Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City (7 page)

As our economic situation has become increasingly unstable, the question for me has
become far less about the theoretical and much more about the practical. And so, to
put it in very practical terms, handling this financial crisis while strengthening
essential services such as education and public safety is a challenge I want to take
on for the people. . . .

On the same day, the head of the City Council came out and said that they would be
introducing legislation to repeal the two-term limit law, which meant that the Mayor
would be clear to run for office for a third time. She said that the decision would
be made in a week. “The Mayor has made very clear that he wants the City Council to
consider legislation that will extend term limits from eight to twelve years. We will
obviously do that. Each person will have to stand up and vote yes or no,” she said.
This did not make a whole lot of sense on the face of it. The people of the City had
voted twice, as a group, to not allow mayors to serve more than two terms. But then
the Mayor had “made very clear” what he wanted, and he was used to getting what he
wanted.

Two of the City’s living previous mayors came forward to endorse the Mayor for this
third term. The other did not.

JOHN’S BOSS CALLED
all of the staff into the conference room. It was a bright white room. He was going
to quit, Thomas said. He couldn’t protect them from the owner anymore, he said.

“Are you leaving us for another woman?” one woman asked.

He didn’t want anyone talking about this in public, he said. “If anyone leaks this
before we’re willing to announce this, I’m going to be bullshit,” he said. Everyone
looked around at each other in the white room. He meant “batshit,” everyone realized.
“Bullshit” meant something that was aggressively false. “Batshit” meant crazily angry.

Right before he’d come into the meeting, Thomas had taken a phone call from a woman
with a website. “I can’t talk to you right now!” he’d said to her. “I’m about to go
into a meeting and announce that I’m quitting!”

And so while they were in the meeting, she’d written about this on her website. So
when everyone eventually stumbled out of the conference room, it was already done
and everyone knew, thereby, at least, putting no one in the awkward position of having
to tell people themselves.

TWELVE YEARS BEFORE
John was born, the country renounced a policy that tied its paper currency to actual
reserves of gold. The country had maintained a set price for gold—thirty-five dollars
an ounce, which is what citizens were paid in exchange for the gold that they were,
for a time, no longer allowed to own. Other countries held their own currencies tied
to an exchange rate of the country’s “dollar.” A good chunk of the powerful world
was in league—briefly.

The name “dollar”—the name for a currency unit equal to one—supposedly came about
from the “thaler,” a currency name dating from another continent, hundreds of years
ago. The dollar coin was first defined as twentysomething grams of pure silver, according
to a statesman ages ago; that amount of silver, however, was reduced twice and then,
eventually, no silver at all was put into silver dollar coins.

While the coins were made of silver, the paper version of the dollar represented gold.
But soon, the government had many more “dollars” in the world than it had gold. To
pay some debts, it made a great deal many more “dollars.” And then: The countries
in league with the U.S. currencies demanded that their debts be redeemed in actual
gold instead of some paper that represented gold.

So the government told them that the deal was off.

Money, untethered, was never the same. The little flat bills became potent objects.
To burn this paper, or to deface this paper, was a crime. To create fake versions
of this paper, which many people did, was an even greater crime. But why wouldn’t
they? It had all the value, and it was far easier to counterfeit than some soft metal
that had come slamming in from the sky and then had melted into the rock of the planet.

THE OWNER OF
John’s company bought himself a new place to live. The people who were selling it
wanted 3.5 million dollars for it, but he paid only 3.2 million dollars for it. It
had two bedrooms, and was two thousand square feet, and had a metal staircase that
led from the public or entertaining spaces downstairs to the private spaces upstairs.
The bedroom upstairs had a window that was the top half of a circle, and was surrounded
by an arch of bricks. All the other windows were normal and rectangular though.

AFTER THOMAS QUIT,
John and Sally and also Trixie and Trixie’s husband and some others from work were
sitting in Duke’s, a terrible restaurant that was a few blocks from the office. Duke’s
was a restaurant that was all dressed up in fake things from outside of the City,
but not exotic, foreign things; instead they were homey, supposedly nostalgic things.
Like street signs and funny pictures and the license plates of old cars from other
states and red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, reminiscent of a church social. Like
it was supposed to be exciting because it was strange and therefore transporting,
but really it was bleak.

They were very upset. It was like someone had died. It was a vague instability made
explicit. They talked about if it all made sense. Was it okay that dealing with the
owner had become too onerous or, at least, not worth their boss’s time? Or was it
just not worth the money to him? What did it mean that he’d said he didn’t feel like
he could protect people anymore? So then who would, when the owner wanted to carve
up the staff, to “cut costs,” to “keep the company lean,” just like every other company
they knew, where all their friends had lost their jobs? And what about the owner’s
point of view? The owner, for his part, thought the boss was slow and stodgy, unwilling
to live in the real world of money.

Everyone was thinking about who was going to lose his job. The idea, the maybe-fact,
that everyone thought they understood, that had likely been relayed from their boss
to Timothy, or through some other channel of gossip, was that three hundred thousand
dollars a year at least had to be cut from the budget. That probably meant that the
newer hires, the people who’d come on in the last year, would all go. Or who knew?
Some of those people were making fifty thousand dollars a year; some were making more,
some less. You never knew how much people were making, even if they sat right next
to you, unless you had a serious talk and compared notes or spied on their pay stubs,
and there were strong cultural prohibitions against both those things. Three hundred
thousand dollars a year could mean eight people; it could mean four people.

In any event, their boss had quit.

John and Sally went outside. They smoked.

“It’s going to be okay,” Sally said.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” John said. “No, it’s not.”

She’d never seen him like this.

JOHN HAD BEEN
not-sleeping with a guy also named John. They would do things like go out to dinner,
a kind of pretend dating, but they hadn’t slept together. So this other John had a
birthday party, at a bar called the Phoenix. The Phoenix was a bar in the sense that
it had lively music and also a bar with bartenders behind it, and other than that
was pretty much just a room that was a weird shape, with brick walls and some stools.

One of John’s other friends was visiting for the occasion, from a less interesting
country. “How has your trip been?” John asked.

“Obviously I’ve been a huge slut, I’ve slept with someone every day,” the foreigner
said. The foreigner was wearing a slot machine sweatshirt, which is to say, a sweatshirt
with a slot machine pictured on it.

“That sounds like fun,” John said, meaning the opposite.

“Obviously I’m not as big a slut as John,” the foreigner said, meaning the other John,
the one that John was not really dating.

“Oh really?” John said, all interested now.

“Yeah, he’s slept with like four guys in the last five days,” the foreigner said.

Good to know, John thought.

Across the room John could see a friend, a mopey guy who never had much to say. His
hair was always overstylized, in that it was designed to fall over his eyes. He was
talking to this other boy—this really dramatically cute boy that John had heard about.
Friends had always said to him, over and over, John, you have to meet this guy, you
guys would really get along. Oh, we’ll really get along? John asked. No, not like
that, he’s basically married, everyone said.

But John had seen pictures of him on Facebook. There was one of this guy with a friend
where they were walking in the rain and he was so skinny and he had a buzz cut and
a weird but very pretty face and he was smoking a cigarette.

No way I’m saying hello to him first, John thought. He can say hello to me. So he
turned his back.

“Hey, John, you know Amy, right?” the mopey guy later came over to say.

“Yup,” John said.

“My friend Edward here is Amy’s best friend,” he said. “You should talk about Amy.”

And so John finally turned to Edward.

“I’m not interested in Amy,” John said to Edward, and he got up close. “I’m interested
in you.”

Edward’s back was up against a gumball machine. They talked. Edward was agitated and
lively and nervous and excited. When they at last looked around, most everyone was
long gone, except for Fred, a school friend of John’s, shambling by.

“John, I gotta get outta here,” Fred said.

“Yeah, you know, I guess I should go too?” Edward said.

John leaned in. “I’d really like it if you stayed for another drink,” he said.

“I’m going to stay for another drink,” Edward said and ran his hands through his hair.

Fred walked out oblivious.

They talked about where they lived. Edward lived not far away. “Oh, that’s so much
closer, we should just go over there,” John said.

“I should tell you,” Edward said, just out the door. “I have a boyfriend.”

John clapped his hands. Right.

“He’s, like, on vacation,” Edward said. “Right now he’s not home.”

“So, shall we?” John said.

“Uh, okay,” Edward said.

They walked the mile back to Edward’s place. Well, really: They went back to Edward’s
boyfriend’s place.

SOMETIMES WORK WAS
just what you clocked into while you were falling in love. Sometimes sex was just
something you did while you weren’t at work. Drugs were something you did sometimes
when you couldn’t deal with one of those things, or with yourself. The City was so
expensive and so grueling sometimes that it was easy to be unsure why you were there.
Many were there to make money, money that could largely only be made there, in the
long spiny arms of industries that could never grow anywhere else or anywhere smaller.
Some people just liked it, its loudness and crowdedness and surprises. Some started
there for a reason and then couldn’t imagine being anywhere else, but maybe lost track
of that reason along the way. Some people had a plan. Some were just chancing it.
Either way the months flew by, and over the years you came up with something or you
came up with not much.

WORK THE NEXT
day was a disaster. John was exhausted. The office was tense. John went over to a
bookshelf and threw everything on the ground.

Then he calmed down, went back to his computer, chatted with Fred.

Fred, you’ll never guess what happened. I slept over at Edward’s.

You crashed there?

No, I slept with him.

I don’t mean this the wrong way, but I’m actually really shocked.

John thought this was the meanest thing Fred had ever said.

Gee, thanks, Fred, John wrote.

No no no, Fred wrote, not because it doesn’t seem like the right match, but because
Edward is religious about not doing anything with anybody.

And then . . . nothing happened. John was going nuts. Nothing was straight in his
head and he checked Edward’s Twitter, which was like Facebook—people wrote things
there on the Internet in public, but shorter. And it said something like, “Feeling
gloomy tired and worn out today.” And John nearly burst into tears.

John talked to Chad about it. Chad was like, “Well, uh, he just cheated on his boyfriend?”

Well, if you want to think about it like that, John thought.

So John wrote Edward an email. Subject line: “Now.” Body: “That was fun.”

Edward wrote back, in total: “Yes it was. . . . xo”

And John thought, Oh crap. And then, kind of desperately, he wrote back something
chatty and overtired and Edward didn’t even respond.

Later that day, after consulting with his work friends, he wrote an email to Edward.

“Hey, I don’t want to screw anything up for you but I’d love to see you again.” He
wrote that he meant “just as friends.”

Half an hour later he got two emails. One said, Edward has added you as a friend on
Facebook. The other said, yeah, I think that’s a great idea to be friends, my boyfriend’s
an awesome guy, everything that happened—

John stopped reading.

NOT THAT LONG
before, two businessmen perfected an idea that they had been kicking around for quite
some time. They made a company that extended credit, on behalf of an individual, that
was accepted at an array of stores. Since before the invention of money, it was common
for people to delay the payment side of a transaction. For instance: He gives her
a dead bird, presumably for eating, but doesn’t ask for payment right away; tomorrow,
after being paid the shells due her for a woven basket, she gives him the shells that
she owes him for the bird.

This was called credit, and in modern times, what these men invented was called a
charge card. The card was a signifier that one held money; the holder of the card
would pay the issuer of the card at the end of the month; the issuer of the card would
pay the stores at which the person had received goods or services.