Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City by Choire Sicha Page A
Authors: Choire Sicha
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had to be right on top of you
for it to matter. Jordan felt like his behavior now, in the middle of it all, was
like that.
He had looked at research about human happiness and believed that people weren’t really
good judges of what made them happy. He was in the City because he had lived in other
cities and didn’t enjoy them, and his friends were there, and his family was near,
and so it should make him happy. But also things were going disastrously everywhere.
For instance, now his dad made less money than he’d made in twenty-five years. And
still Jordan wondered: How is the state of the world going to affect my bonus pay,
come the end of the year? In the grand scheme of things, other people at that time
were facing legitimate catastrophes—the loss of their homes, the evaporation of their
savings—and Jordan wasn’t. Most of the people in his graduate school class from just
a few years previous were employed, while the ones graduating now from the same schools
were not, and maybe never would be. But he also thought there was a bigger crisis
yet to come. Jordan had a certain amount of envy of people who were maybe struggling
a little more financially at the moment but were good at what they were pursuing.
Was this fair? He figured it absolutely wasn’t, but he still felt that way anyway.
Other people were doing something they wanted to do forever, that they cared about.
He thought that they went to bed with a sense of satisfaction, while he could not.
THIS WAS ABOUT right when the trees started to come back, because the seasons were still so regular.
Plants were actually everywhere in the City, but always invisible until they began
to emit a tiny green mist of new leaves. Soon enough the first brave woman would go
outside in just a blouse or a tight T-shirt, while doing laundry, maybe, on a Sunday.
A wave would ripple across the City, boys in skinny jeans and well-worn T-shirts that
didn’t cover their chicken-thin hips. Chest hair! Again! The backs of knees were shining
everywhere. There was maybe no good evolutionary or biological reason for everyone
to want to touch someone’s skin on that first warm day of spring, but there it was.
The days came a bit too cold or a bit too hot, like a patient with a fever, unpredictable.
The nights grew more tempting. The mornings were easy, until the day came when you
woke up, your throat swollen, the apartment too hot and gross, before the cold spell
of the open window. The trees would stop and just wait. The looping squiggly bands
of air would get pushed and bunched around the world, and then finally one day a warm
dry blast settled along every avenue and abandoned lot. The City transformed. Bright
green leaves lined the park fences, surrounded the shrieks of the playground fights.
The streets were transformed with the lines of greenery, reflecting the boxes of blocks
and buildings, elegant or scraggly or malformed or patchy, but at least reaching,
some even flowering. A few came busting out in a pink glaze, set against jewel-box
green. It was coming, time and date unknown, but always it would get there, the full
shrinking of the night, the hot juicy wetness of the days.
THE MAYOR CAME out and made a speech that took everyone by surprise. “I don’t want to walk away
from a city I feel I can help lead through these tough times,” he said. And:
We live in a world where, normal course of business, companies and individuals borrow
money and repay it. And that process has come to a stop. And that’s a much more difficult
thing to work out of. Why people lose confidence and why people gain confidence, psychologists
get PhD theses trying to figure that out. But they are long-term swings and I don’t
think anybody questions that we have a problem. . . .
I will say that we are better prepared than we could have been. We have for the last
couple of years, as you know, kept saying, the
for it to matter. Jordan felt like his behavior now, in the middle of it all, was
like that.
He had looked at research about human happiness and believed that people weren’t really
good judges of what made them happy. He was in the City because he had lived in other
cities and didn’t enjoy them, and his friends were there, and his family was near,
and so it should make him happy. But also things were going disastrously everywhere.
For instance, now his dad made less money than he’d made in twenty-five years. And
still Jordan wondered: How is the state of the world going to affect my bonus pay,
come the end of the year? In the grand scheme of things, other people at that time
were facing legitimate catastrophes—the loss of their homes, the evaporation of their
savings—and Jordan wasn’t. Most of the people in his graduate school class from just
a few years previous were employed, while the ones graduating now from the same schools
were not, and maybe never would be. But he also thought there was a bigger crisis
yet to come. Jordan had a certain amount of envy of people who were maybe struggling
a little more financially at the moment but were good at what they were pursuing.
Was this fair? He figured it absolutely wasn’t, but he still felt that way anyway.
Other people were doing something they wanted to do forever, that they cared about.
He thought that they went to bed with a sense of satisfaction, while he could not.
THIS WAS ABOUT right when the trees started to come back, because the seasons were still so regular.
Plants were actually everywhere in the City, but always invisible until they began
to emit a tiny green mist of new leaves. Soon enough the first brave woman would go
outside in just a blouse or a tight T-shirt, while doing laundry, maybe, on a Sunday.
A wave would ripple across the City, boys in skinny jeans and well-worn T-shirts that
didn’t cover their chicken-thin hips. Chest hair! Again! The backs of knees were shining
everywhere. There was maybe no good evolutionary or biological reason for everyone
to want to touch someone’s skin on that first warm day of spring, but there it was.
The days came a bit too cold or a bit too hot, like a patient with a fever, unpredictable.
The nights grew more tempting. The mornings were easy, until the day came when you
woke up, your throat swollen, the apartment too hot and gross, before the cold spell
of the open window. The trees would stop and just wait. The looping squiggly bands
of air would get pushed and bunched around the world, and then finally one day a warm
dry blast settled along every avenue and abandoned lot. The City transformed. Bright
green leaves lined the park fences, surrounded the shrieks of the playground fights.
The streets were transformed with the lines of greenery, reflecting the boxes of blocks
and buildings, elegant or scraggly or malformed or patchy, but at least reaching,
some even flowering. A few came busting out in a pink glaze, set against jewel-box
green. It was coming, time and date unknown, but always it would get there, the full
shrinking of the night, the hot juicy wetness of the days.
THE MAYOR CAME out and made a speech that took everyone by surprise. “I don’t want to walk away
from a city I feel I can help lead through these tough times,” he said. And:
We live in a world where, normal course of business, companies and individuals borrow
money and repay it. And that process has come to a stop. And that’s a much more difficult
thing to work out of. Why people lose confidence and why people gain confidence, psychologists
get PhD theses trying to figure that out. But they are long-term swings and I don’t
think anybody questions that we have a problem. . . .
I will say that we are better prepared than we could have been. We have for the last
couple of years, as you know, kept saying, the
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