by Choire Sicha
After Kevin had graduated from school, he spent the first year at his mom’s house, in a northern suburb of the City. He hadn’t wanted to move straight from his mom’s into a house with his boyfriend, and so he got an apartment with a roommate, a wild foreign lady with multiple cats, who talked to a psychic online all the time. But she worked in the evenings and he worked in the day, so that was okay, except, still, it was weird, so he finally gave in and moved in with his boyfriend.
JOHN’S LANDLORD, A woman named Zofia, had a 400,000-dollar mortgage on his building. It had been in her possession for about ten years. The cost of the building was 311,000 dollars, and presumably she used the rest for improvements.
Each unit in the building—there were seven, including the ground floor—cost 1,400 dollars each month when she bought it, but then the rent prices were raised to 1,600 dollars each month.
That meant that the landlord had made 117,600 dollars in total each year from just that building. With the rent increase, she was making 134,400 dollars each year. She owned quite a few other things as well, many nearby, as was common. To own one thing was a sign that one could own other things like it.
The neighborhood was industrial near the edges, with four-story apartment buildings and retail storefronts off of a grimy main thoroughfare. It was a place that had long ago been poisoned by industry. But it was on a river, if you walked down that way, and you could see the skyscrapers just across the water. The very first house in the neighborhood had been built 350 years before, about eight blocks from where John lived, and all the land had been that house’s farm. Now there were a bit more than 16,000 households living on what had been that one homestead. And the site of that first house was now just a small triangular intersection of streets and one tree.
Someone at some point had cut up and divided John’s building, which was common practice. There was no telling what these buildings had been like originally, now made and chopped into little apartments.
Now John’s own little apartment, half of the fourth floor, had a combined kitchen and living room, which had no windows. It was big enough for a little table and a cooking area and a small couch that faced a small television, which also directly faced a little bathroom off the living room. There were two bedrooms off the opposite side of this main room; those both had windows, and were big enough for a bed and a desk and a chair.
John’s cousin lived in the other bedroom, and sometimes his girlfriend, who also had her own place. The apartment was, by the standards of most places and times, fairly terrible. Even the paint felt wrong; the windows were ill-fitting; the fixtures were ugly. John loved everything about it, he loved being home, and he never wanted to leave.
There was a desk, but it was covered in things, so mostly he worked in his little broken, sunken-in bed, surrounded by clothes and trash. The desk had one leg bent precariously in and a drawer with no handle. It was nearly impossible to open. That is where he put all the mail and bills from the year, on top of the bills from last year.
It was like a little nest.
He had this old white laptop computer, five pounds of keyboard and a screen. Mostly he used this for the Internet. It made crunching noises and wheezes. It was like one of the popular toys for children, made by a conglomerate called Fisher-Price. They made candy-colored blown-up nonworking versions of real-world things, like fake ovens. They were supposed to be instructional: things that made a game out of things like answering phones and being a doctor and performing light construction. Except John’s computer was a dirty white, so it was like the spooky ghost of a Fisher-Price toy.
CHAD AND DIEGO never fought. They’d never actually, to date, had a fight that they’d call, in hindsight, a fight. They’d never even really snapped at each other.
The worst thing Diego had ever done was to be late to Chad’s birthday dinner. The second-worst thing he’d ever done was, on their first date, he’d made fun of Chad in front of some people, but he’d been trying to make a joke, and it just came out wrong.
The worst thing Chad had ever done was that he insulted Diego’s religion. He said something like, “Well, you’re not really a Jew.” While Chad had grown up Jewish, Diego hadn’t.
“I’m funny all the time though, right, Diego?” Chad said to him in front of some people.
“Right,” Diego said.
They slept together four nights a week or so, and they’d been together then for ten months. Chad was looking vaguely at professional schools, in different cities. Diego wasn’t averse to maybe leaving the City after he finished school. And they both wanted to have kids someday. Or dogs. Or dogs and kids. Chad’s mom had been twenty-five when she’d had him. He really liked having young parents. She was now fifty. So when he thought about having children, he thought about doing it sooner. His aunt had just had a child at forty, and he wasn’t sure he knew what he thought about that.
Even though they were both so respectful and kind to each other, John never gave them much of a chance. The relationship, John thought, was too warm but never hot enough. Chad, he thought as well, was too young. And Diego was too freshly reformed from being out on the town: gone from being a boy who liked the bars and staying out late to being in school and at home with Chad. The reform was, like, spray-painted on, he thought. And John thought Chad was suspicious of Diego. And there were little things. Like, one night Chad got really drunk and said to John and all their friends, “You haven’t had a chance to really see me single yet.”
THEY WERE DRUNK.
“All these women! There’s a lot of women in this bar,” John said.
“I can’t believe we’ve been ghettoized,” said Chad.
“The looks. The claws coming out of eyes,” said John.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Chad said.
JOHN AND HASSAN had a little bit of friction. Hassan was a very quiet person. John’s loud and outgoing nature didn’t always agree with him. So instead of having John over, Kevin would always go meet him out.
Kevin also thought maybe he would go to a professional school. All his ideas about where he saw himself in three years were vague. He had thought that by now he’d know.
Kevin and John were the most broke of all their friends, so sometimes Kevin would bring a six-pack of beer over to John’s and they’d hang out inside, smoking cigarettes out the window.
Kevin and Hassan’s relationship was hard to describe in terms of intimacy. They were very affectionate but increasingly less sexual. Sometimes Kevin got nostalgic for when they had sex all the time. But they’d been together since they were nineteen. There weren’t exactly rules about what they could and couldn’t do with other people; it was more like a principle: Respect the relationship, don’t have torrid affairs. It was a fine line to straddle. Should they be allowed to sleep with someone more than once? It seemed strange to enforce that you could sleep with someone else only once. Why would that be more healthy? Wouldn’t that just force you to have dreary, nonintimate secondary relationships?
Eventually Hassan thought that Kevin and John were a little too close. He thought: You talk online all day, you see each other all night and you’re out till three in the morning, and you do it again the next day? Kevin found it hard to say no to John. John was persuasive to the point of bullying. Kevin had to learn how to say no to him. And John’s reaction to that was, Why are you being so antisocial? And Kevin would say, I just need some time to be home and not be out. So Kevin was barely even going out on weekends now, much less weeknights. And Kevin’s cats and boyfriend were happier about this too, and Kevin thought he probably was as well.
AROUND THIS TIME John had a recurring dream that he was at a dinner with all his friends and their lovers and he was the only one there who was all alone in the world.
A LETTER ARRIVED from Jason Hudson, DDS, and Ash M. Estafan, DDS, dated March 13. “DDS” stood for Doctor of Dental Surgery. I
t was a bill, and the amount owed was 447.64 dollars. The letter noted that payment was more than six months past due.
Leaving a bar late one night, a little drunk, John had simply fallen down on the street and cracked his two front teeth. The dentists had seen to him right away—they were the dentists of his boss, who had made the introduction—and they’d installed two temporary “crowns” on his teeth. They sat in his mouth and felt foreign.
These cappings could not be confused with “grills,” removable gold and diamond-encrusted casings placed over the front teeth for the purpose of displaying wealth, a recent fad. John’s, instead, were white. They were intended to look like real teeth, and they pretty much did.
John never paid and never returned. After more than a year of wear, his temporary crowns were thinning and turning, very slowly, to a translucent gray-brown.
IN THE MIDDLE of March, it was less terrible and biting out, and John went and bought a pair of tough denim trousers called jeans. Often riveted at stress points, jeans had originally been worn strictly for labor. They had since grown popular for daily wear, and even, sometimes, in less formal workplaces. There were now all kinds of jeans, from ones that cost fifteen dollars to ones that cost more than eight hundred dollars and came with gold-plated buttons even. John had been wearing a pair of jeans for over a year that had a big hole that split farther and farther down the front so that more leg was exposed each time he wore them.
And then Kevin called him, on Friday, at the end of the workday. “There’s a sale for the next two hours at Uniqlo,” he said. That was the name of a trendy but very inexpensive store that had recently arrived in the City. “Two jeans for fifty dollars.”
So John left work and ran over and got two, one pair more professionally dark and trim, in a size 31, and one less dark and more skinny, in a size 32, which made him feel that he had gotten very large. He’d never worn a 32 before. His friends had told him to get ready for these sorts of moments, these signs of the body’s transformation into manhood.
After that, he had a brief and loud dinner with all his family—his brothers, the sister-in-law, and their cousins—before the real plans for the night. He went over to a friend’s house. Kevin and Hassan were there, and they sat around watching videos of a popular entertainer named Britney Spears on the Internet on the computer. These were videos that let you hear what her real voice was like when she was singing in concert, without the prerecorded backing tracks that made her sound like a good singer. They were all laughing, and they were thinking they’d just stay in and do this all night.
Then Chad and some friend of Chad’s came over. Chad was in a terrible mood.
“Are you drunk right now?” Chad said to John.
“I dunno, a little, maybe,” John said.
“What did you do before?” Chad asked.
“Oh, it was just a family dinner,” John said.
“Right, you were probably the most drunk there, right?” Chad said.
“No, I was actually the least drunk out of everybody,” John said.
“The least drunk of your family? Now that’s depressing,” Chad said.
Chad said something to Kevin that John didn’t hear.
What? John asked later. “I can’t even repeat it,” Kevin said. “It’s just so ridiculous that, like, I don’t want to think about it anymore. I can’t even say the words to you.”
Everyone was having fun but Chad.
“Can we leave please?” Chad asked everyone. “I want to go somewhere. Can we go out? I want to go out please.”
THERE WAS SOMETHING missing and no one quite knew what it was. This was an absence that people didn’t really think about very much, or at all.
This was about fifty years since people began to understand how a virus “lived” and “ate” and “reproduced,” and a hundred years since even the existence of a virus had become even remotely understood. So the first of the documented lentivirus plagues—the so-called “slow” viruses—took people by surprise. It took a while for people to catch on; these viruses were more than seven million, or so, years old.
The City was a big place, so two thousand deaths right away was not much to notice. The total number of deaths was ten times that five years later.
The number of dead had doubled three years later, and by then, there were estimated to be ten million people alive with this virus around the world. Once again the number of deaths in the City doubled within eight years. Around the country, more than half a million people died.
The winter that Chad and Diego met, there were only about a hundred thousand people with this virus in the City—almost exactly the same as the number of City residents who had died so far. A bit more than two-thirds of those dead people were men, which was because at least a full third and at most, and more likely, two-thirds of all those people were men who exclusively or at least sometimes slept with other men.
So we know from these numbers that some people were missing.
Say three hundred thousand men, minimum, disappeared—nearly all at once, in the long view—in the country.
Say at least fifty thousand men disappeared from the City over the course of John’s life.
These were people who would have been coworkers, mentors, bosses, owners, millionaires, subway workers, neighbors, guys to pick up at bars, people at libraries, people on the Internet, people with advice, good or bad, or ideas, good or bad, or entrepreneurs, or adoptive parents, or stalkers on the Internet, or politicians, or knowing secretaries, or painters, or people in the next cubicle. But they weren’t there.
JOHN WENT OVER to Amelia’s house, just down the road from him, in his new jeans. Amelia was a moody, underpaid, waifish blonde from work. They got really stoned on marijuana. They were reading the Bergdorf Goodman catalogue, which was like a magazine but contained clothes and shoes and jewelry for people to come and buy at the store of the same name in the City.
“This is really good writing,” John said, and he read some of it to her.
“That sounds beautiful,” Amelia said.
After a while he realized that he was so stoned that he had to leave, and so he went home, where his cousin and his cousin’s girlfriend were watching a movie called Shakespeare in Love. John came in during the middle of a scene in which Shakespeare was writing one of his famous plays, and John couldn’t stop screaming at the TV, so they told him to go to his room.
He turned on his personal computer and signed on to a website called Manhunt, a rather more transactional version of DList.
He was chatting with some guy whose screen name—his “handle”—was Ritalin. He had, John thought, a very attractive body. And yet John did not find his face as attractive. This guy was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and John thought that he could start to see this aging in his face. The way that fat starts to pool beneath the chin, the way the skin around the eyes starts to sag, the way fat pulls away from the lines around the mouth revealing the skeleton beneath. He was nearing a cliff, though he hadn’t gone over it yet. The hairline—it was just so slightly inching back. Almost receding but not.
“We should get drunk sometime soon,” the guy wrote to John.
“Hell yes, we should,” John wrote.
They exchanged real names. John searched the Internet. The guy was an actor, or wanted to be. He was 5’11’’ and weighed 135 pounds. He had 875 pictures, many of them of himself, on his Facebook page.
AT WORK, JOHN’S friend Sally smoked cigarettes, and his manager Timothy smoked cigarettes. Some other people did too, but not as frequently as they did. Cigarettes were made up of tobacco, a nightshade, and a secret cocktail of chemicals. They weren’t allowed to smoke in the office though. That had been outlawed just twenty years before. They smoked on the street outside. You couldn’t smoke inside anywhere. People once smoked while inside airplanes. Airplanes were like long air car
s that flew fast in the sky, and you could buy a seat on one to travel to other cities and countries or, if you were really outlandishly rich, you could buy your own airplane. The planes gave off smoke too. At this time, everyone was still allowed to smoke in rental apartments, but quite soon they would not be allowed to smoke in parks or on beaches in the City. This was a way in which the Mayor was controlling behavior that was considered harmful. Cigarettes could kill you.
Smoking was a vice. Some of the other vices were alcohol, drugs, and, depending on who you asked, lying and cheating and cruelty.
So they would all traipse downstairs. They’d walk past their boss’s office. “Hey, kid!” Thomas would say to John.
It was a problem: One person would walk by another’s workspace and say that it was time to smoke, and so often everyone smoked whenever just one person wanted to smoke.
John didn’t smoke well. He held cigarettes wrong—not between the first two fingers, but usually between the thumb and first finger. He squinted when he inhaled. He never smoked in high school and barely smoked in college, so he was going against the tide. The trend was that people would, when they were young, thoughtlessly start smoking and then be unable to quit. Later, when they were a bit older, most people knew better, or had enough self-control, or sense, to not start smoking.
John’s friends—both those who smoked and those who didn’t—would always tell him to quit smoking.
But his friends still went outside to smoke with him. No one was sure yet really how to make people not smoke most effectively. What if you yelled at them every day? Or what if you cried and wailed every time they smoked? What if you put pictures of people dying from smoking on the walls of their office cubicles?
All or none of these things might work but, according to the Mayor, what did work was simply making cigarettes as close to unobtainable as possible. In the City, cigarettes now cost no less than nine dollars for twenty cigarettes in a box. A new sixty-two-cent federal tax went into effect right then; this followed a raise, the year previous, in the state tax on cigarettes from one dollar and fifty cents to two dollars and seventy-five cents. All told, the taxes on a pack of cigarettes were now at five dollars and twenty-six cents. So this meant that the actual product’s cost was mostly composed of tax, and then money for the producers of cigarettes, with a little bit being retained by the people who actually sold them. Or less than a little: This was why cigarettes were a minimum of nine dollars, because already some stores sold them for ten or eleven or twelve dollars. Soon they would be fifteen.