60 for 60: No Names

By Hannah Maureen Holden

In Justin Taylor’s elegiac short story “No Names,” a narrator reflects on his ephemeral but meaningful connection with a deceased poet. His recollections coalesce around a single evening in which the narrator shared a table with the poet at a neighborhood bar, surrounded by fellow writers with whom they drank, chain-smoked, and chatted about nothing in particular.

Among all that goes unnamed in this story—people, places, and things—no omission is more striking than the precise word for the poet’s cause of death. As though unable to reckon with the reality of the poet’s suicide, the narrator describes his obituary in terms more typically associated with a book review: “[A] good notice in the paper of record, and all in all not bad for a poet.”

Ultimately, the narrator alights on a memory that encapsulates his grief. In the image of a matchstick’s brilliant yet short-lived glow, we find not only a metaphor for the life of the unnamed poet, but a consolation for our own mortality.

“No Names” by Justin Taylor was originally published in Columbia Journal’s forty-seventh issue (2010). The story was edited by Kimberly King Parsons.


No Names

Justin Taylor

I didn’t know him. More like knew of: saw around. Heard him read his poems once at the good bar with the red walls, the one everyone knows. Saw him lift his glass with a true drinker’s unstudied ease. He looked like a man who could take belts, but up at the podium he sipped—just enough to keep the pipes from drying out. He had a large face and smallish eyes that seemed to hold in themselves something like a storm out on water, and it was a storm I never saw make landfall but as I say, I did not know him. It would not have been mine to see. We were introduced twice, perhaps as many as three times. I cannot say with any certainty that he remembered me from one introduction to the next, though I don’t hold that against him, for such is the way of all drinkers and men whom you meet deep in the sconce of their element. They were introductions made in passing.

We did sit at the same table, once. After all, we had friends in common. People who meant a lot to me were people who meant a lot to him—which is to say to whom he meant a lot. I cannot know what he knew, and I won’t pretend to. But I can believe. It is my belief that one who is loved also loves. Whatever else one is tempted or driven to believe about this grace-starved world, believe that those who are loved love others and those who love are loved. It’s that or have nothing.

A letter came over the computer, but it was brief. The details were in the paper. There had been troubles, medical mostly but also, one assumes, perhaps wrongly, psychological—probably in part linked to the other—and at some point he made the decision, the terrible and difficult decision which he then found the strength to carry out. Or perhaps the strength to not carry it out is what failed him. Or maybe the decision was not difficult. It could have been the easiest thing in the world.

It was not a bad write-up that he got in the paper. Shorter than the notice the famous Swedish film director had gotten the week previous, also shorter than the one for the famous jazz drummer that ran the same day; but it was a good notice in the paper of record, and all in all not bad for a poet.

We sat at the same table once. I already said that. We were at the bar around the corner, another one that everyone knows. We all pass through, don’t we? Some of us more and some of us less often. We might have sat together many more times than we ever, in fact, did.

On this particular night we were part of the same small but not inconsiderable group, and the bartender had let us stay past closing. When it comes to our crowd the bartender is always indulgent. The front door was locked. The lights were on. We were at a long table in the back. I was at one of the table’s ends and he was a bit up the table from me but not too far up. I for­get whether he was to the right or the left, but the salient detail is that he was more in my field of vision than I was in his, so I was able to let my gaze linger on him if I chose to, and at times this was what I did. We spoke to each other only a little, if and when one of us contributed something to the general conversation that the other had a particular comment on. It was late but we all kept at it. I remember he was deft with a cigarette pack and with the cigarettes themselves. There was a pack on the table; I don’t know which brand, and if I did I wouldn’t name it because names have no place here. Somebody had brought the pack but it had gone from being that person’s to belonging to the table, and people were helping themselves. For all I know it was his pack. I even had a couple myself, which I hardly ever do, but that’s the kind of night it was.

What I remember is that I didn’t ever see him fiddling with the cigarettes. He would have one burning low—but not too low—between his fingers, and then he’d be smoking a fresh one, with the look of a man who’d been born just the way you saw him now: whole. Only once did I catch him—not pulling one out, or even bringing it to his lips, but after, when everything was already in place. He was about to light up and it looked like the moment before the birth of the world.

I want to say he used a match, but at least one lighter had been on the table for some time. Was he the kind of man who would reach for matches when a lighter—his own, or that of one of his students—was already there on the table? I’ve been told he had affect—fancy taste in shoes. It doesn’t matter how the flame was provided. I will remember a match: his cupped hand, tiny fire behind it visible through the spaces between his fingers and also reflected in his eyes. And then the brightness winked out with the same suddenness with which it had come. It disappeared in that first puff of smoke, and left in its place the soft star of the tip, which had already begun to bury its own glow under ash, but hardly.


About the author:

Hannah Maureen Holden is a New York City-based writer, editor, and alumna of the MFA Fiction program at Columbia University. She served as the online fiction editor of Columbia Journal from May 2021–June 2022.