Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City (5 page)

So Kevin left and went to the gym, which was a “club” you could join for money and
exercise, and there he ran on the treadmill. Then he got home and the email was waiting
for him. He thought it was pretty outrageous, but while it was frightening, that such
instability could be visited upon him out of the blue, he didn’t feel shattered.

He had a friend, an older person who had gone to his same college, who had introduced
him to the cousin of the owner of John’s company. This new situation was fine! He
was also getting “unemployment insurance” payments from the state, in addition to
the money from this new job. All told, he was actually making more money than he had
before. He was seeing, like Chad, that being traditionally employed was not a particularly
worthwhile thing.

Kevin even had a savings account. He’d never borrowed money—except for college, and
he thought he would be paying for that for the rest of his life. It was only 150 dollars
a month right now—the first year he was out of school, it was just 70 dollars; then
they ratcheted it up a little. Soon he was afraid it’d be 400 dollars a month, and
what then? But he had felt really informed about the responsibility he was taking
on when he signed up: His parents also had school loans that they were still paying
off.

After Kevin had graduated from school, he spent the first year at his mom’s house,
in a northern suburb of the City. He hadn’t wanted to move straight from his mom’s
into a house with his boyfriend, and so he got an apartment with a roommate, a wild
foreign lady with multiple cats, who talked to a psychic online all the time. But
she worked in the evenings and he worked in the day, so that was okay, except, still,
it was weird, so he finally gave in and moved in with his boyfriend.

JOHN’S LANDLORD, A
woman named Zofia, had a 400,000-dollar mortgage on his building. It had been in her
possession for about ten years. The cost of the building was 311,000 dollars, and
presumably she used the rest for improvements.

Each unit in the building—there were seven, including the ground floor—cost 1,400
dollars each month when she bought it, but then the rent prices were raised to 1,600
dollars each month.

That meant that the landlord had made 117,600 dollars in total each year from just
that building. With the rent increase, she was making 134,400 dollars each year. She
owned quite a few other things as well, many nearby, as was common. To own one thing
was a sign that one could own other things like it.

The neighborhood was industrial near the edges, with four-story apartment buildings
and retail storefronts off of a grimy main thoroughfare. It was a place that had long
ago been poisoned by industry. But it was on a river, if you walked down that way,
and you could see the skyscrapers just across the water. The very first house in the
neighborhood had been built 350 years before, about eight blocks from where John lived,
and all the land had been that house’s farm. Now there were a bit more than 16,000
households living on what had been that one homestead. And the site of that first
house was now just a small triangular intersection of streets and one tree.

Someone at some point had cut up and divided John’s building, which was common practice.
There was no telling what these buildings had been like originally, now made and chopped
into little apartments.

Now John’s own little apartment, half of the fourth floor, had a combined kitchen
and living room, which had no windows. It was big enough for a little table and a
cooking area and a small couch that faced a small television, which also directly
faced a little bathroom off the living room. There were two bedrooms off the opposite
side of this main room; those both had windows, and were big enough for a bed and
a desk and a chair.

John’s cousin lived in the other bedroom, and sometimes his girlfriend, who also had
her own place. The apartment was, by the standards of most places and times, fairly
terrible. Even the paint felt wrong; the windows were ill-fitting; the fixtures were
ugly. John loved everything about it, he loved being home, and he never wanted to
leave.

There was a desk, but it was covered in things, so mostly he worked in his little
broken, sunken-in bed, surrounded by clothes and trash. The desk had one leg bent
precariously in and a drawer with no handle. It was nearly impossible to open. That
is where he put all the mail and bills from the year, on top of the bills from last
year.

It was like a little nest.

He had this old white laptop computer, five pounds of keyboard and a screen. Mostly
he used this for the Internet. It made crunching noises and wheezes. It was like one
of the popular toys for children, made by a conglomerate called Fisher-Price. They
made candy-colored blown-up nonworking versions of real-world things, like fake ovens.
They were supposed to be instructional: things that made a game out of things like
answering phones and being a doctor and performing light construction. Except John’s
computer was a dirty white, so it was like the spooky ghost of a Fisher-Price toy.

CHAD AND DIEGO
never fought. They’d never actually, to date, had a fight that they’d call, in hindsight,
a fight. They’d never even really snapped at each other.

The worst thing Diego had ever done was to be late to Chad’s birthday dinner. The
second-worst thing he’d ever done was, on their first date, he’d made fun of Chad
in front of some people, but he’d been trying to make a joke, and it just came out
wrong.

The worst thing Chad had ever done was that he insulted Diego’s religion. He said
something like, “Well, you’re not really a Jew.” While Chad had grown up Jewish, Diego
hadn’t.

“I’m funny all the time though, right, Diego?” Chad said to him in front of some people.

“Right,” Diego said.

They slept together four nights a week or so, and they’d been together then for ten
months. Chad was looking vaguely at professional schools, in different cities. Diego
wasn’t averse to maybe leaving the City after he finished school. And they both wanted
to have kids someday. Or dogs. Or dogs and kids. Chad’s mom had been twenty-five when
she’d had him. He really liked having young parents. She was now fifty. So when he
thought about having children, he thought about doing it sooner. His aunt had just
had a child at forty, and he wasn’t sure he knew what he thought about that.

Even though they were both so respectful and kind to each other, John never gave them
much of a chance. The relationship, John thought, was too warm but never hot enough.
Chad, he thought as well, was too young. And Diego was too freshly reformed from being
out on the town: gone from being a boy who liked the bars and staying out late to
being in school and at home with Chad. The reform was, like, spray-painted on, he
thought. And John thought Chad was suspicious of Diego. And there were little things.
Like, one night Chad got really drunk and said to John and all their friends, “You
haven’t had a chance to really see me single yet.”

THEY WERE DRUNK.

“All these women! There’s a lot of women in this bar,” John said.

“I can’t believe we’ve been ghettoized,” said Chad.

“The looks. The claws coming out of eyes,” said John.

“I don’t want to hear it,” Chad said.

JOHN AND HASSAN
had a little bit of friction. Hassan was a very quiet person. John’s loud and outgoing
nature didn’t always agree with him. So instead of having John over, Kevin would always
go meet him out.

Kevin also thought maybe he would go to a professional school. All his ideas about
where he saw himself in three years were vague. He had thought that by now he’d know.

Kevin and John were the most broke of all their friends, so sometimes Kevin would
bring a six-pack of beer over to John’s and they’d hang out inside, smoking cigarettes
out the window.

Kevin and Hassan’s relationship was hard to describe in terms of intimacy. They were
very affectionate but increasingly less sexual. Sometimes Kevin got nostalgic for
when they had sex all the time. But they’d been together since they were nineteen.
There weren’t exactly rules about what they could and couldn’t do with other people;
it was more like a principle: Respect the relationship, don’t have torrid affairs.
It was a fine line to straddle. Should they be allowed to sleep with someone more
than once? It seemed strange to enforce that you could sleep with someone else only
once. Why would that be more healthy? Wouldn’t that just force you to have dreary,
nonintimate secondary relationships?

Eventually Hassan thought that Kevin and John were a little too close. He thought:
You talk online all day, you see each other all night and you’re out till three in
the morning, and you do it again the next day? Kevin found it hard to say no to John.
John was persuasive to the point of bullying. Kevin had to learn how to say no to
him. And John’s reaction to that was, Why are you being so antisocial? And Kevin would
say, I just need some time to be home and not be out. So Kevin was barely even going
out on weekends now, much less weeknights. And Kevin’s cats and boyfriend were happier
about this too, and Kevin thought he probably was as well.

AROUND THIS TIME
John had a recurring dream that he was at a dinner with all his friends and their
lovers and he was the only one there who was all alone in the world.

A LETTER ARRIVED
from Jason Hudson, DDS, and Ash M. Estafan, DDS, dated March 13. “DDS” stood for
Doctor of Dental Surgery. It was a bill, and the amount owed was 447.64 dollars. The
letter noted that payment was more than six months past due.

Leaving a bar late one night, a little drunk, John had simply fallen down on the street
and cracked his two front teeth. The dentists had seen to him right away—they were
the dentists of his boss, who had made the introduction—and they’d installed two temporary
“crowns” on his teeth. They sat in his mouth and felt foreign.

These cappings could not be confused with “grills,” removable gold and diamond-encrusted
casings placed over the front teeth for the purpose of displaying wealth, a recent
fad. John’s, instead, were white. They were intended to look like real teeth, and
they pretty much did.

John never paid and never returned. After more than a year of wear, his temporary
crowns were thinning and turning, very slowly, to a translucent gray-brown.

IN THE MIDDLE
of March, it was less terrible and biting out, and John went and bought a pair of
tough denim trousers called jeans. Often riveted at stress points, jeans had originally
been worn strictly for labor. They had since grown popular for daily wear, and even,
sometimes, in less formal workplaces. There were now all kinds of jeans, from ones
that cost fifteen dollars to ones that cost more than eight hundred dollars and came
with gold-plated buttons even. John had been wearing a pair of jeans for over a year
that had a big hole that split farther and farther down the front so that more leg
was exposed each time he wore them.

And then Kevin called him, on Friday, at the end of the workday. “There’s a sale for
the next two hours at Uniqlo,” he said. That was the name of a trendy but very inexpensive
store that had recently arrived in the City. “Two jeans for fifty dollars.”

So John left work and ran over and got two, one pair more professionally dark and
trim, in a size 31, and one less dark and more skinny, in a size 32, which made him
feel that he had gotten very large. He’d never worn a 32 before. His friends had told
him to get ready for these sorts of moments, these signs of the body’s transformation
into manhood.

After that, he had a brief and loud dinner with all his family—his brothers, the sister-in-law,
and their cousins—before the real plans for the night. He went over to a friend’s
house. Kevin and Hassan were there, and they sat around watching videos of a popular
entertainer named Britney Spears on the Internet on the computer. These were videos
that let you hear what her real voice was like when she was singing in concert, without
the prerecorded backing tracks that made her sound like a good singer. They were all
laughing, and they were thinking they’d just stay in and do this all night.

Then Chad and some friend of Chad’s came over. Chad was in a terrible mood.

“Are you drunk right now?” Chad said to John.

“I dunno, a little, maybe,” John said.

“What did you do before?” Chad asked.

“Oh, it was just a family dinner,” John said.

“Right, you were probably the most drunk there, right?” Chad said.

“No, I was actually the least drunk out of everybody,” John said.

“The least drunk of your family? Now that’s depressing,” Chad said.

Chad said something to Kevin that John didn’t hear.

What? John asked later. “I can’t even repeat it,” Kevin said. “It’s just so ridiculous
that, like, I don’t want to think about it anymore. I can’t even say the words to
you.”

Everyone was having fun but Chad.

“Can we leave please?” Chad asked everyone. “I want to go somewhere. Can we go out?
I want to go out please.”

THERE WAS SOMETHING
missing and no one quite knew what it was. This was an absence that people didn’t
really think about very much, or at all.

This was about fifty years since people began to understand how a virus “lived” and
“ate” and “reproduced,” and a hundred years since even the existence of a virus had
become even remotely understood. So the first of the documented lentivirus plagues—the
so-called “slow” viruses—took people by surprise. It took a while for people to catch
on; these viruses were more than seven million, or so, years old.

The City was a big place, so two thousand deaths right away was not much to notice.
The total number of deaths was ten times that five years later.

The number of dead had doubled three years later, and by then, there were estimated
to be ten million people alive with this virus around the world. Once again the number
of deaths in the City doubled within eight years. Around the country, more than half
a million people died.