MINOR BLACK FIGURES by Brandon Taylor

Author:Brandon Taylor [Taylor, Brandon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Wyeth stood at the corner of White and Cortlandt Alley, smoking.

The street was mostly empty of cars, but full of foot traffic. People walking by with dollar slices and bottles in brown bags, huge plastic cups full of ice. Above, the golden light in the windows of the condos and in-progress construction and development to put in yet more condos. How was it that there were still parts of this city to be gentrified and made-over? It was just modernity polishing itself endlessly. There were storefronts now, though the kinds of stores that sold only the most useless objects. In recent years, a whole category? of store had come into being that seemed to specialize in selling items you’d find on the third-page results of online retailers. How could that possibly be profitable? Surely, it wasn’t. Surely the point of starting a business these days was not actually to make money but to signal to the world that you belonged to that chosen and most worthy class of citizen: the entrepreneur. It’s like these people had run out of excuses to start Instagram accounts so now resorted to opening businesses as a front for their ego-peddling and self-merchandising.

Across the street Wyeth watched two young-ish people negotiate a field of plastic cones and an improvised ramp made from busted reclaim to enter a store. They were the only people inside, browsing among the many, many bright-colored packages of processed snacks and candy. They were young women, he thought, both with dyed gray hair and slouching shoulders under denim jackets and oversized pants belted with a skinny black strap around the waist. Every so often, they stopped to hold up something to their friend and laughed. The clerk behind the counter looked bored. She was a black woman with her hair divided into two pom-poms, scrolling her phone while the two browsed. Wyeth looked up into the rooms on the upper floors of the building. Every so often, he heard the rapid tattoo of a nail gun or the grinding buzz of a saw. Blurry shadows passed by the windows or fell across a blue-white glow cast upon a wall.

Keating had said that he would arrive soon, so Wyeth had come downstairs to wait. He left his phone on purpose because he didn’t want to keep checking it and re-checking it, trying to figure out which direction Keating was coming from and at what time he had left and would be arriving. Instead, he smoked and tried to maintain a level of calm that he did not feel. He would let himself be surprised. He would let himself surrender to the fact that he could not, despite his best efforts, control the actions and thoughts of other people. That was one of the darker aspects of texting and cell phones and all of digital life—it left you with the sense that you could pilot other people and their emotional lives, when in fact you couldn’t. Sometimes, he wondered if they were all

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