Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City (13 page)

On June 14, he’d made a debit card purchase at a
fast food hamburger place in the amount of 4.74 dollars.

JASON HAD BEEN
to the same beach town once as well, he said.

“Oh my God, one time I went through the forest and
I like totally hit my head into one of those branches and nearly lost my eye
and
I had to wear an eye patch for weeks but so then I went back home and I realized
my wallet was totally gone and my eye was hanging out of my socket so I went
back out there and I knew exactly where it was and I was walking in the dark
and
I saw these two guys and I’m like, you have my wallet, don’t you, and these guys
were making out and they were like, no, we don’t, and I’m like, yes, you do,
and
the one guy says to the other, c’mon give it back, and then they gave me my
wallet back. It was pretty amazing.”

AT THIS TIME,
people still weren’t entirely sure of their origins. Most people
throughout time had kept records, but they were always such confusing records.
First, the records were so myopic and self-centered that they didn’t make much
sense to people who came later, with offhand references that would make no sense
after twenty or two hundred or two thousand years. And then, people made records
that were created physically in an impermanent and shortsighted fashion, and
many of these had deteriorated, or burned, or the machinery that could read them
no longer existed. And then, if a history survived that, often it happened that
these documents had been translated so many times, into language after language,
that they stopped being intelligible.

And there weren’t many very early records at all.
Many human scientists were convinced—by means of records of fossils, and because
it had been noticed that animals that were isolated for long periods of time
became distinct and novel—that people had been alive for a long time and that
they might very well have slowly sprung from an animal, or a group of animals,
quite some time previous.

But many other people did not believe this. Mainly
theistic groups argued that schools should not be allowed to teach, as a theory,
that humans might be descended from other animals.

Groups cohered around almost every idea—what people
could do with their bodies, what people could do with the bodies of other
people. People even disagreed at this time if the seas on the planet would rise
and drown all the cities.

Because this sort of organizing was divisive, it
was therefore important for social selection. Most people self-selected their
friends based on shared ideas and behaviors. Groups of friends or lovers tended
to agree, largely or mostly, on ideas about politics, or how to live, or about
whether we might have come from animals, or about morals in general.

This tendency to self-select one’s social sphere,
to gather around agreement, caused many cities to exhibit prevailing sets of
ethics and moral codes. The City, for instance, while populated by diverse
viewpoints, on the whole tended toward hedonism, and toward the legality and
practice of abortion, which was a currently legal but not entirely popular
medical procedure that terminated pregnancies. The City’s inhabitants tended
away from religious practice overall, or at least tended toward diverse and
conflicting religions, and so therefore knew that a tolerance for other
viewpoints was in their self-interest. The City, in comparison to much of the
rest of the country, tended toward appreciating difference rather than punishing
it. And as a reflection of this, the Mayor, particularly for an extremely
wealthy person, was fairly “open-minded,” believing firmly as a principle that
people should have broad rights of behavior, even while believing at the same
time that the government should and could limit behaviors. This was a somewhat
unusual position, in the larger scheme of beliefs, and a mildly unusual position
for people of his class.

Tendency toward this set of beliefs about freedom
was more pronounced among people who had moved to the City from other parts of
the country. And then a significant number of people in the City—about three
million—were immigrants from other countries, and, very broadly, they tended
to
be more “conservative” and more religious. But these immigrants—again, most
broadly—tended also not to mix socially with the people who’d come to the City
from other parts of the country. The poorer of these immigrants encountered
other kinds of residents at places of employment, largely, where immigrants
often worked in service positions, at delis, restaurants, retail stores and in
people’s homes, cleaning and/or taking care of their children. These positions
were low paid, most often; sometimes they were “off the books,” which meant that
the jobs were not reported to the government.

These were people who would not ordinarily
associate with each other.

And then as all these different people assimilated
into the City, they tended to see that they benefited from tolerance of
difference because, as they may have been surprised to find, they were listed
among “the different.” Most people, for instance, wanted to live near people
like them, and so the City was composed of some neighborhoods that were diverse
and some neighborhoods that were somewhat uniform. Some of these more uniform
neighborhoods even had a dominant minority language. But then as people born
to
immigrants grew up in those little villages, they felt, quite rightly, that the
City as a whole was theirs too, and they often moved themselves into
neighborhoods of more diversity.

In the end, some people were relatively obsessed
with where people came from, and some people didn’t really care at all, while
others were figuring out where people were going in the immediate future,
largely by moving and amassing capital.

It was the very near future they were interested in
most of all; the human lifespan was not that long, and while some people
captured capital for the benefit of their children and their children’s
children, the influence that came with having capital was not particularly well
exercised by the dead.

JOHN SPENT A
nice enough Sunday at a party on Fifth Avenue with Fred, and this party
was thrown apparently by some nuclear physicists who John and Fred agreed made
the kid with craniodiaphyseal dysplasia from
Mask
look like Brad Pitt. That was a rude way for them to say that these guys weren’t
attractive. But it was a fun party and they were all weird and losers and it
was
great. It was all hot out and they were outside. And so John texted his friends
to come over too—and Edward showed up, having tagged along with them.

John was so mad, he wouldn’t look at him.

After that he didn’t make contact with Edward for a
week. No emails, nothing. I hate him right now, John told everyone.

Edward pushes me off but he comes running back,
John thought. So. He’s really cute, he’s really charming, and also he’s a mess.
He’s looking for work. He doesn’t even have a bank account. But then John would
tabulate the not-bad things: He had a life that was interesting, and John liked
that. One thing he always worried about was that he would be smothered in a
relationship, and he didn’t think Edward would do that. But Edward had his
boyfriend, or whatever—did he?—and his weird situation, and John wasn’t going
to
deal with that. Edward needed to say: I broke up with my boyfriend. I want you—I
want to be with you. And I’ll have my own place in the City. Those three things
had to happen. Instead Edward’s message to him was simply: You blow me away like
no one ever has before. And to that, John thought, well, whatever: not at all
good enough.

JOHN TEXTED
TYLER
Flowers: Do you wanna go to the park? Texts were weird; they
were intrusive in a way that Internet chatting wasn’t. Your mobile phone would
beep or chirp; you didn’t have to be at the computer, waiting to be entertained.
You didn’t access it at your leisure. Among forms of communication, it was the
imperative mode. You: Answer me now. And Tyler responded, hmm I’m really busy
this week, sorry.

So is he just done with me? John asked Fred. No,
Fred said, he’s actually busy, he has a fuck buddy from out of town in town.
Alright, makes sense, John thought, I won’t take it personally.

JOHN WENT BACK
to work and Friday rolled around, and he met some guy named Chris, who
worked at a fancy magazine. They met at a party. And Chris later messaged John
on Manhunt, and as he did, he “unlocked” all his pictures stored online, thereby
making them visible to John. John did have public pictures of his face on
Manhunt that week, so this “unlocking” was Chris’s way of saying, “Hey! We know
each other!” So they chatted a little. Chris wrote, I was going to ask for your
real email. Chris said that he was having a party, and that John should
come.

So of course John IM’d Fred, and said, hey, this
guy Chris is having a party, do you want to go? And Fred wrote back, actually
I
am already planning to attend that party—and I’m going with Tyler Flowers.

John immediately emailed Tyler, to prevent a
one-sided unexpected run-in. Oh my God, this week has been so crazy! he wrote.
I
can’t believe we haven’t met up! Anyway, I’m going to this party tonight, if
you
want to go, I’m really on the fence, but if you were going . . . or we
can do next week!

And Tyler wrote back, oh, you mean Chris’s party?
And John wrote back, oh yes, that’s so weird-funny, why don’t you meet me there,
I’m meeting Jason, we’re meeting at Nowhere Bar at ten thirty and then taking
the train, join us there! And Tyler said he would.

So the evening came on and John called Tyler to
check in, and Tyler said, can’t we just take a cab? A cab would cost maybe
twenty dollars. So John was firm: I’ll see you at Nowhere. It’d be ridiculous
for you to be in the same neighborhood and not travel with me, so I’ll see you
at Nowhere. Tyler relented.

So they all show up at Nowhere Bar. Basically all
you could see in there was Jason’s bald head gleaming. You totally had to beg
me
to come here, Tyler Flowers said.

I insisted, I did not beg you, John said.

You had to beg me! Oh, I’m just kidding! Tyler
said. John was having fun with Jason, even though Tyler was in this weird
hostile mood. Tyler had three beers. It was finally late enough to wait to go
to
the party, and they walked to the R train.

“I can’t believe we’re taking the fucking train,
this is fucking bullshit,” Tyler said.

“Just take the train, don’t worry about it,” John
said.

“I should have brought the
New
Yorker
,” Tyler said.

“You can go buy one if you don’t want to talk to
us!” John said.

“No, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, I just need a
drink, guys, I just need a drink,” Tyler said.

Jason and John kept looking at each other, like,
what is this.

They got on the train; it stopped just a few stops
later and wouldn’t go any farther. We can just transfer trains, John said. So
they went and waited on the platform but it didn’t come.

“We’re just taking a fucking cab!” Tyler said, and
stormed out.

They ran after him. He had gotten a cab.

“I don’t even know why we’re going over there!”
Tyler said. “Whenever you go, it’s a disaster!”

Why had he chased this horrible guy? John wondered.
The cab ride was fourteen dollars. John had something like two dollars. “What
is
this? You can pay with a card now? How do I do this?” Tyler asked.

He was staring at the keypad installed in the back
of the driver’s seat. John hit all the buttons so Tyler could pay with a credit
card. Tyler keyed in one dollar for a tip. And John said, oh, I have a couple
dollars for a tip! And Jason said, yeah, I have a five here for the cabbie.

“No,” Tyler said. “One dollar is okay.”

They got out of the cab, and they asked, why one
dollar?

“Everyone knows that,” Tyler said. “If it’s
anything less than eighteen dollars, you tip one dollar.”

“Is this some rule from the nineties?” John
asked.

“No, everyone knows that, and why should I give him
more when it’s his job to drive?”

“Maybe because we brought him way out here?” John
said.

“Whatever, I just need a drink, I’m sorry,” Tyler
said.

The apartment wasn’t that big and was kind of
crowded and eventually John was out smoking on this fire escape. He climbed back
in and Tyler was there. I wondered where you were, I’m so much more relaxed,
I
don’t know why I was so worked up, I just needed a drink in me, Tyler said.

“Oh okay, no problem,” John said. So they all
re-formed into a group and took off. They ended up at a terrible bar in the
neighborhood. There were like six people in there. Fred, Jason, Tyler—and this
random terrible guy, who was totally evil. They were outside smoking and John
said, I’m experimenting with a new tennis grip, semi-western.

“What else would you use?” this guy said.

“Uh, what?” John said. And the guy started going
off about how there’s really only one way to play tennis, there’s only one way
to hold a racket, that kind of thing.

“Well, I grew up playing with a bamboo stick and
crumpled up newspapers,” John said. He went kind of crazy on him.

They took the subway back, Jason and Tyler and
John. Tyler and John were on the verge of making out. Finally! John thought.
And
then he saw: Jason, sitting across from them on the train, basically with tears
in his eyes, watching them. And Tyler was ready to go, his stop was coming up.
And John thought: Fine. Guess I won’t get off the train with him right here in
front of Jason. So good-bye, John said, see you later!

And when John got home, he sent a text message to
Tyler, just: “Heyyyy.” And Tyler wrote back, “Ha ha!” And John wrote back,
“What’s up?” And Tyler wrote back, “Not much!” And John wrote back, “You were
totally better after you got that drink!” And then Tyler didn’t write back.