Read Online Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City by Choire Sicha - Free Book Online
Authors: Choire Sicha
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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
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
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