Sensation Machines Read online

  Or worse, Broder’s pitch would not be for studio time at all, which I’d have been happy to help with if I’d had the cash. No, the pitch would be for a more outrageous and expensive venture, some scam on which he’d spent the last of his savings, and now needed a loan to push through to completion.

  To preempt the pitch, and because it was true, I said, “Actually, I wanted to talk to you too. I’ve been meaning to tell you I’m sorry, for the past, for losing touch.”

  “It’s okay,” said Broder, “It’s not important.”

  “It is important,” I said. “I was a bad friend. I’m sorry for not visiting you at your parents’ house after you left school, for not coming to your wedding.”

  “Seriously, that’s not important, but if we could find a quiet place . . .”

  “Would you go back and do it differently?” I asked.

  The question gave Broder pause. He scratched his chin.

  “Look, Michael,” Broder started, but before he could continue, we were interrupted by the nearing thrum of a familiar chant:

  “WHOSE STREETS?”

  “OUR STREETS!”

  The door burst open. Someone killed the lights.

  Wendy

  I woke on the couch. My father had wrapped me in an afghan and put a pillow beneath my head. I checked my phone and found no word from Michael. I checked my feeds and caught mention of a riot at the Zone Hotel, where a group of protesters had crashed a finance party. Dozens injured. Many arrests.

  I turned on the news. The streets were lit in blue and red light. I watched as paramedics loaded stretchers and witnesses described the scene. Michael’s phone went to voicemail. The sky was still dark. My father was still asleep. I took cash from his wallet and called a town car.

  I felt nauseated on the ride to Brooklyn. I opened the window, but midtown traffic brought exhaust fumes and noise. The Times Square circus blinked above me. The driver called me ma’am and asked if I was okay. I said I was fine.

  Light dimmed as the town car turned onto our block. Three men stood on the corner blowing smoke at the stars. The stars—all two—were barely visible in the cutout of sky between the oaks that stood like guards outside our building.

  I climbed the stairs. I hoped Michael was home. With each step, my body felt heavier. For a moment, I feared that I’d reverse gears at the top and go tumbling back to the bottom. I could hear the cat crying. The door was unlocked.

  Lights were on. The duvet was spread on the floor, like a picnic blanket, in the spot where our bed used to be. The air mattress lay deflated beside it. Michael was asleep on the duvet, fully clothed, sweating. A bedbug—the first I’d seen in days, though I assumed it would spawn more, repopulate the apartment—gnawed into a mole on Michael’s neck. A single hair sprouted from the mole. Blood swelled in an outer ring around the bull’s-eye of the abrasion.

  It may have been a beetle or some other insect. In fact, I’m sure it was.

  I sat on the edge of the bed. The cat licked Michael’s ear. I placed a hand on the small of his back. I borrowed his phone and ordered a car back to my dad’s.

  Out front, wind ran cool across my body. The cat made cat sounds and scratched at my sweater. I lifted her above my head. She responded with a screech. I lowered the animal and watched it run free for the first time in its brief and now briefer life, feinting toward trash cans before scurrying southbound on Hoyt Street, some elusive, fleshly odor pointing toward darkness.

  Tagged Photos

  1.

  Ricky’s still in control. He whispers, “I’m in control,” releases the links from his French cuff shirt, places them in a rinse cup beside the bed, rolls his sleeves, and fingers the bracelet.

  Broder’s in the bathroom. The shower runs. Steam seeps from the partially open bathroom door. Ricky’s eyes close for a moment, but he forces them open. They’ve snorted Oxy mixed with blow, and drunk their share of tequila, and now, in the dark of the hotel’s false midnight, as sun peeks in around the edge of the blackout curtains, he wants nothing more than an hour of shuteye before heading into the office. First there’s the question of Broder.

  They were together with Michael when the riot began, a rush of chanting people swinging pipes and bats, knocking partygoers to the ground. Some fought back, but most pushed toward the room’s only exit, the same door through which rioters continued to arrive. The congestion caused more blood. Skulls hit walls and bodies tumbled into decorations. The Lego Titanic crashed.

  Amid this chaos, Ricky saw, or thought he saw, Sammy from last night across the room. Protester or guest, he couldn’t say, failing to remember if he’d told him about the party. Ricky yelled Sammy’s name, but no contact was made. The next thing he knew, he’d made it out unscathed.

  They took the emergency stairs to the floor below, and barricaded themselves in the room that Ricky had presciently rented beforehand in case a need for privacy arose.

  It was only then they realized that Michael was gone. Returning to find him wasn’t an option; a SWAT team had already arrived. Ricky’s been texting Michael since, to no avail.

  A trip to the minibar got the party restarted while Ricky combed Twitter for reports from the scene upstairs. Broder rested his head on Ricky’s shoulder and served him small bumps of coke from his overgrown thumbnail. He’s been hanging on Ricky all night, and hasn’t balked at Ricky’s test runs, either: patting Broder’s butt, gripping his thigh, blowing air in his ear as Broder leaned on him in the elevator. As far as Ricky knows, Broder doesn’t have a gay bone in his body, but soon he will have a gay bone in his body. Ba-dum-ching. Ricky’s Viagra should kick in any second. He popped it an hour ago. His cock is slow in responding. Maybe it needs assistance.

  Ricky stands from the bed, undoes his belt, and lets his pants drop. He pulls them over his ankles, and lies down again in just shoes, socks, and shirt. He feels like Big Bird. His hands are cold. His penis inches out of hiding.

  For inspiration, Ricky surveys his sexual past. First, Michael. Well, technically, first was Evan Schmidt in third grade. They’d been playing doctor with Evan’s dad’s doctor bag, using his stethoscope to test the beat of each other’s hearts, when Ricky decided that Evan needed a full body exam. Five minutes later, Evan’s penis was in Ricky’s hand. Five days later, Ricky was in the principal’s office, unrepentant. Five years later, Evan was still in the closet and Ricky was a full-on faggot, and fuck you for calling him one, you closeted fuck. Fifteen years later, Evan was gay-bashed in a public park, Ricky was a Republican, and Ricky’s best friend’s hero was a rapper who encouraged impressionable teens to commit hate crimes.

  Anyway, Michael. Ricky has loved him since childhood. The men he grew up with relied on grunts for communication. Michael was endearingly talkative. Ricky was too, in a sense, but Michael could talk about feelings in a way that Ricky wasn’t able to. Maybe it was a Jew thing, or growing up around teenaged girls, Michael’s melodramatic cousins who were always going on about this boy or that, watching Bette Midler in Beaches and weeping. As a budding homosexual, Ricky knew he was supposed to dig Midler too, but he couldn’t get past the balladeering. He understood his distaste as an emotional deficiency.

  Michael and Ricky have been inseparable since fourth grade. While other kids played football, they discussed death. Mostly they exchanged information: that grandparents are usually the ones who die, but parents and even other kids can too; that animals eat your body when you’re dead; that you turn blue; that you go to heaven, maybe, depending on your religion.

  In fifth grade, their classmate Chris Potter found his stepdad hanging by a rubber belt in his garage, and Potter’s association with the great unknown conferred on him a certain sagacity. Out of what seemed like pity to everyone but themselves, Michael and Ricky let Potter into their clique so they could ask questions like, “Did you cry?” and, “Was he naked?” and, “Does the garage door still
work?”

  They continued to discuss death until middle school, when they became more interested in sex. Michael made lists of the girls he planned to ask to dance at his bar mitzvah and Ricky made lists of famous people he was planning to sleep with once he’d made it on Wall Street. He’d seen enough movies to know that everyone in New York was a little bit bisexual if you had enough money, and he’d later turn out to be right.

  Ricky had come out a year earlier, in sixth grade, to the surprise of no one, and to the derision of everyone in school except Michael. It was 1994, shortly after Magic Johnson announced his HIV diagnosis. Ricky wasn’t worried about the disease; Pittsfield, he assumed, was too far west on the Mass Pike for the urban sprawl of the virus, and besides, he was ten. What excited him were the condom demonstrations squeezed into every TV special on the subject. Watching Magic roll a rubber down the shaft of a banana was Ricky’s first experience in pornography. And though the high-speed modem would rear its head in his household by year’s end, Magic’s hands on the potassium-rich phallus would stick with him, a weather vane pointing turgidly toward the future.

  In fact, it was this very condom demo, shown again during sixth grade health class, that gave Ricky the courage to declare his orientation during morning announcements. Never one to shy away from showmanship, Ricky marched to the stage in a Magic Johnson jersey he’d found at the nearby Champion outlet. He was booed; the kids at school were Celtics fans.

  Bless Michael, who managed to exist outside the pressures of high school Darwinism by frolicking mostly in his own dreamy mind. It’s not that Michael didn’t care what other people thought, but that he never quite noticed.

  It’s supposed to be better for gay teens these days, what with tolerance taught in schools, and gay characters on television, and a generational turn away from open homophobia and toward a more hidden one, but gay teens still pop up in the obits, their terrified eyes triggering Ricky’s memories of the fear he felt, each day, walking home while farm dudes drove past in their pickup trucks holding sawed-off shotguns out the windows as they called his name and hysterically laughed.

  By junior year, Ricky and Michael were still virgins. Ricky didn’t know any other gay people. There was a club at school called the Gay-Straight Alliance, an aspirational title. The club’s only members were goth straight girls and two stoners who knew that membership in the club meant membership in the goth girls’ password-protected panties.

  Besides, the GSA kids were cloyingly political, driving to Boston for Pride marches, and circulating petitions for unisex bathrooms. Ricky’s interests were strictly libidinal. One night, after many shots from a bottle of melon liqueur that had been gathering dust at the back of Ricky’s parents’ liquor cabinet, he managed to convince Michael that a mouth is a mouth. Michael seemed to enjoy it, but he hurt Ricky’s feelings by telling him, after, that he’d pretended the fellating tongue belonged to their math teacher, Ms. Picciola. Michael and Ricky were awkward around each other through the following week, but things quickly went back to normal. Nothing like it ever happened again.

  Ricky’s still soft. The shower still runs. “I’m in control,” he whispers again and taps the SD bracelet against his teeth. Ricky doesn’t play Shamerican Sykosis, but over the past year, he’s been buying Sykodollars. At first, he acquired SD to trade for drugs online, sick of the laxative-cut coke that fueled the club scene. But as the Dow plunged, and Wall Street crashed, and a possible bailout was vetoed by Congress, Ricky realized he had a hedge against the volatile dollar. Shamerica, with its rising popularity and flourishing markets, was a safe storage vault. The dollar dropped and the SD slowly, unnoticeably rose.

  The hedge had paid off, but the really interesting thing happened after that. The game’s creator, a guy called Lucas Van Lewig, reached out to Ricky, offering a wildly lucrative opportunity for investment. And maybe the thought of these prospective riches has hit a primal nerve, or the Viagra has kicked in, because Ricky has finally come to glorious tumescence when Broder emerges, removes the towel draped over his arm to reveal a handgun, and fires.

  2.

  Detective Ryan has been taking statements for nearly eight hours, trying to gauge what went down. One thing is clear: Jay Devor’s speech at the Funeral for Capitalism was a call to arms, and when it was over, Devor led a parade of weapon-wielding #Occupiers to a finance party at the Zone Hotel. What’s not clear is where Devor ended up. He wasn’t at the hotel, and security footage hasn’t turned up his face. How much planning was involved and where the weapons came from are more difficult questions, and ones that can’t be answered by the stoned-looking kid who sits across Ryan’s desk.

  “I mean, it felt like a dream,” says Sammy. “Or not like a dream dream—my actual dreams are much more boring: losing keys or teeth falling out—but like I’d entered a slightly altered or alternate reality.”

  “Right,” says Ryan. They’ve got drones watching Devor’s apartment and scouring the streets. Even his girlfriend, Kate, seems unaware of his whereabouts. It’s unlikely that they’ll find him tonight.

  And by tonight he means this morning. An hour ago, the sun was a dim, lovely golf ball. Now it’s pure terror, coming in through the blinds and coloring the stragglers carcinogen orange. Ryan can see them through the plexiglass, cuffed in folding chairs, one trying to sleep, while another, a clean-cut guy roughly Ryan’s own age, snaps awake and registers a half-second shock at his surroundings. Ryan thinks: Don’t you have a job? But of course the man doesn’t, and of course that’s why he’s here.

  “Does that make sense?” asks Sammy. “I guess what I mean is it didn’t feel unreal so much as untethered. The Funeral had this morbid energy with the caskets and the Mardi Gras band, and I swear I felt a ghostly or apparitional presence. Like those nineteenth-century spirit photographs where the light illuminates a face that isn’t there, you know? Only in this case, instead of a face it was, like, a building-sized grim reaper, or something, that no one could see but that we could feel.”

  “Grim Reaper?”

  Ryan tries to focus. He thinks: If I were Devor, where would I be? He pictures a steaming jacuzzi.

  “And I remember there was some drama with the elevator because we couldn’t all fit. It was a big elevator, but we couldn’t all fit, and you needed an elevator key to ride up to the penthouse, and there was only one key, so one group had to wait for someone to come back down and return the key. And I remember that, for whatever reason, it felt essential that I manage to squeeze in with the first group. So I kind of pushed my way into the elevator, and there were a lot of us in there, and someone turned the key and the elevator started to move but then sort of paused, like it was considering our collective weight.”

  Ryan discreetly checks his phone. Nothing.

  “We went up super fast until suddenly the doors were open and we were deposited. That’s the word that went through my head as it was happening, deposited, because I was sort of narrating in my head, like I was describing it to someone else, even as it was happening. And there was this inkling of a feeling—and I’m not sure where it came from, like, I’m not religious at all—but this feeling that maybe the person I was describing it to was God. That, for some reason, God couldn’t see through the roof of the building into this room, and he, or she, or whatever God is, needed me to describe it, not out loud, but in my head.”

  “Plausible,” says Ryan.

  “So I tried to narrate in clear and concise language, phrases like the man in the orange T-shirt hits the man wearing the striped tie three times in the forehead and ear with something that looks like a drum major’s baton, like I was taking notes, and there’s blood coming out of his ears. And I kept on doing this, this narrating, like I, myself, wasn’t in that room but was now, myself, the ghostly presence hovering over the scene, the grim reaper or whatever, God’s grim reaper, a phrase that kept repeating in my head . . .”

  Ryan checks his phon
e again. He has a text that is not about Devor. It’s something more interesting. A body’s been found at the Zone Hotel.

  3.

  Wendy said she was on her way, but it’s been an hour, so Michael googles F train service. Delay at Broadway-Lafayette. He can’t stand to be alone. Even though the detectives were more interested in his whereabouts than in offering condolence, Michael didn’t want them to go. He offered coffee and week-old Granny Smith apples, and the cops looked at each other like the offer was a sign of insanity. Where was all of his furniture? Why the deflated air mattress and empty drawers? Michael had to admit that the apples were too bruised to serve.

  Now the detectives are gone, Ricky’s dead, Wendy’s stuck in transit, and all Michael can do is search for the missing cat, making his way around the loft, checking every nook and crevice, leaving open tins of sardines by the heating vents.

  “Cat,” he calls, wishing it had a name, and feeling like, somehow, his failure to provide one has caused this disappearance. He imagines the cat traipsing out an open window and down the fire escape. He pictures Ricky’s body on the hotel bed, pillow-propped against the headboard, blood drying on face and neck, blood turning black and gluing bits of blackened brain to skin. The cat on Court Street, crossing Atlantic, licking spilled ice cream from the pavement. Ricky on the morgue table, naked and blue, the ME prodding with steel tools. The cat lingering in a doorway, petted by a friendly kid. The kid’s mother gets mad. The cat, scared, runs into the street, where she’s hit by a cyclist. Not dead, but critically injured, limping down Bergen, seeking a comfortable spot to expire. Ricky’s belly where the bullets went through, half an organ exposed: a tube of intestine, mixed bile and blood.

  He tries Broder again. It goes straight to voicemail and the voicemail’s still full, so Michael sends another text. The detectives were more interested in Jay Devor. Michael told them the truth: that he’d seen Devor that morning outside Goldman Sachs; that he hadn’t seen him during the riot, but that Michael was drunk, and it was chaos. He told the cops he couldn’t imagine Devor killing anyone. A Lyft driver confirmed Michael’s alibi following the riot.