OUT ON MOTT STREET the heat was no longer an issue. She was so frigidly recalibrated from the forty minutes she’d spent in the glass office within the RazorWire office within the building within SoHo within Manhattan that it seemed she might never perspire again. In addition to the elation she carried out of the office, she carried a realigned core temperature.
She swiped her phone and went to make a call to Natalia to tell her the news, to get a reality check on whether this was possibly a good thing, and if there was any reason for her not to take the job. When she unlocked her phone she saw a text had already come through from Mario. He had AirDropped the offer package onto her phone before she left the building, which was not a thing she knew how to do herself. She couldn’t help but feel impressed by his technological acuity—no matter how great a Luddite a person was, Cassie had observed in her not quite thirty years on the planet, they couldn’t help but be awed in the face of true technological aptitude. It was like seeing a staggering wave on an ocean beach: its enormity could only be comprehended when witnessed in person. She opened the file and the number she saw there was fifty grand a year more than she thought she’d been offered. The differential between offers itself, even after taxes, would have been the most she’d ever made in a year. While she didn’t understand anything about vesting or what vesting was, short of being the word investing without the prefix in, it appeared she could also stand to make a large, large amount of money if she continued to work for RazorWire for more than a year.
Now she was ready to talk to Natalia, but before she could tap her finger on the green phone icon again—she had not taken a step further from the entrance to RazorWire, had stopped in her tracks as if the only thing that could exist in the phenomenological present was whatever information was brought to her on her phone—she heard someone say, “Cassie. Cassie Black.” She looked up to see a face that was familiar, but which between the disorientation of leaving the building and the dislocation of stepping into the summer heat from the arctic air and looking up from her phone and trying to have any emotional understanding whatsoever of what it would mean to be a twenty-seven-year-old liberal arts school alumna working at an Internet content development company making six figures, was not placeable to her.
“Regan,” the person said. “Remember? Regan, from that Unified Theory party earlier this summer.” She was. She was the same Regan Cassie had met along with Mark and Mark’s editor Deron when she brought him to that TUT party, who for a substantial part of the evening she’d been certain was named Jordan. Cassie still hadn’t quite found the wherewithal to speak aloud that recognition, but neither was Regan the kind of person who would be willing to stop long enough to force her to acknowledge what they both clearly understood. “So you’ll take the job.”
“The job,” Cassie said.
“The research director position at RazorWire.” Regan was pointing back up at the building where Cassie had just finished her interview. “I was the one who recommended you. I’m director of content there.” Cassie mentioned that Regan had said she worked for some socialist or anarchist journal when they met just months before. She must have left that job? “So you do remember me, then. Good. Oh, I still do the Czolgosz gig on the side when I have the time. But it’s a labor of love. Working at RazorWire is a job. The minuscule amount of skillz that pay the not-so-minuscule billz. Obviously. You must have some bills. Seriously. We’d love to have you join.”
Cassie fumbled her phone back into her pocket, and left her hand in there after, feeling for the first time some warmth return to her fingers.
“It’s an opportunity,” Cassie said.
“It is that,” Regan said. “I went to bat for you for it in a major way. Don’t fuck it up.” She looked directly into Cassie’s eyes, so directly Cassie felt compelled to look down at her own feet. By the time Cassie looked back up, which was not seconds later, Regan had already turned and walked into the building’s tiny lobby and out of view. Cassie realized that she had now been standing more or less in the middle of the sidewalk on Mott Street for five solid minutes, and that if she was going to have any luck making her call to Natalia she would need more privacy. She walked up to Houston and back across town until, wending her way through the quaintest cobblestoned blocks in Lower Manhattan, she found the stairs up to Housing Works. She ordered a drip coffee, pulled a copy of Emerson’s Collected Writings off the shelf, and called Natalia. She told her about the offer.
“Jesus, that’s a lot of money,” she said. “That’s like, ‘Go ahead and own your own Econoline van for tour’ money. Of course you take it. And oh, man, will your Pussy Willow be miffed when he hears.”
Cassie was off the call with Natalia and back to her coffee and looking around the wide-open space of the café in Housing Works before she took in what that last comment of Natalia’s meant, what it would mean to tell Mark about this new gig. He’d been finished with magazines—a job he’d gotten her into in the first place, a job she’d never trained for, never wanted, and never sought herself—and finished with a New York he could no longer afford, while giving over his life to an attack on the impossibility of finding a job, and now here she was, still three years away from thirty and living in New York and about to draw a substantial salary for doing a job she wouldn’t ever have wanted until it was offered to her. Which was one definition, she supposed, of work: doing something you don’t want to do in exchange for money. That wasn’t Mark’s definition of work. It was something like the exact opposite of his idea of work. But it was just about everybody else’s. She didn’t realize it when she was in the RazorWire office, but it was Mark she was thinking of when she tried to imagine someone so scrupulous they wouldn’t even consider taking a job like the one she was about to take. Mark’s definition of work was more like: doing a thing you love so much, with such artful labor and natural talent, it doesn’t matter how much you get paid for that work, or by whom. Or if you get paid at all, even. You’d do it anyway. That was surely not how she would view this RazorWire job, or how anyone there viewed it. And it occurred to her how many of her views of the world were her espousing Mark’s views, or her father’s—or Natalia’s, for that matter.
She would have to take the job.
It didn’t change her view of Mark’s protest, his quixotic Boom Boom revolution—if anything, it only intensified her support of it—or of him, anyway—clarified the need and immediacy of the argument he wanted to make so publicly. Because who wouldn’t want to live in a world where people were given an opportunity to do the thing they loved most, as opposed to not being invested in the work being a precondition of doing that work? Mark’s Boom Boom fanaticism was about a certain kind of love, it occurred to her, and it was a variety of love she’d like to support. But it still didn’t preclude her from taking this new job. If so arbitrary an offer could come to her, in an office chilled and bocce-courted or shuffle-boarded and populated by humans born after 1985, Isaac Abramson was more right than he even knew about how fucked the landscape had grown.
That still didn’t mean Cassie was stupid enough to contact Mark about it, or about anything, until she had to. She understood that he still loved her, or lusted for her, or just wanted to be around her, and something about that sense of neediness pushed her away from him. The Willow Gardens didn’t have any gigs lined up again until a possible spot opening for Punch Brothers at Mercury Lounge in early December—that one hadn’t yet been confirmed, Natalia was helping out—and there wasn’t much reason for Cassie to e-mail or call. And since he’d grown so obsessed with his Boomer Missives and whatever weird stuff he was up to surrounding them, he hadn’t gotten in touch with her much, either. There was an irony in her ability to keep track of Mark by watching him on the Internet, now two levels removed, in time and in space, from him. It allowed her to feel as if they were in touch, knowing she could see him, and it allowed her to absolve herself of whatever implicit guilt she might feel in not getting in touch.