by Choire Sicha
The state’s brand-new governor came and spoke at this party. The president of John’s professional school came. At this party, in fact, John saw most of the very rich people that controlled the various institutions of his life. The new governor was not particularly rich, and would not be the governor for long. The previous governor, though, was nearly as rich as the Mayor. Despite the fact that they occupied the same rarified tier of wealth, they weren’t really friends, though they claimed to be. But then, a large amount of money was often isolating.
The ex-governor’s father had more than 500 million dollars, though he himself had grown up very poor. He gave the ex-governor, his son, a very nice apartment at 985 Fifth Avenue. His father, in fact, had caused the building to be built. The family took in more than a million dollars a year in rents paid by other people.
Because his father was rich, the governor grew up with other rich people; he went to a private high school—that is, he received the mandatory education for young people, but he took it at a school that you paid to attend, because it was a much better school—and then to expensive colleges and professional schools.
But for one summer while he was at school, he gave it all up. He went about to rural places in the country, picking vegetables and doing construction. He wanted to find out what the country was like for normal people. This experience convinced him that, even if one didn’t have a college degree or, say, a college degree from a not-very-good school, one could “make it” in the country—provided one wanted to work really hard. This was not a terribly original idea. In fact, it was an idea so popular that to object to it was considered intellectually treasonous.
At long last, he’d grown up and been in charge of the whole state. But then he had to leave his job governing: He had paid women other than his wife to have sex with him. More important, he had lied about it. Everyone in the City was very upset about that, though some were more amused than scandalized.
The new governor had to announce his infidelities as well, but he had never lied or broken any laws, so he was welcome at the Four Seasons.
The Mayor came to this party as well. The owner of John’s company was nowhere near as rich as the Mayor, but he was, obviously, rich as well, because his father was rich.
The people there were in charge of the actual landscape of the City. That meant that they controlled the dirt, the stones, the buildings, the tunnels, the sightlines, the scene, and, less so but not much less so, the movements of the people within the landscape.
The physical landscape was a harder and harder thing to control. Though always malleable, foot by foot, the City had become more calcified as it grew up over the decades. For one thing, fewer grand disasters happened. For instance, on one incredibly cold night about 175 years before this time, 674 buildings—all of them south of Wall Street—burned down in a single fire.
Unfortunately, many insurance claims weren’t paid to the owners of those buildings, because some of the insurance companies burned down, ending their operations.
Those charred acres were an opportunity. All sorts of physical landscape was claimed and made and shaped.
Still later in the City’s life, whole neighborhoods were bulldozed and claimed, even when they hadn’t burned down.
But that sort of thing didn’t happen much anymore.
Although, to be fair, in the Mayor’s two terms, nearly one-fifth of the land in the entire City had been rezoned. “Rezoning” was what it was called when you changed the designation of a block or a neighborhood, allowing owners to build more—almost never less—usable space on a particular piece of property. Rezoning was a gift to the owners of property. You did some studies and had some meetings, or sometimes not even that, and the City declared that this block—where it had previously been ordered that, say, only low industrial buildings could be built—could now accommodate tall residential buildings. And then someone came along—or, more likely, was waiting in the wings—and they borrowed a lot of money and they built the buildings, and sometimes didn’t go broke along the way.
THE IDEA OF a distinct unit of money was, at that time, a little more than 5,000 years old, as near as could be told. The idea of precious metals being used as currency was maybe about 2,500 years old. The idea of a piece of paper standing in for a set value was almost exactly 1,000 years old.
So for a long time, money had been an object that promised a value, such as a piece of paper that said, with words, that it conveyed a certain amount. Prior to that, instead, money was a thing that actually had an independent value, such as gold or silver, which were chemical elements that were found in the ground.
Some people had, however, been using other things to stand in for value three thousand years ago. Sometimes people who used, say, shells as money made their arrangements quite sensibly, so that the larger or perhaps more rare the shell, the more the shell was worth. The shells could be so big that they were difficult to carry.
Shells, of course, could be found just lying here and there, and also they were replenished by living organisms. Gold and silver were not potentially limitless. There was only so much gold. In just a few years prior to this time, the largest amount of gold per year ever, in the history of humanity, had been taken out of the ground. Almost all through the rest of that decade, there was less and less gold found each year.
The gold was always deeper in the ground—“older” gold. Very little fresh gold was arriving from space. Only a small fraction of a percent of the gold had arrived from space recently, meaning, give or take, in the last four billion years.
Miners—working on behalf of corporations, not for themselves—took just a bit less than twice as much gold from the ground as they had some thirty years ago, and they found four times as much as they had ninety years ago. They wanted it all.
Not everyone was entirely in the system of money. The corporations were; they sold this gold on the markets in exchange for money. The miners were, for the most part, paid in money for retrieving the gold. But some people made their own systems of money. People in prisons, for instance, had no money or extremely little money, so they organized among themselves a system where their “money” had an actual value—which arose according to its scarcity. For one currency, some used cigarettes. For another, canned fish.
It seemed, over a period of many centuries, every group of people large or small that organized a society invented a currency.
Where there was money, some would hoard it. Some would never get much of it. Some who had much of it would use it to get more. This was a sensible reaction to there being money.
Those who had very much money, who retained these markers of value, even if the value was very abstracted, could avail themselves of other people’s money. They used their money as an insurance of the borrowed monies’ return. This sort of money might not even be in paper form but might instead just be distributed through banks, whose job it was to hold money, and therefore the “actual” money might be put to thousands of different purposes by those banks and only be registered as attached to the current “owner” of the money by means of records.
Each person’s money was like an excited band of pigeons that swooped and swooped and always, eventually, homed.
The government had chosen to, or was allowed to, retain the monopoly for creating the official money for the whole country. And then the government let the businesses decide how much the money was worth, although they influenced that value strongly. This idea went terribly wrong, around the world, from time to time—such as when governments would collapse, or would be forced into printing more paper that represented value without taking into account, or sometimes purposely ignoring, the thing from which that paper drew its value.
To be fair, the shell system wasn’t much better. The obvious nonsecret to using shells as an economic marker is to become a better scavenger of shells.
The country once had a coi
n made of gold that represented its money, even while it had its own paper currency. But then, not long after, the government forbade its citizens from having very much gold. They were allowed shells, however, but the shells didn’t get you anything, unless you were a shell collector and wanted to trade shells just for other shells or for, of course, money.
JOHN WENT OUT to Metropolitan, his favorite cozy little bar, particularly in the cold months. John met this guy, this great-looking guy, and they spent the night together. It was a crazy, energizing emotional experience, that thrill you get when you meet someone great and appealing, a kind of magic that was rare.
And apparently the guy really liked John too, because John read about it on the Internet on the guy’s personal diary the next day: “Met this amazing guy last night,” that sort of thing, and then it went into more really quite personal detail.
The thing is, John had been reading this guy’s writing online for months—but when they met, he didn’t connect the person to the persona. He actually read this stuff because he liked to make fun of it. The guy had not only a boyfriend but also an unending series of sex partners, sometimes for cash as well. He had amazing stories too. Sometimes John and his friends would read these stories together out loud. And then suddenly, the shock of intruding unexpectedly into this narrative, guest-starring in this Internet tale, was sort of like—what was it even like, having your activities of the night before published, with your name, in public? A little like opening the newspaper and reading a long and overwrought review of your own private diary, as recounted by someone who doesn’t know at all the most important things there are to know about you.
Later on, the guy wrote about how upset and mystified he was that he never heard from John again.
THE MAYOR HAD not always been the mayor. There had in fact been many before him. He was the 108th. Early on in the life of the City, mayors were appointed, first by a regional governor, then by various elected councils of the City. Eventually—after a bit more than two hundred years—it was decided that people in general, the people who lived in the City, should decide which of them should be the mayor. There had been only forty-eight of these mayors that were elected. They were not all rich men in recent decades. The earlier appointed ones had tended toward wealthy backgrounds, naturally, because the people who were doing the appointing were wealthy and that’s who they knew, but the elected ones were not all born rich or even made rich. One was an Irish immigrant turned police officer; some were lawyers and judges; a few were farmers; many were merchants; one was a locomotive engineer; at least a few were, or became while in office, crooks. The exposure to so much money was too much for them. Because people didn’t live so long, only the last three previous mayors were still alive.
The Mayor was not allowed to be mayor anymore. Mayors weren’t allowed to serve their four-year terms more than twice in a row. The people of the City had voted on it, two times, and a majority of them had voted in favor of this limitation. The immediately previous mayor had tried to extend his term by just three months, and this proposal had been roundly rejected.
CHAD LEFT TOWN, and Diego emailed with some fun advice for what to do overseas. Chad didn’t want to be too much in contact with Diego too soon, so the email made him slightly nervous. He figured they’d talk when he returned. But then Chad found a poster glued to a wall that he knew Diego would like and he tried to tear it off to bring it back. Anyway it was impossible not to reply and soon they were emailing back and forth.
Then Chad got back to town and called Diego right away.
Soon enough, Diego asked Chad if he wanted to exclusively date each other. And after that emotional monogamy talk, they had a sexual monogamy talk. They decided they would sleep only with each other. The monogamy talk was precipitated by a question: How okay was it to be on sex-related websites, such as the one on which they had first become acquainted? So they talked about: Are you using this website for a social life? For a fantasy life? For meeting others? And which and what of those are okay? Because those online relationships can flip so quickly into reality, much as theirs had.
What had happened was that Chad had been checking his email on Diego’s computer, and while on it, he found traces of Diego’s visits to these sorts of sites on the public Internet. Diego said the Internet served a purpose both social and fantastic. The social aspect could extend to photos and interactions with real people—but the fantasy aspect was delimited by his online profile, which declared information about himself and his interests and clearly explained that he was in a relationship and not looking for “real-world” interactions. Chad understood the impulse but wasn’t comfortable. Diego said that there had been no exceptions to their monogamy.
About a month into their relationship, Diego got tested for diseases. Chad had been tested just previous to that. And Diego had the tests run again, because they felt the relationship was getting serious, and then they stopped using condoms for sex. Condoms were what people had used for hundreds and hundreds of years to prevent themselves from giving other people diseases, or from getting those diseases, or to prevent pregnancy, whichever combination was applicable. Chad knew a lot of people who didn’t even know what diseases they might have, and he couldn’t understand that. The anxiety this gave him! Chad was a mild hypochondriac and at the same time was definitely reasonably afraid of dying and death. Two of Diego’s best friends from public high school had a virus that jeopardized their health, and so the possibility of unexpected consequences was not abstract to him. He didn’t need to be a hypochondriac to take his health seriously.
Diego had moved to their cozy isolated corner of the City not long ago, far from the skyscrapers, and had no friends there at all. Having Chad in the neighborhood made it now seem comfortable and private, instead of scary and new.
Diego’s last boyfriend, of a year and a half, had just disliked Diego’s friends. He said that he thought Diego’s friends were too “pedestrian.” So people were hesitant to meet Chad, because they felt so burned by the last boyfriend. Chad had the same thing—his last boyfriend had been very moody and self-absorbed. He didn’t want to go out with Chad’s friends, and when he was dragged out, he was just unpleasant.
Both of them, they thought, had learned from these experiences.
JOHN HAD MET Kevin, his other good friend, at a local bar called Eastern Bloc, back around the time that John had started his job.
John had been out with someone who’d gone to school with Kevin. John was not enjoying himself at all on this date, so he glommed onto Kevin. He thought Kevin was cute—Kevin was slightly redheaded, and the friendliest guy, with twinkly light eyes, clear skin and an incredibly symmetrical face. He had an attitude of being always game for anything. So instead of going home with his date, John went home with Kevin—and Kevin’s boyfriend, Hassan. Hassan was sort of the opposite in appearance of Kevin: He always looked stern or sly, with his dark hair and heavy eyebrows. They’d been together since college. But Kevin’s boyfriend wasn’t that interested and went to sleep on the couch, while Kevin and John kept the bedroom.
About a month later they contacted each other on Facebook; Kevin sent John a message. Facebook at this time was a worldwide social engagement system, nearly indistinguishable from the Internet itself. It seemed to Kevin that they both had an opening for a new friend. Kevin had a lot of friends from high school who’d all scattered, and he didn’t have a best friend in the City. So they went straight from not knowing each other to hanging out four times a week. And they slept together sometimes but not for that long.
Kevin now worked part time—“freelance”—for a company that was owned by the cousin of the owner of John’s company. Both these owners even had the same last name. Also, these two owners hated each other and never spoke. John’s owner was probably richer than Kevin’s owner, but only they would know about that for sure.
Before this new job, Kevin had gotten laid off fr
om what had been only his second job since school. Lots of employers tended to get rid of more recent hires, although others tended to get rid of people who’d worked there the longest, as they were generally paid more. In this case, they fired half the office.
This is how they fired everyone.
Late in the week, at six p.m., the managers said that there needed to be a big office meeting. The office was also a big open room, just like the Mayor’s office and John’s office. In that room, the managers announced to the whole office that the firm was out of money and they needed to fire people.
But we’re not going to tell you now who’s fired, they said. Go home and we’ll send you an email. And then, whenever you want to, you can come in and clean out your stuff.
So Kevin left and went to the gym, which was a “club” you could join for money and exercise, and there he ran on the treadmill. Then he got home and the email was waiting for him. He thought it was pretty outrageous, but while it was frightening, that such instability could be visited upon him out of the blue, he didn’t feel shattered.
He had a friend, an older person who had gone to his same college, who had introduced him to the cousin of the owner of John’s company. This new situation was fine! He was also getting “unemployment insurance” payments from the state, in addition to the money from this new job. All told, he was actually making more money than he had before. He was seeing, like Chad, that being traditionally employed was not a particularly worthwhile thing.
Kevin even had a savings account. He’d never borrowed money—except for college, and he thought he would be paying for that for the rest of his life. It was only 150 dollars a month right now—the first year he was out of school, it was just 70 dollars; then they ratcheted it up a little. Soon he was afraid it’d be 400 dollars a month, and what then? But he had felt really informed about the responsibility he was taking on when he signed up: His parents also had school loans that they were still paying off.
