THERE MUST’VE BEEN 613 WAYS in which Cassie Black changed in the months after Mark Brumfield and his childhood friend Costco attacked the Social Security Administration Building, but her name wasn’t one of them. She was Cassie Black now and she would stay Cassie Black. Claire Stankowitcz was a distant memory never to be returned to. But there were two immediate ways she changed in the weeks and months that followed the attack—one of them professional and the other personal, though over time the two grew to be indistinguishable from each other.
Cassie had been following company policy of posting video alongside the native content she created for RazorWire for months, and while she did long to hold herself aloof of the intricacies of Adobe Premiere, each time she opened it with the intention of correcting a header or a footer someone had created, she found herself understanding how to use it a little better without even meaning to. At first it was basic stuff—in the upper left-hand corner of the application were the source videos, in the lower right-hand corner were lines that represented each video, audio and written lines that came together to make the finished video. Her job was to double-click on the text inserts and edit them.
But over time she found herself editing some video. It was easy enough to see that hitting Enter would return you to the beginning of a video, that the space bar would pause and play. And once she dug in she saw that she basically knew how to use it—the cropping and design tools were more or less the same as PageMaker, which she’d used for her school newspaper. Editing tools for the video itself were almost identical to ProTools, which she’d used for the sound editing when she and Natalia made roughs for the Pollys’ first and second records. It wasn’t exactly the same, but the keystrokes and the concept were, and it didn’t take long for her to see how little it would take for her to master Premiere whether she wanted to use it or not.
One afternoon not a month before the ides of March, she found herself deep into editing on a four-minute documentary about the life of a golden skink that was to be posted the next day. She’d had lizards in her house growing up—mostly geckos; her father would never have let her buy an iguana like Lindsay Henderson down the street had—and for Hanukkah when she was ten her mom had bought her a golden skink. It was long and sleek and glistened under the incandescent lights in her room. She’d loved it more than the family dog until one morning she woke to discover it inert, purple indentations on either side of its body. The new hermit crab in the cage had crushed it. So when she saw that one of their writers had submitted a video of the life of a skink named Golda, Cassie took an interest. She didn’t even think to look at what it was native content for.
On the fly she found herself opening video files, cutting and condensing, slash-cutting and perfecting. In that lower right-hand box each video appeared as a four-inch gray rectangle that could be manipulated—she could go in and expand the bar so it represented, say, ten seconds of video, which itself was slow-mo and represented only one second of real time. Or she could expand it to show just one second of video. Or a tenth of a second, bearing in and in and in on the moment when Golda’s pink-tongued yawn was first caught on video, slowing time to a near standstill both on-screen and in the world around her. What did it do to her conception of time, to her sense of memory, spending her day manipulating time like this? Did writing, slowing and condensing the world into words, do the same? Cassie wasn’t sure. On-screen before her eyes, time had slowed to a literal standstill, the time of the image and audio she was editing represented by a solid gray box. It was as if a unit of the fluidity of a substance with immutable laws—time followed its arrow in one direction, always moving just out of reach—had been encased, caked in some chalky substance, and left to sit inert on-screen. There was an enormous sense of power mixed with an enormous sense of futility in seeing the flow of time interrupted, interrogated, and enhanced this way. All in the interest of making people feel things while watching a caged golden lizard yawn. Cassie had been editing for so long and with such intensity that she was startled into jumping from her seat when Regan’s voice woke her from her editing reverie.
“The fuck’s that a video for,” Regan said.
“I don’t even know,” Cassie said. “Well, it’s a golden skink named Golda. It’s a … well, it’s a biopic about a lizard.” She got up from her desk, saved the file, and left it on-screen while the two of them went out for pho.
She didn’t give the video another thought until two days later when she got simultaneous e-mails from the videographer and from Mario. The videographer, a thirty-three-year-old divorcee living in Akron named Weary, had written to chew her out.
“Cassie—” his e-mail read. “I’ve been working on that fking PetSmart lizard spot for a year and you go in and cut a full minute of content? Do you even understand what a slash-cut is? On whose authority r u making these edits? How do we go back to my original cut?” Fuck. Cassie couldn’t believe she’d made all those edits live and hadn’t consulted anyone—it just seemed obvious that it was at least a minute too long to hold anyone’s attention. Before she could write back she saw Mario’s e-mail pop up and assumed it was to berate her—even the subject line, “HOLY SHIT,” seemed to suggest she was in for a world of conflict. Here she was, director of research, editing native content video.
She opened Mario’s note and it wasn’t what she’d expected at all. Mario, formalest of all the users of “thusly” she’d ever met, for the first time in all the time she’d known him had sent an e-mail that didn’t even start with a formal salutation. It looked more like a text message in its informality and it read, “Have you seen the Google Analytics on your iguana spot? Seventy thousand plus in the first morning! Shit’s gone viral. We think we might have a million by end of week. VAF (viral as fuck! I think I just coined that). Come see me.”
She didn’t go see Mario. She didn’t take the time to tell him Golda wasn’t an iguana—she was a golden skink and who the fuck would name an iguana Golda when they could go with Juana. She e-mailed Weary in Akron and let him know that she’d have been more than happy to restore the original cut on the site but had he seen the fucking numbers on that piece?
“That shit’s going viral AF,” she typed.
He wrote her back with complete and total sycophantic contrition.
“I’m just feeling lucky to work with talented folks like you,” he wrote. They were e-mailing back and forth so fast they might as well have been IMing in 1998. Without even thinking Cassie typed, “And well look it’s not like the creator of some fucking gecko hagiographic PetSmart ad had final cut approval,” then double-clicked and deleted it. But before she closed out of Google Chrome she sat back for a second, opened the video, saw that the spot already had almost two hundred thousand views, and said fuck it. She hit Open-Apple-Z and restored the e-mail and sent it.
She waited.
Two new e-mails popped up. The first was from Weary and it just had the text stand-in for a winking-smiley-face emoji. The second was from someone at Atelier. There was no “thusly,” no heavy come-on. Just a note that said, “Saw your Golda doc. Have been following your rise for some time. Wanna come work for us? We’ll double your salary, whatever the fk Rzr’s paying you. Not remote either. We want you here.” It was like a combination between an e-mail and a text and in the midst of the total typing freedom Cassie Black was feeling in that moment she wrote back, “triple it,” and the guy from Atelier—it turned out it wasn’t a guy but a girl—woman—named Sandra—wrote right back:
“Word. Done deal. You know we’re in SF, right?”