Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City (3 page)

Overall, the parents who hired Chad would probably spend five to ten thousand dollars
for an increase in test scores of less than a hundred points on the all-important
tests for college admission, which were called the SATs. They were paying Chad for
one hundred minutes a week, to help their children focus. They could get the same
result on their own from twenty dollars’ worth of practice books. Or Chad could do
two sessions, with practice questions, for ten times that amount, and the children
would benefit just the same.

But for Chad it was a good thing that he had quit his job. He had more time to conduct
his social life. Chad was cute, but he had been single for a while. He was trim and
pale and had curly brown hair that grew wild, and deep brown eyes, usually obscured
behind glasses that made him look like the sort of person with whom a rich person
would entrust their children.

At a friend’s urging, Chad made a profile on a dating website called DList. It was
run by a guy named Daniel, a sort of well-known promoter of—among other things, like
not-really-erotic erotic film festivals—sex parties. While some used the site in a
goal-oriented way, Chad used it more or less socially. You would “go on” to the site
and see who was “around,” and you could “chat” with those people. It introduced the
right levels of choice and randomness into a digital meeting place.

There were all these people on the site that Chad knew but didn’t really know, like
they were Internet friends of friends or he’d seen them “around.” And then he searched
in his neighborhood, and there was Diego’s profile.

They both lived in a quiet corner of the City, far from the busy center. The City,
long since graded and drained of most of its lakes and marshes, with its pretty houses
high on its hills, was exposed to its wide, deep harbor. Down low at the harbor were
its tall, cold buildings, where trade had always happened. Up between the two rivers
the tall buildings fell away, then rose again, and then once again fell, as wildness
and hills and cliffs surrounded the waterways that pushed south past the City. Each
day the harbor and its briny water pushed up the rivers, and each day the clean rivers
flushed down. Ports first abounded on all sides, until most of the ports were replaced
by highways. Aside from the central column of the City the houses shrank in their
tight rows and neighborhoods ambled. There were little hills with the grander homes
of the rich. And there were little swamps and gullies, with the warehouses and the
houses of the poor. Chad and Diego lived in a flat stretch of neighborhood that was
just right.

Diego was this brown-eyed, brown-haired man, with pale skin and tough almond eyes.
Chad liked what Diego wrote about himself, and so he chatted him on the website. Diego
worked and was in school at night. He would have been graduating in May if he didn’t
also have a full-time job. But he thought this was good because it wasn’t like there
were any jobs anyway.

They chatted for about thirty or forty minutes.

Chad typed, Why don’t we talk on the phone?

WHEN JOHN LEFT
his undergraduate college with his degree, a professor wrote him a four-page letter
of introduction to the world. He could use this for his application to professional
school, or to gain entrance to places of employment. It included some lines about
John’s personal life: “John’s mother died of breast cancer when he was five. His father
subsequently died of a stroke. The family’s financial situation had been badly eroded
by medical bills and nothing was left.”

John’s oldest brother was fourteen years older, thirty-nine, and already had two boys,
John’s nephews. Then there was the next brother, who was thirty-five, ten years older,
and was about to get married. He’d always hated that John was born, John thought.
They had fought a lot growing up, but because of this, or in spite of this, they had
a good amount of mutual respect for each other in their adulthoods.

Sometimes, when John and Chad were out, John listened to Chad talk with his own brothers
on the phone and was mystified by the affectionate way they spoke to each other. John
had never said “I love you” to his oldest brother, and the only time his brother ever
said “I love you” to John was right after their dad had his stroke and John was in
the house and his brother came to pick him up to take him to the hospital.

“I’ve never told you this, but I love you,” his brother said.

“Don’t get carried away,” John said.

MOST PEOPLE AT
this time ate meat. The opinion regarding the treatment of animals by humans, in order
of what was considered most evil to most unremarkable, went: the ivory trade, which
was the slaughter of elephants in a distant land for their tusks; animal medical experimentation;
the skinning and wearing of fur; industrial meat farming; meat eating; dairy farms;
petting zoos; zoos; the eating of eggs; the drinking of milk; the keeping of household
pets.

CHAD AND DIEGOS
agreed that the written self, the online persona, was too difficult and queasy a
form to really gauge a person and so decided to move quickly from the online to the
real world. How can you know if you like a person just based on what they tell you,
not what you see? Not that seeing wasn’t its own problem. Chad loved putting on a
persona, but for understanding who to date, how could you tell online? Like you could
be funny as an online persona and then be anxious or unfunny or just slow in person.

On one Sunday night, they talked on the phone for several hours. Diego was avoiding
studying for school. They discovered that Diego had worked with Chad’s roommate once
upon a time. Other than that, Chad and Diego had little real-world overlap. So Diego
picked up Chad after work and they went for a burger and then to a dance performance
and Diego came over to Chad’s house afterward and together they rode the subway to
work in the morning.

JOHN THOUGHT THAT
people came to the City, and only then did they realize just how very many people
there were. They arrived casually, just to try it out, to see what happened, but wound
up getting caught in the great impossible sea of people: With so many, how could you
choose one deserving of all your attention? With so many choices, you could easily
think that there was always another better one.

The friends who accompanied John to the City—his first real boyfriend, Jordan, and
his best pal, Ralph—were like a diary. Friends were imprinted with the permanent record.
Ralph, for instance, remembered the day at college when John had, with great excitement,
shown him a picture of Jordan.

When John and Jordan broke up, John was promptly devastated and then almost as immediately
intrigued by all the chances there in the City to see all these people who were more
exciting, more handsome, more whatever. But none of them stuck, none made one percent
of the impact that Jordan had made. Ralph knew how John had decided, after Jordan,
that he’d never be in love again, that he’d never find anyone who’d stick.

Ralph had been fairly religious in college, quite straitlaced. But by the time he
and John went off to the same graduate school, they went out six nights a week, to
the City’s bars and clubs. Ralph was tall too, and thin, and gorgeous. They didn’t
always go out together because their interests overlapped in only some ways. Ralph
felt like he had three different identities that he exercised on different days and
in different neighborhoods of the City, small slices of life often invisible to outsiders.

And so they’d go out separately or together, and get home at three a.m., and then
go to class, then study all evening, then go out all night again.

Then they all got jobs and eventually Ralph was going out only once a week, or once
every two weeks.

And then John and Ralph saw less and less of each other, because Ralph had started
seeing someone for a while, until it ended in heartbreak and Ralph left the country
for a while. Now John could watch Jordan with his new lover, Jeff. They had a good
thing going, John thought, and with the time and distance, he could appreciate what
they had together. They’d never cheated; they’d settled on each other exclusively.
Well, actually, Jordan had cheated on Jeff in the first six months, once. But then,
for years, never again. That was pretty good. That kind of thing seemed impossibly
rare.

John thought about how a writer had described babies learning words as though they
were a continual series of floating spoons. A baby just grabs onto one here and grabs
onto another there, and that’s how John thought about boys right now. Like they’re
all hanging out, out there in space but in reach, and John could just close his eyes
and pretty much grab any one of them.

LOTS OF PEOPLE—
most
people—wanted a TV in their apartment. A TV was a thin device for displaying broadcasts
sent by corporations. People paid for the TVs just once, and then, like electricity,
paid each month for what came to the TV. Even though you paid for the TV programming,
big companies also paid to show off their products on the TV, so the companies that
distributed the TV programming made money two ways. Some people had cars, and some
of those people had TVs in their cars. The elevators that went up the tall buildings
had TVs. Taxicabs, the cars with drivers for hire in the City, had TVs, but they weren’t
really real TVs; you couldn’t choose what to watch, but at least you could choose
to turn them off.

THE OWNER OF
John’s company threw a party to celebrate his company at the Four Seasons, which
was considered one of the City’s most sophisticated restaurants. This was what people
with a lot of money did: throw expensive parties to draw attention to themselves.

The place was magnificent. “The walls are hung with a fortune in art and tapestries
by such modern geniuses as Picasso, Joan Miró, and Jackson Pollock,” wrote a reviewer
for what was then the City’s chief newspaper, fifty years earlier. That writer would
go on to win a charity auction in which the prize was a limitless-price dinner at
a restaurant of his choice; he paid 300 dollars—about 1,200 dollars, adjusted for
“inflation”—for this prize. He chose a restaurant called Chez Denis—in a different
country even!—and the bill, for two, came to 4,000 dollars. When adjusted for inflation
to this time, that was a bit shy of 16,000 dollars. At the time, everyone was outraged.

But many people spent that amount of money on a single dress, or a wedding party,
or a very inexpensive car, or a month’s rent, if you lived in the building with the
Mayor’s name on it.

The state’s brand-new governor came and spoke at this party. The president of John’s
professional school came. At this party, in fact, John saw most of the very rich people
that controlled the various institutions of his life. The new governor was not particularly
rich, and would not be the governor for long. The previous governor, though, was nearly
as rich as the Mayor. Despite the fact that they occupied the same rarified tier of
wealth, they weren’t really friends, though they claimed to be. But then, a large
amount of money was often isolating.

The ex-governor’s father had more than 500 million dollars, though he himself had
grown up very poor. He gave the ex-governor, his son, a very nice apartment at 985
Fifth Avenue. His father, in fact, had caused the building to be built. The family
took in more than a million dollars a year in rents paid by other people.

Because his father was rich, the governor grew up with other rich people; he went
to a private high school—that is, he received the mandatory education for young people,
but he took it at a school that you paid to attend, because it was a much better school—and
then to expensive colleges and professional schools.

But for one summer while he was at school, he gave it all up. He went about to rural
places in the country, picking vegetables and doing construction. He wanted to find
out what the country was like for normal people. This experience convinced him that,
even if one didn’t have a college degree or, say, a college degree from a not-very-good
school, one could “make it” in the country—provided one wanted to work really hard.
This was not a terribly original idea. In fact, it was an idea so popular that to
object to it was considered intellectually treasonous.

At long last, he’d grown up and been in charge of the whole state. But then he had
to leave his job governing: He had paid women other than his wife to have sex with
him. More important, he had lied about it. Everyone in the City was very upset about
that, though some were more amused than scandalized.

The new governor had to announce his infidelities as well, but he had never lied or
broken any laws, so he was welcome at the Four Seasons.

The Mayor came to this party as well. The owner of John’s company was nowhere near
as rich as the Mayor, but he was, obviously, rich as well, because his father was
rich.

The people there were in charge of the actual landscape of the City. That meant that
they controlled the dirt, the stones, the buildings, the tunnels, the sightlines,
the scene, and, less so but not much less so, the movements of the people within the
landscape.

The physical landscape was a harder and harder thing to control. Though always malleable,
foot by foot, the City had become more calcified as it grew up over the decades. For
one thing, fewer grand disasters happened. For instance, on one incredibly cold night
about 175 years before this time, 674 buildings—all of them south of Wall Street—burned
down in a single fire.

Unfortunately, many insurance claims weren’t paid to the owners of those buildings,
because some of the insurance companies burned down, ending their operations.

Those charred acres were an opportunity. All sorts of physical landscape was claimed
and made and shaped.

Still later in the City’s life, whole neighborhoods were bulldozed and claimed, even
when they hadn’t burned down.