Sensation Machines Read online

  I’d been to one of those talks, watched my senator speak in boarding school argot, play up his free market vision for the partisan crowd. I’ll admit I was impressed. Not by Breem’s ideas, or the hammy jokes he interwove, but by the disproportionately large size of the senator’s head. The thing was massive, two feet from chin to dome, or at least it seemed from the back row, where I sat borderline tripping after splitting a weed gummy with Ricky. I knew that politicians trended big-headed, but it was something else to see it in person, like watching a living, breathing bobblehead doll.

  “Look,” said Anoush. “If it were up to me, what we’d do is get all the brown people in America to go to a gun show in West Virginia, arm ourselves with assault rifles, and roll into Clayton & Sons like OG gangsters.”

  “Right,” I said. “You really think that would help?”

  “I mean, I’m not a violent dude,” said Anoush. “Do unto others, and all that. But these guys who work at Clayton, can we really call them human?”

  “Hm,” I said, but must have hesitated.

  “You with me brother?”

  I mimed loading an AK, spraying bullets left and right.

  “Watch where you point that thing,” he said, flipped the cab into reverse, hopped up on the sidewalk, and executed a K-turn. The traffic drones were nowhere to be seen.

  Wendy

  Despite having recently bathed, the first thing I did at my father’s was shower. There was neither shampoo nor conditioner. My father is bald. A single bar of mouthwash-green Irish Spring had eroded into a thumb-shaped nub.

  The building was a prewar townhouse that hadn’t seen an upgrade since the 1980s. My father, I assumed, could have moved into a newer apartment with better pipes and central heating, but he refused to leave the place where my mother died. He believed that a part of her existed in the floors and walls. He meant dust particles and hair follicles, or maybe just memories. To leave would be to lose her forever.

  I turned the knob to H in the hopes of being scalded, but all I got was room-temperature trickle. I wet the soap and managed to work up a lather. I washed my cat-wound and the picked scabs. I used my father’s razor to shave off a large scab on my inner right thigh. I watched as my blood mixed with suds and ran down the drain.

  Out of the shower, I found athletic tape, gauze, and bacitracin in a never-before-opened emergency kit on his medicine shelf. I applied bacitracin and taped half the roll of gauze around my thigh. Because I’m sentimental, I put on a matching set of my mother’s flannel pajamas. The pajamas fit me well. In photos from before I was born, my mother gives the impression of a rare beauty, a redhead like me with broad shoulders and a lipsticked smile. I tried to keep this image in my head, but a memory replaced it, my mother in these pajamas toward the end of her illness. Bony wrist poking from a baggy flannel sleeve. Thin neck growing up from her collar like a blighted, peeling branch.

  The pajamas had not been washed in nearly thirty years so as to preserve some trace of her odor, perhaps a faint scent of the perfume she overused toward the end to cover the stench from her colostomy bag. I sniffed the pajamas to achieve further memory, but all I got was mothballs.

  When my father saw me in this outfit, he was speechless for maybe half a second—long enough that I noticed, but only because I know him so well—before he told me I looked beautiful. He hugged me.

  We ordered Thai food from my favorite spot. I was surprised the place was still open, but my father told me they’d extended their delivery hours in order to drum up extra business. The advent of drone delivery had been hell on small restaurants, which were being pushed out due to the vast delivery zones of bigger restaurants that invested in higher-powered drones. The restaurant was called Ground, and competition aside, they made a spinach-peanut dumpling that I’ve yet to find bested.

  We watched the news while we waited for our food. I’d taken two Ativan by this point, and my anxiety about Michael’s disappearance had dimmed. On NY1, Jay Devor spoke to a crowd. I hadn’t seen him in years, but he looked the same: thick hair, gray eyes, plainspoken confidence. A handsome mole sat just below his hairline.

  Devor had hit on me once, at Rachel Kirshenbaum’s wedding. Michael couldn’t attend due to a work conflict and Devor had used Michael’s absence as an opportunity to continuously refill my wineglass. He’d presented his case as a logical argument. Not in a pleading way, but straightforwardly, and with great self-assurance, in much the same manner that he spoke to the protesters. Devor told me that he and his girlfriend, Sophia, were “open.” He said it with steadiness and eye contact, as if being open were an indisputably feminist act. As if Michael’s assumed possessiveness was all that held me back from guilt-free exploration.

  Now he spoke of bigger things. He talked about the concept of progress, the generally accepted rhetoric that it comes at a snail’s pace. He said that this rhetoric was what the establishment wanted us to believe. That the establishment used this rhetoric to keep us complacent. He said that now was not the time to wait, and that, in fact, by waiting, by working within the slow system, we were making things worse. Now was not the time for patience, but for action.

  Devor said we could not, in good conscience, allow the UBI to fail. He said that this was our opportunity to change the system. We had voices, and they had to be heard. This was still a democracy. Our senator was someone we’d elected with our votes. We needed to let him know, needed to scream so loudly he’d be forced to hear. We needed to let him know that if he didn’t hear—and if the rest of the Senate didn’t hear—then we would not accept their verdict of progress stalled, would not wait patiently until the next battle for incremental justice might be fought. No, we would take action. And we had to make them understand that that action would have consequences.

  The crowd was in a frenzy. Devor knew to wait until the cheering died down. He may have urged for chaos, but he was in control. He claimed to want people to think for themselves, but his smooth talk masked the dogmatic nature of his own stance.

  “He speaks well,” my father said. I assumed he supported the UBI. A lifelong lefty, he did pro-bono work for the Transit Workers Union. He rarely spoke of Michael’s work, but I knew he disapproved.

  And yet, wasn’t my father in the very demographic I’d been tasked with convincing? I wondered if he had a secret heart. A heart that didn’t want to pay tax on this apartment after finally paying off a thirty-year mortgage.

  NY1 cut away to the steps of the statehouse in Albany where Senator Breem pushed through a crowd of reporters to a waiting car. Breem looked tired. I pictured him shaving in a hotel bathroom, staring into the mirror at his own strange face.

  The drone pulled up to the window and placed our order on the sill. After my father had emptied our takeout containers onto ceramic plates—I knew he usually ate straight out of the containers, and I found it sweet that he took out dishware just for me—and after he’d tested the temperature of his soup and taken a few hesitant sips, my father reached across the table and took hold of my hand. His fingers felt dry. I wondered if he’d once bought moisturizer since my mother had passed.

  Michael

  The penthouse suite was BroHo-chic with parquet floors, a cowhide rug, faux-Banksy wall art, unattended turntables, and a cadre of finance types in various stages of undress and inebriation. Some ties were tightly wound, while others had been loosened, or turned into bandannas, or used as lassos on the makeshift dance floor. A nude young woman with no visible head or body hair lay face up on the king bed, a small arrangement of sliders covering her stomach. It looked like a six-pack made of sesame mini-buns, leaking pork fat pooled in her bellybutton.

  Of the roughly forty people crammed into the suite, I recognized five from my office. There were Jim “Button-Fly” Nance and “Tender” Eddie Adagio of the fourteenth-floor trading desk, ashing cigars out the window. There was Caroline Dworkins, who stole my promotion in 2015, s
ucking face with someone who looked like Elaine’s old boyfriend from Seinfeld, the deep-voiced David Puddy—or perhaps it was the actor himself, handsomely aged and bearing a stripe of Sontag-silver.

  Button-Fly and Tender hailed from Princeton and Dartmouth, respectively, where they’d played squash and water polo, respectively, and had been members of eating clubs that excluded all but the most corporately connected undergraduates. These weren’t Bushes, Clintons, or Kennedys like the bluebloods from Harvard and Yale, but bona fide titans: Rockefellers, Van Lewigs, and Kochs. The rest of the partygoers were recognizable by type: hedge fund guys in Yankees caps playing quarters on the coffee table; JPMorgan clones in suits and skirt suits, laughing their hissy, reptilian laughs; brokers from smaller firms hovering at the edge of conversational circles. A couple of Goldmanites sat cross-legged on the kilt-patterned couch, lording silently over the proceedings.

  Aside from the suite’s gratis stabs at bohemian decor—e.g. the Banksy stuff and a framed fashion shot of two beached models leaning in for a kiss—a few additional, and seemingly emblematic, decorations had been installed by our hosts. Mirror-green streamers dangled from the molding, and clear garbage bags full of green confetti were taped to the ceiling, to be opened and poured upon us at the stroke of midnight. Green bulbs had been fit into the lamps, throwing a limón glow on the Goldmanites. One wouldn’t have guessed Gatsby, but the theme made more sense in this context than it did at the recent wave of Gatsby-inspired weddings that Wendy was always pointing out on Pinterest, with their grooms in riding breeches, their take-home bags of chocolate coins. At least this party had the right mix of flamboyance and subsurface despair.

  I was making my way toward the bar, eyeing a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle, when someone approached the human platter, grabbed a slider, and dragged it through the happy trail of hoisin sauce—making circular motions at the pubic root to sop as much sauce as possible—before popping the sandwich whole into his mouth.

  “Dude,” I said.

  Instead of answering, Ricky raced across the room, wrapped his arms around my knees, and knocked me over. The vape must have upset my inner-ear balance. He mounted me, tickling under my armpits and repeating my name so that my face was purposely sprayed with spit. I pushed him off and we stood.

  “Hey buddy,” he said. A pasty residue dripped onto his upper lip. Ricky sucked the string of cocaine-tinted snot back up his sinus canal and wiped at his nose. The SD bracelet rattled on his wrist. We made our way to the makeshift bar. Ricky poured us tequila shots, and I chased with a tumbler of Pappy.

  “So what’s the deal with this party?” I said. “It’s supposed to be Great Gatsby, right? Why is there a Lego sculpture of the Titanic on that mantelpiece?”

  “Oh you know, death of the American dream and whatnot. Death of a Salesman, Death in Venice, the petite mort of my drippy dick pulling out of the Titanic’s ass to make room for the ice crater. This is the end, as Jim Morrison once said while wagging his cock at a photo of Barbra Streisand. The end my friend, and here we are: the fall of Rome, the decline of derivatives, the rise of dildos made from real human skin like Hitler only dreamed.”

  “We’re celebrating the crash?”

  “Absolutely. You know why? Because it puts things in perspective, buddy, reminds us of what’s really important, you know? The real gay-ass shit like love, family, and friendships like ours.”

  I didn’t laugh.

  “Aw, I’m kidding you, Mikester. We’re celebrating because the world is going to shit, and how hilarious is that? We’ll watch the plebes run through the streets while us pharaohs sit tight on our thrones and think about the long strings of zeros at the end of our bank statements. Most of us, anyway, you being the exception. You really should have listened to me about not putting all your eggs into stupid investments, but bygones be bygones, buddy, speaking of which . . .”

  Ricky pulled me into a smaller second bedroom. I assumed this had to do with the investment opportunity he’d mentioned that morning. I’d thought it over on the taxi ride here, as I scrolled through my missed calls and texts from Wendy. At this point, I assumed that she knew we were insolvent. She’d be asleep when I came home, but in the morning, I’d be asked to explain. And while the old Michael would have jumped at the chance to risk all our remaining assets on Ricky’s recommendation—a last-ditch effort at easy redemption—I’d decided I would no longer be that person. Instead, I would beg my wife’s forgiveness. I would tell her I loved her and that I was sorry. We’d go from there. Whatever we did would be decided together. I was planning to explain all this to Ricky.

  The other bedroom was shrouded in herb smoke. Bankers stretched out on the floor, vegging out for what may have been the first time in their lives. They were twinkle-eyed and flirty, some barefoot, some in sheer navy dress socks. Jay-Z, patron saint of reckless spending, spit through a small pair of speakers, proclaiming himself “Che Guevara with bling on.”

  A familiar-looking guy on the corner of the couch fidgeted with a lighter and followed the bong’s progress around the room. The man looked older than the others, with a receded hairline gone gray around the ears. He wore a ring of razor burn like a necklace, and his eyes were barely visible beneath his lowered lids. In jeans and a hoodie, he stood out among my business-casual colleagues.

  “You recognize him?” asked Ricky.

  And then it came to me.

  “Holy shit,” I said, and Broder must have recognized me as well, because he brought himself to a standing position and made his way to my side of the room. Broder walked with a slight limp, real or performed I couldn’t tell, though the rest of his appearance—the hair, the eyes, a rolled sleeve revealing a deveined wrist the color of uncooked shrimp—made a case for the latter.

  “Hickory dickory dock,” I said. “Took two Sudafed . . .”

  “. . . Now I can’t feel my cock,” Broder said, finishing the couplet we’d written senior year as part of a Wu-Tang-style anthem called “Law & Order (Marathon on TBS).”

  Ricky said “salut,” and the three of us drank.

  “Found this little bitch sucking dick for coke by the West Side docks,” said Ricky. Broder didn’t laugh, and Ricky said he was only kidding, that Broder had shown up on his doorstep looking like hell in a Whole Foods basket. Ricky had spruced him up and brought him to the party.

  “Something like that,” said Broder.

  Ricky offered me a bump, which, even in my drunken state, I wisely declined. He suggested something more mellow, and held out a pill. It was mint green and marked with a capital M. This was more my speed. I was nicely buzzed and looking to lose what little edge was left. Nothing in my Duane Reade bag would do the job. In the morning I’d face Wendy, but tonight I could obliterate the fact of my mistakes.

  “Two milligrams Klonopin,” I proudly announced.

  “Not bad. How about this one?”

  He produced another pill, of a similar hue but larger in size.

  “Oh shit,” I said, and snatched it.

  “You sure?” Ricky said. It was already inside me.

  “Don’t most people snort them?” said Broder.

  “Sinuses,” I explained.

  I asked Broder what he was doing in town, and he shrugged and looked at his boots, mumbled something about trying to get the DJ thing going again. I told him that sounded cool, that I hadn’t made music in a long time, that I missed it, missed it terribly, but such was life, and, anyway, I was trying to write this book, a book that considered so many things we used to discuss, the theories we’d developed in those ripe, creative days. I thought Broder would be interested, but I could tell, from his wandering eyes, that he was not.

  The Jay-Z song ended, and Biggie came on, the rags-to-riches tale of his rise from humble beginnings reading rap magazines, to the spoils of stardom, owning gaming consoles, racking up long-distance charges. The bong-ripped bankers tried to rap
along, emphasizing the end rhymes and mumbling the rest. They mostly muted themselves when B.I.G. used the N-word, though a few of them, I noticed, seemed to take satisfaction in saying it aloud. Ricky chugged toward the doorway, a conga line of one, heading back to the bar to get the three of us another round. Broder and I hit a conversational impasse. We stood and listened to the song.

  “You’ve done well,” he said. “You and Ricky both.”

  I had practice with this genre of uncomfortable exchange. During my visits home to Pittsfield over the years, I’d always managed to bump into a former classmate and be forced to endure this sort of quick-fire appraisal and resentful third degree. Against instinct, I’d learned not to downplay my position by acting falsely humble or condescendingly nonchalant, so I told Broder, “Yeah, things have been good,” though of course this was a lie—things had never been worse—but I knew, from past experience, that no one had much interest in the complicated truth.

  I waited out another pause as Broder took a cinematic drag on his cigarette and stubbed it out in a ceramic teacup that must have belonged to the hotel. “It hasn’t been so easy,” he said. “Not for me.”

  “No,” I replied. “I don’t imagine it has.”

  “You don’t know the half,” he said, and I tried to make a sober and sympathetic face, though the Oxy I’d taken had begun to spread its wings, and I could feel a heated current floating skyward up my spine.

  “Look Michael,” he said. Through the doorway we saw Ricky lining up shots at the bar. Broder asked if maybe there was somewhere quiet we could talk.

  Fucked up as I was, I could sense what was coming: the big pitch. He was going ask me for money. I’d had the same nervous hitch in my voice when I’d pitched Ricky that morning. Broder was about to explain that he had this sweet deal for studio time at some spot in Williamsburg, and a suitcase full of sick beats and guest MCs lined up, but the thing was that they needed a deposit on the equipment.