Boomer1

by Daniel Torday

  No matter what she was or wasn’t feeling, she had done it, she’d driven across the country alone and without the Internet and now she wanted the Internet again. She opened iTunes and hit the first song she saw, Violent Femmes’ first record in a flash blaring on the radio with its everything, everything, everything, everything—she rocked out to it for a second, then turned it down.

  She turned the key in the ignition, pulled it out, and pocketed it. She got out of the truck, filled it with gas, bought a Vitamin Water—the one with taurine for the jolt, though it tasted like the spit from someone who’d been eating a pomegranate popsicle—and got back into the truck. She located her phone in her bag and went to Options and slid the Airplane Mode to off, a little sliver of green going white, and then the thing started buzzing buzzing buzzing in her hand. Twenty-seven texts flipping through at rapid pace at the top of the screen, a little red superscript showing thirteen new voice messages, all of them from Regan. Well, and two from Natalia. Natalia? She didn’t even have time to look through any of it before she went ahead and called Regan.

  “Listen, you don’t need to worry,” Regan said.

  “Worry about what?” Cassie said.

  “Uh, about your own safety,” Regan said. “I already talked to my lawyer and he said you should call him as soon as you can. I’ll text you his number when we get off. They preserved all your e-mail here at the office, so I was able to access it, and clearly you had nothing to do with it.”

  “What. The. Fuck. Are. You. Talking. About.”

  “Uh, okay. I guess I should say: Where the fuck have you been? I’ve been calling for two days.” Cassie said that of course she’d been, well, everywhere there was to be between New York and Baker, California. Driving across country. She’d decided to put her phone on Airplane Mode until she got all the way west so she could have some peace.

  “And I did,” Cassie said. “I had some peace—holy shit, the Colorado Rockies! I’ve never seen anything like it. I think maybe I had an actual mystical experience or something.”

  “Airplane Mode is for when you’re on an airplane,” Regan said. “Because no one is on an airplane for two full fucking days while the world goes crazy while they’re gone.” Cassie didn’t say anything. “Well, whatever. Mark Brumfeld and his friend bombed the Social Security Administration Building. People died. It has totally overwhelmed the news. His friend is dead and Mark is in custody, but listen, you don’t need to worry.”

  “Mark … and Costco … did what the fuck now? Say again.”

  Regan kept talking but Cassie wasn’t listening. Couldn’t. Couldn’t bring herself to. Make herself. She took the phone from her ear and hit the big black button at the bottom and opened the Times app on her phone. There it was, the first story on Top Stories, or what used to be called The Front Page: Mark’s mug shot and a picture of Costco and a picture of smoke trailing up from the white buildings in Woodlawn Costco had driven them by when she was down in Baltimore just more than a month ago. What. The. Shit. The Times story went away and her phone just said “Regan” in that signature Helvetica Neue, and a green button to answer or a red button to tell her to fuck off. There was a weird ringing in Cassie’s ears that was different from the ringing she heard from the cold of the Rockies. She could feel a squiggle in her esophagus and she barely opened the door to the U-Haul in time to vomit pomegranate Vitamin Water onto the pavement of the BP station. She spit twice, three times, and called Regan back.

  “I had nothing to do with this,” Cassie said.

  “I know you had nothing to do with it,” Regan said. “So does our lawyer.”

  “Lawyer?” Cassie said. “Our?”

  “Yes. I’ve been in touch with him. He’s been in touch with a contact at the Bureau and you don’t have anything to worry about. I mean you’ll need to go in to make a statement, but beyond that you have nothing to worry about. I’ve been through your e-mails here like I said, and like I said they look great for you—Mark asking and pining for you but you just giving cold shoulder. Stuff about playing in a band together. And nothing at all about his activities.”

  “Been through my e-mails?”

  “Had no choice, dear Cassius Clay. You’ve been radio silent—Airplane Mode—for two fucking days, right after your ex-boyfriend committed a domestic terroristic act. You’re lucky you have me. And Lucien.”

  “The lawyer. Lucien the lawyer.”

  “Yes. He was awfully glad you had your contract from Atelier on your desktop, too. What a godsend that turned out to be. It’s all airtight, time-stamped and dated and clear cut. Even with you MIA. But still, call him right now. Don’t wait until you get to San Fran. Call him.”

  So she called Lucien the Lawyer.

  “Listen, first and foremost don’t worry,” Lucien Williams said.

  “I’m not worried. Do we know how he is?”

  “Who?” Williams said.

  “Mark.”

  “No,” Williams said. “Please don’t worry about him, either. Whatever trouble he’s in now he’s made for himself. And he’s made plenty.”

  And so that was it. She drove on to the Bay Area with her head full of Mark Brumfeld all over again. It would be weeks before she could think of anything else. Before anyone could.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  THE SECOND BIG CHANGE IN CASSIE’S LIFE, which only hit her a month or so after she’d been living in San Francisco, was that she found she didn’t need love anymore after all. She needed Regan for the contact with Lucien Williams. But FaceTime and chill was a complete nightmare with Regan, and after a single conversation with a federal officer at an unmarked office near Union Square, all the rest of the dealings to do with Mark, any official word, went through Lucien. Just like Regan said: Cassie’s e-mails, the timing and legitimacy of her move to work for Atelier that week, time-stamped documents, cleared Cassie of any final connection with Mark Brumfeld of any kind. She was almost a thousand miles west of Woodlawn when the bomb went off, eating lamb curry and injera in Cbus fucking Ohio of all places at the moment it exploded. Agents had talked to the waiter there and confirmed it. The paper trail of her interactions with Mark showed just what it was—a long history of an increasingly unhinged young man pining for his ex-fiancée and former bandmate, a fact that, true or not, played well into the government’s case against him. Terrorists were far more often spurred on by love than they were by hate, and if there was one thing Cassie could confirm for anyone, feebee or non-feebee, it was that Mark for sure did continue to love her. Of course she didn’t mention that at one point she may have loved him, too.

  Which in its own way confirmed for Cassie that what she did not need in her life, now or ever as far as she was concerned, was love. Love just fucked everything—everything—up. Maybe that was what she’d learned in that reverie at Independence Pass, a moment that felt more like the memory of a dream than a memory memory: she’d been alone, twelve thousand feet above Cbus level, and she’d been the happiest she was in years. She had a huge salary, a new apartment, a new city. Her conversation in O’Connor’s in Park Slope with Regan felt unreal when it happened, like the bottom line of a video she was editing on Premiere—all you had to do was select it and press Delete and—click!—it was gone. Whatever she’d felt or not felt for Mark, once he’d left New York for Baltimore, she had spent some time thinking about it. Mostly it was because he was e-mailing her all the time, but if Cassie was being honest, she thought about him, too. It wasn’t love but the residue love leaves, that need to know that care itself was immutable, that like energy it couldn’t be destroyed but could only be transmuted into new forms. And all forms for Cassie now were alone forms. The only love she would allow herself to feel would be love for herself, maybe love for a dog small enough to be crated and left in an apartment while she was at work all day.

  As she unpacked each weekend in her new apartment, she didn’t find herself thinking about Mark—or about Regan. The folks at Atelier had found her a one-bedroom on Mission be
tween Twenty-first and Twenty-second. It was small but she was used to small. On weekends she sometimes took her new Pomeranian, Polly, for a walk down to the green bulbous indica-bud hills of Dolores Park where she lay in the cool San Francisco sun among all the hipsters and start-up employees and weekend hippies, walked down Valencia to the McSweeney’s Super Hero Outlet or a place called the Curiosity Shoppe, where she bought decorations for her apartment. They sold books at both places, too, but it occurred to Cassie that along with not caring about love anymore, she couldn’t give a living fuck for the written word. She’d spent a year-plus fact-checking for a website and now she’d moved into video. Video was so much more satisfying. The sheer number of more views, more hits, you could get for a video than for even the viralest of viral listicles was undeniable. There was a store in Noe Valley where you could buy books by the pound, selecting them by the color of their spines. Cassie bought thirteen pounds of pink-lemonade-pink books and three pounds of lime-green ones for her main living space a month after she’d arrived.

  If there was one thing living in the Mission had showed her after just a month, it was that even with the ginormous new salary she was earning, she would need to make a whole fuckload more money if she was going to live well in California.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  THE LAST TIME CASSIE heard direct word of Mark in her life came a year after she’d moved to San Francisco to work for Atelier. She was producing and acquiring videos for the company at a crazy pace, and she rose rose rose through the ranks. There was a Mario here at her new job, too, but this new Mario’s name was Jason, and in addition to VP for native content video development, he gave her the title of chief of recruitment.

  “Dude, you can just spot talent like a motherfucker,” Jason said a couple months into her job. The new office had no bocce court, but it did have a bank of Ping-Pong tables at the center of the warehouse space, and Cassie had grown up with a Ping-Pong table in her basement as a kid, so unlike on the bocce court, there was no learning curve. She could kill anyone in the company, and did on breaks. “I think you should just look for folks making the best video out there and bring them on. Make offers. Do it to it.” He served from his left to her right and the ball skittered out past them and into the banks of cubes at the middle of the big open loft off Union Square where they worked.

  So one day, a year into the job, Cassie went back to her desk and saw that she had an e-mail from one Julia Brumfeld. Mark’s mother. Great motherfucking Caesar’s ghost. Julia Sidler Brumfeld. She hadn’t thought of that name in months. Finally. The terroristic stink of her association with Mark hadn’t followed her here—one thing Lucien Williams was good at was keeping information under wraps—and she sure didn’t need it. She wasn’t going to e-mail Julia Fucking Brumfeld from her work e-mail. She went to take a picture of Julia’s e-mail with her phone—she didn’t even want to type it with her thumbs—but she had to slide the photo function to the right, off of “Video.”

  Her camera app was always set to video these days.

  Before she could head off to lunch she wanted to get in touch with some new talent she’d been watching at RazorWire. In the beginning she’d handled recruitment a little like Jason had when he first wrote her, super informal, but at times she’d find that she didn’t hear back from people at all when she did so. She saw one talented meme developer at a conference that winter and asked him why she hadn’t written her back, and the meme developer looked at her funny. “Wait, that was actually fucking you, the Cassie Black, writing me? Honestly it was so casual I thought it was a joke. I would’ve moved out here to work for you. I just work from my parents’ basement in Bethesda right now.”

  So when she wrote to potential major recruits she’d take it far more seriously, as she did now. She didn’t know the guy’s full name but his screen name was DiceHard.

  “Dear Dice Hard,” she wrote. “I’m writing as I’ve recently become a big fan of the work you’re doing on screen captures from eighties films. You’re use of Space Balls footage in and of itself is wildly imaginative. I wonder if you might be interested in sitting down with me and some colleagues about some amazing opportunities we have here at Atelier these day? Are work in Native Content videos, particularly some new ideas we’ve been developing in the realm of Crowd Sourced Political Video News Clips, are prepped to explode in advance of our upcoming IPO. Please do give me a call hear if this sounds like it could be interest”—Cassie typed in her cell number, her office number, and hit Open-Apple-S to save it to her desktop. In the past she would’ve almost certainly have printed the letter out and proofread it—there was just so much you could catch when you printed, typos and errors you didn’t ever pick up on-screen—but the truth was that Atelier didn’t have a printer in their office. Everyone there was twenty-two, and twenty-two-year-olds were the first generation in the history of the world who didn’t do their reading on anything but screens. Some of her colleagues there didn’t even compose formal documents on laptops or desktops, but did so right on their phones, as if the concept of opposable thumbs had culminated in the ability to type quickly on a tiny touch screen. Thumb thumb thumb thumb thumb. So Cassie didn’t save her letter and let it sit for the afternoon so she could see it with fresh eyes as she might have in the past, but just went ahead and attached it and hit Send. Send.

  She decided she’d take a walk to clear her head while she waited to hear back from DiceHard. Halfway down Market she pulled out her phone and e-mailed Julia Brumfeld back. What the fuck did she want? Why was she getting in touch at all?

  “I was hoping we could talk,” Julia wrote. “Maybe I could ask you some questions via e-mail.”

  No way was Cassie going to create a paper trail with Julia Brumfeld, fully a year after the last time she’d even been in touch with the woman’s son. She knew in advance what Lucien the Lawyer would say about her having been in touch even this much. She wrote back—“no-can-do but if you want to call me on my cell I guess we could talk”—and went down to a bodega to buy a pack of Ammy Spears. She needed a cigarette. She paid her thirteen dollars for a pack and looked at her phone again.

  “I’m not good on the phone these days,” Julia wrote. “I’m sorry. But I would really, really love to be in touch with you, sweetie.” Before she could think better of it, Cassie typed, “Well we could FaceTime if you want.” Julia wrote back to say that could work. Cassie was in the middle of typing to say she was really busy at work today but that she’d be happy to set up some time to talk this weekend when her phone started buzzing in her hand, and a 410 number popped up in Helvetica Neue. Julia was trying to FaceTime with her right now, while she was standing outside on Market Street, amid the din of Japanese tourists, tourists from Milwaukee and Chicago and Phnom Penh lumbering by on streetcars.

  Well, what the fuck.

  She hit the green button on the phone.

  Nothing at all happened for maybe ten seconds. Cassie tried to formulate thoughts, to anticipate what Julia might want, but before she could there was Julia Brumfeld’s face on the phone. She looked older, her hair almost entirely gray, strands of bangs falling across her forehead. In the upper right-hand corner of the screen Cassie saw herself. She had aged, too. Her hair was just plain dirty blond now, the memory of blue streaks in it long passed, and she could see where the faint lines of crow’s-feet had started to spread back at the corners of her eyes. The resolution of the Retina display on her iPhone was so impressive.

  “So,” Julia said.

  “So,” Cassie said. She turned the corner and put her back to a wall on Fulton, far from the madding tourist crowd.

  “Can you do me a favor while we talk?” Julia said. “I know it sounds weird, but if you could make sure you’re looking into the phone camera, I’d appreciate it. I just need to be able to see your mouth to hear you.”

  “Sure, whatever,” Cassie said. “So this is weird. I don’t know if we should be in touch. Why don’t you tell me what you wanted to talk about.” The FaceTi
me cut out for a second. Julia’s face froze there, unmoving, like she was stuck in time. Watching for her, waiting for Julia to return, the rest of the world fell away from Cassie. Technology was addictive when it was working, but when technology wasn’t working, it was more addictive than heroin. All one’s desires and thoughts went to waiting for—hoping for—it to work again. There was no frustration like the frustration of a frozen screen. It was worse even than a blank one. So Cassie was now more focused on Julia Brumfeld than she’d ever been on Mark, and she watched as the image on her phone sped way up and all at once Julia was in the middle of a couple sentences sometime in Cassie’s unforeseen future.

  “—and so the truth is I didn’t go down to talk to Mark much at first. I was busy and a little angry. A lot angry. But now I’ve been down there monthly and I’ve come to some peace with him. Not with what he did, but with him. My son. I don’t even get out of the house much, and I miss him. I’ve been piecing back together what those days before—before. Were like. And Mark said it would be okay to contact you. Also this won’t make much sense but I thought I saw you in a Dean and Deluca’s down in Georgetown. And. And I wondered what you knew.”

  “I know nothing,” Cassie said. “I mean, nothing. We e-mailed around that time, but he didn’t tell me anything about what he was doing.”

  “Well, you did come down to visit that weekend when I saw you.”

  “I know I did,” Cassie said. “But it wasn’t like that. Mark had pretty much walled himself off at that point—I mean I knew he was lonely. He was so damn isolated.” She saw something change in Julia’s face and stopped for a second. “Sorry. I know he was with you so I don’t mean it that way. But like without people his age or who he could fall in love with or kiss on or whatever. He told me he was lonely. I knew he wanted to get back together so I avoided conversations about that kind of shit. Do. Still do. Avoid conversations like that.”