Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City (17 page)

“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, the 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.

“Remember that guy Reed who was flirting with
Edward very openly? Ugh, I hated that guy so much,” John said.

“Oh, he had like an Afro?” Jason said.

“Yes, and he was like, hi, my name’s Reed,” John
said.

“Oh, I didn’t like that person,” Jason said.

“Ugh, I hated him. I was looking at him like I was
going to kill him,” John said.

“Do you know that person?”

“No! I was like, don’t talk to Edward!”

“People are allowed to talk to Edward,” Jason
said.

“I got very upset. Then Edward was like, oh you
know, there’s also a Brazilian guy in the bathroom or whatever. And I’m like,
a
Brazilian man in the bathroom?”

“They didn’t like me as much that time,” Jason
said.

“They did like you! Remember that guy who was
staring at you? The Boy Scout?”

“I’m just not that kind of pervo.”

“But you have to be in a situation like that.”