Colonial Conditions

Abstract

Colonial Conditions Brandon Taylor (bio) The election was on tuesday, but first, the Halloween bonfire. When Carson and Roma arrived, Roma discreetly removed her mask and said that she had to find the host, who had spent most of the late summer and fall cycling across the Mountain West. Carson knew this because the host had documented the trip with a string of photos manipulated to look like Polaroids and posted to social media. He was long-haired and from Rhode Island, and he wrote long, flabby essays about having played football in high school and how his father was kind of a mean drunk. Stranded as he was by Roma, Carson gave some real thought to leaving. Then he dropped down into a battered chair and squinted through the smoke from the petering fire across the yard at the [End Page 13] other guests, who stood breathing into each other's faces without masks on. These were not his people. One woman wore a red plastic dress with a high slit and a cutout over a silicon breastplate, as well as a long fur coat constructed out of Christmas tinsel. She looked like a drag queen. There was a man in a skinny suit with a skinny tie and platinum hair who looked like an FBI agent or someone from a mid-2000s music video. And then a man in a loosely deconstructed cowboy outfit. Carson felt insecure because he had come in jeans. He wore a flannel under a navy-blue chore coat. It seemed a little ridiculous to be the only one wearing a mask, so he pulled the mask down under his chin. Besides, he tended to assume a kind of honor system even though he had been told that such an assumption betrayed an overreliance on rugged American individualism. Just then, a man pulled his own chair over the lawn, digging ruts in the grass. He was a sommelier, he said, and he lived in Des Moines. He'd had plans to open a cocktail bar in Iowa City that ended up getting scuttled after the shutdown, so he moved laterally into wine distro. "Didn't change my registration though," he said. "Totally slipped my mind." "I see what you mean." From the way the sommelier sat back on the lawn chair and crossed his legs, Carson sensed that he was a socialist. Carson was not a socialist, but he was interested in having sex, so he nodded along when the sommelier talked about tax code reform and the moral urgency of health care for all. It wasn't that Carson didn't believe in the need for health care and the redistribution of wealth and all those other things. But something in the socialist fervor among people his age made it seem like their politics were just something they had picked up from their friends at a party, something tantamount to attitudes or styles that would go out of fashion as they got older. They would stop caring quite so much. Or else they'd turn into people who were just rounding into early middle age and still went to protests and composted and had slightly more children than they could [End Page 14] afford. There was nothing sadder, Carson thought, than being thirty-eight, married, with a kid, and still complaining about the environment on Twitter or at potlucks. But this Carson kept to himself, and when asked if he'd like to try some of a Pét-Nat that the sommelier had been working on getting into broader distribution, Carson said yes. The cold wine had a deep but tart flavor. He swished it between his teeth and then gulped it back. "You can really taste the grapes," he said. "That's the beauty of it," the sommelier said. "Nothing gets between you and the taste. It's all natural." "I'm not much of a wine guy. I don't know the lexicon. But it's good. Not too sweet." "Yeah, it's a lighter wine, for sure. Not too acerbic." The coolness of the wine and the silvery pop of the bubbles made Carson's mouth feel slippery...