Perfection

Anna and Tom lived in a bubble, one even more insular and limited than those just starting to appear on social media. In a way, they had become radicalized. They spoke stumbling English with other non-native English speakers. They inhabited a world where everyone accepted a line of coke, where no one was a doctor or a baker or a taxi driver or a middle school teacher. They spent all their time in plant-filled apartments and cafés with excellent wifi. In the long run it was inevitable they would convince themselves that nothing else existed.

Language wasn’t the only national trait to dissolve. They had stopped reading newspapers from home soon after moving, the moment they realized how sloppy the journalism was compared to the writing in their English-language equivalents. Their intellectual horizon was therefore largely formed from headlines in The Guardian or The New York Times, which happened to be the same newspapers their Greek, Dutch, and Belgian friends read. In their world, Barack Obama’s speeches and high-school shootings existed far more vividly than the laws passed just a few U-Bahn stations away, or the refugees drowning two hours’ flight south.
News and language created a sort of shared ideological koine. They and all their friends belonged to an imprecise political left. They identified as feminists and spoke out against social injustices, which in practice meant they were willing to express outrage at instances of racism or sexism that took place in New York.

That sense of instability manifested as a constant nervous energy. Every winter, every weekend, could be one person’s last and another’s first. It made Anna and Tom feel alive, fueled their curiosity and sense of adventure, and reinforced the impression that the city was inexhaustible. And yet their world was smaller now than it had been when they were students. At any given time there were, at most, a dozen or so people they saw on a regular basis, and the liminal circle of vaguely familiar faces and half-acquaintances was looser and more ill-defined than it had been at university. Not that they ever noticed, because that limited world regenerated fast enough to give the illusion of infinity.