THE FIRST WAY CASSIE BLACK’S LIFE changed in the weeks around the time of the Social Security bombing was that she’d taken a new job making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but it meant she would have to move to San Francisco. They wanted her to start ASAP and what really would it take for her to make the move? She could fit everything in her apartment into a ten-foot U-Haul and be in the Bay Area in three days. She cut her lease—she just went ahead and ate the rest of the month’s rent—packed up, rented a U-Haul from the place down off Atlantic Avenue where the first World Trade Center bombers had rented theirs. She hadn’t been in this part of Brooklyn in ages—being in Williamsburg confined her to the L, a quick east-west swoop in and out of Lower Manhattan. She could hardly believe how much downtown Brooklyn had changed. She got off the Q down on Fourth Avenue, a four-lane-and-a-concrete-median expanse that used to house, more or less exclusively, gas stations and garages. The concrete median strip was still there, but now there were bars and coffee shops at every corner, and half the spaces between.
She’d planned to walk up the slope of Park Slope toward the U-Haul when she got down there but she’d ridden the Q one stop too far. She passed the corner of Baltic where a beautiful new public school had been built. Once she hit Atlantic she turned right and there was the Barclays Center, rising out of the concrete like the rusted hull of a beached freighter. The last time she’d been here was to play the back room at Freddie’s with the Willows, but it had been closed down to make room for this new center, where the Rolling Stones and the Nets could play on successive nights. They’d played a bunch of gigs at Southpaw when it opened, but there were so many new venues all across Brooklyn that even that one, with its glorious velvet curtain that opened to greet the band like they were a stage act, had closed.
There was a time when witnessing all this growth and change would have raised Cassie’s hackles—she’d come down to protest the building of the Atlantic Center project, carrying signs that read “Ratner is a Rat!” and “Intensification not Gentrification” and “Oh no, Hell no, the Brooklyn Nets have gotta go!”—but to be honest, it was just a huge improvement. There were actual yellow and white lines painted on Flatbush Avenue to keep cabs in their lanes. The Barclays Center, for all its distressed-jeans-of-a-rusted-façade artificiality, was only fifteen stories tall, nowhere near as tall as the iconic Key Savings Bank to its west. It was all somehow peaceful, and tasteful, and unobtrusive. After setting up her U-Haul rental Cassie walked up Fifth Ave to O’Connor’s, where she’d planned to have a drink with Regan, who was already there when Cassie arrived.
“You know Elliott Smith used to drink here,” Cassie said. She put the two Jack-and-gingers she’d bought down in front of Regan. “He’d play in the back sometimes.”
“Uh, yeah,” Regan said. “I was the one who told you that.”
Cassie was uncertain if that was true but she didn’t want to argue. She was the one who was leaving, all at once, the job Regan had put her up for and the city where they both now lived.
“Long-distance,” Regan said. “I’m not sure I was ever in favor of long-distance.”
“Everyone we know says long-distance isn’t that bad these days,” Cassie said. “Remember how Hussein and Jill said they used FaceTime that year she was up in Cambridge for her Radcliffe? They said it was more like hanging out than talking on the phone. They could just have it open and talk and even watch movies together and—”
“Netflix and chill, but on FaceTime.”
“Right.”
“And with auto-chill.”
“Right.”
“I don’t know,” Regan said. “I just … do … not … know.”
“Well, there is a San Francisco RazorWire office now, right? We haven’t even talked to Mario about that yet.”
“Mario would say no.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You do. I do. Plus what the fuck kind of Bay Area-er would I be? Riding the Google Bus down to Palo Alto for meetings. Weekends for wine tours in Napa. Would I have to start smoking pot? Pot makes me paranoid. I don’t drink wine.”
“And you hate tours.”
“Right,” Regan said.
“Right.”