“Sorry—here you frucking are,” Mark said.
“Who are you?” Finkel said. He was well under six feet tall, with soddy patches of brown hair on either side of his head. On Finkel it looked like capitulation to death two decades early, like wearing sweatpants outside the house (which incidentally the magazine where Mark used to work had just declared a trend). Mark remembered the antagonistic tone Finkel had taken when he’d called young Mark into his office to accuse him of cheating. He heard it again now, shimmering with the thin glowing filament of memory.
“Mark Brumfeld,” Mark said. “I was in your ninth-grade Social Studies class.” He couldn’t help himself: “Kind of thing.”
“Not what I meant. I mean, who are you to talk to me? We’re having a private conversation. You millennials with those computers in your pockets, zapping radiation into your nutsacks, noses pressed to your screens—you think you can just blurt out whatever comes to your mind.”
“Felt like an awfully public conversation to me,” Mark said. “No one wants to hear about your money. Just sitting around in public bragging about destroying the environment. I remember you as a teacher. As a man who wouldn’t have made financial gains off destroying the water supply in West Virginia or Pennsylvania. Making it so rural people’s water could be set on fire just by lighting a match, like we were returning to life under the fucking robber barons.”
“Take care of yourself.”
“I am taking care of myself. And more than myself,” Brumfeld said. “It’s you who only takes care of yourself, your whole generation just doing just that. Taking care of yourselves.”
When he said it Finkel took a step closer to him.
The way he told it later, something shifted in that moment. It was like a fourth wall had broken down. Mark Brumfeld eight years earlier had assigned and edited an eight-thousand-word feature on the first companies to begin fracking. Even then, almost a decade earlier, they’d been predicting that the environmental costs of fracking would far outweigh the financial benefits. At the time the last fiduciary benefit Mark suspected that evil would bring was vacations in Positano for the very man who’d taught him Social Studies. Back then there was a distance a teacher kept from his students, the way a thirty-five-foot barrier was maintained between pro-lifers and women entering Massachusetts abortion clinics.
Now that distance had been closed.
“I said take care of yourself,” Finkel said. Mark had been in two bar fights in his years in the city, had been mugged three times on the Myrtle Avenue side of Fort Greene Park in the first two years he had lived there. But now he just said, “You’re not worth it,” and walked to the water fountain. The whole time he was drinking it was as if something in him had been fractured, some new energy loosed, a new anger that had been hidden in the shale of his veins but now was being released all at once, valuable and voluble and volatile. Rage hidden and kept discreet within the sedimentary walls of his own adult civility was rising to the surface, raw power ready to be burned for fuel.
By the time he got back to the court, the rest of the players were ready to run one more full. First time down on defense, Finkel passed the ball to Silver on the wing. Mark was defending the post. Each bump of each body in the lane was like the blast of chemical-saturated water opening crude in the bedrock of his arteries, combustible chemical-suffused water swelling all around him. The anger that had been building up in him each night he’d gone to sleep in his childhood bed, in his childhood basement, two hundred miles from Cassie and broken up with her, alone, felt ready to burst. When Finkel cut for the basket Mark was there. Instead of jumping to block the shot, he kept down on the floor and undercut his former Social Studies teacher, whose legs went out from under him. Finkel’s body rolled across Mark’s back until he flipped over one full turn, slammed to the floor hard on his lower back, then popped right back up.
“What the fuck was that?” Finkel said.
Mark swung.
He got one good hook into the side of Stan Finkel’s head before bright lights flashed in front of Mark’s eyes. Silver jumped between the two, and he threw an elbow for good measure. It caught Brumfeld above the eye. Mark put his hand to his face to see that a sticky sluice of blood was trickling down his cheekbone. It left him dazed, the space above his eye feeling like it was swelling big as the Ohio River in early spring rains. He saw Silver standing in a capoeira stance, one foot back and arms moving in strange dancelike arabesques until the older man saw that Mark meant his friend no further harm.
Silver ran to pick Finkel up. Mark felt the slow trickle of blood now reaching his stippled chin like water seeping out of a haystack. With it seeped the slightest ease to his angst. His eye was throbbing with each beat of his throbbing heart. At that moment a world opened up in Mark’s head. He was already more Abramson than Brumfeld.
He left the JCC. He got into his parents’ sea-green 1993 Volvo 940 and drove the roads outside of Baltimore he had once driven daily to clear his head and smoke pot without being caught. A sharp pain in his fist surged along with the pain in his eye with each hydraulic pulse of his heart. For the first time in a year, maybe more, he felt not pain, not embarrassment, not self-loathing. The fear fell away like shale from a hydraulic-blasted mountainside.
He felt pure, crude, previously untapped freedom. Resist much, obey little—Whitman had been telling him just that since he first read the opening section of Leaves of Grass, and it felt for the first time in his life like he’d heeded the call.
There were four dozen reasons he’d heard for the economic downturn, for the paucity of jobs available in the two years since the Great Recession had started. Trillions of dollars were headed to pay for the two Forever Wars that had been ongoing his entire adult life. There were credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations; there were soon to be eight billion people on Earth; global ecological catastrophe was so much a foregone conclusion that half the serious novels and television series people watched or read were about what life would be like after it hit. Part of him suspected those entertainments let people continue at their environment-destroying behavior, allowing them to think, Well, if Mad Max or The Walking Dead is ahead for us, we’re fucked anyway, so why not keep tearing through these Keurig individual espresso pods, washing our faces with micro-bead-filled face washes, trash-filled oceans be damned? But on that ride up Falls Road, through Pikesville, and off farther into the dense deciduous-covered roads, it occurred to Mark that there was a clearer reason for it all—for his high school Social Studies teacher now to be enjoying unprecedented leisure and return on his investments only twenty months since the financial sector had imploded so badly the likelihood of Mark’s ever getting a real job was nothing more than a distant dream:
It was the baby boomers.
It had always been and was always going to be the baby boomers.
It grew so clear to Mark as the flow of blood slowed on his face, drying and caking against the tissue he found in the cracked plastic slot in his driver’s side door. It was the baby boomers who had what he wanted, who in their geologic later years had petrified until they were protecting all the natural resources, who had what his friends and his colleagues and his fellow alumni and all those twenty-year-olds and thirty-year-olds and even some forty-year-olds in all the bars in Fort Greene and Bushwick and Williamsburg, in Oakland and Berkeley and Petaluma, in Crown Heights and Prospect Heights and Pacific Heights and Ditmas Park, wanted.
It was the baby boomers.
It was time for someone to do something about it.
So while it felt like a kind of cliché—while becoming any kind of cliché was all he’d been trying to avoid since he was old enough to understand what a cliché was—Mark slammed on the brakes. He did not look in the rearview mirror. He was lucky no one had been behind him. It took a nine-point turn to reverse direction on that narrow suburban street. As he sped back to his parents’ basement, he began to craft his initial diatribe. By the time he opened his three-year-
old black MacBook, he was gravid with complaint, gibbous with jeremiad. He’d bought the laptop just months before the first one with a built-in camera had been introduced, so he set up the iSight next to it, pointed it at his face. He’d worked on some Internet shorts for the university admissions office once he finished his course work, so he knew a little about production on the fly.
In the background, just over his shoulder, was a poster from the first Grateful Dead show he’d attended, RFK Stadium 1994, almost two decades earlier. It was a huge portrait of Jerry’s face. He thought about taking it down but decided he liked the irony of it in the background, so he turned it upside down, like declaring war while flying the enemy’s flag. On the laptop screen in front of him he could see the sweat-soaked hair plastered to his forehead. The blood on his right cheek appeared on the right side of the screen. It had dried in a tacky trail on his face, and his right eye was puffy like a boxer’s in a late round. He didn’t stop to take a shower, didn’t wipe any more of the blood from his face, or the wet hair from his forehead. He didn’t take the time to have a look at how you upload a video onto YouTube, not a part of the production process he’d engaged in in the past, though he had a user ID and a password (ID: [email protected]; psswd: mightaswellmightaswell). When he left for college Mark had never even sent an e-mail. He brought with him the magenta-and-white iMac his parents had bought for themselves, good baby boomers that they were, but never learned how to use, and passed along to him. He left college and took his first job working as an intern at that glossy magazine, where he worked off and on for the next decade, having sent perhaps a hundred e-mails in his lifetime. Now here he was a decade later, sitting in front of an iSight camera, in front of a Mac laptop.
He hit Record.
“This is the first Boomer Missive. Today is June 12, 2010. Earlier this morning I hit a baby boomer in the face. He hit me back. Now I will hit back again. I will hit back harder. We will all hit back.
“Resist much, obey little.
“Propaganda by the deed.
“Boom boom.”
CHAPTER NINE
THE SECOND ANSWER Mark gave for what set him on his path was an image that lodged in his mind and later drove him to reinvent himself online as Isaac Abramson, and it was even more tangential on the face of it than the basketball game incident. It took place in the performance space in the Union Square Barnes & Noble a year before Mark Brumfeld left his apartment in Brooklyn for his parents’ basement. He’d come to see one of his former professors, an essayist of some renown who’d never sold many books, read from a new collection of essays, which would be well reviewed and revered and sell fewer than a thousand copies. A thousand objects passed his gaze that night but only one stuck with him. He had arrived an hour early so he could get a seat toward the front. He sat with the professor’s book, reading an essay he’d earlier read when it had appeared in a respected literary journal with a circulation of under ten thousand. He was deeply involved in the reading when a voice broke his concentration.
“Are you enjoying it?” the woman said.
Mark looked up, prepared to be annoyed. But he recognized the face. It was the professor’s wife. The professor had held his Baldwin/Didion/Himself seminar at his home. She’d been in the parlor room of their spacious prewar four-story brownstone on Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights at each class meeting. At the time, Brumfeld hadn’t thought about the fact that this poor-selling but prestigious essayist professor lived in what must be a $4 million brownstone, and provided for his wife whatever she needed. He didn’t recognize the deep narcissism in the professor choosing to include his own work alongside the two greatest essayists of his generation. Mark didn’t think about it now, either.
“Yes, of course I know you. You had us over.”
“He’s my husband.”
“He was my professor. Baldwin/Didion/X used to meet at your place. You made that zucchini bread.”
“Ah, my zucchini bread,” X’s wife said. “You know those zucchinis come straight from our garden. X built the raised beds himself.”
Mark didn’t say it, but he knew, he did know, he couldn’t not have known that the zucchini had come from their garden. He knew X had built the raised beds himself. When the seven graduate students had come to his brownstone for the first meeting of Baldwin/Didion/X, X himself had taken them on a tour of the garden. It was the first week of September, the first clear, dry week since the oppression of New York summer humidity, one that would always remind Mark of that thin-aired morning in September the year he’d moved to New York when the planes flew into the buildings and he and his reporter and editor colleagues had all run downtown into the gray silty mass, and now they sat out back, ate zucchini bread, drank the Duvals and Leffes and Westmalle Trappists X offered. The placidity, the quiet amid the din of the city—at that moment Mark didn’t say to himself, One day I could have this. He didn’t know that he would later understand, There will never under any circumstance be a day when I can have any of this or the peace and love it would provide. He had just been happy to share in the generosity X had shown him.
That’s not what struck Brumfeld as X’s wife talked with him about the particulars of X’s new book, where his publisher would send him on a reading tour, how even though they don’t send authors on tour anymore they would do so for X since they’d done so for all of his books, or where X and his wife would vacation after that book tour was finished. All he could see, all he could think about, was the immense princess-cut diamond on X’s wife’s left ring finger. It threw off more brightness than the sodium lights over the Fort Greene tennis courts after dark, the fluorescence of the Barnes & Noble’s reading space somehow transformed and minimized to that single diaphanous sparkle.
It must have been a VVS-1 or a VVS-2, five or even six carats, worth as much as the down payment for the apartment Mark had once shared with five late-twenty-and-early-thirty-year-olds in Fort Greene. Brumfeld knew something about diamonds—his mother’s closest friend was an Israeli dealer in colored diamonds in Midtown. She’d walked him through the process when he’d planned to propose to his ex-girlfriend Cassie—he’d gone to her with it in mind to get Cassie an emerald or a ruby, thinking a diamond might be too bourgeoisie for her punk tastes, but his mother’s friend had convinced him it was a diamond or nothing. That’s how people proposed when they proposed. Men did not propose with emeralds, punk bassist girlfriend or otherwise. That was not, his mother’s friend assured him, a thing. Mark would never know how much of a role that particular mistake played in his breakup with Cassie, but like an object approaching the speed of light, it grew larger the more time passed. He’d spent months figuring out how he would afford a diamond and then months more with his mother’s friend trying to pick out the right-colored diamond for Cassie, only to have her stand up and walk away and never come back after he offered it to her. He now assumed he’d read all the signs wrong, he’d been impatient and he’d forced it. But that didn’t make the jilting any less painful. Jilting was jilting, and the pain of it was permanent and as inescapable as the time-and-space-warping gravitational pull of a black hole. He couldn’t stop looking at her left hand. The voices around them, the book in his hands with its deckle-edged pages and rubberized matte dust jacket all faded. A single thought stuck in Brumfeld’s mind:
How did a professor whose books of literary essays were read only by a small cabal of serious readers ever afford such a ring? He did not think about the brownstone then, about the homegrown zucchinis in the home-baked zucchini bread or the La Cornue oven in which it was baked. He did not think about the eighteen-dollars-a-six-pack Belgian abbey tripel he’d drunk in X’s garden. He just saw that ring, watched it flash light at him from wherever X’s wife’s hand moved while they talked. Maybe it was even that diaphanous sparkle that had been loosed in Mark’s mind when he heard Finkel talking about his fracking wealth on the court months later.
Boom boom.
Later that night when Brumfeld took the L
train across the river into Williamsburg for his gig, his whole head was still filled with the light from that ring. What could have afforded these literary people such leisure? Had they received huge sums of money through trust funds? Lived other lives as financiers, surgeons, corporate lawyers? It occurred to him then, not in the same fullness it would later:
They were baby boomers.
They had and they had and they had, as if that was the very condition of their own existence—having, owning, getting, living out Bellow’s I want, I want, I want—while he and his generation had not. They, too, wanted plenty, but they did not have.
Brumfeld walked the ten blocks from the train to Pete’s Candy Store, where his band would be playing that night. He stashed his mandolin case in a corner when he arrived. He downed four Maker’s-and-sodas. While they played their traditional bluegrass music and some covers of well-known country songs for the couple dozen people there that night—that was enough of an audience to fill the small space in the old-time performance area Pete’s provided—he kept picturing that diamond. “Picturing” wasn’t quite right, as it wasn’t the image of the diamond itself as much as the flashing glint of light it threw off. His head was filled with light. While they were playing, Cassie—his ex-girlfriend, his ex-almost-fiancée, who had taken so easily to life without him he somehow felt fine about it when he wasn’t around her, then felt it eat at him the further and longer they were apart—would step up to the mic to take a solo after he finished singing the chorus of “Mama Tried” or “Knoxville Girl,” and he would look at her, thinking, Maybe if I’d been born in the fifties, this would all have been easier. Any fifties, that is. He looked out at the twenty-year-olds and the thirty-year-olds in their H + M shirts, their thrift-shop jeans, and he thought, Maybe if we’d all been born to our parents’ generation, we would be in a different situation now. Maybe we’d all be going abroad on paid book tours, buying our wives precious diamonds and ovens worth more than a new car, working the jobs he’d always dreamed of. By the time the show ended he was a little drunk and a lot tired. He and Cassie sat down at the bar together. It had been more than six months since they’d broken up. Playing in a band was fine. Cassie had long since realized she didn’t want to be with him, refused his proposal. Mark had long since come to terms with it, because he had to.
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