Boomer1

by Daniel Torday

  Lip-reading became more of an issue as Mark’s friends started to come over when he was in high school. By that point Cal knew something was wrong with her hearing, but there was almost nothing he could do to help—no help she would accept, anyway. “You know, you could go see Steinway again,” Cal would tell her. “He’s developing all kinds of novel approaches to hearing loss himself, at his clinic.”

  “Hearing aids,” Julia said. “Devices that look like plastic barnacles hanging off the sides of your head. I will not wear fucking plastic barnacles on the sides of my fucking head. I’m fine. I’m a young woman. A young mother. I can hear plenty. I can tell everything you’re saying, can’t I.”

  For the most part what she was saying was true, even if she couldn’t quite hear herself saying it. Within a matter of weeks in the classroom she knew her students well enough to understand the vast majority of what came out of their mouths. If you could anticipate what was being said—if you knew for example that third-graders didn’t know a half note from a whole note, couldn’t even wrap their right thumb around the frog of a violin bow, didn’t know what an arpeggio was or how to identify a G clef—there was still a whole lot you could teach them. And there was the added benefit that the unbearable squeaking of an improperly bowed E string, while it might send a student’s classmates squirming in their seats, was for all intents and purposes inaudible for Julia. She appeared to any casual observer a saint gifted with infinite patience as she sat through the sourest notes ever played on a violin and viola, day after day, public performance after public performance. If you knew what you needed to beforehand, if you knew most of what was being said and played, you could understand 80, 90 percent of what you were hearing from context, experience, and prior knowledge.

  It occurred to Julia only after the trouble arrived for Mark that this was the very definition of growing conservative: listening for patterns based on what you already knew, comprehending new stimuli based on set assumptions about the world and its context, waiting to hear a version of what you expected to be told and dismissing out of hand any new or contradictory information. She wondered how much it had come to blind her—deafen her—to what was happening in her own basement, trying to match what she saw in her son to what she wanted and expected his behavior to be. It was by necessity that she had no choice but to listen by watching, and wait to hear a version of what she was expecting to hear. Rather than reject it, she came to accept this new information: that there was a good reason people grew conservative as they grew older, as their failures and dysfunction got the best of them and left what it left behind, and she could do worse than to swallow it whole, even if it lodged in her throat like an undigested rodent.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  THE SECOND WAY JULIA lost her ability to hear was more metaphorical—but no less a part of her life: she lost the ability to hear her son. It, too, was a gradual process. She and Cal would never have squelched any desire the kid had, and perhaps that was its own failure—they could have pushed him into medicine like his father, into teaching like his mother, early on. But the longer he persisted in trying to make it as a journalist, as a writer, the less sense it made. Mark had spent his early twenties not receiving validation that he was barking up the right tree. Julia could find no sentence, no melody, no way to communicate this to her son. Maybe it wasn’t her job to do so, but she was his mother and she wanted what was best for him, even if it wasn’t at all clear what was best for him.

  By the time Mark arrived home at the age of thirty-one to return to living in her basement, Cal and Dr. Steinway had found a way to convince Julia that hearing aids weren’t “plastic barnacles” anymore—new research allowed people to have cochlear implants, to have the effective functional restoration of their hearing. But Julia Sidler Brumfeld was sixty-three years old and she had grown comfortable in the wash of bass notes that now served as soundtrack to her daily life, a thudding rhythmic life that had come to suit her. She found all kinds of new music to listen to, music whose basslines you could feel even if you couldn’t hear them—Brazilian dance music, Afro-Cuban bands, the D.C. funk of the early seventies, even some early hip-hop that she could blare so that the bass vibrated through the house. She could literally feel the music now, the vibrations of the subwoofers she installed in each room, the subtle glottal pop of melody as treble notes burst from the tweeters she put on bookshelves. She owned a pair of hearing aids but refused to put them in, a fact that had not been an issue until Mark returned to the house.

  When he’d first told her over e-mail he’d be returning she had a jolt of sheer joy, the idea of having her boy back in the house. The love she felt for him wasn’t something she could articulate but it was a fact that every day he was gone from her house, some part of her was hundreds of miles away, with him wherever he was. Some part of her was thrown out into the world with Mark, some insane emotional attempt to guide him along and watch over him and, if she was being honest, to keep him under her watch. There with her, loving her. It’s not that she thought about him every minute, but that some part of the middle of her chest was focused toward him out in the world like a Jew facing Jerusalem during prayer, a Muslim toward Mecca. The East to which her heart faced was, of all things, her son Mark.

  But as soon as Mark arrived in her house she felt a kind of encroachment on her own routine, the rhythms she’d learned to get through her day, that led her straight into an active and overwhelming depression. She didn’t know it but the empty hollow of that basement with its instruments was a foundation below her, and now it was lousy with thirty-year-old son. No matter how capacious, her heart would not suddenly face right down below her feet. Now it was as if she had no direction at all to face during prayer, the Western Wall and the Kabaa having moved into her very own basement. She would be standing in the kitchen, cutting vegetables for a salad, doing the crossword puzzle, and suddenly as if she’d been shocked by a surge of damp electricity Mark’s vibration would be rumbling down the stairs and across the foyer and then touching her elbow, or just standing in a doorway waiting to be seen, his sound as omnidirectional as bass. She loved him—but she loved him like the cancer that had issued from her very own body that he was. All the maternal love in the world couldn’t make up for the fact that when she was startled by his sudden appearance, or when he forced upon her in the safety of her home that she could not hear anymore, a sense of overwhelming friction rose up in her.

  Then one afternoon in early winter, months after Mark’s return, she saw, peeking in the high windows of their front door, the face of a middle-aged man. She walked through the soundless air of her front foyer and answered. Standing next to the middle-aged white man was a young black man, younger than Mark. Lip-reading would never allow her to be able to make out someone’s last name the first time they said it, but she understood that the middle-aged white man was saying they were from the FBI—a fact confirmed when he took out a badge with a shield on it. She could both hear this man and read his lips enough to get that he was asking to be let into her home.

  “May I see your identification?” Julia asked.

  She took the badges from both of them. The middle-aged one was Mike Cimber. The younger one was Decius Brutes. She said sure, yes, they could come into her home. What could she have to hide? What else was there to do? She hadn’t broken the law in two decades. If there had been an intruder she would have called the police, but even if she felt these men were intruding upon her silence just as Mark was—well, they were the police. The federal police. And it all happened fast. When she’d lived in San Francisco from time to time she would be in a house where police would come—back in those days musicians might cross paths with someone from Weatherman or the SLA, but the bands she consorted with sure as shit didn’t, so there was nothing to hide. She didn’t have that kind of revolutionary fervor herself. It took any paranoia out of the equation, knowing that she knew people who might have met Eldridge Cleaver or H. Rap Brown, but that she didn’t hang out with anyone
who did.

  So now she asked the agents if they’d like a glass of water.

  They both demurred.

  For the next fifteen minutes they asked her questions about Mark, most of which she could understand by watching their mouths. She didn’t catch every word but it seemed they were saying there was some kind of organization he may or may not have belonged to when he lived in Brooklyn, and they wanted to know if he was acting unusually, if she’d seen him with any new acquaintances, if there was anything unusual in his behavior. For a period Agent Brutes seemed to be asking something about the Internet, something called Silent, but she didn’t follow the names of some websites they wanted to know about, and she wouldn’t have known anything about any websites anyway—she did not spend time looking at or reading websites herself—and so she just shook her head.

  “Well, he is my thirty-one-year-old son, now living in my basement again,” Julia said.

  When she said the word basement, Cimber looked at Brutes and Brutes wrote something down in a notebook. “But no. Mark was a journalist. Successful. Enough. Successful enough. He’s just home for a period while he readies for his return to his career as a journalist and a writer.”

  Again she saw one agent look at the other and then Cimber write something in his notebook again, and while she wasn’t sure why, she felt she was done with this intrusion in her home. She said so, that she thought it was fine for them to have asked some questions, but that was enough.

  “I understand,” Agent Brutes said. Julia understood him perfectly. Agent Cimber put his notebook away. “We hope it’s okay if we come back to ask you further questions sometime,” he said. She said that would probably be okay. She was a sixty-three-year-old woman talking to the FBI for the first time in her life, a life that had included travels with musicians whose fans at least surely included members of SDS, Weatherman, Black Panthers. Who was she to put them off any further. “And of course if you wanted to have a look at what Mark is up to on his laptop, we wouldn’t discourage it,” Brutes said as they were leaving.

  “I’m afraid I still believe in civil rights, even those afforded my own son,” Julia said. “Even if the young people seem to have collectively forgotten it, we all have a right to privacy.”

  “At least until we forfeit that right,” Agent Cimber said.

  Julia did not respond. She closed the door behind them.

  Whatever craziness these men thought was somehow related to Mark, they had no idea what they were talking about. Right? Right? It occurred to Julia that there was only one way to find out and that she was lucky enough that Mark lived with her now, and he’d be coming back and she could ask him. That night when Mark got home, she was waiting to talk. Her lip-reading skills, combined with the fact that she was talking to her own son, allowed her to understand maybe 80 percent of what was being said. He’d seemed like a bundle of angry nervous energy of late—his hands would worry each other as he talked, his fingers intertwined like he was playing here’s-the-church-here’s-the-steeple-open-the-doors-see-all-the-people and he talked for maybe four minutes, complaining about the minutiae of his job, until she was able to change the subject and get to it. It somehow alleviated the nerves she had been feeling since the agents left to have so normal a conversation building up to broaching the news. Before she could even tell Mark about what had happened he had launched into three separate diatribes about who-knows-what was bothering him. Conversation with her son had always been this way, overwhelmed by his logorrhea, but conversation with her son didn’t often find its way to her having to divulge that she’d been visited by the FBI. Agents who were likely looking for him. So she just broke in and said, “Listen, Marcus, I have to talk to you because this afternoon two agents came by to talk to me. They wanted to know about you.”

  She told him about the visit. They were asking about him, if he was part of some kind of organization or something. She watched his face very closely as she spoke. He didn’t seem to know what she was talking about.

  “So you’re saying, like, federal agents,” Mark said. “Were here. At our house.”

  “That’s right,” Julia said. “What did you think I meant?”

  “Oh, I thought you must have meant like a literary agent or something.” Though after he said it she could tell he wasn’t, he just didn’t know what she could be talking about.

  “No, Marcus. Federal agents. FBI agents. They wanted to know if you were looking at some websites or some such. So … have you? Been looking at websites?”

  “You’re being serious here, Mom? Am I looking at websites? Yes, I look at websites. There’s not a single human my age, or many ages above the age of five, that doesn’t look at websites. Like, virtually all day. You’re going to have to be more specific.”

  “Something about a site called Silent or something.”

  Now Mark stopped for a minute. His face went white. Then the color returned.

  “Silence is not a website, Julia. Silence is an Internet organization committed to a series of social justice missions that are actually pretty impressive. I mean, not all of it. Sometimes they can get a little out of hand and there are some members who—”

  Mark started into some minutiae she could not follow no matter how she concentrated—even if she could hear him, Julia wouldn’t have been able to follow whatever technobabble her son was now technobabbling. While he talked, her heart calmed. She looked at this son of hers. Above his left eye there was a long pink scar from where he said he’d taken an elbow at a basketball game just after he got back that summer. He was a man now, this son of Julia Brumfeld’s, hair thinning on top, almost gone in the space between his forehead and a third of the way back his head. As with many Jewish men his age he still had thick shocks at the sides of his head, but not much left on top. A couple of times she watched as the flesh below his left eye twitched just the slightest bit, like the fur of a cat jumping away from an unwanted touch.

  “—and they don’t have a website, anyway.” Mark was still talking. “They operate on the Dark Web, chatting on boards that you’d have to know about in order to find.”

  Julia looked at him.

  “What?” Mark said. “I’ve read a lot about them. We were thinking of profiling one of them when I was still at the magazine. I mean I wasn’t going to edit it myself but I would’ve done a top edit. Well, my boss would’ve. But I would’ve helped. But. Fuck. FBI agents were at our house. I’m sorry, Julia. That’s crazy.”

  “It is,” Julia said. “It’s crazy. But I hear you, honey. Just let’s all be careful. Even just being mixed up with whatever an FBI agent could think you were mixed up with would be bad.”

  “And I’m not,” Mark said.

  “I know,” Julia said. She assured him that she believed him and she heard him and she loved him.

  Still, for the next week Julia paced the house, trying to decide if she should go into the basement. She’d respected Mark’s privacy since he was a teenager. Even when he came home in high school reeking like a skunk from the expensive pot he was smoking—pot didn’t smell like a skunk when she was still smoking it—even when the T-shirts he wore had sticky black resin at their bottoms from where he was clearly cleaning out his glass bowl after smoking, she didn’t raid his room to look. Well, except for the one time when she went in and found a bong in his closet. But she put it back and didn’t tell him she’d seen it. It eased her worried mind just to know she’d seen it and could talk with him. They talked soon after, and she didn’t mention the bong at all, but when she asked if he’d been smoking pot, he looked her right back in the eye and said yes. She and Cal decided that if he was going to be smoking he might as well do it in their backyard, where he wouldn’t get arrested. But now here he was, back in her home, and federal agents had been asking questions about him. She felt certain she’d seen their car outside the house again on two occasions since they’d been by to talk to her. Once on her drive to the Giant for groceries she could’ve sworn a black sedan was tailing her th
ree cars back.

  So, four days after their visit, after four days of deliberation and self-flagellation and anxiety, she went down to Mark’s basement room and opened up his chrome Apple laptop. It required a password but she knew that this password had always just been the five digits of their street address, so she entered them. It opened. The screen looked like—well, it looked like the screen of a computer. She clicked on the icon for getting on the Internet (Mark had taught her when he was home on vacation from college that it was called “Safari” and then apparently “Firefox” and then for a while “Chrome” but then back to “Firefox”—she couldn’t understand why the Internet couldn’t settle on one name for itself, it seemed like it was purposefully designed to confuse). When she opened it, it was the Internet. Just like any other Internet. You typed in names and it brought back websites. You “surfed” it. You could even buy clothes and groceries from it now.

  As she sat there in front of the computer two things occurred to her: she did not want to be looking into Mark’s personal computer, invading his privacy, and she did not know what she would be looking for if she did. So she did not mention it to Cal, she did not call the police, she did not get involved, and she did not mention it again to Mark until it was, by a long shot, too late.

  PART SEVEN

  MARK

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  THERE WERE TWO LIVES Mark was living back in Baltimore, and the second of his lives was lived in his parents’ house as it was lived when he was a teenager—quietly, in desolation, and with extreme reticence. Alone. He talked to Julia when she was home, and when he arrived back to his house after seeing Costco Long for the first time in a decade, his mother was busy at the kitchen counter. There was an air of indifference toward his arrival he wasn’t used to—but it was a welcome change so he swallowed it whole. In front of Julia was a large head of iceberg lettuce, a bowl full of homemade ranch dressing, a half-dozen sickly-looking half-white tomatoes, a half-dozen quartered radishes, and a stack of Ziploc bags. She was cutting up individual servings of this salad and putting them, separated into bags, into a large Tupperware container.