Sensation Machines

by Adam Wilson

  “My husband works in finance. I know it’s more complicated.”

  “I didn’t say you don’t benefit. I didn’t say you can’t argue talking points about the trickle-down effects of corporate wealth or the way markets tend to self-correct, or Thomas Jefferson’s wet dream of an open-air flea market. What I said is that you believe it. In your hidden heart, you know you are complicit in the machinations of neoliberalism. The disenfranchisement of the middle class. The destruction of the working class. You are a scion of privilege. A basic bitch who buys a Rag & Bone dress at full retail, then tells her friends it was marked down. A person who convinces herself that by donating a small, untaxed portion of her yearly salary to Kickstarter campaigns that fund urban farming initiatives, the ultimate balance of her good deeds and destructive behaviors evens out. And yet still deep down, you know that you’re complicit.”

  He wasn’t even out of breath.

  I said, “These are things I’ve considered.”

  “And even though you think hippies are dirty and hipsters are used and discarded douchebags, and homeless teen runaways are a blight on the glory that is Alphabet City, and even though you find fault in certain aspects of #Occupy, you don’t ultimately disagree that the system needs reimagining. So what do you do? You try not to think about it. You stay out of it. You tell your friends that you’re not interested in politics. That you don’t have a deep enough understanding of the situation to form a truly educated opinion. That, yes, your husband is a banker, but he’s a different kind of banker, the good kind of banker. A banker with a heart of gold and a wife of heart, and a Sunday kinda brunch-bloated love.”

  “What’s your point?” I said.

  “The point is that you’re not alone. There are a lot of people like you. People who were sickened by the camps at the border, and what happened with the pipeline, and what happened in Charleston, and what happened in Orlando, and what happened in Parkland, and what happened in El Paso. People who hashtag believe women, and hashtag me too, and hashtag it might as well be the heat death of the universe, dude, because time’s indubitably up. People in favor of pan-gender bathrooms, an assault weapons ban, a bigger education budget, less military spending, and more attention to climate change. And yet, they’re torn on the UBI because they like their pumpkin-spiced lives. There are a lot of people like you who are waiting for the right person to come along and tell them there’s nothing wrong with the way that they’re living these lives. Do you know the term psychic foreclosure? That’s what people want. A one-size-fits-all system of belief: no gray areas, no tricky ethical quandaries. License to live as you already are. That’s what we’re here to give. We’re here to tell them that just because they went to Wesleyan and smoke fat blunts of Kush and favor a Chinese sweatshop worker’s right to a fair and speedy lunch break, it doesn’t mean they have to go against their own fiscal interests. It doesn’t mean that socialism is the way forward. It doesn’t mean that the toothless meth smokers in Appalachian trailers deserve a percentage of their hard-earned salaries. It doesn’t mean that people like you should pay a six percent property tax on your refurbished brownstone so every bedsore-ridden inbred in southern Ohio can eat chicken-fried cheesecake while watching amateur wrestling on loop. Forget Joe the Plumber. How about Yelena the Trust Funded Yoga Instructor? That’s our demo.”

  “Okay.”

  I was trying to picture chicken-fried cheesecake. Lucas picked up the pen. He crossed out Wall Street and replaced it with #Occupy. He said, “Your job is to create that narrative.”

  “My job is to create that narrative,” I echoed. It’s a tactic I learned early in my career. Repeating other people’s words makes it seem like you understand, that you’re on their side and submissive. “So you work for a bank?”

  “No.”

  “But someone with an interest in the Senate killing the bill?”

  “This is bigger than a bill. It’s about giving people a sense of comfort. You’ve worked with lifestyle brands. Brands that tell people that if they buy a product they can live like the people in the ads. This is the same. We want people to feel like they can be the people they want to be. That they can find peace.”

  “You’re a lobbyist?”

  “For America.”

  “What a line. You chose me because my husband works in finance. You knew I’d be sympathetic.”

  “We chose you because you’re good. Your campaign for McDonald’s in India—Eat, Pray, Loving It!” He removed an ice cube from his drink with his fingers. He chewed the ice cube.

  “Then why all the secrecy?” I said. “The motel, the project code name, the fact that we haven’t met any of your colleagues.”

  “In a week’s time, we’ll be launching a product. It’s a product that I’ve spent years developing, and it’s a product that I believe will change the world. This product is my personal intellectual property, and until it’s ready for the market, I’d prefer that knowledge of it be limited to a small group of trusted associates. My hope is that, within a few days’ time, you will have proved yourself worthy of inclusion in that group. I promise that, if you do, you will not be disappointed.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Now, the success of this product is contingent on the UBI bill dying on the Senate floor. This is where you—your campaign—comes in.”

  “Okay,” I said again.

  The food arrived. I had a salad. Lucas had a rare cow steak, which cost six dollars more than the stem-cell filet also offered on the menu. He said he always ate real meat, that the kind grown on trees lacked the necessary iron.

  We ate quickly. Lucas’s knife scraped loudly across his plate. When the steak was no more, he dabbed the small puddles of blood and grease with his big thumb. He sprinkled salt on his wet thumb. He licked. I put my napkin in my salad and signaled to the service bot. Lucas caught me looking again at his drawing.

  “Are you getting it?”

  “Everyone’s fucking everyone. That I understand.”

  “Good. Because that’s part one of the agenda. Understanding the problem is part one.”

  “What’s part two?”

  “Part two is complicated.”

  “Why is it complicated?”

  “Part two is what you’re gonna do about it.”

  “What are we going to do about it?”

  Lucas reached back into his bag and removed a rolled-up poster. He watched as I unrolled it. The poster featured a black-and-white photo of steel gates beneath a German sign. I’d seen this image before, in person, on a visit to Poland to see where my grandparents’ cousins had been murdered. Over the image, lay an English translation. Whoever designed it had added a hashtag:

  #WORKWILLSETYOUFREE

  “This,” Lucas said, “is our campaign.”

  Michael

  The atmosphere in the office was too glum to be productive, so I rode the F to 14th, then switched to the uptown 1. At Columbia, school was in sesh. Skinny freshmen weighed down by backpacks, skinny hipsters weighed down by existential despair, everyone weighed down by debt.

  I admired these kids and coveted their freedom. It would end eventually, but for now they could read Judith Butler and Edward Said, pursue an ethnographically diverse array of friends with benefits, friends with benzodiazepine prescriptions, friends with parental benefactors. College is the last bastion of free love and dining dollars, the best aspects of hippie sixties mixed with seventies excess, eighties dad-funded decadence, and nineties wide-leg denim. With the millennium came drugs like 2C-I and Molly, the spread of flash-frozen sushi to landlocked areas.

  Despite these amusements, the library was jam-packed with students. I had access via a not-yet expired Columbia ID purchased from a recently graduated C&S rookie. I bore little resemblance to the ID photo, but campus security was surprisingly lax, especially considering the scourge of school shootings. Or maybe, as a whi
te man with clipped fingernails and no facial tattoos, I’d slipped from the profiler’s purview.

  I was a regular by now, arriving most evenings under the delusion that I’d hack out a couple chapters. In reality, I’d written nothing. Or rather, I wrote things—page-long sentences replete with semicolons, remixed nineteenth-century pantoums, an allegorical flash fiction in which Eminem is reimagined as the charismatic leader of a colony on Mars—and then deleted them. I was still finding my form. There were ideas I wanted to touch on: the way hip-hop had misogynized the male psyche; the music industry as a microcosm of the global economy; the health risks of hair bleach. But I was missing something major, the binding agent that would cohere these ideas into a thesis.

  Mostly, I spent my library time embarked on a kind of vague research. One evening I might make headway in volume two of Marx’s Capital, but the next I’d read only back issues of glossy women’s mags, or online consumer reports, or Insta feeds chronicling the daily deeds of certain superlative LOLcats. I read and reread Em’s lyrics, spending hours self-debating semantics and attempting to justify his scrim of sociopathy. The project was hopeless.

  I chose a seat in the second floor reading room, sniffed the varnished desk wood, lit my desk lamp, sucked on a cough drop, put on my nicotine patch, bit the cough drop, swallowed it, nibbled my sticky inner cheek, blew my nose, chewed two Tums which were chalky and awful with a weak citrus undertaste, so I opened my laptop and called up a blank document which I renamed Chapter 1.

  I typed:

  Before coming to prominence in the field of hip-hop, Marshall Mathers worked as a pizza chef at the Little Caesars Family Fun Center in the Detroit suburb of Warren, Michigan.

  The sentence was slightly misleading. For most of his twenties, Em was a busboy and fry cook at Gilbert’s Lodge, a sports bar decorated in moose-head taxidermy. Gilbert’s was his self-proclaimed second home, and any true scholar knew of Em’s on-the-job freestyling, an incessant stream of invective that amused his fellow busboys, creeped the female servers, irked the shit out of management, and may have led to his firing days before Christmas, 1996.

  Em worked at Little Caesars for six months before being rehired at Gilbert’s. Gilbert’s had played a much larger role in the saga of Marshall Mathers, and yet, mentioning Gilbert’s, out of context, in the first sentence of my book, would not pack the same punch as mentioning Little Caesars. With its charming logo and inoffensive pizza, Little Caesars was a universally recognized symbol of mediocrity, and there was no more efficient way of indicating Em’s humble beginnings than by revealing his stint at the chain.

  What’s more, Em hadn’t worked at any Little Caesars, but a Little Caesars “Family Fun Center.” For a reader schooled in the vulgarity of Em’s lyrics, the fact that he’d worked at such a venue would be downright disturbing. One imagines an oblivious mother handing her offspring to a demonically grinning young Mathers, followed by a montage of bubbling mozzarella and third-degree burns and maniacal laughter as a pizza cutter severs tiny fingers. On top of that, the phrase “Family Fun Center” would hint at one of my book’s major themes, an exploration of masculinity and American fatherhood.

  Another issue was that the clause “Before coming to prominence in the field of hip-hop” had a dry, academic tenor that was nicely balanced by the pedestrian familiarity of “Little Caesars Family Fun Center,” a balance that wouldn’t be as successfully achieved if I replaced “Little Caesars” with “Gilbert’s Lodge.” I wanted the opening sentence to reassure readers that this was a serious work, but that its seriousness wouldn’t alienate the common pizza-eater by bombarding her with academic jargon.

  Ultimately, however, something felt disingenuous about beginning the book by mentioning Little Caesars. I felt an odd sense of loyalty to Gilbert’s Lodge, and worried that, in banishing Gilbert’s to the purgatory of Chapter 2, I was suppressing factual truth in favor of self-serving mythology. Stumped, I deleted the sentence and X’d out of the doc.

  My laptop background was a photo from my honeymoon: Wendy and I, posing in the princess tower at Angkor Wat. The camera stares over our shoulders at the distant moat. It’s not a great picture—the sun is behind us, backlight obscuring our faces—but the honeymoon remained pristine in my memory, a reminder of my marriage’s optimistic prelude.

  In Cambodia we ate curry, rode tuk-tuks, and visited temples. We discussed Western privilege, got stoned on pot-topped pizza, and shopped for counterfeit designer clothes. We kissed. We read books, feet entwined, on poolside mats. We spent mornings in lace-curtained canopy beds, drinking coffee from small porcelain cups and making love. For five US dollars, I got a Dr. Fish foot massage—a tank of baby piranhas nibbling the dry skin off my heels. And one night at a beach bar in a crab village called Kep, we joked about inviting a handsome waiter back to our bungalow after he got off shift to have sex with Wendy while I watched. This was a fantasy I’d entertained for some time, and though we were only teasing each other with the idea in Cambodia, it was something that stuck with me, and that I continued to suggest, always semi-jokingly, during the first years of our marriage.

  It’s hard to say what about this arrangement appealed; the roots of desire, as my therapist, Dr. Becker, has pointed out, are often repressed for practical reasons. The only way I can explain it is that during sex—an interval when I’m meant to be a lit-up pleasure center—my anxiety about being in the quote unquote moment is such that sex has the opposite effect of increasing my self-consciousness. Dr. Becker claims this is a common phenomenon and the cause of much sexual dysfunction. For my part, I imagined that if I watched my wife in congress with another man while I masturbated, I wouldn’t need to worry about maintaining an erection, or hitting Wendy’s G-spot, or whether or not she came. I would be free to lose myself in the quote unquote music, while taking part in a larger, pleasure-giving picture. I would be able to spiritually connect with Wendy while someone else engaged with her body.

  About three months ago, Wendy and I decided to enact this fantasy as a way of fighting through what we refused to call a rut. Ruts were for the gut-soft middle-aged, that smartphone-incompetent demographic who signed up for capoeira classes in the hope it might awaken their libidos. Wendy and I were still young and adventurous, millennial in spirit if only just within that generation’s bracket. We deserved a foray into all the world had come to offer while we’d been engaged in the anachronistic rituals of courtship and baby-making. In a sense, the threesome was consolation for the fact that we’d failed to become parents and fully shuck the skins of our younger selves. We found our third on the Troika app, a John Jay senior named Eric Darving who majored in criminal justice and had the kind of California smile I’d always admired on a man.

  Wendy and I dared each other to go through with it, knowing full well the possible implications for our marriage. We spent a week emailing back and forth with Eric, who was gracious and patient. His lax attitude made us feel like what we were planning wasn’t outrageous, but de rigueur for anyone interesting. Neither of us had been to Burning Man or even Coachella; we’d never attended a swinger’s party or done much skinny-dipping. So though it seemed out of character for Wendy to show interest in something so boldly beyond the limits of her comfort zone, I understood it as a restorative act, a fixed match resulting in triumph over two decades’ worth of demons. Looking back, I can see that I was wrong, that Wendy’s interest—and mine too, if I’m being honest—was masochistic. We were trying to blot out our grief by replacing it with a more immediate trauma.

  When Eric rang the bell, we welcomed him into our loft. It was one of those July nights when the heat’s still temperate after the relief of a summer storm, and you can turn off the AC and open the windows. I got beers from the fridge. Eric stared at the high ceiling and I recalled my own first visit to a rich person’s apartment, amazed that in this cramped city of nonconsensual subway rubbing, a single person might take up so much space. Eric was tal
ler than expected. I’d known his height from the get-go—six-five—but it was something else to see him standing next to Wendy. She looked natural beside a taller man.

  The three of us sat in a row on the couch and stared at the turned-off TV. No one made eye contact. I said, “This is awkward,” and Wendy let out a laugh. Eric smiled. I lit a cigarette—I’d begun smoking again after Nina’s death—and Eric waved the smoke from his face, and Wendy coughed. She asked Eric if he liked music, as if there were people who didn’t. He said, “Yeah man,” and put his legs on an ottoman. I asked if he liked hip-hop and he said, “Hells yeah,” and I told him I was a hip-hop nerd myself, especially nineties stuff and early aughts, though the current scene had plenty to offer.

  Eric nodded. I could tell he wasn’t interested, but Wendy didn’t jump in, and nervousness brings out my verbosity. I found myself lecturing on Em’s place in the pantheon, below Nas and Biggie, of course, but on par with Jay-Z? When pressed, Eric admitted to being a passive listener who didn’t pay attention to the words. I told him that, while beats were certainly important, lyrics were the genre’s defining characteristic. As an example, I put on Em’s masterpiece, The Marshall Mathers LP. In retrospect, it was the wrong choice.

  We moved to the bedroom, and after some gentle coaxing from Eric and me, Wendy removed her robe to reveal a garter set I’d bought her and had never seen her wear. For a moment I was taken aback, jealous that she’d put on the lingerie for someone else after refusing to wear it for me for months. She’d said that when I asked her to dress up in that or any outfit, what I really wanted was another partner, someone confident and lascivious who shaved whimsical shapes into her pubic hair.

  This was a debate we’d been having for years, but it had increased in frequency as we’d gotten older, Wendy growing more worried that she would no longer satisfy my base macho cravings. And though I’d explained that my wanting her to wear costumes and engage with me in light role-playing was no more emotionally adulterous than her own interest in being stimulated by a silicon phallus, I’d ultimately accepted the situation as a lost cause, one that had less to do with me than with Wendy’s own issues. That is, until I saw her pose for Eric Darving in the garter set and came to understand that the issue was not with Wendy at all, but with me; that her antipathy to role-playing was actually about her ultimate disappointment that no role-play could truly conjure another man.