Brent Foley pads his way into the kitchen dressed in underwear and nothing else. If not for the fact that he is forty-six years old and bald, he could have been a child. It is the same kitchen, after all, the same refrigerator in which he now rummages for something to eat, the same knife in which he cuts cheddar and smears butter on slices of bread. In ten minutes, he carries a toasted ham and cheese sandwich into the living room and turns on the television. Sounds of screeching tires and explosions fill the house. Brent slouches on the couch and shoves a triangle-shaped wedge of sandwich into his mouth—all salt and ham and cheesy warmness. He smiles. Brent Foley is quite good at being a bachelor.

Never mind that his mother is soon thundering down the stairs, poor thing. One of these days she’ll fall and that will be that, as they say. But they say a lot of things, so for now we’ll just concentrate on the fact that Ms. Foley—her first name long ago forgotten—manages her way downstairs and into the living room right at the climax of the shoot-out on television. She has to scream above the noise and gunfire.

“Brent! I said turn down the tee-vee!”

He brushes at crumbs and wiped greasy fingers on his bare, graying chest hairs, grabs the remote control and sighs. A lighted bar onscreen shows the volume going down. Eventually, his mother’s voice ebbs back into clarity.

“—as if I’m not here. I live here too, dammit.”

He looks at her and blinks. She’s dressed for something—a wedding or a funeral. Something fancy. Brent chews and swallows and scratches his thigh and tries not to look at the television. It’s the best part of the movie, when the dudes try to escape by—

“Well?” Ms. Foley says, eyebrows arching.

“Well what? I turned it down,” Brent says and stuffs the remaining half of sandwich in his mouth, chewing. He doesn’t say his mother’s eyebrows look like they were drawn in marker while asleep at a terrible frat party, but the image comes into his mind unbidden and he laughs once and swallows a gag of sandwich. “Where are you going all dressed up, Marmah?”

Ms. Foley sags in the doorway, her face drooping now, showing her seventy years. She no longer winces at her grown son’s—hell, let’s face it, he’s old—his repeated use of the childhood nickname, but Jesus. She looks at him—grayish tighty-whitey underwear, a fold of loose skin covering the front band, the rest all pale and pudgy and poorly formed like a half-finished sculpture of a man, the clay left to slump wetly and slightly deformed by gravity. Her son. Her beamish boy. She almost lets loose a sob when he smiles with cheese in his teeth, but remembers her resolution and composes herself with an adjustment of blouse.

“I’ve got a baby shower and a wake to go to,” she says in monotone, joining Brent in staring at the television. “Be back about sundown. Please clean the garage like you said you would six months ago. Put all of the boxes in the trash. Every one.” She turns to leave. There is a long pause before the front door opens, and Brent holds the remote, his finger on the volume button, waiting. “And I’ll tell everyone that you’re sick, as usual,” her voice came weakened and hollow from the hallway.

“Thanks, Marmah!”

The slam of the door cuts off his last word. He turns up the volume and eats the rest of his sandwich. When his mother returns later that night, he had already fallen asleep even though it was hardly eight. The television blares the end fight scene of Die Hard III. Ms. Foley turns it off and cleans up the plates and cups and such littering the living room from Brent’s day on the couch—almost exactly like every day since before she could remember.

#

There. Hardly an auspicious start to a story, sure, but the beginning must come somewhere. If we start to end too early, we will seem rushed. Besides, the end is nigh. Brent Foley will die today, this beautiful morning in the suburbs of Blank, America. Setting isn’t too important, so we don’t want it to interfere or color the essence of the story with unimportant questions. If in the South, there will be overt racism to cover. If the East or West, stupidity will have to be at the forefront. If the Northwest, it will have to be green and rainy and depressing. Even a flyover, square state will have setting issues. So we’ll just say the suburbs. Somewhere. You know—generic, cookie-cutter suburbia in an American city. And this guy, this Brent Foley guy, will die today.

However, we started with the day before his death for a reason. And though we have to wait for Brent to fully awake from twisted sheets, for him to masturbate and shower, we can take the moment to discuss exactly why the story started yesterday, with Brent making a ham and cheese sandwich before a Die Hard marathon. Consider the fact that, right now, dawn breaks in rosy hues across the rooftops. Birds flutter darkly against the coming sky, ringing the air with song. Now that’s a pretty beginning. Sure.

Hold on… Okay. Brent’s only now stepping into the shower, paunchy belly hanging over his pelvis, shoulders slumped and rounded with softness.

Anyway, while most people will remember their last day alive, rarely do they recollect or even attempt to think about the day before they die. And that’s almost as fascinating, because we know or can intuit quite a bit about a person if death is a full step away as usual, rather than breathing down our neck with certainty. Again, death is less unforgettable and often obliterates entire weeks of memories, but still. The day before death shows us a lot…

Okay. Brent is toweling off and will be downstairs shortly. He wakes this early not because he must or should, or likes the dawn sky and songs of birds, but because if he gets up early his mother will make breakfast. Maybe pancakes, he thinks reflexively and smiles, brushing gray-streaked hair along the sides of his bald, shiny head.

Yes, seeing how and why today is so special required a look into the everyday life of Brent Foley. And yesterday, like all yesterdays, is similar to the day before and even today. But yesterday is also different because it’s over, done. No more mystery.

Today? Anything can happen.

Yesterday, we found Brent in his grayish underwear, watching a Die Hard marathon into the evening—making first a ham and cheese sandwich, then a tuna casserole, then two bowls of cereal—yesterday we witnessed Brent as he truly is, not under the stress of certain death or immediate bodily harm. We will see him under that pressure cooker today, but not yet. Right now, Brent Foley is making his way downstairs in the same tighty-whitey underwear, whistling a tune from a television show he cannot quite remember. This is his last day alive, people. Settle in and get ready.

But first, there is breakfast.

#

Descending the stairs, Brent realizes something is wrong. There is no smell of bacon. No pancakes. Not even coffee. When he gets to the kitchen and opens his mouth to say “Morning Marmah,” his mouth clicks shut at the note on the table with his name written in flowing script. He pads over to the note and scratches his thigh. Looking out the window, he sees no car, so his mother is gone. The note reads:

Dearest Brentwood,

I cannot take it anymore and have decided to leave. Please don’t try to find me. The house is paid for through the end of the year. After that, you’ll have to either pay the taxes or I’ll sell the house.

Again, please don’t try to find me.

Love,

Your Mother

Brent Foley’s eyes water as he rereads the note, but there is nothing more. No secret message, no nuance or hesitancy. His lip trembles and he drops the note to the floor, steadying himself on the kitchen table so he doesn’t faint and fall and crack his skull and die now that there isn’t anyone to find him wounded on the floor.

Mother? Gone?

“Marmah!” Brent sobs and collapses to the floor, crying fully now in that pathetic way that men cry because they’re not really good at it so they sound like wounded walruses. He slobbers and a snot string reaches the graying hairs on his chest. Still, he cries and calls out “Marmah,” in a steadily weakening voice until he is spent and lying on the cold kitchen tiles, heaving for breath and trying to understand this new world. His mother is gone—gone! She left, just like his father almost thirty years earlier, with a note left on the same table.

And Brent finds a sudden rage within him. He snatches the note and reads it over and over. “Don’t try to find me.” Not don’t find me, but don’t “try” to find me. As if I couldn’t, Brent thinks in a red anger. To tell a person not to try to do something is much more insulting than asking them not to do it outright.

“Oh, I’ll try, mother,” Brent says brokenly into the air. He sucks the snot through his nose and back into his head, wipes at his eyes. “I’ll find you, Ms. Foley!”

#

While Brent is upstairs getting dressed—a rather confusing procedure due to his rustiness—we’ll consider a few things until he’s ready to die.

First, we don’t want to cut a sympathetic figure out of a slouchy forty-six year old man with a bald head, wearing only stained, ragged tighty-whitey underwear and sobbing like a wounded walrus on the kitchen floor. It’s not funny, really. And we’re not looking at his story because Brent Foley will die today—death is nothing special no matter how much you want to think otherwise. You too will be walking along one day and BOOM! you’re dead just like that. Certainly, there might some who mourn your passing, but they’ll be dead soon too, and everything you’ve done will be forgotten.

That’s a sadder and stronger play at sympathy than the little story of Brent Foley you’re experiencing now…

Ah, Brent just found where his pants have been all this time—folded up neatly in the dresser, beneath all his airplane model glues and paints. Who knew? Once he finds socks—lo! another miraculous drawer full of clean clothing—he’ll be sure to figure out shoes and be downstairs, so we don’t have enough time to discuss sympathy and other obtuse subjects. We have to consider what we know.

Brent Foley awoke to find himself alone after living back at home… Wait. He’s not “back” because he never left. No. Brent Foley lives in the same house where he grew up, some generic cookie-cutter suburban home in a nameless city. He never went to college. He never got married. He held two jobs—one at a bookstore until people stopped reading, the other at a record store until people stopped paying for music—but that was years and years ago. Bent has spent the last sixteen years unemployed and happy. His days are filled with food and the comfort of television, or online day-long video game battles with preteens across the globe. And today his mother abandoned him. Today he will die. That’s all we know.

But consider the now… What will happen to Brent? Watch as he negotiates the stairs in his cheap, black dress shoes. He looks very much like dog made to walk on its hind legs. His blue dress shirt stands out, but only because of the orange flannel pajama pants.  He stops in the hall and recalls that he doesn’t have a key, hasn’t needed a key in many years. So instead of messing with it, he leaves the door unlocked and steps outside, shielding his eyes from daylight.

Mrs. Gable, the widow across the street, witnesses Brent’s first foray into The World of Man in recent memory. She will later note that he looked almost proud, his hand shielding his eyes from the sun appeared more like a salute, and his posture had improved, probably by the pants and shoes. But Mrs. Gable is no more important to this story than the setting… we just needed you to see Brent as he emerges from his house. Now, we must move fast because there are no more showers or breakfasts or getting dressed—it’s straight off to death we must go!

#

The Aristotelian and classicists among you, if any remain, will buck and thrash at the idea that Brentwood Foley and the story of his death holds any literary merit whatsoever. He’s not special, after all. He is no hero and has nowhere to fall, since he’s already on one of the lowest rungs in humanity. Really, if you want an antagonist, American culture is to blame. People like Brent Foley are the reason ISIS exists. What other society in the history of the world would allow a man to not work, not even fill a void or space, yet live comfortably and happily? None. No, people like Brent Foley would be put on an ice flow if among the Inuit, forced into a winter blizzard if among the Blackfeet, killed in some senseless battle if born before 1960… in fact, any society but American society in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would have found a way to weed out a Brent Foley, or at least put him to good use.

So let’s be clear: It is not his stature that makes Brent the focus of this story, and a worthy focus at that. Personally, I wish for any other character in which to write a story. If I’m going to spend many hours and days and weeks honing a story to its essence, I’d much rather it have a wonderful, dynamic protagonist. I’d much rather have an interesting setting. But these things are beyond the control of the artist. God, or whatever, has placed the story of Brent Foley before me and given me the task of telling it to the best of my ability.

That said, if you find yourself yawning or this tale too poorly put, please blame my storytelling faults rather than Brent Foley. He’s just a character. It’s not his burden. And after spending so much time thinking and writing about Brent Foley, I have come to peace with his character and would like you all to do the same.

Perpend:

What other man on the planet could be of more interest to us than Brent Foley? He is a product of our time. He is a man without the pressures of society to bully him into right behavior. He is what all of mankind has been working toward since the dawn of time—to live so freely that life ceases to make sense. He is the culmination of every life and all of time since the Big Bang. Brent Foley, crying in the kitchen wearing only his underwear because his Marmah left him out of disgust, is the penultimate character for the modern American short story. He is the product of the pasture of our collective culture in which he has grazed his entire, worthless life. He is why even reasonable people believe in abortion. He is a flower growing out of pavement. He is the glowing coal of hatred burning in the heart of every terrorist. Brent Foley is greater than Gatsby. He is a mountain of a man, a beacon of humanity, an idea larger than reality. Brent Foley is the canary in the mineshaft of American culture, and today he will fall over dead, warning us all that the absent hammer is lifted high!

#

Too much?

#

Having not left the house in over a year, not since an emergency room visit after food poisoning from a HotPocket last fall, Brent is unsure which way to turn. He long ago let his driver’s license expire, and doesn’t have a car anyway. He is penniless, so public transportation is a no-go. He must walk in his black Payless Shoes an unknown distance to… to try…

Brent spasms and looks at the ground due to a sudden vertigo. Try? he wonders, the word catching in the gears of his brain like a bucketful of rusty nails. Just where should I go? Will I even find mother? Should I go and ask people on the street where she went?

He looks across the street in time to see the curtain fall back at Mrs. Gable’s place. Maybe she saw Marmah leave, Brent thinks. Maybe she can tell me which way to turn—left or right. And as Brentwood Foley takes his first certain steps in an unknowable time, he is completely unaware of the approaching garbage truck, even though it’s enormous and sounds like a train. Brent steps right into the road, the driver honks and slams on the breaks, but it’s too late—our dear American hero lies dead in the road, his thorax crushed.

And that’s it, folks. I’m sorry if you don’t like it.

But we were in this story together, you and I, and we have to consider what possible parable might be drawn from the death of Brent Foley. What is the lesson, right? What ambiguous theme can be gleaned? We have a beginning, some rise in tension, a plot shift and rise in action to a definitive end. So why do we need more? Why are we always just a little dissatisfied, even when eating cake or making love? Why could it always be even better?

In a way, the death of Brent Foley answers all of these questions and more. You are free to strip away all other words and ask, Why? Ask it over and over, with a child’s persistence. Why? Why? Why?

Why are you reading this? Why did your relationship with your father turn so sour? Why did you say that to your brother’s wife? Why can’t you stand your cousin’s voice? Why didn’t you achieve more dreams of your youth? Why aren’t you smarter or prettier? And why are you here, living on earth for a reason so unknowable you must either have the blindness of faith, or drag yourself out of bed daily in a meaningless void?

The answer, my friend, is in the death of Brent Foley. Don’t be like him and you’re doing all right, you know? I mean, no matter how boring or terrible you happen to be, you’re not as bad or bad off as Brent, right? And what are stories supposed to do but make us feel a little better about ourselves, the world, or our understanding of the world?

So sit back and congratulate yourself. Buy yourself some ice cream or go have sex. You’ll never be as bad as Brent Foley. You’re reading, after all. Brent hated reading. You are probably dressed in more than underwear. Kudos! You also probably provide some meaningful work or space-filling for our society and culture. And finally, you’re probably not dumb enough to get run over by a garbage truck. That only happens to children mostly, because children are dumb. But you’re reading an adult story, with sophistication, and likely are familiar with roadways and general physical laws concerning motion and mass—if not in theory, then in practice.

You see, we sometimes have to examine the lesser among us. We can’t always focus on the mighty, the conquerors, the successful, the amazing tales. And in lifting up that which is so low, we too rise. Stories like Brent’s death lift us all because it’s not us and never could be and we’ll all have a much better death—and probably a better day before death as well.

We would be wise to pause and think about that for a while…

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