Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (C. AD 2009) in a Large City Read Free Page B

its earliest, flattest state, of sending words, and
     then pictures, and then moving pictures—was most transformative of this endeavor,
     even more than it was for entertainment and the sale of retail products. The Internet,
     as people knew it then, was only about twenty years old, but most of the products
     and experiences on the Internet were even more recent than that.
    Only through the early tentative arrival of full-world search could fellow enthusiasts
     of very particular sexual procedures easily identify each other.
    And so could everyone else: people who wanted to meet to make children, people who
     wanted someone with whom to grow old, fellow adherents to a religion, people who were
     monogamists—or temporary monogamists.
    But already, even though this was in the exciting early days of a virtual society,
     organic or accidental meeting in the real world—the face-to-face first blush and chemical
     systems rush—was seen as something prized, something original, something the flat
     Internet, even with all its growing reach and inclusion, couldn’t offer.
    JOHN’S FRIEND CHAD had a real office job and took home 425 dollars a week. This was a job that young
     people wanted. It opened doors; it introduced him to people, mentors maybe, famous
     people, intellectuals.
    And then he quit. Chad realized that people didn’t start at the bottom and work their
     way up anymore. This was an outmoded idea. Instead of working at a desk all day, he
     started tutoring rich people’s children, for money. He went to an agency that matched
     him with parents in the City. His rich clients were people who were essentially unaffected
     by any of the current anxieties about the economy, except attitudinally. They were
     supposed to be concerned, so they were. Or they pretended to be concerned. For instance,
     they would not go on an expensive vacation. These were people who all knew people
     who had suddenly gone broke. But it was like a mystery: Who would lose everything?
     Who was working at a financial firm, for instance, that would go bust?
    Overall, the parents who hired Chad would probably spend five to ten thousand dollars
     for an increase in test scores of less than a hundred points on the all-important
     tests for college admission, which were called the SATs. They were paying Chad for
     one hundred minutes a week, to help their children focus. They could get the same
     result on their own from twenty dollars’ worth of practice books. Or Chad could do
     two sessions, with practice questions, for ten times that amount, and the children
     would benefit just the same.
    But for Chad it was a good thing that he had quit his job. He had more time to conduct
     his social life. Chad was cute, but he had been single for a while. He was trim and
     pale and had curly brown hair that grew wild, and deep brown eyes, usually obscured
     behind glasses that made him look like the sort of person with whom a rich person
     would entrust their children.
    At a friend’s urging, Chad made a profile on a dating website called DList. It was
     run by a guy named Daniel, a sort of well-known promoter of—among other things, like
     not-really-erotic erotic film festivals—sex parties. While some used the site in a
     goal-oriented way, Chad used it more or less socially. You would “go on” to the site
     and see who was “around,” and you could “chat” with those people. It introduced the
     right levels of choice and randomness into a digital meeting place.
    There were all these people on the site that Chad knew but didn’t really know, like
     they were Internet friends of friends or he’d seen them “around.” And then he searched
     in his neighborhood, and there was Diego’s profile.
    They both lived in a quiet corner of the City, far from the busy center. The City,
     long since graded and drained of most of its lakes and marshes, with its pretty houses
     high on its hills, was exposed to its wide, deep harbor. Down low at the