Boomer1

by Daniel Torday

  For her first week at the company Cassie opened the file to look for pieces, but after four days of finding nothing there for her to work on—she read over a couple of listicles and caught spelling errors, the purview of a copy editor but there was no copy editor, and signed off on them, while it was unclear if she was even supposed to—she stopped checking so much. She went on iTunes and bought the new tUnE-yArDs record, listened to it three, four, sixteen times, while pounding out rhythms on her desk and watching from a distance as Regan played bocce with her coworkers. She left for long lunches, scouring her part of SoHo for the best cheap pho place. One afternoon she walked all the way down Mott to Chinatown, where the summer heat made fish blood smell like the city itself had vomited, pushed in by the press of tourists and workers out on lunch break. On the Tuesday of her fourth week, just as she was beginning to feel she had no real purpose at this office at all, she got an e-mail from regan@rw.com. The subject line was “bocce,” and the content in the note (she’d begun in her head calling all written material she read for work “content,” though if she’d realized she was doing so she might just spoon the frontal cortex of her brain out of her content-driven head through her content-driven nose in order to again feel emphasis-on-the-second-syllable content) just read, “Bocce. Ten minutes.”

  So the bocce-playing portion of Cassie’s time at RazorWire began. There were only seventeen employees who came to the company’s offices, as the vast majority of their content was provided by freelancers in Iowa or Boston or Qatar. Three of those on-site employees were Cassie, Regan, and Mario. So the three of them played a lot of bocce. Cassie was terrible. Both of her colleagues were seemingly ready to go pro. Mario had perfected the technique she’d witnessed on her first day before she knew it was him she was watching: ball in the hand, palm to the ground, flicking all five fingers toward the oak joists high above. The grace and ease of the subtle backspin it put on the ball allowed him to place a shot anywhere on the court, the ball sticking there without rolling forward or back after it landed. Regan, on the other hand, treated the game like she was a pro bowler with a pugilist’s sense of decorum. She flung balls underhanded like a softball pitcher—and with a pitcher’s natural sense of command. Every time Cassie felt she had a ball in position to score, even a ball touching the littler ball they were all aiming for (Regan told her it was called the pallino though Cassie didn’t have the temerity to ask in person, e-mailed her from across the office to find out), Mario would come in and drop a ball closer, or also touching. Then Regan would strut up, fling her own ball down the middle, scattering everyone else’s to the four winds and leaving her a winner. Cassie got better, grew closer to her colleagues, and she entered into a new relationship in the days that followed.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  BY THE TIME THE FIRST WAVE of Boomer Boomer videos calling for action against baby boomers across the country started to take over the news cycle in early fall, Cassie was afraid she was in love with Regan. This was the second major development in her world since Mark Brumfeld absconded for Baltimore, and it was somehow even less expected than her taking a job at RazorWire had been. She did hate Regan—Jordan—whatever she thought her name was—that first day they met at the TUT party. But as they stood down on Elizabeth Street smoking cigs (Regan called them cigs and though Cassie resisted at first, the two syllables saved did come to feel efficient in free-wheeling conversation), getting the stinkiest stink eye from all the healthy baby boomer Manhattanites and tourists passing them by, Cassie first came to find that she didn’t, in fact, hate Regan. That was a start. Regan had a certainty to her that came off as abrasive at first, a way of speaking so quickly and with such precision that it appeared she was a complete know-it-all. But as they began to talk more, Cassie saw that (a) Regan might be on the spectrum, and (b) Regan did seem to know almost everything about everything, which didn’t make her a know-it-all, but instead someone who did, in fact, know almost all. Of it. She was barely older than Cassie and yet she already had a Ph.D., had published multiple academic articles in major humanities journals, and now had a high-ranking job at one of the hottest start-ups in New York.

  On their second cig break down on Elizabeth, Regan asked Cassie outright if she’d read any recent issues of TUT. The last two were the edition with Mark’s Emma Goldman piece in it and the one after.

  “I haven’t.” Cassie had no choice but to admit it.

  “Why not?” Regan said. She didn’t look at Cassie when she said it—she had her eye trained to the gray sidewalk that was growing grayer in the covering of her own cigarette ash. A woman in her mid-sixties walked by and looked at them and said, “You know you’re not supposed to be smoking so close to that building,” and Regan said, “Fuck off.” Once the woman was out of sight so she wouldn’t see them acquiesce, they moved a couple hundred feet down, to the edge of a park. Back when she was a senior in undergrad, every person Cassie knew smoked, at least before finals week. The school paper reported that 93 percent of seniors polled smoked at least five cigarettes a day. Now, only six years later, smoking in public was like masturbating in public, only with less pleasure.

  “You still didn’t answer me,” Regan said. “The new one just came out. But why didn’t you read TUT 34? At a minimum you must have had to read Isaac’s piece after all he put into it.”

  “Mark,” Cassie said, correcting her. Regan just looked at her. Part of Cassie wanted to say it was because she didn’t fucking want to read a magazine with no pictures, with no celebrities, whose acronymic name sounded like an expression of parental disapproval. Tut. Tut, tut, tut. She’d heard they wanted to call the magazine Les Mots Justes but decided to rename it when they realized a lot of their friends thought they were saying Lame-o Juice. Lame-o Juice. But she didn’t say that. She thought better than to. Instead she said, “I guess maybe because I was so invested in it, in what it meant to Mark—Isaac, whatev-er—that now that he’s left the city, and it didn’t do for him what he thought it might, it would be just painful to have to go back through it, good or bad. Reading it would be more like the emotional experience of reliving watching Mark work on it than it would be like reading an essay. Which I wouldn’t want to do, either. And I really, really don’t want to have to talk to him about it. Thusly…” Cassie finished talking and waited for Regan to lay into her, to tear down all the reasons this made her anti-feminist, anti-intellectual, the subordinate in this formerly central relationship in her life.

  Instead she said, “That makes sense.” That she said it while rolling another American Spirit with its dry, coarse tobacco, while not looking up at Cassie, and without evidence of any emotion on her face, was a good example of why Cassie thought maybe she was on the spectrum, if just barely. It occurred to her that anyone not affable and full of social graces was referred to as “on the spectrum,” and that that could in and of itself be a signal that it wasn’t quite true, that most people’s grasp of what it would mean to be on the autism spectrum was probably pretty tenuous. Herself included. Honestly she had no real idea what it was even a spectrum of. But.

  “I do think you should have a look at the new Czolgosz we just put out, regardless,” Regan said. “I know it’s not your aesthetic or political bent, but it’s smart, I think. There’s a long comparative history of John Brown’s attacks in Osawatomie, and of Czolgosz himself, in there. All about how Brown was essentially the first American terrorist. His goals were pure: he was the strongest voice in favor of abolition and the only one doing anything, while Thoreau and Emerson and those lazy effete aesthetes just sat around Boston talking about it. But never mind Harper’s Ferry. He killed twenty-three people in Kansas trying to make a statement against expanding slavery into the territories. Cut off people’s hands while their wives and children sat inside waiting for him to bring them back. They had to hang him one way or another. But we should take him seriously in 2011.”

  Cassie didn’t know anything about John Brown, other than that a song she’d played at bluegrass
jams when she was a kid in Ohio was called “John Brown’s Body.” She didn’t know the lyrics. She’d never heard of the other guy, and she said so. She took a long pull on the American Spirit Regan rolled her with expertise despite its harsh tobacco. Stuff like that had stirred some of the love she was feeling—she didn’t have to ask. She just stood there on Elizabeth Street and talked and listened, and Regan took care of her nicotine needs without her even having to ask. She anticipated Cassie’s need for a cig, where Natalia anticipated being gone on a West Coast tour for much of the fall.

  “Leon Czolgosz was an anarchist who assassinated President McKinley. McKinley was on a whistle-stop tour. Czolgosz was pissed, had seen Emma Goldman speechifying and fell for her hook, line, and sinker, and McKinley was going to do away with the gold standard—it’s a complicated macroeconomic problem with a complicated background, but it was a major issue of the day, like talking about Islamofascism or NATO or the future of the Middle East today.

  “Anyway, Czolgosz walked up to McKinley while he was on a whistle-stop tour, in Buffalo, pulled out a pistol, and shot him in the gut.”

  For some reason the details, the names and references Regan was making, were sounding so familiar to Cassie. But she couldn’t place where from, so she didn’t say it. She could see Regan could see it on her face.

  Regan said, “Hold on while I finish. So McKinley was dead in a day. Czolgosz they put to death by the end of the week as well—can you imagine a world in which a capital case could be decided in a matter of days? They put him in front of a shooting squad, then they dissolved his bones in acid so there would be no remains for the rest of the anarchists to fight over, be spurred on by Czolgosz.” Regan took a long pull off her own cig. “You really didn’t read Mark’s piece on Emma Goldman? He was mentioned in there.”

  Cassie had to admit once again that she was so exhausted by the whole process with Mark and that piece that she’d never read it.

  “Okay, but you’re a bluegrass fiddler—you must have heard the song about him. There was a version on the Harry Smith anthology. Later I think Bill Monroe did it as ‘The White House Blues.’ It’s an old folk song.”

  “Shit, yes, right,” Cassie said. The sense of familiarity all came washing over her now, to the point that without even meaning to she sang a verse to Regan: “McKinley he holler, McKinley he moan, you gone and shot me with your Iver Johnson gun, you’re bound to die, you’re bound to die.” Cassie blushed, realizing she’d just been standing on a street corner in SoHo on a work break singing bluegrass music rather loudly and authentically. Regan just smoked and didn’t smile because she appeared to be incapable of smiling. Cassie hummed to herself, feeling some of her hiatus from music prickle on her skin—she’d barely touched her bass, let alone her fiddle, since taking the job at RazorWire. Regan was a fount of this stuff, knowledgeable about every aspect of American history, American folk music, posters, songs, and native religions.

  “What’s happening now with our very own home-grown anarchist?” Regan said. For the first time since they’d been out there, she looked around—it wasn’t clear if she was looking off anyone who might complain about their smoking, or if she was protecting them from ears in the next part of their conversation.

  “I don’t think he’s an anarchist,” Cassie said. “Not avowedly, anyway.” Neither acknowledged who they were talking about, just as neither of them acknowledged that after talking about the long essays she was going to publish in her journal, Regan would head back up to the RazorWire offices to edit a list called “Ten Amazing Things You Didn’t Know about J. K. Rowling!” But they had both worked on an essay about protests that were popping up all over the country, the main demands made on baby boomers by the Boomer Boomers as well.

  “Whatever outcome comes from these missives, from whatever’s brewing, it’s going to be anarchic. It might not be led overtly by an ideological principle of anarchy—there’s an oxymoron for you—but he has to think that anarchy is the only viable end product of his ideology.”

  Cassie said she didn’t have any idea of what the end product of any of his actions was at this point—it seemed like he was just a guy in his thirties without a job, living in his parents’ basement, having found some direction for his energies for the first time since his fall from grace and forced good-bye-to-all-that. She didn’t have the heart to say she hadn’t been in touch with him in almost a month, that when he did write her it was becoming clearer and clearer that he still pined for her and even if he didn’t say it outright, that she both didn’t want to tell him about her new gig—which might send him further into his rage—and didn’t want to tell him about Regan, whom she suspected he’d been attracted to and who she suspected she herself was now not only attracted to, but was starting to have feelings for in a deeper, more meaningful sense. So she just said:

  “I honestly don’t know. I guess I could ask him, or you could, but I honestly don’t know.”

  “I’m not going to e-mail him, if that’s what you mean,” Regan said. “I don’t even want contact with him on an IRC channel or anything. Not a good idea in any case. I’m trying hard to limit my online footprint these days.” Then she didn’t say anything. But there on the sidewalk in SoHo on a hot late-August afternoon she walked up to where Cassie was standing, put her hand on Cassie’s face, smiled for the first time Cassie had ever seen, and said, “Can I kiss you,” and when Cassie, amidst her surprise, said, “Yes,” kissed her, and Cassie kissed back.

  “I’ve been wanting to do that for a very, very long time. Since we first started coming out here for cigs. Or playing bocce. Or met each other.” And though the last claim wasn’t true for Cassie, the others were very, very true and so she said, “Me too,” and they went back up into the RazorWire offices to fact-check and edit, respectively, lists that would, with any luck, go viral on the Internet.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED, Cassie and Regan began to have what looked far more like an overt relationship than anything you might have called her romantic involvement with Natalia. Or with Mark, for that matter. Cassie didn’t hear from Regan for most of the weekend after they kissed until, on Sunday night, Regan texted her to say that she’d made a reservation at Prairie Fire, a haute cuisine restaurant on the third floor of the Time Warner/AOL Center, off Columbus Circle. The place was very far from either of them in Brooklyn, but it was an easy shot uptown from work on the R. It was implied they would simply leave work together after the day was done.

  Dinner was the best meal Cassie had ever eaten, and she and Regan kissed on the train home, hands on each other’s faces but little more, and up to Regan’s door on Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights, where the ailanthus trees spilled green oval leaves on the ground like they were undressing, and when Regan didn’t invite Cassie back up to her place, Cassie had no choice but to walk back to her own apartment, feeling jealous at the scantily clad trees the whole way back.

  This was as markedly different from any relationship she’d ever experienced, and so wholly in contrast to her recent trysts with Natalia, that she came to feel even a little paranoid: Did Regan not want her up in her apartment? Was she, in her weird on-the-spectrum way, not interested in sex? But they did kiss, Regan had initiated it—at work, it occurred to Cassie, which was no small risk—and they did seem so into each other. In the days ahead Cassie tried not to pay too much attention to how it was developing, and the attention Regan gave her on the bocce court, at cigs on Elizabeth Street, and in the few editorial meetings RazorWire held—their twenty-six-year-old founder said he was constitutionally allergic to meetings, had instituted a rule that meetings could only be called on Tuesdays and Thursdays, anything else could be handled by e-mail—that whatever paranoia she felt was present only when she wasn’t around Regan.

  It was amid the strengthening of that relationship that on a Thursday morning in September, Regan called Cassie over to her computer.

  “You’ll want to see this,” she texted her,
though they were sitting only a hundred yards from each other in the frigid office.

  Cassie came over to Regan’s computer, where she saw that what she thought was one of Mark’s videos was on, full-screen. He was in his David Crosby mask, imploring everyone who was watching to be a part of some new wave of action that sounded minor and overblown to her. Even amid all the evidence to the contrary, it remained hard for her to believe anyone would follow any of what Mark said into action, but why would anyone listen to anyone about anything? So.

  “This looks like a Boomer Missive,” he said. “But this is not a Boomer Missive. This looks like Isaac Abramson, Boomer1, but it is not Isaac Abramson, Boomer1. It is Boomer2. This is Boomer Action Number One. This country has lived long enough with the hegemony of the baby boomers and their profligacy. The time has come to start hitting back. We have shut down the American Association of Tired People. What will you do? We are Silence and we are myriad and we contain multitudes. Resist much, obey little. Propaganda by the deed. Boom boom.” When Cassie heard the person behind the mask identify himself as Boomer2, she realized that at least one person who wasn’t Mark Brumfeld was involved in the Boomer Boomers now. And he had posted a video calling for action to accompany the ideas Mark had put out there.

  Regan asked her if she knew anything about Isaac’s plans for the immediate future. Cassie said she hadn’t been in touch with him in a month but that she would write him. So she went right back to her desk and e-mailed Mark, being careful not to say anything at all related in any way to the actions or the videos or the Boomers—or Regan or TUT or RazorWire, for that matter. She even used her personal e-mail address to write him.