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.
It helped that Cassie herself never saw the design elements that the company’s designers created to barely distinguish the native content from content content. Each morning she would open a new Google Doc with a list—“Seventeen Great New Recipes that Use Splenda Instead of Sugar,” or “Eight Grate New Emo Records Not Featuring Ben Gibbard,” “The Thirteen Most Heinous Hate Crimes of the Decade”—and tackle them as she would any other piece she was doing research for. She did a fair amount of communicating over e-mail with the pieces’ writers, but again there was no reason for her to think about whether they’d been hired to write copy for regular content or native, given that many of the same writers were doing both kinds of pieces now.
One afternoon after winter began to set in, as Cassie walked up Canal Street from her N stop—she liked the long walk up to the RazorWire office, it gave her time to decompress after the mass of morning subway riders—she noticed something conspicuously lacking. It wasn’t something she didn’t see but something she didn’t smell. It was cold enough now that the fish waste on the Chinatown sidewalks no longer baked its emetic waft with the heat of the morning.
She sat at her desk and found two unrelated documents. The first was a Facebook message from Mark. He was not all that happy again, he said. Even with Costco in town now he was a little lonely. A lot. Lonely. He missed her. He’d been saying he missed her, but this was more explicit. He really missed her. He’d been thinking about her more since she came to town and … there was innuendo but that was it, he left it there.
She didn’t know what to say back to him so she didn’t reply. In fact she’d noticed that of late she did a lot less e-mailing, a lot less responding quickly—or at all—to messages she received over social media. It was as if in the past six months or so the sheer quantity of written messages she received in a week was insurmountable, and so in response people had collectively decided not to answer all messages. Texts—sure, she’d reply to texts. But not e-mail or FB Messenger.
The second document she found was a list in the RazorWire Google Docs folder entitled “Eleven Vulnerable Baby Boomer Venues.” The piece was by one of their riskier writers, who had been covering the Boomer Boomers in their early days, and was getting tons of hits for pieces that seemed to cross a boundary from reporting on the movement, to advocating for it. In the past months he’d published a kind of data-dump of e-mails from Social Security officials, detailing the vulnerabilities to hackers of the organization’s firewall that seemed to invite hackers to attack it. He’d made three lists of new baby boomer targets—Jeffrey Koons, Denzel Washington, Stephen King, Shel Silverstein’s childhood home, and more—that hadn’t yet been hit. His third list even included a target that only two days later was vandalized—Jim Davis’s cartoon factory in Muncie, Indiana, where Garfield comic books were still manufactured. But they each had accrued hits into the hundreds of thousands, and it wasn’t clear that there was any actual intent in their having been written, and they went viral, so legal let them keep posting.
Even with all that in mind this latest list felt like an escalation: it had specific addresses for a baker’s dozen of government offices, national and local, that the Boomers might take next. It was one thing when private citizens were attacked, or when there was an almost tricksterish bent to the list-making and speculation: Was anyone really going to go after Neil Young’s Northern California ranch? Cassie texted Regan to see if she wanted a cig. Regan texted back to say that she didn’t have time to leave the office, had a couple deadlines she needed to hit by lunch, but why not bocce. Smoking had grown to be an even more fraught activity than it had been before—now every time they went out for a cig a baby boomer would attempt to serve as a kind of in loco parentis and tell them they should quit, to which Regan would say, “Who the fuck do you think you are to tell me anything,” and launch into a diatribe about how it was the baby boomer generation that was the first and last in human history to smoke machine-produced cigarettes on such a prodigious level, and fuck them if they didn’t think we could enjoy just a little of that experience ourselves on our own time and on our own dime. By the time her jeremiad had ended, the misguided boomer would be long gone down the street.
So they stayed inside among their fellow twenty-something-year-old colleagues and played bocce. They played to twenty-one, and within three minutes of starting their game, Regan was already up fourteen to three.
“I’m not sure about this latest list from Edmund Steiner,” Cassie said. She bent down to pick up all three of her heavy balls and cradled them against her midriff. “It just seems so specific, going out with a list of the addresses of government agencies. I did a little poking around and in three instances, he’s included addresses of D.C. offices that aren’t publicly listed.”
“Then he’s doing a public service, don’t you think?” Regan said. “More like traditional journalism if you ask me. Bringing information to readers they wouldn’t already have.”
“Under the auspices of advocating illegal attacks against them.”
“Advocating? Absolutely not doing so. It is a satirical piece in the form of a list. A satirilisticle. Very much in keeping with the work we publish.”
Regan reached back and bowled a green ball through the sand, through the mix of Cassie’s balls. It hit the pallino and the two went spinning together against a wall. Two points.
“And what if one of those venues was hit?” Cassie said. “Would we have those FBI agents coming around my cubicle once again, asking questions?”
“Would it matter?” Regan said. “You would bear no culpability. The shadow of the First Amendment looms large over what we publish. There’s always Times v. Sullivan in the background.” She walked over to where all six of their balls were and picked her own up. It would be too heavy to bring Cassie’s over for her, and Cassie knew it, but something about it still felt ungenerous. She came back to where Cassie was standing. “And aren’t there venues on that list that maybe should, after all, be hit?”
Cassie didn’t respond. She went to pick up her balls, brought them back, threw them as if it didn’t matter. And it didn’t. Regan won by fifteen points.
Back at her desk Cassie went through with the full fact check on the piece. Regan was right: there was nothing more controversial about that piece than any other they’d published. She went through and confirmed the addresses on each. Cassie finished checking the piece, got up from her cubicle, and with a force she’d almost never had in their now months of dating, she grabbed Regan and said, “I need a cig. Come roll me one.” They walked out of their still-frigid office into the frigid streets below, two young people working together and in love.