THE SECOND BIG CHANGE IN CASSIE’S LIFE, which only hit her a month or so after she’d been living in San Francisco, was that she found she didn’t need love anymore after all. She needed Regan for the contact with Lucien Williams. But FaceTime and chill was a complete nightmare with Regan, and after a single conversation with a federal officer at an unmarked office near Union Square, all the rest of the dealings to do with Mark, any official word, went through Lucien. Just like Regan said: Cassie’s e-mails, the timing and legitimacy of her move to work for Atelier that week, time-stamped documents, cleared Cassie of any final connection with Mark Brumfeld of any kind. She was almost a thousand miles west of Woodlawn when the bomb went off, eating lamb curry and injera in Cbus fucking Ohio of all places at the moment it exploded. Agents had talked to the waiter there and confirmed it. The paper trail of her interactions with Mark showed just what it was—a long history of an increasingly unhinged young man pining for his ex-fiancée and former bandmate, a fact that, true or not, played well into the government’s case against him. Terrorists were far more often spurred on by love than they were by hate, and if there was one thing Cassie could confirm for anyone, feebee or non-feebee, it was that Mark for sure did continue to love her. Of course she didn’t mention that at one point she may have loved him, too.
Which in its own way confirmed for Cassie that what she did not need in her life, now or ever as far as she was concerned, was love. Love just fucked everything—everything—up. Maybe that was what she’d learned in that reverie at Independence Pass, a moment that felt more like the memory of a dream than a memory memory: she’d been alone, twelve thousand feet above Cbus level, and she’d been the happiest she was in years. She had a huge salary, a new apartment, a new city. Her conversation in O’Connor’s in Park Slope with Regan felt unreal when it happened, like the bottom line of a video she was editing on Premiere—all you had to do was select it and press Delete and—click!—it was gone. Whatever she’d felt or not felt for Mark, once he’d left New York for Baltimore, she had spent some time thinking about it. Mostly it was because he was e-mailing her all the time, but if Cassie was being honest, she thought about him, too. It wasn’t love but the residue love leaves, that need to know that care itself was immutable, that like energy it couldn’t be destroyed but could only be transmuted into new forms. And all forms for Cassie now were alone forms. The only love she would allow herself to feel would be love for herself, maybe love for a dog small enough to be crated and left in an apartment while she was at work all day.
As she unpacked each weekend in her new apartment, she didn’t find herself thinking about Mark—or about Regan. The folks at Atelier had found her a one-bedroom on Mission between Twenty-first and Twenty-second. It was small but she was used to small. On weekends she sometimes took her new Pomeranian, Polly, for a walk down to the green bulbous indica-bud hills of Dolores Park where she lay in the cool San Francisco sun among all the hipsters and start-up employees and weekend hippies, walked down Valencia to the McSweeney’s Super Hero Outlet or a place called the Curiosity Shoppe, where she bought decorations for her apartment. They sold books at both places, too, but it occurred to Cassie that along with not caring about love anymore, she couldn’t give a living fuck for the written word. She’d spent a year-plus fact-checking for a website and now she’d moved into video. Video was so much more satisfying. The sheer number of more views, more hits, you could get for a video than for even the viralest of viral listicles was undeniable. There was a store in Noe Valley where you could buy books by the pound, selecting them by the color of their spines. Cassie bought thirteen pounds of pink-lemonade-pink books and three pounds of lime-green ones for her main living space a month after she’d arrived.
If there was one thing living in the Mission had showed her after just a month, it was that even with the ginormous new salary she was earning, she would need to make a whole fuckload more money if she was going to live well in California.