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

by Choire Sicha

  Chad was stoked for his hearing. He was going to show the City that he couldn’t be controlled. His ticketing officer actually did show up; everyone had told Chad that they never did. Chad got to question the officer. How could the police officer remember anything at this point? Chad remembered everything, in vivid detail, and Officer Vargas was in for a grilling. He recognized Chad’s face but nothing else. Chad was sort of offended. Chad asked a few leading questions. “What was my foot doing?” The judge was very helpful—and in the end dismissed the case.

  He was so excited. “Yes!” Chad said and hit the counter at the window. “Please do not hit the window,” the clerk said. The judge, in her write-up, called Chad “consistant [sic], forthright and sincere.” Chad had been cited before, for drinking on the platform, and had once been with someone who’d been cited for smoking on an open-air platform, so he could have looked like a repeat offender.

  Everyone was getting sick as winter came on. Chad was so ill and dizzy during his hearing. Later he went to a friend’s reading and had to run outside and throw up in a trash can. Everyone was coughing and hacking and throwing up all the time. It was a bright spot that the City paid to have trash receptacles available for public use on the street.

  JOHN WAS AT work, so he was on Facebook, doing nothing, sending all the pictures on this one guy’s account to Chad so they could laugh about them. This was the account of a professional guy, but in all his pictures he was pretty much shirtless and buff and showing off. And then John accidentally sent one to Max, a guy in the office. The problem with chat was that you would choose who you talked to from a list of everyone you had ever talked to, and it was easy to misfire, to click the wrong person from the list. It was equally easy to have a number of chat windows open and to type into the wrong little digital box. And Max was like, uh, what’s this? And John was like, well, obviously that is from this guy’s Facebook page! And Max was like, oh, I see, haha, that’s the best! Anyway, John was looking at these pictures of this guy with all these other guys and realized, oh, I know this one here, I went on a date with him. He remembered some details about the guy, but that was it. No idea what his name was or what they had done. There was nothing left there to recall.

  THE STAFF WAS back in Duke’s for a going-away party, at last, in honor of Timothy and Jacob. They were finally leaving the company! The new boss was there, and Thomas, their old boss, had come back, but the owner hadn’t been invited. And their old boss got up and made a speech.

  “You guys, anyway, lemme just say, I’ll do this super quick. I hired—this is awful! I hired Timothy when he almost hit me in the back of a cab after a Christmas party one night. He actually took a swing at me. And it was that day I knew I loved him.”

  Everyone laughed? In a somewhat horrified way.

  “And I hired Jacob in part because he almost identically resembled my kid brother,” Thomas said, “who has an uncontrollable temper. It turns out, guess what? So. But. The two of them, it’s fair to say, are joining what might be considered the most distinguished alumni society in the world.”

  The two of them, Thomas said, represented what made the business an “astonishing institution”—a “combination of intellect, drive, sensibility and, I would just say, tremendous vitality. How’s that? Hey! That was a code word for insatiable sexual desire. Is that a good way to put it?” Everyone laughed. “I’d just like to say the essence of it is, the older you get, or the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve learned is that the only thing that matters is integrity.”

  Trixie got up right away, during the applause. Trixie was really going to be John’s official boss now.

  “I just wanted to say that I really wanted this to be also a celebration of the last six months of all of us working together,” she said, “and working so hard for Timothy, and for Jacob. I think a lot of us experienced—they plucked us out of some weird—we met them in a bar!” She had met Timothy years and years before she’d worked there. “A lot of our connections are through these two, and then they brought us to Thomas. I love working for you guys together, you’re a great team, and you’re going to do great in the future, and I’m really excited for you.” Then everyone went out in the cold to smoke. Good-bye! everyone said. Good-bye, good-bye!

  JOHN HAD A good-bye party of his own, at the Phoenix, because he was going overseas, early in the morning, for a week. Fred had paid for a cheap ticket for him to visit. His flight left at nine a.m., from an airport pretty far away, which meant he’d have to get up at five thirty a.m. or so. He hadn’t packed. He wasn’t sure where his passport was either.

  “Do you have to show your passport both ways?” he’d asked Sally earlier at the office.

  “Um . . . ,” she said. He did; passports were the international identification required to travel between countries.

  Edward was going back to his parents’ house, because of course he wouldn’t be caught dead in the apartment without John.

  Chad was there, and he was a little crazy, all wound up. Everyone was smoking outside.

  “Aren’t you actually going so as to get away from the insane filth?” Chad asked Edward. He said something about how the bathtub was so disgusting.

  “I can hear you, it’s not like you’re three hundred feet away,” John said, and gave him a look.

  Kevin was there, and though he was scruffy, he’d shaved his mustache off, which was a shame. Kevin was trying to figure out, for his obsessed boss, how to get more people to look at their new website. No idea!

  “You should take a Tic Tac,” John said. He meant Adderall. Chad said, wow, no, I’m so insanely well rested, I don’t need any focus, I don’t actually do anything all day.

  Chad was doing fine with just tutoring a couple days a week and working very part time at home for John’s company. But that didn’t fill all his days. He really wasn’t doing anything right now. He didn’t really get out of bed, not even to make it into the living room. Like he’d get to the living room finally, and then it was sunset. He wasn’t even watching TV all day, just sort of idly reading sometimes, or staring into the computer.

  Something was in the air. Pretty much everyone had grown a beard, even Jason, who looked healthy—his face had gotten a little scruffy as a contrast with the shaved head.

  Jason had done something a few hours earlier that made him feel weird. He’d picked up a guy online and had coffee with him and then had invited him back to the office, where they’d totally had sex. The guy was really into that. The guy said to Jason, “This is so hot.”

  But instead of picking the guy up on Manhunt or Craigslist, he’d used Grindr, a program on his phone.

  “It makes Manhunt look like two cups and a string,” John said.

  Grindr was a program that ran on only very elaborate telephones. When you turned it on, it just showed a grid of pictures of guys. They would have a little green icon if they were actually online right then; otherwise, they’d have been recently online. And because everyone was on their phone, they could be located, so it would show you how far away everyone was. So when Jason turned it on, and there were all these guys, good-looking too, who were like 65 and 132 and 332 feet away. It was like in a popular movie from a while back called Aliens, where people on this other planet built a tracking device and attached it to their guns so that they could track the movement of terrifying monsters. But this was for sex.

  “I guess you shouldn’t look a gift butthole in the . . . butthole?�
�� Edward said. “But . . .” It made him feel old-fashioned.

  “I’m a serial monogamist,” Edward said.

  Jason had been using it for only two weeks and already he felt like he should get rid of it. Like it was bad for him. And bad for everyone. Just bad. Mostly there was too much total information awareness to it.

  EDWARD HAD A lot of time to think while John was gone. He knew zero people who had died basically, although his grandparents were both dead. Having both your parents die while you’re still essentially a child was the very definition of bad luck, he thought. But just because unlucky things had happened, that doesn’t mean they’d continue to happen, Edward thought, and that had become a major, if rarely expressed, part of John’s self-conception. Edward thought John had a notion that other people were likely to die surprisingly. That’s why he wasn’t good about looking after his health and did things like postponing medical tests. But also Edward thought that people bent over backward to help John.

  Edward’s sister quit her job to take an unpaid internship—she was the same age as John—and Edward wondered, how are you going to afford this? And she was really evasive. Maybe her boyfriend was helping her out, or their parents were. He was glad she’d quit. In her industry—well, in every industry now, he thought—it had become fully institutionalized that people were treated as completely disposable. Useful until you were broken, and then you were trash to be taken out. Edward on some level wanted John to just quit his job, even though he knew that was crazy, and then where would the two of them be? Edward didn’t know if it was luck or not, but Edward saw that John had all these strong connections and people wanted to help him. Also he thought that John had some magnetism, where people looked at him and wanted to take him in. There was something in his face. He was feckless, but it seemed to work for him.

  A while back, Edward had accidentally come across one of John’s student loan bills. It freaked him out. At least they can’t repossess your education, he thought.

  The student loan thing is just kicking a can down the road; those people should all be put in jail, he thought. All the private lenders just managed to piggyback on a person—and you can’t declare bankruptcy?

  Edward made a point of being in the apartment only when John was there, even though it was kind of a pain. He knew John’s cousin and liked him, but still, sometimes you just wanted to be alone. It was a tiny space, and even if you love the intruder, there comes a time when you remember that person is watching cable, which costs money, so it’s time for him to put a quarter in the slot. Though of course the roommate’s girlfriend was home all the time too.

  Also he wanted to be independent. But it would be bad to step backward. To get his own apartment would be regressing. There would be weird negotiations, like: Are you sleeping over? How would you parse out your time? Those kind of discussions would become a necessity. But also Edward knew that John would never ever sleep anywhere else. Edward had stayed everywhere, and he’d had to basically beg John to come along. Plus John was kind of afraid of cats. Once when Edward was house-sitting at this place with this little tiny kitten, John was basically terrified every time it moved. John was a homebody and also a bit of a charming control freak; he enjoyed playing on his own turf.

  Anyway the whole thing was like the dead shark thing from Annie Hall, Edward thought: The relationship had to keep moving or else it died.

  CHAD MET AN art history senior who attended one of the good local colleges. He had a ridiculous name! Branford Loverford Covington. He’s so beautiful, Chad said. Gorgeously beautiful.

  They met in real life. Branford was friends with Dieter, from John’s office. They had all been at the Phoenix one night, again, and then Branford emailed Chad to follow up after, and they became museum buddies. That meant that they were friends who went to museums together.

  Chad made it clear that he lived with his partner. I would like to be friends, Chad said to him. It’s very hard, Chad thought. In his head, when Mariel Hemingway and Woody Allen were at that gallery in Manhattan, that’s how Chad felt about himself, though he wasn’t as funny as Woody Allen. But he felt like the old creepy man leaning on the sprightly young gorgeous person. He was too young to feel old and creepy! But there he was, feeling disgusting under Branford’s clear gaze.

  Branford’s parents disapproved of his lifestyle, living in the City, studying high-minded things! They were the sort of family that had never doubted its quality, its validity. They were the kind of family that kept recycling the same names for their children, generation after generation. They’d already gotten it right the first time.

  Branford and Chad went to a show about the Bauhaus together. They had intellectual conversations, about ideas and life and love and history and death. It’s a peculiar kind of heartbreak to be in love with someone and to feel that flush of infatuation with someone else. Branford’s gravity was crushing, and Chad wanted to let go and throw himself at him.

  EDWARD HAD ONCE asked John if John ever saw a future where he cleaned up a little bit. And John was like, no, I’ll just get a cleaning lady.

  There is a little bit of insanity that creeps into your life because of filth. Like one day Edward couldn’t find his Nintendo game. So he literally did nothing. He sat in the apartment while the roommate was out and twiddled his thumbs. Edward spent a lot of time feeling sorry for himself. He thought about things and worried. Like, he owed Aric a lot of money, he thought. Or maybe he didn’t? He didn’t know how to approach it. He didn’t know if he actually had to pay it or not. The thing was that he felt like he owed something.

  Edward thought the Internet had destroyed his brain in the last two years. In part he thought it was chat. It was the closest thing to telepathy. He could beam any thought into other people’s minds. And he was faster, more articulate, funnier than in person, or he thought so. He taught himself to program in BASIC when he was eight, but instead of using it for anything interesting, he made little games. And he liked playing those text games, which taught him to type and prepared him for the world of the Internet that was to come, when chat, suddenly, became omnipresent. One thing that happened was that things came easy when he was young, and then when things didn’t come easy anymore, he didn’t know how to try, how to study, how to learn. Also having a laptop meant you never had to be away from the Internet for long. Everywhere had Internet now. If he could burn the Internet down, he thought he’d be happy. He thought it had physically changed the way his brain worked. He couldn’t even watch TV without a computer on his lap, or unless he was really stoned, or preferably both. He was too poor to smoke too much pot. Though he’d got some recently.

  He had one hundred dollars, so he’d gone out and bought some. He really only liked smoking pot alone. He just wanted to watch Oprah and smoke pot, but didn’t want to talk to anyone. Some guy took him to some other guy’s apartment and he didn’t even know who was selling it. John had slept with one of the guys once, and it was very awkward and he gave the guy the money and took a smaller bag and the guy was like, you can take the bigger bag, and so Edward spent seventy dollars and got what seemed like a lot. And he gave a lot of it away. He did feel bad that he’d introduced John to pot. John was pretty clean when Edward met him. He smoked too many cigarettes—well, so did Edward—but also cigarettes were probably his number-one financial expenditure. He wouldn’t go a day without buying cigarettes no matter how broke he was.

  Edward’s friendship circle had really chang
ed. Part of it was breaking up with Aric. And Jason’s ex, who’d been one of Edward’s closest friends, he was still off on the other coast. Another friend had moved to another state to go to grad school. And moving home, all the endless back and forth, the house-sitting, it had disrupted other friendships. So more and more Edward was hanging out with John’s friends, though at least Jason bridged that gap, as their friend. But he felt a need to branch out on his own. Also he couldn’t stand being near John and Chad. He liked them both. But together they had this whole thing—last time he’d seen them they were flailing around so much that John hit Edward in the face on accident. But it was all of a piece. Edward thought he’d lost a lot of ground in terms of his independence. He’d been with Aric since he was twenty-two. He thought he’d missed out on developing certain skills. And so his natural instinct was to gravitate very close to one person and—well, on the other hand, it was fun. But it felt a little bit dire. Edward would feel bad if John stayed home all the time, but that is what he wanted. If they didn’t lay out the terms of what they were doing, fights ensued. John tended to double-book. Sometimes triple-book. John piled more and more people into every possible occasion. Edward thought John fancied himself this very spontaneous person who would go where the night took him. And he did, except he was hemmed in by the wall of conflicting plans he’d make every night.

  Getting out of all of this could be accomplished by Edward getting an apartment. That would be pretty hard to do when he had only thirty dollars left of that hundred.

  IT WAS A long week that John was gone. Edward stewed at his parents’ house. He realized he had very mixed feelings about cohabitating, so he wanted to pretend that he wasn’t actually doing so in as many ways as possible. Before he left, John had again offered to make him keys. And Edward said, but doesn’t that big key cost like forty dollars to duplicate? And John said, oh okay, never mind.