“I, Isaac Abramson, am a failure. An abject, complete, massive, total failure.
“I graduated from a very good liberal arts college with a degree in English. I graduated cum laude. No one told me how little it would matter. The day I walked onstage to be handed a diploma, September 11 hadn’t yet happened. No one would even have imagined it could happen. The tech boom was still a boom boom. I did the things I was supposed to do. I wrote good papers, I drank first bad beer, then good beer. Then bourbon, then scotch. I watched as the kids who graduated before me left for San Francisco and made money in Internet start-ups. Bought homes in Palo Alto, on the Russian River, in Sausalito. I watched that all go away. But I didn’t want that anyway. I wasn’t ever going to be in on the ground floor of Yahoo! or Google—I never thought Ask Jeeves was all that bad a site. Jeeves gave, I took. I had a MySpace account, wrote Friendster testimonials. I never once chatted in a chat room. I didn’t know what the eye and em in IM stood for. That was fine for me. I wasn’t greedy. I didn’t want a new-economy job. I wanted an old-economy job.
“I wanted a job.
“I want a job.
“I wasn’t a failure at first! I went to New York City, where I got a decent job. I lived there for ten years—ten years! one decade!—and I never once lived in an apartment alone. I had that job and then magazines went into the ground. Old media started to die. They didn’t publish words anymore. They created content instead of publishing journalism. So I went back to graduate school. It was like a job. I read books and prepared to be an educator.
“Then I finished.
“Then there were no jobs.
“Then I accrued debt and I could no longer afford to live on my own. Now I’m back in my parents’ basement.
“Does this sound familiar to you? Perhaps this doesn’t sound familiar and if it doesn’t, click away. Stop listening. Go stream some pilfered free music.
“But if it does sound familiar:
“Do you know who still had the jobs? I think you know who still had the jobs. I tried to get a job but I could not. I tried and tried. Then my money ran out. I could not find a job.
“This spring, I moved back into my parents’ house. They gave me the room I grew up in. The basement room. They did not give me a car. They let me drive the same beat-up old Volvo they let me drive in high school. Today I live in a basement. My father is sixty-nine years old, and he has not yet retired from his job. It will disappear so that his hospital can pay for benefits so that its employees can pay taxes. My mother is sixty-eight years old, and she is, again, a stay-at-home mom today. Only now I’m who she stays at home with.
“Again.
“I am infantilized.
“Again.
“Now I want you to do one more thing. If you have no job, I want you to look at the basement where you live right now. Is it a basement like my basement? Does it make you happy, this basement? Does it smell musty? Does it contain the same couch on which you kissed your first girl when you were in the eighth grade?
“But that’s not who I want to talk to right now. Instead, if you do have a job, I want to talk to you. I want you to do something different:
“If you do have a job, I want you to pull out your latest paystub. Or to pull it up online. Do you see the line that says ‘Social Security Tax’? I want you to see how much money you pay every month so the baby boomers can live off Social Security. And I want you to know one thing: You will never see a cent of that money. You will never receive Social Security. You will never have a retirement. You will never have your parents’ jobs, because those jobs will not exist. And you are paying not for you, but for them. You are not paying so that when you are sixty-five, you will receive security in the form of money. You are paying for them, now. You are paying so that they will be able to live well now, now that they are retired. But they are old and you are young and this is America, land of the young and home of the young, and when the system is broken you fix the system. Think about that until my next missive. Think about how this might look if it were different. Think this: Social Insecurity.
“Social Insecurity.
“Social Insecurity.
“Social Insecurity.
“Resist much, obey little.
“Propaganda by the deed.
“Boom boom.”
PART FOUR
CASSIE
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THERE WERE TWO CENTRAL DEVELOPMENTS in Cassie’s life in the months after Mark Brumfeld left for his parents’ basement in the small city two hundred miles south of Brooklyn where he’d grown up. Neither was in any way expected, though both came to make her unexpectedly happy. The first was to solidify a job she’d never have wanted in the past. In early July she received a cryptic e-mail from someone at a news website that was looking to do, they said, something different from most news websites. They wanted to develop a well-funded, robust, and meticulous fact-checking department. On the face of it, the e-mail itself sounded almost farcical. The second paragraph started with perhaps the worst adverb known to man, the word thusly. Cassie intensely hated the use of adverbs, and she really hated the use of a pretentious one like thusly.
“Thusly,” the second paragraph of this e-mail read, “upon seeking out an established and impressive researcher with extensive experience working in traditional print media settings who might bring an established skill set to our vertically integrated content-driven media organization, we have received your name as an apt candidate to take over and build a fact-checking division for RAZORWIRE. If working for a company such as ours, in which you could be entering on the ground floor of a start-up which has received major resources from a Silicon Valley VC firm, angel investors who can make the kind of resources available that traditional print media is no longer able to undertake, myself and my colleagues request that you send along a resumé and a letter of intense by week’s end.”
After reading the message a third time—oh, that neologistic solecistic use of the word myself almost literally turned sour in her ear, never mind the never-before-coined-but-surprisingly-awesome phrase “letter of intense”—Cassie felt the e-mail itself was far more in need of a copyedit than of fact-checking. It was dictively devoid of checkable facts.
But Cassie also felt she couldn’t afford not to send along her materials and see what would come of it, if only to make it to an interview round in which she could discover who had sent this e-mail so full of empty palaver, the written equivalent of particleboard. No sooner had she sent her resumé than she had an e-mail back from RazorWire’s director of HR, setting up an in-office, in-person interview for the following Monday. There had been no street address in the signature of the initial e-mail, but now she was provided with an address for her interview. A quick double-check on Google Maps confirmed what Cassie suspected: RazorWire had offices in an outrageous location. On her favorite block in the whole city, no less, on Mott Street near Elizabeth, just below Houston. While it was not a feeling she wanted to have, she now found herself curious about going into Manhattan for this interview.
She may just want this job.
It was, after all, the kind of job every liberal arts school senior with a degree in the humanities was in some way yearning for at that exact moment. Was she skeptical of the inept e-mail writer himself, of websites with West Coast VC funds and angel investors and editors who rather than thinking of magazines and newspapers as magazines and newspapers thought of them as “traditional print media”? She was. Was she into the idea of having a job that would take her to an office only three blocks from the Angelika, where she could watch the best indie films on the planet on a lunch break and be back to work without missing much? She was. She was that, too.
Cassie spent the weekend drinking with Natalia, who was around town for the first time that month, just off a long Southern tour. Their relationship had settled into a familiar but confusing condition of being at once routine and undefined. If Natalia was in town she texted Cassie, had her come over to her apartm
ent or met up with her at one of their SoHo fixtures, Tom and Jerry’s or Botanica. There was no question whether Cassie would come back with Natalia and sleep in her bed afterwards. Once she had even come back to Natalia’s and, finding her whatever-Natalia-was-to-her already passed out by the time she got to her bed, curled up into the fetal position in the space left on her twin mattress and slept there, no sex, just actual sleep.
At the same time, any markers of a real relationship were conspicuously absent. They did not go on dates. They did not go out to dinner. Ever. There had been no conversation about how a night like the one in which Cassie slept over would proceed. There was, above all, a chasm instead of a space in which any conversation of the future might take place. They lived together in a kind of Heiddegerian phenomenological relationship present, in which only the present moment of drinking or playing music or fucking existed, an immediate Dasein of mutually undecided and uncommented-upon cathexis, Eros and lust. Cassie had read enough in her 200-level existentialism class to understand that much. She’d read enough to identify a sense of “thrownness” in her current situation, but perhaps not enough to understand what it signified.
What she did not know how to handle was the broader feeling of sadness and confusion that descended upon her as soon as she left Natalia’s apartment. Or sobered up. Or tried to have sex with Natalia sober, which had only happened once, to genitally arid and generally stultifying effect.
So Cassie made her way into the city for her interview at RazorWire. The N train was densely packed with morning riders—it had been long enough since Cassie had ridden the subway on a weekday morning that she’d forgotten what a packed train looked like. She let the first train pass down the tunnel, it was so writhing with the press of morning passengers. But when the next train seemed to have an identical press of American Apparel T-shirts, handlebar mustaches, manbuns, cut-off corduroy shorts, and Warby Parker eyewear, she decided she had no choice but to get on, or arrive at her interview late. Two stops down the tracks she noticed the next car over appeared to be empty, so while she did not like passing between cars while the train was moving, she pushed her way through the press of morning bodies until she got to the end of her car, passed through the terrifying space between them, and found herself in a car bearing only three other passengers.
As soon as she heard the sliding subway car door click behind her she realized she’d made an enormous mistake. There was no air-conditioning in this car. Of course that was why it was empty. She could feel the sweat rise on her brow, a trickle of perspiration sliding down into her lower back, within seconds of stepping on. Worse was the smell. At the middle of the car, by the doors closest to her, was a shiny pile of what appeared to be still-warm human feces. She looked at the three other riders on that car and saw that all three were homeless, one of them now staring at the sweat on her brow and, she thought, imagining the sweat sliding from her lower back to, well, lower than that, and she turned to get back into the car she’d come from, but it was now somehow even more packed with Warby Parker American Apparel manbun facial hair and cutoffs and what choice did she have but to stay on this mobile underground clogged toilet until the train stopped? One of the homeless men on the car took out a cigarette and lit it and smoked the whole way into Manhattan. At least the smoke smell covered some of the shit smell.
By the time Cassie arrived at the RazorWire offices on Mott, it was already 10:17 A.M., and she was covered in a perspiration cycle that wouldn’t give up as she walked into the lobby. There was no doorman, only a bank of elevators with a set of buzzers, one of which read “RazorWire” in a font she’d never before seen. There was something suspicious about the fact that the name above the company’s was written in pencil and said “Schlict/Dick,” and that the one below it was a fortune cookie fortune: “Not all opportunities knock,” followed by a B&W smiley face. But the elevator doors opened before she could interrogate it further.
Cassie’s mood lifted when the elevator doors again opened. She stepped out of the car into a wall of air-conditioned air. She was standing in a loft of maybe ten, maybe twelve thousand square feet, and it was as if she’d come into some filmmaker’s idealized sense of what a successful start-up office might look like. Above her head was the sinewy thick wood of centuries-old exposed joists, fastened to iron T-bars by bolts the size of one of her ulnae. The open floor plan included a copse of desks with nothing but laptops, some open and some shut like lady’s slippers in an early-spring field, and along a far wall a glass encasement for a single office with a desk in it. Between the desks and the office was a long, thin, rectangular depression, dropping maybe four inches below the level of the floor. It was filled with sand. Two men about her age were standing in the pit. She watched as one lifted his hand and flipped his fingers effetely back toward his face, did it again and again, then transferred some kind of heavy-looking red orb into the hand from his other and let it fly until it stuck in the sand twenty feet in front of him.
“Bocce.” It took Cassie a second to realize someone was standing next to her, speaking. “It’s a bocce court. The only one in any office in Manhattan. We got the same people who put one in at Union Hall in Park Slope to do it. Someone knew someone there. It was tough to decide between it and shuffleboard, but I decided shuffleboard seemed less retro, more geriatric.” The guy standing next to Cassie was maybe six inches shorter than she was, with a thick black beard, wiry and slick against his face, and a neck tattoo crawling up near his chin—on the left side of his neck in gothic lettering it read “BOY” and on the right side in the same lettering she could read only “NNY.” “And I’m guessing you’re Cassandra.”
“Cassie,” Cassie said. “Black. Cassieblack. Sorry. It’s hotter than … well, whatever is a thing which is very, very hot … out there … and I had a bad subway ride up. There was shit, like, actual human shit and no AC and—well. Smoking. And. But here I am. I am here.” The tattooed beard announced himself as Danny (not Granny, as Cassie had been glibly imagining) and said that she’d be interviewing with someone from Native Content and did she want a kombucha or aloe water? They had mango or loganberry if she wanted one. She said she did not. Danny opened the door to the glassed-off office in the rear of the place and a wall of even cooler air-conditioned air hit Cassie. Frigid. Sustaining for a polar bear atop a globally warming ice floe. Though it did not seem as if it would be possible just ten minutes earlier, Cassie was freezing. She could feel her metabolism, cellular production, her own thought process slow. It was as if an environment had been created in which a group of young people would be cryogenically kept twenty-six years old for the rest of their existences on Earth, staving off the ultimate horror of ever reaching their aging baby boomer parents’ age. Individual beads of sweat picked themselves out on Cassie’s upper arms and shot needles of biting cold into her skin. No sooner than she had felt it, the door to the office opened again and in walked her person from HR, author of the e-mail that had thusly brought her here. He was also six inches shorter than Cassie, but he did not have a beard or tattoos suggesting his name—or melanin, by all appearances. He was albino, his skin pale save where, across his broad nose, a smattering of orange freckles stood out in the artificial air. He had another splotch of orange freckles around his mouth that obscured where his lips were.
“So you must be Cassandra,” he said. He sat down behind the desk, which was a repurposed, unfinished, rough-hewn oak door, with the blunt edges of rusty nails sticking out in arbitrary directions. It looked like someone had made a desk out of a planed horizontal telephone pole, and it was unclear how one could write on a desk with so uneven a surface and with so many asymmetrical protuberances, but the only evidence of an attempt to do so was a pad of neon-pink Post-its sitting beside a chrome laptop and a huge flat screen in front of it, the shiny newness of all of it making it appear to be only seldom used.
“Just Cassie,” Cassie said. “Cassie Black. That’s the full name. And you are?”
“Oh, sorry, how
rude of me,” he said. “Mario Wilson. I’m the director of the newly formed Native Content Division here. Well, newly forming. Currently amidst formation. I’m the one who sent you the note last week after you were recommended so highly.”
“But you have the only office in the place?” Cassie said. It occurred to her that there was no attendant whir or rattle of air-conditioners to accompany the reverse-entropic cold of the office she was in. It was as if the cold was extended by the air of the room itself. It was so cold the only smell in the place was a whiff like snowballs each time Cassie breathed in.
“Oh, myself and my colleagues share this office when outsiders come in,” Mario said. “Or potential future insiders or whatev.” Cassie looked at him, deciding whether or not to ask how it was possible that they’d reverse-engineered the summer heat but couldn’t afford to have separate offices for each staff member. She decided to keep her mouth shut. Increasingly she wanted a share in it. “Whatever. So you know why we’ve brought you in for.”
“Not exactly,” Cassie said, swallowing whole the circumlocutory way Mario spoke. It was all she could do not to correct him. Maybe she should be looking for a job at a copyediting desk somewhere—old media concept!—after all. But the truth was there were so many solecisms, so many grammatical and usage errors in the way he spoke, she didn’t know where she’d begin in correcting him. “I mean, I got your e-mail and I’ve looked at your site before and all. Read a couple of funny lists you’ve published. But beyond your stated desire for a fact-checking division I don’t know anything about the job.”
“Well, things move fast here,” Mario said. He had both his elbows on his desk now—not his desk, after all, he would say if he said it, but the desk he was sitting behind—and Cassie could see where the texture of the wood was digging deep red creases into the taut skin on his forearms. It did not look comfortable. She may even have detected a grimace on his face, but his posture was set for this part of the interview and he wasn’t going to move it. “And the position has transmogrified a little even from the period when I first wrote you.”
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