Sensation Machines Page 14

  With SS it was different. He had more capital to work with and he’d learned how to outsource. He still controlled the product from concept to specs. Lucas knew he’d succeeded the first time he tried the demo helmet and walked through the dummied-up augmented New York, where rainbow halos ringed the tops of buildings, and the leaves on trees glowed uranium green. Lucas felt a powerful sense of electric connectivity, like that time at Yale when he tripped on acid in a rainstorm, and each lightning bolt pierced the shell of his skull.

  And even if that feeling was psychosomatic, well then wasn’t that the beauty of this product anyway? At Yale, he’d studied the Western philosophers, all those dead white boys debating whether a reality exists beyond what we can see. Capitalists understood the question’s irrelevance; a product and its perception are the same exact thing. Lucas has that feeling as he stands before the mirror and, like the acid trip, and that first walk around Shamerica, it’s enhanced by the knowledge that, for now, it’s his alone.

  On the upper closet shelf, above the space reserved for The Suit™, lies another prototype. This one’s an AR helmet that differs from previous models in two essential ways. The first difference is its appearance, which was designed to appeal to a larger demographic than the 6.4 million users who already log in, daily, to Shamerican Sykosis; to appeal to people who aren’t superhero fangirls or fashion-agnostic gamers. The second difference is that this new helmet, alongside its capacity as a portal to Shamerica, was designed to work in symbiosis with The Suit™, relaying data-prompted consumer suggestions to the wearer in real time, which, unlike texts, banner ads, and marketing emails, can’t be deleted, ignored, or marked as spam.

  To be clear, The Helmet 2.0 won’t be requisite for wearers of The Suit™, just as The Suit™ won’t be required for participation in SS. They are separate products that function adequately on their own. Wearing The Helmet 2.0 in conjunction with wearing The Suit™ is simply an option. But there will be incentives for those who choose this option, and Lucas knows that those incentives will be hard to resist.

  The Helmet 2.0 is all black, and looks exactly like a motorcycle helmet, but for a small antenna on its rear. Lucas takes the elevator down to the lobby. He carries the helmet with two hands against his stomach, as if the item were a boxed and ribboned gift.

  “Nice night,” says the doorman. Lucas nods and makes his way to the bike parked out front, a 1968 BMW R69S in white with chrome piping and black leather trim. He revs the engine, straps on The Helmet 2.0, and enters Shamerica.

  Behold a hodgepodge of architectural styles, from Lucas’s own Versailles-modeled condo, which a neighbor spent six hundred hours fabricating in CAD, to the rest of the block: a building-sized subwoofer blasting Biggie, a note-perfect replica of the USS Maine that explodes and reconstitutes every half hour, and, on the corner, a townhouse-cum-cloud-scraping-oak-tree that starts black at its roots and moves up the color spectrum through many gradations of blue, green, and blond, until, high above, it explodes in white leaves that shine gold in the sun and at night light the sky in incandescent silver.

  Lucas turns down Ninety-Sixth Street and crosses the park, stifling his instinct for speed. He admires the crop circles mown into the playing fields and glittered with space-dust. Barnyard topiaries oink and neigh as he cruises past. He exits the park and heads south on the FDR. Some cars look like fighter jets or fire-breathing dragons, while other, subtler vehicles—Ferraris, Porsches, midlife crisis Batmobiles—shine with the faint glow of augmentation, the all-but-imperceptible sheen of that which can’t rust, fade, or take on dirt.

  Once he’s passed Thirty-Fourth Street the voice ads begin. For some reason, they don’t work in midtown, a programming kink that will soon be ironed out. Now they come as he continues south, though fairly infrequently, research suggesting that people are only susceptible to a limited amount before becoming annoyed and opting out.

  “You are hungry,” whispers the voice, an accurate simulacrum of Lucas’s own. The idea is for players to hear the voice as an extension of their inner monologues. As people spend more time in these helmets, it will become harder to tell which is which.

  Lucas peeks at the tablet mounted to his dashboard. The prototype is right; his blood sugar’s low. Soon, when they roll out the product complete with paid sponsors, the voice will remind the user about the slice place on Twenty-Eighth Street he hit after seeing Taylor Swift at the Garden. He gave it 4.5 stars. For now, the voice says, “You are hungry,” and Lucas agrees, removing a protein bar from his inner coat pocket. He unwraps and eats it while stopped at a red. His blood sugar rises to normal.

  12.

  Both detectives ordered bagels. Perhaps they’re trying to refute the stereotype. Then why suggest a donut shop? They said they had questions, but, so far, all they’ve done is look at their phones. Michael imagines this is what dating’s like these days: mumbles and carbs, a slight aura of shame. He bites into his Boston cream donut. A dollop of filling spouts onto the table.

  Detective Ryan eyes the dollop like he wants to lick it up. Michael asks about Broder.

  “Right, that guy,” says Ryan. It’s clear that Ryan’s partner, Quinn, hasn’t heard the name before. It occurs to Michael to ask if he, himself, is a suspect. He must look the part, sickly and unshaven, faced fixed in criminal blankness. This morning, Michael woke before sunrise and barfed tomato-flecked mozzarella, then crawled back to bed and wept against Wendy’s shoulder. She asked if he was okay. He said he was not. She must have been asleep, because she told him not to worry, she was sure they’d be pregnant soon. He kissed the loose hairs that had fallen from her bun. He swallowed a bubble of vomit.

  The detectives ask if Michael has heard from Devor.

  “He owes me an email,” says Michael. “If that means anything to you.”

  “Poor email etiquette—check.” Ryan marks an invisible notepad.

  “Why does he owe you?” says Quinn.

  “Oh it’s stupid,” says Michael. “I pitched an idea for the Nøøse magazine. This excerpt from the book I’m trying to write.”

  “Book, huh?”

  “A monograph, really. Long essay. Not even a book.”

  The detectives repeat the word monograph. Quinn licks cream cheese from his lip. He says, “What’s it about then, this monograph?”

  “Nothing. It’s not really . . . it’s not even really a thing.”

  “Like Seinfeld?” says Ryan.

  “What’s the deal with pants?” says Quinn. “That kind of material? If so, you’ll need a better pitch. What do they call it, an elevator pitch? My cousin Donald did one. The genius thing was the book was about elevators. Photos and such: artful, tasteful. Nothing crass like you might imagine.”

  “He sell it?” asks Ryan.

  “It’s the irony of the whole thing” says Quinn. “He kept showing up at Random House, but he never did manage to get into the elevator.”

  After leaving the detectives, Michael walks south to Union Square. The streets have been cleaned since the other night, but he still spies the occasional leaflet caught in gutter or tree branch, still senses the presence of the protesting mob. He went to Gettysburg once, and the feeling he had there was something like this. Not ghostly exactly—nothing supernatural—but this feeling that the land itself, or in this case the concrete square, has some kind of violent essence, that it carries, in the wind that moves across its airspace, a faint echo of war chants.

  Before heading down into the subway, he calls his mother. He only calls his mother from loud public places so she’ll have trouble hearing over the background noise and won’t keep him on long. She’s grown impatient with inconvenience in her early old age, and maybe also a little deaf. He’s returning an earlier call. His mom wants to know when he’ll be getting into town. His sister answers.

  “Hey brother,” Rachel says in the husky voice that never fails to surprise. Even Michael, a
smoker, is appalled by her habit, chain-smoking on their parents’ porch, coughing phlegm into a designated soda can. He sometimes pictures the version of his sister from before he left home, a pigtailed middle schooler with a whistling gap between her front teeth. They’ve never known what to call each other, these distant siblings, separated by geography, age, and social class. Brother and sister is something they’ve settled on, comfortably balanced between the irony of its Green Acres formality and the intimacy of an in-joke. Michael doesn’t like it. Let’s call each other by our first names, he always wants to suggest. Let’s see each other as more than improper nouns.

  “Hey sister,” he says.

  Michael spoke to both parents on the day of the murder, struggling through that awkward first stage of condolence, the pauses and half thoughts, a conversation laced with silent ellipses. He can’t go through that again, and maybe Rachel senses this, because she just says, “It sucks, huh?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “It really sucks.”

  She asks when he’s coming home and he says he’s not sure. He asks how she is and she says that she’s fine, that her boyfriend’s fine, that her job’s okay.

  13.

  Donnell’s had a nice day cooking for Jackie and watching Sex and the City reruns on TBS, which have been censored for basic cable—no nipples or cuss words—meaning they can watch together without him feeling awkward or having to answer uncomfortable questions. Not like the time he took her on the SATC bus tour, and one of the stops was a West Village sex shop, and Jackie, then eleven, asked, “Dad, what’s a butt plug?” Now thirteen, she gets most of the show’s innuendo, and they both find the dubbed replacements for the censored swears hilarious, Carrie saying runt when she’s really saying the C-word.

  Father and daughter sit at opposite ends of the couch to buffer against accidental touch. Jackie’s still in the no-physical-contact phase he keeps hoping will pass so he can wrap her in hugs when she comes home in tears—about what, he has no idea, she won’t say—instead of watching her scurry past to her room where she stays until dinner. Occasions for bonding are scarce, so he takes what he can, in this case, sitting four feet away, Jackie adorably looking to dad for approval before allowing herself to laugh at Samantha’s more vulgar witticisms.

  The two have been growing apart since the Great Tampon Incident of last year, when Donnell, not wearing his contacts, saw one sticking from Jackie’s purse and mistook it for an oversized spliff. He reached in to confiscate the product and she screamed. She’s been spending more time at her aunt’s in the Bronx since, and last week, she begged to be transferred to California to live with her mom; she was obsessed with the state after bingeing the final three seasons of Mad Men. She became enraged when Donnell asked if her mother was aware of this plan, because of course Dani wasn’t, and would never approve.

  Jackie’s mother certainly loves her, and showers her with affection on her biannual visits, but Dani’s made clear that there’s no room in her daily life for a daughter. She’s too busy wallowing in self-pity because she hasn’t booked a commercial in years, let alone a pilot, and now the only auditions she gets are for wizened old hookers or dead hookers or church lady types or—gasp!—moms.

  The episode ends. Jackie wants to watch another, but Donnell decides they’ve had enough TV because it’s gorgeous outside and they could both use a walk. Besides, he needs to stop by Verizon and talk to Steve about picking up extra shifts.

  Jackie goes into her bedroom and returns a half hour later in platform Pumas, zebra-patterned leggings, and a crop top. Donnell knows he should send her back to her room to put on something less tawdry, but he can’t bring himself to be that dad, the sitcom dad who demands that his daughter epitomize purity. He says she looks nice. Jackie grunts to let him know she wasn’t asking.

  They walk south down Lenox, some distance apart, Jackie leading, impressively avoiding signposts and other humans without looking up from her phone. Donnell thinks over his essay in progress, a comic but partly in earnest argument for a causal chain connecting the attacks on the Twin Towers to the sorry current state of the Knicks. In his mind, SATC seasons one through four embodied a sexually liberated, pre-9/11 New York. Samantha slept with a doorman, Charlotte learned to stop worrying and love cunnilingus, and Carrie, sweet Carrie, introduced the term sexual walkabout to the American lexicon. Women wanted her wardrobe, men wanted to fuck her friends, Dalton girls took the 6 train downtown to smoke Marlboro Lights outside the Strand, and New York was a playground for professional athletes.

  That changed after Muslim fundamentalists hijacked two commercial flights and flew the planes into the Twin Towers. Suddenly white men were beating brown men with knuckles and broom handles, were watching hijab porn, were wearing pearl snap shirts, were trying not to cry while listening to Taylor Swift. Miranda supported Skidmark Steve through testicular cancer, Samantha boringly attempted monogamy, and Carrie quit smoking because the smell bothered Aidan. The city banned smoking in bars.

  This New York was for serious adults, so college grads moved to Austin and Portland, and white guys talked defense and fundamentals, sang “Manu Ginóbili” from rooftops, rented Rocky II on Netflix, scoured the Internet for Eva Longoria nip-slips, cheered David Caruso as Detective Horatio Caine, and hate crimes in the five boroughs went up 14 percent during year one of Obama’s post-racial presidency, so LeBron James took his talents to South Beach. And when his daughter was born, Donnell bought a two-bedroom apartment in Harlem because a small down payment with a floating-rate mortgage seemed like a good idea at the time. Now those days are ancient history, a feeling reinforced by the fact that Jackie’s doing a unit on the attacks in her middle school history class, and she keeps getting 9/11 mixed up with Vietnam.

  They reach the store. Steve’s at the counter clutching a brand new iPhone, while another, his own, sits tucked beneath his chin. Despite his wheat-blond hair and the Midwestern honesty his blue eyes affect, Steve’s a Brooklyn-born hustler who speaks in a hip-hop dialect, the authenticity of which Donnell can’t begin to parse. Right now, Steve’s on one of his patented fake calls to Verizon HQ, pretending to beg a superior to allow him to give the customer a one-time special discount, explaining that this customer is a personal favorite, and if the superior could find it in his warm heart, etc. Guys like Steve have saved the sales industry from full automation; bots aren’t as good at ripping people off.

  “Well,” says Steve to the customer, a young man with a shaved head and large plastic-frame glasses, “I’ve spoken to my superior and he’s agreed to let me give you a discount.”

  The customer nods. He knows he’s being had, but there’s nothing he can do. Steve offers a price. It’s hardly a discount, 10 percent, and that’s only with the mail-in rebate. Analytics confirm: no one mails in the rebate. The customer hesitates, says, “That’s a lot of money.”

  “You won’t find a better price,” Steve says, a fair point.

  The customer looks to Donnell for an encouraging nod that says: such is life, we all get fleeced, but what’s the alternative, buying an Android? Donnell shrugs. The customer pays and photographs his new phone with his old one. Steve pushes the abacus on another commission. Donnell steps in before the next person can approach. People give him looks because the line trails halfway to the door, and he’s skipped all that and gone straight to the front. They don’t know he works here.

  “My brother,” says Steve, and offers a soul shake, which Donnell accepts. This is their unspoken arrangement; Donnell honors Steve’s b-boy persona, and in return he’s allowed to write during slow shifts instead of vacuuming the carpet.

  “You remember Jackie?” says Donnell, and taps his daughter’s shoulder.

  “I like those Pumas,” Steve says to Jackie, who gives no indication of having heard.

  Someone behind them says, “Ahem.”

  Steve indicates the line, and asks Donnell if they can talk later, maybe
in a couple hours after his shift. Donnell says, “I just need a minute.”

  “Excuse me, I’ve been waiting,” the same woman interrupts.

  Donnell feels a tug at his arm again. He tells Jackie, “Not now.”

  “Excuse me,” the customer repeats, steps around Donnell, and pushes her cellphone at Steve. “I’ve been waiting here for twenty minutes and . . .”

  “Miss, I’ll be right with you,” says Steve, turning back to Donnell, but the woman won’t hear it; she positions her body between them.

  “Dad,” says Jackie. “Buy me this Bluetooth speaker.”

  There is no question mark at the end of her statement. It’s a command. Jackie already has a Bluetooth speaker. She got one for Christmas last year.

  “This one has mega-bass,” says Jackie.

  “Not now,” says Donnell, trying to shake her off his arm.

  “It’s only eighty bucks,” Jackie says, breaking her no-touching rule to pat him down in search of his wallet, which she finds and removes. Donnell tries to snatch it back, but she’s danced out of reach.

  “You get a discount,” Jackie says, and positions herself at the end of the line.

  The customer says to Steve, “It won’t charge.”

  “Excuse me, Miss, if you’ll just wait a second,” Donnell says.

  Steve inspects the woman’s phone. He pops its back and notes the indicator is pink from water damage.

  “You dropped this in the toilet,” says Steve.

  “I did not,” says the woman.

  Donnell tries again to push around the customer, who’s now berating Steve for claiming she purposely peed on her phone. She poses with the item between her legs and asks if Steve thinks she mistook it for a pregnancy test.

  “I said you dropped it in the toilet,” says Steve. “I didn’t say you peed on it.”

  Donnell feels a tap on his shoulder. He turns to face Jackie, but the person tapping is not his daughter. It’s a plainclothes detective who holds up a badge and asks for a moment of Donnell’s time.