“What was on your mind that whole show, Mark?” Cassie said. She wasn’t looking at him. They were belly up to the bar.
“I’ll have a Maker’s and soda,” he said to the bartender.
“You didn’t take one single break with any energy behind it. It was like I could feel the black hole across the stage when you were singing. We all noticed.”
What was there for Brumfeld to say? There was no way to tell the story without telling her what they’d tacitly promised never to talk about again, not in front of people at a bar—how he’d spent a half-dozen afternoons on Forty-seventh Street, walking in and out of the Hasids’ shops with his mother’s friend, looking at settings, looking at diamonds, before spending the ten thousand dollars he’d discovered he had access to on a ring for her, though she’d shown no perceivable signs she was interested in getting married to him, or to anyone.
“Just tired,” Mark said. “But you were amazing on your fiddle breaks all night. Killer double stops on ‘Wheel Hoss.’” Cassie blushed. No one didn’t like being flattered—compliment a clam effectively enough and it’ll give up its pearl. It was one of the best things Mark had learned as an editor, and used as an editor, though it felt inappropriate to use it in his personal life. He’d always believed the line between professional and private life was impermeable. Work was work and life was life, and unless protest and revolt were to take over your life, it was ever important to set up and keep up a line between the two. And now that he and Cassie were only bandmates, working together, he was uncomfortable crossing the divide.
“Thanks, Mark,” Cassie said. “That makes me feel good.” He saw a light in her eyes he hadn’t seen in months, if ever. It was like the light sparkling from a diamond.
It would be a year before the diamond returned fully to mind.
CHAPTER TEN
BACK IN HIS PARENTS’ BASEMENT IN BALTIMORE, Mark hit the space bar on his laptop keyboard. He transferred the video file he’d just recorded over to iMovie. He began editing. He left it mostly raw, left in a long silence a little more than halfway through. He slash-cut between each thing he’d said so that while it took him almost ten minutes to speak all those words on-screen, the video he created went for just over four. He had almost spliced it all together when he realized he’d forgotten the most important part. So while he’d need more material for the second missive, which he hoped to record in just a couple of days, and while he still needed to sign in to YouTube so he could post the video he’d made, he put the iSight back up, and he spoke for a couple minutes more, until he’d said all there was to say that first day.
Mark stood up from his desk aflame, crude oil fractured free from shale and lit by a spark, immiscible and joyous for the first cathartic time since the day he cowered home from New York City, in more debt than he could think about. He took a shower. While he showered he sang a baby boomer anthem to himself, a famous Buffalo Springfield song. He got out of the shower and dried off. He looked on the computer. It was like he’d been given a present, like the feeling of the first night of Hanukkah. The video was still there. He came back to his computer once more and spliced his speech about the Akedah into what was there before. He went to YouTube and uploaded it. He watched. Under the video it just said the number “one.”
One hit.
Him.
He was the first to watch it, to watch his own screed on-screen. He hit Command-Q and closed the browser on his computer.
Then he walked upstairs and said hello to Julia, who made him a pastrami on rye with deli mustard, the same sandwich she’d made him every lunch throughout high school.
PART THREE
JULIA
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JULIA BRUMFELD WAS NOT BORN JULIA BRUMFELD, just like the vast majority of the women of her generation were not born with the last names they carried for the entirety of their adult lives. She was born Julia Sidler and she would always be Julia Brumfeld née Sidler, whether people thought of her that way or not, a secularized Jewish girl growing up in a theologically stringent Orthodox household in the westernmost neighborhoods of Philadelphia in the fifties and sixties, daughter of a WWII veteran and, in the years ahead, an alumna of the finest Friends schools in the area, product of the spoils of the biggest war of the century, which in turn bought an education with the people who invented conflict resolution and peace. When she was asked what struck her most in the days after her son Mark became one of the most notorious revolutionaries in the U.S. since Weatherman filled the thoughts, hopes, and fears of her friends at Syracuse when she was still an undergrad over the broken course of almost six years, what struck her most about those days he was broadcasting his revolutionary views from her suburban Baltimore basement—which she’d spent weeks emptying of her vintage instruments to make room for him in what had once been his bedroom—without her knowledge, making her a pariah until the end of her own days, Julia Brumfeld did not answer. She knew her rights. She had not enjoyed the days of officials from the FBI coming to her house to ask questions, their guns and badges left carefully innocuous on the seats of their unmarked black sedans parked curbside outside her house. But she was savvy enough to know that she should not say much. It took all the forbearance she had not to discuss it, not to express anger at their presence—or, frankly, at Mark’s—but she did not divulge information or bear emotion. She’d hidden enough of her own secrets from him over the years. It seemed only natural once it came to pass that he’d been expert in hiding his.
For two frantic weeks before Mark returned to their basement, months before she even had an inkling that her son had the slightest interest in anything revolutionary, Julia spent her days clearing the guest room on their second floor of everything but its guest bed in order to make room for her fiddles, her father’s old Martin D-45, mandolins, and mandolas, and her record collection. For almost a decade now since her son had moved out to attend college in rural Maine, and then on to New York City, where he’d tried and now failed to make it as a journalist and then an academic and then a musician and a writer, her husband had kept her happy by buying for her and allowing her to buy the expensive vintage instruments, whose value had skyrocketed in the past decade. Between the return of the popularity of bluegrass music in the days after the planes flew into the buildings—there was a sense of a return to things most identifiably American, to all things Americana in those Patriot Act–infused days—and the fact that Japanese collectors had taken to buying old mandolins and arch-top guitars to frame and hang on their walls, vintage instruments were as valuable as they had ever been. And so it was both a boon for Julia, who still picked her fiddle up from time to time to keep herself happy and who had learned to play mandolin and guitar over the years of teaching and playing but would never have let Mark bring these expensive old mandolins to the beery bars where he played (she’d seen the beer stains inside his own F-5)—and for Cal, who had grown convinced that buying a ten-thousand-dollar mandolin that would in five years be worth eighteen was a surprisingly safe investment.
But then Mark announced he’d be returning, tail tucked, to Baltimore. In two weeks. And so for two weeks it was all Julia gave her time over to, clearing out the basement of its instruments and records and high-backed, armless chairs where she would go down to play, so that now she could clear out a second-floor guest room and move them up, one by one in their expensive hard-shelled Calton cases and stands and set them all up in a guest room where guests couldn’t stay in comfort without the imposition of music, music, music. All because when a son returned, tail tucked, to the house where he grew up, he expected to return to the room where he’d grown up. And when he was going to high school Mark had convinced his parents to let him move down to the basement for privacy—a word they understood later to mean “smoke pot without getting caught.” And of course it was more complicated than that—for as she opened up each case Julia found that now that she was playing her instruments less, they were all badly in need of work. She had seven fiddles and real
ly only played the one she’d had since she was a teenager, and as she opened each Calton case—each forest-green and Cadillac-red case with its humidity control and bulletproof back, making them the choice for traveling artists and sedentary rich ones like her, both—she found that bows’ hair had grown slack and tangled, that bridges needed resetting, that cracks on soundboards and fretboards of mandolins were in need of work, new work, old work. Work. Fixing up. So she took them two by two and three by three to the best luthier in the area, out in Owings Mills, and on the way there her nose was filled with varnish, with the particulate of years and decades of old rosin, with the smells that once covered her hands and her skin and filled her head with music, light, and memory.
It was memory now and it would become memory different in the months to come when her son returned and made her a pariah. If she was being honest, if she was to divulge the emotional reality of her memory in therapy, say—a thing she’d surely never do in the days after Mark’s actions—there were two images that overtook her preconscious mind. They were images that had always been not far from the surface, flashes of memory’s lightning that, she came to realize, had struck her throughout her life in times of crisis, and had struck her while she was cleaning out the basement. This was the way the mind handled crisis as far as Julia could tell. There was the immediate physical response, a wetness at the underarms, weird shots of spidery tingle in the hands and at the back of her neck. Sometimes there was a sour taste at the edges of her tongue. But the main response was one of reflexive memory: an image flashed, then another. These images came unbidden and remained unparsed and arrived without order, and perhaps in drunken conversation with Mark’s father she would begin to divulge them one day. But such a day had not yet arrived after more than three decades of marriage. Instead she was stuck experiencing those two images over and over, each time she opened a fiddle case to find a bow’s hair had grown slack, and later when she saw her son’s name on a network news report that flattened his story into something people had decided to compare unfavorably with radical Islamist terrorism and call “generational domestic terrorism,” dangerous, single-faceted; every time a letter came via registered mail with a new summons or clarification of charges or lawyers’ fees, every time later when she went into the city and on the ride out Falls Road, she found that an unmarked black sedan seemed to have been following her, fifty yards back, since she got on Park Heights Ave. Through it all the two images were the same, one seemingly innocuous, one whose odious severity was undeniable and not subject to interpretation:
The first image was of her bubbe, Bertha, ironing tinfoil. That was how she remembered her grandmother. Her zayde, Herschel, was a foreman at a shoe factory in the northwest of the city. He walked the three blocks every day to the small factory to oversee the production of those shoes. Her mother worked nearby, worked all the time since her father’s mind had fallen apart, his business with it. Most afternoons when she was a child Julia would go to her bubbe’s row house in East Mt. Airy, where she would help her at her chores. So that was the image: Bubbe Bertha ironing tinfoil. Tinfoil was a different proposition in those days, a robust product, thick and substantial and suggesting a certain possibility of reuse, a sheet of thin metal used sparingly if at all. When she was a kid it had only existed on the market for less than a decade, was still a kind of novelty, to wax paper what two generations later the iPod was to the Walkman. What struck Julia if she thought back on those days was that her family wasn’t well-to-do but they weren’t yet hard up, and what brought her loving bubbe with her ankles covered in raised purple veins that looked like they spelled out in sanguinated Arabic some indecipherable verse from the Koran and whose flowered candlewick dresses hung off her like the skin off an ancient Congolese elephant to reuse this tinfoil with such ardor was an atavistic need of a generation prior. Bubbe Bertha was only a decade removed from the worst of those years between the Depression and the War, when even to have a luxury like tinfoil, when it came on the market, was more than most had. It made sense she would be plagued still by whatever fear of penury surrounded everyone for decades—until long after the war ended. But the next war was over, the U.S. had won, and all that was coming back from across the Atlantic was good news, good cheer, and pounds, lire, marks, drachmas, forints, francs, all the sovereign money that would buy U.S. goods and services and make their lives here in the westernmost neighborhoods of Philadelphia easier for decades to come, bringing prosperity, relative ease, and unlimited options to the next generation. It was the beginning of a period, an era, that appeared then to have no limit.
If she was even more honest, Julia Brumfeld would admit no scrim or interpretation so full and knowable came to her in those days after her son came to incite violence against his own government, against the country her father had lost his sanity fighting for. It was simply the image: an old steam-powered iron sweeping again and again over a piece of tinfoil on a countertop. Out of the top of the triangular white iron, translucent clouds of evaporating water would puff like the spume of a whale, huffing out sound like something live and breathing. If Julia got too close, Bubbe would stick her substantial knee out, shift her weight, and direct her granddaughter away. Julia had no idea how old she herself had been at the time—five?—eight?—could she have been as old as ten or eleven even, moving toward her early teens, that period they now so facilely called the “tweens” in young girls, as if to diminish the fact that one wrong move could lead them to progeny of their own?—only that she was there, that she had no real purpose but to watch Bubbe at her ironing. The crink, crink, crink of the iron passing over foil, each of the myriad wrinkles finding its half-indelible pattern turned flat, turned back to the foil that might cover a glass container of lard-soaked Brussels’s sprouts, a dozen chicken livers, whatever found its way to the Frigidaire or the pantry in the days ahead.
And again the more she was honest about what she had seen in those days, the more Julia would admit there was no context, there was no knowledge, there was no world or abstraction these images carried. There wasn’t a narrative. She could not have recounted that image, could not have told a story about it, because there was no story to be told—narration implied causation, one thing leading to another in a knowable way. She did not know what having remembered this image caused. It could not be divided, splintered, or repelled.
She did not remember at the time how the light looked filtering slowly into that kitchen on East Sedgwick Street, east of Germantown Avenue, though when she tried to think of how that kitchen looked, she realized most memories were not of the kitchen itself, but of a picture she’d seen of the kitchen in her later years. She did not know how much of this was how her mind worked, and how much of it was simply how the mind worked: there were memories of events, events both traumatic and mundane, meaningful or seemingly without meaning. And then there was the recounting of those events, the keepsakes we looked at again and again which became their own memory. She knew that she did not suffer from what the new generation seemed at every turn to want to call PTSD. PTSD suggested to her that trauma was singular and finite, an event that took place like the snapping of a picture, then ended. There was nothing “post” about what she was suffering. There was no single event that had transpired, then ended. It occurred to Julia Brumfeld almost daily that PTSD must be the most egregiously mis- and over-used medical term in the history of American popular culture. There were soldiers in VA hospitals all over the country who actually suffered from it; most likely her own father suffered from something very much like it long before the term was coined in the very city where they lived. But she herself suffered and suffered and suffered from something that was neither post- nor trauma, not finite nor ended. She suffered from an eternal and eternally recurring present. She suffered while she cleaned out her basement in advance of her son moving back in; she suffered while the smells of the luthier in Owings Mills where she brought her favorite fiddle to get set up filled her nose. She suffered in the months when after h
er son was arrested she couldn’t bring herself to leave the house to do anything other than shop for groceries—an activity during which she suffered even more. She recognized that perhaps the greatest misunderstanding her son’s generation had of the world was the misguided belief that an event transpired—traumatic or mundane, painful or mundane—and then ended in an ineradicable clean way, like a television show or a YouTube clip that began when called forth by the pressing of a right-pointing isosceles triangle, could be skipped by that triangle paired, replayed by a click on an arrow manipulated into a spiral, moved in a direction left or right: to the left, back in time; to the right, forward. This belief wasn’t religious but it was a belief system like any other—and perhaps more erroneous than most, cloistered and credulous. Had any generation in the history of the world been so duped about the nature of time, been rendered so complacent by the appearance of control over perception? Facts so easily undermined: That an event could take place in the time it took for it to be viewed as a video. That the reproduction of the event could be recounted in the same span it took for the event to take place. Julia knew that time was not finite in such a way, that it wasn’t finite at all—there were no beginnings and endings and then retrospective suffering. There was time experienced in a single eternal present of being, being, being, being, being. Julia didn’t know what memory was or why images flashed at her amid this eternal present, but she knew those images themselves were not finished. They existed and persisted in her mind, neither to be overcome nor forgotten.
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