Very Recent History

An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City

Choire Sicha

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780061914317
• eBook ISBN: 9780062198990
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: History

Very Recent History by Choire Sicha is an idiosyncratic and elegant narrative that follows a handful of young men in New York City as they navigate the ruins of money and power—in search of love and connection.

After the Wall Street crash of 2008, the richest man in town is the mayor. Billionaires shed apartments like last season’s fashions, even as the country’s economy turns inside out. The young and careless go on as they always have, getting laid and getting laid off, falling in and out of love, and trying to navigate the strange world they traffic in:  the Internet, complex financial markets, credit cards, pop stars, micro-plane cheese graters, and sex apps.

A true-life fable of money, sex, and politics, Choire Sicha’s Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City turns our focus to a year in the life of a great city.

II.

In a very old and still popular history book, there was a story about a man who said he talked to God. When he was no longer a boy, he confided in his family that he heard voices. So obviously he became employed as a prophet and as a military general. And when he was old and famous, the people said to him, “This system we have just isn’t working out. We’re ready for something new, and we would like you to tell us who should be our king.”

But their prophet said, “That’s a terrible idea. If you have a king, he’ll conscript your children. He’ll make you do his fieldwork. He’ll have your daughters make his bread. He’ll take the best things you grow for his people. And then he’ll take ten percent of your vegetables and grains and the wine that you make—and that’s just for his servants! He’ll take ten percent of your sheep. Basically, you’ll all be his slaves. Eventually, you’ll be sorry, and you’ll have no one to blame but yourselves.”

But from time immemorial—and this was indeed a very long time ago—people have wanted someone in charge. They knew that the person in charge would be terrible, because only a hardheaded and rash and possibly psychopathic person was good at defending a country. Countries wanted to expand, always, and fortify their borders; their leaders personified that need to ooze over maps, over dusty hills, creeping along rivers, seizing and insulating.

So this prophet consulted with the voices he heard, and the voices said, go on, go ahead! Give them a king then, if they want one so bad.

For thousands of years after, the people were always plagued by kings. The kings came in all varieties and titles, but they all shared the love of territory and capital, the love of oozing and taking and fortification and celebrity.

The kings changed their methods over time. Later, the kings were only sometimes military or countrywide kings. All over the world, there were kings that had mere hundreds or maybe thousands or tens of thousands of subjects, but most often they were corporate kings. They let people farm the land for them and keep some profit. Or they bought up all the jobs in a town, as giant merchants, and then owned many of the workers in town for their kingdom. Or they owned all the land and so everyone paid them rent.

You were a king if no one could compete with you, and if no subject could easily leave your kingdom—the less porous your kingdom, the greater your kingship.

While many countries were subject to kings, the City itself was so compressed, so vertical, so tall with kings, that in fact the citizens had more freedom from local kings. There were so many opportunities to become a king, and some were immensely successful and some were less so. Mostly the kings were too busy with each other, oozing and creeping their kingdoms in perpetual alliances and skirmishes. So the people could, usually, hop from kingdom to kingdom.

What had changed over those thousands of years were a few things. Many things did not change; always, there was land and royal matchmaking and trade. Of course there were always more people who wanted to and had to pay for things. And then, in concert with the growing number of people, they invented new kinds of things that people had to pay for. For instance, once you “paid” for water by getting together with others and digging a well; then you all owned it. Now people who lived in cities did not have that equity from their labor; instead they paid for water to be delivered continuously to their homes. It was always on.

There were other things—games and fashions and trinkets and entertainments—that were merely advanced evolutions of age-old markets, from the necessary to the enjoyable to the frivolous. There was, for instance, medical treatment, which at this time hovered confusingly between being a right and being an unobtainable luxury.

THE CITY WAS all soft and steamy and delirious. Tree roots pushed up against slab, patient, growing every day. Down in the old former swamps of the City, where the hard schist broke up or dove down, the roots roamed wet and free, and pushed up because they could, and pushed down through garbage and broken rock and landfill. The old buildings sagged. In the bathrooms a tile would crack, and then another. One day a window wouldn’t quite close square. The old hills from the west side pushed down what was once an old former soggy cove. The rocks and burned buildings and gravel that filled in the swamps and unevenness of the east side, that mass was all compressed and thick now from decades of pressure, held together by webs of pipes and wires and roots and time. Little dirty streams appeared in the subway tunnels. Hundreds of pumps moved millions of gallons of water from the boreholes into tunnels built for wastewater, and then pumped it back into the sea. The sea shoved the water back. The more of the City there was, the heavier it got. All things settled, but not without constant tension, and often, unnoticed, a thing would quietly break. The great heap of structures made allowances one after another after the next for as long as it could.

JOHN BOUGHT A loaf of bread for dinner and was asleep by the stroke of nine.

He’d been texting Taylor back and forth, like dozens of times.

“I have nothing to hide,” Taylor had texted.

“You have my number,” Taylor had texted.

John awoke to the humming of his phone, another text from Taylor. “Don’t worry,” Taylor texted.

Then it was three a.m. and he couldn’t go back to sleep in the dark and hot and quiet, and he stayed up and watched some terrible movie on the TV.

IN JOHN’S MAIL there came a bank statement, for the period of June 22 to July 21.

His checking had 0.41 dollars. His savings had 0.85 dollars. His delinquent loan payments were 1,496.04 dollars. His Checking Plus Credit Line minimum payment due was 43.36 dollars. His annual percentage rate for interest on that was 15.25 percent. The amount of money subtracted from his bank account in that period was 2,581.07 dollars. But the amount of money he’d put into his bank account in that period was 2,272.72 dollars.

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 immigr...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Author's Note
• I.
• II.
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher