by Yash SEYEDBAGHERI

Sea­mus Lu­den­dorff tries to live to the fullest, when he hits thir­ty-one. This is af­ter be­ing holed up in grad­u­ate school class­rooms learn­ing about fic­tion and teach­ing jobs and cof­fee shops, pon­tif­i­cat­ing and com­plain­ing about the world. He has spent years seek­ing out the dark things of life, per­haps be­cause he comes from a hap­py fam­i­ly. He has a moth­er, dot­ing sis­ters, even a fa­ther, crude, yet wise. He has peo­ple watched, imag­in­ing their dark char­ac­ter­is­tics with a des­per­a­tion akin to a drug ad­dict. He has tried to imag­ine the seem­ing­ly en­er­getic and smil­ing pa­trons in the cof­fee shops en­gag­ing in in­fi­deli­ty, de­stroy­ing oth­er people’s lives through lies. He has imag­ined them as cold, cor­po­rate peo­ple, peo­ple prof­it­ing from people’s sins, per­ceived and otherwise.

He has writ­ten trite sto­ries about drunk moth­ers for dark amuse­ment, imag­in­ing him­self a child of dys­func­tion. Sto­ries with no eth­i­cal pur­pose, noth­ing to con­tribute to the ideas of what it means to be hu­man and flawed. He has com­plained about peo­ple wear­ing base­ball caps back­wards, about the lack of good dark fic­tion to read, about the col­or of the walls in the cof­fee shop he used to hang out at. Back then, all that seemed to fill him with a kind of en­er­gy, pur­pose. But now, he looks at it like a crit­i­cal movie­go­er, look­ing on his life. He sees the years be­hind him, ru­ins, sees the years in front of him dwin­dling, re­calls a song he loved about the days grow­ing short when you hit September.

He vows to live. It’s a broad ab­strac­tion, but he de­cides to live “spon­ta­neous­ly,”  Mama’s fa­vorite word, even though she lives a com­fort­able, or­dered life, teach­ing Eng­lish. He de­cides to act on whims alone, un­fet­tered by cal­cu­la­tion, by pre­cise log­ic. He just wants to live like Ro­man­tics, to sound his own bar­bar­ic yaw­ps, to do so much.

Some nights, he goes out and drinks. For a time, it seems to be a re­lease, an op­por­tu­ni­ty to toast to life, to rel­ish the en­er­gy of peo­ple laugh­ing at the pool ta­bles. Play­ing the juke­box, with its songs paeans to  yes­ter­year. But af­ter five drinks or so, that doesn’t seem like liv­ing, and he al­ways ends up in a kind of malaise, lament­ing the op­por­tu­ni­ties he missed on the night in question. 

Many nights, he cruis­es up the street at full speed in his old road­ster, the one Ma­ma bought him for grad­u­a­tion. He rel­ish­es the en­er­gy, the dan­ger, blast­ing the ra­dio at full vol­ume, swerv­ing around cars, laugh­ing at the sym­pho­ny of an­gry horns blast­ing. They flip the fin­ger, he gives them peace signs. He thinks that if he were to die, this wouldn’t be such a bad way, but he has so much more to do. He al­ways pulls back from the brink of ab­solute danger.

He flirts with women, nerdy women, not in a leer­ing way, but a man­ner that con­veys de­sire, cu­rios­i­ty. Hu­man de­sire, not lech­er­ous an­i­mal needs. Com­mu­nion, not dom­i­na­tion. He tries to get dates, tries to form a sort of per­son­al com­mu­nion. He does date a few nerdy sorts, but they are too ab­sorbed in fan­ta­sy worlds, in their own dreams. One girl imag­ines her­self the rein­car­na­tion of Grand Duchess Anas­ta­sia, lost in the shib­bo­leths of a buried world.

Oth­er times, he goes to the movies, watch­es the most trite come­dies, like “Su­per Troop­ers 2” or “Game Night”, but laughs like a hye­na at fart hu­mor, dick jokes, peo­ple bleed­ing, shoot­ing each oth­er. He rel­ish­es be­ing among oth­er peo­ple, peo­ple gath­ered for a com­mon pur­pose, try­ing to find a respite in their lives, need­ing en­ter­tain­ment. He wants to tell them his re­grets, apol­o­gize for be­ing an ass­hole scowl­ing be­hind a com­put­er in the cof­fee shops, apol­o­gize for stor­ing up so many wast­ed en­er­gies. But he just rel­ish­es this togetherness.

Oth­er nights, he goes bowl­ing. He re­leas­es the ball with fe­roc­i­ty, yet rel­ish­es the re­lease, the en­er­gy. He even does lit­tle dances while he pre­pares to re­lease the ball. He laughs at the gut­ter balls and roars with joy at the strikes, em­brac­ing his fol­lies, and try­ing again and again. These all give his life a sense of pur­pose, a sense of achieve­ment, even if these ac­tions are seem­ing­ly in­con­se­quen­tial in a world marked by prof­its. By ma­te­r­i­al achieve­ment. He feels like he’s tak­en over his old body, sort of like one of those body snatch­ers in that old movie his sis­ters like, but this time for the better.

He goes to the moun­tains, he goes swim­ming in the cold­est of lakes un­der the moon­light. He goes streak­ing through his neigh­bor­hood, all the ten­sion, neg­a­tiv­i­ty stripped bare. This makes him feel like a child, young and ad­ven­tur­ous, and a bit fool­ish too. He throws burn par­ties and torch­es things from his neg­a­tive pe­ri­od, burn­ing his old sto­ries and emailed com­plaints to friends, to his fam­i­ly, among oth­er things. He checks off each achieve­ment, feel­ing a sense of pow­er, a sense that he is be­com­ing some­thing vast, even if he has his doubts.

But some­times, late at night he keeps think­ing of him­self thir­ty, forty years from now, even fifty, on the cusp of things, his hair gray­ing, his skin wrin­kling, fes­ter­ing. He imag­ines him­self trans­form­ing in­to a grouch, an old­er ver­sion of the per­son he once was, dis­sect­ing the world. Il­lu­mi­nat­ing flaws. He knows some things can­not be con­trolled, that some things are in­evitable, that world­views change slow­ly, un­til trans­for­ma­tion oc­curs. He fears that these ac­tiv­i­ties are mere­ly cov­ers for the in­evitable, but he can live with this, live for this mo­ment. Think­ing of all this, he keeps on find­ing ways to live, search­ing with a kind of fer­ven­cy, afraid to let go of all the fun times, the good times.

Filed under Fiction on September 20th, 2019

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