On the fly she found herself opening video files, cutting and condensing, slash-cutting and perfecting. In that lower right-hand box each video appeared as a four-inch gray rectangle that could be manipulated—she could go in and expand the bar so it represented, say, ten seconds of video, which itself was slow-mo and represented only one second of real time. Or she could expand it to show just one second of video. Or a tenth of a second, bearing in and in and in on the moment when Golda’s pink-tongued yawn was first caught on video, slowing time to a near standstill both on-screen and in the world around her. What did it do to her conception of time, to her sense of memory, spending her day manipulating time like this? Did writing, slowing and condensing the world into words, do the same? Cassie wasn’t sure. On-screen before her eyes, time had slowed to a literal standstill, the time of the image and audio she was editing represented by a solid gray box. It was as if a unit of the fluidity of a substance with immutable laws—time followed its arrow in one direction, always moving just out of reach—had been encased, caked in some chalky substance, and left to sit inert on-screen. There was an enormous sense of power mixed with an enormous sense of futility in seeing the flow of time interrupted, interrogated, and enhanced this way. All in the interest of making people feel things while watching a caged golden lizard yawn. Cassie had been editing for so long and with such intensity that she was startled into jumping from her seat when Regan’s voice woke her from her editing reverie.
“The fuck’s that a video for,” Regan said.
“I don’t even know,” Cassie said. “Well, it’s a golden skink named Golda. It’s a … well, it’s a biopic about a lizard.” She got up from her desk, saved the file, and left it on-screen while the two of them went out for pho.
She didn’t give the video another thought until two days later when she got simultaneous e-mails from the videographer and from Mario. The videographer, a thirty-three-year-old divorcee living in Akron named Weary, had written to chew her out.
“Cassie—” his e-mail read. “I’ve been working on that fking PetSmart lizard spot for a year and you go in and cut a full minute of content? Do you even understand what a slash-cut is? On whose authority r u making these edits? How do we go back to my original cut?” Fuck. Cassie couldn’t believe she’d made all those edits live and hadn’t consulted anyone—it just seemed obvious that it was at least a minute too long to hold anyone’s attention. Before she could write back she saw Mario’s e-mail pop up and assumed it was to berate her—even the subject line, “HOLY SHIT,” seemed to suggest she was in for a world of conflict. Here she was, director of research, editing native content video.
She opened Mario’s note and it wasn’t what she’d expected at all. Mario, formalest of all the users of “thusly” she’d ever met, for the first time in all the time she’d known him had sent an e-mail that didn’t even start with a formal salutation. It looked more like a text message in its informality and it read, “Have you seen the Google Analytics on your iguana spot? Seventy thousand plus in the first morning! Shit’s gone viral. We think we might have a million by end of week. VAF (viral as fuck! I think I just coined that). Come see me.”
She didn’t go see Mario. She didn’t take the time to tell him Golda wasn’t an iguana—she was a golden skink and who the fuck would name an iguana Golda when they could go with Juana. She e-mailed Weary in Akron and let him know that she’d have been more than happy to restore the original cut on the site but had he seen the fucking numbers on that piece?
“That shit’s going viral AF,” she typed.
He wrote her back with complete and total sycophantic contrition.
“I’m just feeling lucky to work with talented folks like you,” he wrote. They were e-mailing back and forth so fast they might as well have been IMing in 1998. Without even thinking Cassie typed, “And well look it’s not like the creator of some fucking gecko hagiographic PetSmart ad had final cut approval,” then double-clicked and deleted it. But before she closed out of Google Chrome she sat back for a second, opened the video, saw that the spot already had almost two hundred thousand views, and said fuck it. She hit Open-Apple-Z and restored the e-mail and sent it.
She waited.
Two new e-mails popped up. The first was from Weary and it just had the text stand-in for a winking-smiley-face emoji. The second was from someone at Atelier. There was no “thusly,” no heavy come-on. Just a note that said, “Saw your Golda doc. Have been following your rise for some time. Wanna come work for us? We’ll double your salary, whatever the fk Rzr’s paying you. Not remote either. We want you here.” It was like a combination between an e-mail and a text and in the midst of the total typing freedom Cassie Black was feeling in that moment she wrote back, “triple it,” and the guy from Atelier—it turned out it wasn’t a guy but a girl—woman—named Sandra—wrote right back:
“Word. Done deal. You know we’re in SF, right?”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
THE FIRST WAY CASSIE BLACK’S LIFE changed in the weeks around the time of the Social Security bombing was that she’d taken a new job making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but it meant she would have to move to San Francisco. They wanted her to start ASAP and what really would it take for her to make the move? She could fit everything in her apartment into a ten-foot U-Haul and be in the Bay Area in three days. She cut her lease—she just went ahead and ate the rest of the month’s rent—packed up, rented a U-Haul from the place down off Atlantic Avenue where the first World Trade Center bombers had rented theirs. She hadn’t been in this part of Brooklyn in ages—being in Williamsburg confined her to the L, a quick east-west swoop in and out of Lower Manhattan. She could hardly believe how much downtown Brooklyn had changed. She got off the Q down on Fourth Avenue, a four-lane-and-a-concrete-median expanse that used to house, more or less exclusively, gas stations and garages. The concrete median strip was still there, but now there were bars and coffee shops at every corner, and half the spaces between.
She’d planned to walk up the slope of Park Slope toward the U-Haul when she got down there but she’d ridden the Q one stop too far. She passed the corner of Baltic where a beautiful new public school had been built. Once she hit Atlantic she turned right and there was the Barclays Center, rising out of the concrete like the rusted hull of a beached freighter. The last time she’d been here was to play the back room at Freddie’s with the Willows, but it had been closed down to make room for this new center, where the Rolling Stones and the Nets could play on successive nights. They’d played a bunch of gigs at Southpaw when it opened, but there were so many new venues all across Brooklyn that even that one, with its glorious velvet curtain that opened to greet the band like they were a stage act, had closed.
There was a time when witnessing all this growth and change would have raised Cassie’s hackles—she’d come down to protest the building of the Atlantic Center project, carrying signs that read “Ratner is a Rat!” and “Intensification not Gentrification” and “Oh no, Hell no, the Brooklyn Nets have gotta go!”—but to be honest, it was just a huge improvement. There were actual yellow and white lines painted on Flatbush Avenue to keep cabs in their lanes. The Barclays Center, for all its distressed-jeans-of-a-rusted-façade artificiality, was only fifteen stories tall, nowhere near as tall as the iconic Key Savings Bank to its west. It was all somehow peaceful, and tasteful, and unobtrusive. After setting up her U-Haul rental Cassie walked up Fifth Ave to O’Connor’s, where she’d planned to have a drink with Regan, who was already there when Cassie arrived.
“You know Elliott Smith used to drink here,” Cassie said. She put the two Jack-and-gingers she’d bought down in front of Regan. “He’d play in the back sometimes.”
“Uh, yeah,” Regan said. “I was the one who told you that.”
Cassie was uncertain if that was true but she didn’t want to argue. She was the one who was leaving, all at once, the job Regan had put her up for and the city where they both now lived.
“Lon
g-distance,” Regan said. “I’m not sure I was ever in favor of long-distance.”
“Everyone we know says long-distance isn’t that bad these days,” Cassie said. “Remember how Hussein and Jill said they used FaceTime that year she was up in Cambridge for her Radcliffe? They said it was more like hanging out than talking on the phone. They could just have it open and talk and even watch movies together and—”
“Netflix and chill, but on FaceTime.”
“Right.”
“And with auto-chill.”
“Right.”
“I don’t know,” Regan said. “I just … do … not … know.”
“Well, there is a San Francisco RazorWire office now, right? We haven’t even talked to Mario about that yet.”
“Mario would say no.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You do. I do. Plus what the fuck kind of Bay Area-er would I be? Riding the Google Bus down to Palo Alto for meetings. Weekends for wine tours in Napa. Would I have to start smoking pot? Pot makes me paranoid. I don’t drink wine.”
“And you hate tours.”
“Right,” Regan said.
“Right.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
THERE WERE TWO CENTRAL MOMENTS Cassie focused on along her drive west in a U-Haul containing all of her possessions as she headed for San Francisco. Atelier had offered to buy her a plane ticket and have a moving service move her stuff cross-country, but Cassie liked the idea of three days alone in a truck—and more than that, she liked the idea of pocketing the ten thousand dollars in moving expenses the company had offered as a start-up fund. She owed almost half of it to her current landlord for the rest of the month and the next month’s rent since her lease required a month’s notice and she was giving zero months’ notice. And also since, though she’d believe it when she saw it, word was that SF was even more expensive than New York these days, what with all the Facebook Google Yahoo! Instagram capital out there.
The first moment was mundane enough. It came just east of Columbus, Ohio, on I-70 heading west. She was almost ten hours outside New York by the time she started seeing signs for the turnoff to I-71N. The blue-and-white sign served as a kind of trigger to childhood memory. She was surprised to find herself flooded with ambivalence. It was just two hours up 71 to her parents’ house. She’d told them she was moving but hadn’t filled them in on any of the details—it wouldn’t take much to make a detour, spend the night there.
She just couldn’t do it. She’d spent the better part of a year picturing Mark Brumfeld alone in his parents’ suburban basement, and if it hadn’t been before, that image—a thirty-something alone with his parents in the house where he grew up—had come to be the very metonym of failure, like a road sign heading south. The idea of sitting in the space of failure for even a night seemed too dangerous to test. She had momentum, and if her almost thirty years on the planet had taught her anything it was that you didn’t stanch momentum when you had it. When the video was moving ahead in real time you sure as shit didn’t hit the space bar. Forward forward forward was the path, the path away even from Regan and Mott Street and refurbished Brooklyn, and far be it from her to stop progress.
She did make a compromise with herself. She exited 70 in Columbus, where she could stop to gas up and get lunch. She and her friends came down to Cbus a couple times a year to see bands when she was in high school. When her friends had first said they were heading to Cbus to see bands she thought they were going to some kind of Sea Bus, a mistake that was dispelled when they arrived on two-dimensional-flat-and-landlocked-as-shit High Street. Around that time there were three punk bands from Cbus that actually got national attention, one of them even covered in Rolling Stone.
She drove down High Street past OSU, past the redbrick houses of German Village, and stopped at an Ethiopian place she’d always loved. She wondered if the owners would recognize her from her high school days, but it must have been their son who waited on her, so she ate her lamb curry, wiped up the sauce with the spongy injera under it in silence, alone. For all Manhattan had, it didn’t have any good Ethiopian she could find, and here she was in central Ohio, enjoying ethnic food she hadn’t had in years.
She ate in silence. She had no one to talk to. She’d forgotten the sheer pleasure of a meal alone. She’d made a deal with herself not to look at her phone, not to read the Times or keep up with media, while she was on this cross-country cleanse. When she got into the U-Haul in Brooklyn she swiped her phone to Airplane Mode, bought an atlas, and had it open on the empty shotgun seat next to her. But here in Blue Nile she had her phone on the table—doing so was reflexive—and she kept looking down at its black face. All that looked back up at her was, well, her.
The second moment that would stick with her forever occurred in Colorado. She’d been on the road for two days of long cross-Indiana, cross-Missouri, cross-Kansas driving when the Colorado border came into view. She’d seen on her road atlas—she didn’t use Google Maps, unplugged, it was all going to be unplugged and there wasn’t a USB cable in the U-Haul anyway—that there was an immense lake in the unironically named Kanorado (why not Coloransas? or Koloransas even? why fucking not?), right on the Kansas-Colorado border. It would be a little before noon when she hit the crossing, still in the low seventies now in mid-fall, and she figured she’d dip a toe in as she gazed west at the Rockies. But the lake was room temperature and furry with algae all the way to the water’s bottom, and before her lay the manifest destiny of AutoCAD-flat land as far as the eye could see—not only to the west, but in every direction.
She got back into the truck and found that the entire eastern third of Colorado was more Kansas than it was Montana—flat flat flat Kansasean land all the way to Denver. To her surprise, Cassie had found herself listening to talk radio more than music on the ride cross-country, but now she put on Nirvana and blasted “Territorial Pissings” at 38 of 40 on the volume on the dashboard.
So it was amid boredom and disappointment compounded by Krist Novoselic’s off-tune sardonic blaring of come on people now followed by Kurt Cobain’s distorted Fender Jaguar chords blurt blurt blurting that, twenty miles west pre-rush-hour traffic in Denver, with the sun moving toward her line of sight and pink beginning to bleed cut-steak blood across the far horizon, suddenly Cassie found herself driving through the first staggering outcroppings of Rockies.
She reached for the stereo and turned the music off.
Outside of Boulder, 70 cut through convex jagged cliffs looming down onto the highway. Cassie could feel her breath catch in her throat—she rolled down her window and tried to look up but no matter what angle she looked from she couldn’t see up to the tops, only every quarter mile or so getting a respite as the sun glinted phosphorous white through a break in the cliffs. It was like nothing she’d ever seen, felt like nothing she’d ever felt—the sheer physical mass of it kept taking her breath from her—and she was at ten thousand feet climbing switchbacks to drive over Independence Pass, over the Continental Divide, before Cassie realized that something new was in her head, crawling up her back, absent from the buzz in her forearms.
She wasn’t thinking about Mark.
She wasn’t thinking about Regan.
She wasn’t thinking about videos or the computer in her pocket.
She wasn’t thinking about anything. It made her wish she had a quarter of purple kush, that she had seventeen beers or a guitar in her hands, until she realized that it made her happy to have none of those things. She was at peace in a truck with no music on at all. Time was moving forward, her moving through it in a kind of eternal present. Even the instinct to click on one of Adobe Premiere’s gray boxes and edit, slash-cut, manipulate to tell a story, was gone. Images were gone. Sound and melody and harmony disappeared. Words were gone. Here she was, Cassie Black, alone in a U-Haul, free from love, free from sound, free from envelopment, free from her past, flying clear west toward the bright open future. She stopped at a pull-off just as she hit the most dr
amatic heights of Independence Pass. The air was rarified and icy in her nostrils and cold rang out in her ears and as she looked back east all she could see for miles were bright open valleys amid the Rockies. Even the instinct to take a selfie fled her as she realized that her phone wasn’t in her pocket. She didn’t even fucking know where her phone was—and if she did have it her instinct now would be to take a video, not a photo, and there wasn’t a thing to capture here. It was impossible to imagine that the flatness on the other side of Denver, all that Kansas spreading east all the way to St. Louis, existed at all. She shrank deep inside herself. All at once she was a toddler again. Fuck executive function. Fuck object permanence—if you showed her a penny then put it in your pocket right now, Cassie would assume it was lost to this world for all eternity. She didn’t give a shit. What she couldn’t see didn’t exist. All she wanted was just to breathe this air alone.
And she did.
Then she got back in her car and drove with nothing on the radio and just the sound of her tires whirring on the long flat blacktop until I-70 hit I-15 South, where she’d hole up for the night before the last leg of her trip across Arizona, Utah, and a long, flat expanse of Nevada tomorrow before she hit, for the first time in her young life, the soil of California.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
SO CASSIE WAS SINGLE, in a U-Haul with a couch and a half a ton of books from her bookshelves, pulling into a BP station outside of Baker on I-15W, when she learned of Costco Long’s bombing of the Social Security Administration Building and his and Mark’s arrests. She’d hit the California border. It didn’t have one-one-millionth of a percent of the effect of Independence Pass. After six hours of tearing across the blank Nevada desert west of Vegas, doing eighty-five in a rented truck and having Honda Odyssey minivans pass her doing a hundred, she saw the sign for California and saw it pass in the same desert blankness. Every iota of the freedom she’d felt the day before had disappeared in the grinding push of moving across Western desert. Maybe arriving at the Pacific would feel more exciting.
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