This is taken from a novel in progress, whose narrator reflects on the upheavals of 2017 from his deathbed in 2064.
There can be a kind of gratification to a really bad birthday. Toward the dull and lurid end of 2016, the year all our idols died, I turned twenty-two alone. I spent the evening failing to read a book in the eggy lowlight of a deserted Chinatown bar and I deemed this non-event, in its solitude and misery, so much more preferable than, say, drinks with a few people mustering anemic cries of “Happy birthday!” or, god forbid, trying to sing it, a song that was always too slow, maddeningly so, always went on longer than you thought possible, groaning toward that final, protracted lift on the “birth” of the penultimate “birthday” with wincing strain, all while I stared at a lone candle shoved in a cupcake and waited it out. I’d hoped that being alone might feel sort of heroic. Or at least dignified. Or, at least, grown-up.
An overweight barmaid had cajoled me into ordering the house cocktail, which arrived in a small coupe glass, an embarrassingly fruity shade of puce, a mocking strawberry spliced and listing down the side. I’d grinned, sipped it, suppressed a shudder as I felt it sheath my teeth with sugar while I wondered where glory had gone.
It was November, a nothing month, the weekend after Thanksgiving, and I remember rain, a vague but unremitting overlay of pathetic fallacy as the nation failed to accept the reality of what it had done. The sky had a sort of passive-aggressive quality: bruised clouds, withholding their light while telling you they were fine not to worry about them you didn’t care about them anyway. Ahead lay the grotesquerie of the reality-TV boor who would soon be in the White House, eating McDonald’s and watching TV in his bathrobe. A bad joke. The worst possible joke that was now the forty-fifth president, executive producer of The America Show as it barreled ever faster, with more and more improbable drama, to its season finale. The ratings were great. Later, Zara would say, in that flattened-dead way that made the notion of “joke” quail, that they’d all peaced out because they knew what was coming. They’d ducked out before the shit hit the fan. Prince, Bowie, Muhammad Ali.
In November, though, I was newly arrived in New York, with few friends, or, at least, nobody with whom I’d wish to eat pie and turkey or celebrate a birthday. After Dartmouth, least impressive of the Ivies, I’d been eager to delay adulthood a little longer, and had spent a year at Oxford, during which my impressionable speech became infected with the rounded vowels of rich English youth. English youth who fetishized me, ribbed me, paid me attention, ultimately, for being “a bloody Yank.” In those first months in Manhattan, then, I was mistaken, frequently, for an expat. Often, I went along with this, murmuring the lie of “London” with a diffident smile when a cashier or barista asked where I was from. In truth, I was from Ohio, an only child, a former fat kid, an English lit, major, son of a physiotherapist named Marjory—a woman whose life had been a slow cavalcade of disappointments, a landslide, chief among them my father’s departure ten years ago, closely followed by my own callous and total refusal to remain in Toledo and lend a little succor to her sadness. She’d christened me Luke. The day I arrived in Oxford, I became Luca.
They knew me, then, Paula and Jason did, as Luca.