Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City (6 page)

The winter that Chad and Diego met, there were only about a hundred thousand people
with this virus in the City—almost exactly the same as the number of City residents
who had died so far. A bit more than two-thirds of those dead people were men, which
was because at least a full third and at most, and more likely, two-thirds of all
those people were men who exclusively or at least sometimes slept with other men.

So we know from these numbers that some people were missing.

Say three hundred thousand men, minimum, disappeared—nearly all at once, in the long
view—in the country.

Say at least fifty thousand men disappeared from the City over the course of John’s
life.

These were people who would have been coworkers, mentors, bosses, owners, millionaires,
subway workers, neighbors, guys to pick up at bars, people at libraries, people on
the Internet, people with advice, good or bad, or ideas, good or bad, or entrepreneurs,
or adoptive parents, or stalkers on the Internet, or politicians, or knowing secretaries,
or painters, or people in the next cubicle. But they weren’t there.

JOHN WENT OVER
to Amelia’s house, just down the road from him, in his new jeans. Amelia was a moody,
underpaid, waifish blonde from work. They got really stoned on marijuana. They were
reading the Bergdorf Goodman catalogue, which was like a magazine but contained clothes
and shoes and jewelry for people to come and buy at the store of the same name in
the City.

“This is really good writing,” John said, and he read some of it to her.

“That sounds beautiful,” Amelia said.

After a while he realized that he was so stoned that he had to leave, and so he went
home, where his cousin and his cousin’s girlfriend were watching a movie called
Shakespeare in Love
. John came in during the middle of a scene in which Shakespeare was writing one of
his famous plays, and John couldn’t stop screaming at the TV, so they told him to
go to his room.

He turned on his personal computer and signed on to a website called Manhunt, a rather
more transactional version of DList.

He was chatting with some guy whose screen name—his “handle”—was Ritalin. He had,
John thought, a very attractive body. And yet John did not find his face as attractive.
This guy was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and John thought that he could start to
see this aging in his face. The way that fat starts to pool beneath the chin, the
way the skin around the eyes starts to sag, the way fat pulls away from the lines
around the mouth revealing the skeleton beneath. He was nearing a cliff, though he
hadn’t gone over it yet. The hairline—it was just so slightly inching back. Almost
receding but not.

“We should get drunk sometime soon,” the guy wrote to John.

“Hell yes, we should,” John wrote.

They exchanged real names. John searched the Internet. The guy was an actor, or wanted
to be. He was 5’11’’ and weighed 135 pounds. He had 875 pictures, many of them of
himself, on his Facebook page.

AT WORK, JOHN’S
friend Sally smoked cigarettes, and his manager Timothy smoked cigarettes. Some other
people did too, but not as frequently as they did. Cigarettes were made up of tobacco,
a nightshade, and a secret cocktail of chemicals. They weren’t allowed to smoke in
the office though. That had been outlawed just twenty years before. They smoked on
the street outside. You couldn’t smoke inside anywhere. People once smoked while inside
airplanes. Airplanes were like long air cars that flew fast in the sky, and you could
buy a seat on one to travel to other cities and countries or, if you were really outlandishly
rich, you could buy your own airplane. The planes gave off smoke too. At this time,
everyone was still allowed to smoke in rental apartments, but quite soon they would
not be allowed to smoke in parks or on beaches in the City. This was a way in which
the Mayor was controlling behavior that was considered harmful. Cigarettes could kill
you.

Smoking was a vice. Some of the other vices were alcohol, drugs, and, depending on
who you asked, lying and cheating and cruelty.

So they would all traipse downstairs. They’d walk past their boss’s office. “Hey,
kid!” Thomas would say to John.

It was a problem: One person would walk by another’s workspace and say that it was
time to smoke, and so often everyone smoked whenever just one person wanted to smoke.

John didn’t smoke well. He held cigarettes wrong—not between the first two fingers,
but usually between the thumb and first finger. He squinted when he inhaled. He never
smoked in high school and barely smoked in college, so he was going against the tide.
The trend was that people would, when they were young, thoughtlessly start smoking
and then be unable to quit. Later, when they were a bit older, most people knew better,
or had enough self-control, or sense, to not start smoking.

John’s friends—both those who smoked and those who didn’t—would always tell him to
quit smoking.

But his friends still went outside to smoke with him. No one was sure yet really how
to make people not smoke most effectively. What if you yelled at them every day? Or
what if you cried and wailed every time they smoked? What if you put pictures of people
dying from smoking on the walls of their office cubicles?

All or none of these things might work but, according to the Mayor, what did work
was simply making cigarettes as close to unobtainable as possible. In the City, cigarettes
now cost no less than nine dollars for twenty cigarettes in a box. A new sixty-two-cent
federal tax went into effect right then; this followed a raise, the year previous,
in the state tax on cigarettes from one dollar and fifty cents to two dollars and
seventy-five cents. All told, the taxes on a pack of cigarettes were now at five dollars
and twenty-six cents. So this meant that the actual product’s cost was mostly composed
of tax, and then money for the producers of cigarettes, with a little bit being retained
by the people who actually sold them. Or less than a little: This was why cigarettes
were a minimum of nine dollars, because already some stores sold them for ten or eleven
or twelve dollars. Soon they would be fifteen.

In other parts of the country, cigarettes were as cheap as four dollars a pack. But
the Mayor said that, while fewer people were smoking all over the country, that in
the City, even more people were smoking less. The problem was that he was right. He
could personally afford all the cigarettes he wanted, but he didn’t smoke at all.
Instead he had his safer vices, like private planes, which were mildly dangerous,
certainly less safe than planes maintained by big companies, and certainly created
a lot of pollution to transport a single man, but certainly did not take away years
of a person’s life on average. Also one of his houses had a fifty-thousand-dollar
snooker table that, maybe, he could accidentally walk into and injure himself.

ON A SUNDAY,
John hung out with Jordan and Jeff. John had seen Jordan recently, but he hadn’t seen
Jeff in a long while. Jordan had, somehow, never before told Jeff that he had dated
John, back in the day—and for so long!—and John had never cared that Jeff didn’t know.

Now, after Jeff knew, he was just a little weird about John. Aggression, jealousy,
self-recrimination: If you knew how to look at people the right way, you could see
any of these things and more manifesting in microexpressions, in the veiled hostility
of humor, the language of the body. But you had to be careful that you weren’t projecting
these emotions on people. People were as easy to misinterpret as they were to read.
What could you see in Jeff turning his body to the side, the array of ways he touched
Jordan, and the smiles most of all? Were the smiles false and teeth-baring, or were
they sympathetic and brotherly?

Jordan was very tall and handsome and rather blond, with a deep chesty voice. When
Jordan graduated from his professional school just a couple years back, right around
the same time John did, he had total debt of around 160,000 dollars, only a little
of which had been carried over from their undergraduate studies. The payment plan
started around 1,200 dollars a month, on a thirty-year basis, which he could afford,
because he made a good bit of money. The debt built, over time, with interest. The
most economically rational idea, he thought, was to pay the minimum and invest the
rest, to outpace the interest. But that proved too complicated. Instead he paid more
than was required, to chip away at the always-growing interest, and so he had no savings
whatsoever.

He did not like his job at all. That wasn’t something he had the luxury to think about.

Jordan had seen, in this museum in another country, called the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts
de Belgique, this old painting that people then thought was by an artist called Brueghel.
In the painting, all gold and blue in the center, there’s a bay, and a leg sticking
out of the water, and a farmer plowing on the shore, head down, and a traveling man
or a shepherd with a dog, with his back to the person who’s fallen into the water,
and there’s also a schooner sailing away. A poet named Auden wrote about it once:
“How everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
/ Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, / But for him it was not an important failure.”
A poem was like a story, but more abstract. This poem was about how something amazing
and terrible was happening right in front of someone on an ordinary day but there
was work to perform. Without the work there would be no crop. Without the crop there
would be no rent, or no dinner, or some other kind of trouble. That’s exactly like
the human reaction to other people’s tragedies—still, now—Jordan thought, what with
all the people having lost their jobs. They have more important things going on. You
can be adjacent to other people’s misery, but misery had to be right on top of you
for it to matter. Jordan felt like his behavior now, in the middle of it all, was
like that.

He had looked at research about human happiness and believed that people weren’t really
good judges of what made them happy. He was in the City because he had lived in other
cities and didn’t enjoy them, and his friends were there, and his family was near,
and so it should make him happy. But also things were going disastrously everywhere.
For instance, now his dad made less money than he’d made in twenty-five years. And
still Jordan wondered: How is the state of the world going to affect my bonus pay,
come the end of the year? In the grand scheme of things, other people at that time
were facing legitimate catastrophes—the loss of their homes, the evaporation of their
savings—and Jordan wasn’t. Most of the people in his graduate school class from just
a few years previous were employed, while the ones graduating now from the same schools
were not, and maybe never would be. But he also thought there was a bigger crisis
yet to come. Jordan had a certain amount of envy of people who were maybe struggling
a little more financially at the moment but were good at what they were pursuing.
Was this fair? He figured it absolutely wasn’t, but he still felt that way anyway.
Other people were doing something they wanted to do forever, that they cared about.
He thought that they went to bed with a sense of satisfaction, while he could not.

THIS WAS ABOUT
right when the trees started to come back, because the seasons were still so regular.
Plants were actually everywhere in the City, but always invisible until they began
to emit a tiny green mist of new leaves. Soon enough the first brave woman would go
outside in just a blouse or a tight T-shirt, while doing laundry, maybe, on a Sunday.
A wave would ripple across the City, boys in skinny jeans and well-worn T-shirts that
didn’t cover their chicken-thin hips. Chest hair! Again! The backs of knees were shining
everywhere. There was maybe no good evolutionary or biological reason for everyone
to want to touch someone’s skin on that first warm day of spring, but there it was.
The days came a bit too cold or a bit too hot, like a patient with a fever, unpredictable.
The nights grew more tempting. The mornings were easy, until the day came when you
woke up, your throat swollen, the apartment too hot and gross, before the cold spell
of the open window. The trees would stop and just wait. The looping squiggly bands
of air would get pushed and bunched around the world, and then finally one day a warm
dry blast settled along every avenue and abandoned lot. The City transformed. Bright
green leaves lined the park fences, surrounded the shrieks of the playground fights.
The streets were transformed with the lines of greenery, reflecting the boxes of blocks
and buildings, elegant or scraggly or malformed or patchy, but at least reaching,
some even flowering. A few came busting out in a pink glaze, set against jewel-box
green. It was coming, time and date unknown, but always it would get there, the full
shrinking of the night, the hot juicy wetness of the days.

THE MAYOR CAME
out and made a speech that took everyone by surprise. “I don’t want to walk away
from a city I feel I can help lead through these tough times,” he said. And:

We live in a world where, normal course of business, companies and individuals borrow
money and repay it. And that process has come to a stop. And that’s a much more difficult
thing to work out of. Why people lose confidence and why people gain confidence, psychologists
get PhD theses trying to figure that out. But they are long-term swings and I don’t
think anybody questions that we have a problem. . . .

I will say that we are better prepared than we could have been. We have for the last
couple of years, as you know, kept saying, the good times can’t go on forever. . . .
Some of our largest employers and most established companies are in turmoil—and others
don’t even exist anymore. . . . We may well be on the verge of a meltdown, and it’s
up to us to rise to the occasion. . . .