Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City (23 page)

Actually, almost all of everything changed after
this night. Sally was the last of everyone they knew to quit their office. She
felt like the last passenger stepping off a sinking ship and into the lifeboats.
She was the last because, just before that, John left the company too, to go
work for a much-bigger company—where their old boss Thomas was the new boss.
Thomas’s new boss, that company’s owner, was of course an extravagantly wealthy
man, just like the last boss, just like everyone else’s boss, but he was very
old and secretive. And while the company was enormously successful, and no one
was sure what would happen when he died, still, it felt like some kind of
security.

Also John’s cousin did move out to go to school,
and Edward did finally accept a key to the apartment.

And something else happened. It wasn’t that
everyone stopped being friends after this one last night. They were still
friends, after so much; they just weren’t so piled up together. It was part of
the end of being young, or it was part of it having been the strangest, most
exhausting year. Or it had just been a moment. After this, whole weekends, and
then whole weeks, went by without everyone hanging out.

THE CITY, IT
changed more slowly. One thing that happened, with the Mayor’s very loud
support, was that it finally became legal for two men, or two women, to marry
each other. That was something that some young people in love had to think about
for the first time.

The funny thing about being the Mayor was that you
weren’t, for all the attention you got, really all that powerful. What had the
Mayor done, in all his time in office? His real work wasn’t in the announcements
of rezoning or the opening and closing of schools—although he did shut down at
least 140 schools in the City while in office—or in the little programs that
were supposed to help people start small businesses. His real work was as a
whisperer, a money-giver, an influencer. It was in the giving away of his
endless supply of money, and in his rich-person-to-rich-person conversations,
that he did his most important work. In private, he kept other rich people’s
companies in the City—not that they would leave the City anyway. But from time
to time, a company would pretend that it was leaving the City for someplace less
expensive, and the Mayor would make sure they received tax breaks and other
considerations, and so the company would stay. Well, the company itself would
stay: But it would hire more workers, who worked for less money, in cheaper
parts of the country or the world.

By its nature, the City gained back the number of
jobs that it had lost, and then made more. But really they were only jobs for
some people. In the month the Mayor announced his very first candidacy, the rate
of unemployment in the City—the percentage of working people who wanted and did
not have a job—was 5.3 percent. In the month that he won his third term, it was
9.8 percent. That rate never really receded significantly while he was the
Mayor.

The City’s owners just had access to more people
than they needed. A whole class of people had been created. They were unwanted:
They weren’t needed as workers, and they were barely needed as consumers. Also
if they weren’t workers, then they weren’t in a position to be consumers. Not
enough money ran through them.

Across the whole country, the jobs that had for
some time engaged people who were not rich quite literally vanished. Those jobs
were replaced with either no job at all, or with quite low-paying work. So in
the future, some people might climb up out of this class. But most would
not.

It wasn’t like this was a thing that wasn’t talked
about. Everyone knew about it! But it wasn’t like anyone had the responsibility
of just giving people jobs. It wasn’t anyone’s problem, and so it was no one’s
problem. It wasn’t in anyone’s interest to change this, which also must have
meant it was in someone’s interest to not change this.

The City Council, at least, finally decided that
they should pass a law to forbid businesses from discriminating against the
unemployed during hiring. Businesses wouldn’t even be allowed to advertise that
candidates had to be currently employed.

But the Mayor scoffed at this. He said that he
thought this would be bad for business.

Before the Mayor left office, a 2,415-square-foot
three-bedroom apartment in the building that bore his name sold for thirteen
and
a half million dollars. That apartment had most recently sold for just a bit
more than five million dollars. That was just back at the beginning of the
Mayor’s second term. Having money was really quite magical.

JASON’S
THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY
party was held at this bizarre place in the bottom
of the City, down at sea level, just off the water, for now, where all the great
fabled finance companies had their buildings, where all the money came and went.
The place was clearly a home to gangster parties, or maybe the kind of place
that businessmen went to meet women who weren’t their wives. Everything outside
was blue-gray and cold, and the stone of all the buildings felt thick and wet
and old. Inside it was like being in a secret city inside the City. It was
enormous, on a second floor, all mirrored and crazy and uncomfortable, with
security men who had guns.

Everyone was there.

There were plenty of problems. Jason was throwing
the party with one of his best friends, Emma, and all her cool-haired
girlfriends were there, and they were pretty dramatic. The party was a huge
hysterical success, a real mess. There was a screaming match between the women
and the security guards at one point. A guy had gone into the women’s room to
help Emma’s girlfriend, who was busy vomiting outrageously, and the security
guard freaked out.

John had a flask in his tattered old coat, the same
coat as last winter, and he’d sneak sips from the flask. Outside he’d smoke in
his thin coat; it was cold and you could see straight down out to the harbor,
like staring into the future. He’d get a new coat next winter.

The boy who’d introduced Edward and John came
downstairs outside to bum a smoke. “He’s such a cig pig,” Jason said, with
fondness.

Everyone got drunk. The new year was aging oddly.
Edward needled John about how John’s friends all thought Edward was a fishwife.
Don’t worry about it, dolly, John said to Edward. Edward did worry, quite a lot,
but in time he’d try to get over it.

Ralph was on the dance floor. He was in good
spirits, but, he told everyone, he was going to maybe be homeless for a couple
of weeks after his roommate situation had suddenly blown up.

At this party, amazingly, Jordan, John’s ex,
started kissing Tyler Flowers. The next morning, Jordan would call and text John
like a thousand times. No one even knew why they’d invited Tyler! Old habits.
Jordan and Tyler totally hadn’t slept together, Jordan swore to John. He was
sorry!

John could not care less. Why had he been after
Tyler Flowers again? What a strange, strange year. You’re welcome to Tyler
Flowers, he said—you’re all welcome to him.

Still at the party, as it got late, Chad sat at a
table in a mirrored hallway, his head literally in his hands. Boys were
sashaying up and down the hallway. He was thinking about Branford. He was
thinking about leaving Diego. He definitely also didn’t think he should leave
Diego under any circumstances. He was thinking about sleeping with Branford.
He
was all tied up. John and Edward came and sat at his table. There were dozens
of
reflections of them from all these strange angles, all surrounding Chad. Edward
was sitting on John’s lap. Would Chad or wouldn’t Chad? Would he or wouldn’t
he?
Throw it all away, start over, he wasn’t even sure, was it an obsession or
something else, or what were these feelings? Could he have a secret affair? That
hadn’t worked out so well for Edward. Or wait: It had, actually! For Edward.
But
not for Edward’s boyfriend. Would he or wouldn’t he? Tonight, at least, he
thought it was very likely that he would.

John and Edward listened to this talk for a while.
Then Edward got off John’s lap, and they went and danced, with everyone they
knew around them in this magnificent hideout all tucked away in this City of
limitless strangeness. No one would ever find them all there even if the search
went on for years. It got very late, or very early, and John and Edward, all
wrung out and laughing, went home to be alone together while they could.