And when Mark’s ex-girlfriend came to visit, Julia was smitten. She was a fiddler herself, full of sarcasm and edge that belied her background growing up in rural central Ohio. Julia could never quite understand what Mark and Cassie’s relationship had been—for as progressive as she’d been, playing in rock bands, eating and snorting her way through the late sixties, she’d still been married by twenty-six. The fact that Mark and Cassie seemed to love each other, had lived together and played in bands together but couldn’t find a way to make it work, had confused and disappointed her. It didn’t help of course that her son was incapable of having a candid conversation about love on the phone with her.
But when Cassie was in her own kitchen all grew clearer: she came in with her hair tight and short to the back of her head, flashing her fiddler’s hickey and her brown corduroys, and the way she responded even just when Julia touched the red callus at the base of her chin it was somehow clear that she was attracted to women. In fact it was so clear it was something of a surprise to Julia that anyone would ever have expected her to be attracted to men. Whatever she’d tried to make work with Julia’s son seemed fine, but Julia was convinced within minutes of meeting her that there was no way of their relationship ever working. If only her own son had understood it.
Unfortunately those observations were confined to what she could see, what she could touch and smell while Cassie was there. His old bandmate churned through the house like a late-afternoon summer storm. Mark barely gave Julia a moment to turn off her television show or put in her hearing aids—it was basically the first time she’d ever actually wanted to put them in—before they were off, and Julia didn’t get another chance to talk with Cassie. The closest she came was peeking in while the two of them were playing music together.
With all that was to come she never saw Cassie in person again.
CHAPTER FORTY
THE BIG RESONATING BLACK HOLE of a B-flat note struck slowly, and then all at once. Tuesday morning. Mark was at the coffee shop when Julia saw the images start to play and play and play on her television screen. In the bottom corner of CNN it said, “Social Security Administration Building, Woodlawn, Maryland,” and closed captioning in its halting blocky arrhythmic beats spelled out that someone had bombed the Social Security Administration Building just ten miles up the road. Jonathan Weinstock, Harry Block, Wilma Bauer, Hirsch Green, Rivka Goldman—names of Pikesville friends who worked for the government flooded Julia’s head, and who she knew could have been in the building that day. The images themselves were nowhere near as dramatic as those that had come out of the World Trade Center or the Pentagon a decade earlier, but a telltale wisp of smoke trailed up out of the glass atrium at the building’s front, and it was clear the bomb was substantial.
Before she had a chance even to turn the television off Julia felt a bass rumbling in the soles of her feet and then felt something hard constricting her upper arms and she was slammed up against a wall. Only it wasn’t a wall. It was made of linoleum. They did not have linoleum walls. They had linoleum floors. The floor had jumped up and smacked her in the face. Only by thinking about it with words did she understand she’d been thrown down off her chair, down onto her own floor in her own kitchen. She couldn’t hear any of what was being said to her and she’d never know for certain if the federal agents had knocked, knocked, knocked at the front door and she never heard it, as they later claimed, or if they’d just knocked down the door and come into the house. Before she knew it she was standing again, she could see that steady line of smoke still lifting from the Social Security building on the television. She saw Agent Cimber and Agent Brutes had her by her arms. They were in their loose-fitting navy blue jackets with “FBI” in yellow block letters, not in the tight-fitting suits they’d worn when they came to question her. They sat her in her living room and while a handful of other agents dashed down the basement stairs—How many? What was happening elsewhere in her own home at those moments?—they yelled at her, barked questions. She wanted to tell them she didn’t have her hearing aids in, that she couldn’t hear them but if they would just wait she could grab them even though she’d never at any point in her life used them, but the agents didn’t have time for that and as disoriented as she was, the question became familiar enough that she didn’t need her hearing aids or even a larger sense of context to understand—they were asking her, over and over, if she knew where her son was. Where is Mark, where is Mark, where is Mark.
They stopped talking long enough for her to say that as far as she knew Mark was where they thought he was. He was at his barista job. He’d left for it that morning just like he left for it every morning. It was hard for her to believe they wouldn’t know it. Of course they did. Already. Just like when they’d come to talk to her the first time, this was a ruse to get into her house. They were at her house to collect evidence. Mark lived there now. She looked around and saw agents—how many, how many men and women were swarming her house—pulling down books and vases and everything off of shelves, pulling out drawers. She saw one of the two agents turn and put his finger to a bud in his ear and then turn back and bring the other agent away, she saw both of their shoulders relax a bit. She could understand then, as they got her to her feet so they could take her into custody, that they were telling each other they had him, her son.
They had Mark.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
JULIA WAS ONLY IN CUSTODY until three in the morning the day of the attack, March 14, straight through the ides. Agents notified Cal they had her and he came down with a lawyer. Julia couldn’t understand what they were saying enough to be able to answer any of their questions with any nuance. She’d been in enough apartments with large enough quantities of weed and acid in her twenties to know that if you were asked any real questions by cops after a crime had been committed, you asked for a lawyer before giving any real answers.
The house was ransacked. It looked like another late-afternoon summer storm had hit the place, this one not named Cassie. The stuffing from couches, the dishes from cabinets, papers from shelves were torn from their idyll, scattered across floors. A back door had been left open and was swinging just a bit against its hinge. For the first time in her life Julia was ready to wear the plastic barnacles, to hear what Cal had to say, to hear what they were saying on CNN, NBC, CBS.
But her hearing aids were nowhere to be found.
She didn’t remember where she’d put them. Now every possession she’d ever possessed was in a pile somewhere in that house. She walked into the basement, where even the posters from Mark’s wall had been ripped down. She’d comprehended enough in interrogation to understand the agents had come in so fast because they knew that if there was anything on Mark’s laptop it could be deleted by simply closing the top, this was how hackers worked, booby-trapped their laptops to destroy evidence, so they had to get down into that basement as quickly as they could. She wanted to say that her son was not a “hacker,” but she realized she both didn’t know if that was true or what it meant. She still believed that Mark hadn’t lied to her when they talked after the two agents came to their house that first time but who the fuck knew. Who knew anything about her son anymore.
She came back up to her kitchen, the safest space she knew, where she’d spent more of her days than any other place on Earth. Her chair was lying on its back on the linoleum floor. She picked it up and sat down. She put the television back on. Somehow in the banging and the chaos, the closed captioning had been turned off for the first time in a decade. No matter how much she searched in the days that followed she would never find the remote control—maybe the agents threw it into a bag with the rest of the electronics—and she didn’t want to buy a new TV, she wanted to maintain some semblance of her life before it was swallowed by the B-flat of the black hole, so she watched the television in relative silence and without closed captioning.
On-screen now she watched the crawl at the bottom as it reported that a suspected accomplice to the bomber had been
taken into custody. A manhunt was on for the second suspect but the FBI had identified him. In the upper right corner of the television was an image of Christian Long. It was an older picture of him, from a period before Mark had come back to Baltimore—he still had a little hair, was wearing a collar and tie and must have been on his way to his job at T. Rowe Price. But under the picture it read “Christian ‘Costco’ Long” so there was no mistaking her son’s old best friend. The explosion had so much force that it took a day for them to realize his body was in the Social Security building itself, killed by his own blast. Only Mark, who hadn’t been there when the blast went off, had survived. So now it was Mark’s face that appeared on every television station, every newspaper and magazine in the country that week.
Julia had never understood why Mark and all his friends had called Christian “Costco.” She’d never find out. It wasn’t the kind of thing she was going to ask her son in the days ahead—not given the circumstances, and not given the fact that, domestic terrorist or not, Costco was dead. For those moments, sitting in her ransacked house, her focus on the images coming back to her from the screen, she was thinking of the fact that it appeared her son, Mark Brumfeld, aided in Costco’s bombing of the Social Security Administration Building.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
THERE WERE TWO MAIN FACTS that Julia learned in the days after the bombing, one harrowing and the other comforting. The first was the worst news imaginable: three people had been killed in the bombing Mark had been arrested for helping to aid. Three people in addition to Costco, that is. All three were low-level administrators. None of them was from Pikesville. But that didn’t mean the horror of it didn’t land squarely on their community. Not since Herschel Grynszpan killed a German charge d’affair in France had a Jewish man perpetrated such an offense against a Western government, and a certain amount of anti-Semitic backlash was inevitable. Elected officials did their best to downplay the shock of it, but the ugly rhetoric of Fox News, of Stormfront.org, of Breitbart News, of the elected officials of Congress, allowed a certain air of questioning of the religious aspects of terrorism to waft through the airwaves. Then a drone strike took out Anwar al Awlaki and there were two major attacks in Europe and the news soon enough shifted. But it shifted long before any kind of rehabilitation of Mark’s reputation had even been hinted at.
It would never come.
It did not shift in the Brumfeld household, the comfort Julia was granted as the FBI continued their investigation into her son. He was held in federal prison awaiting trial but the facts began to look good enough for him. There was evidence of his having participated in chat rooms, of his being a part of conversations about the Boomer Boomers. But it was also clear that Julia’s son Mark, her adult son living under her own roof, had nothing to do directly with the Social Security bombing. There was no evidence of Mark’s having been anywhere near the building on that day or any other, no material connection between him and the pressure cooker bomb. No fingerprints on any of the materials Costco used for the bombing. Nothing really.
That didn’t mean Mark wouldn’t spend years in jail, decades even, for his role in Costco’s actions. But it could have been worse. It could have. And amid it, all the legal bills began to pile up. The first week Julia and Cal were planning to go to visit Mark at his medium-security prison down in Virginia, their first lawyer bill was due—it was astronomical. Numbers that, no matter what they had in a Roth IRA or would come in a future paycheck, they didn’t have liquid. There were not parents for them to appeal to for a loan. They were the parents.
“How the fuck will we even pay this?” Julia said.
Cal looked down at the table between them. She could see he had some idea already in his head. That he assumed she knew what it was before he even said it.
“That prewar D-18 alone is worth like forty grand now,” Cal said. “Who can even imagine what the mandolins are worth.”
Julia was about to argue—to say something, to say, And you, what are you going to contribute if I do give those instruments up?—but what was there to say? That her nostalgia for a time when she was almost a professional musician, her satisfaction at knowing she had all these vintage instruments upstairs in their guest-room-slash-music-room that no one played anymore, could have a price tag? The last person who had even played that guitar was, of all people, Mark himself—who come to think of it had played it without asking, and along with a woman who wasn’t ever going to be his wife, wasn’t ever going to bring anyone any happiness.
So the day Cal went down to visit Mark the first time, Julia was in her car driving up to Mandolin Brothers in Staten Island, the best shop she knew for selling instruments. She could have gotten 25, even 30 percent more for the D-45, for the F-5, and for a couple of her old fiddles. But what she needed was the cash today.
“Look,” the salesman at the shop said. “We’re not a pawn shop. Why don’t you just leave them here on consignment? That way you can at least get ninety percent of what they’re worth. These are major pieces you’ve got.”
Julia didn’t have time for that, and so she took what she could for the D-45 and left the mandolin on consignment for now—with the understanding that if it wasn’t gone in a month or two she’d just have to sell it to them outright. As she headed down over the Delaware Memorial Bridge the anger under Julia’s skin grew and grew, and for the first time since he was in her womb Mark started to become less a son than an abstraction to her, a need and a necessity and a source not of worry but of anger. She’d go visit him, she knew. But the next time Cal went down to visit Mark, a month later, she had to make another trip up to Staten Island to deal with picking up a certified check they needed after the mandolin sold, and suddenly two months had passed since her son’s arrest on felony charges and she hadn’t been to visit him. She’d visit him. But for now, with the anger she carried and logistics of lawyers’ bills in hand, it would have to wait. And wait and wait and wait.
Other than those trips up I-95, which she dreaded more than anything she’d ever done, Julia watched on television as closed-circuit tapes appeared on CNN of Costco going to Williams-Sonoma to buy the pressure cooker, going to Modell’s Sporting Goods to buy the black duffel, going to Home Depot to buy the ball bearings and nails and all the awful malign goods. Mark would be tried as an accessory but not as an accomplice, as a domestic terrorist, for simply being as close to Costco as he was. Of all things, at least Julia could spend the rest of her days knowing her son hadn’t killed anyone.
He also hadn’t helped force a single baby boomer to retire from a single job.
He hadn’t ever let her know what he’d been up to when he was living in her basement, or expressed his intent in communicating with Silence, with Costco. There were two ways in which Julia Sidler Brumfeld had stopped being able to hear in the days leading up to her son’s being branded the most notorious domestic terrorist of his generation, and at this point she was willing to take both. She didn’t want to hear another word.
PART NINE
CASSIE
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
THERE MUST’VE BEEN 613 WAYS in which Cassie Black changed in the months after Mark Brumfield and his childhood friend Costco attacked the Social Security Administration Building, but her name wasn’t one of them. She was Cassie Black now and she would stay Cassie Black. Claire Stankowitcz was a distant memory never to be returned to. But there were two immediate ways she changed in the weeks and months that followed the attack—one of them professional and the other personal, though over time the two grew to be indistinguishable from each other.
Cassie had been following company policy of posting video alongside the native content she created for RazorWire for months, and while she did long to hold herself aloof of the intricacies of Adobe Premiere, each time she opened it with the intention of correcting a header or a footer someone had created, she found herself understanding how to use it a little better without even meaning to. At first it was basic stuff—in the upper left-han
d corner of the application were the source videos, in the lower right-hand corner were lines that represented each video, audio and written lines that came together to make the finished video. Her job was to double-click on the text inserts and edit them.
But over time she found herself editing some video. It was easy enough to see that hitting Enter would return you to the beginning of a video, that the space bar would pause and play. And once she dug in she saw that she basically knew how to use it—the cropping and design tools were more or less the same as PageMaker, which she’d used for her school newspaper. Editing tools for the video itself were almost identical to ProTools, which she’d used for the sound editing when she and Natalia made roughs for the Pollys’ first and second records. It wasn’t exactly the same, but the keystrokes and the concept were, and it didn’t take long for her to see how little it would take for her to master Premiere whether she wanted to use it or not.
One afternoon not a month before the ides of March, she found herself deep into editing on a four-minute documentary about the life of a golden skink that was to be posted the next day. She’d had lizards in her house growing up—mostly geckos; her father would never have let her buy an iguana like Lindsay Henderson down the street had—and for Hanukkah when she was ten her mom had bought her a golden skink. It was long and sleek and glistened under the incandescent lights in her room. She’d loved it more than the family dog until one morning she woke to discover it inert, purple indentations on either side of its body. The new hermit crab in the cage had crushed it. So when she saw that one of their writers had submitted a video of the life of a skink named Golda, Cassie took an interest. She didn’t even think to look at what it was native content for.
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