Boomer1

by Daniel Torday

  When the Silence hack started, Costco said, “What the faaa?” His parents were out of town for the week, and he and Mark were smoking a spliff. Then the ROWRY call came out. “All right, dude, this shit is just blowing up. Hacking an ad on national television? What did we just see. Fucking MNF. Those dudes are killing it.”

  Mark wasn’t sure what to say. It was one thing when he’d seen Silence’s videos for the first two waves of attacks, sitting alone in a room waiting to see if Coyote or HHH or any of the multitudinous Silence posters might have a comment. But now here he was with another human. Another human who was stoned out of his gourd and also appeared to be in support of what Silence was doing.

  “I … don’t know,” Mark said.

  “Dude, are you okay?” Costco said. His eyes spidered with veins from the joint they were smoking. Part of Mark felt like this might be a time to tell Costco he was being surveilled, maybe, by the FBI. But he didn’t know how to say it and he didn’t know how Costco would take it. That, and Mark had a long history, when they were teenagers, of freaking out a little when he was smoking pot. Once at a party he’d taken a bong hit and then proceeded to grip the edges of the Barcalounger he was sitting in for five hours, earning him the nickname Rodin, which it took him a semester to live down. Now Mark sat there in a different kind of terror.

  “Just a little too stoned, I think,” Mark said. “You? You fucked up by it?”

  “Not fucked up by it,” Costco said. “Listen, I just gotta fucken say, I kinda know the guys who did that shit. I mean, in whatever way you can say you know someone on the interweb. I know that seems crazy.”

  Mark stared at him. He wasn’t sure if he was paranoid or if Costco was suggesting what he was suggesting.

  “You know I was always into computer shit,” Costco went on. “And so you know when I got canned by T. Rowe it was because I was looking at some sicko shit on the net while I was at work. I got real caught up in IMing with people I didn’t really know. They showed me all these sites. This one website that had this thing called a sideboard where you could go and Jesus it was just the sickest shit—I mean if you weren’t careful you could find yourself surfing child porn or snuff films or scat porn or who knows—stuff that makes Two Girls One Cup look like Fraggle Rock.

  “Anyway, these guys I chat with, a lot of them call themselves part of a thing called Silence now and you can get on it and off of it and they’re the ones getting the word out, I think. I mean, dude—you wanna see?”

  Mark wasn’t sure what to say so he said sure, he’d see. So while Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth emerged back on-screen after having been upended by the wave of Silence taking over one of their commercials on Sunday Night Football, their badinage less energetic for the rest of the game, Costco pulled out his laptop and showed Mark a bunch of things Mark already knew: how to get onto the TOR router, how to open windows on the Dark Web and log on to IRC channels and chat. He explained how it was so deeply encrypted even the feds couldn’t track you down on it. Hearing his friend repeat that fact made him feel less paranoid. Not less stoned, but less paranoid.

  Costco logged on to a couple of the IRC channels Mark regularly hit, but there was nothing there. Just a blinking cursor.

  “Fascinating,” Mark said. He said it like he meant it and he was trying to sound like he meant it but Costco said, “Honestly, dude, IDK what the fuck—I figured these boards would be lighting up after that hack. Who knows. They must be somewhere else. Sometimes they say which rooms to head to and sometimes they don’t—it’s just chance. But I swear. I think these motherfuckers are the guys. They’re into some serious shit.” Mark didn’t say anything. “Well, shit, now you’re making me all paranoid. You’re being all narky. You’re not gonna tell anyone I’m into this shit, right? You’re not like researching a journalism story or something, are you?”

  “I am not,” Mark said. It was the longest sentence he’d uttered since the ROWRY commercial aired. “If I’m being honest, I’m fascinated by what they’re up to, too.”

  “Okay,” Costco said. “Okay, word.” He let his own grip on his Barcalounger slip. He pulled a big head nug out of a jar and started breaking it up to roll a joint. “Okay. Okay, well, if you have a look at some of those IRC chats, lemme know what you think. If nothing else, those guys are funny as fuck. And, you know, right. Someone’s gotta do something.”

  “I thought you thought Gandhi might be more right,” Mark said.

  “Even Gandhi has his limits. And you know me, bro! I’m always changing my mind. Out of my mind. Where is my mind.”

  Costco rolled his joint and they smoked it and Mark headed out.

  When he got home he felt emboldened by getting on TOR with Costco, by the tacit sense of consent implied by looking at chat rooms alongside another live human, so he logged on and found that the IRC channels were all silent. Nothing on #retirer, even, where he was somehow sure he’d find someone online. On the surface web—on Twitter, on Facebook—comments sections of articles were blowing up with questions about ROWRY, which was already #ROWRY: how seriously were all those people sitting behind desks at academic institutions, the CEOs of just about every Fortune 500 company, to take this threat? When the second wave of Boomer attacks was spurred on, they went quickly. They were incontrovertible. They had a real, tangible, IRL effect, something the sixty-and-above demographic could understand as a threat. Mark dipped one toe into the #hackro room, though he knew all those threads were dead. Same at #retirer and all the rest. He’d started a revolution, then considered trying to walk it back—and now the main initiative, ROWRY, was back harder than he could ever have imagined. Hoped. Dreaded. He didn’t know what the plan was for March, and it wasn’t entirely clear if anyone at Silence did, either.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  IN THE WAKE OF THE HUGE WAVE receding after the MNF hack and the ROWRY call, Mark’s ex, Cassie Black, the only woman he’d loved in his adult life and if he was honest with himself the woman he loved still, was to get on the Amtrak Northeast Regional to come down a couple weeks before Christmas to Baltimore and stay for a couple days. Mark got into his parents’ Volvo wagon to pick her up and turned the key and nothing. Click, click, click. The battery was dead.

  Cassie was coming and he didn’t want her waiting, didn’t want any single thing to go wrong on her trip down, so he did the only thing he could think of and texted Costco, who said he didn’t have a shift that day, so sure okay why not he’d be there in a minute.

  They arrived just ahead of Cassie’s train. When she came walking through the gossamer air of Baltimore’s Penn Station, Mark felt a kind of ease in his chest he’d not felt since he first started on the IRC chats. Being berated by Coyote or HHH might have felt like friendship at times, even been a kind of friendship, but if it did bring camaraderie, it didn’t bring calm. Even spending time stoned with Costco did not bring him the peace that being around Cassie brought him, no matter how painful it was to think of how he’d been jilted and how unlikely it was he’d ever win her back. That was the trouble with having love smeared all over the inside of you. You could wash all you wanted and your fingers were still bound to be greasy.

  They hugged hello, and he took her fiddle case off her shoulder for her. He introduced Costco.

  “Oh, Mark’s told me a lot about you,” Cassie said.

  “Dude, you shouldn’t tell people things about me,” Costco said. Cassie just looked at him. “Kidding, sistah. That’s cool. Like what kinda things, though.”

  “You’re the Jerry leg-tattoo guy, right?”

  Costco reached down and lifted the leg of his baggy jeans. There on the outside of his right calf was a full-color tattoo of Jerry Garcia’s portrait from the cover of a late-period Jerry Garcia Band record. His full gray hair was blowing in the wind, and all around it the scraggly, wiry black hairs from Costco’s leg obscured him.

  “That is really … something,” Cassie said.

  “It’s permanent like a tattoo,” Costco said.


  Mark said they should get going.

  Costco got behind the wheel and Mark sat shotgun and Cassie sat behind him and they drove out past the MICA building, up north out of the city, through five-story renovated brick buildings full of artists, architects, the new businesses of urbanly renewed Charm City. Mark thought of a line from one of his favorite short stories, the opening of one of Harold Brodkey’s stories about St. Louis, a lyrical description of brick buildings. When he first read it he thought if you replaced “St. Louis” with “Baltimore” the line might cover his own childhood. But as he drove past the UMBC campus and its collection of redbrick buildings with Cassie now, he thought he’d have to undo that idea. He hadn’t thought about the baby boomers in the wash of all the complicated moves in the wake of the latest call to Boomer Action, had grown so focused on the events themselves, but now here with Cassie, downtown, he remembered what it had been about from the first. No more baby boomers. That story was a baby boomer story, and now he had to find a way to unlove it. Open-Apple-Z it. To undo it, upend it, make it his own by washing it away, and replacing the name of one city and giving it the name of another was hardly enough to do so. Their job in those days, as Mark saw it, was not to stand on the shoulders of the generation before them. It was to stomp them.

  Costco drove up to the highway but it felt wrong for them just to go back to his parents’ house. He asked if Cassie and Mark wanted to take a drive. Mark turned back to her and said he figured she might be tired but she said no she was good, sure whatever.

  “Just happy to be out of the city for a little while,” Cassie said. “Let’s go anywhere.” There was something inscrutable in her face. He loved her inscrutability and always had. She wasn’t looking at Mark or at Costco, but out the window as they drove. He was glad she was here and for some weird reason he was happy Costco was there, too.

  “Maybe out through Woodlawn,” Costco said. “The long way. And then back.”

  “Okay?” Cassie said.

  “Whatever,” Mark said.

  “It’s like ten minutes from here.”

  They turned up roads that looked like any roads in the Northeastern United States, uniform double yellow lines between two lanes, well-paved asphalt shaded by deciduous trees in areas where shadows cast a blotchy latticework down below them, houses and strip malls where the sun shone thin through the winter air. Costco reached over into the glove box of his mother’s Saab and pulled out a glass bowl and handed it to Mark. It already had a sizable nugget in it, bright green crawling with white-flecked red hairs. Mark hit it and passed it back to Cassie, who hit it and passed it forward to Costco.

  They drove on.

  Suddenly almost against his will Mark found himself reciting the stanza from the poem he’d thought of when he first saw Costco, the only stanza in all of literature he’d ever memorized. It was the ninth section from that Galway Kinnell poem, including an allusion to Milton: It is better to reign in hell than to submit on earth. After he finished reciting neither Cassie nor Costco said anything for a minute until Costco said, “There’s a whole eighth in the console if you want.” Mark packed another bowl and they smoked it and soon they were coming up though Woodlawn.

  “Look at this place,” Costco said. “Woodlawn motherfucking Maryland. A suburb like any other suburb.” Cassie just said okay. She got quiet sometimes when she was baked. Mark said he knew, he’d been there plenty of times.

  “It’s also the home of the Social Security Administration’s central office,” Costco said. “Did you know that?”

  Mark said that he did and he didn’t—he knew it, he guessed, he didn’t not know it. But he’d never thought about it. Cassie just said no.

  There were three lives Isaac—Boomer1—Mark Brumfeld was living, and Cassie came from a past life, a life that had existed before the three new ones he’d espoused while continuing to exert its emotional traces over all three. Now, here, they’d all crossed. He was slamming Cassie into this other life now, breaking boundaries while maintaining them, at the same time that Costco was slamming his other lives together all at once. They drove straight through Woodlawn and then out a long road into the near-rural side of the Baltimore suburbs west of the city. Out the driver’s side of the car, out on the other side of his window, sat a low-lying collection of newly renovated, white stucco and glass and chrome buildings like any other office park in America, only a little cleaner, newer, more expensive. Too expensive, really, to be sitting on the edge of a suburb of an American city the only distinguishing features of which were its murder rate, and a television show that helped the rest of the nation understand the complicated civic and social underpinnings of its murder rate.

  “That’s the Social Security Administration Building,” Costco said. “Where all the records of all the Americans are kept. The place of origin of every Social Security number. Of every single baby boomer about to receive a check.”

  “You know there’s also a Social Security building right down the street from Penn Station, where we just were, right?” Mark said.

  “I didn’t,” Costco said. He thought for a second. “But it’s a Social Security office. This—this is, like, the Social Security Office.”

  “Okay,” Mark said.

  “For the whole country,” Costco said.

  Costco looked at Mark, who didn’t react. For the first time since they’d gotten in the car Mark turned and looked Cassie in the eyes. It was like looking into the sun—or better yet like looking at someone and seeing yourself looking back. Whatever it was, it was too much, and he turned his eyes back to the road. He faced forward again. Costco was still distracted. The car jerked a couple feet out of its lane, and he pulled it back straight. Then they were all quiet.

  “So I need to tell you both something,” Mark said. They were stoned enough that they each continued looking at what they were looking at, Cassie and Costco, but they were listening. “Julia—my mom—told me the other day that some agents came by the house wanting to talk to me.”

  “What, like, literary agents?” Costco said.

  Mark didn’t have the heart to say that was the same thing he’d thought when she told him.

  “No, like, federal agents. Who wanted to know about my own online activity.”

  “Online activity,” Costco said. “Makes me think of like, ‘Oh, now we’ll do some papier-mâché—online.’”

  “They came to see me, too,” Cassie said. Now this was something new. “Not the same guys of course. And not about you. I’ve been working on some pieces at RazorWire about Boom Boom attacks, and Silence, and they wanted to ask questions.”

  “So did you tell them anything?” Mark said.

  “Feebees?” Cassie said. Mark wondered where she’d learned to sound so casual about it. It only made him love her more. Costco looked again at him. Something passed between them, something unspoken—it was clear to Costco, Mark thought, that he was into something. “Fuck no. You just don’t tell them anything. After dealing with them in a journalistic capacity you kind of just learn to handle it.”

  “Dude, you must’ve learned that, too, at your magazine,” Costco said. Mark didn’t have the heart to confess he hadn’t—Jesus, he’d never worked on a piece that led to him talking to law enforcement—so he just let it pass. “Sounds like I’m the only fucker here who doesn’t have that experience. I mean, I’d be paranoid out of my fucking melon right now if it wasn’t for you guys. You’re big-time, you two.” Mark and Cassie let the compliment hang there, and let the whole conversation drop.

  Their silence continued as they drove past the buildings all the way back to his parents’ house in Pikeville, twenty minutes from their destination. Mark had made a reservation at the one good sushi restaurant he’d found since his return—that was one more than had been there when he was growing up—and Cassie said she wanted to get some rest and take a shower before they went. Costco said he had to head home for the evening, which made Mark perfectly happy, given that he didn’t want his old f
riend to join them for dinner anyway.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  WHILE CASSIE WAS CLEANING UP, Mark signed on to his computer and got on TOR and then found his way to Google, where he looked up the Social Security Administration. The main Social Security offices had been moved from downtown Baltimore to Woodlawn in the 1960s. Somewhere within those renovated buildings they’d driven by that afternoon was every person employed by the government to oversee the dispersal of Social Security funds; every Social Security number of every American citizen in the country, and all the attendant information on all of America’s citizens. There was even a museum dedicated to the history of the New Deal, and the financial safety it had extended to every baby boomer, a safety net that Mark now understood would not be extended to him, to Cassie, to the members of their generation, when the time came.

  When Cassie got out of the shower and dressed, Mark tried to take her down to the kitchen to say hello to Julia. Before they did, Cassie grabbed him by the hand and his heart jumped. It could be like a dream, her taking him into a bedroom—he moved toward her but she let go of his hand and moved farther into the room.

  “Holy fucking shit,” Cassie said. “You didn’t tell me about all this.”

  She was pointing to where all of Julia’s instruments were propped up on stands around the room. There was a Lloyd Loar Gibson F-5, and an early-forties Martin D-18. Mark took her by the hand now, and walked her over to a green Calton hard-shell case. He let go, bent down, and flipped the clasps. Inside was a Cremona-colored fiddle.

  “That’s Julia’s old player fiddle,” Mark said. “It’s an American custom, from the fifties. It sure does have some bark.” He thought Cassie might ask to play it, but she turned back out of the room.

  “Maybe we could play some later?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Jesus, there must be five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of instruments in that room,” Cassie said.