Sensation Machines Page 12

  Michael tries to remember more. He should never have taken that pill. They were laughing and smoking and Broder asked if they could go somewhere to talk. The lights went out, and there were screams, and people were swinging sticks and bats. Michael managed to escape. He’s not sure how, probably dumb luck, the crowd directing him like a pinball, pushing him toward the door. He remembers standing on the street with a man who had blood pouring out of his eye. He remembers trying to hail a cab, then sucking it up and ordering Lyft. The Oxy kicked in. He tried to call Wendy, but failed to unlock his phone. Wendy wasn’t at home. He lay on the floor. The cat nuzzled up. Next thing he knew the detectives were there.

  Michael opens closets and cabinets, looks under the bed, behind the toilet. He checks the washer and drier, empty delivery boxes, inside a pair of Wendy’s boots.

  “Fuck you cat,” he says to no one. “Stop fucking with me.”

  He opens the fridge and the freezer, leaves the doors dangling, holds a frozen chicken thigh to his face. He goes through the garbage. Maybe there’s a cat at the bottom of the bin. He searches the hallway, the stairs, the building’s basement. He knocks on other tenants’ doors but no one’s home. Only Michael in this building, and maybe the cat, stuck in a wall or a heating duct, dying of starvation. He thinks he hears a faint whimper coming from inside the staircase. When he gets close it’s gone.

  4.

  She finds her husband on the kitchen floor. His crying sounds like a small, failing engine, an electric toothbrush, maybe, on the last legs of its battery. She goes to her knees and tries to hold him.

  “I’m so sorry,” is all she can say and not enough. Michael trembles. A mucused gurgle comes from his throat. The position is awkward, like burping a baby. Wendy puts her hand beneath his shirt and rubs his spine. Only hours ago she decided to leave this loft and not look back; to take time to think things over; to tell Michael she knows about the money.

  He says, “I can’t find the fucking cat.”

  “Ssshh,” says Wendy, aware of the cat’s probable state: drowned in a sewer, a disintegrating corpse.

  “I want my cat,” says Michael. She smells a faint trace of urine and thinks he might have peed his pants.

  “Just hold me,” Wendy says and squeezes, as if solace might be measured by a pressure gauge. Michael squirms free.

  “We have to make signs,” he says. “Someone might find her and they won’t know where to bring her back.”

  He rummages through drawers, pulling out pens and markers, ripping paper from the printer. Wendy tries to take him back into her arms, but Michael moves now with purpose.

  “Forget the cat,” says Wendy.

  Michael’s found a Sharpie. He makes the saddest sign she’s ever seen: a slanted scribble, barely legible, no name or photo with which to identify the animal. Wendy resigns herself to this futile distraction. They retrace Michael’s route. The search is her punishment, calling “Cat” and “Kitty,” telling him she’s sure it will turn up. It’s almost ten o’clock and she has to be at work. Michael’s knees buckle. Wendy catches him before he falls.

  “Did you eat breakfast?”

  He says nothing.

  “You need to eat or you’ll be sick. Let me make you something before I go to work.”

  “You’re going to work?”

  “I have to, Michael, the timing isn’t the best.”

  He escapes from the hug. Wendy cracks two eggs into a bowl and heats the pan. Michael pulls at the skin of his arm like he wants to rip it off. She beats the eggs.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he says. “I didn’t realize the timing doesn’t suit you. Silly me. I’ll just go back in time and tell Ricky to get murdered at a more convenient date.”

  “Michael, I . . .”

  “No, no, I totally get it. You have a big day today, and Ricky’s murder is screwing it up.”

  “I just need to stop in. I can come back in a couple hours.”

  The eggs sizzle. Wendy places two slices of bread in the toaster. Michael uses the spring mechanism to pop them back out. The slices flop onto the counter. Michael rips the untoasted bread into pieces, sprinkles the pieces on the floor. He says, “For the birds.”

  5.

  Things started well, outside Goldman, yesterday morning. Then, after lunch, Devor took the train to Park Slope to convince Sophia to come to the Funeral.

  When he got to the Co-op, she was stocking coffee. She dumped beans into a wooden barrel and they clinked like rain on a tin roof. Devor was momentarily transported to French Guiana, their sophomore summer. They’d beautified a bus station as part of a community service trip jointly sponsored by Columbia’s French department and the campus branch of Amnesty. Satisfied with their work—they’d coated the station’s outer walls in mustard-colored acrylic—they took shelter from a passing downpour beneath the station’s tin roof and shared a triumphant spliff. When the rain stopped and they emerged, they saw that a spray-can artist had desecrated the work. The result was a caricature of a Rasta wielding an Uzi on a do-gooder who looked a lot like Devor. Sophia had said, “Lesson learned.”

  What followed was twenty years of protests, and #Occupy, and marching for black teens murdered by white police, and marching to end detainment camps at the border, and marching to support the liberation of Palestine, and marching in support of reproductive rights, in support of bathroom bills and assault-weapons bans. Twenty years of debates and declarations, jealousies and denials of jealousy, hope and disillusion, the best sex Devor had ever had. Sophia did not believe in the prison of monogamy until, one day, she did.

  She’d met a half-Lebanese professor of cognitive science who resembled George Clooney in certain bearded roles, and who complained about American hummus and today’s lobotomized slaves to their cellphones. Sophia moved into his Chelsea floor-through, and Devor spent a year brooding and dating before begging Sophia to dump the professor and take him back. She did, and what followed was a wonderful period leading up to last March when Sophia threw Devor’s engagement ring into the ocean. She called him a cheapo who masked his stinginess behind a veil of anti-materialist commie essentialism, all because he’d purchased the plastic ring from a gas station nickel machine. Devor thought he was being spontaneous and romantic.

  Sophia appeared to have aged since then. Perhaps it was the measured pace of her motions or the gray she’d let bloom in her hair.

  “Soph,” he said, a daring intro. The way he said it made it sound like they were in bed with the Sunday Times and he needed help on a crossword clue. She spent a long moment looking him over. He’d lost weight after Kate signed them up for a Boot Camp class filled with postpartum women intent on shredding baby weight. Devor was embarrassed by how little he could squat-thrust compared to these women.

  Sophia said, “I was wondering when you’d show.”

  He couldn’t read her tone. She had turned cynic following the 2016 election. Whereas Devor had upped the ante on his activism by launching Nøøse, Sophia had entered a PhD program and buried herself in scholarship. Her field was political cinema, and her thesis was on the films produced by failed revolutions. It was about the futility of art in the face of history’s momentum. He’d tried to be supportive, but the growing bleakness of Sophia’s worldview was a factor in their breakup.

  Devor said, “You have to come tonight. There’s a new energy in the air. We can get to Breem. If we get to Breem the other holdouts will follow. We’ve got manpower this time. Things are in motion.”

  For whatever reason, he needed Sophia at the Funeral. He was still trying to prove something. Not about himself, but about “hope,” “resilience,” “the human spirit”—those hackneyed platitudes that he fantasized might, tonight, be removed from their scare quotes, restored to single-entendre meaning. Or maybe it was about himself: evidence that he was an iconoclastic leader. The protest and the plan to storm a finance bro part
y they’d been tipped off about—it was all, in some sense, for Sophia.

  Sophia said, “And how’s Kate?”

  Devor said, “She’s good.”

  Sophia said she had to go down to the basement to get more beans. She said she’d try to stop by the Funeral. She said it in a way that let him know that she would not.

  When the Funeral commenced, thousands of kindred souls emerged on the blocked-off streets. It was a far cry from his college days at Greenpeace when he and Sophia stood outside New York Sports Club on Eightieth Street, failing to engage people coming from workouts. It was a far cry from campaigning for Gore in 2000 or for Kerry in 2004, or the Jill Stein debacle. Finally, people on both sides of the red/blue divide were sick of the banks’ bullshit, and the shitty job market, and the billionaires on Wall Street still getting their bonuses. Marching to the party—which was Great Gatsby themed, how perfect was that?—Devor felt for a moment, in the heat and the music, that his generation had finally arrived.

  And yet, when they reached the hotel, he wavered.

  Devor watched a young guy, no older than eighteen, slap a bat against his palm. He watched an even younger guy swing a sawed-off table leg like a sword. Devor thought of his parents, sixties peaceniks. He thought of Sophia’s disapproving eyes. He thought of John Lennon lying in bed beside Yoko.

  Peace had been given a chance, and look what happened. So why the hesitation? His brain knew that violence was inevitable. The people had bloodlust. The potential upside was worth a few injured bankers. The revolution had to start somewhere. The movement had numbers, but not enough. The action was justified.

  Devor’s brain knew, but his body resisted. His body shook and stalled. He told the others he’d take up the rear. When the rest of his army entered the hotel, he walked ten blocks to his parked car and drove uptown to Sophia’s. It was lucky she was home.

  They watched the fallout on the news. Sophia didn’t say much, but he could feel the judgment in her silence. Devor drank three beers. He crawled into bed. She got in but said they couldn’t kiss or touch. Kate had been texting for hours. He didn’t text back. Sophia fell asleep. Devor took off his shirt and rubbed his chest against her back.

  6.

  Michael finds his AR helmet while he’s looking for the cat. He’s not sure it still works, but the green light blinks when he flicks the on switch, and the battery appears to be partially charged.

  On his laptop, he logs into Shamerican Sykosis for the first time in a year, and takes a moment to audit his in-game accounts—stocks, bonds, and real estate holdings—which, like their real-world analogues, are in a state of near-vacancy. Despite his theoretical advantages—he does, after all, have a degree in economics, and he remains a trader at a Wall Street firm—Michael was never good at this game. In part, this is because his skills don’t quite transfer. The Shamerican markets are subject to discrete forces, demanding alternate instincts and a different knowledge base, just as Roger Federer’s hand-eye coordination and strategic expertise might be of some help in Baseline Smash for Atari 3-D, but wouldn’t guarantee success against a nine-year-old gamer who’s logged thousands of hours on the virtual courts. More so, it’s because Michael’s interests were elsewhere. He didn’t want to perform, during his leisure hours, the kinds of tasks he did at work. Nor was he interested in the game’s design aspect. Why spend time mastering CAD so he could have a hand in shaping the appearance of this augmented world, when he could use that time to roam it as a masked spectator? Eighty Sykodollars remain in his Bank of Shamerica checking account.

  Michael considers leaving the helmet turned off. This way, even other players won’t engage him in the street, which used to happen, most wanting to know how much SD his avatar’s tattoos cost, and if he was consciously trying to look like Eminem. There was also the occasional amorous advance. For many players, the game’s capacity as a cosplay dating forum is a major draw. No more hiding in hotel rooms, sweat-drenched beneath unicorn costumes. Here, all flavors are on offer, from snake-skinned women, to men with tentacle hands, to avatars featuring Jared Leto’s face on Beyoncé’s frame. Shamerica is a true fantasy playground, bodies free from the laws of material space. And while AR can’t render the tactile squish of a tentacle’s grip, or the peach-skin texture of Leto’s lips, the visual is so real-seeming that the user’s brain creates an approximate phantom sensation.

  But even though Michael isn’t up for conversation, the helmet’s appeal goes beyond its function as a mask; it offers an escape from the visual triggers of grief. So Michael rolls up his Missing Cat sign, turns on the device, and fits it over his head.

  The helmet’s heavy and Michael’s still unsteady. He holds the bannister as he inches down the stairs, seeing no difference yet between the cobwebbed real world and its augmented counterpart, though the helmet’s tinted visor darkens everything slightly, an equivalent sensation to wearing sunglasses inside. It’s only when he exits the building and steps onto the street that Shamerica bursts forth, a tumult of chrome spires and silver balustrades, set against the latex-black sidewalk that glints like a river of sunlit tar.

  Regions of Shamerica aesthetically vary, consistent only in their miscellany, but Michael’s block feints at loose coherence, collectively informed by Frank Miller comics, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the chemical-plant zone from Sonic 2, and Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. In other words, the neighborhood bears the high-middlebrow imprint—rare for game worlds—of arty Brooklynites Michael’s own age. Across Hoyt Street stands what might resemble a Gothic cathedral if it weren’t tricked out with jet engine propellers, and lining the block are holographic sports cars, octo-motorcycles modeled after in-line skates, and what appears to be a hand-blown glass glacier on the corner of Pacific whose security system is a ring of flames.

  Michael sees all this, but he’s not really seeing, still checking for the cat behind trashcans, mailboxes, and the glacier that he knows, in real life, is a Chevy Impala piled with parking tickets; still picturing Ricky, whose body, he guesses, is done being examined, and now lies solitary in a freezer tube.

  It’s hot in the helmet, and sweat pools in Michael’s eyebrows as he weaves down the sidewalk, subject to pauses and lurches, less walk than stagger, arms spread for balance like he’s riding a skateboard. He keeps checking to see if Wendy’s texted, or if Broder’s called back, or if, by the grace of a benevolent god, there’s a voicemail from Detective Ryan explaining that there’s been a mistake, the body wasn’t Ricky’s after all.

  staples is crowded even though it’s mid-Tuesday. There’s no AC, just a rickety fan spraying dust and room-temperature air. Michael takes off his helmet and tucks it under his arm. He unrolls his sign as he waits in line, and looks at what he’s scrawled. Wendy was right, he should have included a photo.

  “How old are your kids?” asks the woman beside him, whose own, a boy, looks about six. The boy hides in the folds of the woman’s skirt. Michael’s sister, Rachel, used to do the same thing when she was that age.

  “My kids?”

  The woman points at the paper in Michael’s hand, and only now does he get it: his sign’s been mistaken for the work of a child.

  Michael puts the helmet back on.

  7.

  The poster featuring the photo of the entrance at Auschwitz was just an example. An extreme image designed to get Wendy’s attention and stress the paradoxical nature of their campaign. She’s not actually meant to use the image. Lucas gave her the poster, she thinks, as a test. Wendy’s meant to prove that women can be calculating monsters.

  And while the #workwillsetyoufree hashtag may draw complaints from Holocaust remembrance groups, Wendy doesn’t think it’s a PR concern. Severed from the image, the hashtagged phrase will only have Holocaust connotations to a minority of people—she saw a recent poll showing that one-third of Gen Zers couldn’t identify Hitler in a photo—and the slogan is banal and uncreative enough that Comm
unitiv.ly can plead plausible deniability regarding its source. A twenty-two-year-old copywriter could have easily, unwittingly, come up with the slogan on his own.

  The bigger problem, for Wendy, is strategic. The campaign’s not as straightforward as Lucas’s example would have her believe. In an analogue of the example, she’d be selling the protestant work ethic to Middle America. Convincing flag-waving xenophobes that accepting free money is unpatriotic. That Basic Income is a sneaky liberal trap that would reverse our Cold War triumph and retroactively cause the Russian, Ivan Drago, to pummel Stallone at the end of Rocky IV (a favorite movie of Michael’s). That as people quit their low-wage jobs to live out their days drinking Budweiser on inflatable rafts, a flood of illegals would arrive to replace them, increasing drug smuggling, sex crimes, and the prevalence of Spanish words in colloquial English. That, on the glorious future day when white Jesus has graced them with lottery winnings or a million-dollar inheritance from a long-lost aunt, the government will be there to take 60 percent of that million away. Easier said than done, but at least there’s a precedent; it’s what the Republicans have been selling for decades.

  But this is not Wendy’s demo. Her demo is Yelena the Trust-Funded Yoga Instructor, a Jersey-born Bikram maven whose given name is Helen, but who changed it at Oberlin to sound less basic, and whose parents subsidize her juice bar/studio. Wendy must convince Yelena that handouts are disrespectful. That handouts strip the poor of dignity. That there is something noble about being self-sufficient. That 6 percent property tax might cause her father to finally make good on his threats and sell the storefront that houses Project Child’s Pose.

  Wendy searches for images of people at work looking happy and fulfilled. She finds photos of guys playing ping-pong like the ones in a corner of her office. When she refines her search to include terms like “manual labor,” she gets unsmiling people working obsolete jobs. Finally, she comes across a cowboy brushing a horse. As far as she knows there are still such things as cowboys. Still such things as horses. It’s a start.