American Rust

by Philipp Meyer

was lucky growing up in a place like this because in a city, he didn’t know, his mind was like a train where you

couldn’t control the speed. Give it a track and direction or it cracks up.

wherever you go, you still wake up and see the same face in the mirror.”

By a certain age, people had their own trajectory. The best you could do was try to nudge them into a different course, though for the most part, it was like trying to catch a body falling from a skyscraper.

Citizens with pensions and health insurance rarely robbed their neighbors, beat their wives, or cooked up methamphetamine in their back sheds. And yet, everyone wanted to blame the cops—as if the department could somehow stop a society from collapsing. The police need to be more aggressive, they would say, until you caught their kid

stealing a car and twisted his arm a little hard—then you were a monster.

Farther along she couldn’t help noticing the old coal chute stretching the length of the hillside, passing high over the road on its steel supports, the sky visible through its rusted floor; the iron suspension bridge crossing the river. It was sealed at both ends, its entire structure similarly penetrated and pocked by rust. Then it seemed there was a rash of abandoned structures, an enormous steel-sided factory painted powder blue, its smokestacks stained with the

ubiquitous red-brown streaks, its gate chained shut for how many years, it had never been open in her lifetime. In the end it was rust. That was what defined this place. A brilliant observation. She was probably about the ten millionth person to think it.

It really was better to not visit, to go by reputation. At seventeen, you’d pick a school based on the nice architecture, or that a professor had smiled at you, or that your best friend was going there—you made choices based on feelings, which were bound, especially at that age, to be arbitrary and ill-informed and rooted mostly in insecurity.

Five years—when

you said it like that, it didn’t seem so long. But years were lived in days, and hours, and sometimes even a few minutes with Henry could be excruciating,

All the things you needed to know in life—you didn’t learn them until you’d already made your decisions. For better and worse you were shaped by the people around you.

“This isn’t your fault. You did more than anyone could.” She shrugged. “I made one bad decision but I made it every day.”

It didn’t seem to matter much, it was the least of his worries, it was not a game of sums. No matter what you did in life, there was still your own death at the end of it. There was no question they would kill him, they would take their first chance.

If there is any bad luck you will find it only it was not just luck, there had been many ways to avoid it, he hadn’t taken

any of them. It was hopeless, a lost cause. He had slept through life, let the currents take him. He had let the currents take him faster and faster and he had not noticed. He was at the end now, the big drop. It was not only college there had been other choices as well, choices that had revealed him to others, choices that half the town would have jumped at but he, Poe, had chosen another way.

It was countless the pleasures of life there were millions, you could spend your entire life listing them, they were different for every person the feel of oak bark, light in a room, watching a big buck and deciding not to shoot it. It was a privilege you could lose at any time, he had taken it for granted, but he would change his life. He would make his life mean something. You could not go with the current and expect it to turn out fine, he had not known it before but he knew it

now, he would change everything.

But of course they hadn’t done anything. They’d all been born to the right parents, in the right neighborhoods, they went to the right schools, had all the right social instructions, had taken all the right tests. There was simply not a chance they would fail. They’d worked hard but always with the expectation they would get what they wanted—the world had never shown them anything different. Very few of them had earned their places. Everyone admitted how spoiled they were but underneath, there was always the presumption that they deserved it.

Isaac’s friendship with Poe still baffled her. But of course her friendship with Poe must have baffled him as well. Maybe it was that people had always set them, Poe and Isaac, so far apart—Poe because of his talent for everything physical, Isaac because of his mind. The truth was they were both the best at what they did in that school. It was a special sort of small-town bitterness that must have thrived on seeing them both fail.

“He’s a good boy,” he said. “Things will start going better for him.” He said it and it didn’t even feel like a lie, Billy being a good kid, it was just something he wished were true.