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

minimum of nine dollars, because already some stores sold them for ten or eleven
     or twelve dollars. Soon they would be fifteen.
    In other parts of the country, cigarettes were as cheap as four dollars a pack. But
     the Mayor said that, while fewer people were smoking all over the country, that in
     the City, even more people were smoking less. The problem was that he was right. He
     could personally afford all the cigarettes he wanted, but he didn’t smoke at all.
     Instead he had his safer vices, like private planes, which were mildly dangerous,
     certainly less safe than planes maintained by big companies, and certainly created
     a lot of pollution to transport a single man, but certainly did not take away years
     of a person’s life on average. Also one of his houses had a fifty-thousand-dollar
     snooker table that, maybe, he could accidentally walk into and injure himself.
    ON A SUNDAY, John hung out with Jordan and Jeff. John had seen Jordan recently, but he hadn’t seen
     Jeff in a long while. Jordan had, somehow, never before told Jeff that he had dated
     John, back in the day—and for so long!—and John had never cared that Jeff didn’t know.
    Now, after Jeff knew, he was just a little weird about John. Aggression, jealousy,
     self-recrimination: If you knew how to look at people the right way, you could see
     any of these things and more manifesting in microexpressions, in the veiled hostility
     of humor, the language of the body. But you had to be careful that you weren’t projecting
     these emotions on people. People were as easy to misinterpret as they were to read.
     What could you see in Jeff turning his body to the side, the array of ways he touched
     Jordan, and the smiles most of all? Were the smiles false and teeth-baring, or were
     they sympathetic and brotherly?
    Jordan was very tall and handsome and rather blond, with a deep chesty voice. When
     Jordan graduated from his professional school just a couple years back, right around
     the same time John did, he had total debt of around 160,000 dollars, only a little
     of which had been carried over from their undergraduate studies. The payment plan
     started around 1,200 dollars a month, on a thirty-year basis, which he could afford,
     because he made a good bit of money. The debt built, over time, with interest. The
     most economically rational idea, he thought, was to pay the minimum and invest the
     rest, to outpace the interest. But that proved too complicated. Instead he paid more
     than was required, to chip away at the always-growing interest, and so he had no savings
     whatsoever.
    He did not like his job at all. That wasn’t something he had the luxury to think about.
    Jordan had seen, in this museum in another country, called the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts
     de Belgique, this old painting that people then thought was by an artist called Brueghel.
     In the painting, all gold and blue in the center, there’s a bay, and a leg sticking
     out of the water, and a farmer plowing on the shore, head down, and a traveling man
     or a shepherd with a dog, with his back to the person who’s fallen into the water,
     and there’s also a schooner sailing away. A poet named Auden wrote about it once:
     “How everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
     / Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, / But for him it was not an important failure.”
     A poem was like a story, but more abstract. This poem was about how something amazing
     and terrible was happening right in front of someone on an ordinary day but there
     was work to perform. Without the work there would be no crop. Without the crop there
     would be no rent, or no dinner, or some other kind of trouble. That’s exactly like
     the human reaction to other people’s tragedies—still, now—Jordan thought, what with
     all the people having lost their jobs. They have more important things going on. You
     can be adjacent to other people’s misery, but misery