Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City (2 page)

This open plan idea, like a bonfire or declaration of love, had to be executed completely
or not at all. It didn’t work to make an open plan for the lesser-paid workers while
retaining private spaces for the more important managers. But for now, across the
City, a great number of people sat at work, in rows or at tables, and the less important
they were, the farther inside the building they were seated, which meant, mostly,
being farther removed from any windows. So from the inside of the offices, it seemed
like these workplaces were, at best, an endless shelving unit or, at worst, a livestock
pen where the workers were kept like sheep and the managers, all around in their offices,
were the shearers.

In John’s case, his employer had built a bullpen for the staff, though it wasn’t really
a true bullpen, as the shallow desks had short little carpeted dividers that gave
workers a small sense of privacy. Workers could pin things to these fake walls if
they wanted. Then in the middle of the bullpen was a double row of two desks that
faced each other. So there was a hierarchy there too: the people who sat around the
outside “U” of the room and faced the walls had more privacy, while the people who
sat in the middle, like an “I” inserted into the “U,” had less. And then there was
a row of offices, at the open top of the “U” of the bullpen, which blocked the only
wall with windows.

The supervisory staff worked in those offices. The biggest and most private of the
offices belonged to their boss, Thomas, a rather crazed steel-haired man in khakis,
just old enough to be the father of the youngest of his employees. He was always loose
with a riot of words and prone to extravagant monologues with endless and excruciating
pauses. Everyone adored him. Thomas reported to the owner of the company, who was
young—not much older than John. The owner was fairly new: He had bought this company
recently—instead of having created it himself—to add to his other companies. In the
change in ownership, Thomas had expressed happiness publicly, but the rumors in the
office held that he had been paid one million dollars to stay on running the company.
Thomas and the owner did not particularly get along, although they said they did to
anyone who asked.

This was a traditional disagreement: The owner wanted to spend less money, in order
to be “profitable.” Thomas wanted to spend more to do the same. In any event, the
company’s costs overran its revenue.

If a worker sat in the bullpen, sometimes he could see a door fly open and someone
would say, “Can I see you in my office please?” Often this was friendly, someone just
wanted to gossip or plot. Alliances of the workplace were divided along the physical
outlines established in the office: employees with doors and the employees beyond
them.

Most of the light in the office was provided by the cold baking of fluorescent strips
overhead. Often the bullpen staff would leave those lights off and burn only a few
incandescent lamps, and the room would become suddenly quite dark and cozy and pleasant.
Then in the office one would feel like a young child in a library at the drab end
of a winter’s day.

ALMOST EVERYTHING IN
the City was capital. The offices were to make money; the buildings were to make money;
inside the buildings and the offices, people were employed to make things that made
money. And then around these pillars were services: restaurants, bars, shops, cobblers,
dressmakers, all to serve the people who were employed making money. So: almost everything.
Everything except love, probably. People in the City didn’t often make explicit matches
of their children for the transfer of money or goods. But the arrangements of love
had an old-fashioned lag to them, in which capital was attached. For instance, people
talked about “marrying well,” which meant that someone was marrying someone rich.
For instance also, there were all the attendant issues of cohabitation. Of necessity
or for simple matters of equality, there came the sharing, in some way, of money incoming
and outgoing, and purchasing or not purchasing things, and paying for the electricity.
There was also a custom of gift-giving at the time of the actual legal ceremony of
marriage. When contracted, the parties would join in accepting gifts or, even more
boldly, in dictating which gifts would be accepted. Many people made long lists of
things they wanted to receive and everyone bought them and they were delivered. Frequently
a wedding would be celebrated with a party of great expense. Hundreds of guests would
be fed; spaces much larger than the traditional house were paid for; musicians were
hired; people now came from far away, where once it was customary for only local people
to celebrate a union. The arrangements often cost tens of thousands of dollars, if
not hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it was frequent that the parents of those
to be wed shared in this expense, as if the expense of this undertaking could not
reasonably be assumed by the parties embarking on what was often referred to as a
“new life.”

This was a messy stew of old and new ideas. Marrying for love was a brand-new practice.

The customs of love in general had dictates, although there were many disagreements,
many minority opinions. Early on, the rules concerned who should, or could, pay for
things like the purchase of food in restaurants, and what that meant, this little
gift-giving of things to be digested.

As the relationship developed, the pertinent matters became who would pay for the
residence, who would make more money and how it would be shared. Love suffered most
when issues of capital intruded. It bred distrust and bad feeling. In this way, the
City and love were at odds.

Sometimes people would simply declare themselves married—even with no one there to
observe this declaration. But declarations of marriage became more onerous and bureaucratic
over time. To be truly married, an official had to preside over the declaration, and
the couple involved had to pay a fee in order to be licensed by the government. So
only the official could say who was wed and who was not.

The state became extremely busy deciding which domestic arrangements were legal and
which were not. In this time with which we are concerned, there were some arrangements
that society utterly forbid: it was illegal for people of a certain age to have sex
with people under a certain age—these ages were picked to define “adult” and “child,”
but didn’t always quite hit the mark—and it was illegal to force people to have sex.
And there were some laws that were less sensible and were quickly falling out of favor.
For instance, it was illegal to exchange money for sex, and it was illegal for men
to marry men and women to marry women. It had also, until quite recently, been illegal
for people of some different ancestries to marry. As well, it had been illegal for
two people to have kinds of sex that couldn’t result in the conception of another
human being.

Sometimes the people prosecuted the crimes—or at least the criminals—themselves. Shame
or violence was almost as good a punishment as imprisonment. But almost always, people
were more forward-thinking than the laws. And the laws that fell out of favor, they
didn’t stay laws forever.

JOHN HAD GRADUATED
from his professional school just four months prior to starting this job, which he
had now held for a couple of years. He was very young and very thin, in the fashionable
way of that time. He had freckles that would come and go in the summer sun, and reddish-brown
hair: a handsome chipmunk. He was quick with words and he had no sense of smell and
he couldn’t drive a car and his eyes were pretty bad, so sometimes he wore these old
glasses that made him look funny; they were blocky and dumpy and incongruously old.
Often in the bullpen he’d put his face right up to his computer. He liked working,
but he still remembered the freedom of that summer after graduation—everything had
been so easy.

He had worked briefly as a nonemployee, a “freelancer,” and that meant he made more
money because so-called “freelance” pay was generally higher. It was expected that
the freelancer would pay all his or her own benefits—like health insurance—and, at
the conclusion of each year, taxes. Taxes were a percentage of everyone’s earnings
that paid for everything the government bought or built or wanted to maintain. And
as well, he didn’t have to be anywhere, didn’t have to get up early and go into the
office, any office, every day.

Except he’d also really messed up. Because that freelance situation had been the first
time he’d really worked, and because the taxes weren’t taken out of his checks that
summer as they were for full-time employees.

John had somehow reported only 3,669 dollars in income. The state had corrected this
to 13,134 dollars in income. The government had said he owed something like 3,000
dollars.

When he started working full time, the company started setting aside the taxes for
him, sending that portion of his income directly to the government. For most workers,
the job would take out “too much,” and so when people filed their taxes with the government,
in a great wild flurry of forms and mathematics, people would then get a “refund.”
But John didn’t get his “refunds,” which would have been about 600 dollars each, because
they went to pay off those old taxes.

Also the number that he owed kept going up because the government assessed “interest,”
as a “penalty.”

He took home 2,200 dollars a month.

His expenses were 800 dollars for his half of the monthly rent—his cousin lived with
him—and about 100 dollars for “utilities,” which were the electrical power for the
appliances and the lights and such, and water, and cable television. And then there
were his debts. He didn’t like to think about that. So after paying some of that,
as much as he could face, he had about 900 or 1,000 dollars to spend each month, which
was about 33 dollars a day. The subway to work every day took a little. Food took
a little. Beers were 3 dollars. Every two weeks, he’d run out of money, and have just
20 or 40 dollars to last through Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

SEX WAS A
very unsatisfying practice at this time, considered animal and messy, and also dangerous.
It had been dangerous for a long time, but now most nonlethal diseases were treatable,
and also women could largely control whether they became pregnant. Pregnancy was the
most lethal byproduct of sex. But there were still diseases that were not curable.

Sex itself was hard enough. Some people could achieve sexual satisfaction through
only very specific means. For instance, dressing up in pirate hats, or as lions or
puppies, or as corporate brands and characters. Some people couldn’t achieve sexual
climax without being punched in the stomach. Some people could achieve sexual intimacy
with only one particular gender. Most people at this time believed there were two
of those. And many believed these two genders were very distinct—almost separate species—and
so they should have different roles in life. Many, though, found this ridiculous.

People made great and complicated arrangements to satisfy their urges.

But many people had less elaborate sexual structures—or “preferences”—so it was often
easy, at least at first, for them to mate, or have sex, without even much of a thought
to a prolonged commonality with a partner.

Sometimes people refused to acknowledge their sexual selves, leading to later trouble
with mates. They hadn’t been doing what they wanted, but they hadn’t known it. For
instance, many people wanted to have sex with a number of people, but they, by habit
or by pressure, ended up in agreements that they would have sex with just one person
only. But then their desires won out over their agreements.

Others, in various minorities of taste or persuasion, obsessed over their choices.
If they were excited only by violence, or if they had to gaze upon pictures of, say,
lesser mammals before sexual activity, they sometimes had to go to great lengths to
solicit willing—if not even compatible—partners.

The arrival of the Internet—in its earliest, flattest state, of sending words, and
then pictures, and then moving pictures—was most transformative of this endeavor,
even more than it was for entertainment and the sale of retail products. The Internet,
as people knew it then, was only about twenty years old, but most of the products
and experiences on the Internet were even more recent than that.

Only through the early tentative arrival of full-world search could fellow enthusiasts
of very particular sexual procedures easily identify each other.

And so could everyone else: people who wanted to meet to make children, people who
wanted someone with whom to grow old, fellow adherents to a religion, people who were
monogamists—or temporary monogamists.

But already, even though this was in the exciting early days of a virtual society,
organic or accidental meeting in the real world—the face-to-face first blush and chemical
systems rush—was seen as something prized, something original, something the flat
Internet, even with all its growing reach and inclusion, couldn’t offer.

JOHN’S FRIEND CHAD
had a real office job and took home 425 dollars a week. This was a job that young
people wanted. It opened doors; it introduced him to people, mentors maybe, famous
people, intellectuals.

And then he quit. Chad realized that people didn’t start at the bottom and work their
way up anymore. This was an outmoded idea. Instead of working at a desk all day, he
started tutoring rich people’s children, for money. He went to an agency that matched
him with parents in the City. His rich clients were people who were essentially unaffected
by any of the current anxieties about the economy, except attitudinally. They were
supposed to be concerned, so they were. Or they pretended to be concerned. For instance,
they would not go on an expensive vacation. These were people who all knew people
who had suddenly gone broke. But it was like a mystery: Who would lose everything?
Who was working at a financial firm, for instance, that would go bust?