Cassie couldn’t tell how serious Mark was, but he looked the happiest he’d been in years. His skin looked healthy and fresh, his eyes somehow open just a bit wider, and she was too drunk to do much more than stare out her window at Flatbush Avenue as they roared past the Barclays Center and straight up the middle of freshly urbanly renewed Brooklyn.
PART TWO
MARK
CHAPTER SEVEN
MARK BRUMFELD WAS THIRTY-ONE YEARS old when he changed his name to Isaac Abramson online. A decade had passed since the attacks on the World Trade Center towers. For five years he worked as an editorial assistant at a glossy magazine in Midtown Manhattan. His goals in his twenties were noble: He wanted to write stories that would in some way better the world. He wanted to edit stories that would unearth corruption, grant clarity to the bleary discourse he often found in the glossies, speak the various truths to the various powers he imagined it was journalism’s job to speak. He wanted to publish short stories people would love the way they once loved Salinger, Cheever, Hemingway, or Fitzgerald. He wanted to publish exposés and political tracts that had the power of Mother Earth, of The New Yorker in the thirties, The Kenyon Review in the forties, and Commentary in the sixties. He wanted to find, make, be imbued with, and propagate love. He wanted to marry a strong-minded woman and have strong-minded children and lead a strong-minded life.
He wanted a lot of things, mostly things he’d never have no matter how hard he tried.
The day he’d arrived at the magazine, summer 2001, they did still run ten-thousand-word features on stories like the hijacking of EgyptAir Flight 648, profiles of presidents and rock stars, interrogations of the work of quantum physicists and maximalist sculptors. But within a couple of years, it felt to Mark at least that they mostly ran photographs of celebrities and advice on how to wear a pocket square. It was not clear how this was going to better the world or propagate love or change much of anything, but at least it was work in a noble profession, while everyone he’d grown up with wanted to become investment bankers or corporate lawyers. Mark Brumfeld did not know how to dress, and he couldn’t care less about discovering how to do so. He still wanted to fall in love, to be loved, but he did not believe proper pocket square use would have much influence.
For the first two years he was working at the magazine, Mark had a single idea he wanted to write about. It wasn’t so much an idea as the germ of an idea. He’d read a lot of Emma Goldman in a college course called “John Brown and His Inheritors,” and he thought there was a story in her inheritors—in whatever modern-day anarchists and extremist socialists were up to in New York, or in Pittsburgh, in Osawatomie. He went into the office of his boss, an articles editor at the magazine, to talk about it a couple months after he was first hired.
“I see why that might interest you,” Mark’s boss said. His name was Glen. He was five foot five with a strip of bald pate that ran overtop his head like a skunk’s stripe, tufts of hair standing out from the sides of his head like moss on the side of a boulder. Mark would later come to understand that such a tepid response was a de facto rejection of his pitch, but early on—and still charged with the energy of his college professors, who did their best to encourage all his intellectual endeavors and larks—Mark took this as a reason to look into it. The next time he longed to come by Glen’s office, he started to walk in but saw that his boss was in the middle of a game of computer solitaire. Mark wasn’t experienced or mature enough yet to laugh it off, so when Glen Open-Apple-Q’ed right out of it and said, “What can I do for you,” Mark just said, “Oh, nothing, nothing, don’t worry about it.”
Two weeks later Mark came back into Glen’s office, this time having asked him in the morning if he had a few minutes around lunchtime. “So here’s what I’m thinking,” Mark said. “Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman used to hang out down in the East Village, in a place called the Sachs’s Café. What if I were to spend some time down there, just checking it out? Seeing what it’s like down there?”
Glen never spoke immediately after being spoken to. He worked his jaw so it looked like a small rodent was trying to find a way out underneath his ruddy face skin, looked Mark in the eyes. It lent him an enormous power, this control of silence. Behind him was a wall of plate-glass windows, and light struck into the space, reflected off the glass of a building across Fifty-fifth Street from them. If you listened you could hear the traffic on Eighth Avenue speeding uptown.
“Um, well, is there anything happening down there?” Glen said.
Mark tried out Glen’s power move and didn’t say anything for a moment. It was a moment of pure pain—the anticipation, the quiet of it, not knowing what his boss was thinking.
Before Mark could say anything else, Glen said, “Yeah, that’s not gonna work for me.” He didn’t say anything further. Mark asked why not. “I mean, I think you’ve kind of got it backwards here. You don’t want to come up with an idea and then go searching for a story to tell it. You need to find the story. I mean, if there was a terrorist cell somewhere in Lower Manhattan? If there were anarchists actively reviving the spirit of Goldman and Berkman? Sure. That’d be a story. I mean, even if there were anarchy reenactors like Civil War reenactors … I dunno … acting out McKinley’s assassination in Buffalo or something, sure. That could be a story, maybe. But you’d have to find it.”
Mark slinked out of Glen’s office. For the next six months his disappointment about the meeting shifted from active to reactive. At first he kept wondering: So what if there was a McKinley reenactment group in Buffalo? Could he cover that? This was in the days before Google, when maybe you could ask Jeeves something and maybe he’d tell you, but your job as a reporter was to get on the phone, or get out in the field, and try to find stories like the one he was looking for. Anarchists or anarchist reenactors weren’t just going to find him.
But the thing is, he wasn’t a reporter. He was an editor, and his job was to edit. So now as he edited pieces on celebrities and suits, he found himself imagining that meeting with Glen again, first with all the things he could’ve said: “Well, could the magazine pay for me to go to Buffalo and check it out?” or “You know, I’m a good writer, you’ve seen my sentences, I know I can make it work.” But soon enough it was another kind of rejoinder until he kept picturing Glen saying, “Um, that’s not gonna work for me,” and then Mark himself standing up and saying, “Yeah, well, you know what? Now I don’t work for you,” and slamming the door behind him. If he couldn’t write about those anarchists and their inheritors, that was fine. But he didn’t know what was ahead for him.
What was ahead for the city, and the country, was also unclear in those moments, and it only got muddier. Two months after the magazine where he worked was the only one of the nineteen owned by a single corporation to report on 9/11 immediately after the attacks, the corporation’s CEO called a surprise meeting of the magazine’s entire editorial staff. Mark assumed that since they were the only magazine to have covered the events in real time—for the first time in the magazine’s history they literally stopped the presses, taking a week to produce a new cover and two five-thousand-word features, with extensive sidebars, on the event—he was coming to praise them in person. Instead he spent twenty minutes telling them of the changes to come.
“I know in the past you have edited lengthy features. I’m here to tell you the days of the ten-thousand-word feature are over,” he said. “Advertising dollars will dry up, editorial pages with them. The World Trade Center towers are gone. We don’t want to see magazines go, too. Changes are coming. Big, big changes.”
Within two months, three of his favorite colleagues had been laid off. Though he’d managed to keep his job, it wasn’t clear what his job was anymore.
His next logical move was to apply to Ph.D. programs in English literature. If he couldn’t change the world by editing the articles it needed, if he couldn’t do the writing he wanted for a glossy magazine, he could do it one student at a time, one paper at a time. Tho
ugh he hadn’t shown that much promise as an undergrad, he was accepted into a prominent program in Manhattan. He did not have to move. He would be able to make money freelance fact-checking for the glossy magazine where he’d worked (“beer money,” Glen had called it when he offered, though Mark replaced “beer” with “rent” when he explained it to his anxious mother, Julia, who never quite seemed to comprehend what it was Mark wanted from life). He spent two years doing course work, three years researching and writing a dissertation on postwar suburban fiction, his focus on Roth, Bellow, Richard Yates, and DeLillo—he might have liked to write about Emma Goldman but the primary research felt way too dry when he looked into it and it would’ve meant learning Russian—and then for two years he applied for jobs to become a full-time faculty member at universities across the U.S.
He did not get one job.
He did not get any jobs.
He continued to play in a band and to check facts for a magazine, but he did so a little despondent, a little sad, a little heavily medicated. Occasionally he was able to teach a class to freshmen, but those classes for an entire semester barely paid his rent for a month and a half. It was not a career path, and Mark had the idea that he should be a tenure-track professor. It was noble—and all but unattainable. Around that time he fell in love, but in the end, as with all the relationships that preceded it, it didn’t work out—and while that failure would come to feel like everything later, consuming him, at the minute he was making decisions about what to do next, it hardly felt like a factor in his life. He managed to write a long piece for a respectable intellectual magazine, on Emma Goldman of all subjects, but to his surprise it didn’t get him anywhere. It didn’t pay anything. His expense account at the magazine had once covered for a year his take-home for two months. He made a series of bad decisions in love and in money and his continuing in New York became untenable. He wasn’t following love—if anything, he was moving fast from it. From love, money, anything keeping him in New York. His parents would no longer help keep him afloat.
So one day in the early spring of 2010 he told his bandmates he would be giving up the apartment he’d just paid a large broker’s fee to let. At the moment he had in his possession: $29,492 in debt spread across three major credit cards; a $5,000 invoice from the IRS for a tax bill from the sale of stocks; a closet full of clothes he’d bought at Century 21 more than ten years earlier, a location which now existed in most memories only in photos of the dust from World Trade Center Two covering all its merchandise; and no real prospects for long-term employment, in New York City or elsewhere. His one chance at love had failed, and he couldn’t even bring himself to think about it. He would miss playing tennis on the well-kept courts in Fort Greene Park. He would find something to do next.
First he would move back to his parents’ house outside of Baltimore.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WHEN HE WAS ASKED BY REPORTERS, by friends, by his mother in the years after the Boomer Boomers became the most infamous domestic revolutionary group in the country in four decades, what had set him on his path—an inciting incident, people wanted an inciting incident, so he gave them not one but two—Brumfeld did not think of the day he left the New York borough where he’d lived since the month after he graduated from a prestigious liberal arts college in Maine. He did not attribute his actions to his failures in love or money, which explanations interviewers were most likely trying to elicit. He didn’t think about Cassie and her jilting him, or the lack of response to his Emma Goldman piece in The Unified Theory. He did not even think of the day Glen had shot down his best idea for a feature for the magazine, no matter how influential that rejection had been on him. Instead, two stories would come to Isaac Abramson’s mind:
The first was of a pickup basketball game.
This was an unlikely occurrence. The summer after Brumfeld was forced to give up his apartment and move into the basement in the suburban Baltimore house where he’d grown up, he was idle. He hadn’t maintained relationships with his high school friends, most of whom had stayed in the area, or perhaps moved down to D.C., while he was in New York. His close female friends were now married, and in their mid-thirties their husbands frowned upon their keeping up with a thirty-year-old unemployed bachelor. He hadn’t even accepted Facebook friend requests from his high school friends, had lost touch with them when he moved to New York and kept it that way. On occasion he was able to take the Bolt Bus back up to the city and play a gig with the bluegrass band he’d played in in his decade in New York. But without work, without a solid income, travel grew expensive and doing so meant seeing Cassie, which bore its own pain—while she might not have factored into his decision-making while he was leaving, after just days in his parents’ house, alone with little more than self-harm to keep him occupied, he was consumed by how much he missed her. So rather than just sitting around pining for—or worse, e-mailing—his ex, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, he went to the same JCC where he’d played pick-up basketball as a kid. One afternoon in mid-June, a month after he’d moved back into his parents’ basement, his thoughts on the America he lived in in 2010 changed.
There was a break between games. The men Brumfeld played with were in their mid- to late fifties. Brumfeld had been plagued with an eidetic memory. He remembered every face he saw, and every face on the court. The tall hirsute Sephardic man who set up in the middle of the lane every trip down, who missed every baby-hook he attempted, who on defense was a single lethal elbow seeking a hack-worthy face, was Jaime Silver. The point guard who ran his mouth the whole time he ran the ball up the court was Stan Finkel—Mark’s own freshman Social Studies teacher.
He’d hated Mr. Finkel, who wore TJ Maxx blue blazers in the classroom and burgundy Members Only jackets out of it, who had once accused him of cheating on pop quizzes (he had been cheating, but that didn’t change the fact that he hated being accused of it), whose balding pattern matched to the follicle the balding pattern on Glen’s head.
On that water break, Finkel was talking to Silver courtside. Mark kept to himself. In the first month or so he picked up his iPhone and looked at what the editors of The New York Times selected to tell him about what was happening in the world. But his subscription had run out. While he could read his parents’ paper copy in the mornings, he had access to only ten articles a month for free. It occurred to him that the word news was a plural noun: more than one new. A multiplicity of new things. Ten things that were new, then a paywall, was not quite what people meant by “news.” So, undistracted by the screen before him, he sat and listened instead:
“I made almost forty thousand just this past week on the stuff,” Finkel was saying. Silver was hirsute and swarthy and his Latino first name rhymed with “buy me.” He nodded and yessed as Finkel spoke. “They call it hydraulic fracturing. The tree huggers hate it and, sure, if I think about it or talk to my kids about it, I hate it, too. But it’s not like I’m the one doing the whatever they call it—fracking. Frucking. I just invest in the sand they use. I’m telling you—forty thou, this week alone. I won’t tell you how much I’ve made this year. I don’t like to talk money, kind of thing. Indiscreet. I’m taking Val to Positano next month, if that tells you.”
Brumfeld in his entire decade in New York had gotten out of the city maybe twice a year. A couple times he had taken Cassie to a B&B, but she seemed to prefer being in town and had gigs most weekends. By the end of their relationship he wouldn’t even have thought of trying to take a vacation with her. Mostly he went home to see his parents with the hope of returning with a check in hand to help out with rent.
“Amazing,” Silver said. “You’ll have to put me in touch with your broker.”
“Broker? Shit, I just read about it and do it myself on eTrade. Sometimes I e-mail with an old friend who knows about it. I just see what they say in Bloomberg News and then go for what’s hitting, kind of thing. And then—Positano.”
Silver was looking down at his hands. Mark could see him racking up the
eTrades, and their proceeds, and the coastal Italian vacations all those proceeds could afford him, in his big Sephardic elbow of a head. Brumfeld didn’t say anything, but his face must have betrayed what he was thinking—Finkel looked at him again this time and said, “What?”
Being spoken to sent a charge through Brumfeld’s body. He looked away. It had been weeks since he’d talked to anyone other than his mother. After years in a magazine office Brumfeld had learned about the social constraints of hierarchy—the kind of free conversation a group of editorial assistants might have, and how it would shift if an assistant editor joined in, or how it would stiffen if the editor-in-chief came around: all eye-tightening smiles and reflexive nodding. This had softened for him in his time as a grad student, but when he was with a mentor it was mentorial, another kind of power. This was Stan Finkel. His high school Social Studies teacher, he of liberal politics and Members Only jackets, who had driven the same Volvo 940 that Mark himself had driven over to this game, borrowed from his parents.
“Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” Finkel said. He looked at Mark and then looked back at Silver. “You know what he’s thinking, too, Jaime. I see it on my kids’ faces. I don’t need it on the basketball court. I’m retired, I’m living a life I never led when I was working. I planned to collect my couple thousand a month from Social Security and live quietly, kind of thing. A timeshare in Boca Raton. But here we are.”
“Here you fucking are,” Mark said.
He didn’t mean to say it. He wouldn’t have talked this way to Glen, or to any of the critics and writers he studied with in grad school. But some combination of the shock at news of Finkel’s small retirement fortune, and of Mark’s hearing about fracking, had put words in his mouth. Now that he was talking, what was he going to do?
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