Boomsday Read online

  “They already have enough of our debt?”

  “Precisely. Do you get the significance of that? The largest single purchaser of U.S. government debt just declined to finance any more of it. As in our debt. Meanwhile, and not coincidentally, the first of your generation have started to retire. You know what they’re calling it?”

  “Happy Hour?”

  “Boomsday.”

  “Good word.”

  “Mountainous debt, a deflating economy, and seventy-seven million people retiring. The perfect economic storm.” Not bad, Cass thought, making a mental note to file it away for the blog. “And what is the Congress doing? Raising taxes-on my generation-to pay for, among other things, a monorail system in Alaska.”

  Cass realized suddenly that she was standing, leaning forward over his desk, and shouting at him. Terry, meanwhile, was looking up at her with something like alarm.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to…Long day.”

  “Listen, kiddo,” Terry said, “that resort in the Bahamas where our client Albert Schweitzer threw the party with the ice sculptures…why don’t you go down there and check it out? We’ll call it research, make Albert pay. Least he could do. Take your time. Stay for a few days. Bring a bathing suit and a tube of tanning oil and a trashy paperback. Take a load off. Get…you know…” He waved his hands in the air.

  “Laid?”

  “Whatever.”

  “You use that word more than I do. It’s my generation’s word, not yours.”

  “It’s useful. It may actually be your generation’s major semantic contribution so far. It’s pure Teflon.”

  “What’s Teflon?”

  “They coat frying pans with it so stuff doesn’t stick. Spin-off of the space program. Like Tang.”

  “Tang?”

  “Never mind. Look, go home. Go to the Bahamas. Hang an ‘Out to Lunch’ on the blog or something.”

  He was already back to typing by the time she reached the door. On her way out, he shouted, “If you get any brainstorms on how to make my Brazilian Indian tribe look like bloodthirsty savages, e-mail me.”

  The computer screen was glowing at her in the dark of her apartment. A prior generation would have called it psychedelic; to hers it was just screen saving.

  She showered, changed into comfy jammies, ate a peanut-butter PowerBar, and washed it down with Red Bull. She unscrewed the safety cap of her bottle of NoDoz, hesitated. If she took one, she wouldn’t get to sleep until at least four. Unless she popped a Tylenol PM at three. She wondered about the long-term effects of this pharmaceutical roller-coaster ride. Early Alzheimer’s, probably. Or one of those drop-dead-on-the-sidewalk heart attacks like Japanese salarymen have. She popped the NoDoz. She could sleep in tomorrow. Terry wasn’t expecting her in the office. She wanted a cigarette but had given them up (this morning). She chomped down on a piece of Nicorette gum and felt her capillaries surge and tingle. Shock and awe. She flexed her fingers. Showtime.

  She logged on. There were 573 messages waiting for her. Her Google profile had searched for reports on the Senate vote and auto-sent them to her inbox. She read. They’d voted in favor of Social Security payroll tax “augmentation.” Jerks. Couldn’t bring themselves to call it a “tax increase.” She felt her blood heating up. (Either that or the effects of the pill.) Soon energy was surging in her veins in equal proportion to outrage. Her fingers were playing across the keyboard like Alicia de Larrocha conjuring a Bach partita.

  She typed: “The buck has been passed to a new generation-ours!”

  She stared at it on the screen, fiddled with the font color and point size. It occurred to her that as most of her readers were in their twenties and thirties, they would have no idea it was a steal from John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural speech, “The torch has been passed to a new generation.” Even fewer would know that she’d grafted it onto Harry Truman’s famous slogan “The buck stops here.” Whatever. Cassandra was starting to get hits from older readers. And the mainstream media were also starting to take notice. The Washington Post had called CASSANDRA “the bulletin board for angry, intelligent Gen-W’s.” Gen-W being short for “generation whatever.” Even one or two advertisers were starting to come in, feigning interest.

  In a moment of weakness, she’d posted a photograph of herself on the home page, thinking it might bring in a few male viewers. It did. A third of the 573 messages were from men who wanted to have sex with her. She was, as Terry had put it, an attractive girl or, to use the word of her generation, “hot”-naturally blond, with liquid, playful eyes and lips that seemed always poised to bestow a kiss, giving her a look of intelligence in contention with sensuality. She had a figure that, when displayed in a bikini or thong at the resort in the Bahamas, would draw sighs from any passing male. All in all, it was not the package you’d expect to find sitting in front of a computer screen at three a.m., wired on over-the-counter speed and railing at the government for-fiscal irresponsibility? Girl, she thought, get a life.

  Chapter 2

  Twelve Years Before…

  “I got in! I got in!”

  Cassandra Cohane, age seventeen, was exuberant, and why not? The thick envelope she was waving over her head like a winning lottery ticket bore the dark blue “Lux Et Veritas” stamp of Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. All that work, SAT preparation, studying until her eyeballs burned, signing up for AP courses, all those summers spent tutoring inner-city kids, one working on the archaeological site from hell: helping to excavate a 1980s-era mass grave in Guatemala (“It will look very strong on your application,” her guidance counselor had said). The endless rewriting of the college essay, gearing up for the sweaty interview. The waiting. And now she was in. She said it one more time. “I got in!” She hardly believed it herself.

  Her father wouldn’t be home until late. She waited for him in the kitchen. He arrived after ten. She sprang up to show him the letter.

  “Honey, I’m so proud of you I could bust.” Frank Cohane had gone to an engineering college in California, one that needed to make no apology, but it was-he’d be the first to admit-no Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

  “Yale!” he said. “Damn. Yale. How about that.”

  Two days later via FedEx, a box arrived. It was full of Yale car decals, coffee mugs, T-shirts, sweatpants, cap, a bulldog-theme pencil sharpener, pens, pads, paperweights, a mouse pad, and a sweatshirt that read, YALE DAD. The card read, “So proud. Love, Dad.” He put so many YALE decals on the car windows, her mother complained she couldn’t see out the back. Neighbors stopped and congratulated her.

  A few months later, she came home from school and saw an envelope with the familiar blue emblem lying open on the dining room table. It was from the registrar’s office, addressed to her parents:

  “We still have not received the first installment for Cassandra’s tuition. Please contact us at your earliest convenience.”

  Her mother wasn’t home yet. She called her father. He greeted her with his normal paternal exuberance, which, once she introduced the subject, changed to an awkward silence.

  “Sug” (pronounced “Shug”), he said-an ominous start: It was a word he generally used, perhaps without realizing it, when sugarcoating was called for-“I really want to talk to you about that. But I can’t right now, sweetheart. I’ve got four people in my office. We’ll talk when I get home. Love you.”

  She confronted her mother when she got home. Her mother read the letter with a puzzled look. “Dad said he’d take care of it.” She called him at the office. Cass listened in the doorway, mind racing.

  They weren’t poor, the Cohanes. They lived in a comfortable subdivision in a respectable but hardly fancy neighborhood. Her mother taught economics at the public high school Cass attended. There were four children in the family. Her father was reasonably prosperous, as far as Cass knew. He’d been a systems engineer at Electric Boat, the company that built America ’s fleet of cold war-era submarines. He never talked much about his j
ob, since much of it was technically classified and all of it, he assured them, was boring and dry. One day, Cass’s younger brother picked the lock on their father’s briefcase and examined the contents. He revealed to his siblings that as far as he could figure out, it had something to do with the launch and guidance systems for the subs’ ballistic missiles. Not boring, but definitely dry.

  Frank and several of his colleagues had presciently quit Electric Boat the year before, assuming correctly that the end of the cold war would sooner or later reduce the demand for submarines that could simultaneously annihilate fifty cities, despite the Connecticut congressional delegation’s best efforts to perpetuate a felt need for them. They had a brainstorm for an Internet/software program. In the 1990s, Wall Street was dispensing money faster than an ATM to any start-up ending in “.com.” Frank’s idea had to do with tracking-not ballistic missiles, but shipping packages. If everything went according to plan, they’d take their company public within the year. They were already trying to figure out what kind of corporate jet to buy. He and his partners were working brutal hours, sometimes sleeping on cots at the old mill they’d rented for their office. He would arrive home looking wiped out, but with sparkly eyes. Once they did the IPO, he predicted, “we’ll be richer than King Tut.”

  Cass listened to her mother on the phone.

  “You what? You said you put that in her 529! Oh, Frank-how could you?”

  Cass did not know what a “ 529” was, but the other words issuing from her mother were acquiring an unpleasant critical mass: “can’t believe”…“disgusted”…“unforgivable”…ending with, “No, you can tell her. You get in your forty-thousand-dollar Beemer right now-I don’t care how many people you have in your office-and come home and tell her yourself.” She hung up.

  Cass waited for him in the kitchen, as she had the night she got the acceptance letter. When he finally got home, he wore a smile of the kind generally described as “brave.”

  “What’s a 529?” Cass asked.

  “Did Mom…explain?”

  “No. She said you would. She just burst out crying and closed the door to her bedroom.”

  “Oh. Uh, well, it’s an instrument, a college savings plan. You put money in it, and, uh, it’s tax-exempt.”

  “So I have one?”

  “Sug, I…had to put it into the company. These start-ups take seed capital, honey. But when we do the IPO, I’m telling you…Do you know what IPO is?”

  “‘I’m pissed off’”

  “Clever girl. Initial public offering. We’re going to be rolling in it. Rolling.”

  “So, basically, Dad, what you’re trying to say is that you spent my college tuition money on your dot.com.”

  “Our dot.com. Don’t worry, Sug, we’ll come up with the money. If I have to…I’ll come up with the dough. You’ll see.”

  Her father spent most of the following nights at his office. Meanwhile, Cass’s mother drove to New Haven to try to sort things out. She returned looking defeated, with the news that the Cohanes did not qualify for tuition assistance, as they called it. They were above the thin red line dividing the truly needy from the truly well-enough-off. There was, her mother said, face darkening, her father’s BMW. It might not be a particularly recent model, but you would not find it being used in a remake of The Grapes of Wrath, driven by Tom Joad. Then there was-her face now vermilion-his part ownership in the twin-engine Cessna.

  On the night her father finally reappeared for a family supper, Cass’s mother said, as she passed the mashed potatoes, “Frank, there was a question on the financial aid application: ‘How many aircraft do you own? If needed, list on separate sheet.’ How many do you have at this point?” That was the end of Mom and Dad’s conversation at that happy supper. Her father stormed off into the night, muttering on about how he was killing himself for the family and what thanks did he get? A few hours later, Cass got an e-mail from him, manfully explaining that he used the Cessna “exclusively” to fly to business meetings. In fact, it was deductible as a business expense. Indeed, he managed to make it sound as though selling his share in the plane would be tantamount to economic suicide. The family would be out on the street, eating potatoes that fell off trucks. Irish ancestry is a reliable provider of poverty metaphors.

  A few days later, Frank Cohane was waiting for Cass outside her high school. In his Beemer. That, too, he explained sheepishly, was a “deductible business expense.” He took her to Starbucks, where, according to a recent survey, 92 percent of Americans now hold their significant conversations.

  “Sug,” he said, “have you ever given any thought to, uh…”

  “Religious orders? No, Dad.”

  “The military.”

  She stared. She had, as it happened, not given any thought to the military. She supposed that she was as patriotic as any seventeen-year-old American girl. She’d grown up in the backyard of one of the country’s biggest defense contractors. Everyone here was patriotic. But her adolescence had been focused intensely on AP French, AP English, AP history, 1585 SATs, and a 3.95 GPA so that she might actually get into-you know-Yale. Hello? Perhaps he’d noticed?

  “Hear me out,” he said, suddenly animated, as if he had just had a category 5 brain hurricane. “I did some calling around. Turns out if you go into the officers training program-and hell, you’d be a cinch with your scores-and give ’em a few years, heck, they’ll pay for college.” He made it sound like the bargain of the century.

  What was his deal? He’d done “some calling around”? On his fancy new cell phone? In the BMW? Or had he jumped into the “deductible” Cessna and flown down to the Pentagon in Washington to talk it over personally with the Deputy Undersecretary for Recruiting Kids Whose Dads Have Blown the Tuition Money? He couldn’t actually be serious.

  “How many years?”

  “Three. And get this-if you give ’em six years, they basically pay for everything. You get all kinds of bennies.” He leaned forward. “I called Yale. They said they were expecting you in the incoming class and started to give me some hoo-hah about it, until I said, ‘Whoa, whoa-you’re telling me you’re gonna renege on accepting a patriotic American woman who wants to serve her country?’” He grinned. He did have a winning grin, her father. “Did they ever back down fast. So you see, I fixed it. They’ll defer admission until you’re discharged from the army. Or navy. Whatever you-”

  “You told them-as in Yale-that I wasn’t entering this fall? As in the place I have been working my butt off to get into the last four years? You told them that?”

  “Well, seeing as how we don’t have the money…Geez, Sug, do you know it’s over thirty grand, and that’s without a dining plan.”

  “I could always, like, not eat for four years.” Her head was spinning. “Did you…have you discussed this with-Mom?”

  “No. No. I wanted to bounce it off you first. Naturally. Sug, when this IPO goes through, I’ll buy Yale University a whole new football stadium.”

  Frank Cohane went on talking, but Cass had stopped listening. She was trying to calculate how many people she’d told about getting into Yale. Fifty? A hundred? Let’s see, everyone in her Yahoo! address book…plus everyone on her Hotmail address book…everyone in the senior class knew…relatives…plus she’d stopped by the Martin Luther King Jr. Center where she spent that broiling summer as a tutor. They’d all hugged her, said how proud they were of her. Say, two hundred people?

  Cass became aware that her father was still talking.

  “…I never went into the military myself. And to be honest, I always kind of wished I had. Not that I wanted to go to Vietnam. Jesus, no one in my generation wanted to go to Vietnam. That was completely screwed up. Anyway, we’re not at war now. So really if you think about it, it could be kind of a good experience.”

  Chapter 3

  And so, the following January, when Cass would have been heeling the Yale Daily News or attending a master’s tea with some visiting eminence, she instead found herself at Camp
Bravo (an ironic name, given the enthusiasm level of its occupants) at a place called Turdje-the “d” was silent, though acutely felt-in Bosnia, formerly Yugoslavia, formerly Austro-Hungary, formerly the Ottoman Empire, in the company of several hundred troops, part of America’s apparently endless (and certainly thankless) commitment to keeping Europeans from slaughtering one another.

  “Sir,” she asked one of her superior officers after one especially depressing day, “why are we here?”

  A naive question, perhaps, but legitimate enough, inasmuch as she was asking it five years into America ’s “temporary” deployment in the region. Without looking up from his papers, the officer replied, “To keep World War One from breaking out again.” It was said without irony.

  Cass had gone through combat basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. She had always been an outdoors girl. She didn’t find the training particularly grueling. Her drill instructors were impressed by the zest with which she bayoneted dummies and subdued men twenty pounds heavier than her in hand-to-hand training. Having spent some time in the Connecticut woods with her brother shooting squirrels with a.22 rifle, she took to the shooting part and obliterated the heads and vital organs of targets with her M-16. One of her shooting instructors even suggested that she apply to sniper school. She contemplated it, then decided against it on the grounds that being able to kill at one thousand yards was-thankfully-not a skill in huge demand in the civilian afterlife. She did, however, having passed basic with flying colors, apply to Ranger school with every expectation of acceptance.

  So in due course she found herself assigned, by the army’s invisible hand-more powerful, even, than Adam Smith’s-to Public Affairs. Some functionary deep within the bowels of the Department of the Army in Washington, D.C., while processing her application, saw that she had been accepted to Yale University. Be a total waste to have this one rappelling out of helicopters. No, she was needed-desperately, immediately-in the slushy gray snows of Bosnia, escorting VIPs, issuing press releases, and putting on goodwill coffee-and-doughnut grip-’n’-grins with indigenous locals.