The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor

Author:Brandon Taylor [Taylor, Brandon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

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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. Even that decision in hindsight seemed arbitrary, a whim. An act of petulance. But he had loved it, and he still did. 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.

After he said goodbye to Ivan and Goran, Timo did not go home. Instead he headed off to the small office he shared with the other teaching assistants. He climbed the dark stairs in silence, and when he got to his office, he locked the door but did not turn on the lights. He sat in his chair and took out his phone.

There were messages from his mother and his father. There were three text messages from Fyodor—first saying Happy Birthday, and then I love you, and then Call me when you’re free.

He called up the first of Ivan’s videos again, and when it was over, he watched the second and the third. He watched all fifteen clips without breaking, so that they formed a kind of film. Back to back, end on end, the clips were jerkily of a piece. The same filter. They grew longer, as though the clips themselves were growing more confident in their ability to exist. The acts contained within the clips grew less abstractly sexual and then more concretely sexual. Until he reached the final clip, uploaded just a few hours before, in which Ivan, dressed in the same clothes he had been wearing at dinner, filmed himself stripping out of his Lycra and sweater. He filmed himself growing more and more naked. He turned from the camera to pull down his tights. 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. The room was his room as it was always his room. The same blank walls, the same comforter on the floor. The soft hiss of his clothes, the snap of the elastic being pulled and let go. Ivan rose back to his full height. You could see the slow, unfurling motion of his hand working at his cock, but not the cock itself. Only his arms, the steady pistonlike motion of it. Then, the angle of the hip changing, shifting, as he turned back toward the camera, but as his eyes lifted to meet the camera’s gaze and as the shadow of his cock fluttered into

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