Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City

by Choire Sicha

  The state became extremely busy deciding which domestic arrangements were legal and which were not. In this time with which we are concerned, there were some arrangements that society utterly forbid: it was illegal for people of a certain age to have sex with people under a certain age—these ages were picked to define “adult” and “child,” but didn’t always quite hit the mark—and it was illegal to force people to have sex. And there were some laws that were less sensible and were quickly falling out of favor. For instance, it was illegal to exchange money for sex, and it was illegal for men to marry men and women to marry women. It had also, until quite recently, been illegal for people of some different ancestries to marry. As well, it had been illegal for two people to have kinds of sex that couldn’t result in the conception of another human being.

  Sometimes the people prosecuted the crimes—or at least the criminals—themselves. Shame or violence was almost as good a punishment as imprisonment. But almost always, people were more forward-thinking than the laws. And the laws that fell out of favor, they didn’t stay laws forever.

  JOHN HAD GRADUATED from his professional school just four months prior to starting this job, which he had now held for a couple of years. He was very young and very thin, in the fashionable way of that time. He had freckles that would come and go in the summer sun, and reddish-brown hair: a handsome chipmunk. He was quick with words and he had no sense of smell and he couldn’t drive a car and his eyes were pretty bad, so sometimes he wore these old glasses that made him look funny; they were blocky and dumpy and incongruously old. Often in the bullpen he’d put his face right up to his computer. He liked working, but he still remembered the freedom of that summer after graduation—everything had been so easy.

  He had worked briefly as a nonemployee, a “freelancer,” and that meant he made more money because so-called “freelance” pay was generally higher. It was expected that the freelancer would pay all his or her own benefits—like health insurance—and, at the conclusion of each year, taxes. Taxes were a percentage of everyone’s earnings that paid for everything the government bought or built or wanted to maintain. And as well, he didn’t have to be anywhere, didn’t have to get up early and go into the office, any office, every day.

  Except he’d also really messed up. Because that freelance situation had been the first time he’d really worked, and because the taxes weren’t taken out of his checks that summer as they were for full-time employees.

  John had somehow reported only 3,669 dollars in income. The state had corrected this to 13,134 dollars in income. The government had said he owed something like 3,000 dollars.

  When he started working full time, the company started setting aside the taxes for him, sending that portion of his income directly to the government. For most workers, the job would take out “too much,” and so when people filed their taxes with the government, in a great wild flurry of forms and mathematics, people would then get a “refund.” But John didn’t get his “refunds,” which would have been about 600 dollars each, because they went to pay off those old taxes.

  Also the number that he owed kept going up because the government assessed “interest,” as a “penalty.”

  He took home 2,200 dollars a month.

  His expenses were 800 dollars for his half of the monthly rent—his cousin lived with him—and about 100 dollars for “utilities,” which were the electrical power for the appliances and the lights and such, and water, and cable television. And then there were his debts. He didn’t like to think about that. So after paying some of that, as much as he could face, he had about 900 or 1,000 dollars to spend each month, which was about 33 dollars a day. The subway to work every day took a little. Food took a little. Beers were 3 dollars. Every two weeks, he’d run out of money, and have just 20 or 40 dollars to last through Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

  SEX WAS A very unsatisfying practice at this time, considered animal and messy, and also dangerous. It had been dangerous for a long time, but now most nonlethal diseases were treatable, and also women could largely control whether they became pregnant. Pregnancy was the most lethal byproduct of sex. But there were still diseases that were not curable.

  Sex itself was hard enough. Some people could achieve sexual satisfaction through only very specific means. For instance, dressing up in pirate hats, or as lions or puppies, or as corporate brands and characters. Some people couldn’t achieve sexual climax without being punched in the stomach. Some people could achieve sexual intimacy with only one particular gender. Most people at this time believed there were two of those. And many believed these two genders were very distinct—almost separate species—and so they should have different roles in life. Many, though, found this ridiculous.

  People made great and complicated arrangements to satisfy their urges.

  But many people had less elaborate sexual structures—or “preferences”—so it was often easy, at least at first, for them to mate, or have sex, without even much of a thought to a prolonged commonality with a partner.

  Sometimes people refused to acknowledge their sexual selves, leading to later trouble with mates. They hadn’t been doing what they wanted, but they hadn’t known it. For instance, many people wanted to have sex with a number of people, but they, by habit or by pressure, ended up in agreements that they would have sex with just one person only. But then their desires won out over their agreements.

  Others, in various minorities of taste or persuasion, obsessed over their choices. If they were excited only by violence, or if they had to gaze upon pictures of, say, lesser mammals before sexual activity, they sometimes had to go to great lengths to solicit willing—if not even compatible—partners.

  The arrival of the Internet—in its earliest, flattest state, of sending words, and then pictures, and then moving pictures—was most transformative of this endeavor, even more than it was for entertainment and the sale of retail products. The Internet, as people knew it then, was only about twenty years old, but most of the products and experiences on the Internet were even more recent than that.

  Only through the early tentative arrival of full-world search could fellow enthusiasts of very particular sexual procedures easily identify each other.

  And so could everyone else: people who wanted to meet to make children, people who wanted someone with whom to grow old, fellow adherents to a religion, people who were monogamists—or temporary monogamists.

  But already, even though this was in the exciting early days of a virtual society, organic or accidental meeting in the real world—the face-to-face first blush and chemical systems rush—was seen as something prized, something original, something the flat Internet, even with all its growing reach and inclusion, couldn’t offer.

  JOHN’S FRIEND CHAD had a real office job and took home 425 dollars a week. This was a job that young people wanted. It opened doors; it introduced him to people, mentors maybe, famous people, intellectuals.

  And then he quit. Chad realized that people didn’t start at the bottom and work their way up anymore. This was an outmoded idea. Instead of working at a desk all day, he started tutoring rich people’s children, for money. He went to an agency that matched him with parents in the City. His rich clients were people who were essentially unaffected by any of the current anxieties about the economy, except attitudinally. They were supposed to be concerned, so they were. Or they pretended to be concerned. For instance, they would not go on an expensive vacation. These were people who all knew people who had suddenly gone broke. But it was like a mystery: Who would lose everything? Who was working at a financial firm, for instance, that would go bust?

  Overall, the parents who hired Chad would probably spend five to ten thousand dollars for an increase in test scores of less than a hundred points on the all-important tests for college admission, which were called the SATs. They were paying Chad for one hundred minutes a week, to help their children focus.
They could get the same result on their own from twenty dollars’ worth of practice books. Or Chad could do two sessions, with practice questions, for ten times that amount, and the children would benefit just the same.

  But for Chad it was a good thing that he had quit his job. He had more time to conduct his social life. Chad was cute, but he had been single for a while. He was trim and pale and had curly brown hair that grew wild, and deep brown eyes, usually obscured behind glasses that made him look like the sort of person with whom a rich person would entrust their children.

  At a friend’s urging, Chad made a profile on a dating website called DList. It was run by a guy named Daniel, a sort of well-known promoter of—among other things, like not-really-erotic erotic film festivals—sex parties. While some used the site in a goal-oriented way, Chad used it more or less socially. You would “go on” to the site and see who was “around,” and you could “chat” with those people. It introduced the right levels of choice and randomness into a digital meeting place.

  There were all these people on the site that Chad knew but didn’t really know, like they were Internet friends of friends or he’d seen them “around.” And then he searched in his neighborhood, and there was Diego’s profile.

  They both lived in a quiet corner of the City, far from the busy center. The City, long since graded and drained of most of its lakes and marshes, with its pretty houses high on its hills, was exposed to its wide, deep harbor. Down low at the harbor were its tall, cold buildings, where trade had always happened. Up between the two rivers the tall buildings fell away, then rose again, and then once again fell, as wildness and hills and cliffs surrounded the waterways that pushed south past the City. Each day the harbor and its briny water pushed up the rivers, and each day the clean rivers flushed down. Ports first abounded on all sides, until most of the ports were replaced by highways. Aside from the central column of the City the houses shrank in their tight rows and neighborhoods ambled. There were little hills with the grander homes of the rich. And there were little swamps and gullies, with the warehouses and the houses of the poor. Chad and Diego lived in a flat stretch of neighborhood that was just right.

  Diego was this brown-eyed, brown-haired man, with pale skin and tough almond eyes. Chad liked what Diego wrote about himself, and so he chatted him on the website. Diego worked and was in school at night. He would have been graduating in May if he didn’t also have a full-time job. But he thought this was good because it wasn’t like there were any jobs anyway.

  They chatted for about thirty or forty minutes.

  Chad typed, Why don’t we talk on the phone?

  WHEN JOHN LEFT his undergraduate college with his degree, a professor wrote him a four-page letter of introduction to the world. He could use this for his application to professional school, or to gain entrance to places of employment. It included some lines about John’s personal life: “John’s mother died of breast cancer when he was five. His father subsequently died of a stroke. The family’s financial situation had been badly eroded by medical bills and nothing was left.”

  John’s oldest brother was fourteen years older, thirty-nine, and already had two boys, John’s nephews. Then there was the next brother, who was thirty-five, ten years older, and was about to get married. He’d always hated that John was born, John thought. They had fought a lot growing up, but because of this, or in spite of this, they had a good amount of mutual respect for each other in their adulthoods.

  Sometimes, when John and Chad were out, John listened to Chad talk with his own brothers on the phone and was mystified by the affectionate way they spoke to each other. John had never said “I love you” to his oldest brother, and the only time his brother ever said “I love you” to John was right after their dad had his stroke and John was in the house and his brother came to pick him up to take him to the hospital.

  “I’ve never told you this, but I love you,” his brother said.

  “Don’t get carried away,” John said.

  MOST PEOPLE AT this time ate meat. The opinion regarding the treatment of animals by humans, in order of what was considered most evil to most unremarkable, went: the ivory trade, which was the slaughter of elephants in a distant land for their tusks; animal medical experimentation; the skinning and wearing of fur; industrial meat farming; meat eating; dairy farms; petting zoos; zoos; the eating of eggs; the drinking of milk; the keeping of household pets.

  CHAD AND DIEGOS agreed that the written self, the online persona, was too difficult and queasy a form to really gauge a person and so decided to move quickly from the online to the real world. How can you know if you like a person just based on what they tell you, not what you see? Not that seeing wasn’t its own problem. Chad loved putting on a persona, but for understanding who to date, how could you tell online? Like you could be funny as an online persona and then be anxious or unfunny or just slow in person.

  On one Sunday night, they talked on the phone for several hours. Diego was avoiding studying for school. They discovered that Diego had worked with Chad’s roommate once upon a time. Other than that, Chad and Diego had little real-world overlap. So Diego picked up Chad after work and they went for a burger and then to a dance performance and Diego came over to Chad’s house afterward and together they rode the subway to work in the morning.

  JOHN THOUGHT THAT people came to the City, and only then did they realize just how very many people there were. They arrived casually, just to try it out, to see what happened, but wound up getting caught in the great impossible sea of people: With so many, how could you choose one deserving of all your attention? With so many choices, you could easily think that there was always another better one.

  The friends who accompanied John to the City—his first real boyfriend, Jordan, and his best pal, Ralph—were like a diary. Friends were imprinted with the permanent record. Ralph, for instance, remembered the day at college when John had, with great excitement, shown him a picture of Jordan.

  When John and Jordan broke up, John was promptly devastated and then almost as immediately intrigued by all the chances there in the City to see all these people who were more exciting, more handsome, more whatever. But none of them stuck, none made one percent of the impact that Jordan had made. Ralph knew how John had decided, after Jordan, that he’d never be in love again, that he’d never find anyone who’d stick.

  Ralph had been fairly religious in college, quite straitlaced. But by the time he and John went off to the same graduate school, they went out six nights a week, to the City’s bars and clubs. Ralph was tall too, and thin, and gorgeous. They didn’t always go out together because their interests overlapped in only some ways. Ralph felt like he had three different identities that he exercised on different days and in different neighborhoods of the City, small slices of life often invisible to outsiders.

  And so they’d go out separately or together, and get home at three a.m., and then go to class, then study all evening, then go out all night again.

  Then they all got jobs and eventually Ralph was going out only once a week, or once every two weeks.

  And then John and Ralph saw less and less of each other, because Ralph had started seeing someone for a while, until it ended in heartbreak and Ralph left the country for a while. Now John could watch Jordan with his new lover, Jeff. They had a good thing going, John thought, and with the time and distance, he could appreciate what they had together. They’d never cheated; they’d settled on each other exclusively. Well, actually, Jordan had cheated on Jeff in the first six months, once. But then, for years, never again. That was pretty good. That kind of thing seemed impossibly rare.

  John thought about how a writer had described babies learning words as though they were a continual series of floating spoons. A baby just grabs onto one here and grabs onto another there, and that’s how John thought about boys right now. Like they’re all hanging out, out there in space but in reach,
and John could just close his eyes and pretty much grab any one of them.

  LOTS OF PEOPLE—most people—wanted a TV in their apartment. A TV was a thin device for displaying broadcasts sent by corporations. People paid for the TVs just once, and then, like electricity, paid each month for what came to the TV. Even though you paid for the TV programming, big companies also paid to show off their products on the TV, so the companies that distributed the TV programming made money two ways. Some people had cars, and some of those people had TVs in their cars. The elevators that went up the tall buildings had TVs. Taxicabs, the cars with drivers for hire in the City, had TVs, but they weren’t really real TVs; you couldn’t choose what to watch, but at least you could choose to turn them off.

  THE OWNER OF John’s company threw a party to celebrate his company at the Four Seasons, which was considered one of the City’s most sophisticated restaurants. This was what people with a lot of money did: throw expensive parties to draw attention to themselves.

  The place was magnificent. “The walls are hung with a fortune in art and tapestries by such modern geniuses as Picasso, Joan Miró, and Jackson Pollock,” wrote a reviewer for what was then the City’s chief newspaper, fifty years earlier. That writer would go on to win a charity auction in which the prize was a limitless-price dinner at a restaurant of his choice; he paid 300 dollars—about 1,200 dollars, adjusted for “inflation”—for this prize. He chose a restaurant called Chez Denis—in a different country even!—and the bill, for two, came to 4,000 dollars. When adjusted for inflation to this time, that was a bit shy of 16,000 dollars. At the time, everyone was outraged.

  But many people spent that amount of money on a single dress, or a wedding party, or a very inexpensive car, or a month’s rent, if you lived in the building with the Mayor’s name on it.