Boomer1

by Daniel Torday

  So Mark left the city. It was as if Cassie were allowed to romp as free as the mind of god. For the first time in years she could go out with Natalia when the Pollys were back in town and not worry about one of Mark’s friends seeing them, or running into him at a bar. She went down to Superfine one night and after closing just went ahead and told Jenna she’d always wanted to fuck her. She did. She even picked up her Epiphone again—one of the bands Natalia was touring with needed a bassist to fill in on a leg of a Midwestern seven-city tour, and while Cassie didn’t get the gig, it was only because the band’s regular bassist ended up being able to make it after all. Mark would still be coming up to the city every month or so for gigs with the Willow Gardens, but it was as if Cassie was a fourteenth-century bound Chinese foot who had suddenly been set free of her binding. She only hoped the damage the years of constriction had done to her wasn’t irreparable.

  CHAPTER SIX

  AROUND THAT SAME TIME, mid-summer, Cassie came to Natalia’s place one night to find that Deron was over. He was six foot five with a single tight dreadlock down his back and Steal Your Face tattooed on the inside of his wrist. Deron had been Mark’s editor on the Emma Goldman piece. Deron and Natalia were crouched over his MacBook Air. On the screen in front of them some guy was ranting and rambling, loud but controlled—she heard him punctuate each thing he said by repeating, “Boom boom.” She saw a trickle of blood running down the side of his face and then all at once she realized it was Mark Brumfeld himself, hair wild and eyes all red.

  This was the only time his own face would appear on-screen, before he got smart and started wearing a mask for his transmissions and took the video down. After not having seen him in person for more than a month, seeing him on-screen like this, it was as if Cassie was able to take him in for the first time in years. He was only six years older than her, but they were the six years that appeared to serve as a caesura between early adulthood and the beginning of middle age. He looked like the deity had puffed one breath too many into his baggy face. He was losing enough hair now you might properly call him more bald than balding—hairlessness having become a state of being, not a mode of becoming. But more than that, he looked so, so angry, a rictus of angst twisting his appearance.

  “The fuck are you watching?” Cassie said. She waited for Natalia to light into the insanity of her former fiancé and current bandmate, head Pussy Willow, but Natalia had a kind of sanguine glow in her cheeks. Her eyes were wide.

  “You won’t believe it, but Mark’s kind of fucking awesome—in a batshit crazy kind of way,” Natalia said.

  “Kind of,” Cassie said.

  “Not Mark,” Deron said. “Isaac Abramson. Everyone I know’s watching these YouTube videos he made.” She was waiting for him to crack a smile, to start making fun of Mark, or her, or Mark and her, but instead he just brushed past her and headed out into the rollicking summer heat. Natalia paused the video and there Mark sat on the screen, suspended in a state of all-encompassing static anger. Below his face a number very close to ten thousand signaled the quantity of times the video had been viewed. Cassie could see that another browser window was open behind it, where Natalia had shared the video on Facebook, and behind that, another window open with her Tumblr, and the paused image imbedded there, too.

  When she got back to her apartment that night, Cassie watched the four videos Mark had posted. In the second half of the one she’d already seen, and in the next three, Mark was wearing a mask, his voice obscured. With him disguised they were oddly more affecting—something about them seemed almost like satire, but once you started listening it was hard to stop. At this point more than twenty thousand other views had been added to the latter videos. Cassie closed the window where she’d been watching Mark on YouTube and clicked over to her own Instagram, where as she scrolled down it seemed as if half the people she knew—people who didn’t know Mark—had shared one of his videos. He seemed so sure of what he was saying about the need for millennials to get jobs and the need for baby boomers to retire from theirs, and the truth was that just about everyone she knew needed a job, and just about everyone she knew’s parents were in their late sixties or early seventies and still working, and rational or not, it tapped an anger hiding somewhere deep inside her she didn’t know was there.

  She didn’t say anything to Mark about having seen him on YouTube when he came up to the city next. Their gig at the Lakeside Lounge was on a Thursday night at the end of July. They played and she asked Mark if he wanted to stick around the city for a night or two—there was going to be a The Unified Theory issue release party that Friday night. Everyone in the literary world showed up at those parties. The full press of the crowd comprised mainly hipsters, grad students, and hangers-on, more creatively curated facial hair than you might find in an HBO series set in the early 1910s, but by the end of the night at least one junior literary editor from The New Yorker would come and be swarmed/not-swarmed by writers who hoped one day to write for her. Mark tried to play it cool but it was clear he wanted to go, and he said, yeah, sure, of course he’d come. They met up for soup dumplings and sweet buns at Joe’s Shanghai and then walked through the thick mellow stench of hot fish blood, and up to a door on Doyers Street, right in the middle of Chinatown. Mark pushed the buzzer next to a piece of duct tape that had been pasted up there and had the magazine’s initials scratched into it. Nothing happened. Cassie was already on her phone.

  “Yeah, we’re down here, come get us,” Cassie said into her cell. Then she looked at Mark. “You have to call to get them to let you in. Buzzer doesn’t work.” They stood waiting while Mark told her about his day-to-day in Baltimore. He wasn’t doing much other than preparing his Boomer Missives. That was how he said it, “Boomer Missives,” as if you could hear the capitals when they were spoken, as if she should know that’s what he was doing. Something in the way he played it cool, telling her and not telling her about it, she could just tell that he wanted her to be watching. He flirted with her now less like her ex-boyfriend and bandmate than like a toddler, punching the girl he liked most in the pre-K class. He told her he’d gotten a job at a coffee shop near the Barnes & Noble in the shopping center where he’d worked at a TCBY as a teenager. Living in New York, the idea of each detail he provided was so foreign and loathsome to her Cassie couldn’t even take it in: feckless shopping center, feckless chain bookstore, feckless chain fro-yo shop awful awful awful. Probably they piped in Elton John and Celine Dion over the speakers.

  Deron came down and opened the door for them. He had his dreadlock wrapped up around his head like he’d started wearing a turban made of his own hair.

  “Cassie,” he said, though he seemed only to be looking at Mark. They came in through the door and under his breath she heard Deron say, “Boom boom,” then smile. She’d never once seen Deron smile. Mark looked up at him like he’d seen an old friend or an old bully, but Deron said nothing further, pretended like it had never happened, returned to his characteristic scowl, and they went up into the party. The building where TUT had its office was mainly studio apartments, but on the fourth floor they had rented a huge suite with a couple of rooms with nubby old couches. There was a keg in the corner and some red Solo cups. People stood in groups of four or five. Cassie didn’t see anyone she knew but it felt like people were looking at them.

  Deron left them. Mark went off to pour a couple of PBRs from the keg in the corner. She saw Deron walk up to him and whisper in his ear, and then the two of them walked off to the room next door. Cassie didn’t have her beer yet, and she didn’t have anyone to talk to. She followed them. Against her better judgment, here she was following Mark Brumfeld around.

  In the next room over, Mark was now sitting on a couch. Deron and a woman she’d never seen before were sitting on metal folding chairs across from him. There was a Che Guevara sticker on the back of the seat the woman was sitting in. Their conversation was hushed and yet animated. Mark looked up and saw that she’d joined them. The woman and Deron
were both looking at her like she’d interrupted.

  “What’s so important that you couldn’t bring me my fucking drink?” Cassie said. Mark apologized, and she saw how full of new energy he was and she couldn’t believe it but honestly, she felt a little jealous. Of the attention he was getting, of the jolt Mark was getting from all this. Mark kept talking. This was Deron, he said, the editor who’d worked on his Emma Goldman piece—she said she knew him, of course, she was the one who’d introduced them to each other to begin with—and one of his co-editors, who had a first-name/last-name name, Regan or Jordan, Cassie couldn’t bring herself to care or remember which. Okay, fine, Regan.

  “Well, I work for a start-up but mainly I’m the editor of Czolgosz Quarterly,” the woman said. She was maybe five feet tall, with a sandy brown faux-hawk. Why was it that all the women Cassie met these days had faux-hawks? She was wearing a TUT T-shirt and dark black eyeliner. “You might have read it.” Cassie said she hadn’t. “We disseminated some good information and planning for some protests but the organization never coalesced around a single personality, a single articulable goal.”

  Regan/Jordan asked who she was and Cassie and Mark looked at each other. Mark told her they played in a band together. Cassie checked facts at some magazine, he said. Regan/Jordan’s countenance remained entirely flat. Not a muscle in her face moved. “Okay, this is all beside the point. Look, as I was saying to Isaac, the first thing he needs to do is take down these first four posts. Like, yesterday. Erase the footprint. Does she know about your posts?”

  Mark looked at Cassie, who took a second to decide how to answer. Before she could, Deron said that she did. Regan/Jordan’s face stayed placid. Then Mark said that if Deron said she did, then she did. The woman assented.

  “And as I was saying,” Mark said, “that seems crazy. The third missive has ninety thousand hits already. It’s all over social media—and I’m wearing a mask in it. People are starting to watch. It’s taken me like two months to build even this momentum. Momentum which is probably just luck. Why would I stop the momentum now?”

  “That’s exactly why they need to come down. Later on you’ll get your viewers back on track. I mean you’ve got your foot in the chat rooms and those trolls can make things spread like crazy. Easily enough done. Right now you need to scrub all your activity on the surface web and to move all of this over to the Deep Web. No passwords, no IP addresses that your log-ins could be traceable to, nothing on the surface web at all. It could already be too late, but if you’re planning to continue, you need to be smarter about it.”

  Cassie looked at Mark and Deron, expecting to see them laugh at Regan/Jordan’s having just said “the Deep Web” aloud as if they were in a Philip K. Dick novel, or something William Gibson had imagined, but they both were listening intently and in earnest. R/J went into a disquisition on the Deep Web. Cassie was even more surprised to find what she was saying was fascinating. Some people called it the Dark Web, or the Deep Web, R/J said. But whatever name you gave it, this other Internet was the place Mark needed to be posting his videos. Getting onto it was simple enough: you just downloaded an application called TOR, which stood for The Onion Router. By clicking on an icon, you would go to a whole different version of the Internet. This other web wasn’t searchable on Google, and it wasn’t traceable, either. For a period R/J started talking about encryption tools and overseas IP routing, and during all this technical talk Cassie glazed over—could they possibly care about this programmer lingo? Listening to it made her feel like she would never want to have sex with anyone ever again in her long Luddite life.

  But Mark seemed to be listening more closely now, and there was something attractive in how attentive he appeared. Deron was just nodding, his turban of hair bounding atop his head. Cassie wondered if Mark wanted to sleep with R/J, or if he was serious about this conversation. From the look on his face, it seemed like some complicated mix of the two. Or uncomplicated. Either way she felt ready to move on. So while Mark learned what he needed to know about a new untraceable web footprint and erasing the details of his current Internet usage, which details these boys were lost in and which sounded like the least revolutionary thing she’d heard in years—Che and Fidel and Raul debating the intricacies of telex messages—Cassie went off to find herself another drink.

  Out in the magazine’s narrow offices, twenty-somethings packed the space. Talk was of books and employment, of the long-term solvency of entitlement programs and revolution. Cassie moved in and out of conversations where people were talking about the jobs they didn’t have and the jobs they didn’t think they’d get. One of the first things she’d noticed when she moved to New York was that unlike in other places, the first thing people asked you was what you did. Among friends her age the answer was “unemployed.” But she had no one even to ask at that moment. She was still for all intents and purposes alone. For a period she listened as a kid with a thick Nigerian accent gave a long synopsis of both his reading of Thomas Piketty and his minute critiques of Thomas Piketty and his critiques of Paul Krugman’s critiques of Thomas Piketty’s critiques of Keynes. Then someone broke in to discuss the latest Houellebecq, which they said wasn’t as good as the second Houellebecq, or as The Possibility of an Island, which interested her—she hadn’t yet read him, but at least they were talking about fiction. When Mark came back into the main space, it seemed like people all around the room were looking at him.

  “Seems you’ve got some fans,” Cassie said. “Who would’ve thought a move to Baltimore would be so fruitful for you, Mark.”

  “Isaac,” he said. She asked him if he was serious. “As I’ll ever be. That shit Regan”—so it was Regan for sure then—“was talking in there just blew my mind. I’ve got some serious work to do at home. Time for me to get going.”

  There was a new look in Mark’s eyes, a color to his face she’d never before seen. For the first time in years Cassie found she wanted to know what he was thinking, rather than to be told, crimson and clover, over and over, every last thought in his thought-tormented head. For the first time ever she almost wondered if she should have wanted to marry him, but let the thought pass. He started in on the same talk she’d seen on his YouTube postings, and Cassie was shocked to find herself listening. Soon, instead of going into their deep vocal critique of diluted Keynesian economics and its effect on the current administration, post-morteming once again the effects of the bank bailouts and too big to fail, a half-dozen other people were listening to Mark.

  Isaac.

  Whatever.

  Maybe it was time for them both to clean up their web footprints. Because the talk in the offices of TUT, out in the open, wasn’t about the minutiae of cleaning up web footprints. It was about the damage that the baby boomers had done to the job prospects of every person in their generation. It was about an organization she’d never heard of, called Silence, of FOCO cells that had begun to crop up, young people talking about how to release the palsied prehensile claw of the baby boomers from the scarce resources in this country, around the globe. At first Mark was talking and people were listening, but at some point Deron returned to the room, and it was like a strong breeze had blown at the back of each blade of grass in there, pushing them from their leaning toward Mark to their natural leaning toward Deron. Cassie couldn’t believe it as she watched him do it, but Deron stood up on an actual literal soapbox as he started talking.

  “So listen up,” Deron said. “We’re here to celebrate the launch of issue thirty-three of TUT, ‘Pretirement,’ an issue that wouldn’t have come together without the hard work of many of the people in this room. We’re especially excited about Grayson’s profile of academic union organization in the Midwest, and about Blythe’s piece on homegrown terrorism in Finland, which has been getting tons of traffic.” There was a smattering of applause. Deron went on to talk about the various NPR shows that would be interviewing writers from the issue, a panel they’d be hosting at the New School later in the month, and Cassie was
glad to be listening to just one speaker, all the attention of the whole crowd focused on one leader, rather than the splintered, directionless conversation that had begun to make her head hurt in the previous couple hours. Maybe this was what Regan had meant about coalescing around a single personality. Maybe not. Cassie had had a lot to drink.

  When the crowd thinned out around two A.M., Mark and Cassie found a cab out on Canal Street. Mark stared out to the east as they went over the Manhattan Bridge. To the right of their window they looked off to the scattered lights of DUMBO, and beyond that Flatbush, where new towers loomed skeletal in the late-night sodium light. As they reached the other side of the bridge they passed a clock tower that had for years been dark but was now converted into an apartment Cassie had read in New York magazine had recently sold for eight figures. The lights were on. Purple neon glowed cool against the East River, stretching miles in either direction past the bridge. Cassie could see maybe a half-dozen people dancing inside the apartment, from that distance in a kind of barely-slow-motion.

  “We’re headed right over Superfine, right now,” Mark said.

  “Are you gonna tell me what on earth you talked with Reagordan and Deron about all that time?”

  “I’ll tell you all about all of it. All in due time.”

  “Look, I’m not after a fucking Zen koan. I want to know what they were talking about.”

  “I told them about the Boomer Missives I’m planning to record once I clean up my surface web postings, and they had ideas.”

  “Ideas,” Cassie said.

  “Whatever’s next,” Mark said. “New missives, new ideas. Next up for Isaac Abramson, just as soon as he gets set up on the Deep Web.”