Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City (20 page)

“No, she was also Best Actress but lost,” Jason
said.

“Who were the other nominees?” Sally said.

“I don’t know if I’m going to know this!”

“Silkwood
?” John
said.

“Silkwood
was ’83!
Dolly!”

“Dolly!” John said. “Dolly was nominated.”

John was trying to round people up to go out, as
usual. Chad was out with Diego and resisting. John was saying mean things.

“He’s not that big, right?” Sally asked. She’d
never really met him. “Would you describe Chad’s boyfriend as a large man?”

“No! I wouldn’t say he’s like a svelte person. I
don’t know!” Jason said.

“He’s not a beast, but like,” John said, “there was
a picture, from my birthday party, that I put on Facebook, from the album in
which you never existed?”

“But I was like there,” Jason said.

“You were at the party. Look, I was hardly in any
pictures! Kevin was in every picture. But like there’s one of Diego that I
couldn’t include. The resolution couldn’t fit. It was like, you’ve exceeded your
amount. He was, like, this big, and then there was me on the side of him. I mean
it was disgusting,” John said.

“I mean he can’t be that fat!” Jason said.

Chad texted. “What is Two Boots?” John said. “Oh,
it’s a pizza place? So Diego’s eating pizza right now.”

“Oh, of course,” Jason said. “How many pies? No, I
don’t hate Diego as much as some people do.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” John
said.

“I didn’t say you,” Jason said.

“He’s not as fat as Chris Christie,” John said.

“I just feel like I’m not one to talk,” Jason
said.

John got tired of texting and so finally he called
Chad, but Chad wasn’t interested.

“Okay. Alright, well, we’ll see each other sometime
soon I guess,” John said. “No, that’s okay. Whenever! Whenever, whenever.
Whatever! I don’t know what else to say, I’m not mad, whatever! Alright, I’ll
talk to you soon.”

He hung up.

“Oh, he’s pissed off with me. He was like, ‘Oh, I’d
really prefer the passive-aggressiveness be put to the side, okay?’ He was like,
‘Oh, Diego really wants to go home.’ ”

FINALLY,
FINALLY, ONE
morning Edward and John went to a health clinic to get
their medical tests. They’d really put this off. John had tried as hard as
possible not to think about this for as long as possible.

Health clinics existed because some people had
health insurance and others did not, and so, as opposed to doctor’s offices,
clinics had a different, usually lower, rate of payment. Even though John had
some health insurance, it was better for him to go there, and Edward didn’t have
any anyway. So they told them how much money they made, and the clinic told them
what amount on their “scale” of prices they should pay for services.

Edward was anxious; John was cavalier. Edward,
really, was anxious about this only because he’d been with John.

John got his negative test results forty-five
minutes before Edward.

It was a long and excruciating forty-five minutes
though.

But then Edward’s results came back negative too.
And they were very happy about this, but they could also feel the rush of
relief. You could consider yourself lucky, or you could have some other made-up
system of belief to make sense of things, but it didn’t matter. Disasters
happened.

And sometimes they didn’t.

Monogamy is so nice, John said. It’s so
relaxing.

They went out to a party thrown by one of Jordan’s
exes. “You’re a romantic,” someone said to John, with surprise. They were
standing outside on an old, old street. The paving stones were big gray stone
blocks.

“I always was,” he said. “You could have asked
Edward that and he’d have said so.”

“Blood brothers!” John said. John and Edward
pressed their fingers against each other, but Edward couldn’t remember which
finger he’d given blood for his test from, so he just picked one.

THEN IT WAS
that time already, winter was coming on, now all the trees were all dead
again!

THERE WERE MORE
than a hundred hearings every business day at the Transit Adjudication
Bureau—more than twenty-five thousand in the year. About eight hundred of those
hearings were for taking up too much space on the subway. This was sometimes
the
charge against the people who didn’t have homes who tried to sleep on the
trains.

For the first hearing, you would just show up. It
seemed like nearly all the adjudicators were old women. So you would wait, and
go to window after window, and wait some more, and then you would see someone,
and everything would be recorded on old analog tapes.

Chad was stoked for his hearing. He was going to
show the City that he couldn’t be controlled. His ticketing officer actually
did
show up; everyone had told Chad that they never did. Chad got to question the
officer. How could the police officer remember anything at this point? Chad
remembered everything, in vivid detail, and Officer Vargas was in for a
grilling. He recognized Chad’s face but nothing else. Chad was sort of offended.
Chad asked a few leading questions. “What was my foot doing?” The judge was very
helpful—and in the end dismissed the case.

He was so excited. “Yes!” Chad said and hit the
counter at the window. “Please do not hit the window,” the clerk said. The
judge, in her write-up, called Chad “consistant [
sic
], forthright and sincere.” Chad had been cited before, for drinking
on the platform, and had once been with someone who’d been cited for smoking
on
an open-air platform, so he could have looked like a repeat offender.

Everyone was getting sick as winter came on. Chad
was so ill and dizzy during his hearing. Later he went to a friend’s reading
and
had to run outside and throw up in a trash can. Everyone was coughing and
hacking and throwing up all the time. It was a bright spot that the City paid
to
have trash receptacles available for public use on the street.

JOHN WAS AT
work, so he was on Facebook, doing nothing, sending all the pictures on
this one guy’s account to Chad so they could laugh about them. This was the
account of a professional guy, but in all his pictures he was pretty much
shirtless and buff and showing off. And then John accidentally sent one to Max,
a guy in the office. The problem with chat was that you would choose who you
talked to from a list of everyone you had ever talked to, and it was easy to
misfire, to click the wrong person from the list. It was equally easy to have
a
number of chat windows open and to type into the wrong little digital box. And
Max was like, uh, what’s this? And John was like, well, obviously that is from
this guy’s Facebook page! And Max was like, oh, I see, haha, that’s the best!
Anyway, John was looking at these pictures of this guy with all these other guys
and realized, oh, I know this one here, I went on a date with him. He remembered
some details about the guy, but that was it. No idea what his name was or what
they had done. There was nothing left there to recall.

THE STAFF WAS
back in Duke’s for a going-away party, at last, in honor of Timothy and
Jacob. They were finally leaving the company! The new boss was there, and
Thomas, their old boss, had come back, but the owner hadn’t been invited. And
their old boss got up and made a speech.

“You guys, anyway, lemme just say, I’ll do this
super quick. I hired—this is awful! I hired Timothy when he almost hit me in
the
back of a cab after a Christmas party one night. He actually took a swing at
me.
And it was that day I knew I loved him.”

Everyone laughed? In a somewhat horrified way.

“And I hired Jacob in part because he almost
identically resembled my kid brother,” Thomas said, “who has an uncontrollable
temper. It turns out, guess what? So. But. The two of them, it’s fair to say,
are joining what might be considered the most distinguished alumni society in
the world.”

The two of them, Thomas said, represented what made
the business an “astonishing institution”—a “combination of intellect, drive,
sensibility and, I would just say, tremendous vitality. How’s that? Hey! That
was a code word for insatiable sexual desire. Is that a good way to put it?”
Everyone laughed. “I’d just like to say the essence of it is, the older you get,
or the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve learned is that the only thing that
matters is integrity.”

Trixie got up right away, during the applause.
Trixie was really going to be John’s official boss now.

“I just wanted to say that I really wanted this to
be also a celebration of the last six months of all of us working together,”
she
said, “and working so hard for Timothy, and for Jacob. I think a lot of us
experienced—they plucked us out of some weird—we met them in a bar!” She had
met
Timothy years and years before she’d worked there. “A lot of our connections
are
through these two, and then they brought us to Thomas. I love working for you
guys together, you’re a great team, and you’re going to do great in the future,
and I’m really excited for you.” Then everyone went out in the cold to smoke.
Good-bye! everyone said. Good-bye, good-bye!

JOHN HAD A
good-bye party of his own, at the Phoenix, because he was going overseas,
early in the morning, for a week. Fred had paid for a cheap ticket for him to
visit. His flight left at nine a.m., from an airport pretty far away, which
meant he’d have to get up at five thirty a.m. or so. He hadn’t packed. He wasn’t
sure where his passport was either.

“Do you have to show your passport both ways?” he’d
asked Sally earlier at the office.

“Um . . . ,” she said. He did;
passports were the international identification required to travel between
countries.

Edward was going back to his parents’ house,
because of course he wouldn’t be caught dead in the apartment without John.

Chad was there, and he was a little crazy, all
wound up. Everyone was smoking outside.

“Aren’t you actually going so as to get away from
the insane filth?” Chad asked Edward. He said something about how the bathtub
was so disgusting.

“I can hear you, it’s not like you’re three hundred
feet away,” John said, and gave him a look.

Kevin was there, and though he was scruffy, he’d
shaved his mustache off, which was a shame. Kevin was trying to figure out, for
his obsessed boss, how to get more people to look at their new website. No
idea!

“You should take a Tic Tac,” John said. He meant
Adderall. Chad said, wow, no, I’m so insanely well rested, I don’t need any
focus, I don’t actually do anything all day.

Chad was doing fine with just tutoring a couple
days a week and working very part time at home for John’s company. But that
didn’t fill all his days. He really wasn’t doing anything right now. He didn’t
really get out of bed, not even to make it into the living room. Like he’d get
to the living room finally, and then it was sunset. He wasn’t even watching TV
all day, just sort of idly reading sometimes, or staring into the computer.

Something was in the air. Pretty much everyone had
grown a beard, even Jason, who looked healthy—his face had gotten a little
scruffy as a contrast with the shaved head.

Jason had done something a few hours earlier that
made him feel weird. He’d picked up a guy online and had coffee with him and
then had invited him back to the office, where they’d totally had sex. The guy
was really into that. The guy said to Jason, “This is so hot.”

But instead of picking the guy up on Manhunt or
Craigslist, he’d used Grindr, a program on his phone.

“It makes Manhunt look like two cups and a string,”
John said.

Grindr was a program that ran on only very
elaborate telephones. When you turned it on, it just showed a grid of pictures
of guys. They would have a little green icon if they were actually online right
then; otherwise, they’d have been recently online. And because everyone was on
their phone, they could be located, so it would show you how far away everyone
was. So when Jason turned it on, and there were all these guys, good-looking
too, who were like 65 and 132 and 332 feet away. It was like in a popular movie
from a while back called
Aliens
, where people on
this other planet built a tracking device and attached it to their guns so that
they could track the movement of terrifying monsters. But this was for sex.

“I guess you shouldn’t look a gift butthole in the
. . . butthole?” Edward said. “But . . .” It made him feel
old-fashioned.

“I’m a serial monogamist,” Edward said.

Jason had been using it for only two weeks and
already he felt like he should get rid of it. Like it was bad for him. And bad
for everyone. Just bad. Mostly there was too much total information awareness
to
it.

EDWARD HAD A
lot of time to think while John was gone. He knew zero people who had
died basically, although his grandparents were both dead. Having both your
parents die while you’re still essentially a child was the very definition of
bad luck, he thought. But just because unlucky things had happened, that doesn’t
mean they’d continue to happen, Edward thought, and that had become a major,
if
rarely expressed, part of John’s self-conception. Edward thought John had a
notion that other people were likely to die surprisingly. That’s why he wasn’t
good about looking after his health and did things like postponing medical
tests. But also Edward thought that people bent over backward to help John.

Edward’s sister quit her job to take an unpaid
internship—she was the same age as John—and Edward wondered, how are you going
to afford this? And she was really evasive. Maybe her boyfriend was helping her
out, or their parents were. He was glad she’d quit. In her industry—well, in
every industry now, he thought—it had become fully institutionalized that people
were treated as completely disposable. Useful until you were broken, and then
you were trash to be taken out. Edward on some level wanted John to just quit
his job, even though he knew that was crazy, and then where would the two of
them be? Edward didn’t know if it was luck or not, but Edward saw that John had
all these strong connections and people wanted to help him. Also he thought that
John had some magnetism, where people looked at him and wanted to take him in.
There was something in his face. He was feckless, but it seemed to work for
him.