Free Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City by Choire Sicha Page A

boyfriends for another person, and look what happened. It never worked.
    So they went their own ways.
    After this night, John kept harassing Edward online, flirting, chatting . . . but
     then he was faced with this chill, and he did back off. He didn’t want to be a complication,
     exactly, because actually he did like Edward. He didn’t want him in trouble or in
     torment.
    John and Kevin and a bunch of others went to see Edward at a bar right before he left
     to go live with his parents for a while, to send him off. John intentionally didn’t
     look at Edward the whole night.
    And at the end of that night, Kevin said to John, it is so hilarious how all you do
     is stare at Edward and all Edward does is stare at you.
    I wasn’t even looking at him! John said. And Kevin said, please, all you do is stare
     at each other longingly.
    So John came up to Edward right before he left. Well, I’ll be down your way pretty
     soon myself for a weekend, he said. I’ll come see you maybe. Would you like that?
    THE CITY’S OWNERS were its engine, a kind of smaller city within the City, and they flatly served its
     purposes, to amass organizations that made and also spent capital. To do so they needed
     a few segments of population. So it served to have all these various layers of people:
     the people to work in the offices, the people to clean the offices, the people to
     buy and sell the offices, the people to feed the people within the offices, and the
     people to feed the people who owned the offices. Everyone else was a kind of gray
     noise while the credit card numbers bounced from tower to tower, transaction to transaction.
     Some people’s entire lives were nothing but the reverberations of this noise! “Leisure
     time” was spent consuming, handing over hours of one’s day to someone’s corporate
     entity. This was a fair trade. It must be said that people wanted it that way or they
     wouldn’t have been converting their dollars into products.
    And also this was the attraction of the City: the proximity of the plates of classes
     grinding together, the corner office visible from the bullpen. When someone was young
     in the City, he couldn’t know what he would be, and that was an alluring mystery.
     Some days he might think he was bound for riches too. Some hours he might think he
     was slipping into a permanent disaster.
    And everything else that was free, the people you spoke with and the people you slept
     with, those were strategies of filling a need you could not address in a system of
     capital. Which is to say, the good news was that no matter how hard the City tried,
     or the owners in the City tried, it could not make absolutely everything about profit
     and need.
    People’s lives would always seep out toward freedom, trashy or hilarious or messy
     or sexy or whatever—toward things that lie beyond profit and loss and order and economy.
    ONE NIGHT CHAD said, I’ll be downtown, let’s hang out. And John said, great, I’ll be with Fred. So
     they met up at the Magician, the worst place, a terrible plain little bar where John
     and his coworkers went after work and drank too much, where tonight Diego’s friends
     were hanging out. When John got there, one of Chad’s friends, Dan, was storming out
     of the bar. And Chad was running after him, yelling, wait, wait, Dan!
    And John was like, whoa, hello. And: Slow down, can you explain what’s happening?
     And Chad said, it’s all my fault, but apparently one of Diego’s friends wanted a really
     low-key evening, where it was just her and her friends hanging out, and so I offered
     Dan a free table nearby so you guys could sit there.
    So John said, come sit with us, Dan, who cares. He didn’t even want to sit with Diego
     and his college friends. Fred joined them at their side table, away from everyone,
     and they spent most of the time talking about how they thought Diego was bizarrely
     mean to them. John said so first, and Dan said, oh, you too? Hmm!