Boomer1

by Daniel Torday

  Cassie looked down into the phone. She could see Julia look away to her left, then back at the screen. The feed cut in and out again so Cassie moved a couple steps away and turned her back to the building behind her. Now the connection was much better but with the sun at her back she could see that the image of her in the upper right-hand corner was alternating between visible and invisible—and just a glaring blot of white sun. It eased something in her not to have to look at herself while she was talking.

  “The truth is that when we were together on days like that we just played music. We were working out this Louvin Brothers tune and we spent most of the time just working over the chorus and some harmonies—”

  “Which?” Julia said.

  “Which what?”

  “Which tune.”

  Cassie hadn’t thought of that afternoon since it happened and it did bring her some happiness to think of it—it was the last time she’d touched a fiddle. There was a peace to losing herself in playing and singing, but she did remember that she didn’t get the jolt, the joy, she once had out of it, either.

  “Well, there were two,” Cassie said. “‘If I Could Only Win Your Love’ and ‘You’re Running Wild.’ We both loved them both.”

  “Wonder why,” Julia said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Those songs both have some pretty clear lyrics,” Julia said. “Jilted, lonely songs.”

  “I don’t really think that much about lyrics when I’m playing,” Cassie said. “Was. Was playing. I don’t play anymore. But when I did. I always focused on the notes, the melodies. So that’s all I can remember to say about it,” Cassie said. “I don’t remember a whole lot more.” Cassie looked at her face in the upper right-hand corner of her screen and it was just a big white blurt.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” Julia said. Cassie could see a pained expression on her face, her eyes squinted in and her lips scrunched. “The sun was just blaring over you while you were talking. I didn’t get much of that. You said something more about the Louvin Brothers’ lyrics?”

  Cassie peered into the screen and for the life of her she couldn’t bring herself to talk music right now. Music was finally out of her life. She was free from that particular striving. She’d said it once and she wasn’t going to try to remember again. A green-and-gray box carrying text popped up on her screen and she saw it was from DiceHard—“Totally into Atelier and super interested to hear all about Native Content political division et al. Have a free minute now can talk.” Cassie thumbed the green phone icon again.

  “Something like that,” Cassie said. “That’s all there is to say, Julia. I’m sorry about all of this for you, but I don’t know how much I can help you.”

  “Still having a hard time seeing you,” Julia said. “I didn’t catch—”

  “I know you didn’t,” Cassie said. “I know. Well, maybe we’ll do this again sometime but the truth is I gotta go deal with some business shit right now.”

  Cassie turned her back to the wall again and though she could now see her own image in the corner of the screen, Julia’s face had frozen again. The connection was just awful. Who knows if Julia even heard what she’d said or would hear what she said next, so Cassie said, “I’m sorry for you, Julia, and I know your life ended up a mess because of Mark, but this shit is out of my life now and I want it gone forever good-bye.”

  Cassie put her thumb to the red button at the bottom center of the screen and cut off the call. She would never know if Julia heard the last of what she said. She took out an American Spirit, lit it up, and called DiceHard so they could talk about the possibility of him joining her in a lucrative new opportunity at the horizontally integrated content-driven web company where she was now, and where she hoped she would be for many of the years ahead, working.

  PART TEN

  COUNTERPOINT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  THERE WAS ONLY ONE THING Julia Brumfeld wanted in the months and years after her son was branded a domestic terrorist, and that was to be left alone. She was too old to look for a job again, and she was collecting Social Security after all, and selling her instruments had brought in more than she ever could’ve hoped to earn at a job. She stopped contacting her friends and she stopped calling her old friends from growing up and she stopped making trips to Philadelphia to see her extended family. If Julia Brumfeld wanted one thing beyond being left alone in the days following her son’s actions, it was not to have to leave her house at all.

  And though the one thing Julia wanted was to be left alone, Cal grew quickly and ardently committed to finding some way to get her out of the house. Months passed, and then more months, and Cal wanted to take Julia to the aquarium, out to dinner downtown. He wanted to get in the car or on Amtrak and head up to Philadelphia, to leave the country (which they couldn’t really justify with all the legal bills anyway) or to just go out to a movie. He wanted to get her to go shopping for clothes at the Nordstrom’s or go shopping for groceries at the Giant or to go just do something. Anything.

  She wouldn’t.

  Above all Cal wanted to take Julia to see the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. He’d said it for almost a year and she failed to respond just as long. It was the one thing he was consistent on and persistent about. Still she said no, and without the help of hearing aids, it was easy enough for her just to pretend she hadn’t heard him offer. It had taken a full week to clean the house from the FBI raid and in all the cleaning she’d not been able to locate her hearing aids. The last thing she wanted to do was go back to Dr. Steinway to get new ones made. She’d make do without them. No matter how vehemently she did not want to go out, it made leaving the house easier when the time came.

  First were the looks she got in the Giant when she did finally go out for groceries. People had been telling her about Fresh Direct for years, a service that would deliver your groceries to your house, but if anything Julia was more intimidated by the idea of going onto the Internet to do anything at all. She could hole up for only so long—she could keep from the rest of her daily activities, but she would have to go to the Giant and pick up groceries. When she was accosted in its famously minuscule parking lot—“What’s it feel like to be the mother of a terrorist?” the woman was saying and Julia would never know for how long she’d been saying it, didn’t hear the woman until she was right up in front of her—she started driving the twenty minutes to Catonsville where, though she might still be recognized, at least it would take people a minute to place her face. Which had been all over CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, for months after the bombing. An image of their squat brick Pikesville home was seared into cultural memory like OJ’s white Bronco, the house in L.A. where the SLA made their final stand, the swastika at the middle of Manson’s head. Agoraphobia, a therapist would’ve diagnosed, if Julia had had the heart to go to a therapist. Until therapists started making house calls, she wasn’t interested in therapists.

  “I’m sorry, my love, but you’ve got to get out of the house,” Cal told her again and again. He was her opposite—he could hear everything where she could hear nothing. He could hear the clicks of her tongue when she disagreed with him, the whirr of the air-conditioning mid-fall when he felt it was an unreasonable expense to keep the house so cold. But Cal wouldn’t be able to truly hear music if it was blaring in his ear. Julia still caught the rhythms of her day, if not their melody, then the cadence that grew more precise and confined the longer she stayed in the house: the ticking in the soles of her feet as the refrigerator made its ice, the liquid r’s and n’s of the boiler coming on in the basement all winter, the sibilants of the central air-conditioner out back all summer.

  But now the beginning of winter was just about here. It had been a year since she’d been out of the house to run basic errands. Finally one night when Cal said, “Let’s just go downtown and see the symphony next week, I want to take you, I will not take no for an answer,” after a year of refusing, Julia gave in. She didn’t know what had changed. Maybe it was the oiliness of
her unwashed hair, the creak of her back as she realized she didn’t even leave the house anymore. Mostly it was just that she didn’t think she could listen to Cal complain anymore. If it would get him to stop asking, she would go to the BSO.

  First order of business was that she would, in fact, have to go to the Nordstrom’s to get something to wear. She avoided the Towson Town Center where she was certain to run into people she knew and instead made a day of it down in Georgetown. It was only an hour-plus drive down I-95, and she parked on M Street. In the Laura Ashley she found a turquoise printed dress that looked almost like something Stevie Nicks might have worn in the late seventies. She went into the dressing room, where in the mirror, in that small space, she found two things at once: first, she looked a lot older. Not in any particular way—her hair was just more fully straw-colored, her eyes more puffed with nimbussed skin. She came out into the store wearing the new dress before she realized a salesgirl was asking if she needed any help. She found that in fact she didn’t. She didn’t need help. She still wanted to be left alone. Her whole body felt the vague pain of being in public. But she was happy enough, in fact, at purchasing a new dress, at being out of her house for an entire afternoon without seeing a single person she knew. If anyone on M Street in Georgetown recognized her, she didn’t recognize them.

  Before getting back in the car for her ride home to Baltimore she walked down to the Dean and Deluca, where she ordered a prosciutto panini and saw a girl who looked exactly like Mark’s girlfriend Cassie. Same brown hair, same confident grin. She almost walked up to her but who was she kidding? This wasn’t Cassie. Prickles washed over her body. It was as if she was responding to internal stimuli. It was a phrase she hadn’t thought of in years and hadn’t thought of in relationship to Mark because she didn’t allow herself to think about Mark, just allowed her heart now to face northwest to the prison where he was being held, where she and Cal went to visit him for conversations that neither told her anything new about what had made him do what he did nor gave her a sense of how he was doing now. And now that he was in her head again she saw flashes of images she hadn’t seen in years—three red streaks on a white tile floor, her bubbe ironing tinfoil—and a new image, the floor of her living room covered in the stuffing from her sofa.

  Julia had had her head down on the table in front of her before she realized anyone was even near her. She felt the hand on her shoulder and she sat bolt upright.

  “Just seeing if you were okay, ma’am,” the man said. He was store security, wore a baggy white shirt. He was a kid of maybe twenty-five.

  Julia told him she was fine, she was fine, and she walked back to her car.

  When she returned to her house she decided that if she was going to go to the BSO with Cal, first she wanted to do one thing.

  She wanted to talk to that Cassie Black.

  She knew from what she’d read about Mark that he’d been in love with her still, that people wanted to believe his unrequited love for Cassie had had something to do with all that happened. She didn’t know if that was something she could ask.

  It took almost the whole rest of the afternoon for Julia to figure out how to use the Google app on her phone. She typed in “Cassie Black” and there was a huge list of women with that name. She knew Cassie had worked at that website, though, and it didn’t take her that long to discover a story from AdWeek that said Cassie Black had left RazorWire for some other company called Atelier. These companies all had huge websites with easily discoverable e-mail addresses. All you had to do was press your thumb on the address and suddenly you were writing an e-mail. It was almost too easy. Julia wrote Cassie and Cassie wrote her back and the next thing she knew she was pushing a button that said “FaceTime” and there, like the two of them were characters in the fucking Jetsons, was Cassie Black’s face and her own face, side by side. Julia couldn’t see her that well and her face kept freezing, but there was Cassie in her kitchen again, one last time.

  Julia asked Cassie a couple of questions about Mark. Cassie told her, in a way, what she wanted to hear—they just played music together, there wasn’t much more to know about it. They’d played Louvin Brothers songs, which made Julia’s heart leap up in her chest for a second, but she just felt a new jolt seeing Cassie’s face. She couldn’t hear much of what Cassie was saying, and the sun kept blotting out her face—just a big sharp white glare on her phone. Julia had to look away.

  “Well, look, I don’t know what I was even calling for,” Julia said. “I just left my house for the first time in ages, and I saw a girl who I thought looked like you down in Georgetown, and I thought I’d call.”

  She looked down at her phone, but there was nothing to see. Cassie’s face had frozen like some weird supernova flash on-screen for ten seconds, twenty, and if she was talking, Julia couldn’t hear it. She pressed the button on the side of her phone to turn it off. She took the new dress out of her Laura Ashley bag to clip the tags. She’d left her home for an extended period for the first time in a year for something not related to her son’s needs, and she was tired, winded even, but tomorrow night she would do it again.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  FRIDAY NIGHT ARRIVED as if it had preceded Friday morning. The last humid afternoons of summer had evaporated into fall, and with a low crack Julia could feel in her elbows the thunder dully snapped and the rains came. The sky cleared and the kitchen brightened like an invisible mouth was blowing into the space. The sun was casting thin pink onto the underside of ever whiter clouds, then causing everything to grow a little thin, grainy, brown. By the time Cal arrived home from work Julia was in her new turquoise dress. It was a size smaller than she wore before all that went down—she hadn’t been able to eat a full meal for a year. They got into Cal’s Audi TT, a purchase he had made two years before their son had been sentenced and their bank accounts run low by lawyers’ fees. They made their way down I-83 into the city, forgoing the prettier drive down York Road so they wouldn’t miss the opening. Cal hadn’t told her what they would be seeing—Dvorak? Beethoven? Bach partitas or solo piano sonatas? Stephen Reich or Rachmaninoff?—and Julia hadn’t had it in her to go onto the Internet to find out what it would be. Searching around for Cassie Black had been about the limit of what she could bring herself to do on Google. The BSO no longer advertised in The Baltimore Sun, so the information wouldn’t be there, either. The Baltimore Sun had never been much of a paper, but a person arriving in their house now directly from 1970 wouldn’t even recognize it as a newspaper at all, it was so thin. It was more of a pamphlet, a flyer, almost wholly devoid of any real news.

  As they turned down Calvert Street and then up Cathedral, the Meyerhoff arose out of the city streets before them like an orotund ship arising out of disparate waves, a cone of impenetrable sound arising out of silence, one big vibrating B-flat lifting up above the muted tones of the city.

  They parked and walked to the building. Inside Julia felt every look at her as if it were a physical touch, like every person she came in proximity to was too close, their gazes like the literal strike of a needle tip against the skin of her arms. That was one of the strangest things about her loneliness—there was no prickle in her cheeks, her face, though to be sure she blushed. But anxiety itself, the pain of being looked at when you didn’t want to be looked at, arose as prickles across the tops of her arms, the skin on her raw, pink knuckles. She knew Mark loved a Galway Kinnell book he kept on his shelf, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone, a book federal agents had confiscated when they tore up his room, but that she found in a bookshop in Fells Point months later, one of her few excursions out of the house in those first months after the bombing. She’d read it maybe two dozen times now, had come to know the impressionistic greens and reds of the Klimt detail on its cover. She guessed that the lines that resonated with her most were not the same lines that struck her son, but hers were the opening lines, about not harming so much as a mosquito or a toad. Its tranquil cadences and sense of pacifism, ahimsa, were so precis
e Julia couldn’t help but wonder if her son had ever even read that stanza himself. When she looked around her in their house, in their lawn, on the way to the Catonsville Giant, Julia saw the world as a series of signs Mark had missed, drawing him away from his actions. She hoped to read them where he had failed.

  No matter. As she walked across the red velvety carpets of the Meyerhoff, Cal went to check their coats, and she entered the airy white space of the hall as if walking onto a spaceship for abduction. She wore her new turquoise dress but she noticed what at first seemed like a galling lack of formality in everyone else in the place. The last time she and Cal had gone up to Manhattan to the Met she’d been surprised at how few tuxes she saw, at how men now often wore suits to the opera, but this was different. A man with a huge beard passed her in a tie-dye Grateful Dead shirt from the Lithuanian Olympic Basketball team. She didn’t believe the bromides about the other senses growing stronger when one went deaf or blind—that hadn’t been her experience—but now she could detect the skunky smell of weed on him. He brushed past her and she almost jumped to get out of his way.

  She made her way all the way down to the front row, where Cal had gotten them seats. Three places to her right was a couple as dressed up as she and Cal were, but she looked down to see the man was wearing Birkenstocks. She hadn’t seen those sandals in years. They were just so awful even in the right context. Here in the Meyerhoff they were a direct affront to her sensibilities. Had the entire population of Baltimore lost its mind? She could see the spidery hairs atop his big toes and it turned her stomach. His wife was looking right at Julia now, seeing what she was looking at.