrust of, an animosity toward, so-called public funds channeled into what they considered frivolities. The American economy ran on What good is this to me?

From practical people they each had come, and now they lived out the wet amphibian prologue to their adult lives, dreaming of law school.

It was unbearable to think that this was all humanity had to contain their feelings. These mean kernels of sound.

It was a lie that Timo had not loved piano enough. He had loved it very much, but in a way that was difficult to describe. It was apophatic—he could only describe it through its negation. He only understood how much he loved the piano after he had given it up.

Every day, he felt like a struck tuning fork, vibrating all the time. Except that it wasn’t pitch he was tuned to but something else, some horrible frequency cutting through the universe. Loss, he thought. It was loss.

His back was long and smooth, furry at the lower spine like a tender mammal. His arms were taut and strong. The flexion of his ligaments, the veins running down his forearms, and the plump heft of his ass. His body was beautiful and alive. His shoulders were two swinging blades.

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. He put his head against the desk, hating the feel of himself.

The lights were on in the high window beneath the steeple, which rose and rose into the deep, smooth vault of the sky. Across the street, the parson’s house sat stubby and sincere. Never was there a more midwestern house.

Or maybe everyone was a prodigy if they worked hard enough and long enough and became, at a young age, competent at a thing. Perhaps what people misjudged for prodigious talent was really just unexpected competence.

Those lines had come with a shape and a sound, and he felt that if he could just wedge the poem open, he might manage to scoop the rest out.

Submission. That was what they called it when you sent your work out. When you put your neck on the block and awaited the cold clarity of the blade. You had to believe in the eternal. What came next, after they lopped your head off and hoisted it high in celebration. You had to believe that, in that moment, you became something greater, grander, larger. Submission required belief.

There was a trapezoid of light on his shoulder, some bright fragment torn from a greater plane.

He hated the poem, but hated more that he had liked the poem. How it had outmaneuvered him. You were supposed to be in control of your poetry.

He had wanted to be used. To be run over the edge of someone else’s want to sharpen it.

They were all posturing all the time. Everything they did was a posture, defensive or offensive, meant to demonstrate something to the outside world, perhaps that they were worthy or good or all right, perhaps to imply that they were in on the joke, that they were nothing and all they had were these crude choreographies of the self.

He was around fifty—lean and tall, with a meanness native to those who accept with bitterness a lesser, faded beauty later in life.

Noah had been raised on Laura Ingalls Wilder and bad Chinese takeout. His dad smoked and drove a truck and wore denim jackets, and sometimes he’d swear and sometimes he’d pat the back of Noah’s head and smile and say nothing.

He thought he could understand Bert a little now, seeing the fields and how close the sky stooped in the distance. He understood the peculiar loneliness of such a place, the way that loneliness held fast to you, no matter how far away you ran. You grow up in a place like this, Noah thought, and it haunts your dreams until you die.

There was an astringent, Jesuit pragmatism to the novel Noah was reading. It made him anxious for something to grasp on to—fury, pain, destruction. Instead, the novel felt like a cool, flat sheet of ice into which he had wedged the dull, inadequate blade of his attention.

It was, Noah knew, ridiculous. Sentiment pulled inside out and turned to spite.

Her palms on the glass felt heavy and hot. She could feel the impact, that prickly smack, though it hadn’t yet happened. She might break the glass, send it plummeting down into the garden. She might do anything at all, and it was the array of what she might do that kept her from doing anything.

Parents went on talking and reading, shielding their eyes from the sun, turning to one another and placing hands on thighs, on shoulders, on backs, this choreography of love and life, and their children went on screaming and destroying and tearing at the seams of the world.

She saw him one time in the last year, and it was true, he looked ruined, like an old operation stripped for parts and of limited utility. He didn’t pity himself, which made her want to pity him, but he wouldn’t have it. At the ends of their phone calls, there was always a space the size of I love you, and then nothing, not even a dial tone.

The deer never entered the light. They lurked in the darkness like a stray, half-formed thought or a memory on the edge of consciousness.

It could be like that. Days without speaking to another person, her voice going cool and raspy with mucus, like a membrane reknitting itself after a trauma.

Fatima thinks about money in the real-time, concrete way: as in, how is she going to pay her tuition, feed herself, launder her tights, pay for afternoon movies, pay for electricity, for internet, for heat. Money is like an animal, changeful and anxious, ready to flee or bite. There is never enough of it.

Freedom through restraint, through revision. That is the thing about truly great dance. It has the look of being totally natural, easy, but it is in fact the result of many hours of work and dedication to the understanding and articulation of the smallest possible units of motion. It is abstract and analytical. It is emotional.

What Fatima wants from life changes daily—sometimes what she thinks is that she’d like nothing from life except to be free to change her mind at any moment. She’d like freedom from having to feed herself or buy clothes or pay bills, material freedom. But she does not have that. So she is returning to her parents, where she will work at a corner store and save up money to move to New York. The commonness is so maddening to her. Everyone moves to New York. Everyone saves and scrimps just to suffer and struggle so that they can say that they lived, that they tried. How stupid. How stupid. How stupid.

Overhead, a loud crack of thunder that shakes the glass and the table. It reverberates through her and through them, and for that moment everything is united, vibrating like one great plucked string.

It seems like the kind of thing people write Facebook posts about, eliciting sympathy, eliciting collective rage. The sort of story that unspools in a thread on Twitter or a long caption under a teary photo of her face on Instagram. Imagistic, scrubbed of all human particularity and specificity—it’s a kind of story, a kind of thing that happens to people, but that exists primarily as anecdote ready for consumption. Another kind of local economy.

He remembered remembering her, and it was this tough, artificial memory that had grafted deep inside him, so that it was only in small, quiet moments that his mind touched the real flesh of her memory and he was torn anew.

It was a moment of peace. They had all put down their weapons. Their sharp and pointed ideas about one another and themselves and the world.

The trees were quiet, but they moved in the breeze. It would rain again later that day, surely. He could tell in the clouds, their slow, unfolding language.