The Age at Which

A short story about rebellion.

Kenneth Bates had been doing contract work for ten years now, never quite specializing in any one thing. Roofing, floors, HVAC, bathrooms, cabinets, putting up drywall—you name it, he did it. In his heart of hearts he was a Renaissance man, something much less conscious in his mind than obvious by the way he lived. He had friends from all circles but no steady group, dated women casually (although respectfully), and read everything he could get his hands on. He could not advertise himself like Remley, Remley, Remley, & Remley advertised themselves on a billboard he often saw on his drive home: “The only thing we do is malpractice.”

Ken was a hard worker and quick study, but not the type of person you would expect in construction. For one, he didn’t have the background. His father was a financial planner and his mother had worked in publishing. But more than that, he’d always been a dreamer, someone who conceptually has a difficult time focusing on what is in front of him. Between the head and hands, Kenneth was a head guy, meaning that on mindless tasks like hammering or painting, his mind was likely to be elsewhere. It was frankly a miracle that no serious accident had befallen him. The other men, the men he worked with, had a presence that could not be disturbed—not by any thought, at least. To remove their minds from what their hands were doing would have been like trying to poke a hologram. When they were working, they were working. When they were eating, they would sometimes have a conversation. When they spoke after lunch, it was only about the work. And when they left work, they were done thinking about it for the day.

They did not read books, in other words, but Kenneth did. In fact, that was his problem. He was an abstract thinker who loved the sensation of his mind traveling. Over the last ten years he had enjoyed countless works, which he left strewn in his attic. The Meditations repeatedly, in order to maintain a perspective conducive to the life he was living. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Gibbon not Gibbons. Emerson’s journals. The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis. Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins about the affluence—not poverty, as commonly suspected—of the hunter-gatherer. A Very Easy Death by the same author as The Second Sex, about the death of that author’s mother. Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, along with James Baldwin’s and Raymond Carver’s. The Great Gatsby, of course, whenever he had a few hours. Some Kafka, not much. Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Love’s Executioner by Irv Yalom, a therapist. Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt. Some Barthes, which he didn’t much understand. And some Levi-Strauss: particularly Myth and Meaning, whose gist he could never recall.

He loved to read, to learn new things, and he did so casually, almost randomly. He liked to follow a thread of books recommended to him by the books themselves. Perhaps one book would cite another, so he would read that next. Or he would continue with the same author in a different title. Sometimes a character would be reading something that piqued his interest. He tried to avoid the recommendations of others as much as he could, and he especially avoided the lists his aunts would find online and forward to him. God, can we not breathe a little? he would think. To craft an agenda for his reading would have terrified him in a way; it would have cast supervision over an otherwise parentless play-time. He was nevertheless consistent—almost regimented—in his play. Either he would come home at 4 p.m. after work, read for a few hours, and then go out; or he would grab a few beers after work with the guys, come home around six or seven, have dinner, and read until bedtime. Because he saw value in reading both drunk and sober, Kenneth alternated between the two as one might alternate between the mountains and the beach, with complete equanimity.

Now, you might be tempted to start thinking of Kenneth—even his name to some extent promotes this—as a bookworm. But the truth is that he had been an average student, nothing more. Nobody ever thought he would be the world’s next great scholar, but nobody worried about him, either. He was a cow in the middle of a throng of cattle (his words) that were being moved slowly but surely toward their destination: most people fretted about the cows who were lagging behind or speculated about the cows speeding ahead, but that was not him. If any of his former teachers wandered into his attic now, then, they would be shocked at what they found. They might even be led to conclude that he had always been that way, that a bookworm had slipped past their guard, right under their noses. But although Kenneth did read a good deal when he was a child, the formal process of education sapped his enthusiasm. Only in a laid-back class, with a laid-back professor who recommended—more than assigned—reading material, would Kenneth leaf through a book and…recapture some of that original freedom. But most of the reading he did in high school and college felt watched, as if an instructor were always just over his shoulder, waiting for him to extract a very narrow set of lessons from the text.

All this is to say that Kenneth was a rebel by heart. School hamstrung his enthusiasm precisely because he was the kind of soul that silently turns a nose up at being told what to do. Maybe he dimly perceived his education as a complex and subtle system of incentives—and if he did, he certainly would have balked against it. Maybe he had the suspicion from time to time that it was just another extension of the Parental Law, which employed teachers, sports coaches, and the concept of divinity itself as 1099 contractors. Without this insight into Kenneth’s character, it would be impossible to understand why all his electives were shop-based, when in his core classes he had been placed in Level 1.

It was only in his last year of college that the tap, the passion for learning was turned back on. He had gone to college because it was presumed he would go—but only to a state school, and without any plans for a major. The first three years felt very much like high school for him. Going into his fourth year, though, all of a sudden the adults in his life began admitting, begrudgingly, that he was on the way to becoming an adult himself; and as their grip lessened, he had less to rebel against. It was then that his dedication to reading resurfaced. By the time he graduated from college, he was becoming more of a student than he’d ever been.

And then a curious thing happened. In his final year it seemed as if Adulthood as a whole was going to grant him some slack and let him maneuver throughout the world as one—albeit in his own way. Instead, after graduation, it was the complete opposite. Adults had always peppered him with questions about himself, of course—shamelessly as the old often do to the young—and given him advice. But it had only ever been talk. Nobody had ever held him accountable for the answers he gave or checked up on whether he followed their advice. Yet once graduated, the adults seemed to take up torches against him—his parents at the front of the mob—demanding some sort of recompense for their investment.

Nearly ten years removed now, Kenneth could understand it to some degree. His parents had invested the most, that was obvious; next his relatives, with whom his family was close on both sides; then family friends, who had watched him grow up every step of the way… Even the neighbors had invested in him, if not personally then by way of the taxes that paid for his schooling. But as you can imagine, these demands drove Kenneth far, far away from the desire to accommodate them. He knew what he was supposed to be. He knew what all of his friends were going off to do. Which is why, when he heard about a construction gig through a friend of a friend, right around the time of graduation, he took it.

It was a terrific situation throughout his twenties. All at once he became connected to a sturdier side of town, the underwear that kept the most vital aspects of a society in place—not the people who came for a few years to learn things that would inevitably carry them away. His transition was helped by the fact that he had always been versatile. He could get along with anyone, from any station in life, in part because his personality sought out variety and had something against consistencies or expectations. So he quickly became “one of the guys.” They called him “college boy” because, well, he had gone; and because he looked young and kept a pencil behind his ear. But it was fine by him, and the women they hung around seemed to like it, too. He was also able to acquire through physical labor the type of body he’d always seen on magazines, and his voice took on some urgency for once, perhaps because he was saying urgent things. All this happened quickly, within a year or two of his working, and remained the same for the rest of his twenties.

Kenneth also kept in touch with a few college friends who had stayed in the area. Among these friends, and the women these friends spent time with, Kenneth was considered hard, artistic, even virtuous—he did something simple and good, building houses with his hands, but was no dummy. Actually, he could match anyone in an argument, not because he held in his mind a copious amount of knowledge, but probably because in reading mostly noninformational texts in his spare time (The White Album, the Bhagavad Gita) he had subconsciously developed an ability to discriminate between good and bad arguments. It was nice to stay in touch with the educated side of town for another reason, too: it reassured him that he wasn’t missing out on anything. His college friends groaned about work—being chained to email, attending pointless meetings, creating plans for plans, repeating nonsensical phrases—and meanwhile not making as much money as he was, or doing anything half as interesting.

And so, for a while, all was good.

We come inevitably to the meat of the story, which is usually when things turn for the worse. All this was happening in his twenties: Kenneth was making good money, enjoying close friends, and meeting fine women—and still having more time to read than a post-grad. Often, he wondered if he had figured it out—if he’d “hacked” life. He tried hard not to judge, of course, but why hadn’t others come to similar arrangements? He also wondered why he’d been raised—by his parents, teachers, family friends, and even neighbors—to live differently than he was now, to pursue a white-collar life that tried to avoid, as much as possible, anything vital.

Slowly, his opinion of his situation shifted. It happened on two fronts.

First, his friends began reporting less misery with their jobs. From afar he could not tell whether this was some sort of Stockholm Syndrome or if, by sticking with the same thing for some time, his friends were finally allowed to do something interesting with it. His friend Sam, for example, who worked at a law firm and had been miserable for seven years, got named partner. She’d always made more money than she knew what to do with, but now it seemed that she was able to choose the type of work she wanted to do. When Kenneth spoke to her, he listened (with increasing eagerness) for the whiff of complaint he was so accustomed to, that until now he never knew he needed. But it was not there.

“Isn’t the work more or less the same?” he asked.

“Sort of, except I’m getting to choose which cases to take on—and the associates I want on it, which is even more important. Plus, as a partner I’m responsible for bringing in my own business, so that adds another—dimension, I guess.”

“I never took you for much of a salesman. Or saleswoman, I should say.”

“Neither did I!” she laughed.

“But, I mean,” Kenneth continued, his eyebrows furrowed, “even the parts of the law you enjoy working with, you’re still at a desk from nine to five—if not more—and you’re just drafting documents, doing document review, submitting…what’s that called…cover sheets?”

She shrugged. “The difference is that I’m more in charge now, so it feels different. And things outside of work are good, too. Gerald and I just bought a house and it’s big, bigger than we can even handle, really—and actually, come to think of it, we could use your help on this renovation we’re planning…”

What happened with Sam was happening with all of Kenneth’s friends. They were no longer associates, assistants, or coordinators, but partners, managers, directors. The extra money they made was nice—far more than Kenneth made now—but it was really the sense he got from them that they were no longer miserable—indeed, that they even liked and looked forward to their jobs. Even more than that, he came to realize, their jobs had somewhere along the way become a part of their persona, a major component of an image that previously had been all pixels. Meanwhile, as much as Kenneth diversified himself in the construction trade, he was beginning to find it a little boring, a little repetitive.

The second front concerned Kenneth’s own perception on life. It was changing. When he was younger—say 24, 25—he paid no attention to things like healthcare, investment portfolios, tax planning, retirement vehicles, and the like, because he was healthy, making comfortable money, and doing something people in his college circle thought “unique.” But the market for that type of thinking was quickly evaporating among his friends, and even, he noticed with panic, within himself. At work he began fantasizing not about random thoughts—hypotheticals, scenes and characters from books, women, memories, and so on—but about having a little more security, means, and status. Maybe even leaving something behind. Actually, he mostly fantasized about being an accountant: he loved the thought of coming into an office every day, having his own desk, drinking some coffee, and getting to spend his day among words like “ten ninety-nine” or “W-two” or even “ten forty EZ.” He imagined putting paperwork into the appropriate cabinets, or saving documents to the appropriate folders and sending them out as confidential attachments, with the last four digits of a client’s social security number as the password.

Now he had the boring job, the boring life. He was being left behind while his cohort soared to more interesting and important things. A house, it turns out, is no grand thing. It’s just a box. And those who put them together rely on the same tricks over and over: hanging drywall, refurbishing wood, exposing brick. So much of it could be described as putting lipstick on a pig—or, as he preferred, draping a nice dress over an ugly mannequin. The men working there had nothing interesting to say. His body was beginning to ache in the mornings. As an accountant, his value would be in fastidiousness, in an ability to calmly but persistently stay on top of things. He would arrive home with clean clothes and energy for a proper workout. In short, his interests were beginning to shift along with his priorities.

All this is to say that Kenneth felt uneasy about his 33^rd birthday. (Having been an avid reader for nearly a decade, he recognized it as the age of Dante and Jesus Christ.) A few weeks before the day, he was roofing with a distant view of downtown, when he received a clear understanding of the distance that separated him now from a cushy office job in one of those new high-rises being built along the river. It hit him suddenly as a simple fact that he had spent ten years scatter-shooting the construction and literary trades, with no real specialty or purpose in either, and was still only making sixty thousand a year.

A few weeks passed and he had his birthday. Then, on the Tuesday after his birthday, he had another existential moment with regard to rebellion. This is more or less how the thoughts went in his head (only they flashed as thoughts and did not draw out like words):

How is it possible that I am so far away, suddenly, from the orbit I would like to be a part of, when all I have done with my adult life is enjoy myself in the few passions I have, meanwhile working my ass off for five, six days of the week?

His throat caught and he sat down on someone’s stoop at 6:45 in the morning, laying his bagged lunch on the stairs. Was life a perpetual small sacrifice of the present so as to avoid this one very deep, very depressing moment of being abruptly out of place? It certainly seemed in this instant that he had neglected every wisdom from the older people around him to his extreme detriment. Did everyone know this but him? Was everyone convinced that if you just did as you were told, it would work out in the end? He felt like such an idiot. “I’m a moron,” he said with sudden clarity. “I’m a complete, goddamned moron.”

He tried searching for the rebellion that had once been so familiar—frantically and fruitlessly as a man will search for a lost wallet in his pockets. Once he found it, he’d be able to say “fuck you” to the tide of social normalcy into which people were always trying to drag him, and into which he was now dragging himself, kicking and screaming. But the rebellion was no longer there. In its place was—fear. Fear about whether he would have enough money to purchase his own house one day. Fear about what would happen if he sliced a finger on the job. Fear about whether he would find someone young and beautiful to marry, now that he was in his mid-thirties and most of the women he knew were taken.

And perhaps, he realized, somewhat like in his final year of college, the rebellion was no longer there because nobody was around to provoke it anymore. His parents had long since given up trying to usher him down a path that would take full advantage of his education; his friends no longer told him that they wished they could do what he did; and the women, they no longer looked at him with the same curious hunger, as if he contained an essence they wanted to extract. Their eyes passed over him as if, well—as if he were just another construction worker. Could he blame them? He was, in point of fact, a middle-aged man whose only career so far had been construction. Were they supposed to see somehow that he had a college degree, big dreams, and an attic full of books? Of course not. In short, he had so plugged his ears with what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it, that he’d missed the world moving on. Nobody cared anymore; he was free to do as he wished.

So he wondered over the next few weeks, as he was pouring concrete, running wires, and hanging drywall: Is rebellion easier to possess when you are young because nothing is behind you? No history means no failure means no regret. As a young person, your back is against the wall—there is only forward. Maybe aging, then, can be thought of as moving to the center of the room, where you can be attacked from all sides. If that were true, Kenneth realized, then not just rebellion—but almost anything—would come easier the fewer years you had lived, including confidence and hope.

Maybe this was why the men of his age were beginning to act differently. He was beginning to notice a change in how they presented—which is to say, defended—themselves. They were beginning to puff out their chests and had rings around their eyes, a strange juxtaposition that meant something. He couldn’t tell what it was until he went to a barbecue one day, running into an old college friend who had his two-year-old with him. Yes, that was it. This friend’s identity was now defined by his job and kid. Seemingly overnight, career and family had become secretaries that Kenneth would now have to pass through in order to have a conversation with the man himself.

As the months slipped by in his 33^rd year, then, two primary questions took residence in the cavity below Kenneth’s straight dark hair. The first was somewhat epistemological in nature. Of what value is all this knowledge? By that, he meant not only the facts he daily acquired via reading his books, but more so the vision that reading had opened up in him. Secondly, and more pressing, what was he going to do with his life? It was not too late to go back and occupy the role he was supposed to occupy a decade ago, but he would be forced to eat a lot of shit in doing so—shit that would be difficult for a former rebel to stomach.

And so, one night as he was reading a series of incredibly dense and boring essays by one of Freud’s disciples, Otto Rank—essays that employed so many words he did not know and cited so many people he had never heard of before (and did so in a casual way, as if he should indeed know them)—he became so disgusted that he threw the book across the attic, where it landed in a pile of more books. It was the worst moment of his life, his brain having been stretched to the full understanding of just how small and insignificant he was—it required, of course, a book to do it, a book written in a sub-discipline he thought he knew quite well.

Many years ago, he had domesticated the idea that he was a meaningless creature in the grand scheme of things, but this? This was a bold affront. He was all of a sudden murderous toward the author. For some reason he wanted to see how this presumptuous pencil-pusher would fare on the African plains, or in the Indian jungles—some place where his over-exercised brain would be useless, never mind that he was already dead. How did all these stupid letters on a page fit within the narrative of all life on this planet, the hunters and the hunted? How dare this man posterize Kenneth with his staged, scripted intelligence? Fuck him! And fuck all the people who had lied to him, who had tried to tell him what life was like through their incredibly uninspired positions. If only they had not been such meddling idiots, he could have left rebelliousness alone—a rebelliousness that was supposed to hurt them but ended up backfiring on himself.

“Fuck them all,” he breathed, shaking his head, “and fuck you especially, Otto Rank.” He had a warm beer in his hand, the last of many. The attic had an old and rusted vent which Kenneth always kept open for circulation. He looked that way now and ignored the floor scattered with books. He crossed his arms like a child.

What a phony, he shook his head. He was now thinking his thoughts, not saying them, and his breath was growing shallower. I’m done reading, he decided with a sudden clarity. There’s no point to it. But of course this threw another thing into motion, this formerly stable thing in his life, so that when Kenneth Bates stood up, his head spun like a dreidel and he didn’t know which way he would fall.