3
My name is Linus Olsen. For better or worse, this is my story.
It all started with that purloined Legend of Zelda game, the weekend, the heat, and the house party – though that's getting ahead of myself.
By the time that evening had rolled around, I had been working random office jobs for the better part of three years. Before that, I had waited tables, bussed tables, hauled bags of fertilizer, hauled rocks, hauled trees, shelved books, and mowed lawns since I was thirteen years old. All of those jobs had one thing in common – that blistering California heat. Up until I started working in cubicles, I took odd jobs each summer to pay for video games, then for college tuition. Once my stalled university career ended, so did the summer jobs. In their place came the endless parade of eight hour days, rent payments, and utility bills.
I was twenty-four years old. Everyone always told me that the best years of my life were yet ahead of me. Whenever they told me that – the HR women in pantsuits, balding middle managers, dead-eyed bus passengers, and even my mother – I always had to resist the urge to laugh. Yes. The best years of my life. They're just around the corner.
I knew that those words – "best" and "years" and "of your life" – held meaning for other people when strung together. And sure, they meant things to me, at least separately. It was the phrase – "best years of your life" – that always sounded so ridiculous to me. Whenever other people said it, let it burble out over their lips and into the air like an incantation, I felt as confused as I would watching a sitcom dubbed in German. If I repeated it, it felt at best foreign and at worst, something cobbled together from dead parts.
"The best years of your life." Always referred to in the present tense – or the future, if anyone actually knew me. Then the speaker would look nostalgic, chuff something about the best years of their lives, and change the subject. It wasn't science, but I had seen enough of the upturn-downturn of smiles speaking of those "best years" that I knew just what was going on behind them. People were ever the same all over.
These were The Best Years of My Life, as pondered over on that long bus trip home:
I, Linus Aaron Olsen, worked forty hours a week at a freelance data entry service, punching numbers into spreadsheets and databases for clients that I rarely, if ever, met. It was the sort of labor one can teach a chimp to perform, if one is so inclined. Each day, I finished my allotted document entry an average of two to two and a half hours early. During the remaining hours, I busied myself on Internet forums and with quasi-legal emulation programs, playing every video game I could salvage off the web. Then I went home.
I lived in a two-bedroom apartment with a two roommates, a set-up that worked remarkably well despite the basic mathematical challenge of it. By night, I ate whatever happened to be on hand and not too difficult to cook, smoked whatever marijuana was available in the collective stash, watched television or played video games, then went to bed. The next day? See: Work.
Repeat, with minor disturbances in schedule, five days a week for fifty-two weeks.
On the weekends, I attended parties and drank until vomiting; or, went to movie theaters, generally alone; or, slept until noon and left my room only to eat or relieve myself. There were admittedly combinations of the above, so I guess you can say that my weekends were a rich rainbow of possibility compared to weekdays.
I guess that the phrase "The Best Years of Your Life" was acutely alien to me because these years were exactly like the years before them, and the years before that. If this was the best that life had to offer, then what was the bad going to be like?
On the bus, I shivered with the thought. I gripped the cloth strap of my briefcase tighter and watched Los Angeles flow past me like a sea of smoldering, twilit concrete.