Boomer1

by Daniel Torday

  “Hey M,” she said. “How was your afternoon, honey?” It was verbatim the greeting she’d invited him home with every day of his teenage years. Something elemental had changed in her voice, though—it was lower, muddier than he’d remembered it, almost like she was making fun of the rotund, imprecise way congenitally deaf people talked. And there was a kind of removed tone that he could feel in the balls of his feet. Something seemed off. “You look good. Color in your cheeks. Good day?”

  Mark thought to tell her about having run into Costco, but it was a kind of crossing of the discrete parts of his life he wasn’t comfortable thinking about, let alone relating to her. When he’d first gotten home his mother had asked him about his relationship with Cassie, nudging around the edges like some hometown yenta. He couldn’t take it. He didn’t talk to her about it at all. And here now he didn’t want to talk to her about seeing Costco. Somewhere in the back of his head he calculated the amount of energy it would take to accept how happy this single reconnection with Costco would make his mother. For years he went to an office where he tried everything he could think of to please his boss, his editor, anything that might improve his chances of moving from his position as an editor to working full-time as a writer, a near impossible move but one perhaps helped by cordiality verging on servility.

  Now here he was at home with his own mother and the last thing he could imagine doing was saying even the simplest thing to make her happy. He loved her, but she exerted power over the editorial choices of no national publication. She would let him stay in her house rent-free no matter what he did. There was nothing he could do to change that fact. He knew his mother would love him, would support him, no matter what—she’d probably come visit him in prison if he was in prison, the only Jewish mother sitting on the other side of the glass. He didn’t have the stamina to handle the emotional toll of her boundless satisfaction at his own happiness. In principle, there was nothing that would make him happier than to see her happy; if he wasn’t around her, in her physical proximity, sitting in her very kitchen, knowing she was happy would make him feel something akin to joy.

  But in practice, the emotional effort it took to say the thing that made her happy while he was standing here with her in her kitchen was so fatiguing it felt like it might give him cancer, Crohn’s disease, smallpox, Coxsackie, all at once. So he just talked, talked, talked about nothing at all. Since he was a teenager he had developed a singular set of defenses, reflexive and insuperable, based on the very idea of protecting himself from his mother’s oppressive emotional support. He was the single remaining white blood cell fighting off the mutation her love could cancer him with. The only person who’d ever broken through that defense system was Cassie, and where had that gotten him? So instead he said, “Oh, and so what was that thing you’d wanted me to help with?”

  “Not worried about that right now, to be honest, Marcus.” His name wasn’t Marcus, it was Mark. Sometimes his mother called him by that full name to signal a seriousness more serious than the situation called for.

  “And so what are you worried for?” Mark said.

  “What?”

  She narrowed her eyes and seemed to be squinting at his mouth.

  “I said— Oh, don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m not worried about it,” she said. “I have to talk to you about something and that’s where I have to start, kind of thing.”

  “Kind of thing,” Mark said.

  “What?”

  “Half the people these days, when they talk, that’s how they end every sentence. ‘Kind of thing.’ What kind of thing? What’s the point of even saying it? It’s just like an opportunity to say one more sentence, the nervous tic someone makes when they’re not sure what to say next.”

  “I wasn’t nervous before you said all that, Mark, but I kind of am now. What on earth are you talking about?”

  “It’s somehow worse than the period when in front of sentences it was always ‘At the end of the day.’ ‘Well, at the end of the day I guess you just have to figure some of the banks were too big to fail.’ ‘At the end of the day, I guess all those credit default swaps were kind of a bad idea.’ ‘At the end of the day, you just have to get a job and keep it and make money from it.’ ‘At the end of the day, the day will be over because the day will have ended at the end of the day.’ It’s as if every human was getting paid two dollars a word for speaking, and they were throwing the extra lexicon in there to pad their paycheck.”

  Julia sat there looking at him. It appeared as if she’d stopped listening to his rant at some point in the middle, and was now on to thinking of something else. As if she’d grown tired of listening to what was outside of herself and was now focused on something she heard inside. His MacBook Pro never did that.

  “If you think about it, I guess that is how people talk a lot of the time, Marcus, sure.”

  “‘If you think about it’!” He said it so loud and clear she couldn’t have missed it, no matter what else she was thinking about.

  “What, Mark? What’s wrong with that!”

  “At least ‘at the end of the day,’ ‘kind of thing’ are just empty phraseology, filling up the space. But ‘if you think about it’! That’s actively insidious.”

  “I hardly think our sitting here having a conversation, mother and son, is ‘insipid,’ honey.”

  “Insidious. And it is. It is. The thing is, it’s how people talk whether you think about it or not. That one isn’t just filler in conversation. It suggests a kind of solipsism that can account for almost anything. People use empty language to fill up conversation if you think about it or not. You might as well say its opposite: ‘Well, if you don’t think about it, I guess people do use a lot of empty rhetoric.’ But it’s not empty rhetoric, that ‘if you think about it.’ I mean: right here and now, think about it. If I were to say to you, ‘If you think about it, CTE is a brutal disease killing off dozens of NFL players after they retire,’ the sentence literally suggests that the contingency is such that if you don’t think about it, it isn’t true. ‘Well, if you don’t think about it, CTE doesn’t exist. Phew! Now let’s go watch some receiver get his head taken off on a crossing rout, then deal with it for fifteen years until he commits suicide. Happy Sunday!’”

  “Listen, Marcus—”

  “I don’t want to listen. I want to finish. I mean, this continues all the way on to the worst acts of the latter half of the twentieth century. ‘If you think about it, the Hutus’ treatment of the Tutsis was genocide’—‘If you think about it, the U.S.’s plunder of Vietnam, then Korea, then Afghanistan, then Iraq’—only you don’t think about it. That’s the trouble. You don’t think about it. But in our complacency people feel as if it’s okay to sit back and say, ‘If you think about it at the end of the day kind of thing—bum-dum pah dum.’”

  Mark finished talking. His mother sat in front of him. She appeared to have not one thing to say to him.

  “You know, lately you really have been doing a lot of what someone who didn’t know you as well as I know you, as your mother, might call ranting.”

  This comment, of all others, did, in fact, stop Mark’s rant. He’d come dangerously close in his conversation with Costco earlier that day to feeling like his online and daily lives were crossing.

  “Listen, Marcus, I’ve been trying to say that I have to talk to you because this afternoon two agents came by to talk to me. They wanted to know about you.”

  The first thought that came to Mark’s mind when he heard the word agent was the word literary preceding it. He’d talked to various agents over the years about story ideas, and it struck him in the moment that one could have read his Emma Goldman piece in TUT and might have interest. But then how would they have found him down here in Baltimore? At his parents’ house, no less? And why would there be two.

  “They were asking about some organization I’ve never heard about, about things that happen on the Internet, some thing called Silent or something. Do you have any i
dea what that’s about?”

  Now it felt as if no saliva had ever been anywhere in Mark’s whole body before. He couldn’t swallow, and he guessed his face must have looked like it had no blood in it at all.

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

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

  “Oh, I thought you must have meant like a literary agent or something.” It was a ridiculous thing to say aloud, a ridiculous mistake, but the sheer audacity of it, Mark could see, helped the situation. He could see the lines on Julia’s face ease at this mistake—Of course, she must have been thinking. There’s nothing my son is up to that would bring federal agents to our house. There may be, on the other hand, things he’s doing to bring literary agents.

  “So you have no idea what these agents were talking about?” Julia said. “About some online organizations? You’re not consorting with Internet organizations, are you?”

  “No,” Mark said.

  “You’re sure.”

  “I don’t even know what an ‘Internet organization’ means,” Mark said.

  “Okay, well … phewph. That’s a relief.” She didn’t say anything for a moment. Mark didn’t, either. “So are you working on something with a literary agent, then?”

  Mark said he couldn’t say, and he was so ready just to be out of that kitchen with his mother he headed down to his room without finding out anything further about what the FBI that was there was asking about him.

  When he got to the basement he had both a text from Costco, who wanted him to come by his place for a drink that weekend, and of all things an e-mail from Cassie. An e-mail from Cassie. How many times had he opened his e-mail looking for one from Cassie to find nothing? And now Julia was telling him about fucking FBI agents asking if he was affiliated with Silence and here she was. That was just how it went—you could check e-mail a zillion times looking for something to come up, but it only came through when you weren’t looking. He didn’t write Cassie back at first. He shot Costco a quick “Yup send me your addy” and only then turned to Cassie’s e-mail, feeling some relief at the normalcy of it after talking to his mother.

  Things were fine for Cassie, the note said; she’d just gotten a new job and she was psyched about it and wanted to tell him all about it; did he think he might be up for having a visitor down in Charm City sometime in the next couple months? She was getting tired, hadn’t had a respite from the city in forever, and she knew it might be awkward to find somewhere for her to stay in his parents’ house but she’d be up for it if he’d have her there.

  He couldn’t think of one thing he’d rather have happen. A visit from Cassie. It might have been the only information that could turn his head from his conversation with Julia. He felt grateful for the very existence of e-mail—for the distraction, for the chance to talk to her about what was going on. Had Cassie said this to him in person, he wouldn’t have been able to contain himself, might even have seemed so eager to have her come stay that it would turn her off, possibly even lead to her not coming down after all. Even if it had come up on an IRC chat he wouldn’t have had the time to think, and to say the right thing, before conversation had moved on, scrolling ever up the page until it had vanished. Poof.

  But now he could write a sanguine draft in his e-mail drafts folder saying, Yeah, sure, he figured it’d be fine to have her down there if she wanted to come. He could hold off on sending it until later that evening. He wrote the note, saved it as a draft, reread it, saved it again. He closed his browser and opened up a new video file, feeling that the only other thing that might, might make him feel better about what his mother had just told him would be to make a new video:

  “Boom boom,” he said. “This is Isaac Abramson, Boomer1.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  THE THIRD WAVE OF BOOMER attacks started in December. Yet again they weren’t set off by Isaac Abramson. Mark had been chastened by the knowledge that actual FBI agents knew where he lived. Had talked to Julia. His mother. Off and on for weeks he found himself invited into channels where planning was taking place, then booted off, then let back in. It wasn’t clear he even wanted to be on there right now. But it was also difficult to tell how serious to take all the badgering from the Silence guys—they called him a narc a lot, but they called each other narcs a lot, too. By the beginning of the winter he had come to feel like a single temblor amid a far larger quake—a prime mover, an occasional voice, but the effect of the motion was too great to decipher. Even if he did have to talk to a federal agent there wasn’t much to say: he chatted on the Internet. He made untraceable videos he knew were encrypted. He’d done nothing wrong. Political speech was a clearly protected category. When he was at the magazine Mark had worked on a story about the proliferation of small earthquakes all over Oklahoma and Arkansas, regions that had never had earthquakes, but who now had hundreds a month, all caused by fracking companies that were disposing of waste and wastewater by injecting it deep into the ground, where it hit once-stable fault lines. These had to be the first large-scale man-made earthquakes in natural history, and now here he was, causing something of the same himself—and then finding that it set off a greater temblor, shaken by some other force, undetectable, separate. Again it had to have been someone in Silence’s myriads who sent out the Boomer Action that led to not only their downfall, but Isaac Abramson’s.

  Just before the action was called for, the #retirer channel went live again, and there was a wild, chaotic conversation. Mark hadn’t been let in on the planning for the call to action itself, but he picked up on the fact that there was a series of targets being considered for attacks. No matter how he searched back up the thread, it wasn’t clear what was settled upon as a target. Mark asked a couple times what the plan was, but each time he just got the same response:

  : narc

  He couldn’t have told any of them about the feds if he tried. Chatting with them with what he knew made it feel like less of a threat—a secret he held, and owned. Meantime Mark could do nothing but watch as the hackers in Silence went after old media. Hijacking the advertising experience ahead of an episode of The Daily Show on the Comedy Central website was one thing. But now they went after the centerpiece of the American home: the TV. For years people had been talking about the Golden Age of Television, about how with the advent of shows like The Wire and The Sopranos and Breaking Bad we were living in a moment when TV, once the basest form of entertainment—aspersed by parents and critics and David Foster Wallace alike—had overtaken cinema for artistry, for cultural reach.

  So Silence went after it.

  They used it.

  On NBC, on Sunday Night Football, they managed to overtake one full thirty-second advertising slot. It went out to tens of millions of viewers, and then on to tens of millions more the next morning when people who had made videos on their phones of televisions broadcasting their message posted it to social media. After the first quarter of a Patriots–Broncos game, both teams undefeated and starting the two most popular quarterbacks of the era, the first ad that came on after play began featured someone calling himself Boomer1. It was not Boomer1, of course—Mark was Isaac Abramson was Boomer1, and he had nothing close to the knowledge, wherewithal, or desire to hack into a major network television broadcast and put a Boomer Boomer video up for the whole world to see. But it came on-screen, someone sitting in a basement that looked a lot like Mark’s parents’ basement in Baltimore, with an upside-down Jerry Garcia poster over his right shoulder and wearing a David Crosby mask.

  “This is Boomer1,” the person on the hijacked ad said, his voice disguised by a vocoder. “We are Silence. We have something to tell you. This is the next and final Boomer Action. It is to be called ROWRY.” The person in the video said it so it rhymed with the name Rory, but in big yellow capital letters the word “ROWRY” flashed on-screen like the 800 number in some late-eighties television commercial. Mark had been the first to use the
word, on his own video. Now it was being broadcast across the country on network television. “That’s ROWRY, as in: Retire Or We’ll Retire You. The legal retirement age in the United States of America is sixty-six. There are hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions aging adults in this country still working long past that age. They are baby boomers. They have the jobs we want. Those are our jobs, the property of the young. They are taking the jobs we should have. Their grasp is tight, and it must be loosed. We want the jobs. You have them. We are not unreasonable in our demands but we want them met. You have three months to retire. Blah blah blah the Ides of March. After that: boom boom.”

  The feed cut out. NBC returned its viewers to the advertisements advertisers had paid for, starting with a spot for Chevy trucks.

  The real Boomer1, Isaac Abramson, Mark, was not on his computer when it happened. He was not on chat rooms, searching for IRC channels where Silence might be discussing the fallout. He was, of all places, over at Costco’s parents’ house, watching the game. He’d gone out for drinks with his old friend a couple times since they first ran into each other at that Starbucks. Costco texted and e-mailed, and when he invited Mark over to watch the game it was the first time he’d gone to his friend’s basement, the same basement he’d hung out in hundreds of times as a teenager.