Sensation Machines

by Adam Wilson

  “My brother’s afraid of needles,” Rachel says.

  “No way,” Donny says.

  “It’s true,” Michael says. “I’m lucky. My fear’s the only thing that stopped me getting a Slim Shady tattoo on my eighteenth birthday.”

  “Michael’s writing a book about Eminem,” Rachel says.

  “Trying,” Michael says. “And failing.”

  The other night, while searching his bedroom for photos of Ricky to display at the memorial, he came across an essay he wrote in college that mapped the epistolary novel from Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, to Nas’s “One Love,” to Eminem’s “Stan.” He’d received a C on it, the professor explaining that the problem wasn’t with Michael’s writing, but the fact that Michael didn’t appear to have read Clarissa beyond the CliffsNotes. The professor had a point; in truth, Michael hadn’t read Clarissa or the CliffsNotes.

  Still, a quick skim revealed the essay’s merit. Michael was right about the two songs representing turning points between eras of hip-hop. “One Love” is a dispatch to a friend in prison that describes what he’s missed since being locked down, a catalogue of horrors, from friends lost to drugs to kids caught by errant bullets. The song is dirge and reportage, Nas describing his community’s plight for posterity, and with some hope of affecting change. The outlook is bleak, though, and the transformation of Bob Marley’s “One Love” into a mantra of futile resilience reminded Michael—and still does—of Otis Redding’s cover of “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which sucks the hope from Sam Cooke’s original and replaces it with Redding’s gravelly anger at the failed promise of the civil rights movement.

  “Stan” by contrast is a series of letters written by an Eminem superfan who reads the rapper’s lyrics as dogma and interprets their hyperbolic violence as a rational response to modern life. The song culminates with Stan the superfan driving his car off a bridge, his pregnant wife locked in the trunk. In the essay, Michael called Em the first true artist of the Internet, a product of chat rooms where the id was freed by anonymity, and the victims of one’s vitriol remained hidden until the harrowing moment, as in “Stan,” when they were unmasked. It’s a similar idea to Michael’s thesis regarding derivatives trading: that the invisibility of its victims permits cognitive dissonance among its practitioners. It occurred to Michael, while rereading his essay, that, if he ever gets back to his book, it might be worth attempting to trace the climate of callous indifference among finance types back to those chatrooms.

  And not just among finance types either. Michael sees indifference wherever he looks: in the eyes of his parents, who act like Ricky was only a passing acquaintance; in Broder, who won’t return Michael’s calls; in the journalists, lobbyists, and politicians, whose outrage over the murder is guided by self-interest; in Michael’s former classmates, who were so cruel to Ricky in high school, yet acted dramatically stricken today. But mostly Michael sees it in himself, in the long years without regard for his own heavy boot-print on the lives around him, from the nameless, faceless owners of the mortgages he packaged, to the current clients whose calls he continues to ignore, to Wendy’s father, Fred, and to Wendy—all sufferers at the hands of Michael’s hubris and distraction, his negligence and incompetence, his careless attitude toward the hearts and assets of others.

  These people, and especially Michael, are the products of a culture that values entertainment over accuracy, a culture in which bias is so readily accepted that to imagine its absence seems impossible. They are the products of college classrooms that preach the postmodern gospel of infinite subjective realities; products of a news cycle that proves the claim. They are the Twitter babies and their Instagram spawn, trawling cyberspace armed with such vast quantities of speculation they can’t help but mistake it for fact. They accept the rules of a game in which what’s called truth is simply the loudest sound. I am whatever you say I am.

  Donny and Rachel meander up the path, performing slaloms and quarter-twirls, both in that good state between buzzed and full-on wasted that’s nearly impossible to maintain. They don’t notice the man sitting on the front stoop. Michael does.

  Even in the rural dark, beneath only dim starlight and the hundred-watt glow of the house’s front lantern, he can tell that Broder’s in bad shape. He can tell from the lack of bag or suitcase, and from the way that Broder sits: head against door, legs hugged in a fetal ball. He can tell because a person who wasn’t in bad shape would have rung the doorbell and would be sitting in the living room drinking herbal tea with Lydia. He would have returned texts, attended the funeral, come to the Grub and Grog.

  “Who the fuck is this?” Donny says, having finished urinating in Lydia’s rose bush and noticed the man blocking his path to the fridge and more beer.

  “Broder,” Michael says, taking Broder’s hand and helping tug his former DJ to his feet. Rachel gets the door open and they stumble inside, Broder mumbling something Michael can’t understand. He thinks he’s asking for water.

  The lights are off in the foyer. Broder walks on his own, but Michael holds a hand to his back just in case, guiding Broder to the kitchen and filling a glass from the tap. With effort, Broder removes his coat and lowers himself into a kitchen chair. Michael hands him the water. Broder drinks.

  “I’m Donny,” Donny says, having already pulled two beers from the fridge and popped their tabs. He hands one to Rachel.

  “He has magnets in his wrists,” Michael says to say something.

  Broder nods. He holds out his empty water glass and Michael refills it.

  “Would you like to see?” asks Donny. When Broder doesn’t respond, Donny waves his hand over Lydia’s pocket mirror, which was on the kitchen table. Nothing happens.

  “That’s glass,” Rachel says. “Magnets only work with metal.”

  “Shit,” Donny says. He tries again with a bread knife. The knife jerks a little but is finally a no-go.

  “Too heavy,” says Rachel.

  Panicked, Donny removes a credit card from his wallet and shows Broder how it clings to his wrist.

  “Whoa,” Broder says, to which Rachel responds, “He speaks.”

  “I speak,” Broder says.

  38.

  To say it feels surreal to poke her head through the sunroof of a driverless limo that’s stalled in traffic on Seventh Avenue between Times Square and Penn Station and look up at her billboard through the visor of an AR helmet that enlarges the image to Thanksgiving blimp proportions and animates the models while the slogan Work Will Set You Free! flashes above their heads, and fireworks explode, leaving rainbow trails that shoot above the Chrysler Building into starry, augmented heaven, is not quite right. For an experience to be surreal, there must be a baseline reality to compare it against, and ever since she and Michael were diagnosed with bedbugs and Wendy began hallucinating insects—giant ones climbing from sewers and drainpipes; tiny ones sprinkling from faucets and showerheads; bugs of all sizes crawling inside her clothing—that baseline’s been absent. In its place is a universe where the only constant is the speed at which things shift, movement impossible to track to the point where one second you’re at A and the next at C or F, and now Lucas stands beside her in a helmet of his own.

  “Isn’t it surreal?” he asks Wendy.

  “Totally,” she says.

  39.

  The kitchen is not what inspires Quinn’s envy, though he likes the breakfast nook, and he could cook something nice on the stainless-steel range, his grandma’s schnitzel, say, for an eat-in third date, if he ever has another. It’s not the warm light pouring through the south-facing windows, making hopscotch squares on the pinewood floors. These windows would be worthless to Quinn, who leaves for work in the predawn dark and returns after the streetlights have flicked on like a thousand near moons, sending shadow into alleys and blurring the sky. It’s not the height of the ceilings, though the tall detective does feel unrestricted moving t
hrough this open space as he pretends to search for evidence alongside his partner and their precinct’s cheapo search drone which resembles, in its appearance and inefficiency, an old-fashioned Roomba. It’s not the ample closets, or the outdoor patio, or even Donnell’s collection of sports memorabilia.

  What inspires Quinn’s envy—a violent envy that makes him want to smash windows, spray-paint racial epithets across the kitchen cabinets, and poop on the walls like the kids at Gunther’s school, because who does this doorman think he is, some kind of Kardashian?—is the master bathroom with its human-sized bathtub and ample room in front of the toilet so someone sitting on the throne can stretch his legs. Quinn’s own bathroom is so tiny that the door must be left open when he’s pooping so his legs are free to edge into the hall. His shower is no shower, just a drain and a showerhead. There’s not even a curtain rod. And look at this place.

  Not that the neighborhood’s ideal, east of Morningside Park, beyond gentrification’s greedy reach. Quinn’s own apartment may be humble, but at least it’s in Brooklyn, that magical borough filled with fixed-gear bikes and rhubarb popsicles, where tattooed art chicks wander the streets like horny zombies. Oh who is he kidding? That Brooklyn is a fantasy culled from trend pieces and quarter-life dramedies and reports from the edges of Bed-Stuy by the daughter of his mother’s chiropodist—the product of an overactive cultural imagination. And even if that Platonic Brooklyn did exist, even if, by some happenstance of historical convergence, there might be a patch of concrete where guys like Quinn only need trip on the laces of their brogues to fall dick-first into primo hipster pussy—it wouldn’t be in Midwood, a no-man’s-land below Prospect Park, aptly named, a lonesome wood smack in the borough’s irrelevant middle. At least from Donnell’s place he’d have an easier commute, though Quinn’s still unsure if he’d take the tradeoff of being the only white guy in the building. The point is moot; he can’t afford this neighborhood anyway.

  Quinn reminds himself that he is not a racist. He is doing this for reasons other than racially motivated umbrage, he tells himself, as he uses his foot to lift the toilet seat and unzips his fly, freeing the long, skinny dick that all three women he’s slept with have noted for its resemblance to Quinn’s own face. He’s doing it for Gunther and Gunther alone. Why? Because a boy needs a dad, and a dad needs a job, and that job needs to pay more than eighty grand a year if that dad wants to keep up with hippie school tuition and alimony payments and still have money left to put food on the table and Wi-Fi through the airwaves, and pay for premium upgrades to Gunther’s AR helmet, and if they don’t charge someone for the Cortes murder, then Quinn won’t get promoted, and worst-case, he’ll be out on his ass.

  He’s doing it because, as much as he’d like to take Jay Devor behind the toolshed and befriend him with a branding iron, Devor’s bigshot lawyer is not who the state would prefer to be up against in court. He’s doing it because Sanders is guilty, Quinn can tell, if not for the murder, then for something else. He’s doing it because this morning, at breakfast, he saw Gunther’s SD bracelet sitting there on the table. He asked Gunther if his bracelet, like some others he’d heard about, was worth a million dollars. Gunther said no.

  40.

  Lucas returns with a bowl of ice cubes. He sits on the chair opposite Wendy’s chaise. She drops a cube in her scotch and dries her wet fingers on her cardigan sleeve. She slips out of her heels, tucks her legs beneath her, reconsiders, and slips the heels back on. She’s here for reasons of business, but an air of the tawdry presides over this encounter. Perhaps it’s the blended scotch with its wood-chip aftertaste. Hence the ice cubes. Perhaps it’s the apartment, which could double as the set of a pornographic feature—the kind marketed to women—where clean-cut Caucasians gently screw on ironed bedding. Perhaps it’s the product, which, like a future lover, remains, for the moment, provocatively clothed.

  Not that Wendy’s in a hurry. She likes her watered-down drink, her seat’s soft upholstery. She likes this interstitial space and its illusion of remove from her everyday life. She likes Lucas.

  “So all this time I thought you were some slick businessman,” says Wendy. “It turns out you’re just a gamer who happens to dress well.”

  “I am whatever you say I am,” says Lucas, which she knows is Eminem. Michael had said the rapper was paraphrasing Wittgenstein, but she thinks Popeye’s more likely.

  “You’ve done a good job,” he says.

  “I’m good at my job.”

  “Sometimes I think that’s all anyone asks of us. To be good at our jobs. And yet, it’s never enough, is it? There are always more jobs. Always more fathers to disappoint.”

  For the first time since they’ve met, Lucas speaks without meeting her eyes. He scans his apartment’s massive square footage as if it’s the answer to an equation, evidence of his life’s ultimately fruitless algebra. He stands and moves to the window.

  “I’m not talking about my own father, of course. Though I’m sure you know who he is by now.”

  Wendy nods.

  “You’ve heard horrible things about my father, I’m sure.”

  Lucas opens the window and a breeze pushes in. He turns back to Wendy.

  “When I was twelve years old, my father handed me a pair of boxing gloves. He told me we were going to duke it out in the basement. He was going to teach me how to fight.”

  He holds his hands out to Wendy and waits. She doesn’t know for what.

  “Go on,” he says. “Tie them. Tie my gloves.”

  Wendy mimes lacing the gloves around his wrists. She runs her thumb across a popping vein. Lucas puts up his dukes, jabs the air, pretends to jump rope.

  “I’d been waiting for this day. I’m not sure how, but I knew it was coming, this inevitable showdown, my Anglo-Saxon bar mitzvah. I hated my father and desperately wanted his love, you understand? My father had never hit me before. He’d never hugged me either. My mother sometimes snuck kisses, but only if I pretended to be asleep. So I was ready for this fight, its intimacy. I wanted to hit him so hard I thought I might throw up. We were down in the laundry room: cement floor, humming dryer. I’m standing there, waiting to start. I turn my head for a second. You know what he does? He rears back and takes a swing.”

  Lucas acts this out as both puncher and punched. He falls.

  “He knocked me clear unconscious,” says Lucas, on his back, speaking to the ceiling. Wendy’s finished her drink but she lifts the glass and pretends to sip.

  “I had a black eye for a month, and an egg on my head from where it hit the floor. He told me there was a lesson in what he did and that I should figure it out. I figured it out.”

  Lucas is up again, back to dancing and swaying, shaking off imaginary dirt. He says, “What is it they say about time?”

  “It heals all wounds?”

  “It isn’t holding us,” says Lucas. “It isn’t after us. I had a growth spurt the next year. I was six-two by fourteen. All that American milk. I was first-team linebacker, swim captain. My father’s not a large man. Five-eight in boots. He said it was time to put the gloves back on. I was ready for my Oedipal revenge.”

  Lucas kneels in front of her so they’re face-to-face. She can smell her own cooking on his breath: chervil and habanero, a sour hint of goat cheese.

  “We squared off. This time my father just stood there. He didn’t even have his guard up, like he was egging me on. I reared back and threw a punch.”

  He’s leaning close to Wendy now. Their cheeks nearly touch. Lucas raises a fist and slowly hooks it toward Wendy’s ear. He stops three inches short and drops his hand.

  “My dad ducked. The punch missed completely. I was caught off-balance. My father returned with a right hook to the eye. I hit the floor. My father was barefoot. He placed his foot on my chest. His feet aren’t large, but they’re wide. Size nine triple E. The smell was overwhelming. I was close enough to see the fungus
overtaking his nails. He applied enough pressure to let me know that he could crush my breastbone if he wanted. Then he removed his foot and left the room. We never spoke of it.”

  She says, “Okay.”

  Lucas stands and Wendy follows down the hall. His bedroom overlooks Central Park. Lucas opens the closet.

  “What’s that?” says Wendy.

  “The product.”

  It reminds her of a bandage, the kind that wraps around a sprained wrist or ankle, but bigger, person-sized, and in the shape of a wetsuit or footed pajamas. She says, “I don’t understand.”

  “Go on,” Lucas says. He takes The Suit™ from its hanger and places it in Wendy’s hands. “Touch.”

  Wendy holds and pets the item like it’s someone else’s infant and she’s afraid to drop it.

  “You can’t feel them, can you?”

  “Feel what?”

  “Exactly,” says Lucas, a challenge.

  She tries different styles of touch: palm, backs of hands, fingertips. She presses The Suit™ to her cheek and sniffs. It smells mildly of sweat.

  “I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

  “Microsensors. Twelve hundred of them.”

  He takes the laptop from his bedside table and shows Wendy the software, explaining how the sensors track speech, movement, and bodily functions, track the heart’s rhythmic flutters. He turns The Suit™ inside out and shows her the sensor-laden condom that measures blood flow, secretion, and fluctuations in length and girth. He shows her the spinal seam that models posture.