The Late Americans

by Brandon Taylor

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

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.

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.

Perhaps it was this that he resented in the work of his peers. It wasn’t that their lives were worse than his or that his life was better than theirs—it was that they all had the same pain, the same hurt, and he didn’t think anyone should go around pretending it was something more than it was: the routine operation of the universe. Small, common things—hurt feelings, cruel parents, strange and wearisome troubles.

and the whole world, the whole procession of its events marched on without a single notice or care that there in their tiny, obscure particle of the galaxy, two people’s hearts were breaking over and over again.

It was one of those empty afternoons that reveals after a long period of solitude just how much your life has turned inward on itself. There was no one to call and nothing to do. No one required her. No one needed her to do anything. She did not feel freedom or sadness—instead, it was as if she’d been soaked through with cold water. The feeling was all that remained.

He would go to the smaller market there, get some eggplant, come back when he learned how to be a human being again.