Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City (9 page)

“Well, we can do one of two things. You can stay over, though I don’t know what my
dad would think of that, or I can drive you back,” Edward said.

“How long was I sleeping for?” John asked.

“Like forty-five minutes,” Edward said.

“Were you asleep too?” John asked.

“No,” Edward said.

“Were you just sitting here paranoid, staring out the window?” John asked.

“No, I was just sitting here in a total reverie. I’m so happy,” Edward said.

“Well, you can drive me back,” John said.

THE OWNER OF
John’s company fired the cleaning lady who came around each night and emptied the
trash cans and vacuumed and did everything. Who would clean now?

AT THAT TIME,
it wasn’t customary to ask other people for money. That was one reason why credit
cards were so successful, so universal. It was considered better to borrow from strangers,
at an interest rate, than from friends. But the closer you were to a person, generally,
the more acceptable it was to ask someone for a “loan.” If you were very close, sometimes
someone would even give you some money, as a present. Plus the laws said that if you
died, your money would go to your spouse, and if you didn’t have one, it would go
to your closest blood relative.

But to borrow money from friends regularly was definitely frowned upon. Timothy, John’s
manager at work, asked people who worked for and with him for money sometimes as often
as every two weeks. No one understood where his money went. Bosses were paid more
money than nonbosses by the owner of the corporation because of the idea that the
further up the supervisory ladder you were, the more money you should make. Although
maybe not much? Someone in the office said it was because Timothy put all his money
in a retirement account. No one actually knew, and it wasn’t anyone’s business, and
some people didn’t mind at all. The people at the company were all close, at least
in part because the quarters were close. Some of the people who worked together even
loved each other. And they all liked the idea of being able to loan each other money!
But, for most of them, money regularly stood a chance of running out, so they weren’t
in a position to give or loan too freely. This was a situation of some or even great
anxiety: trying to balance one’s goodwill with one’s own self-maintenance.

Little loans of course weren’t a big deal. One night, John was on a random date, and
at the end of it, he realized he was totally out of money. He called a nearby friend,
at one in the morning, for cab fare home. The friend had just laughed and left twenty
dollars downstairs with his building’s doorman. But also the friend thought that this
was evidence of something: poor planning, maybe. People believed that having no money
reflected on a person’s character, even in little ways.

Almost all companies distributed pay twice a month instead of all at once. If people
quit or were fired, the company would obviously be protected from having to recover
some of the “unearned” salary. And it would involve too much paperwork, for one thing,
to pay employees more often than that.

To run out of money, even for just the two days before “payday,” felt like raw panic,
like the end of everything. That time stretched out, and the worst anxiety was then
that you had to ask for one of these loans.

To have no money and nowhere to get more meant that it was nearly impossible to focus
on anything else. One would feel giddy, or anxious, or sad, or manic, or sleepy, or
even exhausted, but one couldn’t avoid the dread of the next thing going wrong. For
instance, these shortfalls meant perhaps a shortfall in the payments one owed: less
important, for cable TV or water, or more important, for rent. These people couldn’t
stop thinking about it, when they maybe saw some food that they wanted to buy, or
when they had to walk someplace, or maybe when they were thinking about their future,
or even when they were doing something that had no price at all.

EDWARD HAD SLEPT
with a lot of people in high school and was glad he did so he could say he had. But
he was a little jealous of what he thought of as John’s checkered love life. It wasn’t
about the sex, he wasn’t jealous of that. For him sex was somewhat about wanting people
to like you, so usually he was happy with someone just conveying interest. When Edward
went to bars with John, it was like John was a superhero who had a weird sixth sense,
an omniscience. It was like John was viewing the bar from above: That guy was going
to the bathroom, but if you could catch him on the way out, he’d go home with you.
He could suss out every dynamic in the room and understand everybody’s inner workings
and everyone’s rhythms and he was always right. And then he could turn an intensity
on a person, like a blinding light in the dark.

Edward was completely unprepared for this kind of attention the night they met. He
realized that he was a completely easy mark. Edward could count on one hand the number
of times he’d gone home with someone from a bar. John wasn’t his type even. But Edward
never dated guys who were his type; his real type was young, skinny, hairless. None
of that mattered—he didn’t even know why he was thinking about it! Two people had
that pull, that warming reaction; they made something new together by being together,
or they didn’t, and if you really did, it was impossible to set aside.

THE MAYOR GAVE
a speech about the recent state of things. It was less than six months before the
election. The Mayor said that people were spending money again. “In fact I’m reasonably
optimistic that we’ve turned the corner,” he said. When asked why, then, the Mayor
still thought that he should be allowed a third term, he did not answer the question
and in fact called the question asker “a disgrace.”

The week prior, 623,000 people in the country reported being newly unemployed, and
the total number of people receiving unemployment insurance payments from the government
had hit a record—for the seventeenth straight week in a row.

It was unclear what corner was being turned. While he was the Mayor, the number of
poor people in the City had grown as well: 1.6 million people in the City were now
considered poor. That was 20.1 percent of everyone who lived in the City.

There was at least one small plan from the Mayor to help change that. He got a number
of other rich people to give money, and they paid a group of poor people small amounts
of money to do good things, like keep their children in school and see doctors. For
instance, if a child passed an annual school exam or improved his score from a previous
year, the child’s parents would get 300 dollars. Or if they went for an annual checkup
with a doctor, they’d get 200 dollars. If a parent kept a full-time job, she or he
would get 150 dollars a month. At the end of this program, an enrolled family had
on average some savings—about 575 dollars. Two out of three families said they thought
they were better off afterward. And only three out of five of them were still technically
poor.

There was also a surprise finding to this experiment. Compared with similar people
in the City who were not in this program, more of the single people in this program
got married. People said they felt like they could commit to being in a permanent
relationship when they felt financially secure.

EDWARD MADE A
sudden trip up to the City. He and John planned to meet at Metropolitan. Fred showed
up. And Edward brought his friend Jason. John was so excited to see Edward, he didn’t
really notice Jason. Jason was handsome, and had no hair, and he was shiny and trim.
He gave off a sense of being a pleasing series of little circles, from his glossy
scalp to his big eyes to his round cheeks. Then when he smiled all the circles collapsed
and he had a squint in his eyes that could cut glass.

He was really smart, really bright, and talked like Edward but was a bit more substantive,
John thought. Well: Interested more in the sort of things John was interested in.
Jason had a funny way of talking—his voice was sort of deep, but he had a habit of
saying things like “Jinxies!” if you said things at the same time or “Drinksies!”
if you were going to the bar.

Jason had been coupled-up his whole life; he’d met his first boyfriend at seventeen,
and they’d been together until about a year ago, when Jason’s ex just up and moved
to the other coast. It was brutal.

So every time Jason went to the bathroom, John and Edward would touch each other and
kiss a little. And every time Edward left, John and Jason would kiss and feel each
other up. John decided he was going home with one of them and they could choose, or
he would go home with both of them.

All the while, Fred was clapping his hands, laughing his head off.

And then Edward announced he was going home to bed. And Jason left with him. So John
didn’t go home with either of them.

THE LAST WEEK
of work came for John’s boss. He’d become more and more absent, and finally he wasn’t
there anymore.

Timothy, who had been basically the number two, would take over the office for the
owner. Timothy saw his ascension as a way to minimize what he saw as the harm that
the owner wanted to do to the office. There was much dramatic strategizing. There
was much scheming over drinks. There were hushed conversations outside, and people
disappearing into offices, the doors closing slowly.

Timothy said he had to hurt some people to save everyone else. Across the bullpen
and even a bit into the offices, people were going to be discarded. Timothy tried
to solicit what business people called “buy-in” from the staff. He talked them through
it. They sort of believed what he was saying, that if they sacrificed a few, that
the office at large would be safe. He was very smart, and incredibly articulate; he
was such a talker, and everyone liked him, so the things he said made sense. They
tried to prepare themselves to take it “for the team.” This was a projected idea,
a way of looking at things that, through force of character, could be made an article
of faith. Those that thought they were not going to be “laid off” felt good about
this plan, which then made them feel bad for being selfish.

JASON CHATTED AT
John. He’d gotten the contact info off Facebook or something. He told John he’d be
at Metropolitan later. They met up, they made out. Chad showed up. Chad asked John
if he could sleep over instead of schlepping all the way back home. Of course, John
said. Forty minutes later, he said, sorry, Chad, no, you can’t, actually.

What do you think? John asked. They were looking at Jason.

Oh, I’d be all over that if I were single, Chad said.

Okay! John said.

He and Jason took a cab back to John’s. Jason even slept over and got brunch the next
day.

“So you’re not planning on telling Edward? We can just be friends?” Jason asked.

“Oh thank God, yes,” John said. “Okay, we can be friend-os.”

So they’d hang out at bars. Edward wasn’t around, after all. And when they’d go out,
there were a couple nights he was tired and he’d crash at Jason’s place. And he’d
sleep in the bed, but they wouldn’t touch each other. They were becoming friends.

Then they went out one night to some trashy bar, with Fred, and John was all revved
up and they played Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” And Jason was
trying to say something to John, in that late-night-drunk way. “Do you think, I dunno,
whatever”—all these false starts. And John said, what are you saying, and Jason said,
I don’t know! And then, eventually, he coughed up something: It was that he had a
brewing crush on John, maybe, he thought, just a little maybe, it was no big deal,
but he had to say something.

John lied to Jason a little. “Of course I have feelings for you too, but things are
really complicated right now,” he said. He didn’t know which thing to say: Should
he be insulting, to make him go away? Or conciliatory? And what was true anyway? But
John said, you know I have a lot of feelings for your best friend, right? And Jason
said, I know. And: I wasn’t asking for this or anything.

THEIR BOSS’S GOING-AWAY
party was held at the enormous and relatively ancient building of a private club,
in the shadows of the tallest part of the City. It was all marble and looked like
a mausoleum. Really, it was only about 165 years old. Twenty years ago, the club had
been forced to admit women as members. They had not wanted women there, for the simple
reason that the members didn’t want to associate with women.

It was a party that felt like a funeral. All the men put on ties. All the women put
on high heels. People made speeches and everyone was anxious. The big main ground-floor
room of the club absorbed all the people in the room so that, between the murmuring
sound of cocktails being made and people talking, it still felt empty and cold and
bright.

Also, no one knew who would be fired the next morning.

Some people drank too much, and so in the office the next morning—a Friday, because
it had become traditional that groups of people should be fired on a Friday, so that
people’s feelings could cool and settle over the weekend—those people felt a bit chafed
or unsteady. Some people brought bags with them in case they needed to pack their
belongings.

They’d gotten advice from their friends at other companies about how to get fired.

That morning people sat at their desks doing nothing. It was raining miserably outside,
if you looked through the windows of the offices.

Eventually people were summoned into their boss’s old office. It still looked like
his office—books piled everywhere, a mess, a view of the skyscraper across the way—but
it didn’t feel like his office with him gone. Timothy and a representative of the
owner, a man with a vampire grin, met with people in the office. They had a stack
of folders prepared, one for each person they were going to dismiss. People who came
in couldn’t see the other people’s names on the folders—they were careful about that.