Somehow she kept answering no to the agents’ questions now, and when they’d finally exhausted every possible way someone might contact her about watching a video on YouTube, tested every possibility that she’d heard of Silence though she hadn’t, they said thank you and left their cards on the rough-hewn horizontal-telephone-pole door-desk she’d first interviewed on, and told her to call or e-mail if she thought of anything at all she might remember that she hadn’t remembered here today at this interview.
“Well, or not interview,” Agent Flavius said. “I don’t want you thinking it’s anything too formal. Conversation, more like.”
She said she wasn’t all that worried, but thanks, and then she said, “Thank you,” all of which was an active way of not saying “Mark Brumfeld.”
The agents seemed satisfied they’d asked her enough and scared her enough and they left. Cassie walked by Regan’s desk and tried to get her attention, but Regan kept her eyes to her computer screen, and Cassie looked up to see that everyone was not looking at her all around the office, and no one was playing bocce, so Cassie went back to her computer. She was about to text Regan “cig” but she figured they needed to leave at least half an hour or something before talking to each other to make sure the agents had left, but when she looked down she saw that it was almost six P.M., time to leave for the day, so she pulled up the Comedy Central website to watch Jon Stewart’s monologue—the opening of The Daily Show was the only good part, she never even made it through to the interviews—after which she figured enough time would have passed to go debrief about what-the-fuck-was-that-was-that-really-the-real-FBI with Regan. If Regan was still there.
She was barely even paying attention when the buffering finally finished and instead of the “advertising experience” that preceded watching the previous night’s Daily Show on her computer, the site seemed to be playing another Boomer video. That didn’t make sense. Maybe she had the wrong window open on her browser. So Cassie pressed Open-Apple-Q, opened up Firefox again, and went back on the Comedy Central site, brought up The Daily Show, hit refresh.
Now she had the volume up. She didn’t even think to plug in her headphones but wished she had when loudly, in a vocoder-distorted voice, this person who wasn’t Isaac but was again instead calling himself Boomer2 gave some whole spiel about how this was Boomer Action Two, Vandalize, and people should attack baby boomer icons all over the country in the coming days. He’d been talking for almost two minutes—advertising experiences on the Comedy Central website lasted thirty seconds, otherwise who on earth would sit through them—when a list of addresses started scrolling down the screen. Cassie noted the names Bob Weir, Oprah, Stevie Wonder, Philip Roth, and Magic Johnson before she hit Open-Apple-Q and cut it off again.
“Hey, what the fuck,” Mario said. His voice almost made Cassie pee a little, she was so startled. She had no idea anyone was there. Mario and three engineers who sat in the bank of desks behind her were standing watching with her now. Cassie said sorry, she didn’t realize they were all standing there, but before she could say anything more they were all scattering back to their desks to watch the new call to action themselves with their company-issued Beats Bluetooth headphones on. Before she could close the new window on her own desktop Regan was at her right shoulder, grabbing her to stand up.
“Let’s get out of here,” Regan said.
They walked out of the building and up to Houston and into a table at Botanica, which was empty for this hour, even for a weekday.
“What did they ask you?” Regan said.
“They wanted to know why I turned off this new Boomer video—”
“Not our coworkers, Cassie. The federal agents. What did the federal agents ask you.”
“I guess what you might expect an FBI agent to ask you?” Cassie said. “I can only say that, having never been asked a thing by the FBI before. Or ever considered that as a possible outcome of any situation I’ve ever been in. I mean in college I guess I’d get so paranoid getting high sometimes I could kind of think maybe cops or feds or whatever were coming to get me, but they’d never been coming to try to bust me and my friends for smoking a spliff.”
Regan stared at her.
“Oh. Sorry. I don’t know. They wanted to know a lot of stuff about who might have contacted me related to the one piece we did on the DDoS attacks last month. I guess there were some nasty, threatening comments there. All very specific, about people I could have been in contact with. And they wanted to know if I’d heard of an organization called Silence but I hadn’t—haven’t—and I told them I haven’t. Hadn’t. I told them nothing. But Jesus fucking Christ—if they could have read my mind, they would be at Mark’s house right now. Well, Mark’s parents’ house, I guess. Or at the house of every Mark Brumfeld in America, however many there may be. They can’t read minds, right? Sometimes when I was high enough I thought people could read my mind but never any actual feds. Fed. Eral. Federal agents.”
Regan just looked at her again. She went up to the bar and came back with two Maker’s and sodas. The low thud of a track from the first Digable Planets record vibrated the seat of the bench where they sat. Underneath the smell of stale cigarette smoke was the strident ammoniac smell of urine emanating from the Botanica bathroom, which was nowhere near where they were sitting. Cassie took two sips of her whiskey drink, but it tasted like dish soap, so she put it back down.
She asked Regan if she thought they needed to do anything and Regan just said, “What would you do? Call a lawyer?” Neither of them had done anything illegal, she said. Neither of them had done anything, and Cassie hadn’t even been in touch with Mark for weeks except for the one e-mail she’d sent him from her personal e-mail address, innocuous, so. Regan said that feebees came to talk to people all the time and didn’t do anything more than just note it down. You were careful after, acted just as you would if you’d never been questioned.
“Feebees,” Cassie said.
“Federal agents.”
“You talk like you’re experienced at being questioned by the FBI,” Cassie said. “Feebees. Whatev.”
“If the shoe fits,” Regan said.
“If the foo shits,” Cassie said. “Wait, what? The shoe that in this case would be fitting is your having been questioned by the F fucking B-I?”
“Not a regular occurrence. On two occasions, Czolgosz has run profiles about dissidents who have been deemed ‘of interest.’ Well, if I’m being honest one wasn’t a profile, it was an essay, and I edited it, which meant a lot of contact with the writer. And the essay was advocating the violent overthrow of the Mubarak regime. Which did kind of come to pass not long after, but that made it the purview of the CIA, and the CIA did not come to question me. Well, except for one time when we did a piece on the Assad regime, but that was different. It’s not as if these are regular occurrences. But the truth is that when you begin to speak truth to power, power often wants to come speak back. Often politely, dressed in a suit, and without much idea of what is being asked or what they’re looking for or what they would do if they found it. It’s called fishing, and it’s not very effective. It shows they don’t even know what they’re looking for.”
“Fish.”
“Right.”
Now it was Cassie’s turn to sit and stare. Having interacted with two federal agents earlier that day was enough to make Cassie want to apply for a job at Goldman Sachs, teach elementary school back in Ohio, go to law school or something. Rock and roll was about as revolutionary as her endeavors had been in the past.
“It’s not like you didn’t think some of that kind of questioning was going to come down on Isaac, and you were close to marrying him.”
“Mark.”
“Mark.”
“And Jesus, not close to marrying—he had a mistaken idea of our relationship, and I told you that in confidence, over some unconscionably expensive branzino. And you know, none of Mark’s plunge off the fucking deep end had happened before he left for Baltimore. The last
I saw him, his main goals were finding a job as a boring academic at some small liberal arts school in the Midwest somewhere.”
“Okay,” Regan said. “But you’ve agreed with his stances on much of his approach to inter-generational conflict. You’ve been working on pieces about it. Now you’ve been questioned by the FBI. You’ve done nothing illegal, have no plans to do anything illegal, and will go back up to that office tomorrow morning, where you’ll continue checking facts.”
“Right, but—”
“This is still the United States of America, right?”
“Right, but—”
“And we’re still protected by the First Amendment, protected by an inalienable right to a freedom of speech, a free press intended to keep those in power in check.”
“Right, but—”
“Check those facts,” Regan said. “The ones above. My words. All truth statements, yes?”
“Yes, but—”
“Once a piece is fact-checked, your responsibility is to post it on the Internet, a modern form of publication, and sit back and wait for Google Analytics to tell you how it’s doing,” Regan said. Then she put her hand on Cassie’s face, the other on her thigh, and kissed her. “Now I think we should finish these drinks and get out of here.”
They finished the drinks in front of them and then got one more drink, and then another, and then got out of there. The whiskey in her head, the experience of being with Regan, who was the most confident, most beautiful woman she’d ever spent time with, did somehow allow Cassie to forget, or at least stop obsessing over, the fact that earlier that day she’d been interviewed by feebees. FBI agents.
Regan paid for the drinks. They walked across town to a cheap sushi place on Sixth Street, and that night, for the first time in what was now clearly a real, full-on relationship, Regan invited Cassie back up to her place.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THERE WERE TWO THINGS REGAN wanted Cassie to do for her in the weeks after they consummated their relationship, and it grew clear that she was just as much in love with Cassie as Cassie was with her.
The first was officially to break things off with Natalia, once and for all. This was more easily requested, acquiesced to, and desired than it was executed. Natalia was still on tour, and wouldn’t be back for another week. Cassie texted her, told her they needed to talk when she got back to town, and Natalia wrote back saying, “Ooh talk sounds fun you know how good I am @ talk talk talk talk,” followed by the poop emoji.
In the week she waited to meet up with Natalia, Cassie found herself—while sitting in the RazorWire offices, glancing across the open floor plan at Regan, checking facts—giving some real thought for the first time to what she’d be losing. She’d been close to Natalia since they were eighteen years old, college undergrads. In some ways this would be the end of her last close friendship from that period. That mattered, but it mattered in concept, not in any observable way—there was a sense of freedom in disconnecting from someone who’d heard her pronounce the word job like it rhymed with slob in a religion classroom full of their peers, who’d seen her stumble over the cadences of Chaucer, watched her puke into the bushes outside a dorm for an hour at a sophomore Halloween party.
Her connection to Natalia’s part of the music scene and of the Lower East Side scene Natalia had grown up in would be severed at that point, and with Mark in Baltimore and the Willow Gardens on de facto indefinite hiatus, her connection to music more broadly would be tenuous. She didn’t know many bands anymore, and every gig she’d had since Mark left town had come through a recommendation from Natalia. But the truth was she played probably a half-dozen gigs all summer, and with the hours she was now putting in at RazorWire, she could barely consider herself a musician anymore except in conversation, as a kind of factoid about a former self, a chance to send a new acquaintance to search YouTube for grainy video of an old show she’d played at Southpaw or 9C—which was a bigger deal, still, in principle than it was in practice.
For as long as she could remember Cassie had played music in some all-encompassing capacity, from elementary school sessions with the Suzuki method through her time in bands with Mark and Natalia. She had a habit on the side of reading popular books on quantum physics. When she first read about the ideas behind string theory it confirmed something she’d always believed deep down, in some precognitive place where ideas are still the stirrings of something ineffable. If the palpable universe, if all that we considered to be solid matter, was in fact a series of infinitesimal unobservable strings vibrating at differing frequencies, Cassie figured that meant that playing music was speaking the tangible world back to itself. Music was the only nonrepresentative art form. But where a novel, no matter how experimental, was meant to bring across the visible palpable auditory world to its reader, or paint a new window on the visible world as it was, music was music—until you realized that all matter, no matter how solid it felt, contained and comprised its own literal music. So if you sang a note high and hard, thumped out a bassline that vibrated with the low thump of a beating heart, you were actually speaking to the physical world in its own language.
Or that wasn’t even quite accurate. Better yet, you were superseding language itself, and attempting to mimic the very substance of the observable world. For that and for so many other reasons—reasons far less high-minded, like the fact that Cassie enjoyed standing in front of people and having them watch, liked going to bars where she was given respect, bars that would give her all the free drinks she wanted even when she wasn’t playing—the idea of giving up music as an active part of her life would have been hard to fathom even three months prior. It would be like going blind or deaf, like going to prison for the rest of her life, losing some huge tangible purchase on the known world. But now here she was, at a job that paid more than her father made in a year as a contractor in Central Ohio (it was not lost on Cassie that his job was to help build physical buildings, to erect campus buildings in Elyria, Ohio, where college students would pay exorbitant prices to stay in six-hundred-square-foot poorly insulated boxy spaces, and that he did not see the tangible world as made up of sub-molecular vibrating strings, but as pieces of lumber and steel that could be nailed and soldered together, and that he would have thought her making an intellectualized connection between quantum physics and music—and quantum physics itself, and music itself—to be a whole bunch of bunkum). And she was in love.
That was the main thing.
What was a greater expression of love than giving up the things that have interested you most in the past, ceding those interests to the things that will interest you in the future? It was the part of being in a real actual relationship, sustained over time and including dinner dates at which each party in the relationship was expected to talk, that Cassie found most challenging. She would have a solid thought on something, on anything—and in order to keep the peace, when she discovered that Regan’s opinion was in direct opposition, she would have to cede to it, or figure out why she thought what she did in order to defend herself. Whether it was her own opposition to Zionism—Regan held conservative views on Israel and supported not only Netanyahu but the very idea of Settlements in the West Bank; or her own opprobrium of the Cure—Regan held sentimental views on New Wave music in general and Robert Smith in particular; or her own concerns over the politics of socialism—Regan held sanctimonious views on anything associated with the most basic tenets of communism, actively called herself a Fourierist, whatever that meant: Whichever of these kinds of arguments might arise in nightly or cigarette-rolling-on-the-street-daily or now-surprisingly-satisfying-postcoital conversation, Cassie found herself coming to a point of compromise in conversation so far from her previous stances that it appeared to be what it was. Locked in a new relationship, made happy by it and by her circumstances, Cassie was doing something she hadn’t done since she’d arrived at college with a new name.
Cassie Black was changing.
So when Natalia returned from tour on the
third Tuesday in September, Cassie showed up at her doorstep at the corner of East Second Street and Second Avenue. She rang the bell and Natalia buzzed her up. Cassie found the door cracked, and her old friend/lover still lying in bed, wearing the kelly green GETTIN’ LUCKY IN KENTUCKY T-shirt Cassie had stolen from Mark years earlier, when they’d started dating. A waft of what smelled like the water in the abandoned quarry near Cassie’s childhood home signaled that Natalia hadn’t yet brushed her teeth. It was a little past noon.
“So,” Natalia said. “New York is still here.”
“Does not ever appear to be going anywhere, New York. Even if you—gasp!—go away from it for a period. You keep growing older, it stays the same age.” Cassie did her best Matthew McConaughey. It wasn’t very good. “So listen, we need to talk.” Natalia said that she’d already said that in her text message. About talking. The one about talking. Ones.
“A couple of them, in fact,” she said. “More than that—a few. A few text-based messages, about at some point in the future talking. And here we are now. In the future. The future is now.”
Cassie explained to her that she’d found someone else. Well, not just found. She wanted to be with someone else. Was. Was with. In love with. Someone else. This time she was really, honestly in love. She thought. Love like she’d never felt before. “We like go out to dinner together,” Cassie said. Natalia just looked at her. “Like, expensive dinners. We went to Nobu the other night. Like, the actual Nobu. And we work together. In an office. Romance, in an office. I’m like in a for-real actual office romance.”
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