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

by Choire Sicha

  In other parts of the country, cigarettes were as cheap as four dollars a pack. But the Mayor said that, while fewer people were smoking all over the country, that in the City, even more people were smoking less. The problem was that he was right. He could personally afford all the cigarettes he wanted, but he didn’t smoke at all. Instead he had his safer vices, like private planes, which were mildly dangerous, certainly less safe than planes maintained by big companies, and certainly created a lot of pollution to transport a single man, but certainly did not take away years of a person’s life on average. Also one of his houses had a fifty-thousand-dollar snooker table that, maybe, he could accidentally walk into and injure himself.

  ON A SUNDAY, John hung out with Jordan and Jeff. John had seen Jordan recently, but he hadn’t seen Jeff in a long while. Jordan had, somehow, never before told Jeff that he had dated John, back in the day—and for so long!—and John had never cared that Jeff didn’t know.

  Now, after Jeff knew, he was just a little weird about John. Aggression, jealousy, self-recrimination: If you knew how to look at people the right way, you could see any of these things and more manifesting in microexpressions, in the veiled hostility of humor, the language of the body. But you had to be careful that you weren’t projecting these emotions on people. People were as easy to misinterpret as they were to read. What could you see in Jeff turning his body to the side, the array of ways he touched Jordan, and the smiles most of all? Were the smiles false and teeth-baring, or were they sympathetic and brotherly?

  Jordan was very tall and handsome and rather blond, with a deep chesty voice. When Jordan graduated from his professional school just a couple years back, right around the same time John did, he had total debt of around 160,000 dollars, only a little of which had been carried over from their undergraduate studies. The payment plan started around 1,200 dollars a month, on a thirty-year basis, which he could afford, because he made a good bit of money. The debt built, over time, with interest. The most economically rational idea, he thought, was to pay the minimum and invest the rest, to outpace the interest. But that proved too complicated. Instead he paid more than was required, to chip away at the always-growing interest, and so he had no savings whatsoever.

  He did not like his job at all. That wasn’t something he had the luxury to think about.

  Jordan had seen, in this museum in another country, called the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, this old painting that people then thought was by an artist called Brueghel. In the painting, all gold and blue in the center, there’s a bay, and a leg sticking out of the water, and a farmer plowing on the shore, head down, and a traveling man or a shepherd with a dog, with his back to the person who’s fallen into the water, and there’s also a schooner sailing away. A poet named Auden wrote about it once: “How everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may / Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, / But for him it was not an important failure.” A poem was like a story, but more abstract. This poem was about how something amazing and terrible was happening right in front of someone on an ordinary day but there was work to perform. Without the work there would be no crop. Without the crop there would be no rent, or no dinner, or some other kind of trouble. That’s exactly like the human reaction to other people’s tragedies—still, now—Jordan thought, what with all the people having lost their jobs. They have more important things going on. You can be adjacent to other people’s misery, but misery had to be right on top of you for it to matter. Jordan felt like his behavior now, in the middle of it all, was like that.

  He had looked at research about human happiness and believed that people weren’t really good judges of what made them happy. He was in the City because he had lived in other cities and didn’t enjoy them, and his friends were there, and his family was near, and so it should make him happy. But also things were going disastrously everywhere. For instance, now his dad made less money than he’d made in twenty-five years. And still Jordan wondered: How is the state of the world going to affect my bonus pay, come the end of the year? In the grand scheme of things, other people at that time were facing legitimate catastrophes—the loss of their homes, the evaporation of their savings—and Jordan wasn’t. Most of the people in his graduate school class from just a few years previous were employed, while the ones graduating now from the same schools were not, and maybe never would be. But he also thought there was a bigger crisis yet to come. Jordan had a certain amount of envy of people who were maybe struggling a little more financially at the moment but were good at what they were pursuing. Was this fair? He figured it absolutely wasn’t, but he still felt that way anyway. Other people were doing something they wanted to do forever, that they cared about. He thought that they went to bed with a sense of satisfaction, while he could not.

  THIS WAS ABOUT right when the trees started to come back, because the seasons were still so regular. Plants were actually everywhere in the City, but always invisible until they began to emit a tiny green mist of new leaves. Soon enough the first brave woman would go outside in just a blouse or a tight T-shirt, while doing laundry, maybe, on a Sunday. A wave would ripple across the City, boys in skinny jeans and well-worn T-shirts that didn’t cover their chicken-thin hips. Chest hair! Again! The backs of knees were shining everywhere. There was maybe no good evolutionary or biological reason for everyone to want to touch someone’s skin on that first warm day of spring, but there it was. The days came a bit too cold or a bit too hot, like a patient with a fever, unpredictable. The nights grew more tempting. The mornings were easy, until the day came when you woke up, your throat swollen, the apartment too hot and gross, before the cold spell of the open window. The trees would stop and just wait. The looping squiggly bands of air would get pushed and bunched around the world, and then finally one day a warm dry blast settled along every avenue and abandoned lot. The City transformed. Bright green leaves lined the park fences, surrounded the shrieks of the playground fights. The streets were transformed with the lines of greenery, reflecting the boxes of blocks and buildings, elegant or scraggly or malformed or patchy, but at least reaching, some even flowering. A few came busting out in a pink glaze, set against jewel-box green. It was coming, time and date unknown, but always it would get there, the full shrinking of the night, the hot juicy wetness of the days.

  THE MAYOR CAME out and made a speech that took everyone by surprise. “I don’t want to walk away from a city I feel I can help lead through these tough times,” he said. And:

  We live in a world where, normal course of business, companies and individuals borrow money and repay it. And that process has come to a stop. And that’s a much more difficult thing to work out of. Why people lose confidence and why people gain confidence, psychologists get PhD theses trying to figure that out. But they are long-term swings and I don’t think anybody questions that we have a problem. . . .

  I will say that we are better prepared than we could have been. We have for the last couple of years, as you know, kept saying, the good times can’t go on forever. . . . Some of our largest employers and most established companies are in turmoil—and others don’t even exist anymore. . . . We may well be on the verge of a meltdown, and it’s up to us to rise to the occasion. . . .

  As our economic situation has become increasingly unstable, the question for me has become far less about the theoretical and much more about the practical. And so, to put it in very practical terms, handling this financial crisis while strengthening essential services such as education and public safety is a challenge I want to take on for the people. . . .

  On the same day, the head of the City Council came out and said that they would be introducing legislation to repeal the two-term limit law, which meant that the Mayor would be clear to run for office for a third time. She said that the decision would be made in a week. “The Mayor has made very clear that he wants the City Council to consider legislation that will extend term limits from eight to twelv
e years. We will obviously do that. Each person will have to stand up and vote yes or no,” she said. This did not make a whole lot of sense on the face of it. The people of the City had voted twice, as a group, to not allow mayors to serve more than two terms. But then the Mayor had “made very clear” what he wanted, and he was used to getting what he wanted.

  Two of the City’s living previous mayors came forward to endorse the Mayor for this third term. The other did not.

  JOHN’S BOSS CALLED all of the staff into the conference room. It was a bright white room. He was going to quit, Thomas said. He couldn’t protect them from the owner anymore, he said.

  “Are you leaving us for another woman?” one woman asked.

  He didn’t want anyone talking about this in public, he said. “If anyone leaks this before we’re willing to announce this, I’m going to be bullshit,” he said. Everyone looked around at each other in the white room. He meant “batshit,” everyone realized. “Bullshit” meant something that was aggressively false. “Batshit” meant crazily angry.

  Right before he’d come into the meeting, Thomas had taken a phone call from a woman with a website. “I can’t talk to you right now!” he’d said to her. “I’m about to go into a meeting and announce that I’m quitting!”

  And so while they were in the meeting, she’d written about this on her website. So when everyone eventually stumbled out of the conference room, it was already done and everyone knew, thereby, at least, putting no one in the awkward position of having to tell people themselves.

  TWELVE YEARS BEFORE John was born, the country renounced a policy that tied its paper currency to actual reserves of gold. The country had maintained a set price for gold—thirty-five dollars an ounce, which is what citizens were paid in exchange for the gold that they were, for a time, no longer allowed to own. Other countries held their own currencies tied to an exchange rate of the country’s “dollar.” A good chunk of the powerful world was in league—briefly.

  The name “dollar”—the name for a currency unit equal to one—supposedly came about from the “thaler,” a currency name dating from another continent, hundreds of years ago. The dollar coin was first defined as twentysomething grams of pure silver, according to a statesman ages ago; that amount of silver, however, was reduced twice and then, eventually, no silver at all was put into silver dollar coins.

  While the coins were made of silver, the paper version of the dollar represented gold. But soon, the government had many more “dollars” in the world than it had gold. To pay some debts, it made a great deal many more “dollars.” And then: The countries in league with the U.S. currencies demanded that their debts be redeemed in actual gold instead of some paper that represented gold.

  So the government told them that the deal was off.

  Money, untethered, was never the same. The little flat bills became potent objects. To burn this paper, or to deface this paper, was a crime. To create fake versions of this paper, which many people did, was an even greater crime. But why wouldn’t they? It had all the value, and it was far easier to counterfeit than some soft metal that had come slamming in from the sky and then had melted into the rock of the planet.

  THE OWNER OF John’s company bought himself a new place to live. The people who were selling it wanted 3.5 million dollars for it, but he paid only 3.2 million dollars for it. It had two bedrooms, and was two thousand square feet, and had a metal staircase that led from the public or entertaining spaces downstairs to the private spaces upstairs. The bedroom upstairs had a window that was the top half of a circle, and was surrounded by an arch of bricks. All the other windows were normal and rectangular though.

  AFTER THOMAS QUIT, John and Sally and also Trixie and Trixie’s husband and some others from work were sitting in Duke’s, a terrible restaurant that was a few blocks from the office. Duke’s was a restaurant that was all dressed up in fake things from outside of the City, but not exotic, foreign things; instead they were homey, supposedly nostalgic things. Like street signs and funny pictures and the license plates of old cars from other states and red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, reminiscent of a church social. Like it was supposed to be exciting because it was strange and therefore transporting, but really it was bleak.

  They were very upset. It was like someone had died. It was a vague instability made explicit. They talked about if it all made sense. Was it okay that dealing with the owner had become too onerous or, at least, not worth their boss’s time? Or was it just not worth the money to him? What did it mean that he’d said he didn’t feel like he could protect people anymore? So then who would, when the owner wanted to carve up the staff, to “cut costs,” to “keep the company lean,” just like every other company they knew, where all their friends had lost their jobs? And what about the owner’s point of view? The owner, for his part, thought the boss was slow and stodgy, unwilling to live in the real world of money.

  Everyone was thinking about who was going to lose his job. The idea, the maybe-fact, that everyone thought they understood, that had likely been relayed from their boss to Timothy, or through some other channel of gossip, was that three hundred thousand dollars a year at least had to be cut from the budget. That probably meant that the newer hires, the people who’d come on in the last year, would all go. Or who knew? Some of those people were making fifty thousand dollars a year; some were making more, some less. You never knew how much people were making, even if they sat right next to you, unless you had a serious talk and compared notes or spied on their pay stubs, and there were strong cultural prohibitions against both those things. Three hundred thousand dollars a year could mean eight people; it could mean four people.

  In any event, their boss had quit.

  John and Sally went outside. They smoked.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Sally said.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” John said. “No, it’s not.”

  She’d never seen him like this.

  JOHN HAD BEEN not-sleeping with a guy also named John. They would do things like go out to dinner, a kind of pretend dating, but they hadn’t slept together. So this other John had a birthday party, at a bar called the Phoenix. The Phoenix was a bar in the sense that it had lively music and also a bar with bartenders behind it, and other than that was pretty much just a room that was a weird shape, with brick walls and some stools.

  One of John’s other friends was visiting for the occasion, from a less interesting country. “How has your trip been?” John asked.

  “Obviously I’ve been a huge slut, I’ve slept with someone every day,” the foreigner said. The foreigner was wearing a slot machine sweatshirt, which is to say, a sweatshirt with a slot machine pictured on it.

  “That sounds like fun,” John said, meaning the opposite.

  “Obviously I’m not as big a slut as John,” the foreigner said, meaning the other John, the one that John was not really dating.

  “Oh really?” John said, all interested now.

  “Yeah, he’s slept with like four guys in the last five days,” the foreigner said.

  Good to know, John thought.

  Across the room John could see a friend, a mopey guy who never had much to say. His hair was always overstylized, in that it was designed to fall over his eyes. He was talking to this other boy—this really dramatically cute boy that John had heard about. Friends had always said to him, over and over, John, you have to meet this guy, you guys would really get along. Oh, we’ll really get along? John asked. No, not like that, he’s basically married, everyone said.

  But John had seen pictures of him on Facebook. There was one of this guy with a friend where they were walking in the rain and he was so skinny and he had a buzz cut and a weird but very pretty face and he was smoking a cigarette.

  No way I’m saying hello to him first, John thought. He can say hello to me. So he turned his back.

  “Hey,
John, you know Amy, right?” the mopey guy later came over to say.

  “Yup,” John said.

  “My friend Edward here is Amy’s best friend,” he said. “You should talk about Amy.”

  And so John finally turned to Edward.

  “I’m not interested in Amy,” John said to Edward, and he got up close. “I’m interested in you.”

  Edward’s back was up against a gumball machine. They talked. Edward was agitated and lively and nervous and excited. When they at last looked around, most everyone was long gone, except for Fred, a school friend of John’s, shambling by.

  “John, I gotta get outta here,” Fred said.

  “Yeah, you know, I guess I should go too?” Edward said.

  John leaned in. “I’d really like it if you stayed for another drink,” he said.

  “I’m going to stay for another drink,” Edward said and ran his hands through his hair.

  Fred walked out oblivious.

  They talked about where they lived. Edward lived not far away. “Oh, that’s so much closer, we should just go over there,” John said.

  “I should tell you,” Edward said, just out the door. “I have a boyfriend.”

  John clapped his hands. Right.

  “He’s, like, on vacation,” Edward said. “Right now he’s not home.”