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

by Choire Sicha

Are you talking to them at all? someone asked.

  “Well, I know them all really well. I’ve never told them directly that I want to work there. They tried to hire me as a freelancer a couple of months ago, but it wasn’t going to be enough money and it was too much work. And it was kind of like, you know, just hire me in-house please. But I don’t think anybody’s really hiring in-house right now! You don’t have to give me all the benefits! I mean I do care about the health insurance, I guess, but they can just give me health insurance and— I do want to be like, by the way, ‘I’m really cheap! Super cheap. You don’t even have to give me vacation days.’ ”

  “Remember that amazing New Yorker story from the late nineties about the guy who just showed up at a job and like started working?” Trixie asked.

  “Wasn’t that like on Seinfeld when George gets fired, or he quits in a rage or something, and they’re like, just go back to work and see if anyone notices?” Edward said. “Yeah. I need a job.”

  “Oh my God, this is so depressing,” Trixie said.

  “I think I need better clothes too,” Edward said. “I get so jealous of people talking about ‘the weekend.’ Because, like, my level of anxiety just remains the same, Monday through Sunday, I’m stressed about life. I’m just sick of this—I just want to be a hack! I don’t want to do anything anymore. I just want to sell out. For nothing.”

  “Oh, Timothy and Jacob left!” someone said.

  “Oh, Edward, this is my husband, Finn. Edward’s been in our apartment.” John had house-sat for them once, and Edward had come over.

  “Just briefly,” Edward said. “There were no wild parties or anything, I promise.”

  There was a pause.

  “Oh, with John! I was like, old apartment? New apartment? The people before us?” Finn said.

  “Somebody asked a question, like, is there like a Jewish mafia situation taking place outside your window?” Edward asked.

  “The guy? In the car?” Trixie said.

  “The guy in the car does seem like a mafia situation,” Finn said.

  “I think he’s just getting free Internet from our building and watching Hulu,” Trixie said. “Which is forbidden by his religion. Because he just watches the computer in his car all night.”

  “Some young Hasid comes and parks outside our building and watches YouTube all night,” Finn said.

  “That’s like a short story,” Edward said.

  “Oh no, it’s insane, we’re going to have to talk to him,” Trixie said. “Because it’s like, every single night.”

  “I walked by drunk the other night and I was going to do it,” Finn said.

  “It’s definitely not porn,” Trixie said. “It’s like TV. TV on his computer. Every night, in his, like, Lexus.”

  “He’s going to break our heart when his Rumspringa comes to an end,” Finn said.

  “He is too old for Rumspringa,” Trixie said. “He has a beard!”

  “That’s the Amish,” Edward said.

  “There’s more than one problem,” Finn said.

  “My old college roommate, sort of my ex-boyfriend, well, my— My college roommate is studying to be a rabbi,” Edward said. “He’s like a real Yiddish scholar. He speaks, like, he’s probably the last person in America who’s not Hasidic to speak Yiddish as fantastically as he does. So we went to see Cat Power in McCarren Park a couple years ago? This guy, like, he’s eccentric, and he’s only gotten more eccentric since college. Afterward I was like, let’s go to dinner, and it was Saturday night. And he was like, you know, Edward, it would really mean a lot to me if you would like come with me to South Williamsburg so I can talk to Hasids. Because you know he’s fascinated with the culture, and he doesn’t get that much chance to speak Yiddish.”

  “And it’s going to help if you go with him?” Trixie said.

  “And he wouldn’t let you have dinner first?” Finn said.

  “That was our compromise, I got to have dinner first,” Edward said. “But I was wearing like, I was wearing like—”

  “Men’s low-rise pants?” Trixie asked.

  “I was wearing cutoff booty shorts, and like one of those deep-V-neck American Apparel shirts that came down to like my belly button.”

  “That seems like the least appropriate outfit for talking to Hasids,” Finn said.

  “I know, I was like, I am not doing this; please please please. So finally we did. And it was really weird. And I think the guys we talked to—they were actually really excited to talk to him too, I think! It’s weird to meet this young guy who was really interested in talking about religion and stuff with them. And they were asking all these trick questions.”

  “And so what did you do?” Finn asked.

  “I just stood there and looked pretty,” Edward said. “I was just hoping to find a husband basically.”

  “I don’t think really—” Trixie said.

  “I always wanted to have a minivan of my own,” Edward said. “But while we were talking to them, there were all these people walking by giving them dirty looks. I think they were suspicious, that the guys talking to us were going to have people to answer to the next day.”

  “There’s no question those guys had repercussions, but at the same time, those guys give dirty looks to anything they see on the street,” Finn said. “It can be another Hasid couple.”

  “How about that guy who pulled over and asked directions the other day and then pulled over to ask someone else directions?” Trixie said.

  “We actually get that a lot,” Finn said.

  TWO DAYS AFTER Timothy quit, the owner of the company called a meeting in the conference room. The owner brought in two platters of sandwiches. Ham sandwiches and one or two vegetarian options—a very soggy mozzarella, with portobello mushroom and zucchini. And tuna, or some unidentifiable fish salad, which really smelled and tasted of cat food. And Terra Chips, which were fried, thin-sliced vegetables.

  The owner did not eat any of this food. Neither did the president of the company, the owner’s henchman.

  But Jacob, who’d quit as the number two, and another coworker, they went to town. Jacob was up and down, getting sandwiches, chomping loudly on chips. He actually hadn’t even officially quit yet but he was going to, and everyone there except, most likely, the owner knew it, since he’d told them all.

  The purpose of the meeting was to assure the staff that this transition was going to be just great. Everything was going to be just fine.

  One person who worked there said he wished the owner could explain what he was envisioning, because he didn’t understand what the owner wanted from the company.

  The owner gave a long, meandering answer and closed with: “Does that answer your question?”

  “Partially!” the employee said. He followed up. The president of the company was sitting next to this employee. The president turned his chair to face the employee, staring directly into his face throughout the duration of the question.

  And the owner’s face as well! One employee said it was like a Gchat emoticon. He was always flat and neutral. But every once in a while, his expression cracked for a second and became just like an angry emoticon. His mouth would form a little “O” and his eyebrows would go all downward and slanty.

  Timothy was sitting right there in the meeting, but that didn’t stop the owner from saying things like, “We’ll finally have a good leader.”

  Finally
someone asked, “What if you don’t find someone in time?” Timothy would be leaving at the end of the year.

  “I’m sure Timothy will stay on till whenever we are ready,” the owner said. Jacob, the number two, turned and looked at Timothy, mock seriously, as if to say something he wasn’t going to say.

  One of the higher-ups on the staff suggested that things were so tight, that so many people were doing two or three jobs at the company, that they couldn’t afford to lose anyone more. This meant that everyone now was irreplaceable.

  “I had a professor at Harvard,” the owner said, “who had a plaque on his desk.” The plaque, he said, was engraved with a quote that said something to the effect of: The fields of battle are littered with the bodies of irreplaceable men.

  There was silence in the room for a while. A few people tried not to laugh. One of them distracted herself by singing, in her head, a song by Beyoncé called “Irreplaceable.”

  Everyone—that is, everyone who still cared—wanted to know if there would be further layoffs. The owner said that he didn’t know because he didn’t interfere in the operations of the company. This wasn’t true at all because of course he did, not least by setting the budgets that allowed for various numbers of employees being paid various amounts of money.

  The owner held forth on business ethics for a while. Also, there was a bright spot in dealing with the staff, the owner said, for some unknowable reason. He compared his business favorably with another company, a union shop. That was a workplace in which the nonmanager employees formed their own organization so as to bargain, together, for the best possible terms of employment. That other business, a well-known one in the same industry, was hobbled, he said, “with their stupid union.”

  One of the employees was so upset by this that she started crying.

  John spent the entire meeting pretending to check emails on his mobile phone. The staff sitting behind him could see that he was actually just playing a low-quality game called BrickBreaker whose ancestry could be traced to the earliest computers, in which the goal was to control a virtual ball that breaks through variously configured walls of virtual bricks.

  Jacob and Timothy left and spent the rest of the day getting drunk, talking about what they’d do next. The rest of the staff went immediately outside and smoked. “It’ll be okay,” said one young employee.

  “Nope,” John said. “It’s not okay.” He was really upset. Sally told him about her friends’ new kittens to cheer him up. Edward was, of course, planning to spend the night that night, but John said he just wanted to be alone and that he’d send Edward off to Jason’s couch, or whoever’s couch Edward was supposedly sleeping, or usually, really, not sleeping, on.

  Edward, in the end, did come over but then he went out again. John stayed in and stared at the TV.

  WHEN PEOPLE MADE a thing for the first time, they could claim the thing, and the method of making it, as belonging solely to them.

  For instance, someone made a nine-inch-long metal stick, with little serrations all facing one way, and with a handle. And people were to use that to carve off tiny flaky bits of cheese. It had patent number 5100506, and the patent covered several surprising techniques, techniques that you might not expect for something as simple as grating cheese. In the technique, a whole metal file was formed, with “a plurality of cutting teeth chemically etched in the metal blank” and “the etching treatment which is used to form the cutting teeth being applied in one direction only from the back surface toward the front surface of the metal blank.”

  So this tiny thing, it was a significant, possibly profitable but never discussed little invention, owned by three people jointly and assigned to a company based far outside the City. The world was absolutely crammed full of these sorts of things. Handy things, little things—each with little numbers on them, leading back to the patent, the marker of the ownership of an idea or a process or a way. Some people worked nearly every day to make things that would gain a patent. Some people would go their whole lives without patenting something, without the idea of doing so even occurring to them. But those to whom it did often produced the patented idea under the care of their employers. They were hired to make things, and so in the course of this paid employment, the inventions were retained by the company. It was like most all work. All the ideas, thoughts, contributions, labor, materials—that was what the employer bought from the worker.

  But really also still, for him- or herself, anybody could make a thing, or a sketch of a thing, and then file for a patent, which would be granted, if it was an original thing that he or she had made.

  CHAD AND DIEGO’S new apartment was great. They were really getting to know each other from the perspective of the other person. Diego was great, Chad thought.

  Except. “Diego does this thing when he cracks eggs, he leaves the empty shells in the egg carton,” Chad said. “I was like, why do you do this? He was like, ‘You’re trying to, like, control me.’ I mean my tone might have been a little more aggressive? It might have been less of a question and more of, like, you are so fucking weird for doing this. Why! Why! They smell and it’s just weird. I feel like in the refrigerators of the insane are egg cartons full of empty shells. Like people who collect sugar packets from restaurants. Like my great-grandmother, who died, and in a closet were hundreds of thousands of sugar packets. He’s not a particularly annoying person! Anyway I see him less now than when we didn’t live together. It’s fine. It’s good. I’ll come home and he’s already asleep and he’ll leave before I’m awake.”

  EVERYONE WHO OWNED sweaters took them down from the back of closets or out of trunks or from under whatever clothes had piled up on top of them. The first few trees dashed off their leaves and were suddenly lone and bare. It happened fast. The harbor turned cold; the warmer water retreated down the coast. A fog would coat the bridges and buildings, and long, low warnings would boom out over the bays. It was in the fog that the City became small. It was easy to forget the sea, and how close it was, until the fog horns traveled all across the City, their sound and a chill both shuddering up over the hills from the water.

  JOHN SHUT OFF the part of himself that cared about his job. He felt so much better now that he’d made a conscious decision to not care about his job at all. Who would want to care?

  He also felt better because Edward just kept not leaving.

  Really it was because he was angry about the way people were being treated at work that he felt he couldn’t care. People confused these states sometimes. When he was angry, or wanted to avoid something, he, like many people, always expressed it by saying, “I don’t care.” But they did care.

  This was a reasonable but dangerous attitude about work in trying times. If you didn’t do very well at your job, you could lose your job. And if you lost your job, you could maybe not find a new one. Around the country, the “Help Wanted” listings often said things like “no unemployed applicants” or “no long-term unemployed.” That is because humans were made so that they often only wanted things that other people wanted. And even apart from that: You just had more value if people wanted you. This was often true in love as well.

  And if you didn’t have any value, you could just disappear, like being dropped through a hole in the floor. Edward, for instance, with no real source of money, at least had his parents’ house in another city to go live in. Where could John go?

  So he did a decent enough job at work. But it was too upsetting, t
he workplace too gross and now all twisted. Everyone spent all day in the office leaping over these chasms that’d opened up. Most people there were looking for a job, but there weren’t really any to be had.

  John thought Edward was great though. Edward for some reason was always convinced, from the very first day, even when they weren’t really “together,” that John would cheat on him. John thought Edward wouldn’t cheat on him. This belief was solely predicated on John’s belief that such a thing would never happen to him. But he realized that wasn’t trust. What John thought about was how guilty he would feel if he were the one cheating. He’d have to call Edward right away and confess. One night he was out, and Dieter from work was there, and John was like, wow, there are so many hot guys here, it’s all so tempting. And Dieter turned to him, all serious: “John, you’ve got a really good thing going. Don’t mess that up.” And that seemed simple but it made a lot of sense.

  John thought about his recent months in terms of a popular movie called Jurassic Park, in which some people had gotten stuck on an island where scientists had cloned extinct dinosaurs and set them loose in a new ecosystem. When a writer made up futures, it was called “science fiction,” at the time. To lure in one of the scary dinosaurs in the movie, the trapped people had hung up this goat, to lure the dinosaur in with the scent. But the dinosaur wasn’t interested. And the lead character in Jurassic Park realized: The T. rex doesn’t want to be fed. Instead he wants to hunt. John thought that he was like this dinosaur.

  ONE NIGHT, JOHN and Edward just stayed at home, alone together, and smoked a lot of pot, and somehow, John ended up all tangled in Christmas lights, all shiny and colored and spectacular and hilarious, Edward lying back on the broken-slatted twin bed, just laughing.

  JOHN AND JASON rehashed their Halloween night. Halloween was an ancient pagan holiday in honor of the dead now observed by dressing as sexy animals or in sexy workplace uniforms. They had gone to a magazine party—that is to say, a party thrown by a magazine—and then ended up at Sugarland, the long and dark and cavernous bar.