THERE WERE TWO CENTRAL DEVELOPMENTS in Cassie’s life in the months after Mark Brumfeld left for his parents’ basement in the small city two hundred miles south of Brooklyn where he’d grown up. Neither was in any way expected, though both came to make her unexpectedly happy. The first was to solidify a job she’d never have wanted in the past. In early July she received a cryptic e-mail from someone at a news website that was looking to do, they said, something different from most news websites. They wanted to develop a well-funded, robust, and meticulous fact-checking department. On the face of it, the e-mail itself sounded almost farcical. The second paragraph started with perhaps the worst adverb known to man, the word thusly. Cassie intensely hated the use of adverbs, and she really hated the use of a pretentious one like thusly.
“Thusly,” the second paragraph of this e-mail read, “upon seeking out an established and impressive researcher with extensive experience working in traditional print media settings who might bring an established skill set to our vertically integrated content-driven media organization, we have received your name as an apt candidate to take over and build a fact-checking division for RAZORWIRE. If working for a company such as ours, in which you could be entering on the ground floor of a start-up which has received major resources from a Silicon Valley VC firm, angel investors who can make the kind of resources available that traditional print media is no longer able to undertake, myself and my colleagues request that you send along a resumé and a letter of intense by week’s end.”
After reading the message a third time—oh, that neologistic solecistic use of the word myself almost literally turned sour in her ear, never mind the never-before-coined-but-surprisingly-awesome phrase “letter of intense”—Cassie felt the e-mail itself was far more in need of a copyedit than of fact-checking. It was dictively devoid of checkable facts.
But Cassie also felt she couldn’t afford not to send along her materials and see what would come of it, if only to make it to an interview round in which she could discover who had sent this e-mail so full of empty palaver, the written equivalent of particleboard. No sooner had she sent her resumé than she had an e-mail back from RazorWire’s director of HR, setting up an in-office, in-person interview for the following Monday. There had been no street address in the signature of the initial e-mail, but now she was provided with an address for her interview. A quick double-check on Google Maps confirmed what Cassie suspected: RazorWire had offices in an outrageous location. On her favorite block in the whole city, no less, on Mott Street near Elizabeth, just below Houston. While it was not a feeling she wanted to have, she now found herself curious about going into Manhattan for this interview.
She may just want this job.
It was, after all, the kind of job every liberal arts school senior with a degree in the humanities was in some way yearning for at that exact moment. Was she skeptical of the inept e-mail writer himself, of websites with West Coast VC funds and angel investors and editors who rather than thinking of magazines and newspapers as magazines and newspapers thought of them as “traditional print media”? She was. Was she into the idea of having a job that would take her to an office only three blocks from the Angelika, where she could watch the best indie films on the planet on a lunch break and be back to work without missing much? She was. She was that, too.
Cassie spent the weekend drinking with Natalia, who was around town for the first time that month, just off a long Southern tour. Their relationship had settled into a familiar but confusing condition of being at once routine and undefined. If Natalia was in town she texted Cassie, had her come over to her apartment or met up with her at one of their SoHo fixtures, Tom and Jerry’s or Botanica. There was no question whether Cassie would come back with Natalia and sleep in her bed afterwards. Once she had even come back to Natalia’s and, finding her whatever-Natalia-was-to-her already passed out by the time she got to her bed, curled up into the fetal position in the space left on her twin mattress and slept there, no sex, just actual sleep.
At the same time, any markers of a real relationship were conspicuously absent. They did not go on dates. They did not go out to dinner. Ever. There had been no conversation about how a night like the one in which Cassie slept over would proceed. There was, above all, a chasm instead of a space in which any conversation of the future might take place. They lived together in a kind of Heiddegerian phenomenological relationship present, in which only the present moment of drinking or playing music or fucking existed, an immediate Dasein of mutually undecided and uncommented-upon cathexis, Eros and lust. Cassie had read enough in her 200-level existentialism class to understand that much. She’d read enough to identify a sense of “thrownness” in her current situation, but perhaps not enough to understand what it signified.
What she did not know how to handle was the broader feeling of sadness and confusion that descended upon her as soon as she left Natalia’s apartment. Or sobered up. Or tried to have sex with Natalia sober, which had only happened once, to genitally arid and generally stultifying effect.
So Cassie made her way into the city for her interview at RazorWire. The N train was densely packed with morning riders—it had been long enough since Cassie had ridden the subway on a weekday morning that she’d forgotten what a packed train looked like. She let the first train pass down the tunnel, it was so writhing with the press of morning passengers. But when the next train seemed to have an identical press of American Apparel T-shirts, handlebar mustaches, manbuns, cut-off corduroy shorts, and Warby Parker eyewear, she decided she had no choice but to get on, or arrive at her interview late. Two stops down the tracks she noticed the next car over appeared to be empty, so while she did not like passing between cars while the train was moving, she pushed her way through the press of morning bodies until she got to the end of her car, passed through the terrifying space between them, and found herself in a car bearing only three other passengers.
As soon as she heard the sliding subway car door click behind her she realized she’d made an enormous mistake. There was no air-conditioning in this car. Of course that was why it was empty. She could feel the sweat rise on her brow, a trickle of perspiration sliding down into her lower back, within seconds of stepping on. Worse was the smell. At the middle of the car, by the doors closest to her, was a shiny pile of what appeared to be still-warm human feces. She looked at the three other riders on that car and saw that all three were homeless, one of them now staring at the sweat on her brow and, she thought, imagining the sweat sliding from her lower back to, well, lower than that, and she turned to get back into the car she’d come from, but it was now somehow even more packed with Warby Parker American Apparel manbun facial hair and cutoffs and what choice did she have but to stay on this mobile underground clogged toilet until the train stopped? One of the homeless men on the car took out a cigarette and lit it and smoked the whole way into Manhattan. At least the smoke smell covered some of the shit smell.
By the time Cassie arrived at the RazorWire offices on Mott, it was already 10:17 A.M., and she was covered in a perspiration cycle that wouldn’t give up as she walked into the lobby. There was no doorman, only a bank of elevators with a set of buzzers, one of which read “RazorWire” in a font she’d never before seen. There was something suspicious about the fact that the name above the company’s was written in pencil and said “Schlict/Dick,” and that the one below it was a fortune cookie fortune: “Not all opportunities knock,” followed by a B&W smiley face. But the elevator doors opened before she could interrogate it further.
Cassie’s mood lifted when the elevator doors again opened. She stepped out of the car into a wall of air-conditioned air. She was standing in a loft of maybe ten, maybe twelve thousand square feet, and it was as if she’d come into some filmmaker’s idealized sense of what a successful start-up office might look like. Above her head was the sinewy thick wood of centuries-old exposed joists, fastened to iron T-bars by bolts the size of one of her ulnae. The open floor plan included a copse of desks with nothing but laptops, some open and some shut like lady’s slippers in an early-spring field, and along a far wall a glass encasement for a single office with a desk in it. Between the desks and the office was a long, thin, rectangular depression, dropping maybe four inches below the level of the floor. It was filled with sand. Two men about her age were standing in the pit. She watched as one lifted his hand and flipped his fingers effetely back toward his face, did it again and again, then transferred some kind of heavy-looking red orb into the hand from his other and let it fly until it stuck in the sand twenty feet in front of him.
“Bocce.” It took Cassie a second to realize someone was standing next to her, speaking. “It’s a bocce court. The only one in any office in Manhattan. We got the same people who put one in at Union Hall in Park Slope to do it. Someone knew someone there. It was tough to decide between it and shuffleboard, but I decided shuffleboard seemed less retro, more geriatric.” The guy standing next to Cassie was maybe six inches shorter than she was, with a thick black beard, wiry and slick against his face, and a neck tattoo crawling up near his chin—on the left side of his neck in gothic lettering it read “BOY” and on the right side in the same lettering she could read only “NNY.” “And I’m guessing you’re Cassandra.”
“Cassie,” Cassie said. “Black. Cassieblack. Sorry. It’s hotter than … well, whatever is a thing which is very, very hot … out there … and I had a bad subway ride up. There was shit, like, actual human shit and no AC and—well. Smoking. And. But here I am. I am here.” The tattooed beard announced himself as Danny (not Granny, as Cassie had been glibly imagining) and said that she’d be interviewing with someone from Native Content and did she want a kombucha or aloe water? They had mango or loganberry if she wanted one. She said she did not. Danny opened the door to the glassed-off office in the rear of the place and a wall of even cooler air-conditioned air hit Cassie. Frigid. Sustaining for a polar bear atop a globally warming ice floe. Though it did not seem as if it would be possible just ten minutes earlier, Cassie was freezing. She could feel her metabolism, cellular production, her own thought process slow. It was as if an environment had been created in which a group of young people would be cryogenically kept twenty-six years old for the rest of their existences on Earth, staving off the ultimate horror of ever reaching their aging baby boomer parents’ age. Individual beads of sweat picked themselves out on Cassie’s upper arms and shot needles of biting cold into her skin. No sooner than she had felt it, the door to the office opened again and in walked her person from HR, author of the e-mail that had thusly brought her here. He was also six inches shorter than Cassie, but he did not have a beard or tattoos suggesting his name—or melanin, by all appearances. He was albino, his skin pale save where, across his broad nose, a smattering of orange freckles stood out in the artificial air. He had another splotch of orange freckles around his mouth that obscured where his lips were.
“So you must be Cassandra,” he said. He sat down behind the desk, which was a repurposed, unfinished, rough-hewn oak door, with the blunt edges of rusty nails sticking out in arbitrary directions. It looked like someone had made a desk out of a planed horizontal telephone pole, and it was unclear how one could write on a desk with so uneven a surface and with so many asymmetrical protuberances, but the only evidence of an attempt to do so was a pad of neon-pink Post-its sitting beside a chrome laptop and a huge flat screen in front of it, the shiny newness of all of it making it appear to be only seldom used.
“Just Cassie,” Cassie said. “Cassie Black. That’s the full name. And you are?”
“Oh, sorry, how rude of me,” he said. “Mario Wilson. I’m the director of the newly formed Native Content Division here. Well, newly forming. Currently amidst formation. I’m the one who sent you the note last week after you were recommended so highly.”
“But you have the only office in the place?” Cassie said. It occurred to her that there was no attendant whir or rattle of air-conditioners to accompany the reverse-entropic cold of the office she was in. It was as if the cold was extended by the air of the room itself. It was so cold the only smell in the place was a whiff like snowballs each time Cassie breathed in.
“Oh, myself and my colleagues share this office when outsiders come in,” Mario said. “Or potential future insiders or whatev.” Cassie looked at him, deciding whether or not to ask how it was possible that they’d reverse-engineered the summer heat but couldn’t afford to have separate offices for each staff member. She decided to keep her mouth shut. Increasingly she wanted a share in it. “Whatever. So you know why we’ve brought you in for.”
“Not exactly,” Cassie said, swallowing whole the circumlocutory way Mario spoke. It was all she could do not to correct him. Maybe she should be looking for a job at a copyediting desk somewhere—old media concept!—after all. But the truth was there were so many solecisms, so many grammatical and usage errors in the way he spoke, she didn’t know where she’d begin in correcting him. “I mean, I got your e-mail and I’ve looked at your site before and all. Read a couple of funny lists you’ve published. But beyond your stated desire for a fact-checking division I don’t know anything about the job.”
“Well, things move fast here,” Mario said. He had both his elbows on his desk now—not his desk, after all, he would say if he said it, but the desk he was sitting behind—and Cassie could see where the texture of the wood was digging deep red creases into the taut skin on his forearms. It did not look comfortable. She may even have detected a grimace on his face, but his posture was set for this part of the interview and he wasn’t going to move it. “And the position has transmogrified a little even from the period when I first wrote you.”
“Less than a week ago,” Cassie said.
“Right. We toyed with our motto being ‘Moving at the Speed of the Internet.’ But that seemed too old-school. You know, having a motto. At all. We’re a nimble, kinetic, rapidly transforming media landscape, right? RazorWire has now been in talks to move to the forefront of native content production in the new media landscape. Do you know what native content is?”
Cassie said she knew what “native” meant, and she did understand how the new media culture currently defined the word content—but, no, she didn’t know what native content was, exactly.
“Native content is the current best shot journalism has of surviving in a sustainable financial model. Companies and advertisers will approach us with the desire for us to create native content for a specific product or campaign, or for their company or industry in specific. Our editorial department then creates, crafts, hones that content, and we package it on the site alongside trad content. It is designated as such, with some small but clearly identifiable design element to make sure the reader can distinguish between traditional story content, and native content.” Cassie sat there looking at him. “Here, let me literally explain with an example. Literally, say HBO is putting out a show about bluegrass music.”
“HBO is putting out a show about bluegrass music.”
“What?”
“You said to literally say it.”
He just looked at her. “Hah, okay,” he said.
“I’m literally a bluegrass fiddler myself,” Cassie said, trying to right the ship. She found herself at once skeptical and more interested than she’d been since they started talking, which seemed evidence of a certain benefit of the service itself.
“I know,” Mario said. “It was on your resumé under ‘other skills.’ That’s literally—that’s why I used it as a example.” Cassie felt heat come to her cheeks, her throat constricting, and was brought back to herself only by his use of the article “a” when he should’ve said “an.” “So we might send a music reporter to do a piece on the bluegrass scene in Lower Manhattan, or a profile of the Station Inn in Nashville, or the Cantab Lounge in Boston, or a long profile of Chris Thile if he’s attached to the project and how could he not be these days, he’s such a rock star.”
Cassie said that he was a long way from a rock star, given that he didn’t play rock music.
“Bluegrass star,” Mario said. “You know what I mean.”
Cassie said she did.
“But that’s it. That’s the future. It’s the future of where things are headed, and we want to know if you want to be a part of the future.”
“Well, who wouldn’t want to be a part of the future,” Cassie said, while thinking, Unless I was actually to die of the cold in this office right now, I’m more or less certain I will have no choice but to be part of the future. “But honestly, isn’t what you’re describing just an advertorial? They always made advertorials in the past. Advertorial. Worst compound word ever?” She looked at Mario, who now just looked back at her. “But there you have it.”
“The advertorial is a thing of the past,” Mario said. “Very much an old-media concept. Our goal is to test out all kinds of new-media concepts to see if we can monetize them—and of course to use them to support the trad journalism and reporting we’ll always continue to do. We’ll do, say, this native content and use it to pay for arts coverage. We have a division that we haven’t branded yet that will develop a kind of hybrid of political satire and reportage which appears as if it could gain serious traction on social media as we approach each upcoming election.” Cassie asked him for an example of what he meant, if only to see if he’d again try for bluegrass. “Well, say, for example, Kanye ended up running for Senate—we might try to see if stories about his relationship with Kim, or about his childhood in Chicago, might gain traction, though they weren’t true. We could let our readers come up with the concepts and then have our trad op-ed reporters write the pieces.”
“So in this case what you’re describing is crowd-sourced propaganda?”
Mario paused. “I’m not sure that’s quite what we’d call it, but I like the way you think, Cassieblack. Moving straight to branding. I guess maybe … Open-source speculative journalism? Oh. That’s actually kind of good.” Though there was that pad of pink Post-its in front of him, Mario took out his iPhone and typed it in. “I could share credit for it with you if you joined us. When.” Cassie held her face still, trying to keep her jaw from slamming against her chest. “Okay, fine, I’d give you all the credit. You drive tough deals. I’m liking you more by the minute.”
For the first time since he began talking, he sat back in his chair. On his forearms, long red streaks had burrowed into his skin from his desktop, running lengthwise against the orange freckles up and down his arms. As inconspicuously as he could, Mario rubbed the tips of the fingers of his opposite hands along the painful-looking grooves. “But the main thing is that as you join us you need to stop thinking in terms of trad media and start thinking new media. The trad stuff was fine back whenever, in the Clinton Era or whatev—sorry, what-ev-er—but we’re obvi moving in a new direction, new revenue streams, the places where journo and content and editorial will all be heading.”
“And you want me to fact-check it,” Cassie said.
“Join us as our director of research. That’s right. I guess that part of it is trad, after all—a traditional research department. Like, our own snopes.org. Or factcheck.org, only without the dot org. Bringing a kind of retro feel to the way we do cutting-edge journalism. RazorWire thinks one of the best ways to solidify the native content model will be for us to be able to offer to partners that the work we do for them will undergo the same strict kind of overly meticulous, disproportionately funded scrutiny editorial always did in traditional media. So. Yes. You’d come in to head up an initiative to start a robust research department.”
“Fact-check advertorials, and down the road, gussied-up propaganda.”
“Come on with the title of director of the Research Department for RazorWire’s new Native Content Division.”
Cassie sat back in her own chair now. The way he stated and inflected it, it was entirely unclear if that last sentence was an interrogative or an imprecation. There was nothing in need of rubbing on her own forearms, and Mario wasn’t going to lean forward again himself—he had to maintain some sense of self-preservation even while having his crack at interviewing someone in the big office with the big repurposed wood desk—and the two of them were suddenly sitting very far from each other. “You’ve come very highly recommended. I can honestly tell you without your having to walk out of here that folks want you in.”
Cassie didn’t say anything. An image flashed in her head again of the thousands of liberal arts school senior English majors who would view an offer like the one being presented to her as the goal. She was not savvy in these situations and honestly didn’t want to be, but before she left her home in Ohio the summer before graduation, her father had given her one piece of business advice she had taken, and which helped: always leave as much dead space in conversation in a job interview as possible. Leave pauses, allow the interviewer to play his hand. “If you wait,” Dad said, “just count to ten, or sing the chorus of a song you like in your head, you’ll get two benefits: you won’t say something untoward or overenthusiastic yourself, and you’ll force the person opposite you to tell you what they want, even if they don’t want to.” Which is what happened now in a way that made her father look like a sage.
“Oh, and I’m sure you’ll want to know what the compensation package looks like.” Now Mario reached for the neon-pink Post-its on the desk. He pulled a Uni-Ball Vision from his pocket. He put the thin pad down on the desk and wrote something, and Cassie could see the Post-its bend and crinkle as he attempted to write. He picked it up, brought it very close to his face and looked at it, squinted a little, and handed it to Cassie. She couldn’t tell what the last five numbers said, but there were six digits in the number, which made the salary at a minimum three times what she’d ever in her life earned in a year. It might have added up to more than she’d made, total, in her twenty-seven years on the planet. It was enough to consider overseeing crowd-sourced propaganda.
“Well, I will be very happy to take the night to think about it,” Cassie said. She did not need the night to think about it—you’d have to be in possession of a trust fund or an M.D. or far more scrupulous scruples than Cassie possessed not to take a job in that office with that bocce court and that salary, whatever it was—but this was part of her father’s advice, and she was decent at following rules when she needed to be. She stood and left the office and headed out to the broiling summer midmorning after having left it with Mario that he would message her with the offer package.