Natalia said, “Okay, that seems fine to me, whatever. Will you hold on a sec?” So while Cassie sat on the edge of a bed she’d slept in dozens of times before just having made the most self-expository confession of her young life, having confessed to the woman she’d been sleeping with off and on since college that she was for the first time in her life in a relationship, Natalia went into the apartment’s lone bathroom and peed. Audible, straight-up-aggressive micturation. With the bathroom door wide open.
Cassie just sat there. Then Natalia brushed her teeth. Then she came back out, tackled Cassie onto the bed, and started kissing her neck, rubbing her between the legs. She did this little nipping thing where she got just a small piece of Cassie’s skin between her front teeth and bit until it hurt.
“What the living fuck?” Cassie said. “Did you hear any of what I just told you. Confessed. Catholic-confession-style confessed to you.”
Natalia let herself fall back on the bed next to her. She still had her hand on Cassie’s thigh. On top of her bed was a stained white duvet with no cover covering it—she and Cassie had a long-standing plan to take the bus down to IKEA in New Jersey to buy one, but it had never materialized. Port Authority was just so awful neither of them wanted to go.
“And so in your version of this we don’t even get to fool around anymore?” Natalia said.
“We do not.”
“But we still get to play in bands together, trying to deal with the fact that we used to be together for years?”
“We do not. We do not do either of those things. We do not play in bands together specifically so that we might avoid such awkwardness. Awkwardnesses.”
“And so who will you play music with, then, Cassie Black? I am, I must say, not to be a dick, your lone link to the downtown music scene at this point. I am the sole person who has gone to bat for you with a lot of bands that could have found much more talented bassists, and just did me a favor having you fill in. So you could still feel like you were a musician.”
“That is mean,” Cassie said.
“It was meant to be.”
“Well, I’ll figure it out. Myself. I will by myself figure it out. I’ve thought about it. Don’t think I haven’t.”
“And now you’re using double negatives?” Natalia said. “I don’t know if I even know who you are anymore.”
“You do not,” Cassie said. “Single negative.”
“Well then,” Natalia said. She was sitting up now with her legs dangling off the edge of the bed. She was still sitting very close to Cassie, so she kind of hopped away a couple inches. “This is new, then, isn’t it? I won’t say I won’t miss you.”
“That, in turn, is one even more serious double negative.”
“I won’t not not say it isn’t,” Natalia said. “Quadruple negative, motherfucker.” She rolled over on her bed, now a couple of feet away from Cassie, picked up her iPhone, and started flipping through social media. Her thumb flipped upward on her phone, stopped. Flipped upward, stopped.
“So that’s it?” Cassie said. “No further conversation? You’re good with this?”
“That’s it,” Natalia said. There was no further conversation. She appeared to be good with it. But as Cassie was getting up to leave, Natalia said, “Bat-crazy shit with these Boomer Boomer terrorists and their making threats against all old people, right? I guess some shit like that was bound to happen sooner or later. But Jesus, the violence.”
“I wouldn’t call them terrorists,” Cassie said. “More like what we used to call activists before everyone got crazy about radical Islamism. At best, tricksters. Did you know that back in the seventies there used to be like hundreds of bombings every month from domestic terrorists—in mailboxes, post offices, other places where there wasn’t mail being delivered though I can’t think of any right now?”
“I didn’t,” Natalia said. “But. I did know that every social movement in this country from Frederick Douglass to the Weathermen to Martin Luther King Jr. has been to defend the rights of people of color. Black people. All they wanted in the seventies was to be perceived as being friends with Panthers. Where the fuck are the Panthers Mark’s supporting? This boom boom thing sure seems white as fuck.”
Cassie didn’t know what to say. She and Natalia hadn’t talked about race since they were in college, where there was no trucking of dissent because there was no dissent. When they did, Cassie was always copacetic, always listened attentively and always agreed. Now here she was having just broken up with Natalia and she didn’t know what to say. So she didn’t say anything. She hadn’t thought of Mark’s activism on those terms—and she was reasonably certain he hadn’t, either. She was quiet.
“Well, think about it,” Natalia said. “At some point you might want to think about it. That and the fact that the whole thing seems awfully violent to me.”
“The violence!” Cassie said. “Again bringing up the violence. Very unlike you to be against violence. You do after all have an anarchy sticker on the headstock of your Fender Jaguar.”
“My Telly Thinline,” Natalia said. “My Jaguar has a Che Guevara sticker on it.” She said Jaguar the British way, elongating the “u” and enunciating the “a.” “But yeah, I guess violence seems like a reasonable outcome until it becomes the actual, you know, outcome. At which point it just looks like a stupid horrifying outcome. And terrifying. Whether it’s terroristic or not.”
“Well, first of all, vandalism against a website is not violence. And by degree vandalism against a window barely is. And second of all, it’s a natural consequence of years of subtler economic and structural acts of violence perpetrated by the baby boomers themselves,” Cassie heard herself say. She felt back on surer footing and was talking reflexively. It was an almost verbatim quotation from something she’d heard Regan say, but it was consciously that. It was almost as if rather than saying the thing she wanted to be saying, she was attempting as accurately as possible to repeat a thing the person she loved had said. This again felt, in the moment, like the very definition of what it was to be in love.
“Easy there, Chomsky. I guess I’m just saying I wonder how far it’ll all go. But then here we are, you breaking up with me, talking about being done playing bass, and that sure as shit is not an outcome I ever thought possible. Maybe you’ll change your name back to Claire. Claire Stankowitcz, anarchist start-up list-making website fact-checking professional in actual love.”
Natalia was the only person in New York who still knew Cassie’s birth name. Cassie did not like hearing it. She turned and opened the door to the apartment.
“I’m just saying,” Natalia said, and Cassie was already halfway out the door by the time her now ex-lover finished her sentence, giving her a chance to pretend as if she hadn’t heard it, “seems like someone’s bound to get seriously hurt, and shit to get really out of control.”
Cassie said that she agreed, that it did, indeed, appear as if someone would get hurt. Was bound to. But by the time she said it, the door was closed behind her. It was as if she was saying it to no one but herself. She’d never know if Natalia even heard.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE SECOND REQUEST REGAN made was more or less the opposite of the one regarding Natalia, and it came as a surprise: she said that while it might not seem the most intuitive move after having been visited by the feebees, she thought Cassie should keep in contact with Mark Brumfeld. Cassie and Regan had just gone to a movie at the BAM Cinemas in Fort Greene. They went to a showing of the second Godfather, where they were annoyed when the person behind them talked through the first half hour of the movie until Cassie turned around to shush them and saw it was John Turturro sitting with his teenage son, explaining all the complicated relationships to him throughout the movie. When she turned back, instead of annoyed she was giddy with the iconic Brooklyn experience—“John fucking Turturro is behind us,” she whispered to Regan.
“Fuck him and his baby boomer smug face,” Regan said.
The giddine
ss Cassie felt turned to discomfort. She got up to use the bathroom and when she came back Regan wasn’t sitting in their seats anymore—Cassie had to squint in the dark for three minutes of the Michael-Corleone-in-Sicily scene before she found her six rows closer to the screen. Afterward they went up to have dinner in the BAM Café. Corrugated tin covered the ceiling maybe twenty feet above their heads. They sat so that they both had a view out the three-story windows onto the fits and starts of traffic on Flatbush. In the cacophonous room they could barely hear each other, but it was one of Cassie’s favorite spots in the whole city. It was one of those venues that made Brooklyn seem superior to Manhattan, as if in the past decade something had flipped cultural currency from the island and down to the western end of Long Island, where they now sat. Across the avenue the sign on Junior’s awning was the same neon orange it had always been, touting the same cheesecake it had always touted. But BAM’s façade had just given up scaffolding it had carried for what felt like years, a teenage mouth free of braces, and inside the café its patrons were all newly chrome. Let the Manhattanite baby boomers who could afford it have the Met, have the Frick, the Guggenheim, the Flatiron Building, Central Park. Cassie and Regan and their generation had BAM Café, had Rumble Seat music, had the Barclays Center, the new waterpark in Prospect Park. They had the youth and they had the numbers. They were ugly but they had the music.
At the back of the room a funk band played. It was rumored Vernon Reid would join them on guitar by the end of the night. Cassie had ordered locally sourced lamb shank, and Regan was eating pumpkin risotto. They talked about a couple new attacks that were all over the news that week: A Boomer Boomer had attempted yet another vandalism of Bob Weir’s house, but this time the Marin County Police Department was prepared. They’d set up an officer in an unmarked car at the end of the block, and they caught the kid as he was taking a baseball bat to the house’s gate. Pictures surfaced on the Internet of his blackened eyes, and he’d hired a lawyer, said they gave him a “rough ride,” leaving him unbuckled in the back of a paddy wagon as it barreled down the tight esses of PCH. A new round of indignation had gripped young people all over the country. The baby boomers were fighting back, using their money and influence and their institutions to allow the system to harm the bodies of millennials. Things were ramping up. Regan said so, and Cassie agreed, and then they were quiet for a moment as the horn from the funk band blared in its Pee-Wee-Ellis-esque solo so loud they couldn’t hear each other. After their silence, Regan asked Cassie if she’d given any thought to her suggestion about her friendship with Mark.
“I don’t care either way,” Cassie said. “I just would have figured you’d want me to stop being in touch with him.”
Regan said that she could understand why she might figure that. But she knew how close the two of them were—“I have a fundamental belief regarding people who don’t stay in touch with any of their exes,” Regan said. “It strikes me as a kind of inherent character flaw.”
Cassie asked what she meant.
“It seems to me that in most cases when a person is no longer in touch with their ex, it is for one of three reasons. The first kind: they have had a problematic breakup of a variety that doesn’t allow them to be friends any longer. This can be a serious red flag—how are you to know the fault for said ugly breakup doesn’t reside with your now-current partner? That it won’t happen to you, down the road. In this case, I know you’re still friends with Isaac. In fact you were with him when I met you, and it was one of the things that attracted me to you—knowing you were still friends with your ex. Walking into a party with your ex, allowing him to buy you a beer and listen to exposing information about his own clandestine political activities. It seemed to speak well to your character.”
“Thanks,” Cassie said. “I—”
“You’re welcome. So that being the case, it strikes me that the latter two reasons why—sorry, reasons, ‘why’ is implied by ‘reasons’—the latter two reasons a person may no longer be friends with their ex if they were friends with said ex after entering into a new relationship are both fraught. The first of these two new scenarios is that the new partner in the new relationship is too insecure to handle her new partner being friends with her ex. I am opposed to being that kind of partner. My biggest fear in life is of being insecure. My second biggest fear in life is of simply being perceived as being insecure. Which I suppose could be perceived as its own brand of insecurity, but I’m willing to accept that as inherent to the syllogism. Regardless: the point to this second reason is that I am expressing to you my full-throated approval of your continuing to be friends with Isaac here.”
“Okay,” Cassie said. “Mark. Noted. And the third thing.”
“The third thing would be an inversion of the second: that you were not comfortable being friends with your ex because you were somehow insecure yourself that that friendship could intrude upon our own.”
Cassie said that, oh, man, was that not a concern, and that there were plenty of things she was insecure about, uncertain about, but that was not one of them. No matter how hard Mark pushed or still cared for her. She was not interested. Like, that was the last last last thing Regan ever needed to worry about.
“Exactly,” Regan said. “I believe you. And so I think you should remain friends with Mark, and even try to reestablish some of the connection to him you’ve lost. Set up a gig, go visit him, keep in touch.” It was the first time Cassie had ever heard her new girlfriend call him by his real name without being cajoled into doing so, and she took it as the kind of extension of the olive branch it was meant to be. “I will also say that I like the idea of your staying in contact with Mark. It is amazing how effective the most recent calls to action have been. He’s an impressive person. Plus, if he really does go and get himself into any real trouble it makes more sense to have an innocuous paper trail of your innocuous communications with him than to just go radio silent on him altogether.”
Cassie wasn’t sure she agreed with the amazingness that the last month’s actions in the name of Boomer Boomers had accomplished, and Natalia had put new questions in her head that she might have liked to discuss with Regan now if it didn’t seem hopelessly awkward to do so right after all Regan had just said about breakups. It seemed to her that in attacking baby boomer icons like Bob Weir, who had no real job to retire from in the first place, they were muddying their case—but this was one of those places where it wasn’t certain how much it was worth arguing. The violence in response to the second Boomer Action call had ramped up in a manner even Mark Brumfeld himself could never have anticipated. Attacks on major visible venues across the country. Even if no one had been hurt, the vandalism was a serious ratcheting up of the possibilities of what people might do in the name of the Boomer Boomers. To what end or extent it was unclear.
It might not have been apparent to every person in the country yet, but to those who were inclined to watch it—to believe or follow it—it was pervasive. And Regan had made clear at every turn that she was ideologically aligned with it. And now this week, one of the videos had made the first call to execute the Boomers’ ROWRY initiative. Boomer2 had declared that if baby boomers across the country didn’t retire from their jobs—“retire or we’ll retire you”—something serious would happen on March 15. It wasn’t clear what was being threatened. It wasn’t at all clear what connection Mark had to the threat. But this call to action had come with a threat of real violence that winter. It created a new round of jittery excitement. Even if nothing at all came of it, the coming three months of waiting to see what the Boomers had planned would be nervous ones.
“Okay,” Cassie said.
“Okay,” Regan said, but she did not have a mode in which she would admit she didn’t quite understand what was being said to her, so Cassie said, “I’m okay with staying friends with Mark, of course. I love Mark, just not in the way Mark loved me. And if anything I’m a little concerned about him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
&n
bsp; SO FOR THE NEXT MONTH Cassie called and e-mailed Mark more, and while he didn’t answer his phone often, when he did he sounded very much like his old self. Energized, even. He said he’d hooked back up with an old high school friend, Costco, who he’d told her about only in the broadest strokes, and just having someone down there in Baltimore with him was doing wonders. He conceded over the phone that he himself had not put out the ROWRY call, but it was the most revolutionary of any of the actions the Boomers had called for—and so far it had amounted to nothing other than ramping up anxieties.
Exactly zero baby boomer professionals had declared that they would be leaving their jobs as a result of the call. The sheer amount of time between the call for action and the threatened action made it feel futile. And like any futile threat, the back half of the proposition was growing more apparent as time passed, which was … how did these Boomer Boomers think they were going to “retire” someone? Was it an implicit threat of real violence? Was it suggested that someone might even get killed? Cassie didn’t think so, and she was sure Mark didn’t think so, either. But that didn’t mean that they knew what any of the hundreds, or thousands, or who knew how many other Boomer Boomers, shooting their own incoherent missives and planning who knows what, were planning.
During that same period things were going about as well as could be hoped at RazorWire. Native content requests were coming in at a rate the editorial side at the site couldn’t even handle, more than one a day, and they paid better than the sales force at the company had anticipated. They’d added a new division that created short video clips, pulled from existing content on YouTube, to complement much of the written content they were creating—and it was a huge success. While Cassie didn’t want to learn how to use Adobe Premiere herself she figured out some of the basics and could help give at least a cursory copyedit to any text included over video. They were taking on freelancers at rates that rivaled major magazines just to get folks on the pieces and the videos. The work itself was less compromising than Cassie had thought it might be—now that she was also fact-checking so many of RazorWire’s traditional pieces, the act of fact-checking a piece that had been created to get people to watch a television show, or to buy a new dietary supplement, or down the road to vote for a falsely impugned candidate, was just another part of a workday.
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