CASSIE WAS IN THE MIDDLE of scrutinizing sixteen GIFs of Boomer Boomer protests for a piece RazorWire was to post as soon as she was finished with it, three weeks after the Boomers’ initial call to action came, when she got a text from Regan, from across the office. “Need you over hr rt now,” it read. Though she was pretty certain “rt” didn’t mean Retweet, it wasn’t entirely clear if “hr” meant “here,” or “HR.” Cassie got up and was stepping across the bocce court before she saw that two men in tight-fitting suits were standing on either side of Regan’s desk.
“Hi, Cassie,” Regan said. She had swiveled around in her chair, but stayed seated. “Cassie is our director of research for our Native Content Division, but she works on many of the pieces we post. This is agent—and agent—sorry, what did you say your names were again?” The tall twenty-something guy flanking her on her left reached out a hand.
“Agent Todd Flavius,” he said. He had a startling shock of black hair, gelled straight back, and wore a brown gingham shirt underneath his navy blue suit. “We’re just here from the FBI,” he said. “Agents. FBI agents.” Cassie half turned away from them without actually going anywhere. “Nothing to be alarmed about, sweetie. We’re just looking into whatever can be looked into around the group that calls itself the Boomer Boomers. There were a series of threatening comments in the thread under one of your recent stories about the group, and we’re doing a routine follow-up.”
“Routine,” Cassie said.
“Routine,” said the other officer. He was old enough to be her father, with thinning yellow hair pushed back over his head in whatever the opposite of a comb-over might be called. Just, combed. “I’m Agent Miller.” He flashed his badge.
“The routine,” Cassie said. The first agent asked what she said, and she said, “Oh, just routine, as you said, only with a definite article in front of it. You know I think we could do well to head back to an office we use for these kinds of things. I mean not that we have federal officers here often enough to have it be a ‘kind of thing.’ I’ve only been working here for like a month. Or I guess five months. Time flies! Five months. But.”
Regan said she agreed that using the shared conference office was a smart idea. She walked the three of them back to the glassed-off office where Cassie had interviewed for the job. There, with the door closed, the two agents asked Cassie a series of questions for almost twenty minutes: Had she herself received any direct threats? Did she receive any suspicious e-mail? Strange phone calls? Notice any faces recurring on her subway ride? Had she heard of a notorious hacker organization called Silence? Had anyone from Silence ever contacted her? Did the fact that the anniversary of September 11 was just around the corner come up in any communications she’d had with anyone she didn’t know?
The whole time she just kept thinking: Mark Brumfeld, Mark Brumfeld, Mark Brumfeld, Mark Brumfeld, Mark Brumfeld, while actively thinking to herself, Whatever you do, don’t say Mark, or Brumfeld, or Mark Brumfeld. For as long as she could remember she’d had a problem where when she knew she wasn’t supposed to say something she’d find herself right on the cusp of saying it, aloud. Loudly. Shouting it, even. Like in the rare instance when she was around small children she found herself right on the verge of saying “fuck,” or back in Ohio in synagogue with her parents, she had an almost Tourette’s-like desire to shout out “kike” as loud as she could. When she was somewhere very high, she had a deep, giddy desire to jump. Not something she wanted to do, or would do—but it was still a conscious act of self-possession not to do it, the wrong thing, the damaging thing, the irrevocable thing being her reflexive response.
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.