“And you,” Mark said. Cassie didn’t respond. “And no one to play them. They all used to be in the basement but Julia moved them up here when I came back. I bet she spent, like, ten grand just getting them set up as she moved them. It’s like all she does now.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Cassie said. “Too bad none of us plays anymore.”
They descended the stairs, away from the music. Julia was always in the kitchen in those days. She didn’t need to be retired from a job by Silence, or by the Boomer Boomers. She’d long since retired from her job teaching music at the middle school near their house, and other than putting individually wrapped salad bags into a Tupperware container and making him sandwiches when he wanted one, Mark wasn’t sure what his mother did to keep occupied.
Today she was in the kitchen. The television was on. It was a show on which a number of boomer-aged women sat around a table heatedly debating current events without bringing up any of the particulars or conveying any empirical facts related to their view. It was like they were in Plato’s cave with a stone rolled across the entrance, no trace of the world of forms discernible in their darkened hovel.
When Mark and Cassie got to the kitchen, the women on the show were discussing Silence’s hijacking of ad time on the football game days before. Their words were broadcast on closed captioning in big white letters at the bottom of the screen—the TV had broken with closed captioning stuck on years before.
“I think they should all be brought to justice, whatever these millennial scamps think they’re doing,” an older white woman said. “Let them have the Internet! They can play their Gameboys or whatever. But an advertisement during the football game. That is crossing a line.”
The comedian next to her said, “Well, at the end of the day, they do have a point.” You could see each of the other women around the table push back just a bit. “I’m not saying they’re right! But look at us, ladies. We all still have jobs.”
They all laughed. Julia laughed with them and it became clear she wasn’t going to notice Mark and Cassie without their announcing themselves.
“Mom, you remember my bandmate—friend—bandmate, Cassie,” Mark said.
Julia looked up. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, as if waking from a deep slumber. Cassie walked over and gave her a hug, but Julia didn’t have time to stand up, so it was an awkward embrace that looked almost like a tackle. The top of Julia’s head nestled against the frog-belly white of the underside of Cassie’s chin.
“Oh, what’s that,” Julia said. She brushed her thumb across a substantial red mark on Cassie’s neck. A look of recognition passed Julia’s face.
“Fiddle hickey,” Cassie said. She put a finger to her neck, letting her index finger sweep across that rough piece of flesh where the chinrest of her fiddle had raised an almost permanent callus. Julia put her fingers to her own neck, where there was no such mark any longer. “It’s been fading. Not so much time to play since my new job and all. But. We were looking at all your amazing instruments upstairs. Mark tells me that you used to play.”
“Lifetimes ago,” Julia said. She did not offer to let Cassie play her fiddle. She put her finger to her left ear and pushed, as if attempting to dislodge a sound or a thought from her head. The television was still blaring in the background, so loud Mark almost couldn’t understand why it would need to be so loud, and all three of them turned to look where a still taken from one of Silence’s postings showed someone—not Mark—in a David Crosby mask, his face filling almost the entire screen, so you could not see the poster over his shoulder. A wave of heat flushed through Mark’s body as he wondered if a video of him had been made into a screen capture, if something from her own basement might catch Julia’s eye if she saw it. But on-screen it was a kind of purloined letter. Julia could see a photo of her own son on that television set and not understand she was looking at him; such is the displacement of looking at one’s own life on television. It was like the distance between who Isaac was in an IRC chat room and who Mark was here in the room now, an impermeable membrane between.
“Mishigas, what these kids are up to,” Julia said.
“Is it?” Cassie said.
“Making videos on the Internet to stir up some misguided attacks. They say they don’t advocate violence against people but who knows when it will stop. Or how. What do they think is going to happen in March? Even if it’s nothing, to sit through the waiting. C’mon. Don’t they know that our generation was the generation that invented revolution? That’s who they want to have retire—the people who got them to where we are? We marched on Washington. We followed what Weatherman was up to. Patty Hearst. Black Panthers. These kids, they Twitter or whatever, put little movies up on the Internet and call it revolution.”
“We,” Mark said.
He could feel a different kind of wave washing over him now. This was far from the experience of having his anger broken open by the concentrated flush of a blast from water-fractured shale. This was something nature itself was flushing him with, a wave forced by the tectonic shifts of undersea earthquakes, so out of control, a swelling so large that at first it didn’t even look like a wave.
“Wait, what,” Julia said. Cassie looked at him, nothing on her face, just looking.
“I mean we’re basically millennials, too, Mom,” he said.
“No, you’re not,” Julia said. “You’re Generation X. Or Y or Z or whatever they call you. I think I’d know if I’d given birth to a millennial.”
“He’s kind of right,” Cassie said. “I mean, demographics are dumb. There’s just humans, people, born at different times, who all think different things at different times and are unpredictable. But they do call us, anyone who was born after 1980, part of the millennials.”
Julia stood and walked across the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator, pulled out the Brita with its nearly ice-cold tap water, and put it down on the counter.
“Would either of you like some water?” she said. They both said no. “So you two think that these Silent people, or the people in the masks, have a point?” She was looking at Mark. He was looking down at his feet now.
“Silence,” Cassie said.
“What?” Julia said.
Mark exchanged glances with Cassie and before he could say anything more, she said, “Well, they may have a point, but whatever they’re after seems dangerous.”
“Well. I don’t agree and won’t. So. That’s that. It is what it is kind of thing. What are you two going to do tonight?”
“We’re going to dinner. And oh, I forgot, the Volvo wouldn’t start. Maybe you could call AAA for me? I think it’s the battery. And we could borrow Dad’s Audi.”
“What am I going to say, no?” Julia said.
Before she could say anything more Mark grabbed Cassie and they headed out, got straight into Julia’s car. They were barely out of the driveway before Cassie started talking.
“Okay, so I’m just going to say a bunch of things all at once, and I don’t want you to have an opinion on any of it until after I’ve finished. The first thing is just holy shit that was awkward but I kind of think we both handled it as well as we could, didn’t we? You don’t have to nod. We did. But that’s not the point. The point is that I’m glad to have met your old friend Costco and all, but what on earth was with all that shit he was talking on that drive out through Woodlawn? And the feds came to talk to your mom? Jesus. What the fuck. So does this friend know about you and the Boomer stuff?”
“He does not,” Mark said. “Or he did not. Based on your and my somehow both now telling him we’ve been talked to by the FBI I’m sure he’s guessing something at this point. That said, he showed me how to use TOR the other day. For whatever that fact might be worth. But I have kept my mouth shut beyond that—and telling you both about the FBI thing.”
“Jesus,” Cassie said. “What the fuck.”
Now he turned to look at Cassie again, only this time he did not look away. He saw the small hairs that came down from her hai
rline on her freckled forehead, where his lips had been so many times. He saw that at the edges of her eyes, at their very edges, for the first time the slightest faintest creases of crow’s-feet were beginning to etch themselves, marking the passing of time. He saw Cassie, but he saw himself, and he saw his mother, and he saw.
They were just about at the sushi restaurant. It was in a strip mall out Reisterstown Road, in Owings Mills, only a couple miles from the shopping center where he’d worked at a TCBY when he was a teenager, where the Starbucks inside the Barnes & Noble inside the strip mall inside the universe where he’d been meeting Costco was. He didn’t have the heart to point out to Cassie, whom he hadn’t seen in months and who was his bandmate and who in a different circumstance could’ve been his wife, him with a wife and a job figuring out how to pay off the taxes on his stocks and still living in New York where he had had zero interest in ever leaving, where it was. They pulled into this other shopping center in this other part of the Baltimore suburbs where he drove with friends and smoked pot in moving cars when he was fourteen, when he was sixteen, when he was twenty-one and home from college to see his parents, where memories overlapped with each other but they were in the end all the same memory of the same traffic lights and the same trees that had been there before he was even born, where even the biggest tsunami that could possibly hit the Eastern Seaboard couldn’t create enough wave to soak this suburban dreamscape so in need of being soaked by a wave, and if it wasn’t going to be a Chesapeake wave it might as well be another kind of wave, the third wave, a wave that he’d maybe started but that Silence had grown on its own to the size of a tsunami, and all memories were the same memory and so not overlapping at all when you came to think of it. For months now when he wasn’t typing in chat rooms he was thinking about Cassie Black, but now here Cassie Black was sitting beside him and he realized there was no chance of his getting her to love him. He just knew it, there in that car. Cassie was looking at him and he was looking at Sushi Palace and he said, “What the fuck indeed.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
SO MUCH DEPENDS UPON a black Jansport duffel bag, sitting in a suburban basement, empty as of yet. Cassie had been gone a week when Mark found himself over at Costco’s. This time he was in Costco’s room, where they were taking bong hits. He was stoned out of his skull as he always seemed to be when he was with his old friend. He’d had the time with Cassie that he’d hoped to have. They talked, they did not kiss, they picked up Julia’s prewar D-18 and her old fiddle and they sang a lot of Louvin Brothers songs, Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley—“Polly, pretty Polly wontcha come along with me/ Polly, pretty Polly won’t you come along with me-ee”—and played a lot of fiddle tunes together, and playing music made him happy. He assumed it made his mother happy to hear them playing, too, the first time there’d been music in her house in ages.
Now this was the first time Mark had been in Costco’s house since their trip out to Woodlawn. Neither had said anything about the trip, or about his telling about the feds. When he sat down, his old friend handed him the glass bong like he always did. Mark took a rip, sat back on Costco’s unmade bed.
“So Cassie’s hot,” Costco said.
And it was as he said it Mark noticed it in Costco’s open closet: a black Jansport duffel bag, zipped up. In the middle of it, a large cylindrical bulge. In the closet next to it an empty Cuisinart box in a Williams-Sonoma bag. Costco saw him looking.
“Dude, remember when we were in high school and we used to go to Williams-Sonoma for nitrous poppers? Those little pink things? Those were the bomb before I got that tank.”
“Your nickname could’ve been Sonoma instead of Costco,” Mark said.
“Costco is better,” Costco said. “Fucken hate Sonoma. Just a bunch of rich asshole baby boomers looking for a massage or a mud bath or some such.”
They were quiet for a moment.
“You know I went down the coast when I was out in Eugene. Stayed in Bend, then down through Crater Lake, hitched all the way down to Cali.” Mark had never heard this story before. Costco had refused to tell stories of his time out there when he got back, just showed his Jerry tattoo and moved on. His face was now blanched like one of Julia’s tomatoes. “And there were these old heads in a little town north of Sonoma, way north, north of Eureka even. Called Dewberry. All these old, old heads. Boomer heads who’d dropped out, moved farther and farther north from San Fran. They fed me tons of acid. I think they must’ve been fucking with me. Doses like they used to drop. Like, a cup of liquid. Must’ve been like a hundred fucken hits. I flipped my fucken lid. Couldn’t put on clothes for a week. They say they found me curled up in a ball in the sand and no one could come near me ’cause I’d just scream if they did.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I don’t even fucken remember. My folks flew out. They sent me to Minneapolis for a month to get my shit together. Now I take Zyprexa, but it makes me fat. And it was enough to get through Goucher, get a job. But man—again and always it was the fucking boomers, like you say. They gave us los drogas, asi.”
“Well, we are smoking weed right now,” Mark said.
“That shit ain’t drogas! The acid. It fucking liquefied my brains, brutha. And they did it. The boomers. And you are right. They need to pay for it. For what they done.”
“What was Woodlawn all about,” Mark said.
“What do you think Woodlawn was all about.”
“You want me to guess?”
“Like you made me guess about the feds, which you didn’t mention?”
“I told you.”
“Like you’ve been making me guess about everything else, Abramson?”
Costco looked long and low into Mark’s eyes. His hair was receding just like Mark’s was, and Mark noticed for the first time since they’d started hanging out that he had crow’s-feet developing at the corners of his eyes. Like Cassie had. Cassie, who was now his just-friend and who he would never be with again.
“It seemed like way too big a coincidence at first,” Costco said. “I mean I’d been listening to the missives since you started posting them. And I guess in the back of my head I’d thought like, Shit, that kind of looks like my buddy Brumfeld’s old basement. But then when I came over the other day and I saw it and I just fucken knew it. And then when you and Cassie both had your stories—icing, cake. Done. What are the chances, you and me both in the same chat rooms?”
“I guess,” Mark said, “about the same that you and me would end up back in our parents’ basements. Which, as it turns out—well, not so bad. Those chances.”
“Well, brah,” Costco said. “You’re fucken smart. And you’re more of a badass than I could’ve guessed.”
“And you?”
“Me what.”
“I’m looking at a black duffel bag. With the box for a pressure cooker next to it.”
“Don’t forget what else is in there, brah.”
“Well, I can’t forget what I didn’t already know,” Mark said. “But I can guess.”
“If you guessed, I’d guess you’d guess a big old box of matches for the match tips, a bulb from some Christmas lights, and a whole bunch of nails and ball bearings for shrapnel. I am not inspired by Inspire, but yup—there are copies of Inspire. There is some good information in there. Better than when we used to look at The Anarchist Cookbook back in the day.”
“And so what is the plan, then?”
“There is no plan, exactly,” Costco said. “Anarchists don’t make plans. They’re Anarchists. There’s just some goods, and a place to bring them. And a lot of fucken anger, old and new. And I know we both know you’re not coming with me, whenever it is. It’s on me, and that’s good. But I just want to hear one thing from you, brah.”
“And what’s that,” Mark said.
Costco said nothing for a second. He pulled the bong up to his lips, lit it, and pulled some smoke into the chamber, pulling it like a cumulonimbus cloud right up to the space in front of his lips. Then
he took it from his mouth and he said, so that his old friend could say it back to him:
“Resist much, obey little.
“Propaganda by the deed.
“Boom boom.”
PART EIGHT
JULIA
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
THERE WERE TWO WAYS she had gone deaf after she had a kid, and the second way Julia Sidler Brumfeld had lost her ability to hear was in her not hearing her son anymore, but much like her actual hearing, she didn’t know how she could have stopped it. In November of the fall after he returned to live in their basement, his ex-girlfriend Cassie came to visit them. She saw Mark happier than he’d been since he’d returned home. They’d even picked up her instruments without asking, and she was livid at first but then happy enough, knowing at least someone was playing them. Mark had also been hanging out with his old friend Chris Long, who by some chance also happened to be living back in his own parents’ basement, and it came as a relief to Julia that Mark had a companion in Baltimore.
Chris had been a troubling kid when Mark was in high school—she knew Mark smoked pot, but she saw all kinds of signs in Chris, times he came to their house with his pupils the size of espresso saucers, talking in clipped Zen koans and obviously tripping face. It was almost comical to Julia that Mark didn’t understand she knew what it looked like when someone had eaten acid and was tripping in her own home. He’d grown his hair into dreadlocks and seemed unhinged, it was rumored he’d had some kind of break when he was out West and came back changed, and she was grateful when Mark went off to college and stopped talking about him. But the kid seemed to have gotten it together as an adult, or as together as a thirty-year-old living in his parents’ basement could have it together. He’d worked in financial services for a period, and with his hair thinning like Mark’s, he at least looked like a grown man, despite the hoodies and sneakers, the hacky sacks and devil’s sticks he carried around, the fact he didn’t quite seem capable of uttering a coherent sentence to her. And who was she to talk, in her own red Chuck Taylors, her own kid living in the basement.
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