SO MUCH DEPENDS UPON a black Jansport duffel bag, sitting in a suburban basement, empty as of yet. Cassie had been gone a week when Mark found himself over at Costco’s. This time he was in Costco’s room, where they were taking bong hits. He was stoned out of his skull as he always seemed to be when he was with his old friend. He’d had the time with Cassie that he’d hoped to have. They talked, they did not kiss, they picked up Julia’s prewar D-18 and her old fiddle and they sang a lot of Louvin Brothers songs, Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley—“Polly, pretty Polly wontcha come along with me/ Polly, pretty Polly won’t you come along with me-ee”—and played a lot of fiddle tunes together, and playing music made him happy. He assumed it made his mother happy to hear them playing, too, the first time there’d been music in her house in ages.
Now this was the first time Mark had been in Costco’s house since their trip out to Woodlawn. Neither had said anything about the trip, or about his telling about the feds. When he sat down, his old friend handed him the glass bong like he always did. Mark took a rip, sat back on Costco’s unmade bed.
“So Cassie’s hot,” Costco said.
And it was as he said it Mark noticed it in Costco’s open closet: a black Jansport duffel bag, zipped up. In the middle of it, a large cylindrical bulge. In the closet next to it an empty Cuisinart box in a Williams-Sonoma bag. Costco saw him looking.
“Dude, remember when we were in high school and we used to go to Williams-Sonoma for nitrous poppers? Those little pink things? Those were the bomb before I got that tank.”
“Your nickname could’ve been Sonoma instead of Costco,” Mark said.
“Costco is better,” Costco said. “Fucken hate Sonoma. Just a bunch of rich asshole baby boomers looking for a massage or a mud bath or some such.”
They were quiet for a moment.
“You know I went down the coast when I was out in Eugene. Stayed in Bend, then down through Crater Lake, hitched all the way down to Cali.” Mark had never heard this story before. Costco had refused to tell stories of his time out there when he got back, just showed his Jerry tattoo and moved on. His face was now blanched like one of Julia’s tomatoes. “And there were these old heads in a little town north of Sonoma, way north, north of Eureka even. Called Dewberry. All these old, old heads. Boomer heads who’d dropped out, moved farther and farther north from San Fran. They fed me tons of acid. I think they must’ve been fucking with me. Doses like they used to drop. Like, a cup of liquid. Must’ve been like a hundred fucken hits. I flipped my fucken lid. Couldn’t put on clothes for a week. They say they found me curled up in a ball in the sand and no one could come near me ’cause I’d just scream if they did.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I don’t even fucken remember. My folks flew out. They sent me to Minneapolis for a month to get my shit together. Now I take Zyprexa, but it makes me fat. And it was enough to get through Goucher, get a job. But man—again and always it was the fucking boomers, like you say. They gave us los drogas, asi.”
“Well, we are smoking weed right now,” Mark said.
“That shit ain’t drogas! The acid. It fucking liquefied my brains, brutha. And they did it. The boomers. And you are right. They need to pay for it. For what they done.”
“What was Woodlawn all about,” Mark said.
“What do you think Woodlawn was all about.”
“You want me to guess?”
“Like you made me guess about the feds, which you didn’t mention?”
“I told you.”
“Like you’ve been making me guess about everything else, Abramson?”
Costco looked long and low into Mark’s eyes. His hair was receding just like Mark’s was, and Mark noticed for the first time since they’d started hanging out that he had crow’s-feet developing at the corners of his eyes. Like Cassie had. Cassie, who was now his just-friend and who he would never be with again.
“It seemed like way too big a coincidence at first,” Costco said. “I mean I’d been listening to the missives since you started posting them. And I guess in the back of my head I’d thought like, Shit, that kind of looks like my buddy Brumfeld’s old basement. But then when I came over the other day and I saw it and I just fucken knew it. And then when you and Cassie both had your stories—icing, cake. Done. What are the chances, you and me both in the same chat rooms?”
“I guess,” Mark said, “about the same that you and me would end up back in our parents’ basements. Which, as it turns out—well, not so bad. Those chances.”
“Well, brah,” Costco said. “You’re fucken smart. And you’re more of a badass than I could’ve guessed.”
“And you?”
“Me what.”
“I’m looking at a black duffel bag. With the box for a pressure cooker next to it.”
“Don’t forget what else is in there, brah.”
“Well, I can’t forget what I didn’t already know,” Mark said. “But I can guess.”
“If you guessed, I’d guess you’d guess a big old box of matches for the match tips, a bulb from some Christmas lights, and a whole bunch of nails and ball bearings for shrapnel. I am not inspired by Inspire, but yup—there are copies of Inspire. There is some good information in there. Better than when we used to look at The Anarchist Cookbook back in the day.”
“And so what is the plan, then?”
“There is no plan, exactly,” Costco said. “Anarchists don’t make plans. They’re Anarchists. There’s just some goods, and a place to bring them. And a lot of fucken anger, old and new. And I know we both know you’re not coming with me, whenever it is. It’s on me, and that’s good. But I just want to hear one thing from you, brah.”
“And what’s that,” Mark said.
Costco said nothing for a second. He pulled the bong up to his lips, lit it, and pulled some smoke into the chamber, pulling it like a cumulonimbus cloud right up to the space in front of his lips. Then he took it from his mouth and he said, so that his old friend could say it back to him:
“Resist much, obey little.
“Propaganda by the deed.
“Boom boom.”